Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (25 page)

Michael’s freedom, and the way he’d chosen to announce it, unsettled me. It meant that life was not the obedient animal I’d been taught to believe it would be. If it wasn’t, then what else that I’d been plotting, planning, waiting to receive, might turn out to be disconcertingly different from what I’d expected? And it
meant that we as a family weren’t quite what I’d thought we were, weren’t the five perfect, dutiful children for whom every good thing had been reserved. Mostly, I suspect it unsettled me because deep down I understood that I, too, would soon deviate from our mother’s wishes, and that when I did, it would tear her up inside and threaten to build a wall of disappointment between us.

I thought about Michael and Kathleen living together, wondered what it looked like, what they did. Did they feel proudly defiant or diminished by the rift their choice was causing? And did it mean that Conrad was out there sleeping with girls, too? Conrad, who had never done a wrong thing in my eyes and who never could, I was sure. Conrad, whom even our mother seemed to look up to (he looked a little like her father—I think that was part of it—but it was also just him, the way he seemed to carry something brilliant inside himself), what if he was defying our mother’s wishes, too? Wouldn’t it mean that, no matter how I tried or what I told myself, I would fail her, too?

I couldn’t manage to unravel that logic-knot, and so I backed up to the thread I could decipher, the one I had more clearly before me: Michael and Kathleen on the couch, sleeping the deep sleep of lovers, something my parents—that all adults—had the propriety to do behind closed doors. Michael, causing all the whispers and the sighs and the accelerated prayers. How could he? And, perhaps more quietly, silently in the very back of my mind, was this: why should it be him and not one day me? Why should he be able to do it and flaunt it and get away with what I knew I’d feel forced to hide or deny no matter how old I was?

For weeks, I stewed, upset by the upheaval in my view of the world—our world—that the revelation had caused. The next time Michael came home, I barely spoke to him, was deliberately cold.
It hurt me to treat him that way. I was acting upon borrowed feelings and hurting myself in the process. And worst of all, perhaps I was hurting my brother, my sweet, humble brother, the one who deferred so often to Conrad’s authority as the older son or his status as the doctor. Being cold to Michael left me cold inside, but I kept it up until I couldn’t bear it any longer.

“Talk to him,” Mom had urged me. I don’t know if she wanted me to let go of my resentment or if she wanted my words, whatever they might be, to have some kind of a chastening effect on my brother. Once, when I was very young, she’d dictated a letter for me to write to one of Conrad’s college roommates who hadn’t been paying his part of the phone bill. She’d thought that anyone would feel guilty about being reminded to do the right thing by a child. I’d sent the letter, not thinking of how it would make Conrad look, and the roommate had paid up, but the conversation I was being urged to have with Michael was altogether different, one for which I had no script and little wherewithal.

It was just before dinner. I remember sitting on the couch in the upstairs sitting room. Michael came up because he knew I wanted to speak with him. It was a heavy moment—we both knew it—and I still didn’t know what to say. I’m sure he was anxious about what it would be. Did he feel guilty for shocking our mother? For being the one to show me that the world, the real world, could be messy and painful and that such choices—the choices that would hurt or upset the people we love—were absolutely necessary?

“I’m sorry I’ve been mean to you,” I said. I can’t remember what he said, or if he said anything, but it was clear that there was more that I must say in order to come clean and break the spell of tension and distance my behavior had cast. It wasn’t a word like
sex
or
sin
or, for that matter,
God
, that needed to be spoken.
Those words were implicit, part and parcel of our mother’s worry. I’m sure she’d used them at one point herself—that is, if she had indeed sat down and had her own heart-to-heart talk with Michael.

All five of us were good kids. I don’t think any of us wanted to do wrong. But we censored ourselves growing up in order to prevent the need for conversations like the one Michael and I were having. I wonder how much our being good in the eyes of God and our parents came out of the fear of being confronted as having failed in one way or another.

Once, in the eighth grade, I’d put off doing the final bit of work on a social studies report until the Sunday before it was due. It just happened that on that same day, instead of going home after the church service, we went to the house of some of my parents’ friends. It was an impromptu invitation, the carryover of a conversation that had started on the steps outside the sanctuary. We stayed for one of those long Sunday lunches that fall under the rubric of “supper,” and as the sun began to set, I felt a rising agitation. Finally, I interrupted my father to tell him that I needed to get home and finish my assignment. We made an accelerated goodbye, but when we got into the car, my dad turned to face me and said, “I’m disappointed in you.” It was the first time he’d ever told me such a thing, and it split me open. I cried all the way home and felt miserable as I sat poring over my index cards to piece together the finished paper.

Michael probably felt like that—like he’d done nothing wrong but had failed nonetheless because someone he loved, someone with extraordinarily high expectations, had been let down by his actions—when I blurted out, “I’m just—I’m just so disappointed.”

The words drew tears. Mine were tears of shame and regret at having, in just that very moment and with that particular phrase,
broken Michael’s heart. Perhaps the part of me that had been angry for weeks had chosen those very words for precisely such a purpose, but immediately, I felt small. Why hadn’t I just focused my attention in the direction of things that genuinely concerned me? And, more to the point, what was preventing me from apologizing for the error of my disappointment and the haste of my judgment? What has kept me, even after all these years, from offering my brother the kind of apology he deserves, one that would yank me out from behind the safety of having been young and impressionable; one that would expose me for what I was, someone lying carefully in wait, biding her time, determined—I knew it even then—to do the very same thing as the person she blamed: to grow up and leave home and live her own life honestly, unapologetically, doing exactly as she pleased?

MOTHER

“M
other is going to come stay with us for a little while.”

The smells and the heat and the idle restlessness from that ancient visit to Leroy came racing instantly back when my mom broke the news about my grandmother’s imminent visit. For a moment, I was back in Mother’s house, trapped and restless, and separated from my mom by an invisible gulf.

“Mother has started forgetting things,” Mom explained to my sisters and me. “I’d like for her to come out here and let us take care of her for a little while.” The phrase
out here
carried with it a silent nod to our father’s belief in California as the antidote to life in the hot and gritty South or in fast-paced, dangerous New York. In opening our home to Mother, we were hoping to help ease her mind, to give her the chance to regroup and come back into her real self, to realize that she was only tired—exhausted and nothing more.

The way I saw it, Mother in California might have meant a bit of sunshine and fresh air for her, but it meant the opposite for us; our lives would feel more like her life, and our home would feel more like that house with the strange smells and the long, flat hours stretching on and on into the distance. It might also mean that my mother would disappear again into the self she had become in Alabama, the one I couldn’t hold to tightly enough.

Compounding my dread was the fact that I was now a senior in high school and had begun to feel intense pressure from a part of my mind wholly dedicated to the task of tabulating the Embarrassment Quotient of every situation. The idea of Mother as an indefinite houseguest sent that embarrassment meter shooting into the red.

As Mom related it, Mother had started behaving strangely about four months ago. My aunts, who had her with them in New York, said she would insist upon going out to run errands and then wander off, mistaking the streets of Pelham and Mount Vernon for those of Leroy. At any given moment and with minimal instigation, she would become dead set on giving anyone, everyone, a good old-fashioned whipping. Someone might offer her a cup of coffee, and she’d reply, “Go on out in the back and git me a switch, ’cause I’m fixin’ to whup ya,” forearms tensed like snakes homing in on their prey. Aunt Gladys claimed to have narrowly missed a good beating by perching herself on one leg and raising her arms like a kung fu master, making B-movie martial arts noises until Mother called her a fool and stalked away.

“I don’t know how long she’ll need to stay with us,” Mom continued, “but it should do her good to get away. I know my sisters need a break.”

I’d seen Mother only a smattering of times in the span of ten or eleven years since I was last in Leroy. She’d visited us now and again, and there had been a Christmas sometime not too terribly long before when the extended family had congregated in California. Those visits were brief and blurry to me, though her presence, and the conundrum it posed, loomed large to me always.

When she finally arrived that spring, she was so much slighter than I remembered. Of course, I was bigger myself, but there was
something different about the scale of her. She was wiry, and her breasts and stomach had shrunk away to almost nothing. She’d also given up her thick glasses. Her eyes, once cloudy with cataracts, were open and clear, and I tried to take her in as if through them rather than my own, thinking that if I could see her afresh, perhaps I’d be able to hear and understand and love her the way I should have the first time around.

Mother stood on the landing just inside our door, inching forward as we each hugged her, welcoming her into our home. What if we should succeed? What if being sweet with her, just as we had been asked, could lead her back into our lives and back into the world the way it was supposed to be? When it was my turn to hug her, she felt strong beneath her coat. And underneath the perfume one of my aunts must have dabbed her with in preparation for her departure, she smelled just like the tobacco and the woodsmoke and the cane syrup of Alabama.

She was quiet, wary. Evenings, she’d sit with Jean, my parents, and me, and Wanda sometimes, too, in silence. Sometimes, under her breath, I thought I heard her muttering curses. In the afternoons while I was at school, she tried to elude my mother’s watchful eye and venture out into the streets she thought would lead her back to her own house, her own life. At first, I thought she must just be eager to return to her own familiar belongings, the places she knew and liked, but at Christmas, when everyone was home, she touched Conrad’s thigh and called him by my grandfather’s name: Herbert. “No, Mother,” he told her, gently returning her hand to her own lap. How far into a past only she could recognize would any of our voices have to travel before reaching her? Perhaps all the way back to the place my mother used to reminisce so much about, the one I thought would still be waiting
for us in 1978—where Christmas morning meant ripe, sweet oranges and wrist-thick peppermint sticks; where the cotton, melons, and chickens, the whole cured hogs and the catfish swimming in the pond belonged to them; where the brick house on its vast acres made a world all its own, set back, perhaps sometimes only moments at a time, from the world beyond, with its rigid facts and despicable truths.

Truths like the story about one of my distant relations, a great- or a great-great-uncle—someone Mother would have known when she was a young woman in Leroy—who stopped into a bar one night after having sold hundreds of acres of his own timber, his pockets bulging with the cash, or just having the poor sense to boast of it. He’d peeled a few dollars from a fat roll in sight of the wrong pair of eyes. Or else he’d forgotten how quickly news traveled in that town, and his need to slap a few backs and stand a few drinks had given word of his good fortune time to overtake him on the road. It’s possible I have the story wrong. He could have gone straight home. It could have happened on his front porch or in his own house. It doesn’t matter. One way or another, the bullet would still have found him—that bullet or some other—affording one or another white man the ease with which to walk away with all that money, confident he had nothing to fear, accurate in his hunch that, though he’d just killed another man, the law was on his side.

Occasionally, Mother managed to escape her daughter’s gaze, wandering the streets of our neighborhood like a vagabond or a prophet, but we were always able to find her. In a neighbor’s yard. Walking slowly up or down North Texas Street. Arguing with the cashier at the doughnut shop. Once or twice, when the police were enlisted to help, Mother was convinced we had called in some corrupt
sheriff from way back when, and she glared at us with incredulous contempt.