Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (26 page)

No matter who found her, Mother always came back angry—for being kept prisoner, barred from conducting her affairs. Our response was to humor her. “Sorry, Mother,” we’d submit. Only my mom dared correct her. “No, Mother,” she’d say. “You’re in California now.” But no one told her
when
she was—that her husband was gone, and Mama Lela, too—that even if she were to “come to” here or anyplace else, she’d still likely find herself unmoored, an alien adrift.

Despite the discouraging fact that having Mother with us was improving nothing, my mom continued to try, giving her things to do with her hands, asking her to cook or explain or reminisce, anything to slow her descent into the disease we’d all by then started to call by its proper name.

I remember the sorrow in my mom’s eyes when she told me Daddy Herbert had died. I was only four or five years old, but I recognized a heartbreak so undisguised it collapsed me in tears.
My mother’s father has died
, I told myself.
My mother’s world has been touched by death
. But really, what I was crying for was myself and the fact that my mother, having come from a man who was susceptible to death, might one day die herself. I wept and wept, my body buckling under a weight I was too small to have ever considered before, a weight that pushed in from all sides. My mother had been touched by death; it was no stranger to her. There was no way to undo that, no way to make death forget her name.

But this time, it was something else she stood facing. What did she see in Mother’s face, the brow knotted in doubt, the mouth crimped shut in anger or fear? What did she hear in the silence Mother mostly gave back? I never asked. Caught up in my own adolescent
crushes and fantasies, worries and preoccupations, I barely stopped to think what kind of trauma this must have amounted to for my mom. I could see that she was more than tired, that she was mentally exhausted from the stress of wanting to stop time and fix whatever was broken inside Mother—but I said nothing.

I began finding reasons to linger after school, not wanting to rush back to the disquiet I’d come to feel with Mother at home. Sometimes, I stopped into a favorite teacher’s classroom as he was erasing the boards, and we’d talk for a few minutes about poems or novels. Other kids were racing home or changing into gym clothes for sports practice. The band, which I’d quit after eighth grade, was off in the distance; the brass notes and percussion traveled through the air and reached us almost languidly. I was motivated by something I couldn’t articulate. I was sniffing out what else the things I was reading might offer me, some way of seeing or being in the world that might help lead me…where, exactly? I only knew the very real wish, like an itch under the skin, to get there. When my teacher and I talked about a poem or a story, I felt its words rolling toward me in great waves that crashed, receded, then gathered force and returned. The language and how it hit me assured me I was withstanding something, that language was marking me. But sitting there day after day talking with that man as if what we said to one another had never before been said—as if the sound our voices made together really did matter—that was marking me, too.

My teacher was young, just a few years older than Wanda, who by then was already thirty-one. Perhaps I’d fallen so easily into our unfolding conversations because I was used to confiding in people his age. Because of his age, and the fact that he was relatively new to the school—unlike other of his colleagues, he had never taught my siblings or met my parents—he represented a different kind
of authority. He wasn’t handsome. He was exaggeratedly tall and angular. But he was earnest; he talked about works of literature and art as if they were the keys to a deeper, more genuine way of living. I don’t know that he lived that way outside of the classroom, but from the way he talked, I knew he wanted to. Sometimes, the two of us would walk across the quad to the school library, and he’d pick a book off the shelf for me to take home. It was on one of those afternoons, while my teacher was disappeared in the meager stacks, that I noticed a portrait of Conrad hanging midway through a lineup of former Students of the Year. “That’s my brother,” I told him when he reemerged, as if Conrad up there on the wall might help to assure him that he was justified in devoting so much time to a girl half his age.

Soon I began stopping by his classroom every day after school. My teacher would turn one desk around to face mine, and without feeling it happen, we’d talk for an hour, sometimes more. Then I’d collect my things and walk home, with an optimism that helped brace me against whatever unease Mother might have been stirring up at home.

One afternoon while I was at school, Mother cornered my mom in our front yard, brandishing an actual “switch,” a young branch she’d yanked from the shrubs and stripped of its leaves so that, were it to strike someone, it would cut quickly through the air and hurt like the devil. There was an attempt to reason, then a standoff, and then a struggle. My mom, racked with her own grief, was no match for Mother’s desire to be done with the bewildering time and place in which she found herself, and to be done with all of us. How could my mother strike back against an old woman whose anger was not anger but fear swirling in every direction? How could she lash back at her own mother, even if doing so was the only way to save her?

Seeing her mother like that must have tipped Mom into a state I didn’t associate with her, a state of panic, and that thought activated my concern. Did she run for cover? If she had, Mother might have taken advantage of the opportunity to get away. Did she lurch for the arms that whirled the switch in the air like a knife? Surely the promise of one of Mother’s beatings (a promise Mother, incidentally, made good on) would have been secondary to the threat Mother’s escape would have posed. Mom must have called out for help, because eventually a neighbor, glimpsing the tussle through his front window, emerged to help corral Mother back indoors.

By the time I got home, everyone in the house was slumped under a mix of enervation and fright. Jean had taken me aside and told me all the details in a voice barely above a whisper, not wanting Mom to have to relive the day’s events by hearing the story narrated again. I remember that I felt guilty, but also, I am ashamed to admit, lucky, to have been away when the struggle took place. My mom made some calls. By evening, she’d found a way back into herself as we knew her, into her voice and her mind-set as our mother. She had even mustered a thin, brittle laugh at the skill with which Mother still knew how to hand out a whipping.

When Aunt Gladys arrived to take Mother back to New York, she dispelled a small part of our anxiety. She was younger than my mom but older in a kind of visceral experience—strong, tough even, but still feminine. Aunt Gladys had the family eyes—large, expressive, and deep—and my mother’s strong, wide nose that married an unexpected vigor to her beauty. She had a physicality that Mother submitted to more easily. Aunt Gladys was a switchboard operator at a hospital in the Bronx. “Op-er-a-tor!” she sang into the receiver, when she was on the job, like a lady in a movie. She laughed easily, and her laughter was either big and explosive or silent but perceptible, seeping out practically from her pores.
It didn’t seem that a woman like Aunt Gladys could ever be tired or that she might secretly be dreading the family work that lay ahead in New York. “Okay, Mother, here we go,” Aunt Gladys said when the day finally came for their departure. When she and Mom said their goodbyes, the physical mirroring I always recognized in the two of them inverted. Aunt Gladys was, for a moment, the original, and it was my mother who resembled her—not the other way around. My mother’s eyes, her nose, even the dimples in her cheeks, were, for a moment, not working together to conjure an image of herself but rather one of her sister. Something under the surface united them, too. A knowing and a sorrow I had not seen in my mother for a very long time.

EPISTOLARY

T
he hills were already pale, the straw color that Californians call “golden,” which meant the winter rains were a distant memory. There was the sense of things flowering, stretching open. In our after-hours meetings, my teacher had been acting distractedly. His eyes fidgeted when we spoke, avoiding my own. “I’m worried about you. You don’t seem like yourself,” I finally said, fearful that he might be tiring of our visits. By this time in our ongoing conversation, it didn’t feel strange to me to say a thing like that. We were friends. We had entered into a shared language. We wanted to be the characters in books, even the ones like Prufrock or Jude the Obscure, who circled around and around in their lives like bubbles in a drain. I never stopped to ask myself why, in the face of every other possible scenario, either of us should want a thing like that.

On the last afternoon before spring break, he handed me a letter. It sat in a folder behind an essay I’d written, and he asked me not to read it until I got home. The rest of the school day was heavy with suspense. I zipped the folder into my backpack to protect it from my own agonizing curiosity. Did I already suspect what it would say? A year earlier, an older girl had told me how, when she was in his class, he’d once been so pleased with another girl’s work he’d blurted out: “If I weren’t already married, I’d propose to you right now!” What had I done with that information? Is it what
led me to his classroom every day after school? Did it hover around us those afternoons while we passed a book back and forth taking turns reading passages aloud to one another, our knees almost touching beneath the desks?
If I weren’t…I’d…
Where did those ellipses propel my mind? I retrieved the letter from my backpack once I’d put some distance between myself and the campus. I wanted time to take it in before I reached home.

I’ve begun to realize that my feelings for you are different now than they were just a few short weeks ago…

I suspected he had already said more than what he’d once said to that other girl. I walked the blocks home avoiding the cracks in the pavement while my heart galloped. He loved me. It was a dangerous revelation, entirely inappropriate. He’d certainly understand if I chose not to meet with him anymore, to revert to being an ordinary student who handed in her work and raced past his classroom on her way home at the end of the day. He understood that even the fact of the letter would weigh heavily on me, as a secret I would probably feel obliged to guard regardless of what my response would be, and he apologized for that presumption. The letter was written in the same wiry script that cluttered the margins of all the essays I’d written for his class. I folded it into a square that could fit in the back pocket of my jeans. When I got home, I placed it on my dresser, in a wooden jewelry box that played
Für Elise
.

Twenty-five years later, and with children of my own, I ask myself what it was that assured him he’d be safe in handing me such a chronicle of forbidden feeling, safe even in acknowledging the facts to himself. When a teacher says such things to a young
girl, it usually leads to a heap of trouble. Even then, I knew as much. When I was in ninth grade, people had whispered about a tenth-grade girl they claimed was having an affair with one of her teachers. Her story disturbed and perplexed me. Whenever I’d pass that teacher in the halls, his blank stare seemed to both hide and advertise a lurid appetite. I thought of the two of them doing things to one another in his classroom, of her driving to visit him at home, which is how the rumors described it. Did she like it? Whose idea had it been? Could it have possibly been hers? And what exactly was the
it
that bound them? The thought was like a film reel that would flicker in my mind for just a few frames before disintegrating. I told myself that a girl who’d get involved in a situation like that must have been lonely, crying out in a visible way for attention. But whenever I saw her, she had on an exuberant smile; she was tearing through the halls, yelling over her shoulder. The next fall, that teacher was gone. Fired, people said. But the girl was still the same.

My adult self still can’t figure out what made my teacher sit down to write such a letter to me. What had made him decide to come out and say it? What did he think saying so would do? I was not unloved, not a girl for whom such an admission might produce the kind of gratitude that would result in unrestricted access. Taking my home life into consideration, I might have been guilty of having had too much love. We used that word at home a lot: “I love you.” “I love you, too.” And we meant it. We hugged and kissed one another. We talked and laughed together. We spent weekends and holidays, our whole lives, really, talking and laughing and feasting on this thing we never had the need to call by any other name.

When I was still just a very little girl, my father would appear in the doorway at the end of the day and I’d race up and hug him
around the leg, not letting go until he bent down to scoop me up in his arms. Or I’d lean into his chest while he held me in his lap, his gentle, sturdy voice creating a cushion around us that blotted out everything else. By the spring when I received the letter, I was too big for these rituals. And my father was still gone most of the week; he’d moved on to a different job, but the commute was the same, and I saw him mostly on the weekends. An awkwardness had crept into the times when my father and I were alone together. He was still the same man, but there were moments, more and more of them, when I’d anger him with some small thing—sassing my mother or stomping off in disgust at some request he hadn’t seen fit to grant—and he’d grow terrible before my eyes, glowing from some inextinguishable inner source. Still, even when I was angry with him for standing between me and what I wanted, there was also a part of me that drew comfort from the fact that he hadn’t diminished, was just as mighty as he had always been.