Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (7 page)

After Mom and I cleared the lunch plates from the table, the look on Maggie’s face said she had just about decided to collect her things and leave. She craned her neck looking around the room for one last clue. Maybe she caught sight of one of my father’s ashtrays, clean as a whistle (one of my chores), or his pipe-stand on the governor’s cabinet in the family room, because the next thing she came out with was “Do you smoke?”

My mother didn’t smoke, and Maggie didn’t seem inclined to light up all by herself.

“Hmph,”
Maggie said, twisting her mouth up into an off-kilter pout. “Well, do you
drank
?” It was a question asked, it seemed, to verify what she had already come to suspect: that there was nothing other than the coffee they had already drunk or the pitcher of ice water, beaded with condensation and still on the table within her reach.

Ah, but what if things had gone differently? What if my mother
had reached under the kitchen sink to pull out a big green jug of Almaden Mountain Rhine, thunking it down on the table as if to say to Maggie,
I’ll show you my hand if you show me yours
? What if, letting their glasses clink in the air, they’d let the conversation beeline away from small talk about hometowns or military postings to touch upon a topic with real meat and mass, like love? What if Maggie told my mother about the men she ran with and the places they went, the smoky air base lounges where songs like “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late” and “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine” were queued up on the jukebox? And what if my mother had inhaled deeply and then let it out, the long, slow breath of truth about what it really felt like to wait for her husband for months at a time, praying he was safe, praying he was worthy of her trust, while she was home looking after a small battalion of children? What might have transpired there between the two of them then?

My mother’s poise was not an act, but there was something gleaming and spirited beneath it, something that instigated pranks and stunts that could bend the rest of us over in laughter. No matter how decorous she was and how much she lived by the grace and the humility of her faith, there was always this other thing we knew was there, this mirthsome, living thing that set her apart from the church ladies and the military wives and everyone else she knew. I loved when she brought it out and let it run around without reins, like a bareback horse. Like the time, cleaning out the kitchen pantry, she tossed my brothers Tupperware bowls and told them to put them on like crowns and gave them spatulas and turkey basters to hold up like scepters and then made the two of them pose for pictures in chairs perched atop the patio table as if they were a couple of insane Everglades kings. Or the evening
when the topic of nicknames came up for discussion in the family. Everyone had a go at choosing a new moniker: Wanda chose Wani to replace her usual Sissy. My dad confided that, when the time came, he’d like for his grandchildren to refer to him as Papa, accented as in the French. I can’t remember what I chose; I was happy with the nickname I already had: Kitten. When it was my mother’s turn, she said that she didn’t want to be called Mom, or Mama, and that we should cease calling her Mommy. She told us with a straight face, “Call me Sexy.” She could be as giddy and unself-conscious as an actor heaving life into a new role or a child inventing a story, and her excitement and freedom ferried some of her exuberance of spirit over to us, but not everyone was lucky enough to know that side of her.

Maggie certainly wasn’t. For whatever reasons on that day, my mother seemed incapable of calling it up or unwilling to let it out, and so our guest emptied her water glass and set it back down on the table, taking on the tone of someone who really must be getting back to work. Before I knew it, the three of us were standing by the front door, and my mother was thanking Maggie for having come.

“Well, ain’t that a blip,” my mother said after Maggie was gone, sighing.

“
Ain’t
isn’t a word,” I reminded her.

“I know, Tracy. I know.”

LEROY

H
ad it ever struck me as odd that my mom, whom I called
Mom
or
Mommy
, should have referred to her own mother with such formality, as
Mother
, or that I should call my grandmother that, too?
Mother?
No matter that Mother was more likely than not to drop the
r
and more than a few
s
’s from most anything she said, she was invariably known as
Mother
to all thirteen of her children and all thirty or more of her grandchildren. I’d hardly thought to wonder why my mom, the eldest of a whole passel of Deep South farm kids, would have decided to call her
Mother
instead of
Mom
or
Mama
or even
Muh
, which is what our second cousins in Sacramento called my great-aunt Cora (we referred to that entire wing of the family as
Muh ’n ’em
). It did strike me as odd that I called my grandmother, whom I barely knew, something that sat so close to home—Mother—but I did. It was what everyone did.

My first fleshed-out memory of Mother comes from a two-week visit to Leroy, Alabama, that Mom and I took the summer after first grade. My brothers and sisters stayed home. They were in junior high and high school and even college by that point and had other things to do. Not to mention that it wasn’t a simple matter of hopping in the car and driving, as the whole family had done in the years before I was born, when Dad was stationed in Texas or even as far north as New Hampshire. No, flying the seven of
us out from California would have cost a fortune, so Mom and I made the trip by ourselves. I’d been to Alabama just one time before that I could remember, when I was three. But everything from that first visit is crowded out by the silent, gentle presence of my grandfather Daddy Herbert, who bought me crayons and comic books after I’d gashed my face trying to shave with his razor. It’s a recollection tinted a pale pink from the drapes of the room where I convalesced.

The details of this summer, though, remain indelible. It had been my first time on an airplane. The stewardess gave me a set of pilot’s wings and a pack of playing cards. At dinnertime, I ate a little square ramekin of lasagna and drank orange juice made watery and cold with squares of ice. It felt exotic, as if we had genuinely lifted off from our lives on the ground. Perhaps for that reason I had known to be quiet, to speak in the hushed tones of wonder or transgression. I stayed up late. My eyes were open for all of a Farrah Fawcett movie, and when it was over, I curled onto my mom’s lap and finally slept.

When I woke up, we were there, and then we were in a car, on the road to Mother’s house.

I’d been expecting the deep country, with pitch-black skies and insomniac owls, the kind of place that would have meant a leap through time back to the world my mother sometimes reminisced about, with its outhouses and smokehouses, its miles and miles of the cotton Daddy Herbert paid her and her siblings pennies a bushel to pick. Someone—was it my mother or her sister Evelyn?—used to laze at the ends of rows, daydreaming, letting the others take up her slack. At night they’d all sit down to a big country supper, with Daddy Herbert at the head of the table, proud of his army of boys and girls and of the land he’d worked hard to buy.

I’d expected to find a past like that still going about its business, flush with the present. Instead, there were Datsuns and Cadillacs parked on the streets and billboards and sprawling modern supermarkets that seemed to stand a whole world away from the version of Alabama my mother’s stories had sketched in my mind’s eye.

Once we pulled off the two-lane main road, we rolled onto a carpet of dense clay. There were tall oaks and pines on either side and houses that sat some distance from one another. A red clapboard house with white trim stood upon stilts; bits of daylight that had pierced through the trees and shrubs shone out from under it. We took a turn onto a smaller road—or was it, by then, a path?—which gave way to pebbly gravel. A bell of recognition chimed inside me when I saw Mother’s house, a brick one-story that sat alongside a barn, a pond, and dense woods. Perhaps because I’d seen it in so many old photos of my grandparents standing together like a dark version of
American Gothic
and of my aunts and uncles, still just children, playing barefoot in the dirt.

The little house was my only respite from the blaring midday heat—humid, and relentless. Compared with the hot, dry afternoons and cool, breezy nights I was used to, Alabama weather seemed almost predatory. Inside, the place smelled of things I had trouble identifying: cooking gas, pork fat, tobacco juice, and cane syrup. Three generations lived there: Mother; her mother, Mama Lela, who, at nearly eighty, was smiling and chatty, chewing her snuff and spitting the dark sappy liquid into a Folger’s coffee can; and Dinah, my mom’s youngest sister, who was the same age as my sister Jean. (I could never get my mind around the fact that my mother and her mother had been pregnant at the same time, like sisters.) Within hours of our arrival, Dinah had taught me to plant my feet shoulder width apart and swing my hips back and forth
while a forty-five of the disco hit “Le Freak” played over and over on the turntable. We danced together all morning, Dinah laughing and me reveling in the song’s assurance that I was not so far from home—after all, it wasn’t impossible to imagine my siblings listening to the same song just then on our stereo in California. “Le Freak” might have served as an anchor, a touchstone emboldening me to let go of some of my apprehension of that foreign place, had the record not melted onto the turntable the very next afternoon when the curtains were left open in hot sun.

As excited as I had been in the weeks leading up to our trip—
I’m going on an airplane! I’m going to my grandmother’s house!
—Mother remained inscrutable to me, nothing like the kindhearted lady in my mom’s stories, the one who turned out big fluffy cakes and sat laughing beside a lively, jocular Daddy Herbert. For one thing, my grandfather was gone. He died of a stroke the year I was four. Without him at her side, Mother seemed stern, watchful, almost feral. I felt scolded by her small staring eyes and the hardscrabble set of her mouth. Furthermore, the path of communication leading from her to me was a zigzag guaranteeing that anything set upon it would lose momentum, rolling to a standstill just shy of my feet. She’d ask, “Does that little gal want some water?” leaving my mom to look at me with an expression meant to reiterate the question, which I would then answer meekly, watching as it was repeated for Mother at an audible decibel level. When Mother did speak to me directly (often calling me by the name of my younger cousin Stacy), my ensuing silence—a result of confusion about her accent or her funny words for things—would prompt my mom to repeat it for me. It was like being stuck in a relentless game of telephone.

My brothers and sisters grew up spending summers in Leroy,
playing with a cadre of cousins; running around under the feet of Daddy Herbert and a younger, more easygoing Mother; racing up to the general store with the shiny coins they’d been given for sweeping the porch or folding laundry. But just when it should have been my turn for all that, the Mother everyone remembered seemed to disappear. Nobody said where she had gone or why she had left.

I admired the fact that my mom could stay afloat in this place that had me utterly confused, seeming as it did to rely upon a different language and currency. In her childhood home, Mom was herself and something more. She knew how to hold her own with Mother, how to put on an apron and become one of the women of the house, how to be silent without feeling chastised by the wordlessness of whole long segments of the day, even how to fetch Mama Lela her coffee can without wrinkling her nose at the dark funk of tobacco spittle. But that place—which had everything to do with the woman who’d made me (hadn’t it?) and yet seemingly nothing to do with any version of me that I could recognize or even imagine—left me locked out, stuck to my knees in mud.

The two weeks were sweltering and long. When Mama Lela and my mom sat quilting together or when Mom rode with Mother to pay one of the old folks a visit, I’d nurse thoughts of what it would feel like if I could magically wake up and speak the language of this place—if I could move around in this kitchen, emptying a cup of this and a teaspoon of that into a shiny mixing bowl; if I could manage to coax a laugh or even a smile out of Mother; if Dinah’s record were still around to catch the two of us up in its never-ending disco fantasy. I even sometimes imagined what I would sound like if I could borrow Dinah’s voice for the remainder of my visit. She had a slight stammer—it didn’t seem
to cause her any embarrassment, and I quickly came to associate it with her sense of dominion, of authentic, uncontestable belonging not just to Alabama but to this big family stretching back for generations—and even that became emblematic of something I wanted. Other times, I fell into a deep longing for our real life, Mom’s and mine, but not even crawling into bed beside her at night or folding myself in her arms during the day could make me feel less out of place here, less of a stranger.