The Long Journey Home (7 page)

By the time I knew her, Mrs. Forbes had long since given up the kindergarten that she taught in her home for so many years. Now only a few older children came to her for art lessons, and I knew only a couple of those who occasionally joined me. Mostly I remember being there alone with Mrs. Forbes.

Every Saturday afternoon I sat at the small desk in her sitting room or at one of the tables on her porch and drew and painted a still life of fruits or vegetables that she’d set up for me, or, when she was teaching me about perspective, stacks of books, cups, and saucers. Or I laboriously copied one of the many pictures that she’d clipped from magazines for students to choose from.

I painted, and she talked. She talked about attending the Chicago Institute of Art, and how once her instructor in the figure-drawing class reprimanded her for working so long on the face of the model. “This is a figure-drawing class,” he’d boomed loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Not portraiture!” I tried to imagine her as a young woman in a real art school, red-faced with embarrassment at being publicly chastised, but I couldn’t see her as anything other than confident. Mrs. Forbes, I thought, would have held her ground wherever she was. And she went more places than I’d ever thought of going. She talked about her teaching at the Sac and Fox Agency of the United States Indian Service and about her trip to England to see the coronation of King George IV.

She had a drawer full of poems and stories she’d written in response to her experiences, and she would sometimes read stories to me about Byfleet Manor in England, about Wapemac, the Indian boy who didn’t want his braid cut off, or Wishewah, the little Indian girl grieving for her mother. Or she would read “Frowsy Old Grumble” or another of her poems. I was especially intrigued by her poem “Fireplace Imps,” with all of its crackling, sizzling, spitting, and spouting. It fed my own fascination with fire and my love of sitting in front of the fireplace in my parents’ bedroom, imagining a world in the shapes and colors of the hot coals and flames. But the poems’ references to “grown-ups to tea” and the use of words like “wee bit” and “ ’twas” made them feel like something left over from another century. For the duration of the listening, I could be a contented child in some fairy-tale world or a simple, happy child, and not the child I really was.

The child I really was was troubled, but I told no one what I perceived to be the source of my trouble. I felt too frightened of what I thought and too ashamed of the solution that had erupted unbidden in my mind. When I was eight years old, and hanging upside down from the trapeze on the swing set in our backyard, I first realized the problem consciously enough to put words to it.

The swing set stood near an old oak tree that was half-dead and
covered by wisteria vines heavy with blossoms. From where I hung I could see the wisteria on my left, while in front of me and across the coarse grass stood a large clump of banana trees. I loved the long, broad banana leaves and the twisted vines of the wisteria. More than anything else in the yard they reminded me of the jungle.

I was thinking about the jungle that day I’d been to a Tarzan movie at the Zebulon picture show. For nearly an hour and a half I’d sat in the dark theater, eating a king-sized Baby Ruth candy bar and a bag of buttered popcorn, while watching Tarzan swing from vine to vine through the jungle from one adventure to another. After sitting in the dark for so long, I had to squint at the blaze of the late-afternoon sun when I left the theater. It often took me the two blocks of my walk home before my eyes forgot the dark and got used to daylight again. For those two blocks that day I thought about Tarzan.

Home, I opened the front screen door, calling, “Mama!”

For years I’d called my mother “Mother,” except when I was upset and in need of comfort.

I called again: “Mama!”

No answer.

I walked across the living room, into the hall, and to my parents’ bedroom, where I stood at the open doorway looking in. Mother was asleep on top of the bedspread. Her glasses had slipped halfway down her nose, and one of her women’s magazines—
Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal
, or
Redbook
—lay open and spread across her belly.

The hall behind me was dark, and the house felt large and empty with her asleep. I wanted her to wake up. I watched her belly rise and fall with each breath. The electric fan at the foot of the bed ruffled the pages of the magazine a little, but my mother didn’t stir. Not daring to wake her, I hoped that my steady stare would make her open her eyes and look at me, but it didn’t.

After a while I turned away and walked down the hall. I wished Bubba was home, but his room was empty. I went to my room,
kicked off my shoes, took my dress off, and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Then I went out the back door to the swing set, where for a long time I hung upside down from the trapeze, thinking of Tarzan.

In the movie, Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan. I don’t remember the name of the actress who played his mate, Jane. Jane didn’t matter. Tarzan was the one who rode the elephant at the head of the herd; he was the one who wrestled alligators and protected Jane from the charging rhinoceros. I wanted to be like Tarzan, not like Jane, leaping helplessly from the tree limbs into his strong arms, or fixing the food and waiting for him to come back from another adventure.

It wasn’t just Jane I didn’t like. It was suddenly and painfully apparent that I didn’t like being a girl who would grow into a woman. I thought of Mother struggling into her girdle on a hot day, sweat already trickling down between her breasts when she’d hardly dried herself from her bath. I’d watched her straining to pull the sides of the corset together over her flesh, fastening the hooks and eyes one by one, then tugging the zipper closed with short, hard jerks.

I began to swing back and forth on the trapeze. I let my arms hang limp from my shoulders, fingertips touching the dirt where the grass had worn away.
Tarzan, King of the Jungle
. To be at home in all that wildness; to not be bound by rules and expectations. A large grasshopper hopped through the grass just beyond my reach. Then I heard the rush of water running in the kitchen sink. Mother was up, cooking supper.

Some days Mother didn’t change from her nightgown until afternoon. On those days she moved slowly and her mood felt heavy like the heavy breasts that hung loose under her nightgown. Mother’s life felt like a chore to be completed, a burden to be endured. She was always stirring a pot of grits or frying bacon and eggs, and the trash can by the stove was always running over. There were tubs to be scrubbed clean of scum and stray hairs, beds to be made, floors to be swept. And all the while, despite her slow and labored efforts, dust settled on the tables again, floors lost their luster, clutter accumulated.
It was as if the house, with its attendant chores and demands, conspired to keep her forever captive; as if the tasks multiplied and took over her whole life the way kudzu vines took over abandoned places in the country, climbing walls, roofs, outhouses, and tool sheds.

Swinging back and forth on the trapeze, I was flooded with images from my mother’s life. Relentless as kudzu, insistent and intimate as blood, they flowed through me. To be a woman was to be dead. I thought I would just as soon sit down in an electric chair and have someone strap me in and pull the switch. I’d never felt more alone and lonely. And it didn’t matter that Mother was awake now, because there was nothing she could do. There was nothing anyone could do. I was a girl, and being a girl, I had no choice except to grow up and be a woman. My face felt hot. I gripped the trapeze bar with both hands and swung down. I felt sick to my stomach, and a little dizzy. I walked over to the oak and sat on the grass behind it. My mind filled with the image of mother’s large, pendulous breasts. After her bath I’d watched her lift them—first one, then the other—and pat Yardley’s bath powder under them with a large puff, clouds of powder rising all around her. I felt my own chest, smooth and flat under my T-shirt. I thought of Tarzan’s chest, smooth and muscular. And Jane’s chest, too, with its breasts. Maybe the problem after all had to do with breasts. Maybe when I grew up, I could find a doctor who would slice mine off. But as I thought this, I felt a rush of guilt flood through me, threatening the fragile hope I held in my heart. How could I think about doing such a thing? The thought itself felt like a sin. What would Mother think of me if she knew I had such a thought?

I went inside. My father and brother were already seated at the kitchen table waiting for their supper. Mother was spooning grits onto Daddy’s plate. I sat down and put my napkin in my lap. “I wondered where you were,” Mother said, spooning grits onto my plate. “I thought that picture show should have been over by now.”

“I was out back on the trapeze.”

Mother went to the stove, got a platter of fried eggs and bacon, and set it on the table along with a stack of toast. Then she sat down. I scooped a large spoonful of grits onto my plate, slid an egg onto it, and took two slices of crisp bacon, crumbling them into my grits. I cut a large slice of butter and dropped it into my grits. For a few seconds I stared down, watching the butter melt to a yellow pool. Then I chopped my egg up, mixed it with the grits and bacon, spread grape jelly on a piece of toast, and propped the toast on the edge of my plate. Without looking up, I began to eat.

Dear God, don’t let my mother die
, I prayed.

The ambulance had sped past as I was walking home from town where, at age twelve, I’d taken my little brothers while Mother gave birth to my sister, Harriet, at home. I thought the ambulance turned into our drive, not into the road past Miss Sadie’s, where in fact it did turn.

The baby, not my mother
, I prayed over and over, my heart thumping frantically in my chest.

Opening the front door that day, I’d opened the door to a world suddenly gone out of control and nightmarish. My sister’s shrill screaming filled the house.

She’d been born blue, umbilical cord twisted like a noose around her neck. Old Dr. Rogers had stretched a piece of gauze over her mouth and blown his cigar-soured breath into her lungs, pronounced her healthy, and left the house. But the atmosphere in the room was charged with pain, and Mother was unreachable.

After a while the nurse began to time my sister’s screams. She found that she stopped screaming for no more than two minutes in three hours. Then she screamed the whole night through. The nurse
decided that she had pressure on her brain, which was true. My sister had cerebral palsy.

Those first days and weeks after her birth have dissolved into a blur of confusion, pain, and despair. Mostly I remember my sister’s screams.

Often I paced back and forth across the polished oak floor of my parents’ bedroom, holding her in my arms. I walked between the mirror and the closet door until she fell asleep. That she could relax enough in my arms to fall asleep gave me as much comfort as it gave her.

“I
F THERE IS A WAY TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOU AFTER
I
’M DEAD, IF
there is a way to cross over that threshold, I will come back to you,” Mrs. Clemons said to me.

My mother was late in picking me up, and the cold winter light had drained from the room. A warm yellow glow from her chairside lamp illuminated Mrs. Clemons’s hands, long-fingered and arthritic, articulate and dramatic. She was as old as my grandmother. A silk scarf fell around her neck in elegant folds, concealing the goiter on her throat.

“When I die, dear, lean close to my dead body,” she said, leaning toward me as she spoke. “Perhaps it will be easiest to speak with you just after I cross over.”

I lowered my eyes for a few seconds, staring at her feet, side by side in their black satin slippers on a small needlepoint stool. Behind me on the mantelpiece and propped against a pair of cut-glass candlesticks stood announcements of her death, addressed in her own hand. The cards were bordered in black and said: “Dear Friend, Grace Clemons has passed away on this __ day of ____, 19__.” On the other end of the mantelpiece stood a snapshot of her mustached nephew from whom she awaited a visit year after year. On the wall
beside me hung a picture of Death rowing a young woman across the River Styx. I say it was Death because I always thought of the somber figure standing at the stern of the boat as Death itself, though it was in fact Charon, the ferryman who rowed the dead across the River Styx into the underworld.

“Cold lips and breast without breath,” Mrs. Clemons had recited earlier from Sir Edwin Arnold’s poem “She and He.” “Is there no voice, no language of death?” She’d recited the poem to me many times over the three years since I’d begun to visit her after I’d started taking painting lessons from Mrs. Forbes, who owned the house in which both women lived, and who lived below Mrs. Clemons.

She recited the poem slowly and passionately. And, as always, when listening to her recite the poem, I saw in my imagination a vast room, high-ceilinged and windowless, and at its center, a beautiful young woman’s dead body lying on a slab of marble, long hair streaming down the sides of her pillow, strewn with blossoms, as was the hair of the young woman Death was rowing and rowing across the River Styx.

Stillness. Gloom. Cold. These words from the poem filled my imagination, where the image grew so still that it became more like a tangible presence than the absence of sound or motion. That stillness had a weight to it, like the heavy cloak Death wore.

During the three years that I’d taken my midafternoon break from my Saturday painting lessons and sometimes—as now—waited with her for my mother to come for me afterward, Mrs. Clemons often talked about her death. Sometimes she would announce: “I hear the bells tolling midnight in the distance and they are coming closer,” her deep voice anchoring the words in a place of sober acknowledgment and resignation. Sometimes she made reference to the funeral announcements. But until that winter evening she’d never talked about communicating with me after her death. She spoke carefully and thoughtfully. “If you aren’t with me when I die,” she said, “go to my grave. The soul has to have a place to come home to.”