Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (12 page)

So I’ve been accepting my grandmother’s money under false pretenses. I’m not going to spend my life teaching around Fergus County the way she did, the way my mother would have if she hadn’t married my father. I’ve married my husband under false pretenses, too; he’s a good fly-fishing Helena boy who has no idea in the world of becoming a Mr. Ephron. But, subversive as a foundling in a fairy tale, I have tried to explain none of my new aspirations to my mother or grandmother or, least of all, my husband and his parents, who are mightily distressed as it is by my borrowing money for my own education.

“— and it’s all got to be paid back, you’ll be starting your lives in
debt
!”

“— the most important thing is to get
him
through,
he’s
the one who’s got to go out and face the world!”

“— what on earth do you think you’ll do with your education?”

And now all the argument is pointless, the question of teaching certificate over quest for identity, the importance of my husband’s future over mine, the relentless struggle with the in-laws over what is most mine, my self. I’m done for, knocked out of the running by the application of a faulty condom theory.

“Mom,” I blurt, “I’m pregnant.”

She gasps. And before she can let out that breath, a frame of memory freezes with her in it, poised over her rinse tub, looking at me through the rising steam and the grinding wringer. Right now I’m much too miserable to wonder what she sees when she looks at me: her oldest daughter, her bookish child, the daydreamer, the one she usually can’t stand, the one who takes everything too seriously, who will never learn to take no for an answer. Thin and strong and blue-jeaned, bespectacled and crop-haired, this girl could pass for fifteen right now and won’t be able to buy beer in grocery stores for years Without showing her driver’s license. This girl who is too miserable to look her mother in the face, who otherwise might see in her mother’s eyes the years of blight and disappointment. She does hear what her mother says:

“Oh, Mary, no!”

My mother was an unwanted child. The fourth daughter of a homesteading family racked by drought and debt, she was only a year old when the sister nearest her in age died of a cancerous tumor. She was only two years old when the fifth and last child, the cherished boy, was born. She was never studious like her older sisters nor, of course, was she a boy, and she was never able to find her own ground to stand on until she married.

Growing up, I heard her version often, for my mother was given to a kind of continuous oral interpretation of herself and her situation. Standing over the sink or stove, hoeing the garden, running her sewing machine with the permanent angry line deepening between her eyes, she talked. Unlike the stories our grandmothers told, which, like fairy tales, narrated the events of the past but avoided psychological speculation (“Great-great-aunt Somebody-or-other was home alone making soap when the Indians came, so she waited until they got close enough, and then she threw a ladle of lye on them…”), my mother’s dwelt on the motives behind the darkest family impulses.

“Ma never should have had me. It was her own fault. She never should have had me if she didn’t want me.”

“But then you wouldn’t have been born!” I interrupted, horrified at the thought of not being.

“Wouldn’t have mattered to me,” she said. “I’d never have known the difference.”

What I cannot remember today is whom my mother was telling her story to. Our grandmothers told their stories to my little sisters and me, to entertain us, but my mother’s bitter words flowed past us like a river current past small, ignored onlookers who eavesdropped from its shores. I remember her words, compulsive, repetitious, spilling out over her work — for she was always working — and I was awed by her courage. What could be less comprehensible than not wanting to be? More fearsome than annihilation?

Nor can I remember enough about the circumstances of my mother’s life during the late 1940s and the early 1950s to know why she was so angry, why she was so compelled to deconstruct her childhood. Her lot was not easy. She had married into a close-knit family that kept to itself. She had her husband’s mother on her hands all her life, and on top of the normal isolation and hard work of a ranch wife of those years, she had to provide homeschooling for her children.

And my father’s heath was precarious, and the ranch was failing. The reality of that closed life along the river bottom became more and more attenuated by the outward reality of banks and interest rates and the shifting course of agribusiness. She was touchy with money worries. She saw the circumstances of her sisters’ lives grow easier as her own grew harder. Perhaps these were reasons enough for rage.

I recall my mother in her middle thirties through the telescoped eye of the child that distorts the intentions of parents and enlarges them to giants. Of course she was larger than life. Unlike my father, with his spectrum of ailments, she was never sick. She was never hospitalized in her life for any reason but childbirth, never came down with anything worse than a cold. She lugged the armloads of wood and buckets of water and slops and ashes that came with cooking and washing and ironing in a kitchen with a wood range and no plumbing; she provided the endless starchy meals of roast meat and potatoes and gravy; she kept salads on her table and fresh or home-canned vegetables at a time when iceberg lettuce was a town affectation.

She was clear-skinned, with large gray eyes that often seemed fixed on some point far beyond our familiar slopes and cutbanks. And even allowing for the child’s telescoped eye, she was a tall woman who thought of herself as oversized. She was the tallest of her sisters. “
As big as Doris
is what they used to say about me!”

Bigness to her was a curse. “You big ox!” she would fling at me over some altercation with my little sister. True to the imperative that is handed down through the generations, I in turn bought my clothes two sizes too large for years.

All adult ranch women were fat. I remember hardly a woman out of her teens in those years who was not fat. The few exceptions were the women who had, virtually, become a third sex by taking on men’s work in the fields and corrals; they might stay as skinny and tough in their Levi’s as hired hands.

But women who remained women baked cakes and cream pies and breads and sweet rolls with the eggs from their own chickens and the milk and butter and cream from the cows they milked, and they ate heavily from appetite and from fatigue and from the monotony of their isolation. They wore starched cotton print dresses and starched aprons and walked ponderously beside their whiplash husbands. My mother, unless she was going to be riding or helping in the hayfields, always wore those shapeless, starched dresses she sewed herself, always cut from the same pattern, always layered over with an apron.

What was she so angry about? Why was her forehead kneaded permanently into a frown? It was a revelation for me one afternoon when she answered a knock at the screen door, and she smiled, and her voice lifted to greet an old friend of hers and my father’s from their single days. Color rose in her face, and she looked pretty as she told him where he could find my father. Was that how outsiders always saw her?

Other ranch women seemed cheerful enough on the rare occasions when they came in out of the gumbo. Spying on them as they sat on benches in the shade outside the horticulture house at the county fair or visited in the cabs of trucks at rodeos, I wondered if these women, too, were angry when they were alone with only their children to observe them. What secrets lay behind those vast placid, smiling faces, and what stories could their children tell?

My mother believed that her mother had loved her brother best and her older sisters next best. “He was always The Boy and they were The Girls, and Ma was proud of how well they did in school,” she explained again and again to the walls, the stove, the floor she was mopping, “and I was just Doris. I was average.”

Knowing how my grandmother had misjudged my mother, I felt guilty about how much I longed for her visits. I loved my grandmother and her fresh supply of stories about the children who went to the schools she taught, the games they played, and the books they read. School for me was an emblem of the world outside our creek-bottom meadows and fenced mountain slopes. At eight, I was still being taught at home; our gumbo road was impassable for most of the school months, and my father preferred that we be kept safe from contact with “them damn town kids,” as he called them. Subversively I begged my grandmother to repeat her stories again and again, and I tried to imagine what it must be like to see other children every day and to have a real desk and real lessons. Other than my little sister, my playmates were mostly cats. But my grandmother brought with her the breath of elsewhere.

My mother’s resentment whitened in intensity during the weeks before a visit from my grandmother, smoldered during the visit itself, and flared up again as soon as my grandmother was safely down the road to her next school. “I wonder if she ever realizes she wouldn’t even have any grandchildren if I hadn’t got married and had some kids!
The Girls
never had any kids! Some people should never have kids! Some people should never get married!”

With a child’s logic, I thought she was talking about me. I thought I was responsible for her anger. I was preoccupied for a long time with a story I had read about a fisherman who was granted three wishes; he had used his wishes badly, but I was sure I could do better, given the chance. I thought a lot about how I would use three wishes, how I would use their potential for lifting me out of the present.

“What would you wish for, if you had three wishes?” I prodded my mother.

She turned her faraway gray eyes on me, as though she had not been ranting about The Girls the moment before. “I’d wish you’d be good,” she said.

That was what she always said, no matter how often I asked her. With everything under the sun to wish for, that unfailing answer was a perplexity and a worry.

I was my grandmother’s namesake, and I was a bookworm like my mother’s older sisters. Nobody could pry my nose out of a book to do my chores, even though I was marked to be the outdoor-working child, even though I was supposed to be my father’s boy.

Other signs that I was not a boy arose to trouble us both and account, I thought, for my mother’s one wish.

“Mary’s getting a butt on her just like a girl,” she remarked one night as I climbed out of the tub. Alarmed, I craned my neck to see what had changed about my eight-year-old buttocks.

“Next thing, you’ll be mooning in the mirror and wanting to pluck your eyebrows just like the rest of ’em,” she said.

“I will not,” I said doubtfully.

I could find no way through the contradiction. On the one hand, I was a boy (except that I also was a bookworm), and my chores were always in the barns and corrals, never the kitchen.
You don’t know how to cook on a woodstove?
my mother-in-law was to cry in disbelief.
And you grew up on a ranch?

To act like a boy was approved; to cry or show fear was to invite ridicule.
Sissy! Big bellercalf!
On the other hand, I was scolded for hanging around the men, the way ranch boys did. I was not a boy (my buttocks, my vanity). What was I?

“Your dad’s boy,” my mother answered comfortingly when I asked her. She named a woman I knew. “Just like Hazel. Her dad can’t get along Without her.”

Hazel was a tough, shy woman who rode fences and pulled calves and took no interest in the country dances or the “running around” her sisters did on weekends. Hazel never used lipstick or permed her hair; she wore it cut almost like a man’s. Seen at the occasional rodeo or bull sale in her decently pressed pearl-button shirt and new Levi’s, she stuck close to her dad. Like me, Hazel apparently was not permitted to hang around the men.

What Hazel did not seem interested in was any kind of fun, and a great resolve arose in me that, whatever I was, I was going to have…whatever it was. I would get married, even if I wasn’t supposed to.

But my mother had another, darker reason to be angry with me, and I knew it. The reason had broken over me suddenly the summer I was seven and had been playing, on warm afternoons, in a rain barrel full of water. Splashing around, elbows and knees knocking against the side of the barrel, I enjoyed the rare sensation of being wet all over. My little sister, four, came and stood on tiptoe to watch. It occurred to me to boost her into the barrel with me.

My mother burst out of the kitchen door and snatched her back.

“What are you trying to do, kill her?” she shouted.

I stared back at her, wet, dumbfounded.

Her eyes blazed over me, her brows knotted at their worst. “And after you’d drowned her, I suppose you’d have slunk off to hide somewhere until it was all over!”

It had never crossed my mind to kill my sister, or that my mother might think I wanted to. (Although I had, once, drowned a setting of baby chicks in a rain barrel.) But that afternoon, dripping in my underpants, goose-bumped and ashamed, I watched her carry my sister into the house and then I did go off to hide until it was, somehow, all over, for she never mentioned it at dinner.

The chicks had been balls of yellow fuzz, and I had been three. I wanted them to swim. I can just remember catching a chick and holding it in the water until it stopped squirming and then laying it down to catch a fresh one. I didn’t stop until I had drowned the whole dozen and laid them out in a sodden yellow row.

What the mind refuses to allow to surface is characterized by a suspicious absence. Of detail, of associations. Memories skirt the edge of nothing. There is for me about this incident that suspicious absence. What is being with held?

Had I, for instance, given my mother cause to believe I might harm my sister? Children have done such harm, and worse. What can be submerged deeper, denied more vehemently, than the murderous impulse? At four, my sister was a tender, trusting little girl with my mother’s wide gray eyes and brows. A younger sister of an older sister. A good girl. Mommy’s girl.