Up Island (3 page)

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gracefully at me, her fastidious little shudders and drawings aside when I blundered too close to her. At those times he would hold out his arms to me, or make a dry, small joke at my mother’s expense, or sometimes simply say, in his quiet voice, “Tink…”

My mother would run at me then, and fold me into her arms and smother me with kisses that she had to stand on tiptoe to deliver, and say, in her lovely lilt, “As if it were your fault, my darling! As if you asked to be such a nice big armful!”

And, encircled in her warm, sweet, reaching flesh, I would feel the full, ponderous weight and height of my nice big armful, and her arms would feel as cold and alien to me as marble.

It would have been impossible not to see that Kevin, my younger brother and nearly the twin of my mother, fit with every slender, quicksilver inch of him into her arms. Flesh of her flesh might have been written for my mother and my brother.

Many years later, after a near killing loss, I found myself doubled over on my bed, arms folded across my stomach, rocking to and fro and weeping, in a kind of mindless mantra,

“I want my mother! I want my mother!”

And knowing, in a terrible epiphany, that even though she was only ten or so blocks away, I had never had her, and could not now. There has never been anything in my life like that moment for sheer, monstrous aloneness. Never, not anything. I don’t think there ever will be again.

It seems odd to me now that it was for her that I wept that day when, from the first moment of remembered awareness, it was to my father that I ran for comfort. But perhaps it is not so strange, after all. Any child
18 / Anne Rivers Siddons

knows, with a cell-deep certainty, when he has been given only half. Later, when that half has proved strong enough to sustain and propel, he may not miss the unproffered other half of sustenance so much, may not even remember a time when its absence starved and terrified. But the void, the abyss of its absence, is with the child always, and when great loss comes, as it so often does in the middle years, much of the attendant anguish is for that earliest loss. And so, on that hot day in a much later spring, I wailed for my mother and then got up and called my father. As he always had been, he was there, and as it always had, pain and fear shrank back. I have never been unaware as to whom I owed my life.

It used to make me wild when he would refuse to do battle with my mother, to avenge my hurt.

“I don’t think ballet, darling,” she said when I was six and wanted to join the magical classes she taught in our remodeled garage, where willowy little girls wore soft leather slippers and tied their hair high in severe buns and moved like wildflowers in the wind of her presence. A wall of scummed mirrors gave back their images, and a long bamboo bar was a trellis for them. It was the loveliest thing I had ever seen, and she was the mistress. If I were one of them, I would be one with her.

“Why?”

Even I could hear the whine in my voice.

“Because you are already far too big,” she said coolly. She hated whining. I stopped doing it early. Now I hate it, too.

“I’ll stop growing.”

“You’ve only started growing. You’ll reach the moon. You would look terribly out of place in a corps, UP ISLAND / 19

and of course you could never hope to solo. You will be a giant, heroic woman; you must be the one who holds the ropes, not the acrobat. Whatever would the world do without its rope holders?”

“Swim,” my father said when the tears overflowed my bottom lashes. “You’ve got just the streamlined build for it.

You’ll look like a mermaid in the water. I’ll teach you.”

And he did and signed me up for lessons at the Chastain Park pool, and cheered me on when the prowess he had predicted propelled me to victory after victory in the free stroke and relay. He took double shifts at the post office during my teenaged years to pay for my tuition at Westminster, and was always there to cheer me on when I brought home medals and cups for the school, even when Mother had a night class and could not attend. I was never popular at Westminster, not with the petite Buckhead girls whose cliques I aspired to, but I was known and applauded, and that gave me impetus enough to live with some equanimity until, in my last year of middle school, I suddenly began to come into my looks. It seemed to happen overnight; it almost drowned me at first. I was forever looking warily at the vivid image in mirrors and store windows. Who
was
that? Soon sidelong glances and a scattering of dates, usually with older (and taller) boys, followed. Miniskirts stopped looking, as my mother said, like tutus on a Clydesdale and started to showcase enough long, tanned, smooth-muscled leg to occasion whistles and calls from downtown construction crews.

I began to stand to my height, and to stride instead of shuffle.

I learned to smile openly and fully.

My father gave me all that.

20 / Anne Rivers Siddons

And, when I wanted to try out for the varsity basketball team at the start of my junior year and my mother raised her silky black brows and said, “Do you really want to go lumbering around a gymnasium sweating like a draft horse with girls who have mustaches?,” my father said, “You could model. There’s a guy at the post office whose daughter is signed up with some model agency or something. She does fashion shows and even TV commercials. I’ll find out about it.”

And he did, and I signed with Peachtree Models and Talent that summer, and finished putting myself through Westminster and much of the University of Georgia on runways and in production studios. I learned to move and be comfortable with stillness, and to engage a camera with my eyes, even to lower my Amazonian bray to the clear, throaty voice I still have. Mother was proud of all that, though she could not resist giving me stilted instructions on moving and walking and stretching my neck, which had to be tossed out before the camera. And she began to shop for clothes with me, and even though she was wont to say things like, “Smocking and Twiggy baby dresses on someone your height are ludicrous, Molly. I don’t even think they make them in your size,” still, she steered me away from the kittenish excesses of mid-sixties dress that would have made me look ludicrous, indeed.

I could and did thank my father for all that, too.

But I could not make him defend me verbally to her, and that drove me early to rages of protest against the unfairness of her exquisite little sorties against me. Unfairness is the earliest and most irremedial of the world’s wounds that a child encounters. It is never forgiven.

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“Why don’t you tell her to shut up?” I remember weeping once, when I had run to him yet again, this time over some obviously-to-me unflattering comparison to small Kevin. His natural grace and spilled-mercury vivacity, so like her own, were always being held up to me when I clumped or sulked.

“She doesn’t mean to hurt you,” my father said, holding me close enough to smell his familiar smell of Philip Morris cigarettes and sun-dried cotton undershirts. “She doesn’t even realize she does it. It wouldn’t be fair to her to yell at her.”

“What about to me? What’s fair to me? She’s always liked Kevin more than me. He’s her little boy.”

“Well, you’re my little girl, so we’re even,” he said.

And for the moment that would be enough.

It would invariably come up again, though, and I would rail at him once more: “Why won’t you make her stop? I can’t, but you could! You’re always saying people can change if they really want to; if you told her to, she’d change.”

“But I don’t want her to change,” he said. “If she changed, she wouldn’t be her, and that would break my heart. She’s the only magic I ever had in my life until you came along, Molly-o, and one day you’ll see that she’s the main magic in yours, too. You and I, we need magic. We’re earth critters.

She’s our wings. Kevin has her wings, too. It balances out.

All together, we make a family.”

And we were at the heart of it, though I did not know it then.

Neither of my parents ever really had a family, so when they married, they simply made some rules for what they had and called it, if only in their minds, The
22 / Anne Rivers Siddons

Family. They were not the first to make living, breathing individuals fit into the iron cage of an abstraction, not by any means.
Ozzie and Harriet
and
Leave It to Beaver
probably defined family for half the baby boomers born. But it is my own family—The Family—that is finally clearest to me, and I can trace easily the steps of its peculiar, tumorlike growth.

My mother, for instance, was abandoned by her feckless teenaged father when she was an infant and raised until age ten or so by her pretty, empty-headed, Irish mother in Savan-nah. When her mother, still only twenty-eight, took off with a hospital supply salesman to the Florida Panhandle, little Mary Belinda Fallon was taken in by her aunt Christy O’Neill in Atlanta, and raised with the O’Neills’ quarrelsome, clod-dish brood of children in a clannish, dilapidated part of the city near the old Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. Belle Fallon was all grace and moonshine and cloud shadow, profoundly unlike the O’Neills and unwanted by them, and when she graduated from Fulton High she left the mill village and crossed town, to the northside. She got a receptionist’s job at the Georgia Power Company during the day, and in the evenings, she took to the stage. There were few enough struggling local theatrical groups, and she was talented enough, and above all, attractive enough, so that she made her mark quickly. Belle Fallon at eighteen was the toast of Atlanta’s minuscule theater-going public.

By the time she was nineteen, she was singing and dancing and emoting in almost every production mounted within the city limits, and in some in outlying Macon, Birmingham, and Tallahassee. By twenty she had snagged her first featured part in a national touring company. At twenty-one she met and married

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my father, and by the time she was barely twenty-two, I was born and her career was dying, and The Family had begun to emerge as if from developing fluid. My father, himself an orphan raised in the Methodist Children’s Home in Forest Park, Georgia, had his own set of rules, his own blueprint for being a responsible adult, so he was content to let my mother draft the master plan for The Family. He knew no more of how to go about it than she did.

She began by assigning us all roles. Dad would be the provider, the supporter, the fixer, the protector. Beguiled by this creature of wood smoke and wild honey who had flown into his life and alit, he dutifully left his evening law studies at Oglethorpe University and went to work at the post office, where he stayed until his retirement forty years later. He made himself into a good household manager, a banker and ac-countant of some asperity, a fine handyman and fixer of things broken and faulty, and a steady and constant cheerer from the sidelines for the three lives he found himself in charge of. I think that my mother chose well: Dad seemed to me, all my life and his, to be content, indeed, happy, in his appointed role. In any event, he couldn’t have helped but cheer her on in whatever she chose to do; I never saw a man so quietly and totally in love with a woman.

I could hardly resent that. The love spilled over on me in full measure, and to a lesser but equally constant extent, on Kevin. But Kevin, for most of his life until he left home, wanted only Mother. If that disappointed Dad, I never saw evidence of it. It was part of the dynamics of The Family, and therefore meet and right.

Mother was the flame on our hearth, the giver of light and dazzle, the lightning rod, the visible totem
24 / Anne Rivers Siddons

of The Family. She was who we were, in our collective souls and to the world. Almost every family has one of these, but they tend to be men, or certain children of the tribe. The role of nurturing, minding, enabling does not allow for much dazzle. I think my hapless mother tried to be and do it all until I arrived, hefty and draftlike from birth, and she recognized with relief the designated giver. From the time I could toddle I was taught to accommodate, smooth over, prop up, set right. I don’t ever remember really minding. I did and do it well. My role gave me status and definition; there was never a time I did not know who I was to The Family. It was only when I aspired to anything outside the cage that I came to grief. Mother never unsheathed her arrows when I trod my road compliantly. That was when her whirling butterfly hugs and kisses were given; that was when her beautiful trained voice soothed and approved. As for those other times, I don’t know what or who I might be now if it had not been for my father. As I said, his half flourished.

Kevin was our future, who we would be, how we would be known.

“Listen to him; he’s already projecting,” my mother gurgled with delight when Kevin howled in his ruffled bassinet. He was born graceful and pretty; he looked like her from the outset. His silky black hair was somehow hers as mine had never been, though to my eyes they were identical. His blue eyes were Fallon and not Bell, as mine were said to be. He had her delicate, porcelain features, and not the strong, carved ones I shared with my father. When he began to toddle, it was with her flat-footed, straight-spined dancer’s gait. Even his tantrums were silvery and

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somehow theatrical. They made her laugh, as mine never did, and even my father smiled to see them. When Mother held him in her arms they seemed a Degas portrait:
Mother
and Child.
Indeed, Dad once parted with a breathtaking amount of money to have a distinguished professor from the Atlanta School of Art paint them so, both of them bare-shouldered and bathed in dappled purple light from the blooming wisteria vine that sheltered our front porch. It is pure summer to look at; early summer, just before coarsening ripeness begins to swell. It hangs now in the living room of the condominium, as it did in the front room of the house on Peachtree Hills Avenue, where we sat when visitors came.

Kevin and his wife wanted it when they first married, but Mother would not part with it. I knew of little else she had refused him.