The BOOKPRESS | June 2000 |
Mom knotted
the sheer blue scarf under her chin with those thin, elegant fingers of
hers. The dog there all excited thinking he was going, too. Mom reached
down and buttoned the top button of my jacket. When she turned, I undid
the button.
"Suit yourself,"
she said, not looking at me, but in a little cosmetic mirror, working the
cherry-red lipstick just right. "But there’s a chill in the air."
She closed the mirror,
dropped it in her white handbag, then patted the pockets of her dun overcoat
feeling for her sunglasses. She fit them to her face ceremoniously, two-handed,
her fingertips resting a moment on the sunglass frames as she acquainted
herself to the dark. Mom took my hand and said, "off we go" and I felt
the dog’s disappointment as we edged and shooed him away from the door.
Out we went into
the spinning blue day, out the long, lumpy driveway. Beefer barked a half-dozen
hurt and whiney calls, muffled and lost in a stiff offshore breeze that
fussed under hedges, flushed out dervishes of dust and carousels of leaves
and debris. They spiraled across our path and vanished. Above, more wind
demons skinned flocks of cloud from the blue belly flesh of the sky. Sunlight
lapped and pulsed over the neighborhood in surging tides of irregular brilliance.
Mom suddenly let
go of my hand.
"Can’t you walk
alone for five minutes without holding on to me?" she said. "You’re getting
to be such a momma’s boy."
"I just want to
make sure you’re still there," I said.
"Still where? Frankie,
where on God’s earth do you think I would be? Do you think your mother
is going to go up in a puff of smoke?"
The question reminded
her to have a cigarette. At the stop light, she removed a red calfskin
pouch from her bag and nimbly pecked a Parliament from its pack. She struggled
to light it with A&P paper matches, but the mischievous wind blew them
out one after another.
"Hells bells," Mom
said, cigarette flopping in her mouth. The light turned red, then green,
then red again before she got it lit. We stepped off the curb. Mom laughed,
smoke whirling away from her face.
"What’s so funny,
Mom?"
"My son the voyeur,"
she said, and took my hand.
I savored the exotic
word without begging its meaning. It was a rare treat to go downtown with
Mom, and I had already forgotten about the morning’s minor calamity.
At breakfast she
had promised to take me on errands. Usually, she left me home with Beefer
or waited for my brother or sister to get home from school before leaving.
I dreaded the sheer scarf, the lipsticks and sunglasses, the deliberate
pace of her preparations. Her exit line was always the same: "Don’t you
fret, I’ll be home in two shakes of a lamb’s tail."
That was a stumper.
I couldn’t imagine any kind of animal didn’t shake its tail real fast.
Like Beefer. You couldn’t even count how many times he shook his tail when
it got going. But maybe lamb tails were different. Still, it seemed that
any animal, even a dinosaur, could shake its tail twice by the time Mom
got to the end of the driveway. She strolled at the dreamy tempo of wedding
processions or funeral marches. A trip to the corner grocer seemed to me
to take half a day. Mostly I waited and waited for her in the empty house
thinking, "She’s gone. They got her. Bad People got her."
But on this particular
day the whole morning had been a festivity of anticipation. To kill time
before we left, I played in a vacant lot by the train tracks where maple
saplings reclaimed an old foundation. With a stick I found some critters
under the bricks: a ball bug, a centipede, an ugly white worm with an orange
head curled like a macaroni in the wet, wormy dirt and rotten leaves. Then
the wind picked up. The saplings shivered overhead and Beefer started digging
crazy after things I couldn’t see. A mid-morning express hurtled by, mostly
empty; a cloud passed over the sun, and suddenly I wasn’t sure if I had
made up the story about Mom saying we were going shopping or if she already
had gone shopping and I was out there alone. I thought she had told me
not to come until she called. I tried to remember just how she said it,
and the harder I tried the more trouble I had remembering exactly what
she said or if any of it had happened at all. Did she really kiss my cheek
and say, "Don’t get yourself all dirty because we’re going shopping?" Maybe
I invented it.
I had to go check
the house.
The windows were
too high, so I dragged a wooden milk crate under a kitchen sill but she
wasn’t in there. The crate sank in the damp, moldy ground on the dark side
of the house where we buried the dead cats. Coo-coo the black cat was buried
there and so was Sweetie, the tabby and white that was named, I thought,
because she looked Swedish.
Coo-coo’s and Sweetie’s
cat bodies were there. But their cat souls were in heaven with Jesus and
Grandpa Crawford. In heaven, Coo-coo and Sweetie and Gramps looked just
like they did on earth only they wore white robes and Gramps couldn’t spit
tobacco juice because it would make stains. It was better in heaven than
on earth and even though I had some serious questions about the cats and
Gramps and where they were exactly, I didn’t like the way Mom and Dad shushed
me and changed the subject when I asked.
I hauled the crate
to a row of windows outside Mom and Dad’s bedroom. The curtains were pulled,
but through a slit I could see shadowy movement: Mom. That was a relief.
I stood tiptoe and watched her take a brown bottle from the dresser, which
she emptied into a juice glass. Her head tilted back and down. Then she
stood and slipped off her housecoat and was completely naked, a startling
whiteness. The crate broke and I went "ass over tea kettle" as Mom was
fond of saying.
* * * *
Main Street was
only two blocks from our house and you could see how the trees yielded
and opened like a gateway to the bright skyline of downtown.
In Grant’s department
store Mom picked out two shirts and a pair of dungarees that I had to try
on. Bashful with the sales clerk, I held my ground, clutching the clothes.
Mom got mad and whisked me into the dressing room and I tried on the pants
and the shirts and they all fit just fine.
"You need to start
doing some things on your own, Frankie," Mom said, tugging on the belt
loop of the pants, pulling the shirt so it hung right on me. "Your mother
isn’t always gonna be around to look after you."
"Why not?"
"Because I said
so."
"Why won’t you always
be around?"
"Because," she said.
"Now button your lips and zip up your fly."
I didn’t want to
leave the dressing room filled with Mom smells––perfume and something sharper,
familiar and rich. I hugged her.
"Mom, if we stayed
in here till the store closed, would we have to spend the whole night?"
"I guess so."
"We could watch
TV together and sit on all the furniture," I said.
"And sleep in the
bedding department, I suppose?"
"And play in the
toy department."
"And eat gumballs
for dinner?"
"Yeah! Mom, let’s
stay in here forever."
"We can’t, hon.
Now let’s go."
"Mom, why did you
say you won’t always be around?"
"Oh hells bells
honey, let’s go."
From the rush and
swirl of Main Street we entered the library-quiet Thom McAnn’s that smelled
of wax and polish. Mom got me Oscar Robertson sneakers and a pair of Hush
Puppies.
At the Palace Diner
we sat in lofty red leather booths and I didn’t need a booster cushion
and the waitress said I was going to be a real lady killer.
"He already is,"
Mom said, winking at me. I blushed and fidgeted with the place settings.
When you grew up you could kill ladies and ladies liked that. It didn’t
make a lot of sense. But I forgot about it because the chocolate malted
arrived and the first sips were so exciting it got my legs squirming. I
made music by kicking the center pole of the table with my toe, ding, then
boom, on the baseboard with my heel. It went ding-boom-ding-boom-ding-boom,
until Mom said "stop it" just when I was halfway between the ding and the
boom and it drove me nuts not to finish with a proper boom. But if you
didn’t lower your leg slowly the boom would happen and Mom would look up
from her nasty-tasting brown drink with the red cherry in it and the good
feeling of the morning would be lost.
I ate bacon, lettuce
and tomato––and French fries, with ketchup. Mom ate shrimp salad. I slurped
at the bottom of the soda glass and Mom laughed, then slurped at the bottom
of her drink, looking up at me with her green eyes crinkly. She fished
out the cherry and dangled it for me by the stem and its pulp was tongue
numbingly sweet. I was very, very happy.
After lunch we stopped
at the stationary to get cigarettes, then the liquor store, a deep narrow
place of shelves crammed floor-to-ceiling with colorful, gleaming bottles.
My Hush Puppies squeaked on the red and black linoleum squares and I told
Mom my new shoes were no good because they made noise. Mom said "shush"
and got a large brown bottle with a white label and a green bottle with
a yellow label and the man, Mr. Nelson, put them in a crackly brown bag
then said, "wait a minute," and, like he was doing something real important,
went in the back and returned with a strip of cardboard, which he slid
down between the bottles. Done, he patted the bag with his crooked red
fingers and tossed a packet of salted peanuts at me.
"Thank you," I said,
picking them up off the floor.
"You’re looking
very lovely today, Sally," he said, as he took Mom’s money. "Like a queen
of the silver screen."
"Oh, you go on,
Curtis," Mom said.
He was shorter than
my dad, skinny. His hair was slicked back with a straight part like a white
scar on the side.
"And this fella
here," he said. "They grow fast don’t they?"
"They sure do. He’s
gonna be a big, big boy," Mom said.
"Handsome kid. Gets
his looks from his mother," Mr. Nelson said, and winked at Mom. I didn’t
like that wink.
On the way home
the wind shifted, herding cloud animals along Main Street, over shops,
cars, people, us. We reached the American Legion Hall. There was a big
rock on the front lawn with a plaque that had words engraved.
"Mommie, read the
rock to me!"
"Frankie, I’m tired,
my feet hurt. I just want to get home and rest. Don’t you want to take
a nap?"
"Please, Mom, tell
me what the rock says."
I stopped and leaned
my head between the rails of the iron fence bordering the lawn. Mom stood
behind me and set the shopping bags down. I turned to see her lifting the
sunglasses.
"It says: Centennial.
Eighteen Forty-Eight to Nineteen Forty-Eight, " Mom paused, fished for
a cigarette. She tried to continue while she struck a match: "One Hundred
... Years ... of––oh, hells bells!"
She stopped, cupped
her hands round the cigarette and got it lit on the second try.
"One Hundred Years
of Progress: History, Documents, July Twenty-Eighth, Nineteen Forty-Eight,
Open in Twenty Forty-Eight." I turned and she exhaled a plume of smoke.
The breeze yanked it away.
"What does it mean?"
"It means that in
a long time from now they are going to break open the rock, or move it,
or something, and look at all the old things people put in there."
"What old things?"
"Oh, not very exciting
stuff. Papers, maybe some old tools. Just ordinary ... things."
"Why would they
put papers and stuff in there?"
"Because," she said,
tapping an ash. "Things get important after a long time, I guess."
"Like Dad’s Army
stuff?"
"Like that."
"Can we go see the
rock get opened?"
"Oh geez, honey,
that won’t be for a long, long time."
I watched her. She
looked down the street, away from me, and bit her lip.
"Please, won’t you
go with me?"
"Do we have to make
a plan right now?"
The breeze riffled
her blue scarf. Across the street, the Methodist church steeple seemed
to be sailing, its high white cross lonely and alone.
"Please? Just say
you’ll come with me to see the rock get opened?"
"Frankie, for heaven’s
sake, you’ll be older than me by then."
Her tone frightened
me. The Legion flag snapped impatiently. I tugged on Mom’s overcoat.
"Please, Mommie,
please,"
"Stop it now, Frankie,
I mean it," she flicked her cigarette down and squashed it under her pointy
black shoe.
"Please say you’ll
come with!"
She grabbed my hand.
"Frankie, sweetheart,
that’s more than eighty years from now. Your mother isn’t Methuselah."
Methuselah––the
name sounded like a mouthful of spiders. I gaped at her.
"People just don’t
live that long, honey?"
"What people?"
"Grown-ups."
"You, too?"
She didn’t respond
and the silence sucked the stuffing out of me. I collapsed, a slow, dramatic
slide down the iron railings to the sidewalk. My agony was so fresh, so
complete, that when I opened my mouth, it streamed out of me in a high,
thin music. But the tantrum never gathered steam; I was too crushed to
get properly hysterical. The cry arced and flattened into a low, excruciating
drawl, remarkable for a sustained tone held without benefit of an in-breath.
I beseeched Mom’s feet, groping like a drowning boy. Her pointy black shoes
resisted me.
"It’s just a rock.
Franklin, if it means so much––" she said, pausing, I thought, to tell
me "Yes, we’ll go." But people passed by and she got flustered. "Pull yourself
together, do you hear me? Pull yourself together this instant!"
She stepped away
from me and I let myself roll face down onto the sidewalk, tasting concrete
and dirt, snot and drool pooling under my chin.
"All right, stay
here and make a spectacle of yourself," she said. Her heels clacked like
bones as she moved, gone already it seemed. Coo-coo. Sweetie. Gramps. Mommie,
too. Already gone.
Of course, she softened,
returned, got me on my feet, took me home. But she made no effort to console
me about the rock, even though when it got opened in 2048 none of us would
live to see it happen. Later that year, President Kennedy joined Coo-coo,
Sweetie and Gramps, and my older sister tells me I stopped smiling for
family photos.
–
Franklin Crawford
is a writer who lives in Ithaca.
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