“That’s easy enough. Couple of hundred miles west is all.” He waited, expecting more.
“I might—” the ambition began to form along with the sentence. “I want to be a doctor.”
“So?” He was leaning forward, staring warmly at me. “So what’s to stop you?”
Any answer would have been an excuse to him, the one I gave, most of all. “I can’t leave them,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t believe me.
18
Two days after my parents’ return from New York, I came the closest I ever came to fighting with my mother. Children raised as I was did not fight with their parents. There was even a commandment to take care of it, number five: “The only one of the Ten Commandments with a promise attached.” I can still hear the preacher’s twang as he lectured us. “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”
When my mother got off the ferry, there was something different about her. At first I thought it was the hat. Caroline had bought her a new hat for the wedding, and she had worn it on the trip home. It was pale blue felt with a wide rolled-up brim that went out from her face at a slant. There was charm, both in the color, which exactly matched her eyes, and in the angle, which made her face look dramatic instead of simply thin. I could tell by looking at her how beautiful the hat made her feel. She was radiant. My father beside her looked proud and a little awkward in his Sunday suit. The sleeves had never been quite long enough to cover his brown wrists, and his huge weathered hands stuck out rather like the pinchers on a number one Jimmy.
They seemed glad enough to see me, but I could tell that they weren’t quite ready to let go of their time together. I carried one of the suitcases and lagged behind them in the narrow street. Occasionally, one or the other of them would turn and smile at me to say something like “Everything go all right?” but they walked closer together than they needed to, touching each other as they walked every few steps and then smiling into each other’s faces. My teeth rattled, I was shivering so.
Grandma was standing in the doorway waiting for us. They patted her as they went in. She seemed to sense at once whatever it was going on between them. Without a word of greeting she rushed to her chair, snatched up her Bible, and pushed the pages roughly and impatiently until she found the place she wanted.
“‘My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways. For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit.’”
Momma’s whole body shrank from the word “whore” but she recovered herself and went over to the umbrella stand where she carefully took the pins out of her hat. Her eyes steadily on her own image, she took off the hat, replaced the pins in the brim, and then patted her hair down with one hand. “There,” she said, and taking one last look, turned from the mirror toward us. I was furious. Why didn’t she scream? Grandma had no right—
“We’d best change,” my father said and started up the stairs with the suitcases. She nodded and followed him up.
Grandma stood there, panting with frustration, all those words that she was bursting to say and no one but me to hear. Apparently, I would have to do. She glared at me and then began reading to herself as hastily as she could, searching, I suppose, for something she could fire at me and thus release her coiled spring.
“Here, Grandma,” I said, my voice dripping molasses. “Let me help you.” I’d been preparing for this moment for months. “Read it, here. Proverbs twenty-five, twenty-four.” I flipped over and stuck my finger on the verse that I had memorized gleefully. “‘It is better,’” I recited piously, “‘to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house with a contentious woman.’” I smiled as sweetly as ever I knew how.
She snatched her Bible out from under my hand, slammed it shut, and holding it in both hands whacked me on the side of the head so hard that it was all I could do to keep from crying out. But at the same time I was glad that she hit me. Even while she stood there grinning at my surprise and pain, I felt a kind of satisfaction. I was deserving of punishment. I knew that. Even if I was not quite clear what I deserved it for.
But the incident didn’t help Grandma. She was at my mother all the time now, following three steps behind her as she swept or cleaned, carrying the black Bible and reading and reciting to her. My father, meanwhile, seemed less than anxious to get the Portia Sue out on the Bay again. He spent several precious days happily tinkering with his engine, wasting lovely, almost warm, oyster weather. Couldn’t he see how badly I needed to get away from that awful house? Couldn’t he see that being cooped up with Grandma when she was going full throttle was driving me to the brink of insanity?
And my mother didn’t help. Every waking moment was poisoned by Grandma’s hatred, but my mother, head slightly bent as though heading into the wind, kept her silent course around the house with only a murmured word or two when a reply seemed necessary and could be given without risking further rancor. It would have been easier for me if she’d screamed or wept, but she didn’t.
She did, however, propose that we wash the windows, a job we had done quite thoroughly at the end of the crab season. As I opened my mouth to protest, I saw her face and realized how much she needed to be outside the house, though she would never say so. I fetched the buckets of warm water and ammonia. We scrubbed and wiped in blessed silence for nearly a half hour. Through the porch window where I was working, I could see Grandma, poking anxiously about the living room. She wouldn’t dare step out because of her arthritis, but it was clear that our peculiar behavior was disturbing to her. Watching her pinched face, I went through a spectrum of emotions. First a kind of perverted pride that my meek mother had bested the old woman, if only for an afternoon. Then a sort of nagging guilt that I should take such pleasure in my grandmother’s discomfort. I could not forget that only the week before I had been touched by her childish griefs. This shifted to a growing anger that my clever, gentle, beautiful mother should be so unjustly persecuted, which was transformed, heaven knows how, into a fury against my mother for allowing herself to be so treated.
I moved my bucket and chair to the side of the house where she was standing on her chair, scrubbing and humming happily. “I don’t understand it!” The words burst out unplanned.
“What, Louise??
??
“You were smart. You went to college. You were good-looking. Why did you ever come here?”
She had a way of never seeming surprised by her children’s questions. She smiled, not at me, but at some memory within herself. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I was a bit of a romantic. I wanted to get away from what I thought of as a very conventional small town and try my wings.” She laughed. “My first idea was to go to France.”
“France?” I might not surprise her, but she could certainly surprise me.
“Paris, to be precise.” She shook her head as she wrung out her rag over the bucket beside her on the chair. “It just shows how conventional I was. Everyone in my college generation wanted to go to Paris and write a novel.”
“You wanted to go to Paris and write a novel?”
“Poetry, actually. I had published a few little things in college.”
“You published poetry?”
“It’s not as grand as it sounds. I promise you. Anyhow, my father wouldn’t consider Paris. I didn’t have the heart to defy him. My mother had just died.” She added the last as though it explained her renunciation of Paris.
“You came to Rass instead of going to Paris?”