My mother thought I was playing games with friends after school. That’s what I’d told her, because that’s what she wanted to hear. But, at twelve years of age, I felt too old for such games and truthfully, all the other children had gone home. Instead, I sat under the trees at the edge of the schoolyard and wrote stories. I created villains and heroes, lonely orphans and wizened old men, and finished each one with a happy ending. The kind that wrap things up with a shiny red ribbon. Lately, those kind of endings were slipping off our landscape, skidding out of everyone’s grasp. As I leaned against the trunk of an old elm, felt the bark jab my spine, I double dared one to come out of hiding, cross my path so I could remember what they looked like. Above me, a breeze played through the branches and yellow leaves drifted down. I held one up to the sky, watched the pale sunlight pour through its veins.
Rumors had been circling around Castleton that the clapboard schoolhouse might soon close. Already there was no electricity or heat in the single classroom. At times, as we recited our lessons, our breath would hang like smoky clouds just outside our lips. Some of my classmates had left to find work to help their families, their wooden desks, pencils and notebooks abandoned. I’d seen a few of the boys around town making deliveries with their bicycles. Some girls I knew had part-time jobs at the cannery in Glenmont, across the Hudson River.
I grew up in Castleton, a town of tall trees, somber brick homes, and compassionate, God fearing people. Everyone knew everyone else’s stories, helped when they could, stayed silent when they couldn’t. At school, I had given my lunch to the Miller children, Bobby, Carol, and sweet little Susie. They’d trail into class each morning with empty bellies and glassy eyes. Their father, a widower, had patched our leaking roof more than once, nailed down loose floorboards, accepted my apple pies, until he was sent away for robbing a bank in Chatham. The children were taken to an orphanage in Albany.
Mr. and Mrs. Peters lived next door. He tilled some fields along the river and drank too much whiskey; the empty bottles littered his front porch. Some nights he would beat Mrs. Peters. Mother and I could hear their desperate and angry voices waft across the yard. We’d see the bruises that littered her arms the following morning. That all stopped the day my mother paid him a visit with her favorite black skillet in hand. Incidents and milestones linked like constellations between every home that branched off the main street and swirled up into the hills above the Hudson. Some were ignored, others were embraced; I believed my mother’s lapse had been forgiven.
That morning, before I left for school, mother told me Aunt Marla would be arriving on the 4 p.m. from Erie, Pennsylvania. She grew up there with my father. Aunt Marla visited on occasion. She’d move through the rooms straightening picture frames, rearranging cushions and chairs, frowning at our cat Lucy as she pushed her out the back door with a broom. She and I would play long games of canasta or rummy. She’d snap the cards down with a triumphant nod or pass me an affectionate smile as she allowed me to win. But I held my breath if the three of us occupied a room together. I drifted in and out of the upstairs bedrooms, listening for voices below. Aunt Marla’s subtle accusations rattled around the parlor and the kitchen. My mother deflected them with a cheerful shrug of her shoulders, but they must have stung nonetheless. My aunt struggled to restrain herself as best she could, but her dislike for mother coated every surface like a fine dust. It hadn’t always been this way. But after my father died five years ago, it began to take hold, an unchecked virus that lingered under her skin.
Our summers in Erie allowed Aunt Marla and I a respite from the tension in Castleton. Every July she would appear at our front door, Cadillac idling in the drive, then spirit me away, hers, but not hers. Without Mother around, she emanated a quiet happiness. She taught me how to brown breaded chicken legs in a pool of oil, pick rhubarb from her garden and make a pie as sweet and tart as a spring morning. We drove to Cleveland along Lake Erie in her black Cadillac and shopped in stores on Shaker Square, dined at the Hollenden Hotel under crystal chandeliers.
It was early October, the air chilled and silent, shadows already long. Iron gray clouds huddled in the sky ahead of me. I stopped at Mr. Leyden’s store on the way home and chose a can of broth from a shelf crowded with bags of rice and tinned fruit. It would have to do. I pulled some coins from my bag, and Mr. Leyden smiled at me as he deposited them into the register. I knew exactly how many we had left in the yellow teapot at home.
One evening, a few weeks before, I had noticed Mother staring at a loose stack of letters. They’d been arriving, almost daily in the post, and she’d been letting them accumulate on the kitchen counter. She slumped over the table, her brow furrowed, red lips puckered, her fingers playing with the long, kinky cord of the disconnected telephone. I went to pick up the stack, to see what they were, and her hand shot out and grabbed mine before I could touch them.
“They’re nothing. Let them be.” She had said. I pulled my hand away and scooted into a chair across the table.
“They’re something. Tell me now,” I said. She was a terrible liar, and she knew it. She crossed one leg over the other and banged the toe of her black high heel against the table leg.
“They are nothing.” She waved her lacquer-tipped fingers at me and smirked, studied the clock on the wall and twirled a strand of her thick auburn hair in one finger. “But, you should know we are running just a tiny bit low on money these days.” She leaned over the tabletop towards me, her pearls skidding across the wood. She clutched my hands in hers. “Nothing to worry your little head about.” She sat up straight and took a cigarette from the pack lying on the table, tapped it a few times before lighting it. “We should cut back a little,” she offered as she blew smoke at the ceiling. “Of course, I have never been good at that sort of thing.” She shrugged her shoulders and smiled at me as if we were in together on some sort of secret. Mother had never been the careful type. So I stopped the ice and milk delivery and turned off the city water- we had a well Father had dug years ago. I had been doing the shopping for months now so I insisted she give me whatever household money we had left. It wasn’t much, a few wrinkled bills and coins. But the request eased the worry from her face.
To save on heat, we closed off rooms we didn’t use, including Mother’s sewing room. All my life I’d watched her stitch together what seemed like magic from bolts of broadcloth, satin, velveteen and linen. She’d unfurl the fabric in long sheets and measure, cut, pin and feed it through her black Singer, pale fingers bunching and twisting the pieces, a strand of hair escaping from behind an ear. Wealthy women from Albany would come for fittings, or send for her in their private cars. But in the last year there had been only a half dozen such requests. So I found odd mending jobs for Mother from friends and neighbors. We moved her machine to the front parlor and she began patching elbows on coats, letting out hems, stitching up ripped seams. We both missed the heady chaos.
As I approached our house, their voices seeped out through cracked windows. I stood, listening, feet planted in the dry grass, hands clenched tight. Mother sounded heart-wilting, innocent, incredulous. Aunt Marla sounded hard-bitten and stern and a chill quivered down my spine.
“Mr. Parker told me he warned you they could call the notes at any time. For God’s sake, Evelyn, where did you think you would get the money from?”
“I didn’t think this all could last much longer. I thought my clients would eventually begin calling on me again. Mr. Parker’s known our family for years. I never dreamed he’d call the notes before I could pay them back.”
“Mr. Parker runs a bank, dear, not a money dispensary.
A ponderous silence swelled up inside that parlor room. It sucked the breath from me as I stood outside. I imagined Mother examining the stitching in a cushion, wishing she could smoke a cigarette, which was strictly prohibited when Aunt Marla was in our house. I prayed for patience from Aunt Marla.
“How much does Rae know? Please tell me she has not been kept completely in the dark.”
“Well of course she knows about things. My goodness, I don’t know what I would have done without her these past few weeks.”
“Does she know you’re losing the house, losing everything?”
My breath burst in and out of my lungs, my cheeks burned. It wasn’t the first time Mother had bent or spun the truth. But it was the first time she’d hid it completely. I bolted up the steps and shoved the front door open; the glass rattled as the door bounced off the parlor wall.
“Rae, you’re home, finally.” Mother was sitting on her chair, fingers twisting and craving the feel of a cigarette, legs crossed, black heel pumping up and down. She tried to smile, but the arch of it cracked and she hid the effort behind one hand. She came to me and took my arm, pulling me into the room. I dropped my school bag on the floor.
“Rae.” Aunt Marla’s face brightened. “Come here, darling. I’ve missed you so.”
I pulled away from Mother and went to kiss Aunt Marla’s cheek. It was powdery, and flecks of pale peach rouge stuck to my lips.
“You’ve grown thinner than when I saw you last.” She studied me, holding me out at arms-length. Then she sat me down on a velveteen couch, took the cushion next to me, and closed her hands around mine. “Rae, I’ll be brief. Tomorrow night you and I will be on the 9:00 Central to Erie. Tomorrow will be a fiercely busy day. So you should pack your bags tonight.”
“Marla, can’t we talk about this. Please.” Mother came towards us, one hand above her chest as if holding her heart in place, the other reaching towards me.
“For goodness sake, Evelyn, it’s not like any of us has a choice.”
Mother’s arm sunk back down to her side, her frame seemed to collapse. She brought her hands together, the fingers of one held tight in the hollow fist of the other.
“Mother?” I looked at her, completely distraught at Aunt Marla’s words. My mind raced and scrambled.
“I thought she could help us,” Mother offered as she looked at me, her head tilted and she half smiled.
“And I can,” Aunt Marla drew her words out slowly, staring at Mother as if speaking to a child.
I pulled my hands from Aunt Marla and rubbed the velvet with shaking fingers. “I need to know what’s going on.” My words were almost a whisper. “Everything.” I stared at Mother, accusation slipping from my eyes.
Aunt Marla looked at Mother, closed her eyes and shook her head. “Evelyn, what does Rae know?”
“Well, she…”
“Nothing,” I interrupted. “I don’t know anything. Do I Mother?” I glared at her, so angry she couldn’t have trusted me with the truth, angry she didn’t understand the things she did had consequences. Too angry to realize she’d been trying to protect me.
Aunt Marla rose and walked across the room to the glass windows, parted the heavy brocade curtains and looked out at the darkening sky.
“Evelyn has been borrowing against the house. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this.” She hesitated again, measuring her words as if the ones she chose would keep me from hating Mother, as if it mattered who I blamed or didn’t blame.
“I’ve arranged for an auction tomorrow. I’m sorry Rae. I had no choice.” She began to pace the room, searching for words in corners or behind chairs. “Mr. Parker, at the bank, he can’t get anything for the house, not these days, not a house this nice in the middle of nowhere. All the furnishings will have to go. They’re all that’s worth anything.” She fingered the pearl at her neck, her eyes reflected deep wells of an absolute sadness. “I’m doing what I can to help, of course, for Rae’s sake.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, my brain had gone numb and I looked at Mother, pleading for her to tell me all this was not true.
“I’m so sorry, Rae.” Mother shook her head, bit her lip to stop it from trembling.
I thought of our visits to Mr. Parker at the bank last winter. I’d always waited in an overstuffed chair outside his office, watching them through the glass window. He would hand her envelopes she would slide into the bottom of her handbag and sign forms with a fancy pen. As we left her eyes would dart about the room, looking away from the tellers and bank managers as they bid us goodbye.
“And after the auction?” I asked.
“I was able to find Evelyn a position as a seamstress in New York City. It wasn’t easy. But I called in a favor from a friend. And it would not be appropriate for you, Rae, to accompany her to New York. The living conditions…. well, it’s no place for a child.”
I thought of our neighbor, Mrs. Sanders. She’d sent her eldest daughter, Mary, off to New York to work at an apparel factory. I’d overheard her talking with Mother over coffee one day. She’d called the factory a “sweatshop.” Mary slept in a long narrow hall filled with ten bunk beds, shared a single porcelain basin with the other women, worked sweeping up scraps and thread six days a week, fourteen hours a day. On Sundays the women would string rope across the room and hang all their washing up to dry. “A sweatshop.” My words came out as a whisper, a realization, directed at no one.
Aunt Marla flinched, something I had never seen her do before. She shifted her eyes away from me and stared out at the black sky; her silence jarred me. My belly knotted, and my fingers cinched into fists. Mother clasped my shoulders like eagles’ talons, tears dripping down her cheeks. “Rae, stop. We should be very thankful she’s found me work.”
“But why can’t you come with us to Erie? There’s no reason.” But I knew the reason.
“Evelyn, Rae, it’s been a long day. I think I’ll turn in early.” She slipped from the room, stopping to hold me tight. The rough cotton of her dress rubbed against my cold arms, her hands smoothed my hair. After she was gone, my mother’s bedroom door clicked shut, her room appropriated, as always, by Aunt Marla. Mother would sleep with me in my narrow bed, her arm draped around me like a sweet smelling vine.
Mother and I remained for a while on the parlor couch, our sides pressed together, my head on her shoulder. Outside a train lumbered along the riverbank. If Aunt Marla had her way, and she usually did, we’d be on it tomorrow night, headed to Erie, and Mother would be headed to New York. The thought of this brought an ache shooting through my chest like a bullet, careening in and out of my ribs.
“I’ll convince Aunt Marla that you must come with us, tomorrow. Promise her anything.”
Mother looked at me, her face settled, her tears dried. “I wish that was possible. But you know she’ll never agree to that. I haven’t been to her place since your father died. She blames me for what happened. She takes you away each summer just to punish me.”
I was barely seven when we lost my father. I wish I could say his death was painless and quiet but it was a highly publicized tragedy all around, in the newspapers, the church pulpit, the quilting bee my mother had attended. She’d been driving, they’d been drinking, but my mother did not know how to drive. Father may have thought a lesson would be fun? I’d never know for sure. I was laying on the back seat, sedated by their laughter and the clinking of glass bottles as they rolled from side to side on the floorboards. It was Mother’s twenty-fifth birthday. Maybe she didn’t see the red light, maybe she counted on empty roads that late at night. But in the end it didn’t matter because a black pick-up plowed straight into the passenger side of our Ford, killing my father instantly. Mother was thrown from the car through the glass window, shards punctuating her skin, bones cracking against cement; her injuries would take months to heal. I’d been thrown against the door, but I’d been bundled in coats and blankets and suffered only bruises and a cut or two.
During the weeks after the accident I’d find her drenched in sweat on the couch, shuddering in her sleep, screaming for someone to stop and help. She lay there, body curled, eyes glazed, scratching her arms until the skin became raw. I learned to flick a match with shaking hands and light the gas burner, chop with the kitchen knives and not cry out when I nicked a finger and bled on the celery. But I never felt unloved; quite the opposite. There was, at times, an agonized fierceness in her devotion; a never ending embrace at bedtime, the tender twirling of my hair as I read to her on gray, rainy afternoons, a bone-crushing grasp of my hand in hers.
After a while, we went into the kitchen. I warmed the soup, ladled it into three bowls and set out some bread and butter. I placed a bowl and some bread on a tray and knocked on Mother’s bedroom door. Aunt Marla opened it, her eyes rimmed red, hair loose to her shoulders. She leaned in and held a hand to my cheek, held it there for a moment. “Your father exactly.” She took the tray. “You don’t deserve this Rae.”
I wished I lived in a world pure and soft, where no one could be judged. Aunt Marla thanked me and closed the door.
After dinner, we pushed our plates, barely touched, aside. We crouched in our chairs as we lingered at the kitchen table. My father had built it from oak planks, cut, nailed, sanded and stained. Tomorrow it would be sold to a stranger to satisfy the bank. I covered Mother’s right hand with mine while she traced grooves in the rich glossy wood with her ring finger, the paths a complex remembrance of the past.
Later that night I sat on the edge of my bed, legs dangling, heels knocking against the footboard, as Mother brushed and braided my hair. She hummed an old tune I’d heard her sing a million times. Her breath nicked the back of my neck as rifts of the song bloomed in my ears.
She hadn’t spoken about tomorrow since Aunt Marla went to her room before dinner. She hadn’t said a word of encouragement or despair. It was as if Aunt Marla were not in the next room, and there would be no auction to mark and doom the following day. Where had she put it all?
As she knotted the band at the end of my braid, I tried to memorize the shape and curve of the dresser and armoire. I needed to remember every nick and flaw, the deep brown hues of the wood. I recounted each item I had packed in the brown hardback Samsonite, the one that had belonged to my father. I wondered if I could wedge in his old plaid scarf or the collection of poems I had borrowed from my teacher.
Mother turned down the bed, smoothed the sheets and tucked the edges beneath the mattress. Suddenly, she looked beyond me as if someone were standing there, and smiled.
“I still see him, sitting in his leather chair, those fingers of his wrapped around the spine of a book. Or tiptoeing to your bedroom door while you slept, watching the rise and fall of your chest, listening to your gentle snores.”
She became quiet and floated in a world I could not see. My memories of Father had been fading like old parchment. But one remained strong. He was holding me, my body scooped into his lap, his fingers trolling softly along my sides, tickling. His arms were muscled and strong beneath my tiny hands as they clung to his shirt. I remember the color blue. He was rocking me side to side, my giggles rang beneath his silvery voice as he sang. My mother sat across from us on bottle-green grass, her eyes focused in bliss on my father.
It pained me that I remembered the emerald green flecks of my father’s eyes, but not one contour of his face came to mind. I could hear his laughter, strong and robust but couldn’t recall one heart to heart or the cadence and tenor of his voice.
I crawled into bed beside her, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and belly, her fingers curled inward as if keeping a secret.
“I’m scared,” I whispered. Although I think I was mostly scared at her seeming lack of fear. I could not fathom how or where she had found such strength.
“Don’t be scared, Rae. Everything will be alright.” She kissed the back of my head and continued humming, and I let myself fall into the trance of safety all children want.
“I love you, Rae.”
“I love you too, Mother.” Then I drifted into the soft vibration of her gentle voice and our home’s last envelope of silence.
In the morning, I awoke with a sense of absence, rubbing my palm across the cold sheets beside me. Mother had probably been up early as she said she would be, preparing for the men who would move the furniture into trucks as it was sold, greeting the first buyers as they drove in from all over the state. I’d seen this happen before, complete strangers would watch from the road as if it were a show, a macabre entertainment.
There’d be strong coffee, buckets of it, and homemade biscuits, the dough rising with the sun. That was Mother, never holding grudges, offering what she could. I pulled myself from bed and dressed quickly in a common sense sweater, skirt and boots. In the kitchen Aunt Marla sat at the table with swollen fingers curled around a steaming cup, her black hair pulled tight into a knot at the back of her head. The crescents under her eyes were hollow and gray, and she looked at me with a restrained respect, or pity, I wasn’t sure. What she needed to tell me was strangled somewhere at the back of her throat, at the bottom of her heart. My stomach tumbled and knotted and I listened for sounds of Mother but there were none.
“She left a note.” Aunt Marla inclined her head toward a folded paper on the tabletop. I grabbed at it, thinking, hoping it said she’d gone to Mr. Leyden’s for a few things or a walk, both ludicrous reasons for a note. But I was willing to believe either one if only for a moment. Instead, I read
“Dearest Rae, I’ve gone on to New York. Might as well get on with it. Write me every day, and don’t worry as you do. I know you are strong, stronger than me and for that I am sorry. I tried my best to keep the worst of life from swallowing us up. But there are consequences for my well-intentioned mistakes, consequences I will never forgive myself for. I wish we could be together, but this is temporary. Soon I’ll call for you, Rae. Aunt Marla will bring you to New York and we’ll have a holiday.
With the greatest of Love,
Mother
Her writing spread across the page in thick, black ink, lines straight and measured. I looked up and the air in the room swept through me like a cleansing light. Left behind was a stillness, an honest truth. I had only to see who was there and who was not there. Mother’s words became meaningless and unnecessary. They seemed to float up off the paper, mingle for a moment with the steam from the cup, then disappear. I folded the paper and stuck it in the cutlery drawer.
Outside, trucks rumbled up the gravel driveway. Aunt Marla scraped her chair back against the scarred, wood floor, rinsed her cup in the sink, and turned to leave the room.
“Best you eat something, Rae. It’ll be a long day.” She knitted her fingers through mine as I clutched the counter, knuckle bones white and hard under my cold skin. I stared down at the surface where I had taught myself to knead bread, roll the dough till it was perfect, all for her. Things she should have taught me, things she could not believe I knew how to do when she came out of her fog.
Throughout the morning and into the afternoon it all disappeared. Oak bureaus, some still holding sweaters and socks, velvet chairs, china platters and porcelain bowls, silver picture frames, their contents pulled out and tossed into a crate. I would later retrieve each one and press them into the bottom of my suitcase.
Much later I was able to imagine the pale ruffle of her body disappearing down the dusty road. She must have battled a frantic spectrum of doubt, known she was incapable of watching what would surely have emptied her soul, turned her bones to dust.
As the sun descended into a silhouette of tangled oaks beyond the river, the last of the pickup trucks, filled with our possessions, kicked up dust down the road. Scattered through the grass lay dented crockery, a footstool missing one leg, a torn lampshade; bits and pieces no one would pay money for, and they would be scavenged away by morning. It was funny to think these things had served us perfectly well until today when they had become unequivocally worthless.
I wound around the yard, kicking stones, feeling like a ghost left behind when a glint of silver struck up from the lawn. I bent down and saw it was a silver cross attached to a chain. I picked it up and fingered the cold metal, recognized it as one of Mother’s pieces, one she hadn’t worn for months, maybe years, I couldn’t recall. It had been left behind, like so many other things that had once seemed so vital and necessary to own, to keep. I felt as though we were shedding skin, pieces peeling away like a bad sunburn. All that was left was what we could fold and push down into a single suitcase. I held the chain tight in my fist and pushed it into my skirt pocket.
Aunt Marla stood by the door of Mr. Parker’s Ford signing papers, her black shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. He would be driving us to the train station and already our bags were in the trunk. The darkness haloed around me. The house, the road, Mr. Parker’s Ford, were all becoming one dimensional, receding, the moment already a memory, a capstone of all that I would recall from that day. Eventually I would write her letters, then dream at night of her in a dank warehouse pushing fabric through a machine with calloused fingers, head bent, dripping sweat next to rows of a hundred other women. Aunt Marla came close to me, put her hand on my back, held it there with a light touch, and we walked to the Ford.
Laura Stout soaks up the warm sunshine in Manhattan Beach, California with her loving husband and two, sometimes bewildering but awesome teenage children. In between dreaming up stories, she ferries her two dogs to local hospitals and brings smiles to the patients and staff. Her work has appeared, or will be appearing at Writers Type, The Green Silk Journal, The Blue Lake Review and Fiction on the Web. She won first place for best short story of 2013 at Writers Type. She is working on a collection of short stories to be published this year.
–Art by Natalia Drepina