Chasing Lilacs (3 page)

“No, just help her get better.” Daddy stubbed the cigarette in the Folgers can beside the porch. “I called your aunt Vadine.”

“Why?” Something seemed off, like he hadn’t told me
everything. Maybe Mama wasn’t going to be all right. What if something else was wrong? Must be something horrible or he wouldn’t
have called Aunt Vadine.

“As your mama’s only real kin, I thought she ought to know.” He dug in his pocket for another Camel. “I asked her to come
and stay a few days.”

My insides tumbled about. “It’s not like I need a babysitter, you know, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Please, not Aunt
Vadine.

“I’ve got evening shift next week and then graveyards. Don’t want you being alone so much.”

“Don’t worry about that. Tuwana and I are working on our summer newspaper. We decided to call it the
Dandelion Times.
Oh, and Goldie said she could use my help just about any time with her parakeets. She’s been keen, teaching me all about
them. Aunt Vadine will be the one sitting in the house by herself.”

“Glad you got things to do. Besides, she can’t come. She got herself a new waitress job at one of them new twenty-four-hour
truck stops.”

“That’s a relief.” I puffed out my cheeks and let out a long breath.

“Why’s that?” He flipped his smoke into the can.

“She’s practically a stranger, that’s all.” And scary, I wanted to tell him, remembering the pinch she gave me for putting
my elbows on the table the last time we saw her.

“She’s family though.” He picked up Mama’s suitcase and walked to the Chevy. “Goldie said she’d be around if you need anything.
See you tonight.” He gave me a wink and got in the front seat.

“Tell Mama I love her.”

“Will do.”

The car eased down the street, a streak of sun bouncing from the back window. Half of me wanted to run after him and beg to
go with him, but the other half stood frozen, unable to think or move.

“Gotcha.” A poke in my ribs startled me.

I whirled around and faced Tuwana, her blue eyes as round as marbles.

“Don’t scare me like that!” I glared at her.

“Sorry. I thought you’d like some company.”

“It’s not that. Right now I’m just a little bumfuzzled.”

“Your mom. She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?” Tuwana cocked her head the way our dog Patch used to when he wanted to
play.

The world went into slow motion, Tuwana standing there waiting for an answer and me wanting to say,
Oh sure, any minute now she’ll be her old self.

Instead of words coming out, tears trickled from my eyes. Blinking, I tried to hold them back, but they spilled out, running
down my cheeks, tasting salty in my mouth and making my nose drip. Tuwana’s skinny arm wrapped around my shoulders, and together
we walked to the porch. She pushed me into a sitting position.

“So, tell me about your mother. When’s she coming back?”

My eyebrows scrunched. “Three weeks. There’s a special doctor and something called ECT, whatever that is.”

“Shock treatments. That’s what Mother says people get when they have a nervous breakdown.”

“A nervous breakdown?” I looked hard at Tuwana. “Is that what you think? She didn’t go nuts and fly apart. Not even close.
She took some pills.”

“Maybe she did that before you found her. The flying apart thing.”

“Are you crazy? Mama’s not like that.” Who did Tuwana think she was, scaring me like that?

“I wonder how they do them.” Tuwana hugged her knees to her chest.

“Do what?”

“Shock treatments. Do you think they poke them with needles or something?”

“Who knows?” My stomach got a sick feeling.
Shock treatments? Needles?
Whatever they were, they sounded awful.

“Maybe they plunge them into tubs of ice water or hook them up to electricity.”

“Stop it! Daddy said they don’t hurt.” My face felt hot. “Why would you even say such a thing?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Gritting my teeth, I turned to Tuwana. “Daddy would’ve said if Mama had a nervous breakdown. He didn’t. She needs help, that’s
all. Daddy wouldn’t lie about something like that.” My eyelid twitched, but I wouldn’t back down from looking at Tuwana. “I’m
upset, and you would be too if it was your mother.”

“You’re right. Sorry.” She looked away and then patted me on the shoulder. “Hey, I’d better go. Catch you later.”

Being right didn’t change the sinking feeling I had inside. What if they hurt Mama? Shutting my eyes, I tried to remember
her smiling and laughing, but nothing came. Squinching my eyes tighter, her arms and legs dangled like a rag doll, flashing
like a jerky movie behind my eyelids. The way her hair hung over Daddy’s arm and her skin had the color of chalk flickered
in and out of my head.

I wrapped my arms around my knees and rocked back and forth on the porch steps. I tried to picture her in a frilly apron like
Alice Johnson wore or combing my hair the way I’d seen Mrs. Johnson do with Tuwana and her sisters. No matter how hard I tried,
the same pictures came. Mama curled into a ball in a dark room.
Mama with her eyes wild, her robe hanging open.
Your fault. You should have
…

Tears built up again and dropped on my legs. Only this time something had shifted in my head. Why couldn’t I have a normal
mother? One who loved me the way Mrs. Johnson loved her girls. One who didn’t swallow a bottle of pills and get sent off for
shock treatments.

T
HAT NIGHT DADDY CAME
in late and slipped quietly into my room. Half-asleep, I mumbled, “How’s Mama? Is she mad at me for not staying home?”

Daddy leaned over and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “Not that I’m aware. Sleep tight.” His lips brushed my
forehead, then he padded away in his stocking feet into his own room.

Every chance I got the next day, I asked Daddy questions about what the place in Wichita Falls was like. Did Mama have to
wear a hospital gown? Would she get to come home and visit? Could we go see her? I hung on the kitchen counter, asking even
more questions while Daddy smeared mustard on a piece of bread and slapped on a slice of bologna. “When does she start her
treatment? Will she take pills or shots?”

“They didn’t give me the treatment schedule. It’s not a regular hospital, so the patients wear their normal clothes.” He filled
his thermos with coffee.

“That’s good.” Since Mama’s regular clothes the last month had been a terry-cloth robe and nightgown, I couldn’t really picture
her. Daddy had packed her a suitcase though.

He screwed the lid onto the thermos. “There’s also a nice courtyard with benches, and some of the other patients were feeding
the squirrels when I left.”

“Did Mama like it? Did she want to feed the squirrels?”

“Not while I was there. You sure are full of questions.” He snapped the lid on his lunch box and looked at me. “This ain’t
no time to be brooding about your mama, so I want to get something straight. Mama’s in the right place, and you’ve got the
whole summer, so I want you outdoors having fun.” He thumped me on the arm and left for his evening shift at the plant.

I didn’t want Daddy to think I was brooding, and he was right about having the whole summer. So Tuwana and I started working
on our newspaper like we planned.

On the walk to her house, a curlicue of smoke lifted above the trees on my left. The top of a high chain-link fence surrounding
the gasoline plant came into view beyond the camp. Inside the fence, gray buildings with rows and rows of windows had smokestacks
at the ends pointing up like Roman candles. Near the front, great white balls of steel, taller than three houses, huddled
together. Containers of some kind. Engine noises and hissing sounds filled the air—refining natural gas, Daddy said. He told
me underground pipes brought the gas in where it went through a series of boiling, compressing, and cooling like the biggest
science experiment you ever saw. From there it went through an underground maze to another plant that made gasoline, the kind
you get at the filling station. Daddy worked crazy shifts, a week of daylights, then a week of evenings, then graveyards,
but he said it sure as heck beat working on the oil rigs.

Tuwana dragged out her mother’s Royal typewriter, and we set it up outside on a scratchy green army blanket.

She hunched over, pecking the keys, while I dictated what to write and spelled words for her. One
m
in
Siamese
for the article about the Zyskowskis’ new kittens for sale. Five dollars each.

“I wish you’d let me type the stencil,” I said after spelling the
sixth word for her. “I’m the one who wants to be a newspaper reporter.”

“It’s my mother’s typewriter from when she went to steno school, so I do the typing, okay?”

She plunked away, and every three or four pecks, she tilted her head, first one way and then the other. I ignored her and
stretched out my legs. Leaning back on my elbows, I let the sun warm my face. Puffy white clouds drifted past. A dragon. An
elephant. A ship with pointy ends like the Vikings sailed. My mind drifted too with the
tap-tap-tap
in the background. When it stopped, I glanced over at Tuwana.

“Tuwana, what happened to your hair?”

“It’s about time you noticed. You’ve been here thirty minutes and not one word.”

“Well, what happened to it?”

“This, you may be pleased to know, is a poodle cut. Mother gave me a Toni perm last night. It’s the latest thing. Don’t you
love it?”

“Well, it’s perky, like a poodle, I guess, if that’s what you were going for.”

“You oughta have my mom cut your hair and give you a Toni. Then we’d be the most popular girls in seventh grade.”

“I could cut my hair, frizz it up, and wear nothing but my birthday suit to school, and I still wouldn’t be popular.” The
image of me streaking in the nude made me shudder.
Gross.

“You’re too serious, Miss Nose-in-a-book.”

“I prefer to think of myself as creative and introspective.” I threw out the last word from our sixth-grade vocabulary list
and liked the way it rolled off my tongue.

“Boring, you mean. Just like this dumb paper. What we need around here is some excitement.”

“As in…”

Tuwana spent the next thirty minutes talking about boys and her mother’s idea that she should try out for cheerleader in junior
high since all the cheerleaders were popular. And just for the record, I didn’t mind a bit. The sun soaked into my skin, and
while Tuwana twittered, I thought about what Goldie said about no two people on this earth being alike.

As far as me and Tuwana, she got that right. I was a plain vanilla wafer, and Tuwana was like a squirt of whipped cream.

After Tuwana finished typing, I gathered up the stencil and my notebook and took the long way home—down the blacktop road
that split Graham Camp in half. Once I’d counted every one of the houses. Seventy-two divided up into nine rows. All the exact
same box shape with cement porches and a ribbon of sidewalk rolling out to the street. Belinda and Melinda Zyskowski skipped
rope as I passed by.
“Cinderella, dressed in yellow.”
Poppy Brady, Fritz’s new wife, sprayed the garden hose on the hollyhocks in her front yard, and Doobie Thornton whizzed by
on his Vespa. He waved and beeped the horn.

Graham Camp. Not even a dot on the Texas map. Besides the houses, we had a playground on one end next to the community hall.
Across the main entrance, we had Bailey’s store and the Hilltop Church. The only thing missing was a school, so we rode the
bus twelve miles to Mandeville, which did get its own little dot on the map.

At home I turned on the television, but the reception was off. Wavy lines swam across the screen, so I got up to adjust the
rabbit ears, then sat back on the couch and picked at the scab on my arm from where I’d scratched it on the rosebush. At first
I didn’t think about much of anything, but that jingle with the Toni twins came on. Why would Tuwana think I’d want her mother
to give me a Toni perm? You didn’t just pick any old mom to give you the
latest hairdo. Mama should be the one helping me decide about my hair and whether I wanted to be a cheerleader. No, definitely
not cheerleading, but I would like it if Mama would cut my bangs or buy me a ribbon for my hair once in a while. That’s what
mothers do. They don’t swallow pills and get shock treatments.

With my fingernail, I scraped at another piece of the scab on my arm. A drop of blood popped up, so I spit on my finger and
smeared it away. Another drop came, and I watched it ooze toward my hand. My eyes got that hot feeling before tears come.
A tear splatted on my arm, mixing with the blood. What would it be like to have a mother like Alice Johnson? Not exactly like
her, but one who cared about my hair and baked cookies for no reason? When my nose started dripping, I got up to get a Kleenex.

The door to Mama and Daddy’s room stood half open. I thought of finding Mama that day, her body curled into a parenthesis
under the quilt. Her red hair tangled around her pale face, dotty with freckles. The prickly feeling I got when I couldn’t
wake her. Taking a deep breath, I pushed the door open.

Emptiness filled the room. Mama’s quilt, folded at the end of the bed, drew me toward it. The blue and green and pastel patches
sewn together were the Dresden Plate pattern, Mama once told me. I took the quilt in my hands and sat cross-legged on the
bed, outlining the stitches with my fingertips. I slipped the quilt around my shoulders. It felt cold, like the underside
of a pillow you turn over on a hot summer night. Mama’s lilac cologne drifted up, but mostly it reminded me of stale morning
breath.

What good had this quilt done Mama? None that I could tell. She’d swallowed the pills anyway.

I threw it off and left it in a jumble. That’s when I saw the book lying on the nightstand on Mama’s side, laid out flat,
like she’d half-read it.
Gone with the Wind.
Mama’s favorite book.

I picked it up and carried it to my room, feeling like I’d snitched a piece of licorice from Willy Bailey’s store. Maybe Mama
wouldn’t mind. I took down the High Plains Bank calendar thumbtacked above my desk and, beginning with the day Daddy took
Mama to the hospital, made an X for each day she’d been gone. Two so far. According to Daddy, Mama would be home in nineteen
days. I flipped to the back of
Gone with the Wind
. One thousand and twenty-four pages. Dividing in my head, it came to fifty-four pages a day. Wouldn’t Mama be surprised that
I read her favorite book?