Don't Call Me Mother (10 page)

“My mama, Blanche, was born a pioneer woman, in 1873.” I wonder about Gram’s mama—what she looks like, if I resemble her. I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine horses running, dust swirling around their flanks. On the way to Iowa, I play with my dolls and imaginary companions, a fairy mother and daughter. The mother never lets the girl out of sight, and I play for hours with the lucky daughter who gets to have her mother with her all the time.

On the third day of our trip, Gram’s eyes light up and she points eastward. “We’re almost there! Fifty miles to the Mississippi River, the greatest river in the United States. Our family has been living near that river since before your great-great-grandmother was born. That’s where my mama and her mama were born and where I was born.”

A mist settles over her eyes. I don’t understand her story, but I want to know all about these women and the place that made them.

The Mississippi
Valley Cradle

On the Eisely Hill that overlooks the bottomlands of the Mississippi, a road curves across a wide plain of cornfields and rumbles past roadside fruit and vegetable stands. Gram starts to tell me about the family I am going to meet. “You’ll see—it’s a big family—all the kids that Mama had when I was older.” We turn into a driveway with the sign “Martin’s Mink Farm.” When Gram toots the horn, people rush down the porch stairs, smiling and waving.

“That woman with the glasses is Edith, my sister,” Gram tells me in a wavery voice, “and the older one is my mama. Oh, Mama.” Gram opens the door and flings herself into her mama’s arms, tears running down her face. I don’t recognize anyone, but they seem to know me. They hug me one by one, murmuring, “Oh, lookit how she’s grown.” I’m dizzy from so many hugs and the feeling of automatically being part of them.

A woman with white hair caught under a hairnet wipes tears from her eyes. She’s the oldest person I’ve ever seen, with a hump on her back and wrinkles that crisscross her face. Everyone talks at once. “Lulu’s here. Linda’s here.” They pronounce Gram’s name “Lula.” Aunt Edith wears pink plastic glasses and has dark, tightly curled hair. Willard, her husband, wears a plaid shirt. A pipe dangles from his stained teeth. He pats me on the head. “How’re ya doin’, squirt? Sure have grown.”

Their son, Billy, looks like his father, with the same face and plaid shirt. I’ve never received so many friendly pats in all my life. The threads of family intertwine around me, making me feel that I belong here even though I have no memory of this place or these people. They keep saying, “Remember Blanche, remember Edith?” I just smile and nod politely.

Blanche puts a bony arm around my shoulders. She smells like an old washcloth and seems strange, with her wrinkles and thick bones all visible under papery skin. She fixes her watery eyes on me. “Linda Joy! Linda Joy, you’re the pride of your great-grandmother. I named you Joy, you know, because you were my first great-grandchild.”

I don’t know what to say, but I feel nice and warm, like I’m home.

Edith leads everyone up the front stairs and into the grand kitchen. The electric stove is new, she tells us. Edith fixes what she calls “a little lunch,” which seems like a huge meal to me—baloney sandwiches, red Jell-O with fruit cocktail, homemade pickles, home-canned peaches, and chocolate cake. Everyone talks all over each other as we sit at the Formica table in the middle of the room. Gram is clearly the star by rights of our trip across the Great Plains.

“As a woman alone, I go where the truckers go. You can always trust truckers. They eat in the best places along the way, and they would help me if I needed it.”

Nods of agreement.

“Humph,” Blanche gnaws on her baloney sandwich. “Good thing you’re not traveling in a covered wagon. Never fergit the time one pulled up in front of the house. The people was goin’ to Kansas.” She pauses to chew. “They came back, though. I was about twelve.”

“When were you born, Grandma?” I ask. Gram told me to call her mother Grandma.

“Shh. Don’t ask nosy questions,” Gram hisses.

“I’m eighty years old, and I don’t care who knows it.” Blanche fishes peaches from the bowl. “These the peaches we canned last year?”

“Two years ago, Mama, remember?” says Aunt Edith. “Canned two bushel baskets and made four pies for Grace’s birthday.”

“Damn good peaches. Fill ’er up.” Willard holds out his plate with the rind from the baloney sandwich on it. Edith puts the peaches into a separate sauce dish.

“We have to be a good example for Linda,” says Edith with a wink.

Billy slops peaches onto his plate despite his mother’s sour face. “Oh, Papa, just got to be yerself, don’t ya?”

“Can’t do nothin’ else. Yourself is who y’are. None of this fancying up will do any good,” Blanche chimes in.

“Well, if you ask me, getting a good education and teaching a person good grammar isn’t too fancy.” Gram sounds angry. She scoots her chair out and lights her cigarette from the gas stove.

“Well, just so ya know where ya came from. Can’t fergit that.” Blanche solemnly eats her peaches.

“Now, Mama,” says Gram. They banter for a while until Blanche says, “Did you fergit your old mother, livin’ your fancy life?”

“Mama, how can you say that?” Gram, tears in her eyes, puts her arms around her mother. Blanche wipes away a tear, too. Is it possible that this mother and daughter don’t get along either? I am disturbed somehow by this possibility.

Uncle Willard starts telling stories, tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. “When you was little, you’d say, ‘You want to sit on my lap, Uncle Willard?’ Remember?”

Billy chimes in. “We’d have fun pretending for him to sit down on you, and you’d say, ‘No, no. I mean sit on my yap!’” Everyone laughs hard at this; I don’t remember it, but it feels good to hear stories about me, and to find out that I have a history here.

After lunch, Blanche sits in the rocker by the window, embroidering a pillowcase. She shows me how to push the needle in and how to loop it around to make leaves and stems.

“Just as long as I don’t lose my eyes,” she says. “Can’t hear too well, but if my eyes goes…” She chews off the end of her thread.

I watch while she embroiders and Edith irons cotton shirts. She sprinkles the cloth with water from a soda pop bottle, making steam rise from the cloth. Edith lets me iron handkerchiefs, teaching me how to smooth the fabric. How different their lives are from Gram’s and Mommy’s. They enjoy these daily tasks, it seems. I follow them around from room to room, eager to be included in all they do, feeling the comforting mantle of family settle around my shoulders like a shawl. I am especially curious about Blanche and attach myself to her like a small, happy shadow.

Blanche and
the Garden

That afternoon, Blanche leads me to the garden. She bends over, bowed like a water witch’s wand, skirts gathering around her ankles in front, exposing cotton hose rolled under her knees in the back. She gnashes her teeth and yanks, muttering about the weeds. Glossy leaves the size of small umbrellas spread across the sandy earth.

“See this sand—it’s part of the Island, and it’s why we have the best melons in the world. The Island used to be cut off from the rest of the area by the old slough and the river. That’s how it got named.”

Blanche is so old that she knows everything. The heat of the July day rises up from the land. Everything smells like fresh air and earth, black and loamy. The strawberries are ripening, like red buttons beneath green leaves. Blanche snaps off a strawberry and bites into it. Juice runs down her chin. Her deep-set eyes gaze at me from behind gold-rimmed spectacles.

“Mmm,” she mutters, gesturing for me to pick one for myself. Everything is too raw and close to the earth. I am awe-stricken and a little scared. Bugs and dirt are everywhere, flies are buzzing, ants crawling. Gnats fly into my mouth and stick in the corners of my eyes. Blanche tells me to go ahead and pick a strawberry, and I pluck one with a satisfying snap. Gram would definitely discourage me from eating something without washing it, afraid I would die young in her care and she’d be blamed for it, but Blanche is a pioneer woman and she tells me to eat it.

“Come on, bite down hard.”

“But it’s dirty.”

“Come on. Try it. It’s good for ya. Nothin’ like the fruit of the earth.”

I stare at the dirt in the crevices of the strawberry, still worried.

“You got to eat a peck o’ dirt afore you die.”

She smears juice across her chin with her sleeve. Finally I bite down on the strawberry and it bursts in my mouth. I choke, surprised, my senses flooded with the sweet strawberry juice, the sun beating down, the smell of earth. Blanche’s eyes laugh behind her glasses.

“Good, ain’t it?” She turns around to hoe savagely at the weeds trying to take over her vegetables. It doesn’t matter that this is Edith’s garden, not her own. Here, everyone shares in the work. I grab a hoe and copy her ways.

“See that you get that weed out, root and all. Pull ’em all the way out or they’ll take over. Just like some people I know.” She chuckles deep in her throat.

“Who, Grandma?”

“Now never you mind. It’s a sin to gossip.”

I want to know more about everything. “Did you have a mother?”

“Land sakes, girl, ‘course I did. That’s how we come into this world. My mother was Josephine, and she was born on the Island just like the rest of us.”

“My mama’s named Josephine.” The name Josephine gives me the tingles.

“Your mama was named after my mama.” She wipes the sweat from her face with a handkerchief. Her bony, crooked fingers with black dirt under nails are thick like a man’s, her forearms tanned and wrinkly. Everything about Blanche is interesting to me, as if she’s the only remaining exhibit of an extinct species.

“Tell me about your mama.”

“Oh, there’s not much to tell. Hard-workin’ woman. Delivered babies for half the county. Best blackberry jam in the world.” She pauses, leaning on her hoe. “Life was different then.”

She turns to me, her eyebrows fierce and thick. “You got no idea, young lady. People’s lazy now, think the world owes ’em a livin’. Times was hard. But no matter what, we always had enough to eat. Yes sirree, we always had food on the table. And my papa would give his right arm to help a neighbor.”

“Where is your mama now?”

Blanche glances at me sharply. She doesn’t answer right away. Hardens her jaw and clamps her teeth against her lower lip. “She died near to when you was born.” Blanche stands up and rubs her lower back. “Everyone loved my mama.”

I watch roly-polys curling up and ants marching in straight rows up and down their earth mounds. Millions of bugs are living full lives out here. I ask, “Did my mama know your mama?”

She grunts as she hoes a patch of weeds that have gained ground. “Oh Lord, yes. When your mama was a little girl, she lived with my mama for a while in Muscatine. Your mama, Jo’tine—that’s what we called her—would come to see me at the farm where Edith and the rest was growin’ up. Such a pretty little girl she was, with those big, brown eyes. Poor little thing.”

I wonder what she means. “She don’t do right by you, I tell ya. At least Lula has the sense to take care ’a you. But this business ’tween Lula and Josephine… well, you’re too young to understand. I don’t know about those two.” She stomps on a beetle that had been working its way toward a tomato plant. “Got to get them before they get you,” she says, winking at me and wiping her brow with a handkerchief.

I try to imagine all these mothers. Our history, my history, reaches so far back. Blanche, Gram, Mother, and me—we all come from here. Next to Blanche I feel very small and young. I look up at her, the mother of the mother of the mother. She knows everything. I decide to stick to her to find out things. When we go into the house, the dirt caked under my fingernails seems like a badge of honor.

The rest of the day has its rhythm. The men come in and take showers. Edith fixes a chicken dinner with mashed potatoes, gravy, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes, rolls, red Jell-O with banana, and apple pie. On the hour and half hour, seven clocks chime, a beautiful music that goes with the laughter and conversation. I am part of all this. I sense the threads of our common history and like the way these good people look at me with happiness in their eyes.

After dinner, everyone sits outside in chairs under the elm trees, murmuring in the darkness about family, the weather, the cost of food, and how much better things used to be. Fireflies hover, giving off pieces of light in the velvet night. I swoop smoke into Uncle Willard’s empty tobacco can. He lets me sit on his lap, his big paw hands holding me up. Gram seems different here. Lula, as they call her, is not the same as the Frances who lives in Enid. She is her plain self, yet different from everyone else, with her fake accent and haughty ways. But this is family, and she is Blanche’s daughter and Edith’s sister.