Don't Call Me Mother (11 page)

At ten o’clock, as if with one mind, everyone rises and goes into the house, muttering about the mosquitoes and looking forward to ice cream. The men get out the ice cream and chocolate sauce while Edith puts plates of homemade cookies on the table. The room fills with the clink of spoons and the sounds of pleasure. When all the clocks chime eleven, everyone yawns.

Edith tells me that I will be sleeping with Blanche upstairs in the room across from Billy. I feel special, getting to sleep with her, and glance in her direction. She merely gives me a little nod. Smiles do not rest easily on her thin lips. Clump, clump, clump go Blanche’s black shoes with their thick heels up the wooden stairs to the bedroom. The fluffy, high bed seems to rise halfway to the ceiling. The air is thick with heat and the smell of the past. Faded dresses hang on hangers, rifles lean against the flowered wallpaper. Blanche peels away her clothes, her ample flesh rippling and swinging.

I turn away, blushing. Seeing all that flesh is not something I’m used to, but she doesn’t seem to mind. How can she be so free with all this? She turns her body as she pulls on the white cotton nightgown, exposing round lumps hanging at her waist. I have never seen breasts like that. My mother’s are soft and round; Gram’s are pouchy and hanging. Blanche’s feet have thick, yellowed toenails. Her skin is puckered with thick blue veins.

When she’s got her nightgown on she turns to me. “You gonna sleep standin’ up?” she asks, pulling back the chenille bedspread.

“The bed is so high.” It reaches to the top of my shoulders.

“It’s a feather bed.”

“Feathers? What kind of feathers?”

“Duck, goose. Nothin’ like a feather bed. Been sleepin’ in ’em all my life.” She pounds the thick mattress with her fist.

“Feathers?” My finger pokes at the softness of the bed.

She hauls her body into the high bed and lies back, her nose pointed at the ceiling. I pause, not wanting to get undressed in front of her. “Well, gonna sleep in your clothes?”

“Can I turn off the light?” I mutter, shyly.

“Wiped a lot of baby’s butts in my life. Skin don’t mean nothin’ to me.”

I snap off the light. Her casual attitude about bodies amazes me. I slip on my summer nightie, and clamber over her bony shins to tuck myself along the wall. The idea of sleeping with Blanche seemed wonderful at first, but now this large ship of a woman—her hips curving high, her bony shoulders sticking up, her eighty-year-old smells—seems too real.

Then the cadence of her voice lulls me as she tells stories that will stay imbedded in me for the whole of my life. She tells stories about life on the farm—getting up in the morning before dawn, slopping the pigs, milking the cows; how the men had their chores, and the women had theirs. She baked bread several times a week, gathered firewood, and cooked three meals a day for a family of eight. In the summers she fed ten or more hired men, too. She tended a huge garden all summer, and in August she canned the vegetables and fruit to put in the cellar for winter.

She always did the washing on Mondays. “The big black iron kettle sat in the front yard. We fired up the wood, got it to boilin’, and threw in them clothes, stirred the boiling pot with the washin’ stick. We used lye soap I made myself, and the washboard to get everythin’ clean. No self-respectin’ person puts a wash on the line for the neighbors to see that’s not clean. After the washin’—then the rinch water.” (She says it that way: “rinch.”)

“Before them new-fangled washin’ machines, we wrung the clothes out and pinned them on the clothesline. Did the wash for eight workin’ men and six kids. You don’t know dirt until you live on a farm. It took all day. God help ya if it rained.” She shakes her head, her gray curls rasping against the pillowcase. I can see it all—Blanche in the yard, children scampering. Dirt and dust, pigs and cows. Pillows of fresh-baked bread with churned butter. I want to be there, too.

“Did Gram live there then?”

“Lula? Gosh sakes no. That girl—always one for gallivantin’. A lot of the time she lived with Josephine, my mother, in town, went to high school there ’cause the country school only went to eighth grade. Things was far away then. You walked or rode your horse, or you didn’t go. We was poor people, lived seven miles from town on the Island. I drove the wagon into Muscatine to deliver milk and eggs to the rich folks.” Blanche takes a deep breath.

“That Lula always was so different. A dreamer. She had a different papa, Lewis. After he died, I married Mr. Shannon and had your great-aunts and uncles.” Blanche pauses for a long time. I wonder if she’s gone to sleep.

Soon she begins again in a changed voice, picking up speed. “You know, life is full of sorrow. I’ll never figure out some things, no matter how hard I try.” She sighs. “I delivered the neighbors’ babies. Never fergit the night one died. Two days of labor. Nowadays, that baby would have lived. But there’s no way to outsmart God.”

“Why did Lewis die?”

“He breathed his last right ’side me. One day he was fine. The next, dead of twenty-four-hour pneumonia. Seems like yesterday. Can’t believe I’m eighty. Life goes so fast. Don’t you fergit that. Don’t you miss a minute.”

“He was Gram’s daddy?” I feel sorry for Gram. I know what it’s like to miss your daddy.

Blanche turns over onto her back. “Lewis was only twenty-two. I can’t never fergit it, no matter how much time is passed. Too much dyin’. Always too much dyin’.” She sighs and turns her head in my direction. “You’re too young to understand.”

Her breathing keeps me awake. I’m more awake now than ever before in my whole life, cast back in time, into the nineteenth century. Looming large in my mind is Lewis, who died so young and left my grandmother without a father.

I picture Blanche back then, old, the way she is now, but then I realize that she was young then, at the beginning of her life. By now she is marked so much by time, she is different for having lived it. The history she just told me happened sixty years ago, so far back I can’t grasp it, but it pulls at me.

The headlights from the highway make light and dark patterns across the ceiling. Blanche’s great white form snores beside me. I am catapulted beyond my child self and perceptions. The past seems to expand and loosen up, trailing behind me, enticing me to follow its threads and find out more about these people and this place, the bones and the land that I’m descended from.

Ghosts of the Past

The next morning I ask Edith if we can look at family pictures. “After lunch,” she tells me. At noon we have cheese sandwiches and cottage cheese and the applesauce she canned last year, and then Edith hauls out the cardboard boxes. Hundreds of black-and-white and sepia photographs spill onto the table. She names the ghostly faces in the pictures, people who wear funny clothes and stare at the camera in stiff poses. The women wear long dresses, the men overalls. In one picture, my mother is about seven years old, standing by a car with Josephine, Blanche’s mother. Blanche stands nearby, at that time a dark-haired woman in her fifties who was still raising children on the farm. Chickens strut through the crowd in the picture.

Now everyone gathers around and talks at once, lifting out a picture, telling a memory to anyone who wants to listen. Blanche lifts out a piece of paper with a handwritten poem on it:

Preserving Children

Take one large grassy field, one half dozen children, all sizes, three small dogs, one long narrow strip of brook, pebbly if possible.

Mix the children with the dogs and empty them into the field, stirring continually.

Sprinkle with field flowers, pour brook gently over pebbles; cover with a deep blue sky and bake in a hot sun.

When the children are well browned they may be removed.

Will be found right and ready for settling away to cool in the bathtub.

—Josephine Dickerson Stineman

Suddenly the dogs start barking. Everyone goes to the window to see who is visiting. Two cars drive up, honking, spilling out two large ladies and two men. Hellos and laughter clatter into the room, the screen door flapping behind them. One beefy man with a big stomach bellows, “Hello, Mama. What’re ya doin’ sittin’ round on your can?”

“Oh, pshaw, you know better’n to talk like that,” Blanche says, a smile coming to her lips.

“Hal, how’re ya doin’?” Edith says, then whispers to me, “This’s Hal, my brother.”

“Just about great,” he answers Edith, then his eyes find me. “And don’t you forget it, little lady. Lookit you, you’ve grow’d up.” Hal wraps his beefy arms around me and squeezes.

“This is Grace and Stan, remember? Grace is our sis.”

“Call me Aunt Grace. Hi there, little Linda.” Her face is wreathed in smiles and her eyes beam warmly at me. Her large body envelops me for a moment. She smells like flowers.

“Lula, what the hell have ya been doin’. Haven’t seen ya for a while.” As Hal towers over her, Gram puts her head on his shoulder. “Any more trips on them boats? Any new husbands?”

Color rises in Gram’s cheeks. “I’m taking care of Linda, making sure she gets a good education.”

“Book learnin’s all right, long as ya don’t fergit how to act,” Blanche says as she lays out plates and silverware.

The dogs bark again, and the screen door flaps. In comes a very round woman, her stomach jutting out in front of her, a cigarette hanging in the corner of her mouth. She wears a plaid dress and flat, floppy shoes. Her big grin makes me like her right away.

“Lula, how the hell are ya?” She grabs Gram’s neck in the crook of her elbow.

“Celia, you’re a sight for sore eyes.” Gram’s voice sounds more like theirs now; her fancy self is fading.

“Is this the little tyke, Linda? Get over here and give your old aunt a hug. Lula, you don’t fancy her up too much, do ya?”

“Sure she does.” Grace flicks Celia with the dish towel.

Celia wraps her arms around me tight, pats me, and leans down to look in my face. “Yeah, you’re Josephine’s all right. How is that girl anyway?”

“Lula could pass for Linda’s mom instead of her grandmother,” says Grace.

“What about Jo’tine, Lula?” asks Margaret, putting out homemade bread-and-butter pickles.

“They had a fight on the phone last week,” I chime in.

“Get over here,” Gram hisses between her teeth, grabbing my arm and hauling me into the living room. Sparks seems to fly from her eyes and her fingers grip my arm hard.

“Don’t you dare talk about our business in front of strangers.”

“They’re your brothers and sisters…” I protest meekly.

“What happens in our house is not for anyone else to know. Do you understand?” I don’t understand, but I nod, wanting to hide in shame. I slink back to the kitchen, my cheeks burning. Grace gives me a friendly look and tells me to follow her. She gestures toward a bushel of apples and two wooden chairs in the room off the kitchen. “Sit down and help me peel these apples.” She hands me a paring knife.

“I have grandchildren, too,” Grace says. Her brown eyes are huge behind her thick glasses. “You put the blade of the knife into the skin like this.” She rotates the apple so the peel comes off in a single long curl.

“I can’t do it,” I mutter. My apple is in pieces. Gram’s recent scolding has me burning with shame.

Grace’s voice is soothing. “That’s all right. Just watch me. It’s nice when the peel comes off in one curl, but don’t worry. You’ll learn.” Her eyes tell me more than her words. After a little practice, I learn to peel two apples her way, with a whole peeling curling into the bowl. She tells me that I’m a quick learner.

At the table, they all joke and talk about the weather, the price of hogs on the market, the rain. I love the easy flow of conversation, elbows poked in ribs. All the adults defer respectfully to Blanche. After dinner, my aunts and Blanche stay in the kitchen, flicking each other with dish towels and telling dirty jokes out of the sides of their mouths. I love the fresh smell of soap, the slow, soft way they talk, the comfortable way they touch each other. Here I can be a kid, with more than enough mothers to teach me the ways of the farm that Gram left so long ago.