Don't Call Me Mother (9 page)

“You look here. I am teaching her things that she should know. How dare you criticize me.”

“I’m just saying let her pick up a piece of goddamn chicken in her fingers. Let her be a little girl. She’s only seven, for Pete’s sake!”

Uncle Maj’s chair hits the floor with a bang, he gets up so fast. Aunt Helen bustles into the kitchen. Uncle Maj fits himself between Gram and Daddy, tamping tobacco into his pipe. Gram and Daddy give each other a lingering glance, an unreadable look in their eyes.

Uncle Maj says to Daddy, “Frances took Linda when her mother left, and she raises her just fine.” He looks him straight in the eye. He doesn’t say, “Because you aren’t taking care of her.” He doesn’t say, “We’ve got her here now, and we’re all looking after her.” But he does.

Gram plucks a cigarette from her pack of Kents and saunters over to Daddy, who fishes out his lighter. Daddy and Gram stand close, her hair touching his eyebrows as she sucks in her cheeks. She sits down and swings her leg, staring off as if nothing mattered. Daddy heads to the kitchen to ask Aunt Helen how she made her delicious gravy. The storm has passed.

After dinner, Gram, Daddy, and Aunt Helen sit chatting and laughing in the living room. I worry about the train coming to Perry too soon, to take away my daddy. I watch the gold balls of a clock covered by a glass dome roll back and forth, stealing minutes from my time with him. After listening to them for a long time, my jealousy rises like mercury in a thermometer. I want him to myself. Don’t they realize that I don’t get Daddy again until next year? The ache of his leaving fills my body.

To console myself, I follow Uncle Maj outside to putter in the garden. Thick storm clouds gather in the darkening sky. Uncle Maj’s white hair sticks up in the wind, and his face is red from working hard. A thorn sticks his thumb, and I touch his hand. “You’re hurt, Uncle Maj. Let me get a Band-Aid.”

“Oh, it happens all the time. I don’t mind bleeding once in a while for my beauties. Here, put these gloves on. You can help me.”

He teaches me how to loosen the soil from the roots, and how to angle the cuts as he trims the roses. “If you cut the roses back hard, they’ll burst into a fuller bloom in spring. Sometimes cutting things back is a way to make them bloom better.”

I yearn for the spring, the yellow daffodils and the roses. I sense that there is a right time for everything, but never for Daddy leaving.

We all ride in Aunt Helen’s car for the drive to the station. Daddy smiles at me, patting my shoulder, but I can see that his mind is already on Chicago and his exciting life there. I get out of the car at Perry, the wind pushing against my back, blowing me toward my father. I grab his thick, warm hand and brush the hair on his knuckles with the tip of my finger. His Old Spice makes me want to cry and grab at him, begging him to stay, but I just watch the train get bigger as it comes into the station, steeling myself for what I know comes next. The whistle haunts me, warning me to get ready.

“You be a good girl for your Gram,” he says, then turns his back, his shoes tapping on the bricks as he strides to the train.

The train roars and trembles. The hard wind reminds me how small I am, and that there is nothing I can do about people leaving. I watch every detail of the leaving ritual, trying to take the ache away. The train men bring in the steel steps, and the conductors wave and whistle. The doors snap shut. My father waves—oh, so happily—from his square window. I memorize him, his wide smile, the gleam of his bald head. I’m ready to live on another year of memories.

I watch until the train is lost in mist and smoke.

Liberace

The roofline of our neighbor’s house creates a triangle of yellow sun on my rug. During a full moon, the triangle is milk-blue but so bright you can read by its light. The Great Plains is like that, heat and light everywhere. Even the storms are exciting, making my blood swell and rush like the wind and the clouds and the boughs of the great trees.

The neighbors in the house next door are a real family with a mother, a father, a little girl, and even a dog. Sometimes I wish I lived in that bustling house with a real mom and a dad. George comes home every night after working at Sears. Ruth is always sweet, and she’s tender toward Cherie, who is two years younger than me. The dog’s name is Pudgy, a yipping miniature boxer that I’ve grown to love despite the fact that I was bitten by a dog once.

Ruth and George’s house vaulted to mansion status after they got a television. They’re one of the first families in town to have a TV. Once in a while Ruth invites Gram and me over on a Saturday night to watch Liberace. All our neighbors have variations of the same house—white walls, beige couch, plastic sheets covering pale carpets. The neighbors’ houses are neat, with no newspapers, books, or forgotten bills piled up. Our house is wallpapered with dark green and burgundy flowers, a French design, Gram said. The maroon ceiling seems to press me into the hot wool of our Oriental rug. Sometimes I can hardly breathe.

Tonight is Liberace time. A smiling Ruth wears an organdy apron and bears a plate of chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies. All of us are entranced by the small, mahogany box and the black-and-white picture: Liberace’s hands swoop up and down the piano; the silver candelabra sparkles. We all know that Gram is nuts about Liberace, with his super-white teeth, his wrists as graceful as a cat’s tail. “Oh, look at those lovely hands. See how he lifts his fingers up and down like pistons,” Gram croons. While Liberace plays, Gram sips her coffee, a look of such wonder and pleasure on her face that I stare at her more than at the TV. The notes of the music make waterfalls of color In my mind, sweeping me into an unfamiliar, beautiful world.

The next week, on a day so windy that the house creaks, I find Gram tink-ering at the piano, trying to play runs like Liberace, lifting her hands high into the air.

Her dark eyes fasten on me. “Sugar Pie, how would you like to learn piano?”

The piano entices me with its amber keys, the magic waiting beneath them. Playing the piano will make Gram happy. I wonder if I could play like my mother does. I tell her yes, I want to learn. Gram takes out sheet music with a silver cover. A curvy lady with dark hair leans back against a slick-suited man with a tiny mustache. He meets her sultry look.

“This is the music for the ‘Third Man Theme,’” Gram says wistfully. “Oh, how I’d love it if you’d play this for me someday.”

My grandmother at fifty-seven is as glamorous to me as any movie star. She poses, a hand on her hip, her dark hair flowing around her face. She has a faraway look, as if she’s listening to a distant melody. “Ah, this is the music I loved.” She gets up to dance, one hand on her stomach, the other hand on the shoulder of an imaginary dance partner. She takes a few turns around the living room, humming the “Third Man Theme,” cast back into memory.

“You have no idea, when I lived in Chicago, the kind of life I had, men falling all over each other to dance with me. In those days we danced all night. I wore the most magnificent dresses and shoes with little straps. Ostrich boa over my shoulder… oh. I was escorted home properly, of course, with no funny business. Quite a life. I took ships every year to England. You have no idea…”

She drifts off, seeing herself before she was a grandmother. I squint my eyes to see that Gram better, trying to imagine her wearing the clothes that hang in her closet—long satin gowns, fancy shoes with ribbons, the ostrich boa I love to stroke. She turns to me, luminous. “If you learn to play the piano, you’ll be very popular. People will invite you to parties; they’ll ask you to play so they can sing and dance. You’ll see.”

The future spins before my eyes. I want to be the lady on the sheet music, or Gram with a boa flung over her shoulder. I try to imagine the time before I was born and the person I will become, but it’s hazy, like fog on winter wheat fields.

On Saturday, I meet my new piano teacher, Crystal. She flows through the door of her studio, a white caftan covering her full body, necklaces sparkling on her generous chest. Crystal seats me at a white piano with sticky keys and shows me how to position my hands, while Gram takes notes. Crystal says that musical notes look like black flowers with stems. She shows me the mysterious signs of music—treble and bass clef, half notes and whole notes, the repeat sign, middle C. A world opens up, with its own secret runes.

After that Gram and I have a new routine: She drives me to lessons each Saturday afternoon; I practice twenty to thirty minutes after school. Each week Gram reminds me what the teacher says from her notes.

“Lift your wrists like Liberace,” she says, laughing. “What a guy. Wouldn’t it be romantic to have him play just for us?” Her eyes glow with delight.

In the beginning, it’s fun. The piano, left over from her Chicago days, stands like a proud dowager in our small dining room. The wood is worn; the ivories are discolored. I press keys, listening to the notes and how they create songs. Gram smiles a lot. After a few months, she tells me that we are getting a new piano. A shiny new Baldwin Acrosonic piano, with its shiny polished wood and bright new white keys, is delivered. It smells good, like lemons.

Then, as the practice sessions grow longer, the piano gets boring. The neighborhood kids play outside, the sound of their laughter drifting in. I want to play games and run in the grass with them, but Gram makes me practice almost all day long. At night after they have gone inside, sometimes I stand in the yard inhaling the sweet smell of the grass, watching the grand sky overhead with all its millions of stars, listening to the chirping of crickets. The huge moon rises overhead, painting the world silver. Alone in this landscape, I forget about the pressure in the house, and about Gram’s strict rules. I’m part of the night, and the land that surrounds us in dust and light.

The Plains Is
Our Mother

It’s June and school is out. Gram tells me that we are going to see her mama. With tears in her eyes, she says that her mother and brothers and sisters live in Iowa, and she misses them. She loads the car with cigarette cartons and suitcases, and puts the down comforter on the floor of the back seat, to protect me if we have an accident.

The Great Plains is an amber dream, the blue sky a canopy over the flat land that stretches to the far horizon. The wheat fields are ever-undulating seas. It is harvest time for the wheat. Combines lumber up and down the fields spewing golden dust into the air as they cut the long wheat stalks, capturing wheat heads that will be stored in monolithic grain elevators rising from the emptiness of the plains. Every afternoon small clouds grow into huge thunderheads, and the air smells of sulfur. Rain drums the roof of the Rambler, and the windshield wipers bang frantically back and forth. Burma-Shave signs mark our way north.

The car weaves through Kansas towns like Sedan and Arkansas City. We stop at small cafés, where Gram speaks with her English accent, acting like a world traveler. We order milkshakes or hot fudge sundaes and perch at picnic tables.

Gram likes to stop at historical monuments on the roadside, where I learn about the Osage Indians and the tall plains grasses, about outlaws and the Civil War. In Coffeyville, where the Dalton gang was captured, we stay at a fancy hotel with high ceilings and crystal chandeliers. I can imagine an hombre swaggering in, ordering a beer at the bar, then shooting out the brass-framed mirrors. Gram tells me that the Missouri River starts out in Montana, where Lewis and Clark found its source. She tells me about Sacajawea and about the pioneer women in wagon trains that came across here, when the plains hadn’t been settled yet.