Fig (37 page)

Daddy tries a new angle.

“Fig,” he says, “we only want you to succeed,” and I can tell he wants someone to chime in; he needs support. He says this, and then he pauses. He wants the silence to be interrupted. He needs Gran or Billy to agree—a ringing chorus to echo him and to say,
Fig, we only want you to be happy.
But instead the silence burns, it is a static—absolutely overwhelming—and just when I think it will swallow all of us someone speaks.

“Your father's right,” she says. “He really is.”

And when I look at her, I see
my
mother. She is sitting next to me, and I have no idea what happened to the fat chain-smoking schizophrenic who was just there seconds ago. Mama's hair is clean and shiny under the light, spiraled into a bun and held in place by a pair of ivory chopsticks. She smiles at me, and her smile is a gentle smile—a mother smile. Her lips no longer chapped but soft for kissing. “Fig,” she says, “we only want what is best for you.”

I am worried that I am hallucinating. Is this the onset of my schizophrenia? Seventeen instead of nineteen? Or perhaps I've been the crazy one all this time? The room is spinning, and everyone seems to be holding their breath—that is, everyone except for Mama.

The precision of her words cuts into me, and my eyes answer by filling up with tears, and the tears warp my vision—they further distort the delusion. I blink and the salt water falls, but it doesn't matter; the image of my mother is already wavering. Everyone is staring at her and I'm not the only one who is crying. I see Daddy, and Mama sees it too. I see her see it, and I watch her pupils dilate; they expand into two black pools for drowning, and now she is wringing her hands again, and I sit there watching as her fingers twist themselves into a nest of hissing serpents.

*  *  *  *

Daddy and I get into another fight while Gran and Uncle Billy sit in the living room and Mama sleeps in the day porch. Daddy claims Mama fell asleep after dinner with a lit cigarette in her hand. “I can prove it to you,” he says. “Fig, her finger
is
burnt. Why can't you see how bad she is?”

He doesn't believe what happened at the table was a moment of clarity.

“You need to realize that your mother is never going to get better,” he says. “Never, Fig. Not ever.”

According to the pocket dictionary, the second definition for the word “never” is “not at all; in no way,” followed by the word “nevermore,” which means “never again.” The word “never” kisses the word “neurosis,” and “neurosis” is on the same page as “nettle” and “neuter.” Stinging nettles grow along the farmer's ditch as if to guard the water, and my father fixed himself when I was six years old.

He didn't want another me.

I blame my father for everything. I finally say it out loud. And this alone makes it seem truer than it ever seemed before. My father turns away, and I know he is crying because I see the way his shoulders shake. This is when Uncle Billy clears his throat. I had no idea he was even there. I can feel him behind me, standing in the doorway.

“Fig,” he says, “that's enough. It is time for you to go to bed.”

*  *  *  *

But I don't. I don't go to bed. I deliberately disobey everyone.

I sit in the day porch instead. I sit in the wicker love seat and I don't look out the windows. I look only at my mother, who is asleep.

I can hear the hushed whispers of Daddy, Gran, and Billy holding conference in the kitchen. I was wrong. Billy will not be coming upstairs to check in with me—not tonight, and quite possibly never again. Not ever. In fact, he might never ask about the latest flowers or wild grasses I've discovered on the farm or along the highway. He might not even care if I was to hurt myself again.

I press my fingernails into the pads of my thumbs to remember what it was like to pick. I do this to quiet the other pain I feel, because I hurt everywhere. But there is no need to deliberately harm myself any more than I already have by hurting everyone else around me.

I listen to the sound of Billy and Gran saying good-bye to my father—the front door opening and closing, and then the sound of Billy's truck driving away. The headlights flash through the room, bouncing off all the glass the way light travels through a prism trying to escape, and then the truck is gone and there is only the dim light from the bulb above the barn door that is yards away.

Daddy goes to bed. I watch the ribbon of light under his door go black, and I am left alone in the dark with my mother. The light from the barn turns the latest bouquet I've made of bluestem, switchgrass, and azure aster into a silhouette of itself. And like all silhouettes, this black shape can shift. From atop the makeshift shelf, it shape-shifts into a head of hair—like a wig on a mannequin, and I remember the cemetery of heads buried in the backyard. I realize my father doesn't know about this strange graveyard, even though it was planted on his property by his wife.

“Fig ?” Mama says, and her voice is groggy from sleep and medication. She is asking if it is me sitting across from her in the dark. I lean forward. I lean into the light from the barn, and I reach out to take her hands.

“I don't want you to throw your life away,” she says, and her voice is clear again. “You have given me the greatest possible happiness,” my mother says, “And because you have, I need you to be happy. You need to live your life and you need to forgive your father. You both have been so incredibly good. So patient. You have been in every way all that anyone could ever be.”

Now she is sitting beside me. But this time, I am not hallucinating. She is not a memory, even though I feel as if I've heard her words before; when she speaks, it feels like something remembered, and yet this has never happened.

Mama is no longer the specter of her former self like the person I saw earlier at the table. Her body barely fits into the seat beside me, and I can smell her breath and her skin—cigarette smoke and body odor—she needs to bathe and to brush her teeth, and yet her voice is so very clear, as are her eyes, which are looking right into me.

My real mother uses the body of this other mother to talk to me like a ghost employs a medium. As she speaks to me she continues to hold my hands. I study this place where our bodies join—this bridge to cross the vast between, and I realize we have always been connected. And this connection cannot be broken. Despite the dim light, I can see the burn on her finger from the cigarette. The raw wound weeps, and this fluid is called ichor.

Ichor is the watery discharge from an ulcer, but it is also the ethereal fluid that flows through the veins of a god instead of blood.

*  *  *  *

There is a fable both Mama and Daddy used to tell me when I was younger. About a scorpion and a frog. The scorpion wants to cross the river, but he can't swim, so he asks the frog if he can catch a ride across. The frog is insulted. “Do you think I'm stupid?” he asks. “You'll surely sting me.”

“Do you think
I'm
stupid?” the scorpion replies. “If I sting you, I'll never get across—either you wouldn't take me or we'd both drown.”

And so the frog eventually agrees to take the scorpion to the other side, but this is the point where Mama and Daddy always tell the story differently.

In Daddy's version, the frog swims all the way across the river with the scorpion on his back. As soon as they reach the other side the scorpion stings the frog, and the frog dies.

In Mama's version, the scorpion stings the frog while he's still swimming—somewhere in the middle of the wide river, and the two creatures die by drowning. In both versions, the dying frog asks, “Why?” to which the scorpion always replies, “I can't help myself. It's my nature.”

*  *  *  *

The flowers should last longer than they do. The day porch is much colder than the main part of the house, and it should work as the refrigerated room in The Flower Lady does, and yet the flowers seem to wilt within mere hours. Maybe there is too much light? Maybe the flowers die because of Mama's space heater? Maybe they choke to death on her endless cigarette smoke?

Or maybe the flowers die inside because they are only meant to be wild.

Come spring, I will plant my own garden beds of flowers—daisies, peonies, sunflowers, tulips, passionflower, and lots and lots of roses. I want roses everywhere, and I want more moonflowers than the ones we have already. I want to plant gardens that open and glow in the night as well as during the day. For now, I'm using my window seat to grow Christmas cactus, rose geranium, night-blooming cereus, mother of thousands, jade, and wandering Jew, but none of these plants will flower for quite some time. When I'm ready, I will give Sissy Baxter bluebell to express my gratitude. I will give her chrysanthemum to let her know she's been a wonderful friend even if it's just a secret.

Mama asks for Daddy a lot these days. He sits with her, and I'm not invited. I'm not allowed. She wants to talk to him alone. She cries and he holds her. I see them when I happen to walk by—both inside the house and outside. I see them through the French doors or through the windows from the yard as I scour the earth for the last of the autumn dandelions. I pick the dandelions that have gone to seed, to blow on them: I make wish after wish as I watch the starlike seeds scatter. I make the same wish every single time, and this wish is the wish I have always wished.

My one and only.

Through the heating vents, I hear my father call my mother Annie.

“Annie,” he says, “I swear to you—everything is going to be okay.”

He makes this promise a lot these days, and the more he says it, the more he sounds like he believes in it. I don't try to convince him about Mama anymore; I see him beginning to see, and I even overhear him talking to Billy one afternoon when they don't know I'm there.

“Maybe Annie just needed to come home,” he says, “Maybe coming home really is all she ever needed?”

Later, when I come to replace more dead flowers with ones I've recently gathered, Mama watches me. “I got that dress in Ithaca,” she says. “I bought it at a yard sale for ten cents.” The dress is a pink housedress from the 1950s; it has white scalloped trim and a built-in apron with deep pockets. I insert Devil's claw into a spray of false mint and Spanish needles, and when I step back to show her, Mama says, “That sure is pretty, Fig. I think you've found your calling.”

She doesn't seem to notice or mind how quick the wildflowers keep dying. Instead, she wants me to make a promise. “Don't ever stop doing this,” she says, and she sweeps her hand across the air, gesturing to all the flowers in this room, in the house, and growing wild upon the farm. She is also indicating all the flowers I will someday grow, and the flowers I've hung to dry—the ones I get to keep forevermore. And because I love to see her smile, I do. I promise her. “I cross my heart and hope to die and stick a needle in my eye,” I say, but this upsets her, and she makes me start over.

“All I want is your word,” she says, and in the end my word is all it takes to make her smile. Mama smiles at me, and then it begins to rain again.

I sit in the wicker love seat with the teddy bear. Mama watches the rain run down the window glass and whispers a line from a nursery rhyme: “It's raining, it's pouring. The old man is snoring.” She smiles at me and doesn't finish; instead, she leans back, kicks up the foot rest, and falls asleep.

Lulled by the rain, I, too, drift away. Curled into the fetal ball of the unborn, I sleep most of the afternoon and wake later to the mighty crash of thunder. As the lightning streaks the violet sky I pull myself together to go clean the kitchen and cook dinner, but even these banal chores feel unearthly, like a dream.

I go fetch Daddy from the barn, and hanging from the rafters three dead pigs sway from the motion of me pushing the big door open. Upside down, their feet are bound, sharp hooves pointing toward heaven. Skinned and gutted, their meat is the same pink-white as my skin, and I'm confused. We sold our pigs years ago. Have I gone back in time?

But then Daddy looks at me, and he says, “I got them in a real good trade.”

*  *  *  *

“I might be gone all night,” Daddy says when I come into the kitchen to get a glass of water to take to bed. “Did you give your mother a flashlight?” he asks, and I nod.

She was asleep, so I left it on in case she wakes up and can't figure out why the lights won't work. This is what my father said to do; he swore the batteries would last all night. The storm knocked the power out and Daddy and I are each holding emergency candles. The yellow light exaggerates the dark circles beneath his eyes, and he looks even more tired than he usually does.

I hate him for never having more energy. It makes me feel like I don't do enough.

“Here,” he says, and he's whispering even though Mama's been asleep in the other room for hours now. And he slides the silverware drawer open to show me where he's stashed Mama's medicine this time—“Just in case,” he says, and his whisper is like a hush. The pills and wafers are hiding beneath the butter knives in the narrow slot beside the forks.

Stepping into his insulated coveralls, my father grabs the thermos he just filled with hot coffee made cowboy style on the gas range. “The phone lines are still working,” he says, “so if you need me, you can call.” Then he opens the door, and before he walks into the night he turns to look at me. “If I can't get that generator to run,” he says, “I'll likely be gone till daybreak helping Old Man Fergie hand milk all those cows.”

*  *  *  *

October 3, 1992

The relentless rain drowns out my dreams and will not let me sleep. It beats against the roof and trickles down the window glass like tears on a human face. All I hear is rain:
rain, rain, rain.