Of Time and Memory (25 page)

I can see you on one of those warm May days, taking out the storm windows in the brick apartment and washing them before you put in the screens. Washing each window with hot water and soap. Scalding water that turns your hands red, your hands which were once so delicate, the nails strong and ridged with perfect white half-moons. By now your fingers look like sausages. Dick keeps telling you how his sister, Jean, gained weight with her first baby, and you listen to him and you try to believe that he is right, that there is nothing to worry about. And you hate yourself for making a big deal of your swollen hands because in the scheme of things, with people starving in the world and with families still mourning the loss of loved ones in the war, your troubles are small and inconsequential. But still you can't look at your hands without thinking that you are becoming disfigured and you need a way to hide from the world like the British soldiers who will hide behind masks for the remainder of their
lives. You are scrubbing the windows until your hands are raw, the skin on your fingers cracked just short of bleeding; it is a kind of punishment, and you can hear your mother whispering to your husband, “She'll get through it, she's my daughter, I know how strong she is.”

Your mother has been calling you every morning, offering to come by and help you pack up your things so you and Dick can move into their house on Market Street where she can wait on you hand and foot like your doctor has advised. But how can you go back to your father's house? The little half house which is already so crowded with your baby sister and your brother.

Maybe if you keep busy you can dissuade them from this plan. Maybe if you can show them that you are able to clean the windows yourself and put in all the screens, then they will give up the idea that you must move back home and be cared for like an invalid.

Maybe you can persuade them to leave you alone.

How? By smiling?

Yes, by becoming the perfect picture of a housewife. Dressed with your makeup on and your husband's breakfast on the table before he awakens each morning. And standing at the door to greet him at the end of the day, dressed in a different outfit, smiling. Hello sweetheart, I made meatloaf for dinner.

And macaroni and cheese. You spend two days teaching yourself how to make macaroni and cheese. And at night after supper when you sit out on the back porch with Dick, you keep smiling even
when the sky is filled with bombers from the Air Force base at Willowgrove and the radio is talking more and more of the troubles in Korea.

Keep smiling. And what about a double date this Friday night with Tom Pugles, Dick's buddy, and Shirley Graham, the girl Tom's dating now.
Cinderella
is opening at the Strand and you're going to catch the early show and then have dinner together.

But when the night comes you make Dick call Tom and change it to the late movie and no dinner. And you insist on meeting them at the theater. Inside the theater. In the dark because that afternoon you looked through the Landsdale High School yearbook and saw how pretty and how thin Shirley is. Just the sight of your hand next to her smiling face on the page is enough to make your throat go dry.

But you keep trying. Joking with Tom that as soon as you have delivered this baby you're going to hit him up for a ride in his state trooper cruiser. You want him to promise that he'll flash the blue lights and drive as fast as it will go!

The macaroni and cheese in the glass casserole pan is for Dick's sister, Jean, and her husband, Page, who you invited to dinner the next night. You are trying again to show your husband that you can manage. You have worked all day to get it right, washing every bowl and pan that you dirty as you go along so that there is nothing in the sink or on the counter that will be evidence of your struggle. When you bend over to pick a wood-handled spoon up off the floor you are a little short of breath. It's nothing really, it's only the strangeness of the feeling
that draws your attention from the world of preparing meals and entertaining guests, back to the world of yourself. Inside yourself. You can feel the darkness cover you as you lean against the counter, the strip of metal trim around the wood counter pressing against your belly. If you lean harder, it disappears in the soft folds of skin that were never there before. Close your eyes and stop this before it claims you. Concentrate on something else. Concentrate on the picture of the sweet nurse who you have met, the woman who will help deliver your baby. Anna Hartman. Remember how she smiled at you when you were introduced to her the other day? Her strong handshake and her fine bright eyes? Can't you see her handing you your baby—Here's your son, Peggy. Congratulations. And the first thing you'll do is count all the fingers and toes like every mother does. And take a good, long look at his face to make sure you'll never forget it.

No one remembers today what it was that happened, Peggy. Jean and Page arrived just a little before Dick had returned home from work. They brought their new baby, a son named Douglas, nine months old now, just learning how to laugh at the world. They sat him on the burgundy-colored couch between them. He was dressed in short pants and a white T-shirt like the ones your father wore to the print shop. Ditchdigger T-shirts you called them. Everything was fine until he began crying hard about something. You watched Jean hold him up in the air and talk baby talk to him until he calmed down. And then you excused yourself and went into the
bedroom. You closed the door behind you and sat down on the floor and leaned against the door.

This is where you stayed for the rest of the night. When Dick called to you and pleaded with you to open the door, you leaned your weight harder against it and told him that you felt too sick to come out. You wouldn't let him in.

Even while it's happening you know exactly how terrible this evening will be in everyone's memory of it. But you cannot stop what is happening. Twice during dinner, Dick, like a child, comes hopefully to the door and knocks gently. I just can't, you say to him. You can hear the plates and silverware. Before Jean and Page arrived you had set the tin table with your fancy wedding dishes. The beautiful hand-painted Desert Rose plates. The matching cups and saucers. They aren't speaking a word over dinner. It is so terribly silent that you can hear them chewing. You can smell the smoke from their after-dinner cigarettes.

Finally when their baby begins to fuss, they say goodnight. The screen door closes behind them with a slow sigh. And then it begins again. Your husband's hopeful tapping on the bedroom door. You'll feel better in the morning, Peg. He says this all the time to you now, and you are trying to remember when he first began to say it.

Somehow you fall asleep leaning against the bedroom door. When you wake, it is the middle of the night. Broad Street is deserted. No cars go by. You wake suddenly, startled by the silence around you. There is a narrow band of light on the floor beside
you coming from the light on the stove that Dick has left on for you.

You find him sleeping on the couch, his feet hanging over the end, and when you kneel down beside him and lay your head on his chest, he shudders and whispers to you that he doesn't ever want to stop trying to make you happy but he is scared now. He's scared that he may give up on you. He's scared that he may lose his faith in you.

He begins to cry. This is the first time you have made your husband cry. (This you will now have to carry with you.) The sound of him struggling to speak through his tears is enough to take your breath away. He is trying to tell you that he is scared and you are trying to stay where you are with your face pressed against him while the top of your head is burning and you begin to drift away. And the last thing you want to do is leave him behind. All you want is to stay where you are, right next to his sorrow, and so, to keep yourself from flying off, you try again to picture the center of your childhood town. To walk the streets in your memory, going calmly from store to store in Hatfield. Hirzel Drug Store with the glass vials in the window, and Anders Market. Beans Grocery and the old Knipe Hotel.

On Mother's Day I took my family to your grave for the first time, Peggy. I stood beside Colleen, watching our children. Erin pulled the weeds that had grown up around the marble stone. Cara asked me if I was going to be buried here when I died. Nell did a
cartwheel in the grass, pretending this was not a sad place. Jack buried a quarter and said, “Someday I'm going to come back and see if it's still here.”

I wondered what would be left of you. A mat of hair, your shoes. Pages from the Bible your mother buried with you.

I tried to remember the times in my life when I felt close to you. The time I was caught in a gale in a small sailboat, two miles from the harbor. I was alone, down on my knees bailing the boat and trying to hold it on course. I had my St. Christopher's medal between my teeth and I was talking to you as I am now.

And in 1987, when Colleen and I had gone to spend the winter in Ireland. Nell and Erin were babies and I had gone ahead to find a place. In the subway in London a fire broke out at the King's Cross station. People were running over one another to find a way out. I ran to the tracks and pushed my way inside the last car of the last train out just as the doors were closing. As the train was pulling away there were people running beside it, screaming to be let on. And when I saw the great black wall of smoke behind us, I began to speak to you.

And the flight home from Los Angeles in 1982 when the plane fell suddenly and everyone's dinner flew up to the ceiling. People were screaming but I was speaking to you as I am now.

Your bones are in the ground, seven or eight miles from where I was born, half a mile from where you last heard us cry. How far I've wandered from where you lie.