Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (6 page)

My mother was proud of my decorum. She liked having a little girl who instinctively wanted to obey. She would give me instructions once, and I’d do just as she said, never considering the alternative. Obedience came so naturally to me that I am sometimes now perplexed by my own daughter’s equally adamant belief in the primacy of her own free will. Sometimes, I catch myself feeling cheated out of what I had naturally expected would be my due: a child so willing to please me she’d be incapable of doing anything other than what I ask.

Nina struck me as my inverse, my photographic negative. She wasn’t dangerous or bad—I see her behavior now as quite adorably spirited—but she knew how to test things, there on the sidewalk
or in our living room shimmying to her own tune:
If you want my body, and you think I’m sexy, / Come on, sugar, let me know
.

“Why don’t you tell Nina about Jesus,” my mom suggested to me one morning before my cousin had ventured downstairs.

Anticipating the conversation that would ensue, the engine in my chest picked up speed. Not because I was embarrassed or because I was being asked to attest to something I didn’t believe, but because I wanted to make a good case, to get it right and convince Nina of how happy she would be—as happy as the kempt boys and girls who clasped their hands in prayer or smiled up at firm but loving parents in the pages I studied every night before sleeping—if she opened her heart and asked Jesus to come inside. For if it wasn’t belief that accounted for our differences, what could it have been?

I went upstairs and sat on the foot of Nina’s bed. I held the copy of
Little Visits
in my lap, thinking it might be helpful to show her how all the children in the book had found use for God’s word and His will in their lives.

“Have you ever invited Jesus into your heart?” I asked her.

Nina knew full well who Jesus was, of course—everyone did—but had she ever prayed for Him to help her when she needed help or to guide her to do good things when it would have been easier (and, I suspected she might believe, more fun) to do bad?

“Well,” I continued, “if you ask Him, He’ll never leave you. When you’re afraid, you can call on Him, and when you need it, you can pray to Him for help.”

Nina asked a sensible follow-up question. “He’ll give me
whatever
I ask for?” And, not wanting to mislead her, I explained that there are three answers that God or Jesus will give you when you pray for something:
Yes, No
, or
Wait
. When it appeared that the
odds of getting a
No
seemed to be giving Nina some pause, I tried to step up my pitch. I told her about guardian angels, making it sound like God would give her her own personal bodyguard, and about the many mansions and gold-paved streets in Heaven.

But Nina was shrewd. Her face held on to just the hint of a smile, and I couldn’t quite tell what she was thinking. Was I getting through to her, or was she simply humoring me, letting me go through my spiel so that she could more carefully observe this strange breed of girl she had never before encountered? I sat at the foot of her bed, which was normally my bed, while she leaned back against a pillow, watching me talk. I felt like a guest, like someone brought in to amuse a queen, and when I ran out of things to say, I stood up and backed away. It strikes me that I must have been afraid, not of failing God or disappointing my mother so much as having to accept the fact that my cousin’s understanding of the world was incontrovertible, nothing I would manage to rein in or tamp down in fifteen minutes on an April morning. Nothing I, in my limited set of experiences, was likely to comprehend. Her view of the world stood on sturdy block letters, just like the word she’d written on the windshield of my mother’s car, and it cast shadows of doubt upon the hard-and-fast absolutes I’d been taught to accept.

Soon after that, Nina and I started bickering. Not constantly and not for very long, but there were moments each day when she would roll her eyes at my Pollyannaish outlook, and I would frown at some tidbit of the Big Bad City that had crept into our play. I was on edge, afraid that another ticking bomb (like
MOTHERFUCK
, which I couldn’t stop remembering) would be held out for me to turn over in my hands.

My mother knew things were tense between us. “Nina is family,”
she reminded me, adding, “If you’re having a hard time, pray about it.”

So at night, I did. When my mother tucked me into the bed Wanda had left behind when she’d gone away to college, I asked Jesus to watch over Nina and show her how to be good. It was easy to close my eyes and believe that if I could show Nina Jesus’s love, everything would be as bright and cheery between us as a bowlful of cheesy grits.

One afternoon, while we were outside hitting tennis balls against the garage door, Nina and I fell into another disagreement. If it had to do with tennis, the game was merely a pretext, a more acceptable instigator of anger than, say, the fact that we were fed up with one another’s company. Instead of laying out her case (she knew it wouldn’t have persuaded me) or agreeing to disagree (she’d already done that when she’d erased
MOTHERFUCK
from the windscreen of the car or sat patiently while I told her all about Heaven), Nina lifted her tennis racquet in the air and brought it down upon me as if it were the hammer of some pagan god.

When it hit, the racquet, which she had swung in an act of emphasis—emphasis and exasperation—hurt like a slap to my sensibility, a smack at my notion of all that mattered in the world. It hurt harder than an ordinary blow (at least I thought it must have; I’d never actually been struck by anyone but a calf before), and it made one thing clear: if I wanted to salvage things with my cousin—if I wanted to return to the easy rapport we’d had as babies posing for pictures in our white sun hats—I’d have to swing back.

The air was full of a stifling acrid smell from the Callery pear trees blossoming up and down our block. I drew in a deep breath. It was hard to do, but I gripped my racquet in both hands and
raised it up near my ears like a bat. It was going to feel just awful bringing the racquet down on Nina’s shoulder or her back, but I knew I had to. She wasn’t going anywhere for several more days, and if I ran crying to my mom, it would only confirm that I was foolish and prim, a Goody Two-shoes and a bore. I closed my eyes and swung. I knew it was the kind of thing that Jesus would be miserable watching me do. Once I managed to get the image of Jesus out of my mind, I thought of my mother and of how, were she to catch sight of us, she would at first be confused, thinking it couldn’t possibly be her daughter there beating the living devil out of Nina with a tennis racquet.

I was crying, which didn’t surprise me, but when I saw that Nina’s face was streaked with tears, too, I recognized that we had reached a kind of draw. We both must have sensed it, because we gave up with the racquets and went inside to sit on the couch. I felt those same gears, the ones set in motion by
MOTHERFUCK
, spinning freely in a space that had, less than a week ago, been difficult to clear. I was still too shaken to know whether that meant something in me had been broken or whether it had merely broken free. I had no idea what Nina felt. We sat beside one another on the family room couch, our arms just barely touching, neither of us bothering to move away from the other.

Maggie was plump with a scratchy voice, percussive and quick. She wore military fatigues and shiny brogan boots. We’d met her in the meat aisle of the air force commissary, and in the few minutes it had taken for my mother to ask where she was from and how long she’d been stationed at Travis, Maggie dropped phrases like “aw, hell” and “my old man” that gave me the feeling
I knew things about her that I ought not to know. When she used a foul word, she glanced my way, then looked back at my mother and said “ ’Scuse me,” smiling.

On the day of Maggie’s visit, my mother wore a beige shirtdress with a brown leather belt and matching flats. She smelled good. The whole house smelled good. She made a Waldorf salad (which I secretly disliked), rice pilaf with chicken, and green beans amandine. She’d even gotten up early to make the dough for homemade rolls. I had been charged with buttering the pan, a task that had earned me bits of the raw, chewy dough for which I’d opened my mouth as wide as a baby bird’s. Most important, there was a still-warm pound cake waiting under a domed cake saver for its turn on the table.

Maggie was nothing like the ladies from the church who came by in their floral dresses to drink coffee and pray, sitting straight as boards; nothing like the military wives we’d meet sometimes in restaurants to swap stories about one posting or another, the ones who disappeared from our lives as quickly as they came, transferred to another base or just drifting along a different axis. Now, I wonder if that was at least part of the reason why my mother had invited Maggie over in the first place. Perhaps she herself was tired of the remoteness and self-control of her relations with other women. Maybe she hoped that Maggie’s presence in our home might constitute an occasion to let her own voice climb up to the top or dive down to the bottom of its register, to slap her thighs in laughter, to stand up and imitate one person or another in the boisterous, free way she did with her husband and children or her own brothers and sisters.

When Maggie walked through our door, she looked quizzical, as if she’d been looking for a nightclub and had been led to a chapel
instead. She followed my mother into the living room and sat down, face still frozen in a curious expression. I was sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, working my way through a new coloring book and not quite fully listening to what they were saying, but the second or third time one of Maggie’s
ain’t
s landed in my ear, I managed to get in a quick “Don’t say
ain’t
, say
isn’t
.” I tried saying it gently, in case Maggie had forgotten or in case she never knew in the first place. After that, my mother asked me to go and make sure there were napkins on the table. I knew they were there, because I had just that morning rolled them up and threaded them through the pewter napkin rings, but I went to check anyway, taking the opportunity to steal a pat of butter from the dish and let it go to liquid on my tongue.

When the three of us sat down to lunch, I recalled the manners that had been instilled in me. Napkin in my lap, mouth closed while I chewed, no smacking, no elbows on the table, no reaching across for extra helpings. I took small, neat bites. If I needed to speak, I prefaced my comment with “Excuse me, Mommy.” If there was a food I didn’t like (like Waldorf salad), I ate it anyway, out of courtesy. Maggie was much easier on herself, heaping her plate and eating quickly, like a boy. During lunch, she looked around as if pulling her questions out of the different corners of the room. She asked my mother, “What do you
do
all day here in the house?” “Do you all go to church?” and “Do you play pinochle or whist?”

For my mother’s part, she was friendly and smiling. She laughed when Maggie laughed and chuckled sometimes at the undertone of bewilderment in so much of what Maggie asked and observed. But she didn’t ever stop being a hostess. She didn’t take off her shoes or make any jokes. Instead, she comported herself in the same way as she did with the church ladies and the air force wives.
There was a line she could have crossed, a line she had allowed herself to cross before with women she’d met and invited over, women whose voices had become legendary in our family, thanks to the way my mother had narrated her encounters with them. One had been German, and she’d confided to my mother, “To German womens, black mens is
gold
.” Another said, “Aww, sookie sookie, now,” and called my uncle Arthur “just as tender as a little lamb.” I suspected that Mom would repeat one or two of Maggie’s comments, mimicking her deep, raspy voice, once my father and siblings were home, but for the duration of their lunch, the side of my mother capable of clowning like that stayed tucked in tight. For whatever reason, Mom never showed Maggie the version of herself that Maggie was certain to have liked.

I think, now, about what my mother had meant when she’d told me, “I was searching.” I imagine her a young woman alone with one or two or four children while her husband, my father, was overseas on duty. Had she reached out to God only after she’d exhausted the communities of women she hoped might keep her from feeling alone and unmoored? It must have been lonely, confiding in a sequence of people who came and went as if through a revolving door, there one day and transferred away the next. Had God become vital to her because, unlike the people in her life, people who moved according to the dictates of their military superiors, He was constant, always present?
I will never leave thee nor forsake thee
.

If there had been a particular motivation for inviting Maggie over, I must also acknowledge the possibility that it had to do with God. Mom did that from time to time, invited people over hoping our home might serve as a conduit for God’s love. Once, a teenage girl named Faye, who lived in state-sponsored foster care, had spent the weekend with our family. I don’t know how Mom had found
Faye, but she’d been put up in Wanda’s empty bedroom and taken with us to church before being driven back to her foster parents on Sunday evening. Faye had been tight-lipped. She only smiled when my brothers went to lengths trying to make her laugh, and then only briefly. She projected a stoicism that made her seem much older than fourteen. It could be that she had been instructed to be on her best behavior or to be on guard against some ulterior motive, by whoever had given her permission to come with us in the first place. Or maybe the foster care system itself had made her wary. I don’t know what our impression upon Faye had been, if we’d made her happy or uncomfortable or if anything in our lives had reached her as a model to be emulated. After she left, my mother spent some time trying to remove signs of water damage from the footboard of the bed where Faye had draped her wet towel.