Hieroglyphics Read online

  Remember how you were here to greet us, Becca? You were our reason for coming, and we are happy to have this time near you and your family, but I still wake some days and think: “What am I doing here?” Even though we have been here for over a year now, I panic, and then I try to rationalize it all, to name the reasons and the benefits of living here. We have followed the migratory path of the snowbirds we once saw as traitors—the weaklings, your father and I called them as we stood armed with our snow shovels and salt. And, yes, ice and cold are hard on brittle bones, and, yes, help is needed when dealing with worn-out hearts and lungs and words that won’t come. The love and attention of a child nearby cannot be underestimated—please know we are grateful, Becca. And yet there remain those parts of me that simply refused to come along, and they pull my mind this way and that all day, especially when I’m in here sorting through it all and trying to give it some order. I try to collect and hold on to them, but it is like grasping the wind, and yet those are the parts—what I knew as a child—that seem the truest parts of me.

  Home. I hear that word and I am in my bed in Massachusetts. I went to bed as one girl and woke up another. I hear the word “home” and it is 1942, that late dark before I woke to learn that my mother had not come home. Even after all these years, I hear that word and that is where I am transported.

  I guess I have always drifted back there, so often that I have memories tucked within memories, like carpool lines, moments of waiting, when something pulled me backward. I recall clearly waiting for Becca during her swim practice those cold early mornings before school, the air smelling of chlorine; there were echoes and splashing and a kind of false warmth when outside it was winter, snow on the ground. And I remember being there, not just once but many times, too hot in my coat but not wanting to shed everything, because the whistles were blowing and it was time for practice to end and the day’s work to begin. But I closed my eyes, and there in the dozy haze with the sounds of water, I drifted from our suburban comfort into that second story of my childhood home there on School Street; last I checked, it was still there—a simple wooden house, tan with dark-brown trim, a steep center staircase, and a radiator by the door, where we laid our gloves and scarves.

  I can close my eyes and know every square inch. I know the sound of my father’s footsteps leaving for his job at Waltham Watch, and then his return in early evening, already dark in the winter months. His movements through life were as precise as the timepieces occupying his days, the close fine-tuning of parts, a focused ability that reassured me but I suspect had the opposite effect on my mother. I remember her standing, hands on her hips and toe tapping. “Tick-tock, tick-tock,” she said, moving her hand like a pendulum, impatient to get out and go wherever it was we were going.

  I remember hearing them laugh in the room next to mine, leaving me to feel both comforted and left out. My mother’s laugh is one I can still hear on a good day, and yet I can’t even begin to describe it to you. I tried to imitate it once, alone in the car while I watched the rush of children swarm from your school, and my voice was thin and tinny, nothing like what I was hearing in my head. Still, I place my memory of it there, one to handle as gently as a piece of recording tape. These days, there would be a real recording to keep, but not so for my mother; her voice is only in the heads of those of us who knew her. Now, there is no one who shares this with me.

  I remember my bedspread: nubby chenille in a pale yellow with a big, heavy blanket on top of that, the radiator ticking like the Tin Man’s heart, like your father’s artificial valve. For many years now when I couldn’t sleep, I’ve lain awake there beside him and listened. It’s a sound like the radiator of my childhood, the window above it encased in ice, crystals visible in the glow from the light on the corner, where there was a local grocery. I even know the owner’s name, Mr. Rosen, his white apron always stained with blood as he leaned across the counter, his smile boyish and funny as he reported neighborhood gossip, who he saw doing what when, while he slipped penny candies into your open palm.

  “Earth to Lil,” your father would say, or one of you would call, “Mom? Hello?” and I woke to this life, both glad to be in it but also sad to leave that long-ago moment; I would wake, and there you were, Becca, chlorine on your skin and hair, body goosefleshed and shivering, as I wrapped a big towel around you. I remember the moment so clearly, and yet I can’t tell you what might have been on my mind that day or what coat I wore during that period of time. It might’ve been the camel-colored one, or it could have been that red corduroy I wore for so long, the one that led your dad—those times he acted silly (rare times!)—to sing that old song “Hey there, Little Red Riding Hood, you sure are looking good.”

  It’s so clear to me—the laughter, your childhood voices, your father’s young face and headful of dark hair—but I can’t recall how I felt when I woke that day, what I did after your swim practice, what dance classes I taught that day, or what ancient this or that your father was fixated on and lecturing about at the time. And what did he and I talk about then? The news of the day? The weather? What needed to be fixed? If so, then I can assure you that so much of life never changes.

  What I do recall is that while back in my childhood room, I saw my mother’s hairbrush; it was simple and plain, so unlike her, just brown boar bristles, and she tossed her head side to side as she brushed and fluffed, the auburn heft of her hair falling chin-length, very fashionable. It was on my dresser, and I was surprised and delighted to see it there. It was there like a promise, because she brushed her hair before bed, 100 times, as she had read somewhere was the thing to do. She would have needed to come back into my room to get it, and I would have heard the door creak on its hinges. I would have seen her there in the dim light of the hallway lamp we left on all night because our stairs were so steep and the landing so small; I could almost see her there. And that is what I remember, straining my eyes against the darkness to see her there, the brush on my dresser, above which the mirror reflected light from the street below.

  It’s mysterious how fluid time has become for me; I wake and pour a glass and have no idea what I’ll find.

  We all have those objects that keep us feeling connected to a person or time long gone. For me, it’s that hairbrush and my mother’s little ivory pin shaped like a Scottie dog, with rhinestone eyes, and the watch my father methodically took apart and then put back together in the nights after my mother died. For your father, it’s a toy badge, a box of his father’s fishing lures, and his grandfather’s stethoscope.

  Remember how you loved to play with that stethoscope, listening to your own hearts and the gurgles of your stomachs? Jeff, you loved it so much you wrote a school report in the sixth grade so that your father would have to let you touch it. You loved school reports and projects; so many vinegar-and-baking-soda volcanoes over the years! You loved reading about how the Frenchman who invented the stethoscope did so because he felt uncomfortable pressing his ear up to women’s breasts. Remember? You said, “S’il vous plaît open your shirt,” in a silly accent modeled after that cartoon skunk. I thought it was funny, but that was the kind of thing your father got impatient and irritated about; he was always much harder on you, Jeff, something I have never understood. Did he want you to be something you weren’t? Did he envy that you could be a young man without feeling the weight of the world? I have your yearbooks right here on the shelf, too, and you look so young, hair down in your eyes and that denim jacket you wore all the time.

  When I was in high school, our yearbook had a page that said “Faces” with lots of little thumb-sized pictures, and we all very carefully wrote the name of the person under each picture. I was included in one with three other girls: Doris Banks and Lois Starnes and Jean Burr. I still like to look at those girls, the wavy curls with great big bows pinned to the side, a style that seems to have returned, infinite recycling.

  Darling Lil, 2 sweet 2 be 4gotten.

  That was written so many times in my yearbook, but I suspe
ct it wasn’t true at all, both the sweet part and the forgotten. I stayed in touch with many people over the years—through Christmas cards, changes in address, the occasional swapping of birth announcements, and then wedding and retirement, and then the obituaries started rolling in and have continued.

  Stay sweet, Cutie-Pie.

  My best friend in elementary school was Bettie Conroy; she lived down the street, and I went to her house almost every afternoon after my mother died. Then at some point, it was like I just stopped going, and I don’t remember why.

  Bettie had a doll I loved, and she would let me hold her if I promised to be very careful—a bridal doll, all white lace and veil. And we roller-skated, our keys on strings around our necks, the scritch-scratch sound of those old metal wheels on the sidewalks. Remember all those times I took you all to Wal-Lex for birthday parties or just on a Saturday afternoon? I always thought about skating with Bettie just a few blocks away. A different time, a different life, and yet it felt like the two overlapped, a double exposure of me in two places.

  “What happened to your mother?” Bettie asked one of those days, and though her mother shushed her, she also stopped stirring to listen. We were there in the kitchen because she had promised to let us crack and break the eggs. “I mean did you see her?” Bettie said.

  I focused on the recipe her mother had on the counter, something from Woman’s Day, a magazine my mother had also sometimes bought. Cheese soufflé, costs 63¢; 6 large servings, the recipe said. Warn the family that the soufflé must be served immediately!

  I nodded but gave nothing else; it felt like a betrayal, and I was still harboring the hope that it had all been a terrible mistake, that it wasn’t my mother after all.

  Maybe that was the last day I spent at Bettie’s; I have tried so many times to remember what came next, but I can’t, just as I now sometimes look at the Faces page and, even seeing the names written there in my own youthful handwriting, can’t place them. Your father often says, “Of course you can’t remember! We’re old as dirt, Lil,” and we laugh.

  In fact, when we moved here, I got a chalkboard and wrote “Faces” at the top and then listed the neighbors we met and described them. Lucy next door: slight stoop to the shoulders, hair has a pink tinge. Her husband, Raymond has big ears and wears his pants too high and was a dermatologist. They have a koi pond in their backyard and talk about it all the time. The Parkers down the block, originally from upstate New York, but if we have anything in common who would know, because they spend all their time golfing and visiting their kids, somewhere even farther south than where we are now. The Warrens, much younger than everyone else on the street and always offering to help, even when you had no idea you needed any.

  Faces has helped us to remember all of their names and something about them. I wrote of the Parkers: “Fans of black hair dye and facial procedures.” And of Ron Todd, the divorced realtor who sold us this house in between various dental procedures he described in great detail, I wrote: “A man, a plan, a root canal.”

  Remember all those palindromes you kids knew? I had made your father laugh, something that has become harder and harder to do; he used to always make jokes about his heart, about kicking the bucket, circling the drain, but those jokes have dwindled with all he has going on, and so any levity is good. I’m hoping to do some more palindromes, but in the meantime, he said I need to keep Faces hidden in the bedroom, in case any of our neighbors pop in, something we are finding people do around here a lot.

  And I am not complaining, Becca, because you (and Ron Todd, of course) helped us find a great place to be, but I would be lying if I didn’t say that there are times when the heat and humidity is killing us, as is the constant chatter and hospitality and all that hugging. Oh my. Your father has done much better with that part than I have; he once lived here, after all, and has a greater tolerance for those who invade your personal space. I extend my hand and hope for the best. I avert my eyes if I sense a talker up ahead. Just the other day, a woman at the dry cleaners said to me, “The humility is just awful, ain’t it, sugar?” and I said, “Oh my God, yes. The humility is terrible these days.” And don’t even mention the tea, thick with sugar and God knows what; you can feel your arteries closing in resistance.

  In short, I am homesick and I am timesick. I would be lying not to say that. It is possible to feel content and resolved and still be homesick. I miss all that no longer is, which is why I paste and piece all these scraps together. Sometimes, I hold a ticket or photo, a piece of paper, while willing myself back to where I first held it. I know that might sound silly, but it’s what I do. I want to hear your young voices, the dog scratching to come in; I want to call my father on the telephone, finger in that rotary dial one number at a time—TW3-3642. Let me take this Playbill and arrive at the theater, or this receipt and find myself there in the produce aisle of Star Market. Then, after the show, after I check out, after I sit and let the car warm up, I drive those familiar streets home and find everything just as I left it, the kitchen door creaking behind me.

  The cornerstone always goes in the northeast corner, something my father told me about years ago. I don’t recall why we were talking about it; perhaps it came up because of that popular cartoon of the singing and dancing frog trapped there—you know the one, “Hello, my baby, hello, my honey”—only the frog refuses to perform for the greedy man who hopes to make a fortune, except when it is just the two of them. What I recall is my father telling me it all had to do with the Masons, and something about coming out of the cold darkness of the north into the dawning light of the sunrise, and something to do with the summer solstice and the longest day, but now for me, the memory is all about my parents at a time when there seemed to be no threats whatsoever to our life.

  We were at our kitchen table, a small white porcelain surface, and it must have been spring, because the window facing School Street was open and there was a single jonquil in a jar on the table. I don’t know what we ate (the plates are empty), and my parents are both smoking (Chesterfields, an ashtray shaped like a little frying pan between them). “I bet that’s why graves face that way,” my mother said, and my father nodded, both of them seeming pleased to be teaching me something, although it doesn’t always hold true; I have been to many cemeteries in my life, and there are a lot of graves not facing east. Even recently, when I went with your father to ride by that house where he once lived, we went in the cemetery where he played as a boy, a shady lovely place, Whispering Pines, but there seemed no rhyme or reason whatsoever to the way people were placed. His mother is facing north, in fact, which Frank said was unintentional but certainly made sense.

  We were once on a trip, one of those far-flung places your father wanted to see—Egypt or Morocco or Peru; so much has run together for me, though I do remember that he was writing something about fishhooks from thousands of years ago. We were somewhere, brilliant-blue sky and sun and sand, when I suddenly froze in panic of what I had left written for you to find, should something happen to us. I kept a journal then, or my version of one, a legal pad tucked in my bedside table drawer, where I often documented the date and the weather or made lists of this or that: what to buy at the store, what people want for Christmas. Should I attempt a real ballet for the recital or just keep doing flowers and bees and sunbeams? Should we get a second dog so we are never without one in the house? Should I leave your father? The whole time it was all I could think about, picturing you two, your own adult lives barely beginning, having to read all that I had to say.

  I recall that I had written “Frank—the pros and cons.” But now I’m not remembering the details listed there. What I do remember is burning the list in the kitchen sink as soon as we got home.

  “Will you snap out of it?” your father said, the bright, exotic place devoured by my panic. “You could just as easily go to the grocery store and never come home.”

  “Yes,” I told him. “Yes, that’s right.” Or I could just as easily say I was going out to tea
ch a dance class on a cold November night and wind up in a club burned to cinder.

  October 17, 2016

  Do I need to draw you a picture?

  I woke today with that question stuck in my head. It is something my mother said, each syllable clearly enunciated, when she felt unheard or misunderstood. She would stand there with her hands on her hips for emphasis.

  My father and I often told her that, yes, she did. Her stories were often so confused-sounding, as if she couldn’t tell it all fast enough, high-speed versions about this or that neighbor and what was going on, too many pronouns to keep up with who was who.

  Once, after a particularly long-winded tale that left my father sighing in exasperation, she went and got a piece of paper and a pencil from the kitchen drawer where she kept the grocery list and drew a picture of a stick woman (Mrs. McCarthy two houses over, who had seven boys), then drew an arrow to the stick woman’s stomach. “‘Another bun in the oven,’ is what I said. I heard it from Mr. Rosen, whose wife teaches one of those boys, whichever one is in fourth grade,” she said. She tapped the pencil in place and then repeated very slowly, in a way that made us laugh, “A bun in the oven. Hoping for a girl.” Then she laughed and said if she were Mrs. McCarthy, she’d be hoping Mr. McCarthy might find a hobby like stamp collecting or something and take a year off, and my father said he doubted collecting a few stamps would make a difference but certainly there was something he could do.

  The older I got, the better I understood it all, my mother pointing to her galoshes by the back door and the two of them laughing and touching each other’s arms in a way that reassured me. I sat there at that small kitchen table picturing a fat baby girl (redheaded and freckled like all the McCarthy boys) baking away in the oven, while my mother did a little variation on the Lindy Hop, which she had been practicing, her stocking feet moving while she sang “I Got Rhythm.” Who could ask for anything more?