My mother had married at nineteen, had three children and lost one, suffered in her marriage to my father, though of course I didn’t understand that then. If there was a shadow of grief on my mother I felt it only on those nights when she whispered like that in my ear. I remember her as bubbly, irrepressible, theatrical. She dressed for dinner and called me “chérie” and referred to the living room as the “parlor.” As a child I marveled at her endless cheer—I admired it enormously, and it mystified me. So I couldn’t quite see her as human. And then I got older and she grew artificial, or my idea of her did. After that we couldn’t understand each other at all. But when I was a child, and she was all marvelous gleaming surfaces, moments of truth—her whisper in my ear—just frightened and unnerved me.
For years she imagined for me the brilliant life I’d have at college, but my father was a doctor, and I wanted to go to nursing school. What I really wanted was to be a doctor, too, but nothing led me to believe that was possible. When in the end she couldn’t wear down my determination, she swallowed her own disappointment and behaved as though nursing school had been exactly what she’d wanted for me all along. When I joined the army, that was something else. I said, “I enlisted,” and she turned ashen at the words. She looked at me like I was already a ghost. All those times she’d said different, this was not what she’d had in mind.
It’s funny where your mind goes, when you get to be my age. When my mother died I was in the emergency room with her. We’d been in there five hours or more. She’d had a stroke. I was holding her hand, and she kept talking about a song called “The Old Oaken Bucket” that was stuck in her head. Was the line “by the well” or “in the well”? Which was it? I didn’t know. I had no idea, and that was maddening to her. What was wrong with me? Finally I picked one. After that she kept saying don’t leave me.
Don’t leave me. Anyone I might say that to is already gone.
I’m restless. Once upon a time I would have cleaned my house from top to bottom, or perfected my garden, or gone to work. Now what am I to do with this energy? Fly to Paris and take a lover? Jog?
In the days when I still had conversations, and people found out I went to war, they’d ask if I’d wanted an adventure, and I’d want to tell them no, that all I wanted was to serve my country. But I suppose if that were truly all I’d wanted I could’ve stayed at home and knitted socks. I was not pressed into service, rising to the occasion against my will. I always wanted something more. Something bigger. Something different. Something else.
Trapdoor
They need money. Even more so, now that she’s put Milo in school. Their need for money wakes her every night into midnight silence, so that she traverses the darkened hall to Milo’s room, whispers to his sleeping form that everything will be all right, then goes out on the deck and looks at the starry night and wills herself to feel peace. All around her the maddening mindless thrum of insects, punctuated occasionally by an eerie, insistent owl, a sound that reminds her of the woman across the pond. They need money, so she’s trying to get it, sticking in each thumbtack, asking each proprietor if she can leave a stack of her cards. At the coffee shop in Sewanee, at the café in Monteagle, at Monteagle’s real-deal small-town places and Sewanee’s knowingly rustic ones, they tell her to go ahead, smiling at Milo as he zooms his toy car up the side of a counter, and she puts up her flyers, with their hopeful tabs printed with her number and her name. A woman behind a café counter in Sewanee tells her she has no competition: there used to be a massage therapist in the little strip of three storefronts at the edge of Monteagle—“You know the place? Everything that opens there closes”—but a few years ago she moved away. Jennifer isn’t licensed in Tennessee but up here there seems little chance that anyone will check.