Like toadstools blossoming by night in dank spongy earth there had emerged a complicated sub-career in the netherworld of her life that involved the acceptance of (posthumous) awards and honors for Dr. Gus Voorhees: rarely renumerative though (of course) the widow’s travel and accommodations were paid for. Everywhere she went she was embraced and she was cherished. A highlight of the past several months—(she knew that Gus would be thrilled)—was Jenna’s acceptance for him of the posthumous honor Humanist of the Year from the American Humanists’ Association; this required a speech Jenna deftly culled together from numerous speeches of Gus’s. In her spare time she worked tirelessly on articles and book reviews for such journals as Women’s Law Forum, Berkeley Journal of Gender Law and Justice, Women’s Review of Books, Nation, New Republic, Harper’s, Mother Jones.
It wasn’t clear where she was living. Or rather, where she was staying. In the Ann Arbor area, or not far away. She seemed to have no fixed address, not even a post office box. She was itinerant, a perpetual “guest”—she lived out of a suitcase, a backpack, the rear of the station wagon. Sometimes she visited us in Birmingham where her Voorhees in-laws kept a beautifully furnished guest room in perpetual readiness for her—“Jenna, please know that you are always, always welcome with us.” It was strange for us to be living in a house in which our mother was an occasional guest but we understood that our mother never wanted to stay more than a few days with us out of a fear (we surmised) of being trapped with us and unable to leave.
Also, our mother feared Gus’s father and stepmother commiserating with her. She’d grown to fear the tears of others as a contagion that might devastate her as salt water carelessly sprinkled will devastate expensive leather.
Usually in these months following the “mistrial” she was traveling. Or, she was between engagements, not exclusively in Michigan but elsewhere in the Midwest or in the Northeast, on the West Coast, even in Texas (Austin), and so it wasn’t practical to fly all the way back home to Michigan—“I’m fine here. They’re putting me up at the college as a guest.” Or, “There’s a cottage on the property, they’ve been wonderful saying I can say as long as I want and what an ideal place this will be for me to finish that piece for Harper’s.” Or, “It’s for just a quarter. Ten weeks! All I need to do is live in the all-women residential college with a view of the Pacific Ocean, have meals with undergraduates and give a few tutorials, judge an essay contest on ‘New Frontiers for Feminism,’ give a public lecture . . . I don’t get paid exactly but there is an ‘honorarium.’”
There was not yet a home for us. But (our mother wanted us to know) she had not given up trying to find one.
In the meantime she’d stored some things in her in-laws’ house. They had pressed her, and she had given in. Her books, Gus’s books, hundreds of books, were shelved in various rooms of the house including the basement, more or less haphazardly; when Jenna found a permanent place for us to live together we would arrange the books in a proper order, as our father had promised he would oversee, someday. In the guest room reserved for her, our mother had filled most of the walk-in cedar closet with our father’s clothes—the frayed old camel-hair sport coat, the tweed coat with the worn leather elbow patches, the Shetland sweater now sadly riddled with moth holes, neckties Dad had never worn except under duress. The “new, fancy” charcoal gray wool three-button suit with the vest we’d teased him about for he’d looked like a banker and not—our father. Waterstained running shoes, dress shoes, sandals. Even socks, paired. Neatly organized in the closet along with her own less substantial clothing on hangers. We could enter this closet at any time if we were feeling lonely.
“PLEASE SHUT THE DOOR! This is for just us.”
Grandpa Clem and Grandma Adele were downstairs. Perhaps they had visitors: there were voices. Our mother was staying in her room in the house on Gascoyne Drive, Birmingham, just overnight for she’d arrived from Chicago that afternoon and would be leaving again for a conference in Seattle in the morning. She was a very busy woman! She was breathless! She’d done something strange and radical with her hair, which was graying and had thinned badly since November 1999, cutting it short, brushing it back severely from her thin face so she looked (Naomi thought) like a scalped bird, with large blinking blind-seeming eyes.
Most radically she’d lost weight. Breasts, hips. She’d ceased to be female. In ceasing to be female very shrewdly she’d ceased to be maternal.
Seeing Mom after several weeks we’d stared at her as if trying to identify her. Then Melissa cried, “Mom-my!” and ran to her to be swept into her arms and hugged even as frowning Naomi held back and especially frowning Darren hung back out of distrust.
Who are you, fuck you. Your fault Dad is dead you left him all alone and kept us with you. We don’t love you.
That night, she tapped the bed beside her in the guest room reserved for her, that we might sit beside her. We saw on her thin wrist a man’s wristwatch with a black strap, that fitted her loosely: Dad’s watch.
“Just for us. Just for you. We won’t tell your grandparents. Our secret.”
She had a small recorder. She was not adept with mechanical things but she managed to play it for us.
Oh we had not heard since the first time. We’d forgotten.
H’lo there? Anybody home?
(Pause)
Jenna? Darling? Will you pick up, please?
(Pause)
Is anyone there?
(Pause)
Well—I’ll try again. If I can, tonight.
I’m sorry that—well, you know.
I think I’ve been distracted by—what’s going on here.
(Pause)
If I sound exhausted—I am!