On the table by my bed, I keep a picture of Mammy as a young woman in her hat with the side dented in, a heavy suit with a long skirt, a white blouse with ruffles, carefully ironed. Beside her, a suitcase; behind her, a railroad track and a boxcar with an open door. In the far distance, a long expanse of flat American land, a line of bare trees with thin branches dwarfed by the wide-open sky clear of clouds.
“Where were you going?” I want to ask her, but I’ll never know.
I see her, decades later, reaching up to hang laundry on the line, clean clothes slapping in the wind.
The woman who will become my grandmother is alone in the photograph by my bedside and does not appear happy or eager to travel. She is a farm girl from a big family with a reasonable number of acres on the outskirts of a town called Clarence. Maybe she is leaving home, perhaps departing for the women’s college—Hardin, in Mexico, Missouri—where she learned Latin. Maybe she is off to teach in another place. Her eyes are closed, perhaps because of the sun, or the fact that she is reluctant to be photographed, or because she is in tears.
A few years after the picture was taken, she would marry Joe Baker, back in Missouri after a few years in Alabama—Tuscaloosa, it said in his obituary—working in a John Deere factory. In photographs, my grandfather has shadows around his deep-set eyes. I never knew him; years before I was born, he sat down at the lunch table and died after a heart attack. During my lifetime he was never spoken of. None of them, not Mammy or Betty or Bill or Harry, ever told us anything about him. All Betty will say when asked about him is that he was “a very nice man.”
The picture of my grandmother was taken almost a century ago, when hundreds and hundreds of small farms dotted this area and it was rare for anyone to leave home, especially a young woman. Today, most of the land around the county is owned by a half a dozen or so families who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for huge implements, large operations stitched together from dozens of the sort of little farms where Bill Baker once stopped on Sundays to deliver parts while June waited in the car, doing crewel embroidery.
“How cruel is it?” I asked her once, thinking myself extremely witty.
“It’s a bitch,” she said.
. . .
I did not leave home on a train. My father drove me in our blue Oldsmobile, and, riding in the front seat, Betty kept turning around to look at me. I thought she was giving me fond parting glances, but soon she offered a comment: “I cannot believe you did not get a haircut before you left.”
When we got to the dorm room, she glanced at me, looking tender and a little lost, but left quickly. My mother and I hate good-byes.
The previous spring, the fraternities at the university had begun to host prerush parties for potential members. At an event at the Phi Delta Theta house where I had been invited by Jack Fleming—the son of Betty’s best friend, Evelyn—I ducked out early. While others bonded over a trailer-sized keg, I was downtown watching Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born for the fourth time. I just wanted Kris Kristofferson to go ahead and kill himself so Barbra could sing the closer. I believe she had the same idea.
At home, late that night after my drive back to Paris, I confessed ditching the Phi Delts to my devastated mother, who wrung her hands like a peasant woman told her village is burning. I expected a seizure. Glancing away, I saw my father down the hall, heading toward the kitchen. Taking a look at our expressions, he hotfooted it back to bed after mimicking my mother’s scolding finger and making a face at me. I flipped him the bird.
“What,” she asked, “am I supposed to say to Evelyn? This will kill Evelyn. She went out of her way.”
I hate it when someone goes out of their way for me. It makes me feel guilty. “Please no,” I say if someone wants to do me a favor. I pictured Mrs. Fleming, waxlike and stiffened laid out at the Theta house for viewing, dressed in an ensemble from the Tall Girl’s Shop. I had known her since I was a child; now she would hate me. Proprieties were important to her. She was an elegant woman who, if I was eating at her table, always came up behind me to rest her hands on my shoulders. I liked it, but didn’t want it to happen very often.