“What do we have here, Clara?”
What we had here, Clara, was a small photo printed out on regular copy paper from a color printer. It was not me as a baby or a little girl. A curl of tape on the back of orange-snowsuit me had stuck to it and turned it into a twofer photo. It was not my high school graduation photo, as the minute I saw it I realized I had expected it to be. It was a photo of Tamar. My mother. Ma.
Except not really.
“Ma?” I said to the photo. I brought it up closer to my face and studied it, then tipped it this way and that underneath the lamp. I recognized the shirt she was wearing; it was one she had worn for a year or so when I was in high school, a shirt unusual for her because it was pretty. A white gauzy shirt shot through with blue embroidery, a non-Tamar kind of shirt. “Ma?”
The woman in the photo—my mother, at least partly—said nothing. Her eyes were bright.
“Who are you looking at, Ma?”
No answer.
“More to the point, what’s that look on your face?”
It was not a look of I have something on my mind or Hurry up, I’m going to be late to work or What is my strange child up to now or Can you just take the picture already because You know I hate having my picture taken. It had not been me who took the photo, because I would have remembered that look on her face. And the look on her face was one I could not place, because I had never seen it before, this soft, young look.
Strange.
My mother’s legacy to me: three photos of her daughter, ones she must have found in that whirlwind week she spent clearing out the house, giving everything away, packing up the rest and moving herself out. It was the habit of the Amish to pay cash for everything, and I imagined her walking into the place where she lived now and placing a shoebox filled with hundred-dollar bills on the reception desk. Here. Take care of me and whoever I will become. The image made my heart hurt. Yes, it was an image I had imagined up right then and there, but imaginings make unreal things real. See the look on my mother’s face as she walked into the nursing home alone, her shoebox of money clutched to her narrow chest. Shouldn’t she have had someone with her on a day like that, a day when she had just left behind her entire life? Shouldn’t a family member, like a daughter, have been with her? Ma.
I put the shoebox with the three photos of me in it back into the cabin. The last photo, the one of my mother in her pretty shirt, I took with me into the Subaru, and out into the night we drove, me and my young mother, seeking calm and steadiness on the winding Adirondack roads.
* * *
It took a long time to find calm, if calm is another word for the kind of exhaustion that comes after outdriving your own mind. Call it calm, call it exhaustion, the Subaru and I were north of Long Lake when my brain finally stopped buzzing and I turned the car around. We hugged the curves of the road, headlights on high because so few others were out. A small bar appeared around the bend north of Inlet—a bar I’d passed but never been to, a twinkling-lit bar—and I put the blinker on and pulled in.
Jukebox and conversation and dinging register, the bartender busy with bottles and glasses and shaker, one server maneuvering around the tables and stools with her tray lifted high. Where did bar-in-the-middle-of-nowhere people come from? Did they live nearby? Were they just passing through? Had they come upon this place like me, out of happenstance and chance?
“Gin gimlet, please,” I said to the server when she made her way over to me.
“Ice?”
I shook my head and she nodded and wove her way back to the bartender. I watched him make it, the way he upended the bottle without even looking, the way he shook and then strained it into a martini glass and placed it on the server’s tray. His fingers were long. Piano player’s hands, if it were a requirement that piano players all have long, slender fingers, which it wasn’t. Then the server was back with the gimlet. She put it on the table and tilted her head, squinting at my pushed-up sleeve.
“What’s your tattoo?” she said, and pointed at the thin, black spiraling line.
“Wire,” I said. “Holds me together when things fall apart.”
I smiled so that she would think I was joking, even though I wasn’t. I had gotten the tattoo seven years ago, when Asa died in Afghanistan.
“Huh,” she said. “Do things fall apart a lot?”
I shrugged in an ask-but-not-answer way. Unimpartable information. I nodded at her own tattoo, black words I couldn’t read on the underside of her arm. “What’s yours say?”
She twisted her arm so that half the sentence was visible.
“‘Everything was beautiful,’” I read, “‘and??—’”
“‘Nothing hurt,’” she finished. “It’s a quote from a Kurt Vonnegut novel.”
“Why that particular quote?”
She shrugged in the same way I had—I see your unanswer and I raise you mine—and threaded her way back through the tall barstools to the bartender, who was waiting for her with a new tray of drinks.
A slice of lime floated in the gimlet as if the gimlet were a tiny swimming pool. I pushed it, just enough to get it sailing. Enough of this dead man’s float, little lime. Time to swim on your own. Push. Push. Now it was bobbing around the perimeter of the glass. Good job, lime. Remember to breathe.
I looked up to see the bartender smiling. Had he been watching the lime and me and our swimming lesson this whole time? Probably. That was the kind of look he had on his face. An I know exactly what you were doing kind of look. I quit talking to the lime—the bartender had ruined things and now the little lime would never progress beyond dog-paddling—drank the gimlet and then began mushing the lime into pulp with the tiny red straw. Death by drowning. Death by pulverization. The server started in my direction once the glass was empty but the bartender said something to her and she shrugged and he came around the end of the bar.
No tray, no order pad, just him and a black T-shirt and jeans and boots like the boots my high school boyfriend used to wear. Don’t look at the boots, Clara. Look up. No, don’t look up. Look at the empty gimlet glass with the mushed-up lime pulp. Don’t say anything. But the bartender was as good at silence as I was. He knew its power. He knew I would break eventually, and eventually I did. I dragged my gaze up from the drowned-lime pulverization at the bottom of the glass and looked him in the eye.