“Could you please use it in a sentence?”
That was what I used to say to Tamar, back in my elementary school spelling bee champion days. Asking to use the spelling word in a sentence was a ploy, a stall. If you didn’t know how to spell a word, staring into space while the word was used in a sentence as your brain sifted through a thousand possibilities to find the right one was an excellent strategy. I used to ask in a polite, distant, measured tone of voice, as if Tamar were an official state spelling bee judge.
“No, Clara, I can’t use this word in a sentence, because I don’t know what the hell this word means. I don’t even know how to pronounce this goddamn word.”
That was her usual response. A Tamar remark. But the few seconds it took her to go through the rant was usually enough time for me to take a stab at how to spell the word.
“Autochthonous. A. U. T. O. C. H. T. H. O. N. O. U. S.”
“Correct. Do you have any idea what it means?”
“No. How the hell would I?”
“Don’t curse.”
“You curse.”
“Do as I say, not as I do. I’m your mother.”
“Who cares what it means, Ma? Why does that matter? All that matters is spelling it right. Onward.”
That was a lie, though. I cared. Even back then, I cared.
“Hi, Ma. It’s Clara.”
I always told her who I was these days, just in case. I put my hand on the walker handle, next to hers but not touching. Tamar was never big on touching. She was pushing her walker up and down the hall outside the dining room. The hallway was decorated with removable decals: blocky branched trees with stylized birds fluttering up into the fluorescent-ceiling sky. Flowers drooping on stems. Apples and pears and cherries. Every decal was a replication of something that lived and thrived only outside.
“Hello, Clara.”
“Where are you going today, Ma?”
“Choir practice.”
“At the Twin Churches?”
She stopped walking and looked directly at me. “Where the hell else?”
That was Tamar. That was a Tamar thing to say. She was there, she was right there with me, the daughter who never stopped asking dumb questions. The look on her face would wither a lesser woman. Let me not be a lesser woman.
“I don’t know, Ma. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, maybe?”
She shook her head and shooed me away with her hand. Annoyed. But I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was she. It was a Wednesday night in upstate New York, and it was my job to follow my mother wheresoever she went, and where she was going was choir practice, just like she did every week for thirty-two years despite the fact that she never went to church.
It was practice only, for my mother. A lifetime of practice.
There was a time when she wanted to leave upstate New York, desperately wanted to, but she got no farther than a party in Utica.
Autochthonous was an adjective. It meant formed or originating in the place where it was found. Autochthonous meant native. Autochthonous was the definition of my mother, Tamar Winter, formed and found in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I thought back to those nights when she was pretending to be the spelling bee judge and I was pretending to be the spelling bee contestant, each of us needling the other, sitting there at the kitchen table, and I thought, Was that the time in my life when everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt, and I didn’t even know it?
She stopped pushing the walker and touched my arm just below the elbow, where the wire began.
“What’s this?” she said, and she pushed the sleeve higher, twisting my arm, trying to see the whole tattoo.
“I got it when I was twenty-five,” I said. “Right after Asa died.”
“Asa,” she said, and the sound of his name in her voice made my heart pound. Again. “What happened with you and Asa?”
“He died, Ma.”
“I know he died. He died after. After”—she cast her hand out into the air, searching for the word or words that escaped her. “After.”
“After we broke up.”
“Broke up.”
“Yes, Ma. It happened after that night I came home and the two of you were sitting at the kitchen table talking.”
The image rose up in my mind again. In the wake of the breakup I had thought about that night, the sight of them across from each other at the table, each leaning forward. The intent look on Asa’s face, the look on hers of—what? Surprise? No, something more. They must have been there for a while without me—I was out babysitting—because the air in the kitchen, when I walked up on the porch and opened the door and breathed it in, was stale. Stale and charged and full of invisible words that had been spoken without me there to hear them.
The next day he returned to the house and ended it between us.
“Do you know why he ended things, Ma?”
A calm detachment, the Buddhist way of regarding the things that make you suffer. I made my voice sound quiet and mild. There was a difference between fake quiet and mild and actual calm detachment, though. I could hear Brown in my head—Why does that still eat away at you?—and in my head I looked at him with fake calm detachment and said, I wish it didn’t, but it does.
“Asa,” she said again, and then, “Eli.”
“Yes, Ma. Eli used to come over sometimes too. We used to play cards together, all four of us.” Just in time, I stopped myself from saying the word Remember?, which you were not supposed to do. “Eli was Asa’s father,” I said. “Is Asa’s father.”
Which he was, wasn’t he? You didn’t stop being someone’s father when the someone died, did you?
“Maybe Asa was planning to enlist and he was afraid to tell me,” I said. “Maybe he figured I would want to leave Sterns and he didn’t want to keep me stuck there. Maybe he didn’t love me anymore.”
All things I had tried out in my head, then and in the years that followed our breakup and my leaving Sterns. I heard my own voice, a thin ghost filled with question marks, strutting and fretting their time on the stage, signifying nothing, and my mother was frowning and shaking her head.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“Why then, Ma?”
The category was Breaking Up for $400. The contestants stood at their podiums staring into space, ghost question marks floating in the air around them.
* * *
My mother was right about Josh Gibson. He was a Hall of Famer who never played in the major leagues due to a “gentleman’s agreement” that black baseball players wouldn’t play in the major leagues. He had a baby face. Soft eyes, soft lips. 1911–1947, which meant he died when he was barely older than me, the same year they brought Jackie Robinson up from the minors.
Did I even know that my mother liked baseball, let alone knew enough about it to know about Josh Gibson and the gentleman’s agreement? No.
“Ma?” I said. “You were right about that Josh Gibson question.”
She gave me a withering look, an Of course I’m right, and what kind of idiot are you? I soldiered on.
“I never knew you were such a baseball fan. Do you have a favorite team?”
“Of course.”