“Who is it, then?”
But she waved her hand at me and turned away. Fool, was what that shooing motion meant, and my mother suffered no fools, then or now. If the fool sitting next to her was dumb enough not to know what her team was, why should my mother tell her?
When Sunshine and Brown and I played Jeopardy! we suffered no fools either. We played it for real. We made bets, we kept score, we slammed our hands down on the table. Six categories and five clues each, just the way it was done on the real show. Our only variation was that each category had to have something to do with our actual lives. Snap out a clue and one of us would slam a hand on the table and snap back an answer.
Upstate New York Mountains We Have Climbed.
Books We Most Loved as Children.
Best Diners in the Adirondacks.
Cocktails We Got Sick on in College.
Best Drugs to Counteract the Side Effects of Chemotherapy.
Names No Child Should Be Given.
“Baseball for sixteen hundred,” Brown said. Baseball was one of his favorite categories. I slammed my hand down so fast and hard that the tiny bowl of salt, with its matching tiny spoon, jumped on the table.
“Name of Tamar Winter’s favorite baseball team,” I said.
“What is the Yankees?” Brown said, and he looked at me for verification, but I made a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine face and shrugged.
“It’s a yes-or-no question. Are the Yankees or are they not your mother’s team?”
“It’s upstate New York. So they’d have to be, right?”
“You tell me. She’s your mother.” His eyes narrowed. “Winter,” he said, which was what he called me when he was annoyed at me. “There are no maybes in Jeopardy! You know the rules. Don’t pose a clue without knowing the answer.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“Is she really a baseball fan?”
“Apparently.”
Brown made a shooing motion with his hand, exactly the way my mother had when I asked her which team she liked.
“If your mother’s a baseball fan and you don’t know her team, what else don’t you know about her?”
He wasn’t being unkind. It was a simple question. A wonderment more than a question. A musing. But it was the kind of question that wedged itself into your chest and didn’t go away.
* * *
Facts I Knew About Tamar Winter for $800: 1) She graduated from Sterns High School at age seventeen and 2) immediately tried to head south to Florida for adventure and 3) to get away from Sterns and her father and 4) the memories of her mother, who had died earlier that year, but 5) she was raped at a party in Utica and 6) got pregnant with me and my twin sister, Daphne, who was 7) stillborn, so 8) it had been just me and her for all the years since and 9) it was still just me and her. Me and my mother. My mother and me.
Brown’s question—What else don’t you know about her?—was not answerable. It was a situation of unknown unknowns.
“It would have to be the Yankees,” he said. Still frowning. “It’s upstate New York—who the hell else would she root for. Seriously, she never talked baseball with you?”
“Seriously, she never did.”
But maybe she had. Maybe she had, and I just didn’t remember, or didn’t notice, or was so uninterested that it was as if she’d said nothing. Was there a whole part of my childhood that I had forgotten? That I was leaving out? Memory is everything that’s ever happened to you, I would have said when I was a child. Everything, held in images and conversations and knowledge buried safely in the recesses of your brain, with safely being the operative word. Something that could not be taken away from you. But I was no longer sure of that.
Whatever was happening on the outside with my mother, was there a secret place inside of her that still knew everything, remembered everything, was full of pictures and conversations in which she was still herself, a self that couldn’t be touched? Rooms within rooms within rooms, and all of them invisible.
At night sometimes, when I came in late from the porch wrapped in the quilt, bottle of Jack dangling from my fingers, I looked at the photo propped up on the kitchen shelf. Sometimes I talked to it. “Ma? Who took that photo of you? What’s that look on your face?” She said nothing. Her face was tilted, her eyes looking past me. As if she were seeing beyond me into another room, as if something good—something wonderful, from the way her eyes were lit up—was about to happen. But the photo was taken a long time ago. It was worn and soft, Xerox color copy turning streaky with age. The place where the curl of tape had held it to the photo of orange-snowsuited me was worn almost through.
When I was with her these days we turned on the television in the Plant Room and we sat together on the couch, calling out Jeopardy! answers. On a recent visit, one of the categories was Iconic Singer-Songwriters of the 20th Century. Clue: The singer who penned “Suzanne” for $800. Tamar slammed her hand down on the couch.
“Who is it, Ma?”
On television, a history professor had guessed Neil Diamond. Wrong. He was back to zero now. Next to me, Tamar pounded on the couch again. She was looking at me, something angry and frantic in her eyes. Her mouth was half open.
“Ma?”
She shook her head impatiently. Furiously. She knew the answer but it wouldn’t come out. She clutched the book I had brought for her that week—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—and held it out like an offering to the word gods. What had the clue been again? Singer who penned “Suzanne.” Think, Clara. “Suzanne.” “Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river.”
“It’s your boy Leonard, Ma,” I said. “Leonard Cohen. Right?”
Her face eased. She nodded. The words had gone floating by her and spun themselves up into the ether before she could grab hold and bring them down to earth. Now they were back in her hands.
“You got it, Ma. You just won eight hundred dollars.”
Leonard Cohen was my mother’s favorite singer. The whole time I was growing up, she sang his songs, “Hallelujah,” especially. “Hallelujah” in the kitchen, “Hallelujah” by the woodpile, “Hallelujah” in the strawberry field. “Hallelujah” times a thousand.
“Nice work. You beat Mr. Professor.”
She turned to regard me, her daughter, the woman who kept showing up and calling her Ma.
“What’s your line of work again?”
In her real life, my mother would never have asked a question like that, because in her real life, she wouldn’t have needed to. In her real life, she would have known who I was and what my line of work was. Shhh, Clara. This is her real life.
“Words,” I said. “I’m a word girl.”
* * *