Easy? No.
Words for me were best sought early in the morning or late at night. In the morning they were just-born babies new to the world, depthless eyes fastened on yours. As the hours floated past they lost that newness, that innocence. They turned guarded and wary. They put up walls. They stood at the parapets with buckets of burning oil, ready to vanquish those who would steal the kingdom. At night, though, they rose again from the weary remains of the day, cool, dark air beckoning them back to the bower. A tiny light began to glow in their bellies. Firefly words floated up and glimmered among the white pines. If you were lucky you could catch some of them, keep them for a while and then let them go.
There was wonderment out there in the Words by Winter world, and sorrow, and regret, so much regret. There was wishing and hoping and more wishing and more hoping. Craft a note from a gay son to his born-again parents who believe that homosexuals will burn in hell. Craft a note from a girl to her lifelong crush, asking him to prom in a way that he won’t be able to refuse. Craft a note from a middle-aged woman to her elderly stepmother, an apology for making her life hell when she was an adolescent. Craft a note like that, do it right, and do it in under a hundred words with a one-day turnaround.
See? Hard. So much harder than you’d think.
Speed and precision were essential. But the hardest part about words-making wasn’t the words themselves but the invisible scaffolding that lifted their black-and-white stick-figure-ness from the page and turned it into heart and soul. Dear Mister or Miss Winter, please help me. Dear Winter, I wonder if . . . Dear Words by Winter, I need your help.
The only way out was through, and what through meant was that you had to transfuse the words you wrote with your own heart and soul. As Jacob wrestled with the angel, as Teresa of Avila contemplated silence, as Jonathan Livingston Seagull tried and tried again to lift his heavy body from the earth, so I wrestled, and contemplated, and tried. And tried again.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the seventies book about the teleporting seagull? Did she really just stick a seagull in there with Saint Teresa and the angel-wrestling Jacob? Did I read that right?
Yes, yes and yes. I put him in there because of Tamar. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you squawking heavy bird, my mother read you over and over and over again. There must have been something in you that had thus far escaped me. As words were my witness, I would seek it out.
* * *
Can’t we? No. Why not? No. Come on. No.
That was Sunshine and Brown, asking to go with me to the place where my mother lived now. They kept asking, and they wouldn’t stop, and after a while it was harder to say no than to give in, so we all drove down together. Brown held the book of the week, My Side of the Mountain. Sunshine had a notebook and pen.
“Tell us what we should know,” she said. “What to do, what not to do.”
“Don’t tell her she’s wrong,” I said.
“Like anyone would do that?” Brown said. “She wasn’t called The Fearsome for nothing.”
It was more than that, though. Different from arguing with an ordinary person about a point of fact, the way Sunshine and Brown and I might do when playing Jeopardy!
“It’s more like training yourself not to correct,” I said. “It’s figuring out how to listen. To whatever she’s saying, even if it doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
“Follow her,” Sunshine said, and I nodded. Yes. Follow your mother wheresoever she goeth.
“And don’t ask her to remember things. Don’t even use the word remember.”
Vigorous nods. That was a no-brainer, was what the look on their faces said. But it was a far harder task than you might think, to train yourself out of saying, “Do you remember?” In the course of my failures, which by now were many, I had learned just how often that word wanted to be said. It lurked, a danger word, ready at any time to fall into the air between my mother and me and rend the fragile peace that not-trying-to-remember meant for her.
Remember when . . . ? A phrase that links one human being to other human beings. It is a phrase of heft and permanence, the verbal equivalent of Sunshine and Brown’s old garage-sale telephones. It puts you into another world, a world that used to be and no longer is, a world that you and the person you’re talking with both remember. Unless one of you doesn’t.
“Remember when” was something that Sunshine and Brown and I said all the time to each other. We went back many years, to that first week of college. But before age eighteen, I had no one left. My high school friends and I had lost touch. Annabelle Lee was my mother’s friend, not mine, and we exchanged no confidences. I might once have had Asa Chamberlain, but he let me go, and then he left the earth in a fury of blasted metal and flesh. Regrets for $2000.
We walked in together, me leading the way. Hello to the nurses, hello to the aides, hello to the woman who sat by the miniature rock fountain with its endless trickle of water, hello to the old man by the piano, one finger stroking its closed lid. Hello to the Jokes and Jingles Workshop attendants, sitting around the table in the conference room, today playing a game involving cards and cookies and laughter. You had to be in the early stages to attend Jokes and Jingles, and Tamar didn’t qualify. Not that she would have joined anyway. Never a joiner, my mother. Always a loner. Like now, in the Green Room—it was no longer the Plant Room—the television remote in her lap.
“Tamar,” Brown said. “Remem??—”
“Brown!” Sunshine said. “Shhh.”
She held the notebook up in the air—she was still clutching it—“Remem”—then she too stopped herself. See? It was harder than you’d think, not to use the word. Tamar, remember me? That was what Brown had been about to say. My mother looked from Brown to Sunshine and then to me, accusation in her eyes. She knew something was not right, but what?
“Ma, I’m sorry,” I said.
“We pried it out of her, Tamar,” Sunshine said. “It’s not her fault.”
“You pried what out?” she said. “What’s not her fault?”
They didn’t know what to do with those questions. Welcome to the club, best friends. Welcome to Jokes and Jingles. Brown handed her My Side of the Mountain.
“This book is for you, Tamar,” he said. She placed it in the exact middle of her lap, the way she always did, but she repeated the question.
“You pried what out?”
“The keys to the kingdom,” Brown said, which made no sense. But somehow it did the trick, because she nodded.
“Is it time?” she said.
“It is, Ma. It’s seven-thirty. Time for Jeopardy!”
“Time for Jeopardy!” she echoed.
* * *
The four of us sat together on the couch, waiting for the show to begin. Sunshine and Brown urged me on with their eyes, their Talk to her eyes, their Time is running out eyes.
“So, Ma,” I said. “I’ve been wondering about some things.”