“What the hell’s wrong with that man?” she used to say. “A voice like that and songs like that and, poof, he just disappears?”
“Cracklin’ Rosie” came drifting in along with an image of Tamar watering the zinnias, the giant ones she always planted on either side of the front steps. She held her thumb over the hose so that the water sparkled out on the red and pink and orange double-headed blossoms and they swayed on their thick stems. She swayed with them, belting it out. “Sweet Caroline” next, and I remembered coming down the stairs late one night—I couldn’t sleep—to see her lying on the floor, singing along to that song, the album cover, with Neil Diamond’s face looming up from it, propped against her bent knees.
“Ma?”
Even back then I could hear the scorn in my voice, and here in the car I heard it again. Tight and hard-edged and abrupt. The judgment of my seventeen-year-old self traveling through the decades, back to haunt me here in the dark night, dark mountains rising around the car and me.
I remembered that she startled. The album fell out of her hands onto the floor next to her.
“What?”
“Um. What exactly is it that you’re doing?”
I already knew what she was doing. She was singing, late at night in a quiet house, singing along to the songs she most loved. And what I was doing was trying to embarrass her into stopping. Send her into retreat, or come roaring out to do battle with me in the ongoing match. Angry Daughters for $400. But she did neither, did she? What she did, what my mother did, my young, young mother lying on the floor singing to the music she loved, was crumble into a ball right there on the floor and cry. More than cry. Wail. A cry so full of desolation that my heart leaped into overdrive then and there, pounding so fast that my eyes blurred and stars swam before them.
Did I say I was sorry?
Did I drop to my knees and start crying with her, out of shame?
Did I bring her a washcloth and wipe away her tears, cover her with a blanket, comfort her?
Did I talk to her about what was really going on inside me, the bewilderment and hurt after Asa broke up with me, the feeling that something had been lost, would stay lost forever, the panic and shame that had poisoned me from the night I had screamed those awful You’re a nothing words at her?
Or, when she called my name in that choked voice of tears, did I turn and walk back upstairs and leave her there crying and then next morning in the kitchen not mention one word of what had transpired the night before? Mother, daughter. Tree, apple.
Thirty miles were gone now between Sunshine and Brown’s house and the point at which the car and I were mindlessly driving north. I pulled over and did an about-face. If a deer leaps into the road ahead of you, don’t swerve. Keep going straight. That was a Tamar caution, repeated over and over when she was teaching me to drive. But I knew, and I had always known, that if a deer did leap into the road ahead of me, I wouldn’t keep going straight. I’d swerve.
In the darkness I drove and drove. Closing in now on the bar, the bar that would be dark by now, the bartender and the tattooed server gone to the homes they lived in, wherever those homes might be. On this night, I was the one who was awake. A word girl, making her way through the parted seas.
But the bar was still lit up. I slowed to a crawl. Through the big front window I saw the bartender behind the bar, washing it down with a rag. Both arms moved in unison, a practiced swirl of up and down. I inched past, barely moving, only my fog lights on. He couldn’t see me in the dark. I was safe. But he looked up anyway and stopped washing the bar, stood there without moving, as if he could see into the car, as if he knew a woman out there was watching him and wondering about him. I pressed my foot down on the gas and sped away.
It was late, so late by the time I got back to the cabin, but I propped the little speaker on the window ledge and Jack and I sat on the front porch together listening to music. Emmylou sang about an orphan girl while the fairy lights twinkled from the sun they had stored up all day while I was gone. My mother’s voice sounded in my head: I always listened to you, Clara. My own voice sounded in my head: You know what kind of mother does that kind of thing? Your kind of mother. A nothing kind of mother. You’re a nothing. Dear Words by Winter, I am looking for words to write my mother. Dear Words by Winter, I am looking for words to resolve difficult issues with my mother, who is disappearing ahead of me down a road I can’t travel. Dear Words by Winter, I am searching for words to tell my mother how sorry I am.
* * *
One Wednesday night the Subaru and I turned left at the village green. The Twin Churches were lit up. They were always lit up on Wednesday night, because that was choir practice night. Annabelle Lee would be in the rehearsal room at this very moment, her arms spread wide, the baton in her hand. I knew this because I used to spy on the choristers—which is the word for choir members, plural—when I was a child. Down the hall from the church house I would sneak in the dark, past the Sunday-school rooms I had never entered, down the steps to the closed door of the rehearsal room, where I would press my head and listen.
If you listen long enough, with your eyes closed, the voices of a choir become distinct. Not just when someone is singing a solo, but in general. What sounds like one voice from far away becomes many voices close up. I used to listen for my mother’s voice, pick it out of the crowd.
It was 9:21 on the car dashboard. Choir practice was over. I watched as first the far-end hallway light went dark, then the near-end hallway light, then the church itself, with its stained-glass windows, and finally the light that illuminated the front steps. The church and its adjoining building transformed in an instant into dark hulks on this November night. Then the front door opened and the dark hulk of Annabelle Lee herself emerged. I got out of the car.
“Who’s there,” she said. Her voice was a sharp command. Not a question.
“Sorry, Annabelle. It’s just me.”
“Clara? Is your mother??—?”
“She’s fine. I mean she’s not fine, but she’s not why I’m here.”
Annabelle Lee was silent. The mass of her moved down the steps in the darkness and came toward me.
“Can I ask you some things?”
“Such as?”
“Why did my mother always eat out of cans and jars?”
Her sigh gusted out white in the dark air. She bent her head forward and rolled it back and forth, one hand massaging the back of her neck.