“Yup. We boiled and boiled and boiled it and then we burnt the shit out of the entire batch. All we got out of the whole mess was this one tiny jar. What do you think?”
“I think you’re not very good at making syrup,” Tamar said.
Now that was her. That was a Tamar remark. Surprise and happiness, electric, passed through Brown into Sunshine and from Sunshine into me.
“My daughter loved maple syrup,” Tamar said.
“I bet she did,” Sunshine said. She was already good at the not-criticizing and not-correcting, the not-pointing-out that Tamar’s daughter was, in fact, sitting right here at the end of the couch.
“How do I know you again?” Tamar said.
“You met Sunshine and me back when we were in college,” Brown said. “It was a sunny day in the White Mountains. Parents’ Weekend. You were driving a pickup truck.”
She listened as intently as the first time. Keep going, I said to Brown in my mind.
“We went to college with your daughter, Clara. She was pretty secretive about you.”
“Pretty secretive?” Sunshine said. “She didn’t tell us anything about you. Zip. Zilch. Nada.”
“Zilch,” Tamar said, and then again: “zilch.” It was like a new word, a word that she was testing on her tongue.
“So Clara hadn’t told us a thing about you,” Sunshine said, “and we thought you must be this creepy witch-mother, like a mother in a Hitchcock movie.”
“Hitchcock.” Tamar brought her fingertips together with care, one by one, and studied them. “Hitch. Hitch. Hitchcock.”
“But then you turned out to be you!” Brown said. “The coolest mother in the crowd!”
“Not just the crowd,” Sunshine said. “The world.”
“The world,” Tamar said, and she laughed that new chiming laugh of hers. Sunshine and Brown laughed too. It was a club of three, there on the couch next to me. They laughed and kept saying World! World! and pressed their fingertips together like a row of monkeys imitating an invisible lecturer. Follow them wheresoever they goeth, Clara. I pressed my own fingertips together and leaned my head on Sunshine’s shoulder and listened to them laugh and talk. They were recounting the day they met Tamar, in all its to-them weirdness.
“You were wearing your lumber jacket,” Brown said. “The oldest lumber jacket in the world.”
“Lived-in,” Sunshine said. “That’s what that jacket was.”
“It had seen a lot of living.”
“A lot of wood chopping.”
“It was a lumber jacket that had been used for actual lumber.”
Actual lumber chopped by actual Tamar, who chopped wood for our woodstove my entire life long, something that as a child I accepted without thinking, like most children accept their lives without thinking. The woodstove was in the kitchen, and the rest of the house was freezing, so we spent most of our time in the kitchen, and that was the way it was. There was an oil furnace but we didn’t use it. Too expensive.
They talked on, the three of them. Which was good, because the feeling of our kitchen and our woodstove was taking up all the space inside me. The table where we ate our can and jar dinners, the blue chair inches from the stove that we took turns sitting on, the wall behind the woodstove that I leaned against when sitting on the floor with a quilt around me, flashing through whatever homework I hadn’t gotten done during study hall. So what if the rest of the house was freezing? So what if the broken zipper on her lumber jacket was held together with duct tape, and so what if there was always a faint, pervasive scent of mothballs coming from its lining? It was warm in the kitchen, and we were fed, and my homework was getting done, and the porch and the barn were filled with stacks and stacks and stacks of split wood, which meant that no matter how endless the winter to come, we would survive, because we had enough wood.
“How do I know you again?” Tamar said.
“We went to college with your daughter, Clara,” Sunshine said.
“It was a sunny day in the White Mountains,” Brown said. “Parents’ Weekend. You were driving a pickup truck.”
* * *
Back at the cabin, post-visit to Tamar, I sat down on the floor next to my books-as-coffee-table and put my arms around them, around the books of my childhood, my life buoys, my escapes, my worlds without end. The books-as-coffee-table was already reduced by more than half. Soon the table would be entirely disappeared.
How do I know you again? Did I ever know you? Will I ever know you?
Two of the stacks were lopsided, one because it held an especially fat novel and the other because it contained The Velveteen Rabbit, slender and long. A gift from Asa for my sixteenth birthday. The book I had tried for his sake to love, because he loved it so, because he had told me how his father, big rough Eli, used to read it to him when he was tiny, and how he would look up to see his father crying. How he, Asa, had every year drawn a picture of the rabbit, large and gentle and floppy and brown and white, and given it to his father on his birthday. But the story of the forsaken rabbit and sorrowful child had only made me sad. It still made me sad. I pulled it out of its stack and the coffee table shrank another half-inch. The smell of dust, that closed-up smell, wafted out when I opened it. Maybe I would bring it to Tamar. She could throw it in her pile of books-as-firewood.
I glanced up at the mystery photo, my mother with that soft look on her face, propped on the kitchen shelf. Talk to me, Ma. Say something. Tell me something I don’t know, will you, like why did you stop wearing that one pretty shirt?
Silence. It was me and the disappearing coffee table, Dog in his urn and Jack in his bottle, watching. Beyond the cabin the fairy lights glimmered in the trees. And beyond that, far beyond, the bar with its little lights glimmered by the side of Route 28. What did I have to lose?
“Nothing,” I said out loud. “You have nothing to lose.”
Do we, as human beings, say that because it feels as if we do have something to lose? The smallest act, the fewest words, the tiniest of movements: they can feel enormous. Once set in motion, so many things don’t stop. They gather and gather and gather momentum. They keep on going.
It works backward too. Had I picked up the phone more to call my mother, said things that were real, that were true, even if it felt agonizing to do so, back then, maybe it would not feel so hard now. Had I ever, even once, spoken to Eli Chamberlain in the wake of his son’s leaving first me and then the earth, maybe things would be easier now.
Who’s to say? Who’s to know?