“The book.”
“It’s strange. It’s a strange book.” She frowned. “The girl, she”—she searched for the word then suddenly curved her body forward with her arms over her head, as if she were about to dive into a deep lake, and the motion somehow panicked me, as if we were standing on the actual edge of an actual cliff—“jumps.”
“Maybe she likes to jump.”
“No! No! Not jump!”
Distract. Redirect.
“Who gave you that book, Ma?”
She leaned back and regarded me, as if I were a stranger, as if we hadn’t just been talking.
“She was a strange child,” she said. “A tree. A houseboat. A cabin. A covered wagon. All of them. She was a”—she fumbled for the right word and began to whisper words in succession, shaking her head after each one, a No, no, that’s not right either kind of motion—“plains. Snow. Oxen. Blizzard. She was a blizzard. A blizzard girl.”
“Pioneer,” I whispered back. “She was a pioneer girl.”
She nodded. That was the word she was looking for. She could rest now. She looked at me patiently. “What’s your name?”
“Clara.”
“That was her name too!”
Her eyes lit up. It was a miraculous coincidence. These dark searching nights of following your mother meant that you had to follow her into a world that used to exist, one in which she called you her word girl and rolled her eyes at your dreams of being a pioneer girl who braved the winter blizzards, a world in which you used to make up fake books about winter so that you could write real book reports about them. A world that if you could, you’d do over. Do differently. Because this time around you’d know that it would end. That there would come a time when you and your mother would sit on a couch together, and she would lean toward you politely, asking your name.
“Ma, can I ask you about some things?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you tear up my MVCC application? Was it because you were angry at me?”
She picked the pillow up again and placed it on her own lap, then back on mine. The pillow of dunceship. The pillow of distraction. Try again. Rephrase.
“You must have been so angry with me.”
“Why?”
“Because of the night I screamed at you. The awful things I said.”
“You were a, a . . .” Frustration wrinkled her face and her fingers came off the pillow and into the air, searching. “You were a, a . . .” She scribbled in the air. Letters? The alphabet? Words? Then it came to me.
“Word girl?” I said and she nodded in relief. Her fingers closed and made a fist and she pounded the pillow on her lap. Yes. I was a word girl and I had to go away. She sank back against the headboard, gone again into that parallel world. The word girl was gone too, spiraled away into the coiled shell of my mother’s mind, if that was where memory lived. Unless there was somewhere else that memory went, an invisible place where everything that ever happened to everyone on the planet was held safe, untouched and untouchable.
I wrapped my arms around themselves and against my body, wire holding me tight together.
* * *
How did they do it? How did Tamar Winter and Annabelle Lee, women unfamiliar with the ways of the elite, women who had not studied past high school, women well-schooled in the ways of the rural world, its byways and dirt roads and woods and hymns and milkshakes but schooled not at all in the ways of college and how to get into one early-decision with a full package of scholarships and grants and work study, manage to apply in my name and come up such massive winners?
When you hear about first-generation college students, how hard it is for them to navigate their way in a world so unfamiliar, maybe you inwardly roll your eyes, thinking, Oh, please, it’s not that hard. It is, though. It was only now, when I looked back, when I pictured myself in those New Hampshire mountains wearing my fake leather boots from Payless and the mittens that Crystal from the diner knitted me as a going-away present, that I saw just how hard it was.
So hard.
People like Sunshine and Brown and my other friends from college, they didn’t know what it was like for someone like me, someone from Sterns, who grew up surrounded by plenty of people who never considered college, who didn’t graduate high school and didn’t care, because life wasn’t about school and jobs didn’t need degrees and you learned how to work at the side of your mother and father: on the farm, in the trades, cleaning houses, waiting tables. But so few at my college were from lives like that. Most were from cities, or the rich suburbs just outside them. They had gone to prep schools, country day schools, which was a term, like poached eggs, I had never heard before I got to college.
It was bewildering. Overwhelming. Like learning a new language, one that used English words and English names and English terms but was a language parallel to the one I grew up in.
So how had my mother and Annabelle Lee learned that language?
“We faked it,” was all Annabelle would say. “And by we, I mean your mother. She was determined.”
“Why, though?”
“Because she knows you, Clara.”
She and Annabelle must have huddled over the college applications when I was out of the house. She let me go on for a long time, didn’t she, with my MVCC plan, until she knew for sure I had gotten into the college of her choice early-decision, the admissions committee particularly impressed with the power of my essay about someday traveling to Hong Kong, that the full aid package had come through. Then came the January day that she ripped up my MVCC application.
She drove me to New Hampshire and she came back alone.
* * *
“Time speeds up in a situation like this,” Sunshine said. “You just have to keep trying, Clara.”
How would you know, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Because they did know. Sunshine’s cancer had sped everything up for the two of them, just as early-onset was speeding everything up for me. Sunshine had had to figure everything out with her parents, get everything said, everything settled, in case there was no time.
“Keep talking to her.”