“So how’s The Fearsome?” Brown asked. “When’s she coming back, anyway?”
I had told Sunshine and Brown, in the face of their repeated questions about my mother, that she wasn’t around. That she had decided to travel the world, go wandering through Europe and Asia, all the places she had never been, a solo traveler on an odyssey. Lies upon lies. Once conjured, lies feed upon themselves. They get greedy. At some point they turn real and take over, tumors muttering, Feed me feed me feed me.
“Maybe never.”
“But isn’t she weary of wandering yet?”
Brown was fond not only of exclamation marks but of rhyme and alliteration. In the one literature class we had taken together back in college—Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare, which ran together in my head, then and now, as chaucermiltonshakespeare—that class in which we all sat together next to the giant window, he used to copy down his favorite examples from the passages the professor read aloud. It was a fall of bright skies that year, and sunshine, the literal form of it, spilled through that window and set Sunshine’s red-gold hair on fire, metaphorical fire. Her hair alight like the New Hampshire trees in the fall, on the mountains visible beyond the classroom.
“It’s hard to imagine The Fearsome anywhere but Sterns,” Brown said. “When I think of her I picture her eating out of jars and chopping down trees. Not presenting her passport to some grim Eastern European customs officer.”
“She never chopped down trees, Brown,” I said. “She split logs that other people delivered to us into woodstove-size chunks. Big difference.”
It was a difference that Brown and Sunshine didn’t care about. When they had first met my mother, lo those many years ago at college, they formed an image of her as a woodswoman who spent her days up in the Adirondacks chopping down enormous trees. A female Paul Bunyan. That was long ago, when Sunshine and Brown were new to a rural landscape, when they ferried back and forth from Manhattan and Boston, respectively, on school breaks. Before the three of us spent the summer before junior year together, living and working in Old Forge, which was when they fell in love with the Adirondacks. They were nothing like me, a country girl raised by a country woman.
“Semantics,” Brown said.
“It is not semantics. There is a profound difference between chopping down a tree and splitting chunks of that tree into small pieces suitable for a woodstove or a fireplace. Which you should know by now, seeing as you just had three full cords of fireplace wood delivered and stacked.”
I was strewing conversational bread crumbs, leading them away from the forest, away from the subject of my mother. But they would not be deterred.
“Seriously, Clara. How is she?”
“Seriously, Brown, she’s a year older. It was just her birthday.”
“No! For real? Are you kidding?”
Brown and Sunshine were birthday people. They used to call me wherever I was, back in the nomad days, the Winter of Nomad-istry, as Brown used to say, and sing “Happy Birthday to You” into the phone. If I was anywhere within driving distance, they would have a party for me. Cake, candles, special handwritten, rhyming poems full of alliteration.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But why didn’t you remind us? We could’ve called her or something. Geez.”
I shrugged. A two-shoulder shrug—quick up and quick down—which was what you did when there was something enormous you hadn’t told your two best friends about and too much time had passed and all the words were locked up tight and would remain so, in this time of closed books that were slept on and eaten off but never read aloud.
“Actually I kind of forgot too.”
“You did?”
Again the two-shoulder shrug, this time with averted gaze. But the problem with best friends, friends who had known you from day one of your first year in college, was just that: they knew you. They knew the expressions on your face, the things you did to distract. To avoid talking. They knew the two-shoulder shrug, the averted gaze.
“Why do you have such a hard time with your mother, anyway?” Sunshine said. “You’ve never given me a good reason.”
“A good reason for what?”
Pretending you didn’t know what she was talking about. That was another way to stall. To avoid. To redirect. To give yourself time to think up a good answer. But I did know what she was talking about, and she knew I knew. See the two friends as they were fourteen years ago, back in college, when they shared a dorm room in the White Mountains. See the slim green phone on the coffee table between their beds. Hear it begin to ring, that shrill jingle of a landline ringtone.
Brr. Brr. Brr.
See Clara close her eyes and picture a heavy black telephone in a kitchen in a house in Sterns. Her house, two states away, across the Whites and the Greens and down through the heart of the Adirondacks. See her picture Tamar sitting at the kitchen table, the receiver pressed to her ear, waiting. The every-Thursday phone call. See Clara bite back a sigh and pick up the phone.
“Hello.”
“Greetings, Miss Winter speaking. How may I direct your call?”
“Ma.”
“Shall I see if Ma is available?”
“MA.”
At this point I would quit speaking and wait. She would wait too. Then she would start speaking again as if she had just been summoned to the phone.
“Clara?”
“Ma.”
“How are you?”
“I’d be better if you quit this stupid phone charade.”
“Not sure what you’re talking about.”
The only way to break through was to surprise her. Pop a question into the conversation, Jeopardy!-style.
“Ma. Random Questions for two hundred. Why do you eat everything out of cans and jars with a cocktail fork?”
I remembered Sunshine glancing up at me from her desk. There was a look on her face, I could still picture it, of, what, dismay? Annoyance? I smiled at her and rolled my eyes, thinking we were in collusion—me and my annoying mother who called every Thursday—but now, here in the time of rejiggering of memory, I thought, Maybe it was you she was annoyed with, Clara, for being snotty to your mother. Silence on the other end of the line.
“Time’s almost up, Ms. Winter. Why cans, why jars, why a miniature fork?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
But that was it. Silence.
Why didn’t I talk to her? Why didn’t she talk to me? Why did we leave so much unsaid, back then, and still? Now, so many years later, I felt Sunshine and Brown looking at each other over my head, which was bent. Telepathy. She’s hiding something, they were telepathically telling each other. We have to make her talk.
* * *
“The Fearsome is so cool, though,” Brown said. “So tough and so funny and so . . . herself. It’s like my parents—they’re the gracious hosts, the witty conversationalists, and I adore them, but when I compare them to The Fearsome and the way she talks, there’s a tiny element of bullshit. Teeny tiny. But never with The Fearsome. Why the tension?”