Authors: Paula McLain
F
awn Delacorte was my second cousin, the only daughter of Raymond’s cousin Camille, who’d married a French Canadian and moved from Bakersfield, California, to Phoenix in her early twenties, thus successfully vanishing from the family and all evidence of her former self, like a rabbit in another country’s hat. I never met Camille or her husband, Claude. My grandmother Berna had rarely spoken of them, and although she kept pictures of them in albums, they were the dustiest, most unloved books, the ones at the bottom of the upstairs hall closet, with bindings split and yawning. Inside, the paper was acid-bubbled, leprous. As I handled the pages, an unspoken question seemed to move back and forth between me and the gray faces of my estranged family, and that question was,
Who are you?
I had lived with Berna and her husband, Nelson, since I was eighteen months old. They had a farmhouse ten miles outside of Bakersfield, which was built by somebody’s father’s father and looked it. Pocked yellow paint shed itself in long strips. The front porch was hangdog, and sets of four-paned windows pitched in and toward each other like tired eyes. It was a house to be old in, that seemed done-in by simply standing still, holding its bones together.
Some grandparents were older than others, I knew. Some worked, some played tennis in white ankle socks and terry cloth headbands. Mine played gin rummy and complicated dice games. They read
Reader’s Digest
and
National Geographic
and did the Daily Jumble in the
Bakersfield Bee
. They walked around the kitchen in house slippers that made shushing noises. They ate dinner at five thirty, in broad daylight. Each meal was preceded not by prayer but by pills, little ovals clicking inside the plastic days-of-the-week containers, and cloudy solutions of drinkable fiber in juice glasses.
It was odd and sad being a kid in Berna and Nelson’s house, odd being
their
kid, ostensibly, when they had already finished the better part of their lives. I knew that caring for me and worrying about me wore them out. They never said so directly, but they didn’t need to. I was a handful and I knew it.
I used to have spells—that’s what Berna called them. Mostly they involved not breathing, a crushing feeling descending on my chest like an anvil or an elephant and settling there until I thought I would simply cave in, like a faulty tunnel. Everyone assumed I was asthmatic, and although the inhaler I carried couldn’t do much for the spells once one would start in earnest, knowing I had one with me comforted me. Mostly I didn’t even use it. Just reaching into my hip pocket, my school desk, my lunch box to flick the plastic cuff with my fingernail could make me feel like I had a better hold on things in general. When I was ten, a doctor we’d driven all the way to Los Angeles to see said I didn’t have asthma at all, that the spells were psychosomatic. Although this was unfathomable to me—the heaviness, the pressure, the breathlessness all felt so real, so absolutely convincing—I began to think Berna had always suspected it.
“It’s perfectly natural,” she tried to reassure me on the way home from the doctor’s office. “You’ve been through a lot.”
What she was referring to indirectly—the only way we ever
really talked about it—was my mother’s running off when I was a baby. I didn’t have a father that anyone knew or would tell me about. I only had my grandparents and my uncle Raymond, who’d come around once a year or so, bringing wan-looking and misshapen stuffed animals he’d purchased at truck stops. Apparently, I now also had my not-quite-right-in-the-head head. Psychosomatic or not, I still had the spells and had no intention of letting my inhaler go. Thinking about losing it, in fact, was a sure way to bring a spell on.
Nelson, a pragmatist who believed you were only as sick as you let yourself be, said, “You just need to lighten up a little, Jamie.”
But how could I be light when the world was heavy? You only had to watch the news for two minutes to know that bad things happened to good people every ticking second of the day. Floods and famines and pestilence—and then the everyday disasters: people hurting other people, lying, cheating, turning on a dime and walking fast the other way. I myself was proof of this. I hadn’t seen my mother since I was a baby and had no memories of her at all. What I knew of her—Suzette—I knew from Berna and from photographs. She had dark brown hair, much smoother and finer than my sandy blond disaster, and dark eyes sitting wide in a heart-shaped face. She was more petite than I was, with small square shoulders and delicately shaped hands—but all of this information was flat and factual. I couldn’t say what my mother’s hair smelled like wet or how she walked or what her voice did when she was angry or sad.
According to Berna, Suzette had come back to the farm with Raymond, unannounced and uninvited, for my fourth birthday. They had brought a copy of
Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang
and a stuffed turtle that was electrically purple, with a green-feathered hat and startled-looking oval plastic eyes. I remembered receiving these gifts and even the attendant flush of happiness, but
my mother remained unavailable to me, a dodgy blank space, a bobbing, swerving
lack
that made my eyes throb when I tried to think it into some kind of clarity.
When your mother comes back
was a phrase that popped up occasionally in my early years with Berna and Nelson. Sometimes it was a warning, as in, “When your mother comes back, she’s not going to like that haircut you gave yourself.” Sometimes a weak promise: “When your mother comes back, she’ll buy it for you.” The “it” was usually something extraordinary, like the baby carriage with real rubber wheels and a folding pink bonnet that opened and closed like a paper fan. Or the white goat I had seen at a county fair. It had long white eyelashes and could do a cartwheel. Cupcake was its name, and my heart fell as I watched it balance on one side of a wooden teeter-totter, because I knew the goat would never be mine.
I didn’t think Suzette was ever coming back, and I didn’t believe Berna thought so either. It was something she said because she thought it made me feel better, I suppose. But mostly it made me feel worse. Against my own good sense, I’d find myself spinning a fantasy that my mother was someplace fabulous—Key West, New York, Alaska—and dreaming hard about me, the kind of dreaming that made magic things happen in stories: blue roses and mermaid-laced sea foam and straw turning into gold. But even before the princess tinge of these fantasies had faded, I would feel sick and sorry. Thinking about or even wishing for Suzette’s mythical return inevitably brought with it the darker thinking of why she had left in the first place. What was so terrible about being a mother? About being
my
mother? Did I cry too much as a baby, want too much? Maybe I kept Suzette awake at night. But these were things all babies did. Whatever made my mother leave must have been specific to me, then, to some unbearable thing about myself. Letting my mother fully into my thoughts, my dream life, was like hand-
feeding the elephant that would come to crush the breath out of me, and yet I couldn’t stop myself, either, any more than I could stop myself from watching the evening news that invariably gave me nightmares.
The years passed with no Suzette, no sign of things changing, and eventually Berna stopped mentioning her name, stopped talking about her altogether. I began to feel relieved. If she really was gone for good, then maybe the worst thing that could happen to me had already happened. And I had survived it—was surviving it even then.
Then Berna got sick.
It was just a few weeks before my fifteenth birthday when I heard the noise, a single loud
whump
, as I was brushing my teeth for bed. It sounded like a cement bag coming off a truck bed, which was unlikely in the living room on a Sunday night in the middle of
Columbo.
So I stood at the top of the stairs, toothbrush in hand, my mouth full of too-sweet peppermint foam, and waited to hear Berna set the house right by swearing lightly at Nelson or the dog or whatever chair or ottoman or screen door had caused the commotion. But she didn’t call, and neither did Nelson. The house was eerily mute. And I’ll confess that what I most wanted at that moment was to ignore the noise and the silence and the dropped-cement-bag feeling in my stomach and disappear down the hall to my room. But I knew things had to go another way, knew it the way we always know when something bad has happened, and that we have to walk toward that bad thing as toward a half-open door in a dream.
Moving downstairs in my cotton nightgown, I thought I might gag, the unswallowable toothpaste like egg cream at the base of my throat. In the living room, Berna and Nelson’s chairs were empty and a low light was on near the television where Peter Falk scratched his head in the “one more thing” scene. For twenty or thirty seconds, I let myself believe I was wrong
about the wrongness. Maybe all was fine and the same. Maybe I would turn the corner to find Berna and Nelson holding splayed fans of playing cards, the blandness of their faces releasing me to bed where I could listen to KERA on my transistor radio, pressing it to my ear like a seashell.
But in the kitchen, Berna lay slumped in the middle of the braided rag rug by the sink. Her head was on the hardwood floor, neck tilted back slightly, as if she needed to see something over her shoulder. Nelson was looking into Berna’s face and his gaze seemed numb, arctic.
“Nelson.
Nelson!
” I had to shout to startle him and even then he stayed crouched on the floor beside Berna. His silhouette, with shoulders stooped and shuddering, looked oddly childlike.
I called the police and fetched a thick stack of cotton dish towels to prop Berna’s head, and sat next to her, rubbing her papery hand. Berna was unconscious, her eyes rolled deeply back. Was she dying? Was this what death looked like? I tried to stay focused on what was available, the snarls of string fringe on the striped dish towels, light swinging in a cone over the Formica table, the linoleum square that bore a crosshatched scar, like the number symbol on a typewriter. As a little girl, I had a habit of picking at the scar with my fingernails. Berna would swat my hands and redirect me, but before long I’d find my way back—
pick pick pick
—finding something pleasurable in the slight snapping back of the linoleum, its rubbery give. If I crawled over to it right then, I wondered, could I be five years old again? Three, two, zero?
It was all really happening. Berna’s hand, clammy as a damp grocery bag, was real, and the wall phone with its low-swaying coil, the wheezing refrigerator, the calendar stuck on a blue lighthouse—August—though it was late October. My bent legs felt needled at, anesthetized, though they would carry me through this night, to the hulking and fluorescent hospital.
There, the waiting room was the color of pistachio ice cream and hung with Halloween decorations. Fake webbing had been strung in the corners of the room and studded, here and there, with fat crepe-paper spiders. Near the nurse’s station, a real-looking skeleton wore a pirate’s eye patch and red Santa’s hat. Nelson and I sat for hours, now flipping mindlessly through stacks of old
Sports Illustrated
magazines, now pacing or looking out the window onto the nearly empty parking lot below, or walking to the vending machine for cans of A&W root beer. And then, near dawn, a doctor came to say that Berna had suffered a major stroke. She was conscious but still very weak. As for her prognosis, it was too soon to tell. We would simply have to wait and see.
The next several weeks spun slowly by. After six days in intensive care, Berna was moved to a recovery ward upstairs, where she looked startlingly fragile, sagging to one side in the metal bed, favoring the arm that wasn’t working the way it should.
“This is all temporary,” Nelson assured me on rides home to the farm. “Berna’s strong, has a lot of life in her. She’ll beat this back with a broom.”
But would she? Berna didn’t look strong to me. She looked like a limp and empty glove. I worried that she’d never return home. What would possibly happen then, no one was talking about that.
We visited her in the afternoons after I was let out of school, Nelson in a neatly pressed striped shirt and dress trousers. He carried his town hat, his fingertips worrying the felt brim as we waited by the lit “up” arrow by the bank of elevators. Though I’d known him for as long as I’d been conscious of memory, Nelson now looked like a stranger to me, greenish light planing his cheekbones, glinting off his scalp, which shone through the carefully combed and lacquered-down hairs.
I had never thought hospitals were the romantic places they
seemed in soap operas, where nurses and doctors flirted over drawn masks, everything in their eyes, where children went to get their tonsils out and ice cream spooned over the wounds and women delivered babies into pink flannel blankets. But Bakersfield Memorial Hospital was even more soggy and sallow than I imagined, with gummy-looking slightly greenish walls and a cafeteria with folding chairs and what looked to be card tables. Behind a glass counter there was cottage cheese and red Jell-O in plastic-wrapped bowls. There was milk in waxed fist-sized cartons and packets of graham crackers, most of which had been crushed in the box and looked like hamster food.
Berna’s recovery room was just off the VA wing, where it wasn’t uncommon to see men in wheelchairs cruising down the hall, easy as you please, with amputated legs jutting from the bottom of their gowns and tucked into what looked like gym socks. How could someone get used to that, to half of themselves missing? Would Berna get used to her slack left hand, the slur that made her sound like she was drunk all of the time? Would Nelson get used to carrying his wife to the toilet? Would I get used to TV dinners with Nelson—sodden fried chicken under tinfoil, triangles of applesauce cake only partly warmed through—while Walter Cronkite’s voice boomed through the living room like a burning bush?
Berna stayed in the hospital for three weeks, and in that time it became obvious to everyone except Nelson that if Berna was going to get her strength back, it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. She was transferred to a long-term care facility with pee-smelling hallways and pureed-squash dinner hours, where old women sat by windows with wrinkled-fruit skin and white, electrified hair, waiting not for visitors but for the day to be done with already.