Because I Said So (43 page)

Martha’s Table is organized and supervised, but it’s anything but familiar. Gentrification hasn’t hit the neighborhood yet, and Clare, the private-school helper—she continued going once a week after spring break—doesn’t exactly blend in with the regular staff. (I’ve meant to ask what she did on lunch break during that vacation week, since I doubt she parked herself at the hall table where the teachers eat and talk, often in Spanish.) Clare doesn’t seem deterred by the hints she gets of dire family hardships. The children get fed breakfast because they might go without it otherwise, and some of the parents who pick them up look awfully young. I’m equally struck by how eager Clare is to be needed—to be helpful and, yes, powerful, able to maintain order and dispense comfort and guidance (and, in spare moments, sort papers). Isn’t that what we need—kids who feel necessary? There’s an irony at the heart of a century devoted to sequestering and protecting vulnerable children: we’ve all but eradicated the useful child. “Do you think they miss me?” Clare asks. “I miss them,” she says.

I don’t worry that she’s emotionally overinvesting in the kids, or paving the way for a life of full-time domesticity: this is day care, and she’s a girl with ambitions. She’s thrilled to be the object
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of crushes among her charges, and she’s doting in return, but she’s also picked up a certain cool-headedness from the Classroom A teachers. They’re matter-of-fact and pragmatic, the unsentimental style Jane Eyre favored yet knew might discomfit “persons who entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children, and the duty of those charged with their education to conceive for them an idolatrous devotion . . . ,” doctrines Jane dismissed as

“humbug.” Clare is well aware that child care is not bliss. First hand, as a kid herself and as a babysitter, she’s experienced her share of stress and injustice, and has had to deal with tedium and messes. Zachary mopes or gets mad when her attention is elsewhere, super-sensitive Brianna won’t share, one weepy toddler from the younger class insists on being held, nonstop, out in the play yard (which irritates the other teachers, but Clare’s still narrow hip is ever ready). Nap time is long but rarely peaceful, and one of the aides can be a little heartless.

I suppose I could worry when I stop to realize that my daughter owes not just her realism about little kids, but also her unusual enthusiasm for tending them, in no small part to a youthful babysitter I hired back when Clare was seven and my son was ten, someone they adored and admired: Lena was a teenage mother.

As a Howard University junior, she headed over every day after school with her toddler in tow (and no father in sight). But I don’t worry. Lena reminds me of the Jane of my youth—a charismatic figure (a great athlete, even) who immediately inspired worship—

and Lena’s daughter was the little sister I had never produced, despite Clare’s pleas. Lena reigned over all three kids with a blend of rigor and vigor I couldn’t begin to match, and then she graduated and went off to Teach for America. My daughter isn’t the only one who will never forget her.

But will Clare’s Classroom A kids remember her, she keeps asking? The four-year-olds, she suddenly realized after a long summer away, are heading off to kindergarten. But Zachary, as luck would have it, has a little brother who should be moving up.

I don’t think Clare will be moving on.

Ourselves, Carried Forward

B e t h K e p h a r t

I married a man
who seduced me with stories about the shape and the smell of his youth. He’d spent time in a jungle, he said, and caught glimpses of witches. He’d surfed with the sharks and saved his brother from earthquakes. Even the marketplaces of my husband’s past were mythic, and there were talking birds and flaming fighter jets; eruptions in the street; big spiders; a cave that led to a cavern that finally spiraled right down into the belly of the earth.

It takes nothing to listen to a man who tells stories; it takes something to believe in your own. I didn’t. With every scene my husband resurrected, my past lost volume, rhythm, color. The birds didn’t talk where I’d come from; they just clung to limbs and twittered. My backyard had a strawberry patch; jungles were for Tarzan. There were no bombs in the silver jets overhead, there were no sharks as big as surfboards at the shore, and witches hob-bled near but once a year, when they traded their taunts for candy. There is little democracy when it comes to telling stories; the best stories always rule. The untold stories fade away, and memory goes flaccid.

I claimed as my right and my talent the present moment. The sun skewered on the horizon. The overwrought attitude of spring.

The cool in a plank of shaded floorboard. The imminent heat of a hearth. Touch this. Hear this. Smell this. Know this. I was good at
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that, and that, as it so happens, is what motherhood requires: A capacity for being here now, in the company of a child. A talent for pointing the way toward wings and stars and snow. A faith in the transitory shimmer. We named things together, my son, Jeremy, and I. We figured out (a conspiracy) just what it was that we loved. And when things got hard—because things always do get hard—we defined what we were up against and did our best to solve it. My son wasn’t asking for my childhood stories. My husband had already settled on who I was. If there was time at the end of those long mothering days, I did not spend it adding fractions of my past.

I was the memoirist who wrote little of her childhood. I was the wife who knew more about her husband’s history than she could conjure of her own. I was the high school graduate who could not remember the name of her third-grade teacher, or her fifth, and I was also, all this time, the sister who grew up listening to her brother talk about moments that were, in her mind, indistinct, the color of old denim. All of which was just fine, I told myself, because I was living in the moment. I was alive, with a child.

I am not trying to suggest that my entire past had gone and vanished, nor am I undermining the inevitable ways the past will waggle forward. Someone from before will hunt you down with a treasure of a tale; it always happens. Someone will salvage an old photograph and present it to you in a frame. They will say, inevitably,
I remember you singing
. They will ask (an unexpected question),
Whatever happened to that shoe box?
And one afternoon, in winter, your brother will get a look on his face that suggests honeysuckle and lightning bugs, stars watched from the roof. My brother climbed trees when he was young; I am certain of this, this I remember. My sister made mud patties near the swing. I played kickball and ice skated and once, in sixth grade, I won all the blue ribbons on a sun-soaked Field Day and then again, during that very same year (but was it before or was it after Field Day?), I was doing my best with a science test when the teacher, whose name I still cannot remember, called me to her desk and said,
Your mother’s car has been hit hard by a truck, but
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she’s okay, don’t worry. Go home. Be with her. Tell her we are
sorry.
Walking home, running home, flying to my mother.

A splash of paint on a stretch of canvas. A jagged, blinding flash.

Everyone knows something
about memory. Everyone knows what and how it is: episodic and aggrandizing, mischievous, iconic. It defines some waylaid part of us when we find our way back to it. When our lives start to shift, when the husband’s tales are already told, when the son, that daily companion, is off increasingly on his own, then it is time for our own stories. “I’ll see you, Mom,” Jeremy had started saying (standing at the door in his leather jacket, headed down the street, toward his job).

“See you.” He’d grown taller than I’ll ever be. He knew things I’ll never know. He had his cache of secrets, a cluster of girls with whom he flirted, things that he alone had chosen to fight for or to love. The house felt emptier than it had in years, and in ways that I won’t count or measure, I was keeping company with myself.

I wasn’t sorry that my son was tall. I wasn’t sorry that he understood himself, that he had his friends, that he knew precisely where he stood on politics, rap, religion, torn pants, movie plots, and girls. I wasn’t sorry that when I looked up, into his face, I glimpsed more man than child. We had gone on a journey, my son and I, and now a new road spooled before him. What he had learned, I hoped, he’d hold to. Who he had been, I hoped, would become the stuff of his tales. I wasn’t worried about losing my child. Jeremy is my son; he always will be. But in Jeremy’s increasing absence—distance?—I was starting to think about the lost parts of me, about the rumors and the whispers of the self I’d left behind.

I remember you singing
, someone had said.
You were eight or
you were nine.

I was there. I saw you win. I saw the ribbons in your hand.

Do you remember the honeysuckle? That big hedge, up near
the field?

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Do you remember those kittens that summer?

Do you remember the stars from the roof?

Do you remember
Windjammer
?

Who are we after the first long sprint of motherhood is through? What parts of our history do we return to ourselves when the days shift in shape and size and tempo? I hadn’t been young for years and years. But I remembered the cat and the ribbons and the kittens and the hedge. I remembered, and for no other reason than that I found myself longing to. I remembered my mother’s amber-lit sewing room and my father’s long car and the grocery store where we Saturday shopped, its big, wide, briny vat of pickles. I remembered roller-skating on the basement floor and soaring high on the backyard swings and trying, desperately, to draw butterflies, to draw anything at all. I thought I could con-quer the wings with symmetry, but my butterflies wouldn’t fly, wouldn’t perch. They were never more than pencil colors, but I was proud of them.

There were marathon games of Monopoly. There were miniature carnivals up the street; tadpoles in the nearby creek; splinters of mica in the dirt, which I found and polished and showcased.

There was a mother and a father and a warm meal every night.

There was a brother and a sister and a cat, a calico we called Colors. I called her Colors. I named our cat. I made such bold, unblinking declarations when I was younger than I am.

Somebody says so, and suddenly it’s true: I am in the back of the car, behind my mother—my brother on the left, our sister between us. We are driving home from the beach on the last possible day of summer, and I have the soundtrack from
Windjammer
on my mind—those songs of the ports, those sounds of the cadets, that calypso, those melancholy ballads. “Kari Waits for Me,” I sing, and my brother whistles harmony. “Don’t Hurry Worry Me,” I sing, and my mother sings the chorus. “Everybody Loves Saturday Night,” I sing, and my brother, mother, father, sister sing along with me. We are in the car, coming home from two splendor weeks away. We are singing the songs of the sea. Do you remember
Windjammer
? Yes. The music lives. I remember.

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I was a sun-spotted, unruly-haired girl long ago. I vacationed at the seashore and lived on a cul-de-sac street, beneath skies that hosted strictly friendly planes. I stayed outdoors, whenever I could, looking up and out at things. I sat down every evening to a family meal and played kickball late on summer nights and hiked through the snow in winter. I had, I am trying to say, the very sort of childhood that I have attempted—intuitively, quietly, perhaps old-fashionedly, never perfectly—to shape for and yield to my son. For haven’t we sat down to family meals, most every night?

Haven’t we gone hiking in the snow? Haven’t we sung our own favorite seafaring songs, when driving home, at the end of summer, from the shore? We knew all the lyrics to “Shenandoah,”

Jeremy and I. We knew mostly all of “Go Down, You Blood Red Roses.” We could hum our way through “The Girls Around Cape Horn” and moan along with “Ranzo.” My childhood nested in my son’s, somehow. The girl I was is in the boy he’s been. The past carried forward, planted, and sprouted, and not because it was merely good enough, but because it was whole, it was happy.

Who are we after the first long sprint of motherhood is through?

We are ourselves, carried forward.

It is something
to be on the cusp of things, contemplating and projecting. Something to go back in time to consider who you were before you were a mother mostly or what you loved before a child stole your heart. Lately, when my son is at his job and my own work seems done or dull, I find myself remembering the not-quite-a-mother me. She is twenty-eight, this other me, and there is no gray in her brown hair. There are no punctuation marks in the skin around her eyes—no parentheses, no brackets, no exasperated semicolons. She likes fast things. Bikes on the downward leaning slope of the hill. Ice skates on an empty pond. Her own two feet, which take her everywhere—in and out of thrift stores, hunting; up and down the wide streets, snooping; onto the stoops of neighbors. She takes other people’s children on as friends, miniature companions. She is responsible for little; she’s not tired.

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She writes fierce things in notebooks and calls herself a poet, and when she plays her music, she plays it loud and dances, unafraid to be seen, or to be found out.

There is an exuberance about this me that I find enviable, appealing. There is a fearlessness that seems naïve, incautious, and terrific. This me does not yet know what I now assuredly know about how fortifying, consuming, blinding, defining, and still somehow fleeting the childhood of one’s own child can be.