Authors: Eleanor Brown
O
ur mother was recovering from her first week of radiation.
She’d been tired for so long now, we’d nearly forgotten her any other way. She didn’t complain, though we knew she’d been having chest pains, and even the tiniest effort seemed to exhaust her.
Bean was working, and Rose had gone into town, leaving Cordy alone with our parents. When our father had brought our mother home, she had seemed tired, but she played a game of Scrabble with Rose, and walked in the garden, and sat down with us at dinner, though she ate hardly anything, her presence serving mostly to smooth the rumpled silence between Cordy and our father.
The next morning, Cordy awoke to the sound of our mother vomiting, and though she had lately been doing the same thing herself, this seemed worse, desperate and painful in a way hers was not, uncomfortable as it was. Cordy stumbled out of bed, her hair tangled in the loose bun she slept in, T-shirt speckled with holes, and pajama pants tied loosely at her hips, and felt her way, sleep-blind, into our parents’ room.
How old were you when you first realized your parents were human? That they were not omnipotent, that what they said did not, in fact, go, they had dreams and feelings and scars? Or have you not realized that yet? Do you still call your parents and have a one-sided conversation with them, child to parent, not adult to adult?
Cordy, we think, figured this out at the moment she saw our mother lean back against the bed, our father’s arm around her shoulders, her mouth wet with saliva, her skin gone white and papery in the unforgiving arm of sun reaching through the curtains. Our father put down the silvery bowl we had all used, at some point, when in the grips of some awful intestinal trauma. The hollow clang against the bedside table made Cordy shiver with memory. Our father dabbed our mother’s forehead, then her mouth, with a wet washcloth, and she smiled at him, and he smiled back, and then she closed her eyes.
“Is she okay?” Cordy asked, her voice no more than a whisper. Our father shifted on the bed, turning to see her, and she thought how he always looked surprised to see us, as though he had not known us for our entire lives.
Who goes there?
He took off his glasses, wiped them unnecessarily with the handkerchief he kept in his pocket for these purposes—such a gentleman, our father—and replaced them, peering at Cordy as though clearer lenses might resolve the mystery of her presence. To that, we have this to say: Good lucky, Daddy-o. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “I think it’s just the medications.” He looked slightly disappointed at this news, as though the chemical chains present in the pills had let him down on a deep and personal level.
“Can I help?” Cordy asked. She stepped forward cautiously, bare foot lapping over the ridge between the wide-slatted floorboards and the edge of the rug, gone bare at the edges from wear. Beside her, fingers fluttering, birds in flight.
“Come here,” our father said, and patted the bed on the other side of our mother. She did not open her eyes, but she smiled thinly when she felt Cordy sit down.
“Hi, Mommy,” Cordy said, and our father handed her the washcloth, which she dabbed carefully along our mother’s jawline, her mouth. She had always had such beautiful skin, taut and fuzzed softly like fruit, the tiniest freckles along the bridge of her nose (none of us had inherited those and how bitter we were about it), petals blooming in her cheeks. Our father stood and went to the bathroom, Cordy listening to the familiar clank of that bowl against the sink, the way it rang as he rinsed it out. “Do you need anything?”
“No, honey, thank you. I’m just tired.” Her eyes were still closed, flicking slightly under the blue-veined tissue paper of her eyelids. “Will you make your father some breakfast?” She paused, licked her lips. “And then maybe you can come up here and read to me.”
“Sure,” Cordy said. She kissed our mother’s forehead, gone cool and clammy, and stood up gently, careful not to move the bed. The air was cool in their room still, and she adjusted the thick white comforter before she pulled the curtains shut, blocking out the inquisitive rays playing their way, like fingers on a keyboard, across the covers. Cordy had always had this way about her, a calm willingness to accept what came. We had too often stolen toys from her chubby fingers before she had the motor skills or the will to fight back. But we would be dishonest if we said it did not still her to see our mother lying that way on the bed. Savasana. Corpse pose.
In the kitchen, Cordy clanked and fussed, cracking eggs, dicing vegetables for an omelet, considering the tiny bottles of spices. Rose alphabetized the jars and cans in her kitchen. Here, they were piled against each other, drunken sailors spilling drifts of dried leaves across the bottom of the cabinet.
“She’s sleeping,” our father announced gruffly, making his way into the kitchen. He must have gone out already, the paper was unfolded, a mug of coffee gone cold beside it. He lifted the front section as Cordy deftly slipped a plate onto the table, golden omelet flecked green and white with onions and peppers from the garden. “Thank you,” he said, looking at her and then back at the plate, pondering the mystery of how the girl and the meal were connected.
“You’re welcome,” Cordy said. She poured and cooked another omelet, eased it onto her plate, and joined him at the table. Our father hid behind the paper, but she heard the sounds of his silverware, the grimacing swallow as he drank his coffee, bitter and black.
As a child, Bean had developed a tremendous aversion to the sound of chewing. At the breakfast table, faced with the melodious crunching of our entire family’s teeth working against their cereal, she would grow furiouser and furiouser until she stood and stomped off to eat elsewhere, in peace. Cordy had never been bothered like this. She loved the symphonic harmony of people eating, the gentle sigh of pleasure at the meeting of taste and bud, the percussive notes of cutlery.
“I really like working at the coffee shop,” she said, apropos of nothing. Our father lowered the paper, brows down, and stared at our sister. “I was just thinking, I love all the sounds. Like the steamer, and the bell on the door, and the conversations. I can work, and I can just listen to all those sounds around me, and it’s kind of comforting, you know?”
“If music be the food of love,”
our father said, and gave a short smile. Cordy took it, a crumb. He went back to his paper. She felt tears sting in her eyes. It had never been like this. He had always listened to her stories, asked her to share her dreams, laughed the hardest at her jokes. Now it seemed he could hardly bear to hear the sound of her voice, couldn’t even be civil enough for small talk.
Cordy was sure we were wrong. He wasn’t going to come around. Maybe not ever.
How had she never known how good she had it until it was gone?
She finished eating in silence, the food tasteless in her mouth, and went back upstairs while our father did the dishes. She stood for a moment, watching our mother rest, the quiet rustle of her breath in and out. Is this what it would be like? Wondering always if what you were doing was right, was enough, was tender and gentle and caring enough to soothe pains and nourish hopes? A little pulse of panic fluttered around her heart at the thought of so much importance. At least here we could pick up after Cordy when she left things undone. But a baby would be hers. Hers alone.
She shifted slightly. When she heard the creak of Cordy’s feet on the floor, our mother opened her eyes. “Did he eat something?” she asked. This is our mother. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse could be bearing down hard and fast upon us, and she would want to make sure our father had eaten. So he wouldn’t, you know, get hungry in the afterlife or something.
“Aye,” Cordy said.
“The duke hath dined.”
She looked at our mother more closely. “Are you okay? You look kind of”—she waved her hand—“funny.”
Our mother sighed. “I’m fine. Just tired, as usual. And hungry.”
“Do you want something to eat?” Cordy turned to head back to the kitchen.
“No thank you, honey. Even if I could keep it down, everything tastes like metal these days. It’s awful.”
“Oh.” Cordy tuned back and walked toward the bed. “You want me to read to you now?”
“That would be lovely,” our mother said.
Cordy picked up the book on our mother’s bedside table. “Tolstoy?” she asked suspiciously.
“I figured I’d have a lot of time,” our mother said, and smiled wryly. We are notorious for our efforts to read the (non-Shakespearean) classics, but are similarly notorious, with certain exceptions, for our inability (or unwillingness) to finish them.
Cordy nodded, hopping up on our father’s side of the bed rather enthusiastically, and apologizing at our mother’s grimace. “You haven’t started it yet?” she asked.
“No. Your father was being dreadfully bibliographic at the clinic, so we watched a movie. Something about a dog.” Cordy knew exactly what our mother meant. Occasionally our father would get in a mood, particularly while reading something complex, where he would harrumph repeatedly, and then stop at random intervals to read the quotes aloud, as if to say, “Can you believe this malarkey?” Not that he is likely to use the word “malarkey.”
Cordy nodded, opened the book. Our mother turned her head, her hair spilling across the pillow, and looked at her. “My baby,” she said, smiling up at her, and Cordy touched her hand to her stomach. “My baby,” our sister said.
B
ecause you know our family now, you will not be surprised that when our father broke the ice, he did so with a note. And you will similarly not be surprised this was not a note written, but a photocopied page of his
Riverside,
lines gone carefully over with highlighter. Polonius to Ophelia. Our father had once written a paper pulling apart the advice given to Laertes (
This above all: to thine own self be true
—the same lines he had quoted to Rose) and that given to Ophelia (roughly: don’t sleep with Hamlet, you ninny). Now, given the way things turn out for Laertes and Ophelia, we have always figured that despite the gender inequity inherent in these two exchanges, Polonius was spot-on in both instances, and Ophelia really ought to have listened. After all, Hamlet = bat-shit crazy, and apparently it was catching.
But these words were more tender than we have admitted, and in our father’s gift to Cordy, they seemed innocent and kind.
“You speak like a green girl, Unsifted in such perilous circumstance . . . Tender yourself more dearly . . . I do know, When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows: these blazes, daughter, Giving more light than heat, extinct in both, Even in their promise, as it is a-making . . .”
Cordy gripped this paper in her hands, sitting in the shadowed alley behind the Beanery. A year ago, this would have been her cigarette break, but now was simply a moment where she leaned against the gritty sharpness of the brick wall to inhale the scent of aging garbage. Her apron was marked with incomplete handprints, as though she had recently been assaulted by a floury, three-fingered monster. She had unfolded, read, refolded it how many times now? The paper was already going soft along the creases from her sweaty palms.
Here’s one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: it’s damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about. Look, the sheer fact that people have banged out book after article after dramatic interpretation of this guy should tell you that despite his eloquence, he wasn’t the clearest of communicators. Not that any of us would ever say this to our father, but we had certainly thought it.
Cordy knew our father thought she was making a mistake, being immature, juvenile, that this was a passing fancy. And this assumption of juvenility was largely her fault. All her life, she had reveled in the favored daughter status, had taken pleasure in being the beloved baby, and here was the other side of that double-edged sword. Who would believe her now, when she said she had decided to be a grown-up?
“Cordy!” Dan called from inside. She put her hand to her face, feeling the burn of old humiliations. Who was she kidding? Our unspoken admonitions burned around her, swirled, twisting through her hair and blurring the edges of her sight. Had she ever succeeded in anything besides drifting, which was no accomplishment in and of itself? Long ago, she had thought bravery equaled wandering, the power was in the journey. Now she knew that, for her, it took no courage to leave; strength came from returning. Strength lay in staying.
She opened the screen door leading into the kitchen—once, long ago, the Beanery had been a restaurant, and Cordy had begun to eye the industrial ovens cannily, wondering—and listened to the squeak and the slam behind her. Ahead, the tiled floor spread narrow into a hallway, and then wider behind the counter. She walked toward it like a nervous bride.
“Hey,” Dan said, and he smiled at her. Cordy, like a pup kicked too many times, relaxed. “I’ve got a couple of sandwiches need making.” He nodded at a mother and daughter sitting at tables across the way. A high school student on a tour, it looked like. They sat stiffly, looking around, the mother judging, the daughter trying it on. This could be where I come on a date. This could be where my friends and I hang out after classes. “Chicken salad on croissant, turkey on focaccia.” He handed her the order slip and a wink, and Cordy set to work.
When she had finished the sandwiches, split them neatly on a plate, pickle slice, potato chips, watermelon cubes arrayed in an edible bouquet, she walked them over. “It’s so small,” the mother said, her fingers fiddling absently with her straw. “I’m not sure you could get used to being so far away from . . . everything.”
Cordy’s ears snagged on this statement, and a million thoughts rushed to her mind, but she simply smiled, set the plates down. Her approval wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The girl was like Bean, she could see, full of her own dreams and demands and ideas, and who wouldn’t fall in love with a place like Barney anyway? The evocative wide-stoned walls of Main, the bowed original staircases of Rubin, the skylights in the Student Union, deceptively alluring during summer campus tours, threatening in the depths of winter, the spread of the Quad, soft green in the shade of the maple trees. The campus is gorgeous, and lesser girls than she have fallen for its siren song.