MY WRITING

The moment at evening when the pictures set sail from the walls

—W.S. Merwin

Knowing Mrs. Gildersleeve suffered in extreme heat, my mother had phoned, and when there was no answer, stopped by. I‘m here, Anna, Mother said softly, then pulled a chair close. Mrs. Gildersleeve lay on her flowered divan, the pink and yellow roses on her flowered dress wilting onto her generous body. Her startlingly pale face floated in a sea of leaves and trailing blossoms covering the wallpaper and carpet. Even the drapes were flowered. 
 

She had been an ambassador’s wife, and before that, an opera singer. On the mantle was a photograph of her standing next to Winston Churchill. She was taller than he, with broader shoulders and a confident smile. A large woman herself, Mother for once seemed oddly small, settled in beside her.

This was a time when experience and intuition accounted for something. One could be a practical nurse, with no formal education, and my mother’s reputation as a sensible and caring companion was well known, even among the wealthy tenants of the Griswold House, where Mrs. Gildersleeve lived. My father was caretaker of the once elegant estate. We lived next door in the caretaker’s cottage. 
 

People would call at all hours asking for Mother’s advice, and if they could not afford a doctor, for her to come right away. If she were cooking dinner, she’d call my sisters and me into the kitchen and quietly explain what to do to get the meal on the table. Then off she’d go. But that day she had tried everything to make our neighbor comfortable, removing her nylon hose and loosening her corset, bathing her forehead and inner wrists with cool water. Nothing had worked. 

Mother had lived through much, and her face held all that anguish and heartbreak, but a measure of joy, too, so that when a rare smile occasioned her lips, her eyes remained dark and sad. But she knew how to feed ten of us around the table by stretching the small portion of meat she could afford with potatoes, or by serving biscuits and gravy or chipped beef on toast. And she knew how to treat the sick. If you weren’t feeling well, you wanted Esther there, sitting by you, stroking your arm, or fixing milk toast if you needed nourishment.

Now Mrs. Gildersleeve lay prostrate in the stifling heat. Her breath had slowed to a fluttery gurgle, her lower jaw working with each inhale and exhale. Mother took a deep breath as if trying to help her, shifting slightly in the straight-backed chair. She turned then and gazed intently at me. I often accompanied her on these visits, cherishing our few times alone. I would be eleven on my next birthday, and because I was wandering in those middle years between being a child and no longer a child, when the world was full of mysterious signs with few words attached, I sensed something was terribly wrong.

Mother held forth then as if she had been given the gift of speech for the first time.

The spring was a wet one and that morning the draw was bank full, she said suddenly, her voice clear and bright. By afternoon the Pumpkin had flooded half way to the barn. 

Mrs. Gildersleeve’s hand moved imperceptibly. Mother took it in hers and closed her eyes. 

Sheep don’t like to get their feet wet, she went on, almost chanting now, so my brother William and I laid cornstalks in their stall in case the creek kept on coming. But we’d no sooner finished when the barn door flapped open and a tremendous rush of water tumbled in.

I sat dumbfounded. My mother had never once told me a story of any kind, never opened her childhood to me. When I’d asked what it was like when she was young, she’d say she lived it once, and didn’t ever want to return. But there I was with her, a girl my age, I imagined, water closing in on us, in a place more vivid than my own life—the acrid, almost pleasant smell of the barn, the sheep, bleating pitifully, heavy with wool. Shearing had been planned for that week and lambing would be soon. Taken by the water the sheep would surely drown.

And so it went that day attending Mrs. Gildersleeve, my mother pitched headlong into memory long buried, into a swelling stream gone mad, each of us on the fragile raft of her life—even sweet young Anna is there, fresh from her voice lesson. Somehow, we lift sheep and carry them to higher ground, where they bound away to safety. But the water keeps coming. When a pregnant ewe is stranded on a hillock no bigger than a tabletop, William fords the angry water to rescue her. I am bursting with happiness.

Then with a great heave Mrs. Gildersleeve let go a long rattling breath that seemed never to end. 

At once I was back in the desperate heat of August. Stillness settled over us, into every florid corner, quieting the delicate figurines lining the windowsills, the satiny tongues of exotic plants with impossibly long names, the small naked Buddha, which, Mrs. Gildersleeve had once told me solemnly, needed no clothes. I’d delivered the newspaper one morning and she’d invited me in. The room was heavy with a mysterious fragrance that kindled in me a hunger. It was not for food I yearned, as I think of it now, but for that which I did not know—for the source of my mother’s sadness, for the confidence in Mrs. Gildersleeve’s smile, for a story that offered a place for me beyond my own small life.

Published in Mom Egg Review