Follow Me (11 page)

She followed the river a couple of miles until she reached the Route 36 bridge. She climbed up the sloping bank, slipping
once on the wet grass, muddying her nice yellow dress. She started walking along the road, keeping just inside the gravel
edge to avoid the sharp little stones.

A few cars sped right past her. She kept walking, minding her own business. But when she turned at the loud approach of a
station wagon, the driver slowed and the children sitting in the back waved and called something to her. The car stopped a
few yards ahead along the road.

She jogged up to the passenger door, which swung open before she reached it. A sullen, pimply boy sat in the passenger seat,
and a man with a broad, sunburnt face and buzz-cut hair was at the wheel. The man leaned over the boy and said to Sally, “Need
a lift?”

“Sure, thanks.”

“Go on,” the man said to the sullen boy, who dragged himself out the door without acknowledging Sally. She climbed into the
seat while the boy squeezed himself into the back beside the other children.

The man started driving.

“Where you heading?”

“Rondo,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

“Downriver.”

The man had never heard of it. But of course there were lots of places he’d never heard of. He asked Sally if she’d heard
of Sarabelle, where he was from. He knew a doctor there, if she wanted to see one.

“Why would I want that!” Her eyes blazed, and her voice was harsh.

“No, sorry, it’s just… if you had trouble, you know.…”

She assured him that she was fine, she’d just been walking to the bus, and wouldn’t you know, the heel on her shoe broke so
she threw both shoes away. That’s all.

“You want to get the bus in Amity? I’ll take you to the station there.”

“That would be helpful.”

He drove along slowly, as if he meant to delay their arrival in Amity so he could hear something of her story and satisfy
his curiosity. With each bump and dip in the road, the children in the back yelled joyously.

“Say,” the man asked after a while, “what’s your name?”

“Sally.”

“Just Sally?”

“Sally Angel,” she replied in a cold voice. She turned to watch a tractor plowing a field in the distance and didn’t speak
again until the end of the drive, when, as she was stepping out of the car, she thanked the man for giving her a lift.

S
crappy changeling, there and not there, transforming herself with a snap of her fingers. Good-bye, hello. Dear Sally, I’m
your namesake. Wait for me. You should listen to what I have to say. I have the advantage, after all, of living in your future.
I know what’s in store for you. Of course, that makes it more difficult to be accurate in my description of the past and keep
the facts compatible.

Ever since discovering that my grandmother’s grasp of this story was incomplete, I’ve made an effort to fill in the gaps.
I’ve retraced her journey upriver and beyond, all the way back to Tauntonville. I’ve talked to members of our extended family,
along with some of my grandmother’s old acquaintances, and I can say with confidence that my version, even if it’s not infallibly
correct, is closer to the truth than hers. I admit, though, that I can’t always keep straight who told me what.

Girl, my grandmother would say to me when I was caught causing trouble: you sure are a Werner through and through. I used
to think I heard in her voice a note of conspiracy, as if she were concluding, in light of my bad behavior, that I was obliged
to repeat the mistakes she’d made. Over time I came to believe that she was only pretending to disapprove of me, and in reality
she was secretly pleased with my antics.

In one picture from the late seventies, we’re standing facing each other on the terrace behind her house on Anchor Heights.
I’m about five in the photo, and my grandmother Sally is still young enough to look spry. I’m holding up a bouquet, though
not a bouquet of cultivated flowers from a garden. They’re weeds, unglamorous, aggravating stalks of dandelion and yellow
rocket from the looks of them. Just weeds I must have plucked from the side of the road.

I only ever collected weeds — out of ignorance when I was little, and then as part of a game. Over the years, my grandmother
and I engaged in a fierce competition involving weeds, each of us trying to outdo the other, gathering as many weeds as we
could find in an hour. We’d rate our hauls at the end by counting the different stalks in each bundle. I usually won the contest.
My grandmother managed to find the colorful weeds, but I’d collect more of them.

She kept a
Golden Guide
to weeds in her kitchen, and we took to drying and pressing examples of individual species, though we didn’t make much effort
to keep track of our collection. Even to this day, I’ll pull an old book off my shelf and find in its pages an ancient sprig
of pigweed or goosefoot.

In this photo of the two of us, I’m proud to be showing off my winning weeds, and my grandmother is proud to acknowledge her
defeat. There’s something wily in her expression. It took me years to realize that I won our games because she wanted me to
win.

Weeds might be infesting, unattractive plants, out of place everywhere they spread, but the way they adapt to the most adverse
conditions —
well, it’s something,
my grandmother liked to say whenever I told her about a patch of weeds I’d found growing in an unlikely place around the
city, in a sidewalk crack, between bricks on an outside wall at the mall, in the middle of the Wegmans parking lot.

More than something,
she’d add.

My mother was standing at the kitchen counter flipping through a magazine when her water broke. My grandmother, slouched in
her chair, had surrendered to the lulling glow of the TV and was singing in a whispery voice to Lawrence Welk’s orchestra.

Ay-yah. Hmmm, most any afternoon at five…

Mama, it’s time.

We’ll be so glad…

It’s time!

It’s a familiar scenario: a suitcase already packed, a doctor on call, a pregnant woman saying,
It’s time.
What’s missing is the jittery husband standing ready to transport his wife to the hospital. In this story my grandmother
is the one who’s ready. She’d been the one who packed the suitcase. And she’d been sleeping with the car keys on her bedside
stand, along with a flashlight and a battery-powered clock radio in the unlikely event that a storm blew down the electrical
lines and she had to orient herself in the dark.

There was no storm that night. There was a rising moon casting a silver light, turning the contrails of a cumulus mass into
streams of melted iron. There was a warm breeze rattling the cones that had fallen from the pines onto the driveway. And there
was my grandmother, standing with the suitcase in her hand, urging her daughter, my mother, to hurry, hurry, hurry.

My grandmother and mother would often laugh about what followed: the rush to the car, the wild drive to the hospital with
my grandmother blasting the horn as she ran through every red light. My grandmother parked the Chevette half on the sidewalk
in front of the emergency entrance and swept my mother through the open doors, shouting for a doctor, the violence of her
voice causing a temporary stir among the medical staff, though what the nurses found as they gathered around was my pregnant
mother resting her folded arms on the ridge of her swollen belly, calmly surveying a fire-hazard notice on the wall while
she let out a leisurely burp.

As punishment for causing unnecessary havoc, my grandmother was directed to a bench and given a dozen forms to fill out before
any help would be offered.

Name, date, address, policy number, patient history, reason for visit. Name, date, address, policy number, emergency contact.
Name, date, policy number, home phone, work phone. Name, date…

Like as not, folks won’t be noticed until they generate a folder stuffed with unnecessary forms, my grandmother would grumble.
You’d think life begins and ends on paper.

Only after she’d finished signing her name on the last sheet was my grandmother taken to the waiting room and my mother officially
admitted to the hospital. Irked at being left alone, my grandmother ignored the No Smoking sign and lit a cigarette. In the
story she tells about that night, no one came to tell her to put her cigarette out. She didn’t wait long after finishing the
first one to light another.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t making my entrance easy for my mother. I’d accomplished a full somersault during my last week of gestation
and was presenting breech, as if to demonstrate my reluctance. And though my mother’s contractions intensified, by the time
of her first exam in the maternity ward her cervix had hardly dilated.

She was given a shot of morphine to relax her. The drug relaxed me as well, causing me to loosen my grip, and I began slipping
into this world, though my resistance continued to slow the process, so what should have progressed quickly from that point
took ten hours, along with ten Lucky Strikes and the remaining fluid in my grandmother’s lighter.

Ass-first I descended through the squeeze of the canal. Ass-first in what my grandmother Sally would cite as my first great
act of disrespect.

Craziness mirroring craziness. You and me, Grandma. I knew there was something I wouldn’t want to face, so I turned my back
and tried to hang on to the center, gripped my mother the way I’d grip the branch of a tree high above the ground. And then,
helpless to gravity, feeling my hands weaken, the weakness spreading numbness up my wrists. Centimeter by centimeter, letting
go. One Lucky Strike after another.

The sky above the courtyard was a velvety blue when a mockingbird outside the window suddenly changed its irritating sounds
from hungry clicks to a lovely warbling reminiscent of a wood thrush’s song in spring. That’s when my grandmother knew that
I’d been born.

She took advantage of an open door, slipping into the restricted area as a doctor let himself out. She made her way to the
nurses’ station and demanded to see her daughter and grandchild without delay. The nurse at the desk sympathized, and without
asking for the supervisor’s permission she led my grandmother into the birthing room, where my mother was resting and a pediatric
nurse was putting silver drops in my eyes.

Assured that my mother had made it through in good condition, my grandmother held her breath as she approached me, even as
she directed her mind to the task of willing away all the nightmarish fantasies that had been haunting her through her daughter’s
pregnancy. She was admittedly impressionable, and her imagination was still populated with hoofed demons from the illustrated
Bible of her youth. Oh, they would have their fun with me, my grandmother feared, branding me as the product of my parents’
unnatural love, stealing essential organs and adding extra body parts — an eleventh toe, a third arm, or even a pink tail
curled like a pig’s.

I was more than a mistake. To my grandmother, I was the consequence of a long series of bad decisions traceable back years
before my mother and father fell in love, back to the time before my mother had been born, when my grandmother was a young
woman fumbling along, following the river north.

I was lying under a warming lamp, not yet swaddled, when my grandmother first saw me. She counted my fingers and toes, eyed
my proportions, studied my bunched, angry face. Was I adequately symmetrical, or was I cursed with deformities? Had I been
marked by my parents’ sin? It demanded such intense and lengthy concentration for her to be reassured of my normalcy that
she didn’t notice how light-headed she’d become. She staggered, clutching at the air. She would have fallen to the floor,
but a nurse took quick action, sliding a chair behind her, catching her as she collapsed.

My mother, who’d been watching the scene from her bed, was only partially right in thinking that my grandmother was overcome
with joy at the birth of her grandchild. It’s more accurate to say that she was overcome with relief because I wouldn’t have
to go through life advertising the fact that I never should have been conceived.

My grandmother Sally, with her peach-white thistle hair, her speckled green eyes, and dimples multiplying into fine-lined
wrinkles. I didn’t realize how much we were alike until after she was gone. It’s not just that I’m reminded of our obvious
resemblance when I look at photographs of her as a young woman. I’m convinced that I recognize the potential for disarray,
as though I could tug the end of a frayed thread sticking out from her cuff, and the tidy package she’d squeezed herself into
would unravel.

Of course, if she comes apart, I’ll do the same. And then we’ll both have the opportunity to start over again. If she’s not
the woman she was led to think she was, then neither am I the result of her mistakes.

There’s still much I have to consider in order to come up with a convincing new version to replace the old one. Like all stories
that are pieced together from different accounts, this one involves a fair amount of guesswork, and sometimes I look at an
unfinished sentence and feel stumped. It’s then that my thoughts will drift and I’ll start imagining what I would have done
in my grandmother’s place.