Search Party (29 page)

They lifted out the nylon underpants inflated with Stevia's shape, and untangled the huge yellowed bras from the Avon jars and the pink canister of talcum powder, with the holes in its lid never quite closed, so that everything in the drawer was roughened with powder, and held them up against each other in voluptuous disbelief.

“Shh! Someone's coming!” They froze at the sight of their mother in the doorway. Before she drew back into the hall she said something distinctly, she said, “Your mother wouldn't like that.”

J
O
said, “Stevia made us give her all our meat. She took it home on Sunday.” Susannah did not remember that. She could not really see how it could have been so, because of getting meat off their plates and into the refrigerator and keeping it there until Sunday, Stevia's day off. And their father had been there somewhere watching over things. He was certainly in the house in winter, when there was less to do outside.

Susannah tried to hear his voice from that time, laying out rules or giving directions to Stevia, but she could summon him only in his commanding passage among the cows and in the smell he still had: the little wake that followed him of grease and gasoline in the knees and seat of his pants where he wiped his hands, mixed with soap from washing udders and the smell of the truck bed: rags, bitter little weeds sprouting in the rust, brown rained-on feedbags going to mulch. He had all these smells. He was not
part of the house, and why would he be? “He never had any control over Stevia or anybody else,” Jo said, spying out Susannah's mental defense of him. “Stevia tickled us until we threw up.”

Then Stevia was going to have her own baby, even though she was not married, and would not agree to stay on, even until the baby's birth, and went away.

Stevia was going to stay with her sister in Georgia. She was going to have a boy. No girls for her. He would be named Steve, after herself and the dead brother for whom she had been named. She showed them a brown line going up and down from her navel, like the beam of a star. Even though Susannah knew better, knew from Stevia herself how her mother had labored ten hours to get out something even as undersized as Jo, the line made Susannah imagine a painless splitting there. Out would press the baby, Steve. A strong, grinning baby with the yellow eyes of the elf boy on the cover of the fairy tales Mrs. Bayliss had sent home with them. The same little horn nubs on either side of his head. Devil or calf, creature to be chased on his delicate little hooves, and seized by Stevia, and nursed until his mouth frothed. Or just a baby. The thought of this baby, born and named and carried around in Stevia's fat arms, would not be banished from the house, no matter how they raced and fought and teased in the hope of raising Stevia's intent pink face from her stack of maternity patterns. Their father had given her the old sewing machine, and she sat making giant gathered tops for herself out of flowered material, flouncing them up against her chest with pins in her mouth and going to look at herself, severely and respectfully, in the mirror.

The vanity case had come back out from under the bed and she had taken her egg shampoo and her jar of bobby pins off the bathroom windowsill, and packed her magazines and the framed picture she said was her boyfriend, that Susannah thought was cut out of one of the magazines.

All the last week, Susannah rummaged through drawers looking for a school picture of herself to give Stevia. At the end, with no picture to leave behind her, Stevia waved her soft plump hand
at them when she left them off at Sunday school, as if it were any Sunday and she would be back in the morning.

Jo had just turned six and Susannah was nine.

Different women came in to help. Jo went to the doctor with a scabby rash on her face and neck and chest. No one knew if the rash was contagious, and eventually the doctor said it was because she was scratching at herself. But for a while, to Jo's shouts of fury and misery at bedtime, Susannah was allowed to sleep in Stevia's room. There she found the pile of their drawings, years of them, on a musty shelf in the closet. “Jo!” she yelled. She remembered this, yelling for Jo, who had not mentioned Stevia's name once since she left, or looked into her dresser drawers to see if anything remained, or even gone into her room.

During this summer Jo liked to sit in the kitchen doing nothing. She sat at the table scraping out the spaces between the little glass tiles on the salt and pepper shakers with her fingernail. The women who came in for part of the day to look after them stayed in the kitchen away from their mother and ironed, but Jo did not enter into conversation with them. The house was quiet, except for a groan now and then from the living room. At least Jo would snap at Susannah, if Susannah bothered her. At six Jo had a deep, angry voice she could summon up out of her chest when she wanted to. But when Susannah put the drawings on the table Jo bent over them with her.

Girls. Not a boy among them. There was a kind of sigh from both of them. Jo broke her silence and said in a whisper, “Stevia liked my drawings better than yours.” This did not surprise Susannah because Jo was going to be an artist. She was already better than Stevia, even making fun of the black-haired girls Stevia drew, with eyelashes like ant legs and high heels on tiny, sideways feet. “Stevia! Skirts don't look like that, like triangles.”

“See, those dumb clothes she made us do! And these are babyish!” Jo was suddenly furious, and began to tear up her own drawings, one by one. She flung the pieces all over the kitchen, and the woman who was ironing that day left them there so their father could see how Jo had carried on. Susannah felt a certain
bitter elation while Jo was doing the tearing. But she kept her own drawings. There were smudges of Stevia's Trushay hand lotion on them. There were certain sacred noses and mouths in the margins, drawn with such careful pressure that the pencil lead still shone, and places where the paper was almost erased through, and passing back in time to the days when Stevia was newly in the house, before Jo could pick up a pencil, larger and larger faces for Susannah to copy, larger and simpler renderings of her name in Stevia's broad print. “Suzzana.” In the first grade, she had taught Stevia how to spell her name.

Of her mother in the same period her memories were vivid but sparse, and not really shareable except with Jo.

There would be no one else to whom she could mention one dress of their mother's. It had a lint-filled pocket where Susannah put her hand as they sat on the couch together while her mother was giving the baby her bottle, and felt with her fingers through to her mother's thin leg, almost the same size and inertness as the banister.

Sooner or later they would be alone together, because the baby would start to cry and this would cause her mother to breathe faster and then shrink and squirm as if somebody had put a groundhog in her lap and not a baby in need of a burp. Stevia would swoop down on the dark-faced outraged baby. After a while Susannah could do it too.

Susannah did not look up at her mother's face, with the dark oily hair falling over it, the rubbed eyes and the chapped lips. Not right at it. They just sat there. She was astonished to think how many times the dress with the pocket must have been worn. In fact she thought now that her mother might have worn nothing else.

“I'm sure she wore it until it stank!” said Jo.

Had their mother always been like that? Why hadn't they asked their father? Or had he married someone who seemed no different from the women other men married? Where were the grandparents, the aunts and uncles, who should have appeared from North Carolina, so nearby, and cleared everything up?
There was only their mother, fetched from her previous life as if she had called him to come and get her. Susannah saw her father leading her mother down out of the humped Smoky Mountains. But something was not left behind.

Sometimes they had misgivings in school, away from the habit and familiarity—as expressionless, as consoling, when they burst through the screen door in the afternoon, as God—of the house. There was their mother, as she ever was. There was the kind of greeting that was hers, a look. Was there a shiver, at the sight of them? There was the hot water bottle, as ever, and why not, exactly, why not? And yet . . . They felt questions in themselves, but the questions, when the time came that they had pushed up far enough to be asked, seemed not to be there after all, like those mushrooms in the woods that turn to brown smoke when you step on them.

Eventually the questions were simpler, specific ones, such as where had their mother gone, the times she went away? Their father said it was not a hospital but a kind of boarding house in Maryland. You went there and people saw to whatever you needed. For a while
boarding house
gave Susannah a queasy picture of boards being used in some way that people—certain people—needed. It was not anything that hurt them; it was an involved, agonized shuffling back and forth and carrying and piling up. Boarding. How had their father decided when she ought to go, had to?

Why did he twice hire someone to do the milking, and go and get her back? It was not a subject you could pursue with a man like their father, then or later. “Don't you worry about it,” he would say.

For years, Susannah and Larry took their children to the farm every weekend. There were always things for Susannah to do. When Jo came home from Chicago the first few times, she would pull Susannah away from the babies at milking time and drag her to the barn. There, while their father was hitching up the milking machines, she would storm about their mother and the way they were living, their father and Susannah and Larry, with
their mother in the middle of them all like a bag of feed. With her groans! For other people, there were medicines! Hospitals!

“Well, my advice, Miss Mary Jo,” their father would say from behind a cow, after letting her go on for a while, “would be, you just worry about the war.” Or, “You concentrate on the show you folks are putting on out there in Chicago.” He meant the Democratic convention. “Now, hospitals, and the rest of that. That isn't what you really want,” he said, relenting and coming out to put his arm around Jo. “For your momma. Is it now.” It was not a question. “Don't you worry about it.”

Years before, somebody had worried about it. Who was it asking them questions and writing down their answers in a stuffy office in town? Who decided it was a shame they had no outings, a shame they could not swim, and bought them bathing suits and put their mother in the car with them and drove them all, with Stevia not even there, the time they went to the swimming pool?

Susannah must have been eight, the first and last time she was in the town pool. And Stevia was there when they got back after the accident, to say, “Betcha the kid that did it gets a licking,” and to touch behind Susannah's ears with perfume when she had her put to bed in her figure-eight bandage.

Susannah had been idly walking on tiptoe and clapping the water, hypnotized by the spangles in the blue color all around her. Without knowing anything about pool water she had the feeling it was going to lift her. She wandered up to her neck in it, and it did begin to lift her, but then there was a shout and a slamming pain, which was the snapping of her collarbone. Everybody seemed to be screaming with her, at her, and at the boy who had cannonballed off the slide. While she herself screamed, a man carried her to her mother on a towel on the grass.

There she stopped screaming. She remembered her mother, alone, in a bathing suit with loose elastic, looking up through her hair with her bottom teeth set in the white upper lip in a terrible way. The man, who had a deep, commanding voice, said, “She'll have to go to the doctor,” and her mother got up so slowly and heavily, in such confusion, holding her suit to her ribs, that
Susannah stopped crying in order to reach for her hand. She couldn't move the upper part of her body to do it. She could think just clearly enough through the pain to be sure they should never have come to a swimming pool.

Then the man fetched Jo from the wading pool and unpinned the key to their basket from Susannah's suit, and got their clothes and towels, all very quickly. The man wouldn't let Jo grab Susannah by the hand. Jo began to wail. “Stop that,” the man said calmly.

He drove them to the hospital, where, he told Jo—for people knew them, they were part of the county's history—she had been born. Jo was sitting in the front, still crying, and Susannah was lying down in the back seat, partly in her mother's lap, with her feet braced in a way the man had arranged them so that she would not be jolted. Her mother was not actually holding her still, though the man had said she must. Her mother had herself backed against the door, with Susannah half propped up by the damp towels in her lap. All the way to the hospital her mother said nothing to Susannah or Jo or the man.

Susannah could remember the smell that had gotten into her new bathing suit rising off her in waves. Years later the smell of chlorine still called up the dread she had felt in the man's car and at the same time her mesmerized confidence in him.

“And while this one was being born,” the man looked over his shoulder to tell Susannah, who was listening and not crying, despite the shocking pain, “a lot of people, myself included, were looking for you.” And although his deep voice did not fade from memory, most of the strange day faded, to be replaced by the story of it, of the trip to the swimming pool and Susannah's broken collarbone. And she never learned to swim. Neither of them did.

Looking back, the remarkable thing seemed to be that her mother had been there at all, at a swimming pool. Who had taken them there?