Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (36 page)

When the choir was in place and the minister had turned to face the congregation, my mother set out boldly to join Aunt Dodie and my sister in a pew near the front. I could see that the grey slip had slid down half an inch and was showing in a slovenly way at one side.

After the service my mother turned in the pew and spoke to people. People wanted to know my name and my sister's name and then they said, “She does look like you.” “No, maybe this one looks more like you”; or, “I see your own mother in this one.” They asked how old we were and what grade I was in at school and whether my sister was going to school. They asked her when she was going to start
and she said, “I'm not,” which was laughed at and repeated. (My sister often made people laugh without meaning to; she had such a firm way of publicizing her misunderstandings. In this case it turned out that she really did think she was not going to school because the primary school near where we lived was being torn down, and nobody had told her she would go on a bus.)

Two or three people said to me, “Guess who taught me when
I
went to school? Your Momma!”

“She never learned me much,” said a sweaty man, whose hand I could tell she did not want to shake, “but she was the best-lookin' one I ever had!”

“Did my slip show?”

“How could it? You were standing in the pew.”

“When I was walking down the aisle, I wonder?”

“Nobody could see. They were all still standing for the hymn.”

“They could have seen, though.”

“Only one thing surprises me. Why didn't Allen Durrand come over and say hello?”

“Was he there?”

“Didn't you see him? Over in the Wests' pew, under the window they put in for the father and mother.”

“I didn't see him. Was his wife?”

“Ah, you must have seen
her
! All in blue with a hat like a buggy wheel. She's very dressy. But not to be compared to you, today.”

Aunt Dodie herself was wearing a navy blue straw hat with some droopy cloth flowers, and a button-down-the-front slub rayon dress.

“Maybe he didn't know me. Or didn't see me.”

“He couldn't very well not have seen you.”

“Well.”

“And he's turned out such a good-looking man. That
counts if you go into politics. And the height. You very seldom see a short man get elected.”

“What about Mackenzie King?”

“I meant around here. We wouldn't've elected
him
, from around here.”

“Your mother's had a little stroke. She says not, but I've seen too many like her.

“She's had a little one, and she might have another little one, and another, and another. Then some day she might have the big one. You'll have to learn to be the mother, then.

“Like me. My mother took sick when I was only ten. She died when I was fifteen. In between, what a time I had with her! She was all swollen up; what she had was dropsy. They came one time and took it out of her by the pailful.”

“Took what out?”

“
Fluid
.

“She sat up in her chair till she couldn't any more, she had to go to bed. She had to lie on her right side all the time to keep the fluid pressure off her heart. What a life. She developed bedsores, she was in misery. So one day she said to me, Dodie, please, just turn me on to my other side for just a little while, just for the relief. She begged me. I got hold of her and turned her—she was a weight! I turned her on her heart side, and the minute I did, she died.

“What are you crying about? I never meant to make you cry! Well you are a big baby, if you can't stand to hear about Life.”

Aunt Dodie laughed at me, to cheer me up. In her thin brown face her eyes were large and hot. She had a scarf around her head that day and looked like a gypsy woman, flashing malice and kindness at me, threatening to let out more secrets than I could stand.

“Did you have a stroke?” I said sullenly.

“What?”

“Aunt Dodie said you had a stroke.”

“Well, I didn't. I told her I didn't. The doctor says I didn't. She thinks she knows everything, Dodie does. She thinks she knows better than a doctor.”

“Are you going to have a stroke?”

“No. I have low blood pressure. That is just the opposite of what gives you strokes.”

“So, are you not going to get sick at all?” I said, pushing further. I was very much relieved that she had decided against strokes, and that I would not have to be the mother, and wash and wipe and feed her lying in bed, as Aunt Dodie had had to do with her mother. For I did feel it was she who decided, she gave her consent. As long as she lived, and through all the changes that happened to her, and after I had received the medical explanations of what was happening, I still felt secretly that she had given her consent. For her own purposes, I felt she did it: display, of a sort; revenge of a sort as well. More, that nobody could ever understand.

She did not answer me, but walked on ahead. We were going from Aunt Dodie's place to Uncle James's, following a path through the humpy cow pasture that made the trip shorter than going by the road.

“Is your arm going to stop shaking?” I pursued recklessly, stubbornly.

I demanded of her now, that she turn and promise me what I needed.

But she did not do it. For the first time she held out altogether against me. She went on as if she had not heard, her familiar bulk ahead of me turning strange, indifferent. She withdrew, she darkened in front of me, though all she did in fact was keep on walking along the path that she and Aunt Dodie had made when they were girls running back and forth to see each other; it was still there.

One night my mother and Aunt Dodie sat on the porch and recited poetry. How this started I forget; with one of them thinking of a quotation, likely, and the other one matching it. Uncle James was leaning against the railing, smoking. Because we were visiting, he had permitted himself to come.

“How can a man die better,”
cried Aunt Dodie cheerfully,

   
“Than facing fearful odds
,

   
For the ashes of his fathers

   
And the temples of his gods?”

   
“And all day long the noise of battle rolled,”
my mother declared,

   
“Among the mountains by the winter sea.”

   
“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note
,

As his corpse to the ramparts we hurried.…”

   
“For I am going a long way

To the island-valley of Avalon

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.…”

   My mother's voice had taken on an embarrassing tremor, so I was glad when Aunt Dodie interrupted.

“Heavens, wasn't it all sad, the stuff they put in the old readers?”

“I don't remember a bit of it,” said Uncle James. “Except—” and he recited without a break:

“Good for you,” said Aunt Dodie, and she and my mother joined in, so they were all reciting together, and laughing at each other:

“Though when you come to think of it, even that has kind of a sad ring,” Aunt Dodie said.

If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn't stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents' old camera used to take. In these snapshots Aunt Dodie and Uncle James and even Aunt Lena, even her children, come out clear enough. (All these people dead now except the children who have turned into decent friendly wage earners, not a criminal or as far as I know even a neurotic among them.) The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to
get rid
, of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same.