The Long Journey Home (38 page)

I saw Mother and Mercer before they saw me. They stood at the gate, Mother talking to Mercer. Mother—who had equaled exactly my five feet seven and a half inches in height and had always been heavy—was now a thin old woman, shrunken by inches and with a slight hump on her back. As always, she was impeccably dressed.

Our embrace was almost formal, but Mother had never given or received warm, affectionate hugs. As she’d said to Daddy many years before: “Wyman, you know I never liked to be touched.” Embracing her, I was even more aware of how much she’d shrunk. Then Mercer and I hugged each other. He was balding, and the familiar sadness in his eyes had grown deeper.

Mother insisted that I sit in the front seat beside Mercer in the air-conditioned car. It was then that I realized that I had no makeup on at all and that I’d not worn lipstick in years. I wondered what changes in me Mother was noticing.

The South again. Mile after mile of flat land covered with pitch pine. This part of Georgia felt depressing to me. Daddy always called it “the jumping-off place.”

Mother and Mercer had made plans. We were to go not directly to Cairo but to a motel near the Okefenokee where we would spend the night, then go to the swamp the following day before driving to Cairo. I began to realize how very large this trip was to them, and that they had arranged it this way to get the Okefenokee “chore” behind them. I say “chore,” for listening to them talk, I was realizing more and more acutely that going beyond the parameters of the small town of Cairo was something rarely considered, much less accomplished.

I regretted having taken the special flight to Jacksonville rather than spending the extra time, energy, and money and flown to Atlanta, then Tallahassee. I’d thought it would be a pleasant thing for all of us to see Jacksonville again, but we didn’t see the city or beaches at all. It was clear that their aim was to get out of Jacksonville as quickly as possible. Mercer was nervous but drove safely and efficiently. Mother kept telling him how well he was doing, as if praising
a child. Realizing that the trip to pick me up was a major challenge for both of them, I felt sad and regretful.

Soon I fell into my familiar role as the unconventional member of the family. We passed a trailer by the side of the road, a large sign beside it on which was painted an enormous palm of a hand, and beneath it the words:
PALMS READ HERE
.

“You went past so fast. I would have loved having a palm reading,” I said.

“Are you serious?” Mercer asked.

“Well, sort of,” I responded thoughtfully. I’d been kidding, but in truth I’d always wanted to see the inside of one of those trailers and experience what it was like to have a Gypsy read my fortune. Gypsies in trailers had been advertising their fortune-telling abilities since I was a child.

“I can stop and turn back, sister,” Mercer said quickly.

“Yes,” Mother added anxiously. “It would be no trouble at all.”

It upset me that they were so eager to please me. I would have felt more comfortable if Mercer or Mother had responded, “You
would
want to do such a thing!” Or “You never change, do you?” in a tone of familiar derision.

At the motel, Mother and I shared a room. After we changed into our robes and stretched out on our beds, Mercer came in, sat in a chair facing the beds, and lit a cigarette. He and Mother talked rapidly
at
me for hours. I smoked cigarette after cigarette. Their anxiety filled the room and my mind and body until I could no longer bear it. I went into the bathroom, changed into my swimsuit, and went out and swam laps in the motel pool. After I returned to the room, Mercer said good night to us and went to his room. Mother and I got dressed for bed and turned out the light. She was a tired, anxiety-riddled old woman. I felt like crying.

“Good night, Mother.”

“Good night, Margaret.”

The next morning after breakfast we went to the Okefenokee.

As Mother was stepping from the dock into the boat for a ride up
one of the canals, I reached out my hand to steady her. She jerked back angrily and told me that she was perfectly capable of getting into the boat without my help. Then she sat down beside me.

“Mother,” I explained, “you must have forgotten that I was with you that time we were going to the backyard to pick blueberries and you fell down those steep back steps and hurt yourself so badly.”

I was in my early teens when that had happened and was terrified to see Mother lying on the ground, unable to get up and crying out in pain. I’d rushed inside and phoned Daddy to come home. Then I ran out and sat beside Mother, wiping her forehead with a damp washcloth until Daddy and the doctor arrived. Mother had damaged her sciatic nerve and was in bed and on heavy dosages of painkillers for weeks.

“Then there was that Fourth of July when you fell from the top bench of the bleachers at the Amherst High School athletic field, and bounced down every bench to the ground. I was scared to death.” Somehow she’d escaped injury altogether that time, but the incident had triggered my memory and again I was shaken.

“I guess I didn’t realize how upset you’d been by those falls.”

“I guess you didn’t,” I responded, and the boatman pushed the boat from the dock and we were on our way.

It had been sixteen years since I’d been down Cairo’s North Broad Street. Trees and shrubs had grown large and lush and covered many details of the houses, making them look unfamiliar. Other houses had been torn down or remodeled as office buildings. I turned my face away from Mercer and Mother so they couldn’t see me crying. I had no desire to upset them. My feelings had always been too much for Mother. But my feelings were what I had. I no longer had husband or house. John Elder visited rarely, and Chris had moved to San Francisco. My relationship with Suzanne as I’d known it was over.

Despite my losses, I felt a stronger sense of self-confidence than I’d ever felt before. I’d faced Dr. Turcotte and the Northampton Police Department. While the assistant district attorney had been watching for me to break under the pressure of Dr. Turcotte, I’d grown stronger instead. Through my work with children and teachers in elementary schools, I’d discovered my power as a leader and teacher in new ways. Yes, I could bear to come back to Cairo, could bear seeing Mother and Mercer. I could even bear to take this ride down North Broad Street. But not without tears.

Mercer turned into the driveway and parked. Mother and I got out and walked to the house, Mercer following us inside carrying my luggage. Mother insisted that I use her room while she used the small bedroom that Bubba and I shared before Mercer’s birth. I declined her offer. “The middle room will be fine, really fine. It would make me feel bad to displace you.”

I stood, looking around the living room. The wood gleamed. Bright light poured through the newly washed windows. How hard Mother must have worked in preparation for my visit. I noticed several new chairs and a new coffee table in the living room. Then Mother wanted to show me her room. She was proud of its changes and additions. It looked more like a sitting room than a bedroom. The bed had no head- or footboard, and had a new, blue tailored quilted bedspread. At the foot of the bed stood a teak coffee table on which she’d arranged sand and seashells around a wood carving of a sandpiper. She’d added more bookcases, and a Danish-modern tan leather reading chair with a matching footstool stood in place of the old wicker rocker in which she’d rocked Harriet.

Then I looked up to see the oil painting I’d done of Mercer from memory the first year I was in college. I’d missed him so. How clearly my longing had brought his features back to memory. It wasn’t until he was middle-aged that he told me how upset he’d been at my leaving home and how much he’d missed me. We’d expressed so little overt affection in our family.

The three of us went to the breakfast room, the room where we
had always sat to talk as well as to eat. The breakfast bar had been replaced by a handsome old round walnut table with matching chairs that Mother had refinished. Between the table and the door to the dining room were three low Danish-modern chairs, leather straps woven over walnut frames, and several small tables and lamps. Ashtrays were everywhere. On the wall hung an old barn board on which I’d painted several ears of Indian corn, a watercolor of a clay owl I’d bought in Mexico, a plaster replica of the Aztec calendar I’d bought at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, and rows of coffee mugs hanging on a wooden mug holder.

Behind the chair in which I sat was the glass door leading to the terrace. It was through that door that Daddy had watched the birds splashing in the birdbath or eating at the bird feeder hanging from a pine tree. I remembered again how one of the last things that he’d done before dying was to feed the birds, and as always, the image comforted me.

I told Mother and Mercer how good the house looked, and how much I liked their new furniture. Both of them talked at me until I was exhausted. It felt like their talking was sucking the life from me. I finally went to bed, unspoken sadness and grief thick as water in the air.

The next day Mother left the house to go to the grocery store while Mercer was still asleep. Desperate to be alone, I didn’t offer to go with her. As soon as she left, I began to pace back and forth in the living room. Then I realized I was doing just as I’d done when I was a girl. It had been an act of survival, my way of working off the anxiety that had often been present in my body when I lived there. After a while I walked out the front door, picking a leaf from a boxwood shrub by the front steps. Just as I’d done when I was younger, I caressed the smooth surface of the leaf and traced the curves of it with
my index finger. Until then I hadn’t realized that touching the leaf had brought me an even deeper, richer comfort than rubbing the satin edging of my blanket when I was a young child. The long-leafed pines were tall and majestic. The azalea bushes had grown to trees. It was the azaleas, the long-leafed pines, banana trees, wisteria vines, fruit trees, flowers, and grass that had given me the comfort and nourishment that my family had been unable to provide.

I felt guilty for not going to the store with Mother. I knew she wanted me to be with her every minute of my visit, but the longer I was with her, the more upset I became. When Mother and Mercer were together, it felt intolerable. It was as though their pain was so great that their bodies couldn’t contain it—it filled the whole room.

Mother invited Bubba and his family for dinner. Bubba spent most of the evening lying on the bed with the headache he usually got when he went to Mother’s for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or any special occasion that brought the family together. The older of my nieces asked me a question about how I taught children to write poetry. Otherwise, the family talked about things and people of which I knew nothing.

After Bubba and his family left for the night, I surveyed the damage—a table full of dirty dishes and silver and a kitchen full of dirty pots and pans. I began to gather the plates to take to the kitchen. Mother got up from her chair in the living room and began to help me.

“No, Mother,” I said firmly. “Just sit back down. I’m going to clean up this mess. You’ve worked more than enough.”

I was still upset from watching how she walked with Bubba and his family to the front door. She’d shuffled along like a hunchbacked ghost. It was as if most of her had already left the physical world, while her husk of a body was so insubstantial she almost floated. It was heartbreaking how soul-weary she looked.

At my commanding tone, she sat down.

“You’re talking to me like Florence talked to Sarah just before she died.” Sarah was Mother’s sister, and Florence was her daughter.

There was more relief than irritation in Mother’s voice. I felt a hard lump in my throat. I knew that this was the last time I’d see Mother just as I’d known that I’d never see Daddy again when I said goodbye to him at the Tallahassee airport in 1967.

Grief over the lost years between us flooded through me. Grief, and great regret that I’d expressed so much anger to her when I was Dr. Turcotte’s patient, psychotic, and so strongly under his influence. I wished I’d expressed my anger privately, though I don’t know how I could have ever found my way to myself had I not broken with her. There had been no way to talk with her, no way to work on the relationship together.

But I wished for the impossible. I wished I’d been mature enough, strong enough, whole enough, to have given her more. She was no longer the domineering mother who threatened my selfhood. She was an old woman, and someone for whom I felt compassion and heartbreak. Mercer had grown increasingly paranoid as the years passed, and the two of them rarely left Cairo. “Sometimes I feel like a prisoner in my own home,” Mother said sadly. “And Mercer is so possessive of me, the house, and everything in it.”

I remembered the summer years before when I’d begged her to let him stay with me. “I need your brother,” she’d said, and I knew there was no hope of his getting away from her just as I now knew there was no way for her to get out from under his control. As difficult as it might have been, they loved and needed each other.

Mother wanted me to have her father’s briefcase and my great-grandmother’s bedspread that she’d woven herself, but she had to sneak them into my suitcase when Mercer was out. I remembered how often she used to quote “Bars do not a prison make.”

Fortunately, she was able to escape through reading her many books, magazines, journals, and—in their seasons—watching football and baseball on TV. Mercer was especially jealous of her reading. He also complained of her habitual coldness, though I expect he could have borne no more intimacy than he had with her. After her death, from time to time he expressed guilt about the way he’d fussed
at her when she’d left Comet sprinkled in the bathtub but hadn’t completed the cleaning.

“I need your brother.” Well, she had my brother and he had her, and there was nothing I could do except to feel sad for both of them.

After the dishes were finished, Mother and I took a walk in the yard. It was a clear night with a sky full of stars. I reached out and put my arm around her. While she didn’t respond, she didn’t pull away. She didn’t feel wispy and ghostlike as much as she felt wooden and hollow, like a tree dead for years, but still standing, waiting for a strong wind to finally topple it.