What We Keep Read online

  We suspected our parents would object to our sleeping outside, so we never asked them if we could. Instead, we would wait until the grandfather clock downstairs bonged midnight in its old, metallic voice, and then we would tiptoe out—silent, we were sure, as any Indian ever was. We admired Indians. We dyed sheets with coffee and made long-stitched dresses out of them, cut the bottoms into unlikely looking fringes, and then cinched the waists with beaded belts. We tucked our parakeet Lucky’s discarded feathers into our hair and put on the moccasins we’d begged for at Christmas, even though their color was an untrue pink. We arranged rocks into circles for a campfire, hunted for squirrels and chipmunks in order to commune with animal spirits, and rolled jewel-colored berries in leaves for dinner.

  Mostly, though, we practiced walking noiselessly through the woods behind our house. It wasn’t easy. I thought the best approach was to think yourself very light, and to intuit where the twigs were—if you tried to see them all, you’d only fail.

  Our parents went to bed early, as did virtually everyone in our neighborhood. No doubt we would have been safe exiting the house around ten, but midnight had a romantic and dangerous flair to it. Besides, we liked being on the cusp of something, being exactly between days, moving about like ghosts when Monday gave way to Tuesday. We thought if ever there was a time for the extraordinary to occur, this was it. And we longed for the extraordinary. People rooted in security often do.

  All along one side of the house were lush white lilac bushes, and it was in them that we hid our sleeping blanket, an old quilt that our family once used for picnics—long after it had been used for many beds. The colors in the quilt—pinks, purples, yellows, greens—were faded beyond pastel; they resembled the bleeding edge of a watercolor, and the fabric was so worn it felt almost like touching nothing. The pattern was of flowers in a basket, and the person who made the quilt had embroidered a bee hovering over one of the roses. I liked thinking about how, a hundred years ago, someone else had been charmed by the sight of a bee and a flower, had believed it worth commenting on in this quiet way. I loved the natural world, too. I loved all aspects of science, in fact—everything I read having to do with that most elegant of subjects thrilled me, though usually I did not understand what I read. It was an oddity about me that the subject I had the most difficulty with was the one I loved most. I would stare at formulas and admire them for their spare beauty without being able to grasp their meaning. The fact that they cleanly explained some higher law to someone else was enough for me. It comforted me.

  Sharla and I would spread the quilt out in the middle of the backyard and then stretch out luxuriously. We would spend some time contemplating the constellations, reciting to each other all the star lore we’d learned thus far. It seemed like an Indian thing to do. Plus it required the beautiful necessity of focusing on the dark heavens, letting the phase of the moon register on the back of the working eye. The grass was a deep blue color in the dim light of night; the smell was rich and horsey. The whine of the occasional mosquito was thrilling because we couldn’t see the insect, and therefore our minds made it roughly the size of a little airplane. We wore sleeveless T-shirts and waist-high underwear, the white cotton uniform of the flat-chested.

  Just before dawn, when the sky lit up at the bottom with its hopeful shade of gray/pink, we would sneak back into the house. Now our beds were acceptable, and we would pull down the shades and sleep until around ten, then come tousle-headed and blinking into the kitchen for a breakfast of peanut-butter toast and orange juice. Except for those rare times when our mother wasn’t home—when she put on her gloves and hat and took the bus to the dentist’s, say. At those times, we would have miniature Coke floats, served in the thin, light-refracting champagne flutes our parents kept in the high cupboard over the refrigerator.

  We had some thoughts about life that summer: it was a smooth and plodding thing, as comfortable as slippers. It was pleasantly predictable, widely safe. Without knowing exactly what our futures would hold, we nonetheless felt sure about the way to march toward them. Right was right. Wrong was wrong. The difference between the two was easy to see.

  And then Jasmine Johnson moved in next door and set off reverberations in our minds and in our centers that would shape us more surely than anything else ever had, or would.

  I was the one to see the moving van first. I came downstairs early one Tuesday, bent on finding a “dew nest.” This, according to my sister, was the morning home of the sacred Egyptian jewel spider, a delicate creature with a multicolored pattern on its back. Much prettier than your average spider. And capable of granting wishes. If you were so fortunate as to find one still in the nest, you put your hand over it, made a wish, kissed your fingertips, and, voilà, at the end of the day anything you desired would be yours. Anything. I half knew this was another one of my sister’s fanciful lies—she believed in benign forms of torture—but I got up early just to check. My mother was in the kitchen making breakfast, the radio turned on low to “keep her company.” Perry Como was singing one of his nice-guy songs and my mother hummed along shyly. She had a crush on Perry Como. She said that. It was all right; my father had a crush on Dinah Shore.

  My mother was dressed in her beautiful yellow summer robe, the tie cinched evenly into a bow at the exact center of her waist, but her auburn hair was sticking up in the back, an occasional occurrence that I always hated seeing, since in my mind it suggested a kind of incompetence. It was an unruly cowlick, nearly impossible to tame—I knew this, having an identical cowlick of my own—but I did not forgive its presence on my mother. It did not go with the rest of her looks: her deep blue eyes, her thin, sculptured nose, her high cheekbones, her white, white skin—all signs, I was certain, of some distant link with royalty. She would not pursue the notion; I intended to do it for her when I grew up. “There!” I would say one day, presenting her with papers embossed with gold seals. “Oh, my,” she would say softly, handling the papers with a combination of wild joy and great delicacy. “Thank you, Ginny! I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. Thank you!”

  “It’s all right,” I would say, wiping the tears from her old face. “At least you got to finally know.”

  As for now, my mother looked up from the electric frying pan to ask, “Where are you off to?”

  “Your hair’s sticking up,” I answered.

  “I know,” she said, though she had not known. If she had, she would have fixed it. She put her hand to her head, pressed down, and I saw a hint of embarrassment, a rising up of pink to her cheeks. This was a tender thing; and I thought about crossing the room to hug her around the waist, to feel her hand with her loose wedding ring on the back of my head, cradling it, but I was getting older. And I had work to do. The spider had to be found still in the nest in order for its magic to work.

  “I’m going out to look for something,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Do you want eggs?” my mother called after me. “Bacon?”

  “No,” I told her. “I’m going back to bed.” Although as I stepped outside I realized I wasn’t tired anymore. Early mornings invigorated me; it was the clean-slate aspect of them, the way the air seemed washed and expectant.

  The screen door banged behind me. I stretched, searched the backyard, found nothing. Then, though I doubted the spider would be so public, I went into the front yard, and there it was, an orange monstrosity of a truck, backed up over the lawn to the front door of the house beside ours.

  Mrs. O’Donnell lived next to us, and I had supposed she always would. She was a widow of indeterminate age. She was slow-gaited, but not dependent on a cane; she dressed in clothes that were dowdy but not quite grandmotherly; and she had a voice that was thin but not quivery. She wore thick bifocals with pale-blue frames, one side repaired—apparently permanently—with a tiny gold safety pin. Every spring she gave herself home permanents that were an advertisement against them: her steely gray hair reminded me of Brillo pads, minus the thrill of the hidden soap. She wore
a dark-pink lipstick that disappeared from the middle of her mouth and caked at the edges of it, and excessive amounts of rouge that on anyone else my mother would call suggestive. With the exception of our annual Christmas cookie exchange and the halfhearted ritual of waving when we saw each other coming and going, she mostly kept to herself. I never saw anyone come to her house, except for her nephew Leroy, who was a cop. He would visit irregularly in his show-off work car, pull up in front of her house at an angle that suggested extreme emergency. He exited his vehicle with difficulty; his belly got in the way of the steering wheel. Sometimes when he left the house he would be carrying a brown paper bag folded over neatly at the top. I had no idea what was in there, but I liked to think that it was fried chicken, wrapped up in aluminum foil. A leg and a breast, which Leroy would eat while he sat in his car, waiting for speeders, longing for salt.

  Last summer, for a few fever-pitched weeks, I had entered into the business of making and selling pot holders. Mrs. O’Donnell was my first customer. She bought a couple of the rose-and-green ones—my favorite, as well—and then invited me in for Rice Krispies treats. After she’d given me an impromptu tour of her house, we sat down together at the kitchen table. Then we both seemed to realize we had nothing whatsoever to say. I noticed faint brown stains on her tablecloth, next to an embroidered picture of three gray kittens in a basket, whose blue eyes seemed sad to me, lost and pleading.

  “Oh, well,” Mrs. O’Donnell finally said softly, looking up from her lap. I saw that her eyes were moist and that she had what appeared to be a bit of an infection in one of them.

  I didn’t want the treat anymore. Pinkeye had broken out spectacularly last spring in my elementary school. I was one of the few spared, and I didn’t want to take any chances now. I looked around in a way I hoped didn’t seem desperate, and finally commented on a rooster clock hanging on the kitchen wall. It was a black rooster, tail feathers drooping forlornly, comb and wattle faded to a dusty pink. The round face of a clock was trapped forever in his center—he would never seduce hens, or exuberantly salute the morning. Though I knew full well he was plastic and never stood a chance for such things, I nonetheless regretted for him this awful loss. The clock said 1:47, though the time was around ten-thirty.

  “That’s really nice,” I said, smiling and nodding at the rooster.

  “What is?”

  I pointed behind her, and when she turned to look, I slipped the Rice Krispies treat into my shirt pocket.

  “Would you like that clock?” Mrs. O’Donnell asked.

  “Oh!” I said. “No, thank you; you keep it, I couldn’t take that.”

  “To tell the truth, I’d forgotten I even had it. You’re welcome to it.”

  “Oh,” I said. And then, after a pause, “Uh-huh.” Finally, “Thank you, that’s very nice of you, but really …” I so very much did not want that clock. I knew it would be sticky with old grease, that there would be nothing at all I could do with it, not even take it apart to have a look at its innards. I was very interested that summer in taking things apart. I cracked open rocks with my father’s hammer, rubbed gently the damp surfaces I found inside various pods I pulled from trees, ripped apart buds for the tight sight of embryonic flowers. I used a pearlhandled steak knife to saw open the high heels of a pair of party shoes my mother was throwing out, and on one brave day when no one else was home, unscrewed the back of the kitchen radio. I enjoyed several minutes of silent appreciation for the glowing tubes and copper wires I found there, adjusted the volume up and down ceaselessly, trying to see what did that.

  Now I stared at the rooster clock, trying to imagine if there could be any single thing of value or interest to me in it. I had heard that there were jewels inside watches, but I didn’t think anything like that lay inside that rooster; knew if I opened it I would notice nothing but perhaps a rising up of fine dust. I wanted to say clearly to Mrs. O’Donnell that I did not want the clock, but I wanted even more not to hurt her feelings. Therefore I remained silent, while long seconds passed. My stomach felt as though it were being wrung out; I curled and uncurled my toes slowly against the soles of my new flip-flops.

  Finally, Mrs. O’Donnell smiled, closemouthed and vaguely regretful; I did the same. She nodded; I hesitated, then nodded, too. Then she said, “You know, you can take as many treats as you want, dear. But let me wrap them up for you. They’ll stain your shirt if you keep them in your pocket that way.”

  Apart from that one visit, I never really talked to Mrs. O’Donnell. I didn’t particularly regret her moving. I understood that this meant anything could happen; a kid my age might move in, for example. She might be an only child and I could become her best friend and profit by the spoiling she got from her parents. And we needed younger kids on the block; Sharla and I were the only ones under sixteen. I enjoyed very much the sight of teenage goodnight kissing that went on, both in cars pulled up in front of houses as well as the more chaste variety that took place under yellow porch lights; I thrilled to the screeching sound of peel-outs performed by the neighborhood boys whenever their parents were away; I noted with interest and envy the outfits worn by girlfriends walking down the sidewalks together: neat upside-down V-cuts in pedal pushers, blouses with the collar turned up, white leather bucket purses slung over shoulders, rabbits’ feet on a chain at the side. Those girls wore fat lines of eyeliner, Fire-and-Ice lipstick.

  I also liked seeing the teens come back from town with bags from the record store holding the latest 45s; liked knowing they’d probably also been to the drugstore for vanilla Cokes and fries, after which they might have gone behind the store to sneak a smoke. But I would have traded all that happily for some kids our age. If ever we’d taken the risk of telling hard truths, Sharla and I might have admitted to each other that we were lonely.

  After I spied the moving van, I ran back in the house and told my mother Mrs. O’Donnell was moving.

  “Is it today?” my mother asked. She went to the window, looked out at the van.

  “Oh, it is. Poor thing.” She returned to the stove, turned the bacon, drained some grease into an empty milk carton.

  “How come you didn’t say anything?” I asked. “How come you didn’t tell me?”

  “Well, I did. I’m sure I did.”

  “Nuh-uh,” I said, which was my favorite expression. It was rakish, I thought. I recalled now, though, that my mother had told me. But it had been on a rainy day and I’d been reading, and I was close to the end of a chapter in a Nancy Drew book. Who could have expected me to hear anything when a pillow was being lowered onto Nancy’s face?

  “How come you called her ‘poor thing’?” I asked.

  “Oh.…” My mother laid the bacon out in neat rows on a paper towel.

  “Can I have a piece, just one?” I now regretted saying I didn’t want breakfast; the smell of the bacon rivaled my mother’s “My Sin.”

  “Yes, I made some for you.”

  Ah.

  I took a piece of bacon, then sat at the kitchen table to eat it, one leg crossed over the other and swinging in order to maximize the flavor. “How come you said ‘poor thing’?”

  My mother cracked eggs into the frying pan, then bent and squinted at the dial, adjusting it. I liked when she did this. She looked like a scientist.

  “Oh, you know,” she said. She didn’t want to tell me. Which meant that I must persist.

  “What?”

  “Well, she’s old and all alone. Having some … problems. She’s going to the nursing home.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know much about nursing homes, except that the residents I’d seen there mostly sat like rag dolls in wheelchairs, staring. They were the recipients of many construction-paper projects that we did in school and then reluctantly delivered—May baskets, glittery valentines, turkeys made from handprints, Santas with cotton-ball beards. And you died there, I knew that. I had a flash of regret that I hadn’t been kinder to Mrs. O’Donnell. It wouldn’t have been so hard.

  “Who
’s moving in?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—We’ll see pretty soon, I guess. How many eggs do you want?”

  “One,” I said. “No. Two.”

  It was going to be a busy day; I wanted to be fortified. Everything Mrs. O’Donnell had in that house was about to be brought outside. Her ottoman and her scrapbooks. All her pots and pans. Towels and rugs, the doilies she kept on her maple end tables. Her very bed. I would see everything she owned, carried by strong men in T-shirts up a ramp and into the dark mouth of the truck. When they left, the house would be empty. Not even a curtain. I shivered.

  I hear someone rummaging around beside me and open my eyes to see Martha, digging in the seat pocket. “My reading glasses,” she says. “I think I stuck them in here.” She reaches in farther, pulls them out, and holds them up triumphantly.

  “You decided not to sleep?” I say.

  “I did sleep! It felt like such a long time, but it was only fifteen minutes. I had a dream and everything. I dreamed I had a baby—a little girl. Actually, from what I hear, that’s a nightmare.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know, how mean girls are to their mothers.”

  Something inside me stiffens. “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “Do you have girls?”

  “Two, ten and twelve.”

  “And they’re nice to you?”

  “Well, they have their moments. But all kids do.”

  “I don’t know,” Martha says. “I guess that incident in the cemetery reminded me of how hard girls can be on their mothers. I know I was—for the longest time, my mother just couldn’t do anything right. It’s like … Well, once I saw these two young women in an art museum, talking about a painting. One of them said, ‘It’s really just the quality of differentness that I love so much here. I always want a little differentness in my art, don’t you?’ And the other woman said, ‘Oh God, yes. I want everything in my life to be unusual. Except things like, you know, my mother.’ And I thought, that’s true. I wouldn’t want my mother to be different, either. Yet I always despised her for being the same as everyone else.” She looks at me. “Your kids aren’t like that, thinking everything you do is wrong?”