Some Things That Stay Read online

  It’s the first time in quite a while that I have really looked at one of my father’s paintings. It’s a wonderful painting, very stark, very moody. I just wish that girl looked a little more like me. If she had breasts it would ruin the whole thing, but she could have my face. That wouldn’t hurt the picture at all.

  He finishes the painting in two days, a record for him, and begins to sketch a new one of the cow pasture. By the edge of the field, there is a girl flying, naked, arms spread out to catch the wind. My mother comes outside and walks over to look at the sketch. She shakes her head and sighs.

  This flying girl looks even more like my sister now, but I must admit that even though this painting is hardly done yet, it is more alive than all his other paintings. He paints right through the time he usually paints the couch pictures. In the evening he wants to play Scrabble. Megan and my mother team up together and are beating us all when my mother starts coughing. She coughs so hard she knocks the table, and the letters on the board scatter and lose their place.

  My father says it’s time for bed.

  Five

  Today my mother comes back from the market with something more than food. She has a white box, a gift box, but it’s not anyone’s birthday. “Don’t touch,” she says, with a sly grin, then puts away the food: chicken in the fridge, cereals in the cupboard, canned food on the back hall shelves. It’s a bright blue day outside, but Robert, Megan, and I hang around in the kitchen; we even help to put things away. We scoot around the kitchen chairs, open cupboards and close them. I notice my mother glancing at the kitchen table every minute, at the box.

  “Careful,” she says, to no one in particular.

  Finally, without comment, she opens the box and pulls back the crisp white tissue paper. Inside is a very light cadmium-green vase, a glass vase; the glass unbearably thin. She lifts it slowly out of the box like a baby, with both hands. She walks it over to the sink and fills it with water, then places it on the kitchen table. “Don’t touch,” she says as she goes to a drawer, takes out the scissors, then goes outside. We look at each other, unsure whether to follow her out or look at the vase.

  We don’t buy fragile things. It’s an unspoken law. We do not allow ourselves breakable things in our life. Nothing that is not easy to move. Only tin pans, clothes, a few board games and puzzles, canvas and paints, frames and framed pictures, boots and shoes.

  My mother carries in fresh-cut flowers, naming them as she snips the stems under running water in the sink. “Foxglove. Its other name is digitalis. It’s used for medicines, but it’s deadly if ingested. Poppy. It’s where opium is derived from. Yarrow, used as a dye. Columbine. My favorite.” As she talks and snips, she turns to place each flower, one at a time, into the vase. When she’s done, she steps back and just looks at the flowers arching out of the green glass. A drifting sigh comes up and out of her lungs, through her open mouth, like a butterfly on a warm day.

  “It’s pretty,” Megan says.

  “Thank you,” my mother says. “It is, isn’t it?” She picks up the glass vase and walks around the house, all three of us following. She puts it down on different surfaces, steps back, then moves it again. It stays, finally, on the glossy table between the couch and the overstuffed chair. But in the morning it is on the kitchen table again, and at dinner it’s on the dining room table.

  That night, at dinner, my father brings up the subject of the vase. “Yes, it is lovely. I can see why you were tempted. It’ll be hard to move. It might not make it.”

  Another rule: we do not mention moving until it’s too late. I wish he hadn’t said what he did. It’s like breaking the enchantment of the vase. It’s almost like breaking the vase itself.

  But over the next week the effect of my father’s words mellows to a point where the vase grows stronger. Thicker somehow. We don’t tiptoe when we walk by, wherever it is placed. We don’t even always look at it. It is part of us now.

  We become more careful about this house, and more careless. We are careful not to spill juice on the carpeting, or scuff the floors, or bump the walls, but our belongings begin to be absorbed by the house as if it were a sponge. We lose a shoe, a garden glove, a box of markers. We keep a Monopoly game, even though we have lost three of the properties; we assume they will turn up someday under the couch or a rug, even though we have looked already. Never before did we keep useless or broken things. Fixing things is something people do someday, and our somedays have always been limited to a year. We throw broken things out when they break. We move only what is whole.

  But this time we begin to occupy this house as if it belonged to us.

  It is seldom that I go to town. There is no reason. I imagine this town would be a comfort to someone old, who has seen too much change in the world; this town holds on to yesterday with a fierce grip. One block still has wooden sidewalks with wooden rails, as if we might need to hitch up a horse. The market has a minimum of staples, mostly those things, in combination, that can be the basis of all else. Flour and salt, eggs and potatoes, fresh fruit and canned fruit, fresh vegetables and canned vegetables, whole bodies of meat hanging in a back cooler to be dragged out and cut to specific sizes and shapes. Lots of tomato paste. Nothing foreign. No green olives. Rarely a pineapple or plum. It is a town that has been frozen, pre—World War II, except for the newest addition, seven years ago: the granite stone outside city hall with the names of forty-eight dead.

  I don’t like this town. There is a statue in the town square of two children huddled under an umbrella, the fountain sprinkling down a constant rain upon them. There is something so old about these two children in their perpetual wait for a sunny day. There is also a sadness to their lack of privacy. I try not to look at the statue; I imagine them at night, alone, in a dark, steady rain, their feet planted in cement. They are the stuff of nightmares.

  Today, though, I have asked to be given a ride into town when my mother does the shopping.

  I leave her at the market and walk across the street to Myra’s Merchandise. Brenda says Myra is an Indian, an Indian princess with magical powers, and she has everything you would ever want, or need.

  When I walk in the store she is standing behind the counter. She has long black hair and black eyes and she watches me closely as I look around at the stuff that’s piled all over the place. There are typewriters and seashell-coated cigar boxes, a brass trumpet with a dent and a lamp with maroon trim on the shade. There are dishes and rugs and old clothes and wooden guns. Everything. I walk around but I don’t see what I want. My mother will get mad if I don’t hurry.

  “Do you have a mirror?” I ask.

  “What kind of mirror?” she asks, her voice soft and smooth.

  “A hand-held mirror,” I say. “With a handle,” I add stupidly.

  “Yes, I have two.” She squats down behind the counter, slides open a glass door, and from nowhere brings out two mirrors, one wooden, one ornate silver. There is no question which one I want. I reach for the silver one and it is in my hand before I know it.

  The mirror is a perfect circle, the glass clear, the image sharp; but it’s an old mirror. On the back the thick, tarnished silver is shaped into vines with leaves spiraling inwards to the center, where there is one rose, fully opened. The mirror is smooth and heavy; a weight of something more than I can handle easily, but there is no giving it back. It is already mine, even though I don’t know how much it costs.

  “Five dollars,” she says. “If you don’t have it all now, you can owe me.”

  “No, I have it.” I brought everything I have, which is exactly six dollars. I hand her five.

  She takes the money and folds it into her pocket, then holds out her hand for the mirror. “I’ll wrap it for you,” she says, placing a white box on the counter.

  “No, thanks,” I say. I’m not wrapping anything up again. I’m not putting things in boxes. I hold the mirror to my chest and leave, turning back just in time to catch Myra’s smile. I believe Brenda. She is an Indian princess
. I just wonder what she’s doing here, in this town. Maybe her ancestors are buried nearby. Maybe she can’t leave. Maybe the dead won’t let her.

  Maybe I’ve been reading too many of my brother’s comics.

  There are mirrors in this rented house, as in all our rented houses. Round mirrors above bedroom bureaus, square mirrors above bathroom sinks, long rectangular mirrors above dining room cabinets, oblong mirrors behind candles stuck to the wall, but they all reflect a foreign place; the reflections from those mirrors are like pictures of a vacation, like postcards of me visiting a foreign country. The reflection is of a person in a place which she will soon leave. But I’m not moving again.

  With my new mirror, the exact size of my face, there is only a hint of what lies behind me, someplace vague and shiny and out of focus: it is the place that I will someday call home. Holding the mirror close, I see my face, my high cheekbones, my heavy and too hairy eyebrows, my uneven lips and plain-as-mud hair. The mirror doesn’t lie, but for once, I like the way I look.

  I lay the mirror facedown on the dead boy’s bureau.

  Above me, a board creaks.

  Dinner Saturday night is tense. Robert, Megan, and I have decided to go back to church with the Murphys tomorrow.

  “I don’t understand,” my mother says. She is walking around the dining room table carrying a bowl of salad. “Why do you want to go back? Did you find God there?” She says this as if it were offensive, like finding a slug in your shoe.

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t.” I emphasize the I, looking at Robert and Megan. They have been behaving very piously all week, offering to do chores, never talking back. You would think she would want us to keep going to church by the way they are behaving.

  “But then why?” She sits down. Our plates are full and we all begin to eat, except she doesn’t. She just keeps looking from one of us to the other. She looks confused. Betrayed. She looks like she might burst into tears.

  “I like the possibility,” I say.

  “I like the windows,” Megan says. “And the singing.”

  “I like the singing too,” I say, not to be outdone.

  “And you?” my mother says to Robert.

  He shrugs and ducks his head. He’s such a baby. I could tell her it’s just because Megan and I are going and he doesn’t want to be left out, but she should be able to figure that out if she’s so smart.

  “It’s their choice,” my father says. “They’re just balancing the scales.”

  My mother looks sharply at him, her lips thin. “We are talking about religion, not weights and measures. We’re talking about a form of brainwashing. I find it frightening.”

  “If you’re wrong, we will be condemned to hell for all eternity,” I say. “You’re risking our souls.”

  “Damn! It’s started already. Damn Helen!”

  We are all shocked. Damning Helen is like kicking a puppy. Worse even. My father lays down his fork and clears his throat.

  “I don’t like it any more than you, Liz, but we’ve brought them up to think for themselves.” He gestures to us, as if we need pointing out. “Going back to church might be the best thing for them. The more they go, the more disenchanted they will become. It’s like a crush right now. If we don’t fight it, it will get old and lose its appeal.”

  My mother opens her mouth but no words come out. She stands. She hasn’t touched her dinner.

  “I’m not very hungry right now.” She goes outside.

  We eat in silence for a while. Finally my father speaks. “Well, did anything interesting happen today?”

  “I got the new Haunt of Fear,” my brother says, animated, eyes bright. “It’s great. It’s just so great. The Crypt Keeper tells this story about a man whose wife dies and she comes back and her skin is all falling off and …”

  “You know I don’t like those magazines, Robert. You may read them, but I don’t want to hear the gory details.”

  Robert looks back down at his plate, and we eat.

  It’s different at church this time. I know where to sit. I can find the song in the hymnal quicker. I still don’t sing, but I say the words in my head. Best of all, Helen doesn’t stand up, so I begin to relax.

  Several people do stand. They ask us to pray for a daughter who is having a difficult pregnancy, an uncle who has stopped bathing or taking care of himself, a grandson who can’t control his temper. When we pray, I add my own message. I tell God that if He saved me from the bull, I’m grateful, but would He please keep trying to convince me. I suggest a message in the sky. I apologize for being such a pest, but it’s hard, since my mom raised us to be good atheists.

  After a few songs, none of which I sing out loud but kind of hum in my head, seeing if I have the timing right, the minister reads a Bible story from Luke about going after a lost sheep. I think he’s saying that God will look after people who get lost, but then I wonder about the ones that were never found in the first place, like me. This is the part I don’t get. God saves people who believe in Jesus, and everyone else will go to hell. What about kids in India who never heard about him in the first place? What if I never met Helen? Would he damn me because I was born to my mother? I’m guessing, from what I’ve heard, God’s not all that friendly. Or fair. I can understand how my mom might get so mad at Him. I make myself stop thinking this stuff. I am here to believe. I wish God would make it easier for me.

  Next, the minister tells another story about himself. He was in a storm on the lake and his sailboat tipped over. He was wearing his life preserver and floated in the cold water for over five hours before he was rescued. He says Jesus is like that life preserver. He’s there for us, but we have to wear Him, we have to have Him in our heart for Him to help us. He pauses a long time before he speaks again. He lets his story sink in. Then we sing. Then we pray. Then we sing again. I really like the singing and I think I’ll sing the next song and God will come to me, but then everyone gets up and leaves.

  Once again I feel as if I was almost there. The warmth of the church, the comfort of the songs, the belief of all those people radiating all around me, was just beginning to get to me, and then it is over and I’m outside and everything looks the same. It’s a dingy little town, still four blocks long, still smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

  After we return home from church, I go into the barn to look for my mother. The smells hit me. Hay and manure, cow’s milk, warm wood. Cool air. The barn is muted and hazy, except where the sun peeks through holes in the roof, casting beams of golden light like pillars in a temple. I tense, thinking God might speak now. It feels holy in here. I wait. Nothing happens. I wave my hand through a beam of light. Dust motes swirl. My mother isn’t here.

  She can usually be found in the barn, even when she isn’t milking the cow. Sometimes I find her sitting on a hay bale, staring at nothing. Maybe she likes it in here because it relaxes her eyes. The barn holds in the distance of the outside world, sets limits to what can be seen. It’s relaxing in here. Like church.

  She loves to milk Edith. She sits bent forward on the stool, motionless except for the pull, pull, pull of her hands. She is the only one of us who drinks the cow’s milk. The rest of us don’t like the thin-looking stuff that comes out of our rented cow, or the way the fat floats to the surface when it thickens in the fridge. Even when my mother shakes the glass bottle before she drinks it, you can see little bits of fat, like tiny frogs’ eggs, floating in the murky white.

  The other place I can usually find my mother is at the pond. The pond, three times the surface of the barn, is grown over in spots with weeds, but it’s deep enough at the far end to swim in. It also has fish. Bass and sunfish and a few catfish. My mother fishes in the pond, although she doesn’t bring home the fish to eat. She gently takes the hooks out of their mouths and tosses them back in. She talks to them too, telling them not to worry while she takes the hook out, she won’t hurt them. I bet that’s hard to believe with a hook stuck through your cheek.

  Even though she like
s these peaceful places, my mother is not peaceful. She’s constantly restless and there are lines around her eyes I never noticed before. At night, I hear her get up and go to the kitchen. Last night I heard her coughing down there, the repetition of her cough so constant it actually put me to sleep. My father never wakes when she goes downstairs. He is a heavy sleeper. We could play a tuba in his room and he wouldn’t wake. I wonder if he knows she isn’t sleeping well. No one mentions my mother’s health.

  I walk to the pond, following the path that leads off to the right of the barn and curves up over the hill. I pluck a piece of long grass and chew on the sweet end. Bugs attack my bare legs. I have been in places just like this dozens of times, but I like this better than the rest.

  My mother is fishing, sitting on the grass by the deep end of the pond. I’ve never seen her sit and fish. Always before she has been standing, casting and reeling in the line, casting again. But now the rod is propped between her legs, her arms folded atop her knees. If a fish bites, she won’t be able to grab the reel quick enough to hook it. I guess she doesn’t care. I sit down beside her and she smiles at me.

  “How was church?” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “Find God?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.” Slowly she picks up her rod, reels in her line. “Let’s go back home,” she says.

  I wince. We are usually very careful. We usually say the house. Let’s go back to the house.

  “Are you mad at me?” I ask on the way back.

  “What?” She stops and turns to me. She didn’t hear me because I was walking behind her.

  “Are you mad at me for going to church?”

  “No. I’m not mad. I’m sorry you think that. I’m just disappointed. But not in you, Tamara. And I’m tired. Very tired.”

  “I’ll make dinner,” I say.

  “All right. Thanks.”