Hints and Guesses

It was a family saying: “Huh?”

Or at least Sue thought so.

She, an amateur woodcarver, carved a plaque even, a plaque that simply said, “Huh?”

Huh.

Evening always makes me think of summers during my childhood in southwestern Missouri.

Being a child, the extreme humidity there was not as noticeable to me as it is now.  I really remember no discomfort about evenings at all, though I know there had to always be mosquitoes.

I loved to sit on the porch (front or back) and just look.  Look at the trees moving softly in the gentle breeze.  Look at the flowers as their colors faded with the light.  Look at the cats and dogs playing (not necessarily with one another).  Look at the sky as it changed from hot, hazy white to pinks and oranges to deep, star-dotted blues.

Like most children, I could not sit still forever, so I would get up and chase a rabbit, coax the cat to come to me or practice cartwheels.  I don’t remember when I first started doing cartwheels, but someone instilled in me at a very young age that they must be straight-legged cartwheels.  I don’t know if my legs were really straight, but I practiced all the time.  They felt like they were straight.  I remember loving how the cool grass felt on my hands as I did cartwheel after cartwheel.

As it got darker, I would love to return to the porch to sit and watch the sky as it turned dark blue higher in the sky, and yet remained a paler color, even yellow, near the horizon.  The color surrounded me, and I became a part of it. 

And there were the sounds.  The brushing sound of the trees in the breeze.  Crickets and locusts and tree frogs.  It was loud, but to me it was just ordinary. I took it all for granted.  Now I miss it.  There was always sound in the country in southwestern Missouri.  Bugs and frogs at night.  Birds in the day.  I remember the first time I heard songbirds where I live now; it almost shocked me.

As I watched the sky get darker and darker, a new light would appear.  Fireflies--something else I took for granted.  As they filled the evening darkness with their own light, I would jump up from my spot and run to catch them.  There were always old pickle jars with holes in the lids by the doors in which to collect them.  My brother and I would fill those jars and stare and stare at them, waiting for them to all flash at one time.  It never happened, but we for some reason thought it would be so unbelievably cool if they did.  So we kept hoping.  And watching.

The breeze of evening always felt sublime.  The days were hot, and the evenings were reprieve.  The light wind was rarely cold in the summer, only soothing.  The feeling of the soft air wafting against my skin while watching the sky change from dusk to night might be my favorite memory of summer evenings.

Sometimes I would turn on a porch light and pretend I was singing on a stage.  I would grab my jump rope and use the handle like a microphone.  It warms my heart to see my daughters doing similar things on the landing of our stairs now.  The singing would have to come to an end quickly, however, for the moths would be thick, flocking to the light and getting stuck in my hair.

Maybe I would walk around our large yard and watch how things changed in the waning light.  We had lots of trees and flowers.  I always loved things that grow, and I loved to see and touch them as the day made its way to a close.  Somehow they felt smoother and softer in the cool of the evening, as if the darkness had transformed them into something magical.

Then my bare feet might feel something cold.  And slimy.  My shriek would pierce the peaceful evening.  It was time to go inside, with toes stuck together by slug slime.  Time to forget the fading light and the mesmerizing sounds and the gentle breezes caressing my skin.  It was time to go inside, grab the salt and return (with shoes) for the more barbaric activities of the evening.

Lillian had seen those hands before. They were her mother’s. That’s where she knew them. It is not like reading a palm, Lillian thought. There’s no future in it. The back of a hand is all past.

I stood alone. My father sat to my left in the black lounge chair. My stepmother sat to the right in the brown recliner. My mother sat somewhere in Kansas.

“Your mother sent a birthday card,” she said. My tenth birthday—or it had been, four days past. “What kind of mother sends a card like this?” She’d signed the card “Happy birthday, Mother.” There was no gift, just the card. And it was four days late.

“She doesn’t love you,” she said. “If she did, the card would have been sent on time, and she would have written something meaningful. And she would have sent a gift.”

My small, skinny, 10-year-old self began to cry, and for the first time, my father spoke.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

Why was I crying indeed? Perhaps because the mother I got, the one I lived with every day, was not so much mother as caretaker. She fed us three times a day. We wore clean clothes. We went to school. She made birthday cakes and held small family parties. These are not small things, and acknowledging them is to recognize part of the truth.

She served as religious educator. We studied our Sabbath School lesson and read assigned religious books every day—an hour on weekends, half an hour on weekdays was the setup, but in reality we started when she told us to start, and we stopped when she told us to stop. She often told me I was a bad, unrepentant child who was on the certain road to committing the unpardonable sin (whatever that was), so to save my soul she repeatedly assigned Steps to Christ. I can spot a quote from that book at fifty paces.

She hit us. Sometimes with a wooden paddle. Sometimes with the leather belt that hung behind our bedroom door. Sometimes with the plastic ruler in the pencil cup on the table next to her brown recliner, or the one she kept in her car visor. Occasionally she hit us with her bare hand. She hit us often, and almost always she hit us in places no one else would ever see.

Fours years and a handful of visits with one mother. Five years of living every day with this other one, plus a father who was often gone. In the face of overwhelming emotion, my ten-year-old self was powerless to do the math, but the result was still the same.

“I’m all mixed up,” I said.

He took me in his arms, and I cried some more.

Read the companion piece to this post at Thursday Drive.

Jennifer at Thursday Drive, as some of you may know, is my sister. She has recently begun to tell stories of our family. Her stories make me think of other stories, the ones that I write in my head, and of a particular problem, being what to call our stepmother. In real life, we call her by our name. Here, I may follow Jennifer’s example and call her Sue, a deceptively plain name.

While unwieldy (it works better as a book title than a nickname), I have stumbled upon a name that describes her well: Hitler with a Heart of Gold. HWAHOG. HOG for short.

Here are the stories by which she gained this name.

In late September, I ran into my aunt and uncle at a church function. Neither my church nor theirs, we were surprised to see one another.

“We’ve just come back from moving Grandma into a nursing home,” Ann said.

I’d missed making my monthly telephone call to Grandma that month, so it was really no one’s fault but my own that I didn’t know about the move. Still, I did little to quell the small explosion of anger in my chest. Couldn’t Ann have called me before the trip? Was she ever planning to call me? But the anger was useless. Grandma had broken her hip in the spring; Ann hadn’t called then, either.

Since then, Grandma had been in the hospital, and then rehab, and she’d never made the move back into her tiny senior apartment.

Grandma, it should be explained, is the mother of three daughters: Marie, Ann (who stood before me), and Sue, the stepmother. For better or worse, this was the family I’d grown up in, and like it or not, they’d always be part of me.

“She just wasn’t able to live on her own anymore,” said Ann. “We asked her to move up here with us, but she didn’t want to move away from her church and her friends.”

“What about Sue?” I asked, knowing full well Grandma would never have moved in with Sue. Still, Sue lived near Grandma, and I thought she might have tried to make a go of it.

“Sue?” Ann snorted. “She’s like Hitler, or a general.” She caught the look on my face and hastily added, “She’s better now, you know.”

Ann was right. Sue is better now. As far as I know, she no longer beats children. She no longer tells children that if they can’t sleep, they must be feeling guilty about something. She no longer makes children eat whole raw onions for telling lies.

As far as I know.

She does, however, still have a tenuous hold on the truth, and she still uses her influence to stir up family dynamics. Ann has her own reasons for keeping her relationship with Sue, and it helps that she doesn’t want to know about how Sue raised us.

“No. You said Hitler,” I replied. I’d never contradicted Ann before, and my heart pounded. She dropped her eyes, and we moved on to something else.

It was enough to say that, to bear witness to what she really said, and to know what she really meant.

Grandma didn’t last long in the nursing home. She died shortly before Thanksgiving, and I went home for the funeral. Before I left, on the road, at home—every moment I expected a telephone call telling me not to bother, as I wasn’t wanted at the funeral.

In the event, it was my father who got the telephone call—years had passed since he’d formally been her son-in-law, but they’d kept in touch, and he wanted to pay his respects.

My uncle, Ann’s husband, did the dirty deed. Sad, really—the only trouble he would have caused was entirely in their—Ann’s and Sue’s— heads.

The funeral ceremony itself was nearly anticlimactic, although I spent some time trying to figure out if certain family members (besides Jennifer and I) had been left out of the eulogy. Ann’s husband rose at the end to make a few comments and give the benediction.

“These two women [Ann and Sue] have hearts of gold,” he said, referring to their work in the previous week. My eyes and my mind boggled. Hearts of gold? The same hearts that asked my father not to attend the funeral? The same hearts that gave funeral scheduling preference to a grandson-in-law over a grandson? The same hearts that left another son-in-law out of the obituary? As for Sue, the same heart that beat children and inspired guilt where none existed?

Hitler with a Heart of Gold indeed.

Why I voted for Mitt Romney

Sure hope it doesn’t backfire.

Surprise, surprise. Surprises can be fun, but I’d rather be the surpriser than the surprisee. A childhood in which most of the good and most of the bad (in other words, nearly everything) was a surprise heightened my appreciation of the value of anticipation.

One memory of a surprise floats to the surface. Most of the setup details are lost to my memory, but when I returned from Korea in 1989 at the beginning of my fourth year in college, I didn’t tell my sister exactly when I would be returning. I told some friends, however, and we concocted a plan wherein a group of them would be at the airport to greet me. She’d go there too, on her own, having been told by her boss to pick someone up.

She was surprised, all right. We both cried, and our friends laughed at their success.

Weekly Anamnesis

Rob Beschizza in Wired sums up why I don’t have a cell phone.

I’m no Luddite. I can imagine circumstances in which I would gladly pay for a cell phone. But since I turned mine in five years ago, I’ve encountered only a few situations in which I might have wanted one.