Which was certainly not what I had expected. I had thought I would have to drag her away from the casket. “How would that look to Mother’s visitors?” I asked her.
“There may not be any visitors, and even if there are I’m sure they’ll understand.”
“You may stay home then,” I told her. “Jeremy and I will go alone.”
Jeremy said, “Well, but—”
“You can’t refuse to visit your own mother, Jeremy.”
“I don’t think I want to go,” Jeremy said.
And Laura said, “Why don’t we all stay home?” With her face bright and hopeful — protecting Jeremy. Jeremy sat slumped in his chair, mashing cake crumbs with his fork. His lips were pressed outward. Sometimes I wonder if Jeremy possesses some strength I have never suspected, some perverse, inner strength that keeps him an immovable lump in spite of all our nudges. Wouldn’t it be easier just to give up and act the way he is supposed to? “I don’t understand you, Jeremy,” I said. “You did see her on the stairs, after all. It’s not as if you could spare yourself the sight. And this will be much better, even, now that they have her all—”
“Can’t you just let him be?” Laura said.
I set my milk cup down as gently as I could manage. Another person would have slammed it. I said, “I’ll count on you to clear the table, Laura. It was you and Jeremy who did all that eating. I’ll just go and change the sheets in Mother’s room before I leave for the funeral parlor, shall I?” Then I rose from the table, keeping a tight hold upon myself. I tried my best not to notice how my temples were pounding.
We were going to have to stay in Mother’s room because all the others were full of strangers. The only time we ever saw our own room was at Christmas and Easter, when Mrs. Jarrett went off to visit her married daughter in California. And even then we saw it in an altered state, with Mrs. Jarrett’s hats stacked in our closet and her dresses shoved to the back of it. Oh, this house had closed over our leavetaking like water; not a trace of us remained. I had never been bothered by it before but I was that night. In Mother’s bedroom, which was crammed with half-soiled clothes and wall mottoes and empty coffee cups and pictures of kittens wound up in balls of yarn, there was not so much as a photograph of me at any age. Just Jeremy looking frightened on her nightstand, eleven years old and wearing a Sunday suit that barely met across the front. Beside him our father, in a sterling silver frame. Now there is a sample of how Mother did things. Our father was a building contractor who left us thirty-four years ago — went out for a breath of air one evening and never came back. Sent us a postcard from New York City two weeks later: “I said I needed air, didn’t I?” “Yes, he said that as he left, I remember he did,” said Mother, dim-witted as ever. She kept his brushes on the bureau and his shaving mug in the bathroom, never removed her ring, never to my knowledge shed a tear, not even a year and a half after that when he was killed in an auto accident and the insurance company notified her by mail. And look on her nightstand! There he was, big and dashing in an old-fashioned collar and a villain’s pencil-line mustache. Handsome, I suppose some might say. (As a small girl I admired my father quite a bit, though not, of course, after he deserted.) And what did he see in Mother? Why, it’s written on the bottom of his photograph. “For Wilma, with my deepest respect.” She was a cut above him, a storeowner’s daughter born to be pretty and frail and useless — which, Lord knows, she was. Spent her mornings tinkling halfway through popular tunes on the piano before she trailed off uncertainly, her afternoons painting forget-me-nots on china plates, her evenings in the front porch swing giving herself the barest ripple of motion every now and then with the toe of her shoe. From a distance I suppose that a building contractor could find her mighty impressive. How was he to know she would stay frozen in china-painting position for the rest of her life?
I stripped the bed and made it up fresh with sheets from the cedar chest. I folded the old sheets and placed them in the hamper. I picked up the clothes that Mother had left scattered everywhere. Meanwhile I could hear Laura clattering dishes and talking on and on — to Jeremy, I supposed. Never a break for breath, even. She thinks she is such an authority, just because she was married and widowed once upon a time. Thinks she is qualified to speak about life. Well, she was only married a year and never had children, and her husband was no more than a boy anyway. A hemophiliac. Died from a scratch he got opening a Campbell’s soup can. How does that make her so worldly wise? But there she was just rattling on, handing down her pronouncements. Was it me they were discussing?
Laura used to pull Jeremy around the block in a little red wooden wagon when he was just a baby. He didn’t learn to walk until he was nearly two; that’s how well she took care of him. He had no need to walk. After the ride she would hoist him up by the underarms and lug him into the house, the two of them grunting and red in the face. Then Mother mashed up a little banana for him or peeled some grapes — peeled them! — and set them into his mouth one by one. “You love Jeremy more than you do me,” I told her once. I said it straight out. She didn’t deny it. “Well, honey,” she said, “you have to remember that Jeremy is a boy.” I thought I knew what she meant, but now I’m not sure. I thought she meant that boys were more lovable, but maybe she was just saying that they took more care. That they were weaker, or more accident-prone, or more likely to make mistakes. Who knows? It doesn’t matter what she meant; the fact is she did love him more. And next to him, Laura. The pretty one, who in those days was only slightly plump and had hair that was really and truly golden. Me last of all. Well, I couldn’t care less about that now, of course. I never even think about it. But I did at one time.
I hung armloads of Mother’s clothes in her closet, beside other clothes cram-packed in any old way with their sleeves inside out and their hems half unstitched. They had a used smell, sweet and sickish. Some she had saved for forty years in the hope that they would come back into fashion; she imagined that the rest of the world was as stagnant as she was. “And see?” she would say, draped in some filmy frayed prewar dress, slumped before the full-length mirror, “people are wearing these again, I saw the same hemline in the park only yesterday.” The only thing she bought new were shoes, racks and racks of them, top quality. She believed in changing her shoe wardrobe often to safeguard the shape of her foot. As if she pictured herself still soft-boned and malleable, still a child. Which she was, in a way.
I cleared the bureau of whole handfuls of Kleenex filmed with pinkish-gray powder. I collected hairpins from the rug, worn stockings from the seats of chairs. I found her cameo brooch under a corner of the bedspread and held it up to the light, wondering what to do with it. Maybe Laura would like it. It was more her style. Then I thought of Mother’s will, so-called — the scrap of paper she always kept in her jewelry box, telling which of her personal objects should go to whom. She revised it year by year, and continually moved the jewelry box to new hiding places. I had to hunt for quite a while — I finally located it on the bottom shelf of the glassed-in bookcase — but sure enough, there was a paper folded into a tiny square below Mother’s pearls and her baby bracelet and Grandmother Amory’s glove-button hook. A sheet of her favorite stationery, cream-colored, a row of withered-looking wildflowers strung across the top.
My dear, darling girls,
Now if I die I don’t want to be mourned and grieved over. I want my sweet children to just carry on as usual. I like the hymn “Be Still My Soul” if there is any question about what to use in the service.