“What made you this way, Mama?” Lucy finally does ask. Their mother who has been so sick for as long as the girls can remember, too weak to talk much now, moves her hand toward her heart.
“It’s my heart,” she whispers. “As a child I had rheumatic fever and now I have a damaged heart.”
“Rheumatic,” Lucy says, writing it down, sounding it out, “room-attic.” How terrible.
On the day their mother died the girls were only eleven and twelve years old. Their mother was thirty-five.
“Room-attic,” Lucy said over and over again. “Room-attic. How terrible.”
And it was only months after their mother was gone that my own mother came running into the death house after school, crying out to her younger sister, “I’m dying, too.” She hurried Lucy into the dingy bathroom and said, “Look, just look,” and she pulled down her underwear to show the blood that had stained them and continued to flow from her.
“It won’t stop, Lucy. I’m just like Mom.” And she began to sob.
“Don’t cry,” Lucy said, stroking her sister’s head. Something occurred to her. “Wait. I’m not positive,” my eleven-year-old aunt said, “but I think this is supposed to happen.”
“This is no time for jokes, Lucy,” my mother yelled. She sat at the edge of the bathtub and wept. Blood ran down the inside of her thighs. Bright red blood fell to the tiled floor, flowing harder, the harder my mother cried. Her sister sat on the edge of the tub and began wrapping toilet paper into a little pad which she put in a clean pair of underwear to absorb the blood.
“Here, put this on,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something.”
But secretly Lucy was worried indeed. She looked up blood in the encyclopedia. She looked up cut, bruise, scrape. She looked up every possible spelling of rheumatic but found nothing. Maybe it was true: they were marked for death in advance, as Christine said.
“Mother!” Lucy said, growing impatient, stomping her feet on the street and looking up into the sky. “Tell us what is happening!”
But their mother was dead now and she had been too ill to hold the words of life in her mouth that would have prevented this scene.
Wandering desperately through the drugstore, trying to find the courage to approach the pharmacist who had known their mother so well and to tell him the terrible news, Lucy found the clue she was looking for on a box. The box was lavender and had flowers on it and a woman about the age of their mother smiling. Another box was pink with a sunset and a bird flying across it.
“You’re men-stroo-ate-ing,” my aunt said proudly.
“That sounds bad,” my mother said softly. “How long do I have?”
“No, you don’t understand. It is supposed to happen. And everyone is smiling on the boxes like they have a secret.”
“What boxes?”
“The napkin boxes.”
“The napkin boxes?”
“Sanitary napkins.” And Lucy presented Christine with her own box. “They catch the blood.”
“Did Mother have this, too?”
“Yes, I think she did.”
“Everybody gets it?”
“Only girls do, when they become women.”
“I’m a woman?”
“I guess so.”
My mother cried with relief. But she also cried, I think, because she was a woman and she did not want to be one yet. For some reason she knew that a woman’s life would not be an easy one. Her mother, the only woman she really knew, was dead; she did not know where to turn. Lucy, soon to be a woman too, began to find consolation in boys who, by some predictably fitting quirk of fate, did not have to be men when girls had to be women.
Soon Lucy would never be home anymore either. She would get a job in the drugstore selling Hazel Bishop lipsticks behind the cosmetics counter, the same drugstore where she had discovered, not so long before, the secret of menstruation. The rest of her time she would spend at the local soda fountain or “having adventures” as she liked to call them. She would be a wild teenager, riding motorcycles with boys in leather jackets, jumping from planes in parachutes, teetering on the edge of the Great Paterson Falls. What was my aunt wishing as she looked down at the jagged rocks, the rushing water? I don’t know what would have happened to her had the man in the suit and tie carrying the briefcase not shown up and offered his hand and said in his optimistic way, “I hope you have a good life plan, young lady.”
“Huh?” Aunt Lucy must have said.
“I said you should be protected by a comprehensive life-insurance policy,” he shouted over the water.
“Life insurance!” she said to the man. “Life insurance?” She was only sixteen.
When Philippe Petit, a celebrated tightrope walker and bon vivant, would cross the falls in the early 1970s, Aunt Lucy, in her nurse’s uniform, taking the afternoon off from St. Joseph’s hospital, would be in the front row with Uncle
Alex, her neck craned, pointing, closing her eyes, visualizing herself up there, too, next to Philippe, umbrella in hand, remembering her own days of daring at the edge of these same falls.
The insurance salesman proposed marriage when Aunt Lucy was seventeen, and that year she entered nursing school and put her old life behind her. She would learn what made her mother so sick in the first place and why nothing could be done about it. I can see her today. When my brave aunt puts a steady hand on a patient’s forehead in Beekman General in Hartford, Connecticut, or speaks softly to a sick child, or cradles a postoperative woman in her arms, I know it is really her mother she hugs and whispers comfort to, her mother’s forehead she touches. Daily she saves Grandma Alice’s life as she checks a pulse, measures temperature, takes blood pressure. Over and over again for thirty years — she continues even now.
And what of Christine, my mother, a young woman left all alone in that silent house? Motorcycles, parachutes, souped-up sports cars — these things frightened her. All the risks my mother took were mental. Her high dives, her balancing acts, her fiery leaps were in the imagination. Every day of her teenage life she tried to imagine her way free — to find somehow the shining door inside her that would provide the escape from this Paterson and their poor life and no mother. Escape it with words; change it with words. Words — she looked tirelessly for the words that might bring back her mother if only momentarily or the words that might make some sense of things. She invented the versions, pictured the scenes where her mother still lived, finding a way to continue.
She looks still, wherever she is, I’m sure of it. She searches for that pale quiet woman, wrapped in blankets. She writes, helping her up from the bed. She writes, getting her back, recovering her from the dark.
This is their favorite day of the week. The children sit quietly in the room and wait for their father to come home. The mother, who is so sick, sleeps, preparing for his arrival, too. When he comes in at twelve from a morning of overtime, he will have with him flat bread and poppy-seed buns from the Armenian bakery, and the Sunday paper. They will sit together in the bedroom and all afternoon he will read to them of exotic places from the paper’s travel section.
“Where are we going today?” Mother asks. She has not left her bed in weeks.
“Let’s see,” Father says. “How about Savannah?”
“Oh, yes,” little Christine says. “Let’s go there!” Savannah — they all sigh and he begins to read. He reads to them all afternoon. Savannah first, then Niagara Falls, then Taos, then San Francisco, then Savannah again, until the sky grows dark.
“It’s pitch black out!” Lucy says.
“We could be anywhere!” Christine whispers.