For all that my mother accrued in material possessions, her most prized collection was of people — of cousins, of “once-removeds,” of friends. She had dozens of genuine friendships — not acquaintanceships — that lasted for decades. These were not colleagues; no one was networking. No one had girls’ getaways, pre-packaged. Instead, they had the phone — rotary, princess, cordless, cell. They had the car for the afternoon. These relationships were messy and complicated. Many of the women — all “Mrs.” to me, until I went to college — are dead now. Their kids, who once piled with me into backseats of cars, are all over the country, all over the world, as are the snapped-off branches of my family.
I have a little devil.
Medals
We bought our house from a man who’d been living there with both his lover and his mother. When his mother died he was getting ready to fix up the place to put it on the market; we offered to buy it as-is. This meant that nothing had been repaired or repainted (the ghost of a Dustbuster past haunted the kitchen wall; he had apparently painted around the device). Various items remained in the house. Some, such as the old stuffed chair in the sitting room where I sat and nursed my babies in the night, were deliberate leave-behinds, furnishings he told us he no longer needed. Others took a while to find, including the silver medals of saints stuck in odd spots on the walls.
Both of the apartments where I had lived with my husband in Manhattan had been refurbished and delivered as if new. But in our house, it is impossible not to notice that other lives have been lived within its walls. The previous owner’s mother, for all we know, died here; if not, then she was certainly dying, surrounded by emblems of faith.
The house has been expanded — to the back and to the side and now up. But its core is more than 100 years old. Its walls have yielded layers and layers of paint. We found floors under floors.
Some people believe that the souls of the dead hover near the house that is the body, until the body’s burial. What about the house of that house? The bodies have certainly left their marks — made scratches and dents, left scuffs and prints. And what of the disturbance that is breath?
The Mirror
The man who sold the house to us also left the mirror in the upstairs bathroom, gilt-framed, hanging from two big nails. Its surface has reflected not only his face and that of his lover and of his mother, but also my face and my husband’s as we’ve aged, and those of the children as they’ve grown. A different set of faces every day — the work of gravity on mine, the efflorescence of the children’s; steam.
Garnet Earrings
Right around the time I was 30, I was having a great deal of difficulty selling the stories I was writing. It seemed endlessly my fate that in any competition I would be among the finalists but never the winner, or that I would receive a letter from an editor of a literary journal stating something to the effect that she’d had to choose between my story and another, and in the end, well….
I had meanwhile gotten it into my head that I wanted a pair of red earrings — ruby, garnet; didn’t matter — and that I would buy them for myself as a reward, as soon as I made a sale. Months went by. More rejections. More months. One day I was walking on 47th Street, New York’s diamond row, when, in the window of a resale store, I saw the exact earrings I wanted — garnet drops with diamond chips, set in gold, old. They were one-of-a-kind and I knew they’d be gone in a week, if not sooner. They cost $115, which was beyond my budget, and which, contrary to character, I paid on the spot.
A few weeks later I sold a story; within the next year, seven more. For awhile, I attributed this to the purchase of the earrings, an advance on success, so much so that my friend E paid $100 for a bracelet she could also not afford and waited for the luck to pour in. It didn’t quite work according to plan, but the premise — to act as if you’re already in the place you’d like to be — is not entirely unsound.
I wear the earrings often. They belonged to a woman I know nothing about. I have sometimes wondered whether her features and her coloring were anything like mine, and how she dressed, how old she was and who she loved, and whether she thought she was lucky.
The Dictionary
Before I started college, my mother and I drove into Chicago to shop. We stopped at Brentano’s now defunct bookstore, and there my mother bought me a hardbound copy of Webster’s Second College Edition New World Dictionary of the American Language, a heavy brown volume with extra-thin pages and old-fashioned finger tabs for each letter.
The letters on the finger tabs have mostly worn off and the gold-embossed cover is splitting from the spine. The contents need revision: Names of many countries have become obsolete, and absent are words such as Internet, cyberspace, and globalization.
My children have no patience for a printed dictionary. Their laptops — another word not present in Webster’s Second College Edition—weigh less than 1692 pages of paper.
My dictionary sits on my desk, a relic of a world from which everyone roughly my age lives in exile. Opening it, I am standing once more on the cusp of my life, with my beautiful mother, unburdened of years. My dictionary holds between its covers all the words we might have said.
Acknowledgements
For their unwavering support, I would like to thank Melanie Jackson, Debra Di Blasi, Noreen Tomassi, Terese Svoboda, and always my husband, Michael Evers. A deep debt of gratitude is owed to my family. Thanks are also due to Caitlin McKenna, Patricia Volk, and the editors of the magazines who first published these chapters: Samuel Ligon, Donald Breckenridge, Tim Small, Carroll Beauvais, Mikael Awake, David McLendon, J.D. Scott, Luke Goebel, Matt Bell, Scott Garson, Ronnie Scott, and Douglas Glover. Finally, a special thank you to Joyce Raffel for persuading me to take home the mug.