Norma
EVEN AS I GOT OLDER AND STARTED TO MAKE MY OWN way in the world, my
mother tried to keep me close, pulling on that invisible chain that brought me back into her space whenever I tried to occupy my own. I loved my father and I know he loved me, but his love was different. While there was distance, there was also a lightness about it. I never felt that his love was a burden.
“Your mother . . .” He rubbed his forehead with his thumb and pointer finger. “Your mother is nervous.” Father sat in his chair in the living room, his book closed on his lap, a tissue for a bookmark. A glass of whiskey, neat, beside him. I sat on the ottoman facing him, my elbows on my knees. “A lot has happened to her, remember. Her parents dying when she was young, raised by her grandparents. They weren’t cruel, but they weren’t loving either, Norma. She didn’t have the love that she gives to you.” He leaned forward and placed a hand on my knee.
My grandparents died in a car accident when my mother was three and Aunt June was six. Mother didn’t talk about them, and I’d never seen a photo. Aunt June told me that their grandmother would often remind them that they had already raised their own children and that Mother and Aunt June could sleep under their roof and eat at their table but not expect much more. They learned early on how to care for themselves and depend on one another.
“And then all those miscarriages. It’s been a lot for her.”
I lived my entire childhood in the shadow of infant ghosts. Their memory haunted my mother, and she carried them around with her, constantly tripping over their absence and blaming me for the fall.
“She wanted children so bad, Norma, wanted a whole houseful, and the sadness just got worse with each one. And then you came along and brought a little bit of the light back into her eyes. But sometimes I think that sadness drilled down deep and some of it might just be there for good.” He leaned back in his chair, reaching out to catch the book as it started to slip from his lap.
“She worries too much. I just want to go to camp. An hour away. For two nights.” I’d never been away from home and Janet was going. “It’s a church camp, Dad. What does she think is going to happen?” She’d gone to lie down, citing my ungratefulness for her headache, so I whispered.
“I’ll talk to her.” He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and picked up his book. I sat there for a minute watching him until he glanced up and nodded toward the door. “Now, get lost and leave me to my book.”
“I couldn’t get lost if I tried. I never get to leave the house.”
He smiled a sympathetic smile, and I went back to my room, passing a small photo of Mother and Aunt June just outside my bedroom door. It had sat midway up the wall my whole life, cast in the shadow of the hallway. The black-and-white photo showed two girls standing on the steps of a church, hats straight and hands at their sides, smiles wide and mischievous.
This was one of the rare photos that existed in our house, and I never considered it strange that we had so few, until I went to Janet’s house for a birthday party. Mother came, of course, offering to help the hosting parents, but she ended up sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea in her hand, never taking her eyes off me. Only at school or in the shower did I not have Mother hovering over me, and I’m sure that if it were possible or proper, she would have had eyes on me there, too. The walls and shelves at Janet’s house were covered in photos of children at all ages, grandparents and weddings, and Polaroids were stuck to the refrigerator. Our refrigerator held only the grocery list and a magnet with a clasp that Mom used to keep track of the bills. They came in the mail and she put them on the fridge until the next time she went to town, paid them and filed them in a cabinet in the basement. In our living room, above the sofa, hung a photo from their wedding and two of me. In the first I was four or five and looked terrified in a taffeta dress, my pronounced frown “adorable” according to Aunt June. The second was replaced each September after a trip to the photographer downtown. I’d wear a forced smile and the new outfit bought for the
occasion, a fake backdrop of fall leaves behind me. The one from the previous year would be taken out and filed away in the same cabinet in the basement. As I passed the photo of the smiling girls, I stopped and, for the first time, wondered how this particular photo hadn’t burned in the fire.
“Didn’t we used to have more pictures?” We were at the supper table, and I was absent-mindedly pushing around a piece of steamed broccoli.
“Pictures of what?” Father stopped cutting his pork chop and looked at
me.
“Of us. Family pictures. Why don’t we have more?”
“We have all the photos we need.” Mother took a sip of her water and
eyed Father.
“I don’t know why, but I remember there being more.” I stabbed at the broccoli, bringing it to my nose.
“Stop smelling your food and eat it.” It was bad manners to smell your food. She set her glass on the table and continued. “You have quite the imagination. You know we lost almost everything in the fire. I saved only our wedding photo.” She set her fork and knife on the table and wiped her mouth with the corner of a napkin. “You were just four. You wouldn’t remember.”
“What about that picture of you and Aunt June?” I asked.
“It’s a copy your aunt made for me after the fire.” She was quick to answer.
I shrugged and went back to my meal. “Okay.” I stuffed the broccoli in my mouth and washed it down with a sip of water.
That conversation was all but forgotten when I was allowed to attend church camp a week later. Despite all the things my mother imagined, nothing terrible happened to me at camp. There were no sinister men hiding behind trees, lake currents ready to pull me under or cliffs to fall from. I had three full days away from home, sleeping in a bunk, steering canoes along the lakeshore, the autumn-stained leaves reflected in the water, singing hymns by the fire at night, religion enriched by roasted marshmallows. My first taste of freedom was delicious. I was destined for more freedom, but not until years later did I understand how that freedom came to me.
Fate is a trickster. He likes to set up all the clues just to see if you can put them together and make sense out of things you never thought to make sense of in the first place. He presented me with a bold clue, one so obvious to me now that I know the truth, but one I ignored at the time in favour of
freedom and a new bicycle. I was in middle school and working on a project on the circulatory system, and I needed red and blue coloured pencils and some blank paper for drawing. Mother kept her craft supplies in the basement, where there were shelves stacked with dried leaves and plants, coloured paper, yarn and felt. I was rummaging when I saw the cabinet where she filed the bills. It was cold and grey, beaten and battered by time, with a thin layer of dust on the top. I’d never been told to stay out of it—it was understood that I would have no need for anything inside. But something that Sunday afternoon made me open it and look. The first drawer was just as I had been told. It was filled with old bills for electricity and property taxes, and income tax forms filed in neat colour-coded folders by year and month. But the bottom drawer was different. While I’d been expecting more bills, documents of little consequence to my fourteen-year- old self, I was surprised to find it filled with photos, strewn about haphazardly, almost in defiance of my mother and her need to have everything tidy.
As I sifted through the photos of familiar but younger faces, I turned them over to read the dates and names on the back. Mother had labelled each photo in her perfect and recognizable cursive. I found pictures of my mother and Aunt June, pictures of my father looking younger with less creases on his forehead and more dark than white in his hair. There was a nice one of the three of them sitting at a picnic table, tall pine trees framing the ocean in the background. I turned it over and read the back: “June, Lenore and Frank, July 1960.” I would have been two years old. But I was nowhere in the picture. There wasn’t a toy or doll, no notice of a toddler. And there were more. Pictures of Mother and Father at a wedding, of younger Aunt June and Alice, their arms linked, hands on hips, laughing into the camera. Photos of parties, the beach, barbecues and church services. Some were taken before I was born, but in others, I was missing when I should have been there.
“Norma, come up here and help me a minute. What are you doing down there? It’s damp. You’ll catch a cold.”
I took the photo of my family by the ocean and tucked it in my back pocket before I closed the drawer and pulled the string to turn out the light, casting the basement back into darkness. At the top step, I shivered. The damp, cool basement air gave way to the comfort of a room warmed by the sun, the yellow streak of light from a small window laying out a path from
the top of the basement stairs to the kitchen. At the end of the sunlit path, my mother stood, nature’s debris scattered around her.
“Give me a hand with these.” She held up a handful of common holly that grew like a weed in the ditches and fields. The greyish brown stems were cluttered with hard red berries and cut at the base at the perfect angle for preservation. She collected them to decorate the church for Christmas. The simple act of collecting holly was such a deviation from the mother I knew. With a scarf tied around her perfectly formed curls and gardening gloves that were too big for her hands, she’d slug through ditch water and tall grass in the boots my father wore to shovel the driveway in the winter. Seeing her standing at the counter, her cheeks stained pink by the October chill, I couldn’t help but feel a deep love for her.
She was tying the branches in bunches with twine when I pulled the picture from my back pocket and placed it on the counter. “Mother, why am I not in this photo?”
She stopped, set the scissors down and picked up the photo. She held it as if it were about to burst into flames, and I watched as little droplets of sweat began to form on her upper lip. She took a deep breath like she wanted to speak, but said nothing. I waited, quietly, picking up the scissors and cutting the piece of twine that she had been about to cut. I wrapped it around the branches and tied the ends in a knot while I waited.
“I feel one of my headaches coming. I think I need to lie down. I’ll finish this in a bit.” She took the flower-patterned handkerchief she’d been wearing over her head and placed it on the table before leaving me with the small forest. “Dinner is in the refrigerator. Please be a dear, Norma, and put it in the oven at 350 for an hour at four o’clock. We’ll eat at five,” she said, before she disappeared around the corner and down the hall, taking the picture with her.
I never saw that photo again. I thought about it occasionally and wondered what was so troubling about the photo that it caused one of her headaches. That evening the invisible chain that kept me shackled to the house slackened even more when my father allowed me to go to Janet’s house for a sleepover.
When I got home the next morning, Father surprised me again by presenting me with a new bike. It was red with tassels erupting out of the handles. I wanted to tell him that I was too old for tassels, but I was afraid of hurting his feelings, and so they stayed, the long strings of rainbow-
coloured plastic blowing in the wind. The seat was long and curved, and it smelled of grease and new rubber. The best part was that I was allowed to bike down to the baseball field.
“It’s so weird.” I’d snuck the phone into the kitchen while Mother was out shopping and Father was raking leaves into piles on the lawn.
“What’s so weird?” Alice whispered back.
“Just being able to do things. I get on my bike and look back at the house and, for a minute, I feel like I should go back inside.”
“Why would you want to go back in the house if you’ve been given permission?”
I heard her take a sip of tea on the other end of the line. I twisted the cord around my pinky and looked out the window to make sure Mother hadn’t come up the drive. “She doesn’t want to do it. She doesn’t want to let me go. I can tell. And I feel bad.”
“Norma, you’re nearly fifteen. It’s time to start thinking for yourself, start doing things for yourself.”
“But her headaches.”
“Her headaches are hers, not yours. You don’t cause them; she does.
Remember that.”
Alice always had a way of making me understand things. Yet regardless of the wisdom she imparted, once the telephone went silent, I still felt the weight of my mother’s headaches. There was love in that house, but none of us really knew what to do with it.
I’d only had my new bike for a few weeks before winter came, and the blowing snow forced it into storage and kept me confined again. With adventure stalled by snow squalls and freezing temperatures, I remembered the drawer in the basement with all the photos and went searching again. The snow fell sideways that day. It hardened on the roads, roofs and anything that didn’t move. School was cancelled, so I tried to go back to sleep, but sleep wasn’t meant to be mine. Mother was already up and working away at whatever she worked away at. Her heels fell hard on the wooden floor, and I’m sure her sighs could be heard down the block. So, I got up and dressed, missing the stolen sleep and the warm comfort of my bed. A Nancy Drew I intended on spending the rest of the day reading lay unopened on the bedside table.
“Can you please go down and put some wood on the fire? I’m getting a chill.”
The bacon grease was starting to harden on my plate as the wind rattled the windows. Mother was standing at the sink, her hands in the soapy water. I gave her my plate and headed down to the furnace room in the basement.
“A nice piece of ash, please. It burns longer and warmer.”
At the bottom of the stairs, I turned toward the furnace but noticed the old cabinet, full of paid bills and the photos I once thought didn’t exist. I looked up to the top of the stairs to make sure she wasn’t watching before I turned away from the furnace room and knelt by the cabinet. My knees rested on the concrete of the basement floor as I leaned forward, taking the handle of the bottom drawer in my hand. It opened easily, but the sound of metal sliding made me stop and look again to the stairs. It wasn’t loud, but the sound was amplified by my knowing I was doing something I shouldn’t. I looked down into the drawer. Empty. There was nothing in it except for a few paper clips and dust. All those photos were gone. I sat staring into the empty drawer, then closed it quietly when I heard her heels on the floor above me. I was halfway up the stairs before I remembered what I had gone down for. I found a large piece of ash and tossed it into the furnace.
I spent the next few weeks looking for those pictures. Each time Mother would lie down for a nap or go to the grocery store, I would look, but I never found them. The only place I didn’t look was in Mother’s closet. After she got sick and I couldn’t care for her by myself anymore and she went to live in the home, Aunt June helped me clean out the house and ready it for sale. I was washing out the lower cabinets in the kitchen when she tried to sneak by me, a large hat box in her arms. She’d borrowed a friend’s car and was heading toward it.
“Aunt June?” She didn’t stop. “Aunt June?” I said more forcefully. She turned before she reached the car but didn’t say a word. We stood there, looking at one another, in a strange sort of standoff. She with a hat box in her hands and I with a dishtowel in mine. I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening, but I knew there was something strange in the way she walked, the way she held that box, the way she pretended not to hear me when I called her name.
“Just a few knick-knacks from our childhood. I’m going to take them with me back to Boston.” She set the box on the ground beside the car.
I stepped off the porch and started toward her. “Can I see?”
“No, no. No need. Nothing interesting.” She opened the door and bent to pick up the box.
“I can get that for you.”
“I’m fine, Norma. You go back to what you were doing.” “Will you show me someday?”
I noticed her old back was crooked as she placed the box on the back seat beside a few of Mother’s dresses she was taking with her to give to the women’s group she worked with. “Someday maybe.” She smiled and closed the car door.
“Good, I’d like to see them . . . someday.”
She patted my arm and rested her wrinkled hand there for a few seconds before she headed back into the house. I waited a moment, then looked through the car window at the corner of the box before I turned and followed her inside.
BY THE TIME I started to experience freedom, my dreams had faded, like a watercolour left in the sunlight. The colours thinned, the night warmed, the birds and the night creatures quieted, the fear and confusion dulled. And even though I never forgot them completely, they began to take up less space in my life. Space that I first filled with church camp and bike rides but quickly extended to soccer and a boy named John, the older brother of Randall. He smelled nice, and the first time he kissed me, he tasted like black licorice, sweet with a little bit of spice, which I could taste long after the kiss.
I’m certain that, as I aged, my mother’s headaches got worse. The more time I spent outside the house she kept so carefully all those years, the more she took to her bed with a bottle of Tylenol and a warm, damp cloth draped over her eyes. Father resigned himself to my freedom, imposing curfews and town limits but little else.
“And where did you adventure to today?” He placed his napkin on his lap as I took a sip of water.
“Janet and I went to the park for a while and hung out. Then we went to the library.” I nodded toward the stack of books sitting on the counter.
“I’ve heard that some of the kids are hanging out down by the reservoir?” Mother tried to make it sound like a statement, but we all knew it was really a question.
“I don’t hang out with them, Mother.” She eyed me skeptically and I shrugged. “I swear I don’t.”
“We believe you, Norma. Finish your dinner,” Father said.
It was true. I didn’t hang out with those kids, but I don’t think Mother ever believed me when I told her I was behaving. Aunt June was always telling her to relax, which only seemed to heighten her anxiety instead of relieve it.
Aunt June was visiting for the weekend on the first warm day in May the spring I was sixteen, when I came home five minutes late for supper. Mother was waiting by the door, and she looked at me doubtfully when I told her I’d been at the library and had lost track of time. Aunt June came up behind her and kissed her on her worried red cheek. “You’re going to fret yourself into an early grave, Lenore,” she said, giving me a wink.
Mother wrung her hands and rolled her eyes before stepping aside and letting me in the door. “It’s hard being a mother, June. You can’t understand how trying it can be. How much worry there is.”
Aunt June let the conversation drop and smiled at me as we piled the mashed potatoes, ham, honey-glazed carrots and homemade bread onto the table for dinner.
Aunt June frustrated my mother. Her “liberal ways” turned Mother’s face red and caused her to lose her words. Mother disapproved of her menthol cigarettes and her assessment that a woman did not need a man to be content. She was a “career woman,” a phrase my mother uttered with distaste before throwing her arms into the air. But Aunt June danced with me in the living room, slipped me advanced copies of good books her company was about to publish, and snuck me a sip of gin once when I was thirteen. I hated it, still do, but that was the kind of aunt she was, so very different from my mother. I was always perplexed by their relationship.
“Your aunt June can be such a trial sometimes, Norma,” Mother would say while hanging up the phone after one of their hour-long conversations. Yet when Aunt June stayed away for too long, Mother groaned about how much she missed her. It made me jealous, this odd sisterhood between them. I wanted a sibling, and I went to great lengths expressing it, knowing the entire time that I was hurting my mother. I finally gave up asking after I caused a headache that kept her in bed for a week. But Aunt June, despite her perceived flaws, was all Mother had aside from my father and me. She didn’t have any friends. There were the ladies from church, but they couldn’t be called friends. They spoke in awkward, high-pitched voices to one another each Sunday as they stood in circles outside the church, their sensible heels sinking into the soft earth, their obvious judgment of one
another floating on the air between them. They kept their conversations to topics such as the weather, misbehaving children and recipes.
The day after my late arrival home was unseasonably warm. I remember the spring frogs croaking out in the shallow pond in the woods behind our house, and knowing that summer was close. Father stood at the barbecue flipping hamburgers, and Mother and Aunt June were sitting in quiet conversation, their glasses of iced tea set aside in favour of wine and mint juleps.
I’m still not entirely certain what made me speak up, except that I believed, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, that Aunt June would always tell me the truth. It hurts now knowing that was not the case, but I am working on forgiveness. Maybe, as I sat out under the warmth of the sun, I could already see the skin on my arms start to darken.
“What was my great-grandfather’s name? The Italian one?”
Aunt June had her face turned toward the sun and was swirling her drink in her hand. I was sitting at the top of the steps that led to the yard where I’d spent much of my childhood. The yard that contained the graves of hamsters and June bugs and a baby doll, long forgotten.
“What Italian great-grandfather?” Aunt June sat up, adjusting her sun hat to cover her eyes. “We’re Irish back further than the famine. Although I once heard a story that there might be Moors back there somewhere.” She winked as Mother and Father exchanged worried looks.
I watched as a hamburger, half cooked, landed on the ground when my father tried to flip it. He cursed under his breath before kicking it aside. “On my side, June. My grandfather was Italian, I believe.” He stumbled over his words and Aunt June looked at him sideways, taking a slow sip of her wine before turning back to me.
“Right, I always forget you have a mother and a father.” She laughed a little too hard and a little too boisterously for the joke she’d told. “Why the interest, Poopkin?” Mother got up and went inside.
“I’m darker than you guys, and I get really dark in the summer. It’s just weird.” I set the magazine I was reading on the deck beside me.
“Genetic throwback,” she said, without looking at me. “Genetic throwback?”
“Yup, your dark skin is nothing but a physical testament to the family histories of most people in this country. You just never know how your kids are going to turn out. Genetics are tricky, I guess.”
Aunt June stood up and went inside just as my father passed me on the steps with a plateful of burgers.
“Let’s eat,” he said, his voice cracking. He waited for me to get up and open the door for him.
Their quiet, which I now know was designed to kill the conversation entirely, had the opposite effect and stirred in me a fascination with genetics. I took out books from the library, which Mother retrieved from my bedroom and promptly returned before I had time to even crack the spine. But she couldn’t monitor me at school, and whenever I had a moment to spare, I made my way to the library to soak up all the information I could. I must have read the same encyclopedia repeatedly until I was fluent in all things related to molecules and chromosomes, cells and genes. By the time I studied biology in the twelfth grade, I was well versed in the traits of handedness, eye colour, cleft chins and attached earlobes. I had brown eyes, the same brown eyes as my father, and all three of us were righthanded, but both my parents had earlobes firmly attached to the sides of their heads. Mine were not. The little peninsulas of skin hung loose, unattached and, despite my constant arguments in favour of earrings, still unpierced.
“Aunt June?” I was crouched down in the hallway closet where we kept the second telephone, not wanting my mother to hear. Even when she napped, I was convinced she could see everything I did and hear everything I said.
“Norma? Why are you whispering? What’s going on?”
I could hear Alice in the background, asking if everything was okay. “Everything is fine. I just want to ask you a question, and I don’t want
Mother to have one of her headaches.” The line was silent.
“Norma, Alice is listening on the line with me.”
“Okay, that’s fine.” And it was. “It’s just that my earlobes aren’t attached.” The other end of the line was quiet except for the breathing of the two women I trusted most in the world.
“Okay, is this what you called to tell me?”
“No—well, yes. But listen to this: it’s not common for two people who have attached earlobes to have a baby with unattached earlobes.”
“Not common, but impossible?” she asked, lowering her voice, too. “Not impossible, but not likely.”
Father coughed in the next room.
“So, I’m confused, Norma. My earlobes aren’t attached. Maybe you’re more like me in that regard.”
I could tell that she put her hand over the receiver and was talking with Alice. Alice spoke next.
“Why are you thinking about this now, Norma?” Her voice was still so soothing.
“I don’t know. It’s just interesting, I guess.”
“But why are you talking to us about it and not your parents? Why the need for whispers? They might find it interesting and may even have the answer you’re looking for.”
“I don’t want to make Mother sick again.”
“We’ve talked about this, Norma. You are not the reason for your mother’s headaches, remember? You need to give her a little more credit. You’re almost an adult now, and it’s time you started sharing with your mother. She might appreciate it, and it might make you better friends. If it helps, write it down in your journal before you have the conversation.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that for the last three Christmases, I’d regifted the journals to my friend Janet, and I no longer wrote about anything. The older ones, the ones with flowers printed on the cover, sat on a shelf in my room, covered in brown paper in a juvenile effort to hide the information from my mother. As far as I knew, they hadn’t been touched in years.
“Yeah, okay. Maybe I will. This was a silly thing to call about. Sorry, Aunt June.”
“Don’t be sorry about calling. I love to hear your voice, Poopkin. You have a good day at school tomorrow. I love you.” And with that she hung up, leaving me sitting in a dark closet, the receiver in my hand and the sound of the dial tone absorbed into the winter jackets hanging over my head like ghosts.
