Wagon

My mother came to live with me the day before my fortieth birthday. I knew it would be a bad day to travel, since for the last three days snow had accumulated into a thick white muff over the parched landscape. Her DC-10 was delayed six hours in Chicago before reaching Denver.

There was something about the scent of my bathrobe after she wore it that yanked me out of the habitual spell of eating, sleeping, working and preparing for the momentous event of her arrival. A sweet, delicate, tentative scent. These were qualities no sane person would ever use to describe her, yet the maternal residue unmistakably left by her pulled me back in her womb. I watched her stoically pull folded polyester pants from her suitcase on the bed.

“Let me do that for you,” I offered. She regarded me sideways, briefly, and then returned her attention to the pants. This was just her way.

Our first night together as cohabitants could be compared to American soldiers before being sent to Europe at the outbreak of World War I, or perhaps The Last Supper. Now I’m here - what are you going to do with me, her presence seemed to be saying. My students tried to prepare me for this big life change. In particular, Cassandra Stonas, a dicey sociology freshman, advised me of the natural order of things. During last Tuesday’s art lab she leaned over one of the long tables in 4-inch bold red platform shoes, low-waisted navel-revealing jeans and a cropped blue T-shirt.

“Centuries ago and up until very recently, it was traditional for parents to live with their children when they grew too old to care for themselves,” she counseled.

Although my body was busy cleaning up globs of paint and folding drop cloths, my mind was deeply focused.

“Is that right?” I answered, not meaning to sound condescending. Then I turned to face her. “Cassandra,” I said with a shaking head. “What kind of impression are you trying to make dressed like that?” 

Some timorous form of I-don’t-know came through her clenched jaw. A young woman wanting everyone to pay close attention to her outside so she can protect what’s inside.  I could clearly recall this behavior from my own repertoire of character traits twenty years earlier.

Mother consumed my expertly prepared acorn squash, autumn chicken and rosemary olive bread without a word about my birthday. Had old age and the move caused her to forget altogether?  I hadn’t even heard any of the usual derisive remarks about my lifestyle – husbandless, no children, my graying hair, my drafty house.

After clearing away the dishes, I did the oddest thing. I went into my bathroom, undressed completely and slipped on my bathrobe, still warm from when she’d had it on after her bath, still scented of my mother’s secret essence. I wrapped it tight around my body and sat down on the rug in front of the sink, and rocked back and forth the way she had rocked me in the squeaky black leather chair when I was a baby. I could scarcely remember ever feeling so warm and secure and, although an overwhelmingly good feeling, I couldn’t stop the tears from falling onto my closed fists. I held myself there for half an hour. The doorbell snapped me back into place. Then I heard it again, and again. I had no idea where mother was.  

“Hi Trav,” I said after a frenzy of face washing and putting clothes on.

Travis held three envelopes in one hand and a peach pie in the other. It was camouflaged by plastic wrap, but I smelled the peaches from the other side of the door. That was the deal with Travis and me. His house, as was apparently confusing to the postal service, was the same house number and exactly one block from mine. So once a week or so before mother came, he’d show up at nine o’clock in the evening with some of my mail and a homemade peach pie. We’d sit on my front porch and share teaching woes and stories about our students.

For the first few months, the pastry indulgence led to other forms of indulgence and then began to feel too much like a habit we couldn’t break. Neither of us were looking for that at the time. So I just didn’t answer the door one night, knowing full well he’d seen my beat up Toyota in the driveway. Though I saw him at school every day, he didn’t come around for six months. Until tonight.

And as if our entanglement needed more complication, there was always Cassandra. For now anyway, Travis came with me into the kitchen.

My heart came right out of my chest when I noticed mother in the darkened backyard as I stood at the sink preparing tea. Still in the white sweater she’d worn on the plane, her silhouette mimicked the snow still rock-frozen in the ground amid a huge closet of blackness. I yelled for her to come in out of the cold. Travis stood next to me, confused by my reaction and unaware of the connection between myself and the crazy lady in the backyard.

“Mother??” I almost screamed now, the chill slapping my face like stray shards of glass. I tried not to look at her, since my wanting her to come inside had no effect on her resoluteness to remain where she was. The screaming whistle from the kettle was melting my ears. Slamming the back door, I yanked it off the burner and poured. I spooned two teaspoons of chamomile flowers into a teapot and let it steep while I paced back and forth clenching my fists.

Mother’s mysterious ritual went on like this for the first few days. She offered no words of explanation when I braced her up about it, and just sort of slipped out after dinner every night. Travis saw her walking on the Old Mill Pond Road one night after eleven. For someone who had installed a deadbolt on her bedroom door, this behavior seemed wholly uncharacteristic. Then one night she made an announcement.

“I’m going to Flagstaff.”

“This time of year?  Be reasonable. You might as well go to the Yukon for all the snow you get up there,” as if this was what bothered me about the idea. What I wanted to say was “Who are you and where is my real mother?”  Instead, I just asked why.

“For you,” she said with a smirky smile.

Two days later, I came home from a usual eight-hour day at Hampstead Junior College, and every square inch of my house had been sanitized. The smell of ammonia stung my eyes and the wood floors squeaked as my rubber soles scraped against them. A sheet from a yellow legal pad lay whimsically on the dining room table.

“Gone to Flagstaff - back Sunday. See ya.”

See ya. These were not Mother’s words. It crossed my mind that she could have fallen in with a bad crowd of sixty-nine year old hooligans looking for trouble. I read and re-read her note as if it contained a secret code that might translate this madness to me. As if from some subliminal cue or homing device, I charged upstairs to the guestroom she’d taken over. I yanked opened the dresser drawers and searched the contents with opened palms, listening all the while for the sound of the front door. Forty years old and I’m still afraid of her, I thought and chuckled, and then cried slightly. Underwear, books, pens, a notebook. I reached for her suitcase under the bed and then backed up a few thoughts. A notebook, I repeated. I turned on the lamp on the nightstand and crouched down low on the carpet and opened the cover. Bufferin, Pond’s cold cream, bottled water. I laughed. She hated the water here. I fanned out all the pages back to front and stopped on something caught in the center.

A photograph.

Me, six or seven, dressed in those wide-leg, queer corduroy pants we all wore in the seventies, my right hand holding onto something. A tailgate?  No. It was the long black handle on my dilapidated wagon with most of the red paint weathered off and a gold horse insignia on the front. I carved my initials on the seat with a rusty nail, but it had faded by the next year. I recalled a lemonade stand and bunches of weeds or flowers  and a gold necklace with a pendant in the shape of ballet slippers. I wore it to bed every night until I lost it on summer vacation in Daytona Beach. I could feel how big the smile was on my face. I held the photograph in my hands for a moment longer. Though I had never seen this picture, I couldn’t put it down. Flagstaff, Arizona, I thought and shook my head.

Cassandra Stonas fell as violently in love with Travis as she did with the resurgence of halter tops, platform shoes, and the alternative rock bands she worshipped. I sympathized with her sometimes, and other times I found her behavior affected and intolerable. After Travis turned her down the first time, she stood under the eaves of his house outside his bedroom window every night for two weeks. He watched this display by peeking out the slots in the mini-blinds from the kitchen. The wind blew circles around her frail body, rain spilled onto her head from the gutter, yet she remained there with her scarf and mittens, hovering, hoping and waiting.

It started the day after her two-week vigil was over. She showed up at his door the next night, and instead of sneaking through the bushes to the backyard she rang the doorbell. He had been expecting her and was dressed accordingly in tight black jeans, a white t-shirt and a dark green v-neck wool sweater. For some reason, he decided this was irresistible attire to young women. They talked, he poured her a glass of wine and sent her home. An hour later the doorbell rang again.

The fact that he’d had an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl didn’t bother me as much as the fact that he’d made her wait out in the cold for two weeks. I understood her compulsion, not because Travis was God’s gift to the universe but because I had once been a young woman searching for an identity. To combat this emotional deficit, I sought affirmations from every man I came in contact with, in particular, older men. I could look at her now and feel a sort of tenderness in this female solidarity, in knowing that I had gratefully outgrown this nonsense.

It was Friday night and I hadn’t heard a word from Mother. No phone calls, no requests for money to be wired to her at some lonely bus station in the middle of nowhere, no calls from the police or from mental institutions. I could only assume that she knew what she was doing and had her wits about her.

“Hungry?” Travis asked from the other side of the screen door. I had started keeping it open all night since mother left on her pilgrimage.

“No,” I said with arms crossed in front of me.

Travis came in and closed the screen and the storm door and locked it. “Why was this open?  Did you know I was coming?”  He set a pie on the coffee table and magically pulled two paper plates and forks from his jacket pocket.

“Mother’s gone.”

“Where?” he asked and looked up at me.

I considered sitting beside him on the couch. I considered a lot of things in that moment, but remained standing with my arms folded. I didn’t know what I was protecting.

“Flagstaff. She left me a note and said she’d be back Sunday.”

“You let her go alone?” he asked.

Instead of strangling him, I just smiled to myself and remembered why I had stopped answering the door. In an instant, I played back every unsupportive, thoughtless, condescending comment he’d ever made to me in icy clarity. As if it was my fault, as if I could have stopped her. “She left while I was at school,” I replied. I knew it was a lame excuse.

Travis started cutting into the pie with a white, plastic knife. He pressed too hard and it snapped in half, popping the handle clear across the living room. I picked it up and wiped a spot of pie from the carpet with my fingers.

“It’s all right,” I said in response to his expression.

“Guess I picked a bad night for this.”

“For what, exactly?”

He raised his eyebrows, knowing full well what I meant. “Just a visit from an old friend.”

“Is that what you are?”

“I was before you shut me out of everything.”

“You would have done the same thing eventually. According to the grapevine, I’m too old for you, anyway,” I said and then cursed myself. I swore I’d never drag Cassandra into it.

He backed away from the pie and sat back on the sofa. He slicked hair out of his face and rubbed the two days of stubble from his chin. This action had driven me wild with desire once, when we were fresh with the excitement of being virtual strangers.

 “I didn’t come over here to talk about Cassandra.”

“Why, then?”

“I thought I came over to talk about us. But apparently we need to clear the air.”

“Actually I’m much more concerned with the state of mother’s mental agility than with your preoccupation with teenagers.”

He shook his head and looked at the ceiling. “We were both legally consenting adults.” He paused. “She pursued me, not the other way around. Then she decided I was too old for her and started dating someone else. It was no big deal.” Another pause. “The way you’re talking, you make me sound like I’m a pedophile.” 

“Maybe you just feel like one.”

He sighed. “Maybe I should go.”

I put my hand up in front of him. “Don’t. Please. I’m sorry.”

Travis stood up and walked to one of the long windows facing the front yard. “Some part of me knew that whatever happened with Cassandra would hurt you. I didn’t mean to.”

“I know. I have bigger problems than Cassandra right now.”

In the moment it took me to go to the kitchen and come back with a proper cutting knife, Travis had taken his wallet out and spread a thin layer of business cards all over the coffee table. 

“What are these?”

“From when my house got broken into. One of the detectives at the police department plays tennis at my gym. I’m sure he’d be happy to try to track down your mother.”

Track down, like she was a crack dealer or a runaway teen. “It would defeat the purpose. She wants to be alone.”

“Did she say that?”

“No. I just know her. She’s on some secret mission.  Maybe she’s got a boyfriend in Arizona that she met online. She did buy a computer this year.” A boyfriend. God help me, I thought as the words tumbled out of my mouth. I had a vision of her tied to a chair with her mouth gagged and a wound bleeding from her forehead.

After twenty minutes of tension-filled silence and pie eating, I convinced Travis to come upstairs and help me look through mother’s things again, for some clue, a reason for her behavior. He looked longingly at my bed as we passed my room on the way to the guest room. So that’s why he had come after all.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said pulling out a suitcase from under the guest bed.

He knew what I meant. “You always do, Jan. It’s what I was most drawn to in the beginning.”

“What – the challenge?”

He chuckled. “I guess.”

“I’ve gone over everything in here six times forwards and backwards, but maybe there’s something I missed.” I held up the picture in front of him. “I found this stuck in the notebook.”

“Is that her?  Or you?”

“Yes.”

“Which?”

I thought it was obvious. Maybe he didn’t. Or maybe he was trying to provoke me into an argument that could in the end lead to sex. “Doesn’t it look like me?”

He held the picture up to the light next to my face, and smiled in a way I hadn’t seen in a long time. “I see it. Same shape of the eyes, high cheekbones, and dimples.” I was trying not to blush. “And your hair’s the exact same shade.”

“I color it now.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s still the same hair, the same beauty.” He caressed my face with his eyes. I could feel what was happening between us, leaning on the bed on a rainy, windy night. I could fight him, fight this if I really concentrated. I tried to ignore the fact that he was wearing my favorite tweed jacket with the wooden buttons and patches on the elbows and a white shirt unbuttoned to just the right place. My desire to put mother in a safe place, whether it was my house, her house or a nursing home, overshadowed any sexual desire. That’s all it was, too. Libido. I was no longer in love with Travis; maybe I never had been.  I had my master’s degree now, and in my life academia had always stamped out primal impulses.

I was gazing out the window at some maple branches scraping against the house when he started fumbling with the bottom of the suitcase. “There’s something under here,” he said pointing to a panel. “It’s not locked but … it may have been glued shut.”

“Can you pull it up?” I asked while he was trying. My kitchen utility drawer had a putty knife the perfect size for prying things open. I left to get it and came back to find Travis lying prostrate with a fan of 4” x 6” photographs in both hands. I could see from the doorway that they were my own baby pictures. Not because I knew the images and had seen them all my life in scrapbooks. Mother wasn’t like that. Her aversion to sentimentality kept her from the predictable patterns of parenthood. There were no baby books in our hall closet growing up. No piles of old family photographs stuck in the piano bench like at my aunt and uncle’s house. No tacky saloon photo memoirs hanging on the walls of our parlor. It was as if mother wanted to forget she had two children entirely. I couldn’t honestly say that my father was like this, though my brother had been much closer to him that I ever was. When he died, Brendan inherited the boat and his Cadillac. I got his World War II medallions.

It was three a.m. when we’d gone through the last of them. Forty-five snapshots from various stages of my childhood and adolescence, in every conceivable context from birthday parties to peeing in the woods on camping trips. How I never knew these pictures existed, let alone remembered them being taken, seemed too much of a coincidence.

“So what do you think, then?  That your mother implanted your clone into these pictures or had them digitally altered?”

“Digitally altered. That’s a good one. She forgets how to turn up the volume on the television. I don’t ever remember seeing her so much as holding a camera. Maybe I’ve had a twin all this time, and she never told me.” My stomach clenched at the mere mention of it.

“You have none of the telltale signs of twin-syndrome.”

“How do you know?” I asked and then remembered that he was a psychologist.

“I did a clinical trial for my master’s thesis on a set of twins. I studied their behavior separately and together over a period of six months. The results were astoundingly predictable.”

“Lemme guess. They each felt like half a person without the other. I guess it would explain some things about my personality.”

“Not even your mother could hide a twin sibling from you.”

He didn’t know her the way I did.

Like a criminal, she showed up in the middle of the night and crept into the guest room. If

I hadn’t heard her snoring the next morning, I would have walked past her room, showered, and left for work. Livid, I loomed in the doorway staring until telepathy finally snapped her lids open.

“When did you get back?”

“About four o’clock. I didn’t want to wake you. You were sleeping so blissfully.” She sat up and slid her bare feet into the pair of worn, pink slippers near the bed.

“You missed my birthday,” I said and watched another eerie smile creep across her lips.

“No I didn’t.”

“It was three days ago.” I sighed.

She looked up. “It was two days ago. Another thing we never agreed on. You were born on midnight on the dot. Remember?”

I remembered how we’d argued about it a thousand times. “Doesn’t matter. So far, forty feels the same as thirty-nine.”

While brushing my teeth and washing my face, I had trouble ignoring the gnawing sense of anticipation that pooled in the pit of my stomach and my chest. I could feel a tingling in my hands. She was in the kitchen making coffee, placing slices of bread in the toaster. When I came downstairs, I was wondering if I was happy to see her, if it was better actually sharing a house with her than wondering where she was. For some reason I walked through the living room to get to the kitchen. I never did that. My eyes landed on a strange, misplaced object from another life..another time.

My red wagon.

“Yes it’s the same one,” Mother said from the kitchen reading my thoughts. I could hardly breathe. The photograph of me holding the wagon when I was six was propped up against one of the inside walls next to a birthday card and a huge chocolate heart. I let out what I thought was a chuckle, until I felt a coolness against my wet cheeks. She had always infused our birthday ceremonies with a hint of Valentine’s Day, because Brendan and I were both born in February. The card was not the typical benign painting of flowers with a generic inscription that meant nothing to either the giver or receiver. Instead I found a black and white photograph of a woman in an apron hanging sheets on a clothesline with a young girl on a rubber tire swing off in the hazy distance. The phrase “To my Daughter … on her Birthday” was printed in the perimeter of the photograph, and inside it read “You are a part of me, and I am a part of you.” I didn’t know whether to hug her or run out the door screaming.

“Where did you get this?”

“From the man who bought a bunch of our things when Daddy died. I basically let him clean out the whole garage for a hundred dollars. It all reminded me of things I couldn’t face. I didn’t want any of it.”

I turned to face sixty-nine year old Anna Rhodes, the woman who had raised me and my brother alone after my father died, who had endured a lineage of thankless part-time jobs with no life of her own. I looked at her hands, and at the lines in her face and wondered if I would be so beautiful and well kept in twenty-nine years. I was trying to see where the change had happened, evidence of the transformation that made her agree to move into my house and led her walking around a strange town and another state in the middle of a cold winter. But there were no signs to explain this behavior. I chocked it up to senility. This too ran in my family.

“The wagon’s not your real birthday gift,” she said.

“What do you mean?  You drove through two states to get it.”

While she buttered the toast, I poured coffee into mugs and waited.

“I didn’t want you to feel like you had to take care of me. For however much longer I have left—”  She stopped buttering and turned to face me. “My father was a minister. I learned early on that doing what I was told made my life easier. I went to high school, got married and had a family because that’s all there was for women to do. And it felt good to follow, rules, be a part of something.”  She bit her lip, and looked directly at me. “Until I realized that belonging is an illusion.”  She chuckled.  “Maybe now I’m making up for lost time.”

 “It’s not unheard of,” I said quietly.

“My mother used to say that life gives us what we need, not what we necessarily want.”

I watched her go out the back door and light a cigarette on the picnic bench under the eaves. Looking at her, I noticed how far we’d both strayed from our habitual stereotypes.  I felt betrayed in a way.

I wanted to thank her, but our relationship had no precedence for this type of exchange. Instead, I started emptying the dishwasher. It needed to be done. I could see the wagon just by the door, though, and kept glancing at it every two seconds. Dishes, wagon, dishes, wagon… oh hell! I went to the living room and wheeled it under the window. I liked looking at, having it there.  Before I went back to the kitchen I found three potted plants and brought them to the wagon, resting them on its weathered, red surface.