"We had a photograph on our piano . . . "

We had a photograph on our piano, in the sunroom in the front of our apartment on the North Side of Chicago.  The sunroom had little black and white mosaic tiles on the floor, like in the bathroom, and windows all around.

The piano took up the entire sunroom. . . . They said my mother used to play. 

I didn't like to look at that photograph. . . . 

It shows a sweet, half-turned, slightly out-of-focus face.

She's almost smiling in the picture, but she wasn't smiling at me.    

She left.  She vanished.  She didn't say goodbye. 

I didn't want to be reminded.

I didn’t like to go into the sunroom, with the grand piano and the photograph and the dust motes dancing in the shafts of light. 

The dust motes, feathery, loft and drift.  In the darkness the dust motes vanish, you cannot see them.       

You don’t think about them when you can’t see them.  Maybe they don’t exist.  Like the music that used to come out of the piano.  I don’t mean the sheet music, which was stuffed inside the piano bench, under the flip-top seat.  Later, someone gave it away.

I couldn't remember the music.  Had I heard it?

What I had known I could no longer be sure of.  What had felt real now seemed a dream.

She was gone. Had she ever been?

“People talked in front of me…”

People talked in front of me but not to me.  They whispered behind their palms.  They halted their words mid-sentence. 

Best not to speak about it, pretend it wasn't happening. . . .  

I never said a word.  Of course, not a word was said to me.

❧ ❧ ❧

My father was a doctor, surely he knew all about it.

My father knew things that other people didn’t, carried around a storehouse of knowledge, secrets in his head.  These weren’t the kinds of secrets you told your friend or your friend told you—things you weren’t supposed to tell.   They were things other people could know, might know, but generally didn’t–didn’t know the way he did.

My father taught me to orient a chart by the points on a compass.  He introduced me to the earth–what it looks like and how it got that way.  He revealed marvels of climate and land.  He could list the conquests of Charlemagne and name the highest European peaks.  He recalled the distance from Berlin where he grew up to Freiburg where he studied, and what time the trains departed and how long was the journey. 

My father talked of the distant past as if it were yesterday.  He remembered the birthdays of the aunts and uncles and cousins on the family tree he spread out on the living-room rug, and liked to speak their names as if I knew them.  He kept the letters they sent from the far-flung places they had fled to, written in handwriting you don’t see any more, certainly not now, handwriting of another language and continent and age.  He kept the stamps, taught my brother how to soak them off the envelopes and put them into albums. 

But he didn't like our questions, mine and my brother's.  Especially mine.  Robbie was older.  I learned to stop asking them. 

No one said out loud why my mother was gone and all the other mothers were there. It could have been a secret like the things my father knew, things out of books. But it seemed like the other kind of secret, the kind you were punished for telling.

“Geography, my father liked to explain . . .”

Geography, my father liked to explain, is a Greek word that means writing the world.  A map will anchor you, ground you, guide you when you are lost.  A map will supply the name of the town you are passing through and the stream running alongside the road.  

My father knew the configuration of the earth not only as we understand it but as the ancients believed it to be.

He brought out primitive and astonishing maps, secreted in the volumes of his library.  They showed the shape of the world and how it, incredibly, changed, from the Greek concept of the inhabited world to the Christian cosmos depicted by medieval monks to the approximation of our own charted by the great explorers. . . .  

The explorers set sail for they knew not where, venturing beyond that watery frontier which looks like a precipice.  Sometimes they didn’t know where they had landed, my father said.  “Sometimes they got swallowed up, or shipwrecked, or eaten by savages.”  He laughed. . . .

If they were lucky they found land before their food and water ran out.

“What if they didn’t come back?” I asked.                                          

“Getting back was easier,” my father said.  “They knew the way.”

They could get lost, though, couldn’t they?   Even my father said so.  Shipwrecked or swallowed up.  Maybe they got lost there, maybe they ran away.  They could disappear, into forests where the sun never shines, on rivers going deeper and deeper into uncharted territory.  Even if they made it ashore, even if they didn’t get shipwrecked or blown off course. . . .

A person could disappear, slip into the unknown.  Never to be heard from again. 

“My father wasn't supposed to be sitting in the kitchen . . .”

My father wasn’t supposed to be sitting in the kitchen, in the suit he wore to work, at three o’clock when I came home from school.    

My father never was home in the afternoon, neither were any of the other fathers I knew.  Ginger’s wasn’t, he came home after we were done with our games and I had gone home. Molly’s father didn’t go to an office, he went to a plant, the kind where they make things, and he came home earlier but not till dinnertime.  

My father didn’t speak just as he didn’t speak in the morning when I got up or in the evening when he sat down with his newspaper and sometimes fell asleep even before he had supper.  He’d shake when my mother woke him up to tell him supper was ready.

My father seemed to see everything, underneath or through.  But now he looked at me, then away from me, as if I wasn’t there.

My mother came out of their bedroom wearing her best dress, not the fanciest but the newest, the one she'd brought home one day and held up in front of the mirror saying, "Isn't it American?"  It was stiff navy blue material with a cinched waist and white star-shaped buttons.  It was hard to the touch. 

She dressed up for the opera or a party, more dressed than this, but not in the daytime, not in the afternoon. 

She was carrying the neat square train case she'd taken on the Denver Zephyr with lingerie and makeup, slippers and the clothes she would wear to meet my grandparents in the morning—more than you'd think would fit.

My mother stood there not like my mother but a woman going out, already on her way. 

"Where?" I asked, and she opened her mouth, but he spoke first.

"Eve, put the bag down," my father told her.

"It isn't heavy," she said.

"Everything is heavy now."

He looked at his watch and said, “Mrs. Ewen will be here any minute.”

“Mrs. Ewen?” I asked.

“From across the hall.  To stay with you.”

“Why?”

“A child your age can’t stay alone.”

“When Dora came she took my mother's clothes . . .”

When Dora came she took my mother's clothes out of the closet and packed them in a carton from Kroger's that said Clorox in big letters on the side.    

I wasn’t supposed to say “my mother” that way and didn’t say it and never would say it again.  Leila told us to call Dora that and so we did, though it stuck in my throat and I had to have something crossed, like my fingers behind my back, at least I meant them to be.

I watched her.  I watched as she went into the closet, which was in the back right-hand corner of their bedroom, past the double bed, which took up most of the room, and the high dark-wood dresser.  She reached in and pulled them out, not one by one, but in a bunch as big as she could carry in her arms.  I saw the housecoat with the little pink flowers, the yellow sundress, a brown nubby wool that came from England.  There were the blue jeans from Colorado, when we went to visit my grandparents, and the pale blue dress with the velvet sash she put on, adjusting the bow, when people came over.   Dora tossed them on the bed.

I watched as she loaded them up and flung them down.  Dora was lean, with honey-blond hair waved carefully behind the ears.  She dressed in tailored, creased pants and sharply pressed blouses.

I didn’t stop her.  I let Dora take the clothes out of the closet, the dresses my mother had worn.  They had been washed a hundred times, until the colors faded and the cloth wore thin. 

Dora opened a box and took each dress off its hanger and laid it neatly on the bed and folded it, two sides to the middle and then in thirds, and put it in the box. . . . She pulled open the drawers and took out piles of my mother’s underwear and slips and nightgowns, the silk one patterned in Oriental blossoms she packed in the train case and the flannels she wore even in the spring when she could not feel the warmth, when she was shivering.

The dresses mocked me, they had turned away.  I was glad Dora was packing them.  I never wanted to see them again.

“By the next summer when I went down the back stairs . . .”

By the next summer when I went down the back stairs out the side gate onto Thorndale and around to Magnolia, past the stoop where the mothers sat, I could barely picture her at all.  Memories flickered, seeped out of my consciousness.  How did I know they were real? . . .

They did not speak of my mother—my father or Leila or the other mothers or Robbie.  Robbie just looked daggers at Dora.  Robbie slammed his door and didn’t come out.  Or he went outside and played ball for hours, even by himself, even with no one to play with, instead of doing his homework.  I was afraid to slam the door, and I didn’t know how to play ball. 

The mothers didn’t talk about how it had been before.

I didn’t think about it jumping rope.  You really can’t think of anything while you’re timing your jump to the rhythm of the ditty and the slap of the rope on the ground. You’re singing the rhyme and counting the jumps, jumping double-time and speeding the rope at the end—whether you’re jumping by yourself or it’s a long rope and other girls are swinging it.  It comes so fast, you’d trip if you weren’t quick enough.  Or roller skating, with the motion carrying you along, free almost from gravity (friction, my father would explain).  You had to watch so you didn’t catch your skate or lose your balance and fall.  The sidewalk didn’t slope except at the corners, but the pavement could be uneven.  You had to look out for tippy slabs of sidewalk, and you had to slow down at the corner.  You could skin your knee, I did it many a time.  You don’t think about anything.  You just feel how fast you’re going and try not to fall. 

You could get out of breath jumping rope, and roller skating too.  You gasp for air when you are done.  That's when the thoughts could come--when I was resting, kids were talking and laughing, mothers too.  Letting the day cool down, the evening fall before going inside. 

The air was mild those afternoons when we played outside and the mothers sat on the stoop, speaking in low confidential tones.  I preferred winter, with the bitter winds that sting your skin and produce puffs of condensation out of your mouth.  Then there was a reason to feel the burning, the shortness of breath, the knife-sharp cutting of your lungs.   

Soon they would stop sitting there. By the next summer we were old enough to play by ourselves. We could cross Thorndale and Magnolia and even Rosedale, the next street over, though not Broadway, only on the way to school, when there was a patrol boy.

“My mother left . . .”

My mother left, not with another man, and not all at once, but little by little, pieces of her falling away.  She didn't pack suitcases, she didn't make arrangements, she didn't bring back a present.

She slid out of reach, over that place where the earth curves, where our ancestors believed it ended.  They needed to be careful. 

Now we know better: The horizon is continuous, the earth is round. 

“We” perhaps, but not I.  She fell off this edge.  It is out there, I know.      

Things went blank, whole continents froze up and covered over and disappeared.  Where were the footprints, the markers?

The landscape was laid waste, the maps redrawn.

I no longer knew where we had started, what it had been like to have her.  A spirit fled, like ghosts, like gods no longer believed in. . . .

I dig, trying to discover what I had, what I lost.  I listen for the music that must be somewhere, like the light of stars so far away we see their deaths a million years later.

I splice together fragments like the crumbled pieces of an ancient scroll, put back together by scholars believing: This is where we must have come the from.