“I hope one of you didn’t go and pawn it or something,” she said.
I could hear her, and the rest of them, through the screened door in the kitchen, where I stood, eavesdropping, until an image not unlike my own caught my eye.
There was a picture of my mother lying on the table, a photograph leaning against a candle. Taken long ago, on the porch. A picture of her wearing a straw hat, leaning on a pillar, staring out over the peony bushes. Behind it, there was a picture of my mother painting a rusted rake in the barnyard. Behind that, another picture of my mother squatting, her back to the hushed lens, painting the same rake, and Aunt Viv standing beside her with a paint brush in one hand and a bandanna on her head, her mouth moving, caught in midsentence as she spoke to the camera. Protesting, no doubt, against being in such an unflattering setting, sweating, in clothes she’d only wear to paint in a barnyard.
“That ring’s worth a fortune,” Gran went on. “It’s a whole carat. The detail on that carriage, they don’t make them like that anymore. Of course, my father had taste. Taste and money, which is more than I can say for your father.”
“Dad tried, mother,” I could hear Aunt Ruth say.
“He forged cheques!” Gran snapped back.
“The worst time,” Aunt Viv joined in, “was when the police came to get him just as my date showed up, that Robert what’s-his-name. You know the one, Charlotte. He drove the red convertible.”
“Robert Davidson,” my mother answered without hesitation, plucking the detail from her mind as she plucked thread with a favourite needle, up and down, through the thinning fabric of one of my father’s shirts. “He lived in town, on Emily Street,” she continued. “His father was a butcher.
“My God, dear, your memory never ceases to amaze me,” Aunt Viv said with her own mix of drama and sarcasm. “Thank you for carrying around the details of my life I can’t be bothered remembering.”
“You can’t be bothered remembering, Missy, and I’ll never forget.” Gran began rocking back and forth, faster, enough to make the chair inch closer to Aunt Ruth. “I’ll never forget that time your father went all the way to Florida to keep from going to jail again. He came back three hours before Charlotte’s wedding, with no money and no suit to wear. Remember that dear? He had to borrow that awful powder blue suit from Norman.”
“It wasn’t awful, mother,” Aunt Ruth said. “My husband paid a fortune for that suit.”
“It was the ugliest suit that ever came out of a store!” Gran yelled, her anger at everything and nothing squeezing into the first opportunity she’d had all day.
“It was an expensive linen suit, mother.” Aunt Ruth’s voice was controlled, with exasperation only a few more words away.
“Ugly as hell, and wrinkled too,” Gran pecked again.
“It wasn’t wrinkled, mother!” Aunt Ruth yelled. I could see her shaking her head, sighing, turning to face the flowers that had gone limp in the beds below her. She was a tired as they were of the unrelenting heat and the burning words from the yellow goddess who sat across from her. Gran wore the same yellow smock dress most of that summer.
Just as Aunt Ruth yelled, my mother dropped her sewing box, and straight pins and spools of thread scattered all over the porch floor, and Gran switched to the old sewing machine she gave my mother, and why didn’t she ever use it, and how many times is she going to mend the same shirts, and isn’t that husband of hers ever going to make a decent living so she can go to the store and buy some new clothes.
The rest of the McCann women stayed low to the floor, picking up the mess of pins one at a time, while Gran ranted on to no one in particular about the heat, and the weak tea, and the intolerably long distance between the porch and my mother’s only bathroom at the top of the stairs.
I slipped into the pantry off the side of the kitchen when I heard Gran coming. I stood behind the door and pretended to be looking for more sugar. In case. I heard her climb the stairs with a steady pace at the start, then slow, staggering steps. I could hear the aging anger go out of her when she got close to the top — it wheezed its way out, and was replaced by confusion and indecision about which direction to head off in.
I read the labels on soup cans while I heard her feet shuffle one way, then the other. A door closed and she moaned slightly as she sat down on the toilet. I stayed in the pantry until she flushed and went back to the porch — and the pump in the cellar below me kicked in, drawing water from the well in the field behind the house, with a motor that was growing louder and slower, deadening the sound of her return and the question of what happened to her mother’s ring.
The pale blue silk patch over here never found out. He went back to Italy and fell in love with a model with nicer feet than mine.
The plaid flannel on my elbows didn’t even want to know I had a grandmother, or a mother, or children of my own, and frequently called at the last minute on a school night to get together, and planned weekends with beer and pot and sex at my house because he was married and we couldn’t go to his house.
Earlier, Ben asked me about this funny green material on my hip. It wasn’t like any shirt he’d ever worn, he said. It feels like polyester, but thicker, he said. I was going to tell him, but then I had to put my mouth on his and take my jacket off, and everything else, and slide into the lake with him because he made me think of Bobby and his nice strong body, and why I clipped a few pieces from one of his ball caps.
I was going to tell Ben how every time I went into Bobby’s closet or dresser drawers looking for a patch of cloth, he walked back into room and made love to me again, and again, and I couldn’t think of clothes at all when I thought of Bobby, only his tireless, muscular body. But as I lay under him one night, drained by love’s rough touches and his inexhaustible probing and acrobatic curiosities, I couldn’t help but notice the swollen fabric on his collection of ball caps, which hung on hooks in perfectly straight rows on the back of his closet door, and when Bobby got up to shower before another round of spinning and hanging and tangled limbs, I snipped away at his Scout’s hat with the Swiss army knife he kept on his night table.
It sounds like a fable, not a real life, and I don’t sound at all like the same person when I tell that story and the one about my grandmother’s ring. I can hear the difference in my own voice.
I hear it.
The way my voice loses its smile and becomes guarded, and unsure, as I stand under the covered bridge on Mill Street and watch the flow of Rawdon Creek and tell Mary-Beth once again how Ben romanced me in the wee hours of the morning, faking surprise at myself for letting it all happen. The midnight rambler, we call him. His name is rarely spoken anymore, not even by me and my handy little bad girl voice. Shame, shame on me, trailing the verbal journal entries I make every time I see Mary-Beth.
Except that one time when she cornered me outside the Sears Catalogue Store and invited me up to her apartment for a drink and I couldn’t think fast enough about what else I had to do.
When she did most of the talking and I walked around her living room scraping fragments, excavating amongst her brown Lazy-boy leather furniture, and the dying fig tree in the corner, and the pictures on her bookcase, which sat near a heap of seemingly uninteresting rocks and pebbles, until I looked closely and turned them over and found the embedded vertebrae of something tiny and unknown.
Mary-Beth dropped names like gastropods and cephalopods and trilobites, and did I know they were pre-Cambrian, five hundred million years old? She collects them from the beach at Presqu’ile. She drives out on weekends and scours the shoreline, looking for historic backbone.
She’s never had any of her own, she said.
“I’m not likely to leave any marks on this earth.” That’s what her clinical doctor’s voice said.
“Nothing that’ll last beyond tomorrow.”
When