A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [48]
“When I was your mom,” Claire said, coming to me and putting a clammy hand on my arm, “and you were a baby, I beed sweet and nice.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, reaching out to touch her shiny dark little cap of hair.
“I was never mad when I was your mom.”
Maybe Claire knew best. Maybe she was the reincarnation of my mother, Barbara Gardner, who had died so early in life of lung cancer. Maybe my mother died willingly because she knew full well that she was going to return to earth as my second child. My mother had decided that it was better to be an infant again than to be married to my father, and finally, then, she planted herself in my womb.
Emma piped, “When you were a baby we put a pacifier in your mouth to keep you quiet.”
Maybe Lizzy was already planning her return, sitting in a waiting room with magazines and soft music and potted lemon trees growing up to the ceiling. I thought of Theresa and Father Albert walking out into the empty parking lot after drinking their cherry sodas, the two of them embracing under the three-pronged fluorescent light, Theresa feeling the blaze within her at once, what seemed to her to be the love of God.
At lunch, “dinner,” Howard called it without much affectation, he and the children and I sat at the table and ate. Most of us had whole-wheat bread with Cheddar cheese, warmed in the microwave, and milk, and slices of store-bought honeydew melon and a few limp leaves of lettuce from the garden. Bad Emma had white bread and butter, no cheese at all, and no melon either, because once, two years before, she’d been served a piece with a beetle crawling along the rind. Claire ate everything as is. We were the last dairy family eating Dinner, Prairie Center, Circa 1990. Although Howard hadn’t told me, I knew that the cow with the prolapsed uterus had died because I’d seen her trussed up with chains behind the tractor. They would come and get her, take her away to a plant for glue. He was glowering at me for something I must have said. I was staring out of the window thinking about how I had never planned to live this long, how in my child’s mind I was sure I was never going to reach the age of eighteen.
After lunch the team from the university came. There were several of them, bright, responsible people wearing their co-op grocery-store T-shirts, bringing along snacks that had been purchased in bulk. The women looked like I would have if I’d stayed in Ann Arbor. They wore their hairy legs and underarms as a badge signifying their higher power of reasoning and their disinterest in conventional standards of beauty. The women of Prairie Center, as a demographic entity, shaved or waxed all the way up to their bikini line. It was later that afternoon when Emma and Claire and I were standing out by the mailbox at the roadside that we saw the Collinses go past. Dan was driving, Theresa was in front next to him, and Audrey was in the back seat. They were going to climb and climb, trying to find awe within themselves. Theresa had said she was afraid to go and that she couldn’t tell Dan about her fears, but Dan was probably struggling too, over the same appalling thought: She isn’t dead, because she can’t be, and she’ll come home to a deserted house. I lifted my hand to wave. He saw me and drove on. Theresa was bent over her map. Audrey pressed her nose to the glass and opened and shut her fist.
I left the girls playing in the sandbox in the yard, and went upstairs to lie down by the fan for just a minute. Next I knew Howard was shaking me, saying, “Wake up. Go downstairs and make supper. Please.”
We each had our own clocks on either side of the bed. They were old wind-up