The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [70]
We each have a purse and matching hat. White gloves, socks with lace cuffs. Crinolines under stiff cotton skirts that make us feel important. Patent leather Mary Janes. My two little sisters and I pose for a photograph before leaving for church. We stand by the station wagon. “Robin’s egg blue,” my mother had called it. I like to think of the car as an egg, my family hatching through the doors. For my youngest sister, it is her first purse. It distracts her. She swings it back and forth, hitting us on the knees. Quit it, we say. Shush. Stand still for the picture.
Sunrise at Punchbowl cemetery. My father’s band is here, the 7th Fleet Navy Band, and also the church choir he directs in downtown Honolulu. That’s why I’m here, to sing in the choir. It feels odd to be singing so early, to be up before the sun. It is hard to imagine all this death; I have not lost anyone to death, except the collie we named Lady. Her death seemed so large, I felt the need to do something. I set my toy ironing board up in the back yard and covered it with one of mom’s old tablecloths. Death was hungry, and I couldn’t do enough. Not just dog biscuits and Lady’s collar, but some of my things, my favorite marbles, and a Golden book—Scuffy the Tugboat—and a copper bracelet that I bought with my allowance on vacation the summer before; it all went on the makeshift altar. I couldn’t do enough. Death was empty, and I tried to fill it.
I remember one morning when our neighbor came over as we were eating breakfast, still in her nightgown, her thin hair in rollers, gray at the roots. Out of breath, she said, Harry’s collapsed, and my father ran next door and called the ambulance and missed a whole morning of work. After school that day, a new phrase, “dead on arrival.”
I remember the front page of the newspaper on the day that the plane crashed in Rio de Janeiro with members of the U.S. Navy Band on board. Everyone died. My father’s face turned ash-white; he looked old, not like my dad any more. He had known all the people on that plane. He cried, and my mother cried. She told me that if we had stayed in Washington, my father would have been on that plane and he would be dead. I could not imagine this.
The men’s voices drone, I am sleepy and hungry. The soldiers’ white crosses are beautiful in the morning light. Such a peaceful place, such terrible deaths, and so many. Easter Sunrise Service.
Spring break, spent with friends from college. My favorite was at Montauk, walking in cold sand, watching the sun come up. Easter is a blank space on the calendar, and I barely remember the Easters of my childhood. Once, though, my mother and I are visiting her parents in Lemmon, and we go to church on Easter Sunday with my grandmother. I grumble over having to dress up and deliberately sing flat on the hymns, until my mother jabs me with her elbow.
After college, Manhattan, my first apartment. My roommate and I furnish it mostly with hand-me-downs from her family’s home on Long Island. The necessity of buying things—even salt and pepper shakers, or a small Oriental carpet—terrifies me. It seems risky, this pretense to adulthood. One Thursday night in spring, my roommate brings home some mescaline,