SNAPSHOTS

from "Portrait in a Rear View Mirror"

CHAPTER EIGHT

SNAPSHOTS

1961

There were no photographs of Sandra and me taken after our mother died. We became invisible, as if we had been buried with her. We were our father’s children now. The only proof we existed was a single picture I still have of Sandra and me with Santa Claus at the mall, and it was taken by a paid photographer. We look solemn, unsure in Santa’s arms that he had anything left to give us.

But there were bright spots, even in the pink house, snapshots in color, recorded only by the retina. Below the surface, feeling had taken refuge, burrowing down in the marrow, but I was touched tenderly from time to time by the senses of the world: sunlight, music, just enough honey to remember how sweetness once tasted and might return.

My grandfather made me a pair of stilts and I walked around the yard, thrilled to be so tall above the green grass. Sandra and I both got kittens—I called mine Goldie and she called hers Tiger; they weren’t allowed in the house at night and slept in the garage. Still, they were ours. My father knew that I was fascinated with the night sky ever since I went to a planetarium and bought me a small telescope and a book about the stars.

Sandra had a best friend, Carol Hobaugh who lived a few houses away on the cul-de-sac of Barlow Road. My one friend, Carolyn, lived on the opposite end of Little River Hills subdivision, a long bike ride away and we rode the neighborhood together. Nobody ever came to the pink house for a sleep over.

 One fall evening when my father came home from work he called for Sandra and me at the bottom of the stairs. “You have to see this!” he said. Just seeing my father excited about something, anything, was not to be missed. Sandra and I got into the car and he drove us to a place in the neighborhood where we could get a look at the sky. “That’s the aurora borealis!” he exclaimed, pointing upward to the heavens. “It almost never can be seen this far south. It’s a miracle!” Pink and green waves of light shimmered, opalescent, and the three of us stood looking up at the miracle. Our miracle. There was no one else there to witness it. The night sky revealed this gorgeous message just for us. I didn’t say so out loud, but I thought, “My mother sent it to us.” Such a mysterious, unreachable place. We waited until the Northern Lights faded and went out and arrived back at the pink house past our bedtime, amazed.

Besides the mysteries of the galaxy, I had another obsession, more terrestrial. I had collected twenty-six horse statues of all sizes and colors. They were lined up in order of height across my dresser. My father had just given me the largest one, a magnificent white porcelain stallion, anatomically correct, rearing from a pedestal. With the mirror behind them they were doubled, and looked like a herd. But I wanted to ride one. A real one.

My father started taking me on excursions with him in the car. Sandra stayed at home with my grandparents. One day my father took me for a pony ride at a roadside corral near Centerville. There was also a large track that served as the route the stagecoach and surrey rides took. There were a few full-size horses tethered next to the ponies.

It was a cloudy, almost rainy day in November, around my birthday. There was no one else at the horse park. “Please,” I said, “can I ride a horse instead of a pony?” My father looked at the owner and nodded. The owner helped me up into an English saddle he put on a chocolate brown mare. He led both the horse and me by the reins through the gate to the track and then gave the reins to me. The leather felt both strong and supple in my hands. I made sure my sneakers fit firmly in the stirrups, and nudged the horse into a trot. I’d seen the movie “National Velvet” with an adolescent Elizabeth Taylor on TV and understood that when you rode English style, you “posted” up and down, raising yourself in the stirrups in the rhythm that matched the horse’s stride. So that’s what I did, giddy with freedom. When I got all the way around the ring the man said to my father, in front of me, “That girl needs to ride. I’ll bet she would like to have some lessons.” My father looked at him, surprised, then turned to me as if I were someone he had just met. “Who taught you how to do that?” he asked. “Elizabeth Taylor,” I answered.

 My birthday was always a rite of passage, going from training wheels to a real bicycle, from pony rides to a full-grown horse. One day I would get my driver’s license on my birthday. Then I could really get away.

 That first summer after my mother died, my grandparents gave my father money to take me all the way to upstate New York so I could stay for a month at a small, family-owned dude ranch called The Circle B. My father had already singled me out for his untold stories and instructions. On the long drive there he told me this was a place he and my mother had vacationed before I was born. I would even get to ride the same horse my mother had ridden, a big gelding named Target. It didn’t seem possible that I was going to get to ride the same horse, be carried down the same trails. If the summer had been longer, we might have found her there in the Adirondacks, standing by a stream, wondering why it taken so long for me to find her.

Not since Fine Lake had I spent so much time outdoors in the sun, feeling my body grow stronger, watching my skin darken with tan. I fell hopelessly in love with horses and read everything I could on the bookshelf. Misty of Chincoteague, Sea Star, Black Beauty. Spencer LaFlure, the owner, took me riding every day. Target and I trotted down the wooded trails. I wanted to go faster. Spencer said, “Give him a good kick. He’ll know what to do.” I kicked Target into a gallop and he responded immediately as if he’d been longing to run. We flew through the woods. My butt bounced in the Western saddle, hard, and I held onto the reins. A searing pain shot down my spine and I had to slow Target to a walk to stop hurting. When Spencer caught up with me I didn’t say a word about it. I didn’t understand that hitting the ice while sitting up in my snow saucer had compressed my spine and forced the vertebrae into a curvature. I kept riding, only slower. The summer wouldn’t last forever.

The following summer, my father chose another dude ranch to take me to. After all, the first one had been so successful. This ranch, also in upstate New York, was enormous. At least a hundred people stayed in a motel-like building and ate all their meals in a big cafeteria.  The owners, the Earharts, were acquaintances of my father’s, and had promised to take care of me. My mother had never been to this dude ranch.

My father left, promising to pick me up at the end of the month. But instead of living in their house like I had at the Circle B, these people gave me one of the rooms in the motel. They were busy. The owner’s wife gave me a pair of her cowboy boots to wear. They were too small but I wore them anyway, hobbling back and forth to the barn.

I was nine years old. I knew no one. There were other children there, but they had families and those families weren’t sure at all if I was playmate material. They all played volleyball, shuffleboard, horseshoes together. I rode horses, but a different one each time, on trail rides with lots of other people, single file. I knew none of the horse’s names. I swam by myself, desperate for attention from the lifeguard, following him when he swam laps. I ate by myself, mostly sweets. There was no one to stop me. I slept in my pine-paneled room alone, listening to the sounds of other families in the game room down the hall.

I returned to the pink house at the end of the summer undernourished and exhausted. My grandmother blamed my father. Again. As if everything he touched he damaged or destroyed.

Only through writing these memories do I see a pattern developing. After our mother died, Sandra and I grew further apart. We rarely did anything together as if we were literally separated by her death, a death we could never talk about. It’s almost as if the secret I had to keep from her aged me and instead of being four and a half years older, it felt like there were decades between us.  My father focused on me, taking me to dude ranches for the summer. Sandra was always “too young” for whatever I was doing. She had an imaginary friend, an Indian girl named Wahoo See-Saw. The tectonic plate that had once been solid beneath us broke into fragments.

There is a photograph I saw in a book recently: a polar bear on a piece of ice that had broken away from land where its cub still stood. The bear must have gone sailing down a fast-moving river on a raft of ice barely big enough to hold it. The cub, of course, is me.

I rode my bicycle constantly or galloped through the woods on my own two legs as if I were still riding Target. I had trouble taking a full, deep breath; it felt like there was a clamp in my solar plexus. I dreaded dinner when I would have to face yet another plate of food I couldn’t eat.

My grandmother didn’t know what to do with me. She certainly couldn’t ask me if anything was the matter. Instead, she suggested I open a lemonade stand. I liked the idea of the stand but had no intention of selling lemonade. Besides, we lived on a short, dead-end street. The only people driving were the few neighbors whose names I didn’t know.

I struggled down the steep driveway alone with a portable blackboard on an easel. Next, I brought down empty Coke bottles, the small, green kind. I carefully poured dirt into them knowing the green glass camouflaged the contents. I called my product “Gypo” and wrote that on the blackboard in big capital letters. I stood there all day at the bottom of the driveway by my enterprise screaming, “Come and get your Gypo! Right here! Right now!” hoping to trick someone. That was the whole point—to trick people. Not even the neighbors stopped by. They must have thought I was very strange, screaming there by myself in the road. But it is the one memory I have of that time that includes me having a voice. A loud one, all my own, where no one else could hear me.

Relief arrived one day in a Dodge Dart with a push-button transmission. Two of my father’s relatives from Warrenton, half an hour away, came to get Sandra and me and take us home with them. Our Aunt Edna Hulfish, our father’s eldest sister, in her 60’s then, was afraid to drive up our driveway so she and her only daughter, Ansley met us at the schoolbus stop on the highway.

Our cousin, Ansley Hulfish, then in her forties, had been born in their house on Winchester Street and still lived in it. I suppose she was technically an old maid. Photographs of her from college show a dark-haired, vivacious young woman surrounded by friends and suitors but she contracted tuberculosis and had to drop out of school for a long stay in a sanitarium. When she got out she went home and stayed there. Ansley wasn’t completely well, but she was very much alive. At least she came home again. She looked a little like our mother—she was about the same age. But Ansley was far from maternal. She didn’t cook or sew or clean but she liked to get in her Dodge Dart and tool around town or even out into the country. She and Sandra hit it off right away and went visiting Ansley’s many friends. Ansley enjoyed her job as voting registrar immensely. She knew everybody in town and made a point of registering every black person she could. A staunch Democrat, she probably helped Kennedy win.

 Aunt Edna was a music teacher and patiently taught Sandra and me to play on the old upright piano in her music room and the baby grand in the living room. Her students came and went on weekends. Propped up on the piano stands were sheaves of well-thumbed, yellowed sheet music: Chopin’s Etudes and Nocturnes next to “Five Easy Pieces.” She took me to Grace Episcopal church in The Plains with her so I could sing in the choir where she had played the organ since she was thirteen. Hymns filled the old church and for my ninth birthday in early November she gave me a hymnal of my own. Two doors down from that church was the white house with a porch and picket fence where both she and my father had been born along with several other siblings. Some other family lived in it now.

Aunt Edna let us come into the kitchen to help her while she cooked, something our grandmother never allowed. “Good lands above,” she said more than once as she realized that Sandra and I knew absolutely nothing about cooking. At 5’8” she towered above us. Her blue-gray hair looked as soft as cotton and was always wound in a bun with bobby pins. Ropy veins rose in her hands like rain-swollen rivers. She showed us how to whip meringue for lemon pies, how to make sweet tea, custard, green beans with Virginia ham, Toll House cookies. The gas stove was always hot with simmering or baking.

 Built in the ‘20’s the house was too old to be split-level; it had two distinct floors and a long wooden staircase connecting them. Sandra and I explored all of it. In that house we were sisters again. Most compelling of all to us were the “secret stairs” that pulled down from the second floor ceiling with a rope, a telescoping ladder that led up to a large attic dimly-lit by a single bulb hanging from a long cord. At one end, a jumbled chimney crouched as if the workmen, having built the fireplace downstairs in perfect upright posture had had a lot of fun with the part that couldn’t be seen. Boxes were stacked on the rafters where we weren’t supposed to step—there was a narrow walkway between boxes full of hats, old dress patterns, wrapping paper, and Christmas ornaments. Things saved and reused, year after year.

A doorway from the kitchen opened onto a broom closet and another set of stairs that disappeared down into a dark basement that we had to get up our courage to descend. Shelves stacked with Mason jars could have been an exhibit in a mad scientist’s laboratory filled with strange, murky fruits and vegetables floating in cloudy liquid. A dusty pump organ in the corner always scared me. It was something a ghost would play. We were always a little scared down there, but drawn to it all the same.

Everything felt historic in that house. Like some archaeological site, there was evidence everywhere of its long being occupied by the same people. Framed pictures of relatives hung on the wall. But there were no pictures of our mother. I looked. There were other artifacts: crystal glasses displayed in a hutch with glass doors. Special commemorative plates from Luray Caverns, Natural Bridge. A cut glass punch bowl with a crystal ladle.

We learned the songs Aunt Edna used to play and every night just after we went to bed she’d play “Que Sera Sera” and sing in her high, wavering soprano as we drifted off to sleep.

Uncle Howard said very little, but presided nonetheless in his easy chair. Tall, gray-suited and lanky, he smoked Chesterfields endlessly, stubbing them out in an ashtray on a stand by the chair. A perpetual cloud surrounded him. When he came home from the bank where he worked he watched Huntley and Brinkley on the news and then the Friday Night Fights. He was hard of hearing because he turned down his hearing aid. Ansley was always shouting to her mother from her chair in the living room while Aunt Edna was in the kitchen. He always smiled at us, his eyes behind his rimless glasses shining with some old mischief we might have reminded him of. In his house we were allowed to play. To run up and down the stairs. To sing as loud as we wanted to. He couldn’t hear us anyway.

A cherry tree in the back yard invited me up with a branch low enough to climb. From that vantage point, a pasture stretched out with nothing blocking the view to the foothills of the Blue Ridge to the west except wild grass. There was plenty of room to breathe.

Somehow our weekend visits to Warrenton helped Sandra and me when we returned to the pink house; we brought music with us. Music became a common language we could start speaking at the pink house, too. My grandfather, being Welsh, started to whistle and sing the songs his father taught him. My grandmother said he hadn’t done so in a long time. He was a big fan of the Lawrence Welk and Mitch Miller shows on television. We watched these shows together and I especially liked the bouncing ball above the lyrics on the screen during Mitch Miller’s songs: Sweet Adeline. Swanee River. Old Black Joe.

One Saturday night I put on a dress like a girl getting ready for a date. I don’t know where this idea came from but I decided I would dance with my grandfather instead of just listen. I came out of my room and stood at the top of the short flight of stairs that led down into the living room. He was sitting on the couch when he saw me. He stood up slowly, came to the bottom of the stairs, held out his hand and bowed.

He was not much taller than I was. He wasn’t fat, but slightly stocky. He smelled like Aqua Velva. He had a little white hair left on the sides of his head.

Lawrence Welk raised his baton and said, “Ah one and a two ah” to the orchestra. Poised, we waited for the first notes and then we waltzed while the Lennon sisters sang. Whatever deep sorrow had settled in him lifted for that hour as we turned slowly around the living room. My grandmother sat on the couch quietly, maybe even proud of me, for dressing up, relieved that her husband could still sing and dance and smile. My sister spun in circles around us until she was dizzy. The setting sun, it seemed, broke through the perpetual scrim of cloud, that hard crust of gray. When it did, it was almost blinding, briefly, proof there was another world just behind the one we lived in.