Mother wears a T-shirt that says I SAW IT TWICE, in memory of the comet.
She tells me again in person the story she`s told me before by letter and on the phone. That last year she and Dad piled into the Olds and drove out past the city limits at 4 in the morning, to see it away from the lights of town. That he wanted to leave the emergency blinker on so that they wouldn`t get hit from behind by some crazy fool in a semi barreling along on the way to fried eggs and biscuits, but she said no. They`d set the alarm, had their allotted two cups of coffee and come out there, on the road to Houston (the road to Smithville and LaGrange, which might, for all she knew, not even be the road to Houston anymore), to see it flash across the sky.
That the first time she`d seen it she`d been a little girl, taken out in the back yard to see Halley`s Comet by her mother. That her aunts were there, plus older cousins. Even her father, in his nightshirt and overcoat, although she is sure it was September. ”There it goes, Julia,” her mother whispered, her voice as thrilled as Christmas morning. ”This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
And in a way she was right because by the next year her mother was dead, her father remarried and the back yard of their house where they had stood when the flash went overhead belonged to a woman she was sure her mother couldn`t stand.
I try to imagine it. ”A nightshirt and over-
coat-”
”What?” Mother misunderstands me. ”Of course your father didn`t have his coat on. In Texas? In April?”
”So how did it look?”
”To tell the truth, this time it was sort of a fizzle.”
My dad passes by, on his way to the coffee pot. He is in his pajamas, moving slowly. He has hardly got out of bed, my mother tells me, dropping her voice, since the price of oil bottomed out at $10 a barrel. When it first happened, he stopped eating; he stopped sleeping. He went about in the manner of a man who has seen the world go up in flames.
When the stock market collapsed almost 60 years ago, he was a young man, starting out. He had energy then, and not much money to lose. But that wasn`t it, he told my mother, how much you had. That wasn`t the point. It was seeing it repeat. Who had an idea in 1929 you were witnessing the First Crash? If you`d even had an inkling that righting things wasn`t a one-time matter of figuring out how to stop the run of withdrawals or insure deposits or whatever the Sam Hill they`d done to make you think that it could never happen again, it would have taken the heart clean out of you.
It was the same, he`d said, as the War To End All Wars turning into the First World War. If the boys fighting ”over there” had known, they`d have thrown down their guns and quit.
”Line up,” he says now, as he pours his first cup of the day-coffee perked triple strength and black as the ace of spades to fudge on the doctor`s orders. ”Help yourself.”
I follow him into the kitchen and get a hug.
”Mary Ann,” he says, blinking to see me home. ”You must be having trouble with that man of yours again, to be showing up around these parts.”
It`s true that once before I`d come home with a sore heart. That was back when Taylor`s first novel was rejected. When the sound of my key in the lock made him look away and the sound of my voice going past his ears hit flat against the wall.
That was when I learned that men cannot stand the sight of you when they fail.
I met him, a great big mountain and valley of a man, when I got his son
(nearer my age than his) safely placed in Dartmouth. Then, as now, I tutored students for a living. Teaching boys who run track to read for comprehension, teaching young girls who have thrown off their bras how to be mathematically agile. Prying secrets for others from the standardized paragraphs and problems, my mind`s fingers dexterous as an oyster knife.
Taylor was the opposite; he spoke in his own voice. His contributions to the local weekly carried his byline; the numerous drafts of his tortured and tortuous war novel were penned in his own name.
That fact and the way he touched me and spoke directly to the center of me, swept me off my feet. I thought we would stay as we were forever. And if his books had been accepted, we might have.
After breakfast, Mother wants to show me what she`s done to the upstairs since I`ve been gone.
My parents were young, newly married, the year Daddy brought her here from the state where I now live (the state where fathers wear overcoats in September). The house, like all turn-of-the-century Victorians, has space to spare, with two floors, attic, rooms for special purposes: linens, sewing, guests. The upstairs hall, I think, standing bracing myself against the tug of homecoming, the upstairs hall alone may just possibly be the size of our whole house in Vermont.
What Mother wants to show me is that she has turned the single-bed guest room, the tiny one for the extra cousins, the unexpected in-law, into a little study.
”My eyes,” she explains, ”have begun to water in the evenings. I wanted a place where I could put a 200-watt bulb right smack over my shoulder and read a bit at bedtime. Your father, well, he was disturbed by the glare. Now I bring a cup of cocoa up, and whatever I am reading. Lately, it has been Elizabeth. And read in my robe until I can`t hold my eyes open.” She steps out of the way for me to see. ”He grumbles, but-” Here she looks faintly embarrassed. ”I tell him it isn`t separate bedrooms, only separate lamps.”
She`s done the room all in pale blues. (Perhaps she once wanted to have a blue bedroom or had one as a girl.) The narrow spare bed is gone, replaced by a pair of wing chairs and round end table. The chairs and windows are covered in a matching print: wreaths of larkspur, blue on blue, blooming in orderly repeating rows.
”I don`t keep fresh flowers up here,” Mother says. ”I don`t want to have to worry about anything. Not up here.”
”I like it.”
”I wanted to show you.”
My parents were pleased when I married Taylor, because he was a writer. They felt a kinship; they were readers. My mother enjoys the rolling heads of royalty. She owns and has read three times through Strickland`s ”Lives of the Queens of England.” My dad prefers the winning of the West.
I wonder now if she wants permission to read far from his gloomy present state of mind, or only to show me a woman has to fend for herself in marriage. Back downstairs, the three of us sit in the dining room, where my parents go through the ceremony of their second, final cup.
When I was young, they were full-fledged coffee buffs. Sometimes I think I can date my growing up (rings on the tree of my adolescence) by when they moved from the all-stainless perk pot to the Pyrex globes which fit one on top of the other, to the Chemex with its litmus papers and handground beans, to the Bunn, the Braun, the Mr. Coffee. Now, and reasonably enough, they are back with the shiny metal percolator and Folger`s Regular. And why not? Limited to two cups, why should they worry about the grounds or the fat or the exact right temperature for opening the flavorbuds?
I imagine right this minute, all over Texas, couples like my parents sitting at their tables forgoing whatever it is they`ve learned to cherish:
the gulps of hot caffeine, whole-grain toast, golden yellow egg yolks runny as honey, spicy sausage patties, cornflakes swimming lazily in heavy cream. I wonder if doctors know what they are doing, taking away the specialty of the house?
Mother and Daddy are playing their midmorning game of solitaire when Taylor calls.
Each plays alone, with a very different style. Daddy`s strategy is simple: He does what he has to do to beat Old Sol. This involves a complicated series of stages, each bending the rules a little bit further. Mother, on the other hand, plays strictly by her version of Hoyle, ”buying” her cards at an imaginary dollar each, getting back five for every card played on the board.
”Come back,” Taylor says in my ear.
”I`ve been through this before,” I remind him.
”It won`t be like last time,” he promises. ”I swear. I`m back at work already. Your students keep calling for you.”
”Mother and Daddy are playing solitaire.”
”I`ll meet every plane until you come.”
I look at my parents. Daddy, still in his pajamas, fudges with an eighth row. Mother, squaring her shoulders, plays her queen.
I imagine Taylor waiting in the Vermont chill, searching the slate gray sky for a returning light.
”Don`t catch cold,” I tell him.
In the afternoon Mother mentions that she`d like to go out to eat. Daddy, suffering losses on all fronts, has not taken her to dinner for months, not even for Mexican food, a favorite.
”We don`t need to eat out, Dad,” she says wistfully, her face clearly sending signals that she longs for a restaurant meal. ”But it would be a pleasant change.”
I do a double-take. Dad? Did she call him that, my father, Mack? I look at her, slim in her shorts and orange T-shirt, her white hair a knot that looks new and cool off her neck. Things must have been worse than I guessed. No wonder she is reading about Elizabeth. What was Essex required to call his queen? Your Royal Majesty?
”I`d like to take you both out,” I tell them, resolving the matter in this way. ”My treat.”
”Can you afford that?” Mother is amazed.
”Out?” Daddy blinks at me.
That evening, while they are getting dressed, I go into the newly blue-wreathed, bedless reading room. Recalling how, on my last visit home, I fled into this nook and flung myself on the daybed, covered then with a green patchwork quilt, pressed my hot cheeks into the neat handstitching and waited out my broken heart. Waited out the aftermath of Taylor`s first defeat, as if it were the mumps and the swelling had to go down, the measles and the spots to fade.
I move about the room with its upright chairs well lit from behind. Elizabeth is on the table; a bookmark in her reign. I turn out the 200-watt light and push apart the thick lined cotton curtains, feeling in the dusk the muted blues.
This is my mother`s escape now, not mine. The patchwork quilt now lies on a bed I`ve made elsewhere.
Daddy has dressed up, and that in itself cheers us all. He`s out of his pajamas, into a white shirt and dry-cleaned suit, all pink-cheeked, carefully shaved and feeling spry. The young men around town (his lawyer, his broker)
have gone nuts, he says when we are settled at our table in El Rancho. They`ve taken leave of their senses. The closing of a bank in Odessa, another in Midland, has knocked them flat. They haven`t his perspective. They need a little patience; they`ll see, the price will rise. The presidential election will roll around, and the price of oil will rise again. Someone like him, who has weathered a crash once before, has an overview.
”You and your man have a falling out again?” he asks me, back in the present.
”Not a bad fight like last time,” I tell him, realizing I`m thinking of buying Taylor a nightshirt. ”This one is something of a fizzle.”
He`s pleased. A man his age, arcing toward the horizon, needs to believe that some things in life, such as matrimony, are once-in-a-lifetime events.
Reassured, he decides he`ll have the Deluxe Dinner.
”It`s nice to be here.” Mother relaxes, cutting her guacamole salad into a little lawn of green bites. ”It`s a real treat.”
”Overdue,” my daddy says. ”Long overdue. I`ve been neglectful of late.” Glad to have his life back under control, he signals the waiter expansively. ”Coffee all around,” he orders.
