43. The Colors of Other Storms

She never spoke of gathering clouds. Mother didn’t, either, but then she wasn’t one to speak about the weather.

I didn’t understand why until I saw it for myself. Of course, in her childhood home, Mrs. Littington sometimes wouldn’t see rain, or even clouds, for months at a time.

Every evening, the sun set wider and brighter behind trees that ringed the sea from her front yard, around a shoreline that arced like a boomerang back to the mountains she could see when she looked directly in front of her. For weeks, through August and September, and sometimes October, the sun—colored like the earth of the nearby hillsides—filled the waves with a power that burned foam away, leaving the most intense shade of azur—too much for the bluest of eyes, accustomed as they are to the flat colors, interrupted only by splashes of white, of the northern oceans.

She was right. I had to see that to understand why the part of the world where she grew up—even the gray city, Toulon, that she knew, where ships drifted away and disappeared beyond waves: ships heavy with their freight of secrets—is called the Cote d’Azur. The sea, the sky, at night or during the day, do not turn into shades of black or gray. Under the moon, nothing does.

And so even in Toulon, gray and gritty even before the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on it, the passage of days, of lives, happens through intensifying shades of blue and rose turning to orange, and back.

She remembered the day she left. It was close to evening. Blue hues deepened, as if the sea had engulfed the sun but couldn’t put it out. Instead, the sun refracted the depths of the sea through the stars and under bristles of cedar trees.

There was not darkness, no blankets of clouds: only more color, more intense and consuming hues, than even her eyes, which were accustomed to months of sun followed by months of rain, could take. Or take with her, she said.

Still, she never complained about this block, even though she wouldn’t’ve stayed any longer than she had to. Summer heat-- not light-- blinded people here: It led the eye to cracks in faded bricks. So did the clouds: layers of reflections of the shingles and windows of the houses here.

On this block, the clear blue sky—on those rare occasions when we really had one—suspends time, freezes motions—even those of the face—like a moments recollected from dreams. On the other hand, time, at least in every story I’ve heard or read, marches and gathers like the bodies of water that become storm clouds.

That’s how it is; that’s how it was—except in Adam’s stories. Or in Mrs. Littington’s, though she hardly ever told them. I don’t remember when I heard them: I don’t think she would’ve told my mother—or maybe she did, once or twice. But mother wasn’t interested in hearing about any other time or place but the one she was in. She’d’ve never understood what Mrs. Littington might’ve had to say about this place; she had no interest in Mrs. Littington’s Cote d’Azur or prewar Europe, for she’d never been, and never would be, any place but here.

And, through all those years we’ve spoken over the phone, mother never asked where I was: only that I had some place to say and something to eat. The sun from the Mediterranean, the wind down the Rhone—nothing like those things would’ve mattered to her.

42. What Is Enough

 

Some people think they’re underpaid, which is to say they think others make too much. Mother’d hear about some actor or baseball player in the news, shake her head and exclaim, “Nobody needs that much money!”

I’d’ve liked to’ve believed, or should I say agreed with, her. But all I could think was, How did she know?

And I thought it was a strange thing for her to say. After all, from her I learned that all that matters is whether you’re making enough to pay for what and who you have to pay for. I never knew the details of her finances—still don’t—but neither I nor—as far as I know, anyway—she missed a meal. Sometimes one or the other of us was hungry, or simply didn’t want to eat.

And I can remember a time when somehow or another she got a watermelon late in January—a particularly cold month and season, as I recall.

I don’t know how she got it or what—or if—she paid for it. But there it was. And it was one of the few things she ate from which she didn’t offer me even a bite, and it never occurred to me to ask for it.

Why didn’t I ask? Not because I didn’t care for watermelon: every year, I looked forward to that pink flesh that crumbled in my mouth without scraping my tongue or the slippery tissues above it. Just moist pieces that disintegrated before they slid down my throat.

Somehow I always felt like I was getting away with something when I ate watermelon. There was that texture; there was the coolness and the colors I’d never seen on anything else. Somehow, even in my ignorance of geography, I knew that nothing like it could come from this block.

And every year, right around the Fourth of July, we’d have it. I’d look forward to it, enjoy it. But I knew enough not to look for it in the middle of winter. No one told me: I just noticed that nobody ate it at any other time of year but those few weeks before Labor Day. Whatever mother had, there was enough for watermelon during the summer.

Since then, I’ve been what some people would consider poor. I met boys—and some girls—who sucked somebody so they could eat that day. And they didn’t have any place to stay that night, except for the bed of whoever fed and fucked them.

They weren’t making enough to live any other way; sometimes all they had were a sandwich and beer in their bellies and the stained sheets at their backs. Some people would say they were underpaid, which they confuse with being exploited.

I don’t imagine the question ever crossed their minds. One night, they needed only something to eat and drink, maybe something to smoke or snort, and some place to lie down, whether or not they get any rest. Another night, they’d need a pair of stockings or boots, a new makeup compact or something else, and they’d have to find another trick. Sometimes they didn’t have anything to eat or drink; sometimes they’d notice.

So maybe they weren’t making enough money. But were they underpaid? All anybody knows—and only sometimes do people actually know this—is what other people make, sometimes for doing the same kind of work they do, other times for doing things they can’t even imagine. Even if someone knows what you make, how could that person know what you should make?

After I left this block, I heard people say that other people in certain jobs, like teaching or social work, weren’t “paid enough.” How did they know? Sometimes they said the same thing about priests, rabbis, ministers and astrologers. How could they make such statements? Since I’ve tried so little to recall any part of my life, I’ve never needed religious people or spiritualists, and since I don’t fear ghosts, I have no need for the services such people render. I’d never have to pay for them, so they’re worth nothing to me. But I’ve known people—just-divorced suburban housewives and men who can only imagine they’ve seen this block, or something like it, in movie or on TV—who think ministers, mystics and mediums ought to live in big houses, drive cars that are almost as big and have wallets full of unlimited credit.

I’ve never tried, and don’t think I would ever try, to argue someone out of such a belief. On the other hand, I don’t think they or their kids—and certainly not their pets—shouldn’t have enough to eat. I think I learned this belief from mother. And this: Even though there weren’t that many people either of us really liked, I never—and I don’t recall that she ever—wished deprivation on anyone else. There just never seemed to be any point to that. Not even for the ones we wished dead.

But there were others, like one man—acutally, there were others like him, but I just happen to remember him right now—who thought he could starve or beat his wife, his kids and the kids on the team he coached into doing what he wanted them to do. Actually, I only saw him once or twice. But Nancy Hambramunde, his daughter, hunched over like the old women on the block even though she was my age. She never looked in my, or anyone else’s, direction. In school, she sat in an almost-fetal position, furtively, as if she’d never had and never would have the chance to rest before her teacher, her father or somebody else snapped her to attention.

We’d been in the same class, I think, for the year or two before I stopped going to school. And the teacher—Mr. Actun—called on her whenever she seemed ready to sleep or simply shut out the rest of the lesson, which she’d already learned anyway.

During the first few weeks of that term, she never answered—until one day when Mr. Actun informed her, and the rest of the class, that she’d fail the class if she didn’t answer his questions.

She lifted her head slightly, just enough for us to know she’d heard him. But she remained curled and held her hands to her stomach. From that day on, she answered—she always had the answers—as if she didn’t have to hear the question and we—and possibly someone else—would hear.

Although she always seemed to know anything she’d read, anything on which she could be quizzed, forward and backward, having Mr. Actun call on her never got easier. And he went from calling on her once during each class to twice, and more, until one day he subjected her to an impromptu cross-examination of a reading assignment (which, as I recall, I hadn’t looked at) punctuated by his shouts of “Speak Up!” and “Let the whole class see you!”

He was about to ask another question when a long, viscous tear streamed down each of her cheeks—and the bell rang. Her tears grew more liquid and her head bent almost into her when we pushed out and shuffled around her into the hallway.

I don’t recall seeing her after that day, at least not in school. I saw her around the block—I’m not sure it was after that day, or when—and I don’t think she saw me. Not that I tried to get her attention, or would’ve wanted it. But I do remember how she glanced sideways to ward off the sort of man who looked as though he’d just bellowed, “No comment!” as he barged past a TV news camera. If Nancy had always tried to stay curled, he looked as if the slightest motion or gesture could spring him like a trap.

Mr. Hambramunde drove the only Cadillac on this block—at least, the only one that didn’t come and go. And Nancy was, if not the best, certainly the most impeccably dressed girl in that school. Even when she slouched (which was almost never), she couldn’t disturb the straight lines of her starched, buttoned blouses and skirts that neither clung to, nor bellowed nor bagged, around her. And if a hair had rippled out of place, it’d’ve been as noticeable as if she’d forgotten to wear her glasses with tiny hexagonal lenses—which, of course, she never did.

After she’d left that school, I heard Mr. Hambramunde left after he and Nancy’s mother argued over the cost of private school. By that time, I’d stopped going to school. But it would be a while before I left this block.

41. The Yellow Gown

 

I—the funeral director, really—chose the soft yellow gown in which she was dressed when the women of our block and I saw her for the last time. I told the makeup artist that she always liked loose but neat fabrics that could drape, but not billow, on or away from her skin, depending on whether she’d been lying down or standing up. The crepe de chine fabric was finer and softer than anything I’d ever seen her wear. But I don’t think it would’ve upset her, if she could’ve known she was dressed in it.

But the color was---perfect! Though the woman who dressed and made my mother up was probably my age or younger. But looking at the way my mother was dressed and made up, I’d’ve thought the stylist/hairdresser had accompanied the girl who’d become my mother when, for the first time, my mother bought a dress: a soft, drapey frock in the color of August afternoon light or sunflowers. Mom’d saved her allowance—literally, what she was allowed to keep after she handed her mother the pay envelope from the shoe factory where she worked in the office. Having to save and wait frustrated her, she said, but it turned out for the best: the dress fit her perfectly, she said, for she’d grown two inches and hadn’t gained any weight.

But I can only imagine that color on my mother. Hardly anybody looks good in any shade of yellow and I, no matter how I’ve changed, couldn’t help but to look like fruit that’d over-ripened in the cindery haze of a malarial swamp. Mother’s skin, a bit earthier than mine, and her brown eyes coulldn’t’ve done that hue any more than justice than it could’ve done for her. But in the one photograph I ever saw—in black and white—of her in that lovely dress, there was a tension miising that she seemed to carry even as a very young girl. Could’ve been something about that dress, I guess. I don’t know, I’ll never know, about that color, though.

I’d never seen that color--I’d known it only from my mother’s descriptions—until I saw her in repose. That tension, gone again—before the other women of our block. I hadn’t seen that color, that look, certainly not on her, until then; haven’t seen it since. And it was the only time I saw her in a gown. She didn’t have photographs, at least none that I know of, of her wedding or any other formal occasion. Since she didn’t graduate from high school, or even junior high, I doubt she went to a prom.

In fact, the only occasion of her life marked by any ritual, besides her death, was her birth. I guess she wore a gown then, as I did. (She showed me the photos.) But then again, who knows: She entered this world in her mother’s house, only two and a half street blocks—forty-one doors—from the funeral parlor. Down the street, turn right, go four avenue blocks and there’s the window I peeked out of the night they pulled Adam out of the house across the street from ours, his head out of the oven. They wrapped a gown around him in the hospital, just as they did the one and only time I had to stay. A gown at the time of my birth, and then, in that room, as sterile and odorless as the funeral parlor, but colder.

That gown, which barely covered my crotch, was made, it seemed, for an eleven-year-old girl. I still don’t know how long they made my mother’s final dressing gown: The casket’d been open only down to her breasts; below that, the linen-colored silk lining dissolved into a shadow. Somehow I get the feeling Adam’d never been covered quite enough until the medics pulled the sheet over his head as he lay stretched on the gurney on which he made the trip from the hospital to the morgue.

Maybe some people never get to be gowned; they don’t get the chance to have their bodies covered but not confined: protected from the cold, but not prevented from gathering the shadows of trees together to allow light to pass through. Some people may get to wear such a gown when they are named; others—only women—when they take on someone else’s name; and a few people, like my mother, at the end of their lives. A garment under which their energies—their echoes and reflections—are gathered. But one which still allows the arms and legs to move, even when the newborn, the enjoined, the recently-deceased, cannot or do not want to touch anyone.

Besides mother, the only other person on this block I’ve seen in a gown was Mrs. Littington. And hers wasn’t like any of the others: only slightly too long to be a cape or poncho but too short and not bulky enough to be a kaftan, only the caps of sleeves circled her forearms. As a kid, I thought it was some French costume they didn’t tell us about in social studies class; now, as far as I know, she might’ve made it or had it made.

Sometimes some other woman—who wasn’t at the funeral—would appear at Mrs. Littington's front door or by one of the windows. She was the only person I’d ever seen who shared Mrs. Littington’s facial shape: all angles and refractions of olive bark and chestnuts baked by centuries of sun and wind. But the other woman’s—I was never sure of her relation to anyone, or role in that house—basic, earthy tones and sturdy shape hadn’t transmuted, as Mrs. Littington’s had, into a statue of shadows, each in her own reflection, or rather, refraction through time. But this is not to say she was timeless.

That is to say Mrs. Littington, before any of us met her, was not the person we knew, and she changed again after she left this block. She was just like that. On the hand, the other woman was always that, wherever she went, which is to say, wherever the Littingtons lived. She wasn’t of this block, but she was of its equivalent, in Toulon or some other place. Wherever it was, it was this block.

Which, of course, is the reason no one made any attempt to speak to her. The only one less trustworthy, or worthy in any other way, than someone who leaves this block is someone who comes from its mirror image in some other town, some other country, some other world. They’re always too dark, too coarse, too uppity, too something. So they survive they way anyone else does in the moment they’re about to enter after that uncertain and hostile moment they’ll always think of as the present—protected or at least covered up. We enter, or exit, in a gown, and don’t trust anyone who hasn’t entered our lives in that way.