Don't Call Me Mother won the 2006 Gold Medal Award from the Bay Area Independent Publishing Association, and "Tracks to My Heart," won first nonfiction prize in the Jack London Writing Conference contest.
The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy.
- Adrienne Rich
The train bisects the blue and the green, parting wheat fields by the tracks. Mommy and I rub shoulders, watching the landscape move backward as we sit in the last car, as if erasing my childhood when she would board the train and leave me aching for her. Now, in my dream, we rub shoulders, her perfume lingering. The old longing wrenches my stomach.
Click-clack, click-clack, the train’s wheels on the track, the language of my past, my future.
Her face is soft. Her wine-dark eyes glance at me with promise, an endearing look that gives me all I ever wanted. The click-clack ticks away the time, the mother time, moons rising and falling as the years fall like petals in a white garden, our body-and-blood song haunting my dreams. Mommy, where are you.
Even as she is with me, she is gone.
The train station is the center of the universe, with tracks going and coming in all directions. People stand shivering in the ever-present plains wind, their hair kicked up violently when a train blows by, especially a freight bound for Chicago where, as I understand it, all sensible trains end up. To me, the Windy City, as I hear my mother and grandmother call it, is the end of the known world. It is where I began and where my mother is off to as the three of us - my mother Josephine, my grandmother Frances, and I - stand in a miserable clutch. I am sure they are as miserable as I am, my mothers, standing there arms across their chests, hips slung out like bored movie stars competing for the same part. Maybe that’s what they are doing - vying for the part of good mother, or bad mother, depending on how you define things. But to me they are beautiful and thrilling.
But underneath their beauty and power, a secret is buried. A secret that runs in the blood. This moment repeats for the third time what has happened before - a mother leaving a daughter, repeating what Gram did to my mother so long ago, and her mother before her. It will be years before I find out the whole story about the three generations of women who will define my life. At this moment, the ticking bomb is set to go off when my mother gets on the train. No one here claims any knowledge of this dire pattern. I can feel it though, deep in a silent place inside me, a place of desperation, the beginning of a crack that will split my life open.
The sun pinks the sky in the west, a place where the eye loves to rest in this open land. Already the lore of its history tickles my curiosity, even though at this moment I am four years old. I hear of Indian chiefs and the frontier, if not from books, from the pictures all around town proclaiming our cowboy heritage - neon signs, billboards showing an Indian chief in full headdress, peace pipe slung from an arm as casually as a gun. Right now the picture of an Indian, wearing only a blanket and standing in front of the Santa Fe Chief hangs on the waiting room wall, wreathed in smoke rising like a mysterious code to the ceiling.
I read the code here, tapping feet in open-toed suede shoes. I stare at my mother’s toes, as if to memorize an intimate part of her, bringing my gaze up her shapely legs, my stomach in a pang, the scenes that brought us to this moment fresh in my mind.
Mommy and I came here a few months ago from Chicago, where we had lived after my father left. I don’t know much about him, except that he went off to the war, and came back too, but not to us. She cries when she looks at his pictures. Every so often she shows me a small black-and-white photo of a man wearing a captain’s hat and grinning as he leans casually against a brick building. The crease in his pants is knife sharp. With her slim fingers, she almost caresses a photograph of herself against the same wall wearing a big fur coat.
“That was the night before you were born, a cold night in March. What a wonderful thing that was for your mother.” Mommy often talks about herself like that, as if she wasn’t in the room.
I remember our time in Chicago, when Mommy would talk on the phone forever in the evening, twisting her hair in tiny ringlets all over her head, or knitting scarves and sweaters. I remember the amber light that shone over her like a halo, and I remember that I’d do anything to get her to scratch my back with her sharp fingernails.
But a few months ago, we left - my first time on the train. The ride was thrilling: the sound of the whistle, huge clouds of gushing steam, great deep rumblings of the engines that sounded like scary monsters but sped us by green fields and blue skies all around, with little towns along the side of the track and people waving, waving as if they knew us. The whistle tooted a special hello to them. What fun.
That night the porter unfolded the special bed that was our seat, pulling down a shade made of thick green cloth. I loved the little tent that he made for us. My mother had a dreamy look on her face, staring at the sights as the wheels click-clacked beneath us. Mommy wore her cotton nightgown, and I my pajamas. We cuddled between fresh cotton sheets. The train rocked us back and forth, back and forth in a sweet rhythm that one day I would remember as the best moment we ever had, Mommy and me. On the train, together. The next day, we arrived in Wichita where I met Gram, Mommy’s mother.
She looked like my mother, with the same pretty face. Her voice was soft as she sifted my fine hair away from my forehead in a gentle gesture and smiled at me with soft brown eyes so dark I couldn’t see the pupils you can see in most people’s eyes. She was nice to me and called me Sugar Pie. But Mommy and Gram - whew - they sure did surprise me by fighting all the time. I’d watch, or hide in the hall, while they yelled, screamed, and cried. Almost every day. It was terrible to hear; it made my skin itch. I scratched it, making red marks all along my arms. Their cigarette smoke filled the air, choking me. Mommy rushed off to work each morning, and then it was quiet and nice in Gram’s little house, with windows that let in the sun. It made pretty patterns through the Venetian blinds on the hardwood floors. Gram read stories to me, and we made bubbles with soap in the sink. She taught me to eat prunes every morning. I began learning how letters make words that make stories come alive - like Cinderella, Snow White, the Three Bears. I would wait for Mommy to come home. I loved her throaty voice, the way she touched my hair for a moment. I was always slinking around trying to get more hugs out of her, but she was not much for that.
One evening, everything seemed different. Mommy was in a worse mood, Gram edgy. I watched them while I helped set the table. The argument began, Mommy saying she hated Wichita, Gram making a nasty face. They started in, voices higher and higher until it seemed that something broke, not a dish but something inside them. Mommy stomped across the floor and said, “That’s it, I’m going back to Chicago.” I can’t say how I knew it, but I could tell that she wasn’t going to take me, and if she left me now, it would be forever.
I watched Mother stomp back and forth while I traced the patterns in the Oriental rug. You could get lost in those swirls, just like in a forest in the fairy tales. You could get lost and never be found again.
So here we are, waiting for the train. I don’t know how to feel. My mother stands apart from me and from Gram, far enough to show that she is the one leaving, the one who will go alone on the train. I don’t want the train to come, but people move around getting ready for it, the train men pushing luggage carts, kids jumping up and down. I want to tell Mommy to stay, I want to hold onto her, but I can’t. I know it won’t help to try to tell her what I want, or even to cry. The wind blows through me, whirling my dress, my hair. Then the sound of the whistle calls out over us, a cry of pain, of sorrow so deep I can feel tears in the bottom of my stomach. If I hold my breath I can stop them from coming out. The light appears at the far end of the tracks and gets bigger. I cheer the light and the train, despite the fact that it will come and take my mother away. The train is beautiful, huge, terrifying, and wonderful. It hurls itself into the station, and everyone gathers around it as if it were a stallion that had won a race. It roars and sweeps its paws at the ground, steam rolling from its nostrils.
It feels as if Mommy and I are wrapped in invisible gauze, wrapped tight so it can’t break; but as she touches me softly with her fingertips, and leans to give Gram a kiss even though they are mad, I can feel the fabric unwrapping, unwinding us until just a thin piece is left as she finds her seat in the lighted car. Mommy, Mommy, I chant silently, putting my fingers to my nose to inhale her memory, her scent that lingers on my skin.
How I want to be on the train. But Gram looks at me with such sadness in her eyes, I know that I need to stay with her. It’s funny that she was so mad before, but now I can tell she is sad, though she doesn’t say it in words. I take her hand, and stand with her as we watch my mother get smaller, as the train disappears down the track into a puff of smoke.
The train whistle cries its lonely song, lingering in the wind that crosses the plains. It will call for me all my life, in my dreams and while I am awake. The train song, the tracks that meet at the horizon are etched deep in my soul from this day forward.
Blanche: My Great-Grandmother - 1955
Blanche and I are in her garden. The Iowa air is full and rich, redolent with the scent of thick black earth, green growing things, the sweetness of flowers. When I get close to her, I smell her sweat, see it running in rivulets in the multiple creases in her skin. Her brown eyes under curly eyebrows are fierce as she flails away with the sickle at weeds who have the audacity to grow in her garden and bury the potato patch. Her whole arm rises and falls, sails of flesh hanging from her substantial bones. I am fascinated by her, how she can be so old, her body with its variety of wrinkles and drapings. She is more alive than anyone I have ever known, passionate about weeds, about her tomato plants and her raspberries, her strawberries, her woodpile, and the fire she builds each day in her wood cook stove. Blanche is the hero of my life. Blanche is with me every day, even now.
Blanche’s life in her eighties is that of the earth, of growing things. Soil, green leaves. Life. Her garden. Her life and the life of her mother, Josephine, a life of farm and earth. Blood and slaughtered animals; births of colts and calves and lambs in the barn at dawn or in the middle of the night. Death. Burial. Milk and cheese, chickens, beheaded chickens spouting red blood over the dirt yard. Births at home. Many deaths from the birthing of babies. Midwives delivering, mopping the brows of the laboring mother. Josephine and Blanche were both midwives. There was always mud. Frozen water. Outhouses. Heated bricks tucked among featherbed and quilts in the icy winters. Quilting in the living room. Bodies laid out in death in the living room. Blanche tells me of these things as we sleep together in the featherbed in her daughter Edith’s house. I am eight and she is eighty, and the stories drone on and on during the hot summer nights of my childhood.
Blanche’s mother, Josephine, and father, John Peter, were farmers. He had emigrated to the United States at the age of five from Germany and Josephine’s family came from Ohio in the 1850’s, transported to Iowa after the land was officially rid of the Indians, the Sac and Fox, and the Mouscatin, tribes who fished and hunted on lands beside the Mississippi. It was for them that the little town, Muscatine, once called Greenwood, was named. The midwest is full of the names of those who bodies lie silently beneath the rich land plowed for corn and sorghum, tomatoes and melon. I would stand still in the open fields and imagine the Native Americans, we called them Indians, lurking behind trees, silently tracking us in their moccasins.
It’s true that I had quite an imagination, but after doing research as an adult and finding out how whites stole their land, I wonder if I was simply able to listen more deeply than those around me to stories emanating from the very soil where I stood. For it is true that the Indians were cheated out of their land, the state of Iowa is named for one of the tribes of the Midwest. Their lands were deeded to my great-grand parents and other Germans who wanted virgin lands for farms in the 1850’s. I heard that a lone Indian or two would come begging. Mark Twain lived in Muscatine for a time, haunts on the Mississippi being one of his favorite places.
Whatever the history of the place, my family was Germanic, stark, grim, and unsmiling, if you can trust the photographs from that time. They believed in the value of work, self-reliance and stubborn survival. Tears were for the weak. One cried alone in secret about the things that were too strong to bury completely. By the time Blanche was eighty, she had a mound of buried, yet very alive feelings.
During summer days, Blanche and I spend a lot of time in the garden, out back near the mink pens. Blanche is bending over the earth, wearing her sunbonnet, digging up weeds. She is bowed like a water witch’s wand, skirts gathering around her ankles in the front and riding above her knees in the back. Flesh-colored cotton hose are rolled up on an elastic just below her knees. Blue veins make a map on her legs. Sweat drips from her nose. She gnashes her teeth and yanks, muttering to herself. Thick ropes of melon stalks and huge leaves the size of small umbrellas wend their way across the sandy earth, called “The Island” where most of the family was born. It is called The Island because of a slough that connects with the Mississippi River, cutting off that area from the mainland. By now the slough has been filled in, and the area is known for its huge, juicy watermelons. The farms along the highway near the mink farm have watermelon stands, and sell a bounty of summer crops: tomatoes, peaches, and especially sweet corn. It is no accident that Iowa is at the heart of America. Or is it the stomach?
The heat of the July day rises up from the land, and everything smells like fresh air and earth, black and loamy. The tomatoes are ripening, round globules of green and yellow, pendulously hanging from the vines, the red of the tomatoes high contrast against the green. Blanche snaps off a tomato and bites into it. Juice runs down the crevices of her chin. Above the red tomato and her long nose are her deep-set, wise eyes behind gold rimmed spectacles.
“Mmm,” she mutters, suggesting I pick one myself. I hesitate. Everything is too raw, too close to the earth. I am awe-stricken and a little frightened. There are bugs and dirt everywhere. Flies are buzzing and ants crawl all over everything. Gnats fly in my mouth and stick in the corners of my eyes. At night there are mosquitoes who eat me in particular, and of course lightning bugs. But right now Blanche is gesturing and I must follow her directions. I pluck the tomato with a satisfying snap. Everything smells of tomato—acrid and a little bitter. The skin doesn’t give in to my teeth. I feel stupid, and look around for Gram. She would definitely discourage me from eating something without washing it. She is afraid I will die young in her care, and it will be her fault. But Blanche is a pioneer woman, born in 1873, and she tells me to eat it.
“Come on, bite down hard.”
“But it’s dirty.”
“You got to eat a peck o’ dirt ‘fore you die. Come on.” She smears little yellow seeds around on her chin with her sleeve. I think she is unsophisticated and rough, and feel immediately guilty of that thought.
“Come on. Try it. It’s good for ya. Nothin’ like the fruit of the earth. This is what it’s all about.”
I finally pierce the skin and the juices flood my mouth and run down my throat. I choke, surprised at the instantaneous tart juice, suddenly flooded with the tomato, the sun on my head, the smell of earth and Blanche's sweat. Her eyes laugh behind her glasses, her mouth curls up a little.
“Good, ain’t it?” She says and turns around to savagely hoe the weeds that try to take away her vegetables. She fed her children from her garden summer and fall every year of their lives. She taught them how to plant and reap and grow things, and how to can them for the winter. The life of the land belongs to Blanche, just as it did to the Native Americans who planted corn on this very spot. Blanche sucks in air, and spits out a few seeds. They will take root next year, and provide volunteer plants, free, nurtured by the soil and the sun and the deep rooted water under the land, the Mississippi sending out its life giving waters, part of the endless cycle of life.
If Gram came up just then, her eldest daughter, the different one who prides herself on being a sophisticated lady, a citified woman as they call it, she would shriek and pull me away lest I be contaminated against the program to be a lady that she has set up for me.
But instead, I grab another hoe, and learn how to cultivate the garden.
“See you get that weed out, root and all. Pull ‘em all the way out or they’ll take over. Just like some people I know.” She chuckles deep in her throat.
“Who Grandma?”
“Now, never you mind. It’s a sin to gossip.”
“Tell me about your mother.”
“She had your own Mama’s name.”
“Josephine?” I shrill, excited to hear this. I love to hear about my Mama.
“Your Mama was named after my Mama.” She pauses to wipe the sweat with a handkerchief she pulls out of a deep pocket in her dress. Her fingernails are caked in black threads of dirt. Her fingers are long, arthritic, bony. Thick like a man’s. Her forearms are tanned and wrinkly, all muscle. On her upper arms hanging flesh swings back and forth as she works. I am almost embarrassed to watch it move, but everything about Blanche is interesting, as if she’s a species that’s extinct and she is the only remaining exhibit.
“Tell me about your Mama.”
“Oh, there’s not much to tell. Hard working woman. Delivered babies for half the county. Best blackberry jam in the world.” She pauses, remembering. “Life was different then. You got no idea, young lady. People’s lazy now, think the world owes them a livin’. Times was hard. But no matter what, we always had enough to eat. Yes sirree, we always had food on the table. And my papa would give his right arm to help a neighbor.”
I notice the theme about them having enough to eat, and feel the pull of wanting to know this other Josephine.
“Did she die?” Blanche glances at me sharply, scraping at the earth with the hoe. She doesn't answer right away. Seems to be thinking. Hardens her jaw and clamps her teeth down, making an indentation across her bottom lip. “She died near to when you was born. We all got to go. But everyone loved my Mama.”
“Did my Mama know your Mama?” I watch Blanche, but take delight in watching the roly-polys curl up when they are touched, ants scampering around their little mounds of earth. There are millions of bugs living full lives out here.
She answers in paragraphs and gulps of breath. She vigorously throws the hoe toward at a patch of weeds that have gained ground, tearing at them angrily.
“Oh Lord, yes. Your mama when she was a little girl would visit her in Muscatine, and after that she’d come to see me at the farm where your aunts and uncle were growing up. Such a pretty little girl, your Mama. Those brown eyes. Poor little thing.” She pauses a moment. I wonder what she means. “But she don’t do right by you, now. I tell you that. At least Lulu has the sense to take care ‘a you. But this business ‘tween Lulu and Josephine...well you’re too young to hear about all that. I don’t know...I just don’t know about those two.”
This conversation is loaded with innuendo and hidden, underground stories. I want to find out the truth but it seems unapproachable directly. I decide to return to the subject at a later date, sensing there is indeed a great deal I don’t know, and imperative that I find out. It has to do with my mother. It has to do with me. And Lulu. And Blanche. All the way back.
After a huge dinner of chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes, rolls, red jello with banana, and apple pie, after sitting outdoors to watch the traffic on the highway, rocking lazily in the metal lawn chairs, listening to the murmuring of voices in the dark, it is time to ascend the steep wooden stairs. Clump, clump, clump go Blanche’s black shoes with thick heels. Her ankles are thickened and the distinct odor of her body wafts toward me. The lace of her slip tickles the backs of her cotton hose.
The fluffy, high bed rises halfway to the ceiling in the musty smelling room. Its roof line cuts across the top of the bed, and two windows allow the air to stir only a little. The air is thick with heat and the smell of the past. The room is piled along its edges with unused furniture, a rocking chair, a discarded stuffed chair with ripped upholstery. Clothes hang along the sides of the walls, dresses with tiny prints, faded, with cap sleeves; two rifles lean rakishly and dangerously against the far wall. Hats with ripped veils stuffed with tissue paper sit atop upended glass jars. The pulsing sound of the highway comes through as Blanche lifts her arms and peels away the clothes that cover her.
Rippled flesh rustles and swings, dancing to the movements of her body, at once graceful and awkward and she catches her breath tight, then releasing it in gusts, as if moving is hard for her. I turn away, blushing. Seeing all that flesh is not something I am used to. She doesn't seem to mind being seen. I wonder why she can be so unabashed. She does turn her body slightly as she pulls on the white cotton nightgown whose hem falls across the top of her feet. I catch the sight of pendulous lumps of flesh near her waist. They must be breasts. I have never seen breasts like that. My mother’s are soft and round, and Gram’s are pouchy and hanging, but not that low, or flat. Her toes are bent and the nails are thick and yellowed. Yet her feet are soft and tough at the same time. Her skin is puckered all over with veins, bumps and nodules.
I keep turning away and looking all at once, not wanting to miss any detail, yet embarrassed to be so curious.
“You gonna sleep standin’ up?” she inquires, pulling back the chenille bedspread. The smell of sun and fresh air laps around us.
“The bed is so high.” It reaches to the top of my shoulders.
“Feather bed.”
“Feathers? What kind of feathers?”
“Duck, Goose. Nothin’ like a feather bed. Been sleepin’ in ‘em all my life.”
“Feathers,” I say, rapturously poking at the loft, leaving tiny fingerprints.
“Well, gonna sleep in your clothes?”
“Can I turn off the light?”
“Whatever you want. Wiped a lot of baby’s butts in my life. Skin don’t mean nothin’ to me.”
I snap off the light gratefully, blushing again, my whole body flushed with shame. Her casual attitude about flesh amazes me.
After taking off my shorts and top and slipping on my summer nightie, I clamber over her bony shins and large feet and tuck myself along the wall. The idea of sleeping with Blanche seemed wonderful. But now, this large ship of a woman, her hips curving high, her bony shoulders sticking up, the flesh of an eighty-year-old seems too real. Soon the cadence of her voice begins, and I follow her as she begins the stories that will stay imbedded within me for the whole of my life.
Stories about the life of the farm, getting up in the morning before dawn, slopping the pigs, milking the cows, not all the time, but if need be. The men had their chores and the women had theirs. She baked bread several days a week, gathered firewood, cooked for a family of eight, which in the summer included ten or more hired men; cleaned, gardened for the food to take them through the winter. Always did the washing on Mondays.
“The big black iron kettle in the front yard. Fired the wood up, got it to boilin’ threw in them clothes and stirred with the washin’ stick. Lye soap I made myself. Used the wash board to get them clean. No self respectin’ person puts a wash on the line for the neighbors to see that’s not clean. After the washin’--then the rinch water.” (She said it that way--”rinch.”)
“Before them new fangled washin’ machines, we wrung them out ourselves and pinned the clothes on the clothesline. Washed for eight, all workin’ men, and dirty kids. You don’t know about dirt unless you live on a farm. Took all day. God help ya if it rained.” She shakes her head, her curls rasping against the pillow case. I see it all--Blanche reaching and sweating. Children scampering. Dirt and dust, pigs and cows. Pillows of fresh baked bread. Churned butter. I want to be there too.
“Was Gram there?”
“Lulu? Gosh sakes no. That girl--always one for gallivanting. She went to live with her grandma, Josephine, my mother, remember, in town, to go to high school. Things was far away then. No cars. You walked or had a horse, or you didn’t go. We was poor people, had work horses, and one other for deliverin’ the milk and eggs. Lived seven miles outside of town on the Island. Lulu always so different. Not like the other kids. She had a different Papa, you know. Lewis. He died and then I married Mr. Thompson. That Lulu--always was different. A dreamer. Guess she still is.” Blanche pauses. Breathing hard. I think she’s gone to sleep.
“You know, life is full of sorrow. Full of things you don’t understand. I’ll never figure out some things. No matter how hard I try.” She sighs. “Full of things. Delivered the neighbors babies, we did. Never forget the night that one of them died. We tried so hard. Two days labor. Tried everything. Nowadays, I suppose that baby would have lived. But there’s no way to outsmart God.”
“Why did Lewis die?”
“He breathed his last right ‘side me. One day, just fine, the next, dead of twenty-four hour pneumonia. He was just a boy. Seems like yesterday. Can’t believe I’m eighty. Life goes so fast. Don’t you forget that. Don’t you miss a minute.”
“He was Gram’s Daddy? Did she miss him?” I know what it’s like not to have a Daddy around.
Blanche turns over onto her back. In the dim light I can see the beak of her nose aiming straight toward the ceiling, eyebrows thick and curly above her closed eyes. “Such talk. Talk don’t make nothing different. Lewis, he was only twenty-two. Both of us, just kids. Never forget it. Never as long as I live. Too much dyin’. There’s always too much dyin’.” She sighs again and turns. “You’re too young to understand.”
She is silent. The sound of her breathing, in and out, keeps me awake. I feel more awake now than ever in my whole life. I am cast back into time, her time, the nineteenth century. Swirling before me is Lewis, who died so young. Gram’s father.
When I imagine Blanche struggling with the wash in the yard, making butter, milking the cows, she’s old, as she is now.
Suddenly, I realize she was once young, at the beginning of her adult life. By now marked so much by time she is different for living it. This history happened sixty years ago, too long to put my mind around. As I lie there, the lights of the cars on the highway making shadows across the ceiling, Blanche’s great white form snoring beside me, I am catapulted beyond my child self and perception. Time seems to expand and loosen up, trailing behind me in tatters, yet with windows and doors, ways to see in, thanks to her story.
At that moment is born my fascination with history, aware for the first time that the past fashions the present. I begin to understand there are roads that start out and lead to places we do not choose. This map on my body is drawn by Blanche, and I will have to sort it out as I grow.
Lewis is a ghost figure, another ghost father like my own, always looming behind my grandmother, standing near Blanche. He is someone to be curious about. This curiosity will lead to all of us looking for him, for his grave, which will not be found. But Lewis will continue to hover throughout my life, with the single picture I have of him, a young boy of twenty-two, his large innocent eyes gazing ahead into a future he will not live to see. His features are perfectly ours—Lulu’s, my mother’s, and mine. Forty years later, I will look for Lewis, and find him.
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Mrs. Rockwell's fourth grade classroom smells of polished wood, chalk dust, and pads of Red Eagle newsprint tablets lined with pale blue lines, a dotted line between the thicker ones to indicate where “t’s” should be crossed. About twenty-five of us are sitting in school desks, our books and papers tucked neatly or messily, as mine are, in the well beneath the desktop. The windows of the room go from the thick green radiators to the ceiling. The windows are raised and lowered by long poles wielded by the boys or the teacher. The boys are noisy, some have dirty fingernails, and their hair is cut in a flat top or slicked to the sides with Brylcream.
There are the “in” kids and the “out,” and the girls’ hierarchies are more complex than the boys’. The highest girls in the hierarchy sit in little clumps if the teacher doesn’t keep rearranging them throughout the room, their perfect hair swinging and shiny on their shoulders, wearing the latest saddle shoes and white, turned-down socks. They wear dresses, skirts, and sweaters from the better department stores. These girls’ fathers own car dealerships, or they are accountants, teachers, or school principals. Their mothers belong to the PTA, drive them to school and pick them up in polished cars; their mothers come to school dressed nicely with flat shoes, towing another couple of children. The most “in” girls are on the honor roll. They lead the games at recess on the concrete slab behind the brick school, wind blowing their dresses tight against their bodies. These girls will marry well, live in the best houses on the west side of town, and have husbands with big muscles who come home at night to barbecue in the backyard with neighbors wearing a chef hat. That is what we imagine in 1954.
The lowest class of boy or girl is obvious, with dirty or ragged clothes. They smell of poverty, their teeth are yellow, and their eyes furtive. They are hopeless, they’ll never get anywhere, they reek of failure and are ignored at best, or sniggered at openly. Their mothers have to work as waitresses, or perhaps house cleaners. Maybe their fathers work or don’t. Their houses are hovels shoved back behind decent, tree-lined streets. Old cars and disemboweled washing machines and refrigerators lie listlessly in the dead grasses around their houses. You never go into a house like that and you certainly don’t befriend those kids because their bad luck will rub off on you.
The ill-defined middle group, despite good enough grades, good enough clothes, and decent enough parents, demonstrate qualities of lucklessness or edginess. Perhaps their family bears its shame openly, unprotected by money or status; perhaps the family has some taint, such as mine, a child living with an aunt or a grandmother. Their houses aren’t shacks, but they are not up to snuff. Perhaps the front yard is not a tight green handkerchief, or the mother is not perky enough; perhaps she is tight lipped or square shouldered, carrying the family secret of alcoholism or penury or incest in the posture of her shoulders or the kind of kerchief she wears around her neck. Perhaps it shows in the way her hair isn’t just so, or her lipstick the wrong color, slipping over the well-defined edges of her lips. The town might not know exactly what is wrong, but it will smell a discordant note and the child will be judged accordingly.
In my case, I live with my grandmother and I wear clothes that are never right, a little off in design and acceptability. She wants me to be in the upper echelon, she wants me to compete with all these girls who live with fathers and mothers in houses with perfect lawns and curtains. She doesn’t understand why I shouldn’t automatically be part of them. She assumes I am equal to them because of who she is, but I know better. I can’t tell her the truth. It is because of my hair, my buckteeth, and most of all the fact that neither of my parents is around. I live with a grandmother who speaks with a fake English accent, wears clothes that are too fancy, and uses a cigarette holder. She won’t set foot in a church.
We are all held to high standards in this town by our forty churches, all Protestant but one, most of them Baptist, but quite a few are Methodist, Church of Christ, or Nazarene. The quality of the souls of Mrs. Rockwell's fourth grade class is measured by their Sunday School attendance and that of their parents. The children’s souls are measured as well by their timbre of voice, or whether their eyes are closed or open when they recite the Lord’s Prayer each morning. The kids who mumble, recite mockingly loud, or stare off blankly are noted. Also a matter of interest: the placement of your hand on your heart during the Pledge of Allegiance; the ability to get the words right to this our country’s patriotic faith, and the degree of enthusiasm while singing God Bless America, America the Beautiful, or the National Anthem are noted and duly gauged.
There are good children and bad children and questionable children, and you know who you are.
It is into this milieu that he comes that morning, the Pied Piper that will change my life. It is this layering that he will save me from, and cast me further into.
The day begins as usual—the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord’s Prayer, and a round of spelling. Outside the classroom, we hear a flurry of activity. Melodious music wafts into the room from the hall. A willowy, tall man appears, bright red hair tumbling over his forehead, a violin tucked under his chin. He dips and sways as he enters, his enchanting sounds making us stop what we are doing. He amazes us with his graceful movements. His violin sings melodies from heaven. We leave our seats to gather around him and drink in the magic. He plays and dances and charms us like a leprechaun. He kneels to our level, grinning, his blue eyes shining, and winks as he unfurls Turkey in the Straw, then some melody that makes me think of clouds and God. My chest hurts. I want more than anything to draw such sweet sounds into the world.
“Hey folks, this is called a violin. It is one of the stringed instruments in the orchestra. How many of you want to play an instrument?” I am drawn to him like a magnet, hypnotized by his violin. It speaks in high notes and low, sultry tones, silky and intimate; his violin laughs and tells jokes, his bow flies into the air and comes back down on the right string. White stuff called rosin flies all over.
“My name is Mr. Brauninger, the orchestra teacher. Do any of you want to join our orchestra? You could play the violin and any other of our stringed instruments. You just have to take a slip home to your parents to be signed.”
I come to him, drawn to his warmth and bright blue eyes. To his golden-toned violin. He asks me my name.
“Linda Joy.”
“Linda Joy. What a pretty name you have, Linda Joy.”
He is looking directly into my eyes. I feel more important than I have ever felt in my whole life. He looks at me as if I’m a real person, and talks to me as if what I say matters to him. I’ve never met anyone like him before. He gives me a permission slip and tells me that I have to get my parents to sign it if I want to come to the orchestra next week.
“I don’t have parents. I live with my grandmother.”
He doesn’t seem to think there’s something wrong with me because I live with my grandmother, but I know I’m the only kid whose parents are divorced. I’m sure none of their parents fight like my mother does with my grandmother when she comes once a year on the train. Mr. Brauninger’s smile makes all that go away.
He plays a jig that sets toes to tapping, but Mrs. Rockwell tells us to sit down in our seats and fold our hands like polite children. Mr. Brauninger plays something soft and sweet, his face tender with the music, his lips quivering when he reaches for the high notes. The fingers of his left hand vibrates back and forth. I want to cry. I could sit at his feet all day. I have to be included in his orchestra. I begin to scheme and plan what I can say to convince my grandmother.
When I go home that afternoon, the determination to play the violin rides in solid clarity in my chest. I will make any promise, I will do whatever it takes to be with the man with red hair, with the emanations of love flowing from him in waves. I tell Gram about the man who came to class with the wonderful violin. She says she’ll think about it. I promise her that I’ll practice, she won’t have to remind me. “Please, please, please let me play the violin.” She nods and takes a drag on her cigarette. The room is filled with smoke. I see from her eyes that I need to let her think about it.
I know she wants me to be a famous musician. I convince her that the violin is what I am meant to play. Later that evening, I promise not to neglect my hour of piano practicing each day, and to finish all my music theory assignments.
I hear her talk to him on the phone after I go to bed. She tells him about Vera and my divorced parents. The next morning I find out that they decided that I should play the cello instead of the violin. Gram tells me, “You’ll be more popular, there’s less competition.”
I am disappointed. I want to play the violin, but she says that there is a cello waiting for me. I’ll play anything just to be near him.
The first day of orchestra is on Thursday of the next week. My shoes squeak as I walk on the polished walnut-colored cork floors and down the stairs to the basement music room. It is raining outside. The school smells of oil, wood, and musty dust in the thick curtains of the windows. Mr. Brauninger greets me with the same smile and shakes my hand again. An irrepressible happiness fills me up. He shows us the stringed instruments.“This is a violin. Next to it is a viola, a little bigger.” He plays a few notes to demonstrate the deeper range of the viola. He picks up a cello.
“Linda Joy, I talked to you grandmother and we thought maybe the cello would be best for you. It’s a special instrument for a special girl like you. I picked out one just your size.”
He holds up a burnished brown cello, half-sized to fit me. He shows us how stringed the instruments are constructed, the curves of the ribs, how the maple comes together in the back of the instrument to make a beautiful wavy pattern with a perfect seam. The intricately carved bridge, the nut at the top of the fingerboard, ebony pegs to tune the instrument, the graceful scroll, and strings made of steel and catgut. Curlicue F-holes carved in the top allow the sound to emerge from the belly. The sound post connects the top with the back, creating a vibration in the instrument. The bow is made of a special pernambuco wood from Brazil. Horsehair from real horses is strung from an ivory tip covered all the way to the ebony part where we hold the bow, called the frog.
“Ribbet, ribbet,” he says, grinning, his blue eyes shining as he looks at each of us.
We all feel important, and laugh at his jokes. He shows us how to drape our hands over the frog. We take turns holding the bow, learning to place it on the string, how to pull it smoothly. I watch the string widen as it vibrates. When I put my fingers on the ebony fingerboard, I can feel the hardness of the string under each finger pad. It hurts my tender fingers, but I am making music. I am playing the cello.
Entering the music, the music enters me
Mr. Brauninger becomes my guide and my inspiration into realms of beauty. I suppose I fall in love with him. I practice often because I want Mr. Brauninger’s face to light up. He draws little pictures in my string book to make me laugh, little men with bulbous noses lying over the edge of the lines and spaces. He tells me I am special, but it is the look on his face that sustains me, a look that tells me that I am a real person. I am a cellist, and I am me. He sees the music in me, coaxes it from me. He helps me find something greater than the disharmony at home. He is my guide to find the true harmony that lives inside me.
I become “the girl with the cello,” part of the “strange” musician kids. The next stage of development is the Youth Orchestra on Saturday mornings. The best musicians in Enid are selected to play real music, “symphonic literature,” as Mr. Brauninger calls it.
The first time I am supposed to go, I am nervous. The night before, I polished my cello and Gram rolled my hair so it would be fluffy. She is particularly happy because she believes I have “talent.” Mr. Brauninger told her so. They talk about Carnegie Hall, but I don’t know what she means. It seems like a foreign, scary world, but because of Mr. Brauninger, anything I could imagine with my cello is possible.
The Youth Orchestra meets in the basement of the high school music room. The building is huge, with cavernous long halls. I can’t imagine ever being old or big enough for high school. I find that I am one of the smallest children in the room. My natural shyness makes me want to hide, but I put on a brave face. I need to go meet the other string kids standing around with their instruments.
A clump of kids gather around Mr. Brauninger, their faces shining. Mr. B is the tall one, his red hair a beacon in the middle of room. The French horns, trumpets, and woodwinds are tuning up, sitting in the upper levels of the tiered room. The noise is huge and thrilling. I try to conquer my shyness as I wander over to the group of kids laughing and grinning around Mr. B. A boy with jet-black hair is laughing in a deep voice, his voice already changed. His face is carved good bones and his brown eyes behind black horn-rimmed glasses are soft brown. He dances toward me, hands fiddling with change in his pockets, “There she is, the new girl.”
Mr. Brauninger introduces me. “This is Keith. He’s first chair cello, a wonderful cellist. This is Linda Joy.”
“Nice to meet you, Linda Joy.” Keith’s dark eyes are like lassos, drawing me to him. He shakes my hand as if I’m an adult. He leans over to me and whispers in a conspiratorial voice, “Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of things. It’s nice you could join us. We’ve heard good things about you.”
I am shocked to be already known. The group turns their faces toward me. I stand still, unsure of what to do next. Mr. Brauninger comes over, takes my cello, and puts his arm around me. “This is Linda Joy, a bright new star from Adams Grade School.” Another young girl with long dark hair flowing down her back holding a cello flashes me a quick smile. She is tall for her age, nearly as tall as Keith. Mr. Brauninger puts his hand on her shoulder. “This is Jodie from Emerson Grade School, another bright star. Do you know that you two started cello the same week last year?” There are murmurs and nods. Next, I am introduced to redheaded twin boys who look alike except for their haircuts.
“This is Floyd, he plays the viola, and this is Lloyd, the violin. They’re from Emerson school too, and fine musicians.”
They nod at me, and grin. “You can remember us this way—Floyd, flat top, Lloyd, long hair.”
Jodie and I are the last two chairs in the cello section. Mr. Brauninger taps his baton softly, but the instruments blare on, trumpets, clarinets and oboes and strings a discordant blare. Then he bangs his baton against the metal stand and the musicians put down their instruments.
“Good morning. We are here to play the greatest works of music ever written. This is the start of something new—a Youth Orchestra for all you talented musicians in town. Let me introduce you to the players you don’t know, and then we’ll get started with some Vivaldi, Bach, and a little Mozart. Some of you will not keep up with all the notes, but just do the best you can. Let’s have fun.”
The music builds up around me, filling the room. Often the strings are out of tune, and the woodwinds squawk. The music rushes at us like a mountain stream. Jodie and I scrub away at our posts, watching Keith and the other cellists up front play with aplomb. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to play like they do. At one point during a rest, Keith looks back and winks. Tingles rush up and down my body. He would never know from my smile how he affects me. He turns toward the front, and leads the cello section all morning. During Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, thousands of notes rush by unplayed. Jodie and I look at each other helplessly, knowing that we both missed most of the notes, but I’ve never had so much fun in my life. Mr. Brauninger stops to demonstrate dynamics, how to crescendo and diminuendo, his fingers opening wide and then coming together as do the hieroglyphs on the page. He tells jokes and stories about the composers, and makes wavy pictures with his hands to show how sound vibrates in the air and through the wood of our instruments. He helps us to notice our poor intonation, which is rampant, and singles out each section to play separate passages, teaching us to hear how each person is playing and how the section works as one. We learn that we are one body of music makers, not individuals. We must play together, feel together, and listen as one being to the composer’s ideas coming alive in our time, through us.
The music rises above us, lifting us to a higher plane of knowledge, a realm of experience untouched by the rest of life. Through Mr. Brauninger’s conducting, the swoop of his lanky arms, his shining eyes, his waving red hair, I am birthed into feelings I never knew possible. There is a beauty in the world that has no words, and a connectedness I could never imagine. It soothes the place within me that’s sore from the absence of my mother and father.
Each week I am transported into this nether realm. The music is more than words, or ideas, or anything the mind could conceive of. It is pure, it goes straight to my heart beating under my breastbone where my cello rests.
Mr. Brauninger becomes a family friend as well. Gram invites him over for dinner one evening, and spends all day cleaning up the house for the event. Of course I do a great deal of the work. But I am overjoyed to have company, we have very few people in our house, and I am thrilled that he is going to come. Gram feels sorry for him. "Poor thing. He’s a bachelor living all alone. He needs friends, and a home cooked meal. Now, you be sure to mind me . . . "
She goes on with a list of rules, but I don’t care. I am thinking only of Mr. Brauninger’s face when he urges us to “come on, come on and play with everything we have,” gesturing with his whole body, his long arms with their blond fuzz at the edge of his cuffs swinging around wildly. I think of how he tells us about Beethoven and the sublimity of his music. But is it his words that tell us, or the look of beatific surrender on his face that inspires us to surrender to it ourselves, even as we strive so hard to play the notes.
Finally, the house is spic and span, and Mr. B. knocks at the door. He comes in with a present for Gram and a new ball of rosin for me, and brings his records so we can hear some wonderful music after we eat. Gram fixes New York Steak with mashed potatoes and a salad, and corn on the cob. She makes it seem like she can cook, but I know she can’t, not really compared to Aunt Helen or my aunts in Iowa, but he loves her food, and says so with relish. After dinner he sits on the floor spread legged and starts to play marbles.
“Come and sit on the floor with me Linda. We’ll have fun. Do you know how to play marbles?”
I don’t, but I sit down and start to hold the round, pretty marbles while Gram is in the kitchen, but she comes in the living room and has “that look” on her face. I get scared for a moment, worried that she will say something bad to Mr. Brauninger. She tells me in a stiff voice, “Get up off that floor, ladies do not sit on the floor spread legged like that. What are you thinking?”
Mr. Brauninger gently tries to tease her. “Oh, it’s my fault. I just thought a little girl would like to play marbles. I loved them when I was a kid. Can’t she play with me?”
He looks up to Gram with a sweet, begging look as innocent as a young boy, but she holds her line. “I’ll have you know that I am raising my grandchild to be a lady, and ladies never, ever sit on the floor wearing a dress. They never sit on the floor in the living room. Period. Get up, Linda Joy.”
I watch this exchange, in friendly enough tones, with interest. I am impressed with how he can not just try to please her at first, and feel warm inside that Mr. Brauninger stands up for me, for the fact that I am after all still a child of ten, and he thinks I should be able to play like a child. Sometimes I don’t know what to think, but I am quite familiar with Gram’s insistence that I be a small grown-up, that I must say please and thank-you just right to everyone at the right moment, and that I must always have the best manners of any kid in town. In the state. In the universe. I get up.
Mr. Brauninger shows us the three record 78 RPM set from the Prades Music Festival.
“Linda Joy, here’s a recording of the greatest living cellist, Pablo Casals. He is Spanish, exiled from his own country because of the Franco regime, and refuses to go back. But each year he plays and conducts at this wonderful Festival with other great musicians such as Isaac Stern, Alexander Schneider, and Dame Myra Hess.”
Mr. Brauninger puts the record on the turntable and carefully lays down the needle. Out pours the music, the most sublime music I have ever heard. We sit in the thick darkness of the living room, the burgundy Oriental rug, the maroon ceiling, and the stern portrait of Rembrandt staring down at us while the room fills with light from the record player. Mr. Brauninger sits under the brass floor lamp by the piano, his face and red hair a golden glow. Waves of peace, love, and serenity emanate from him. His face is composed, his usual grin replaced by the kind of smile that suggests heaven. I take his cue, and quit worrying about my grandmother.
I sit quietly, and let the music operate on me as I see it does Mr. Brauninger. After a few minutes, I understand why he looks that way. The music is breathtakingly beautiful. Waves of strings, violin, cello, and piano composed by Brahms and Schubert fill the room, creating a universe of harmony. The sore place I felt inside from Gram’s scolding, the way I feel hampered by her, held back, controlled by her, the place where all the time I hold the missing of my mother and father, and the place where I am continuously embarrassed and ashamed because of my family, my looks, and my grandmother—all this is gone. Replacing it, a smooth silky feeling, perfectly balanced with no rough places. Peace and beauty beyond imagining fills me, and I am brought back to myself, the person that I really am without pain and constriction. Mr. Brauninger sighs, and I fold my hands over my stomach, sighing with him in the same realm.
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