BACK IN 1996, the airlines had returned my suitcase just a few days after I’d left for Christmas vacation. Todd was still in the apartment, since he rarely rushed home for the holidays, so he was able to ID it, take possession. “It’s the real deal,” he told me. “Your actual suitcase. I’d know it anywhere.” He’d given the other back, which I hadn’t anticipated happening in my absence and was distressed about.
Of course, it’s always possible that while I was hitting the tarmac in Indiana, Harlow was sneaking into my room, as she so liked to do, and putting Madame Defarge safely back into her powder-blue sarcophagus. “Always possible” as in “No chance in hell.”
I do feel terrible about that. I’m sure she was an expensive and irreplaceable antique. I’d meant to put a note inside the suitcase before it was returned, making my apologies. Let me do so here:
Dear jogging puppeteer,
Although I didn’t steal Madame Defarge myself, she did disappear while under my care. I’m so sorry. I’m sure you valued her highly.
The only consolation I can offer is my belief that she’s now living the life of ceaseless retribution for which she is so justly famous. She has, in short, returned to form as a political activist and dispenser of rough justice.
I still hope to get her home to you someday, intact in all her parts. I look for her on eBay at least once every month.
My sincerest apologies,
Rosemary Cooke
My own bulging suitcase had no such missing items. There was my blue sweater, there were my bedroom slippers, my pajamas, my underwear; there were our mother’s journals, not as sprightly as when last seen—travel had frayed their corners, disheveled their covers, left the Christmas ribbon at a rakish angle. Everything a bit squashed, but essentially unharmed.
I didn’t open the journals immediately. I was tired from the trip home and scraped raw from all the talking and thinking of Fern I’d done over the last weeks. I decided to put them away for a bit on the top shelf of my closet, pushed back so I wouldn’t see them every time I slid the mirrored doors apart.
And then, having made that decision, I flipped open the cover on the top one.
There was a Polaroid of me, taken in the hospital in the early hours of my life. I’m red as a berry, shiny from the pickling of the womb, and squinting at the world through suspicious, slitted eyes. My hands are fists up by my face. I look ready to rumble. Under my picture, there is a poem.
dear, dear,
what a fat, happy face it has
this peony!
I went ahead and opened the cover of the second notebook. Fern also has a picture and a poem, or at least part of a poem. The photo was taken the first day she arrived at the farmhouse. She’s almost three months old and wrapped like seaweed around someone’s arm. It must be our mother’s; I recognize the large, green weave of the shirt from other pictures.
The hair on Fern’s head, including her side whiskers, is up. It springs from her bare face in an aggrieved and agitated halo. Her arms are twigs, her forehead creased, her eyes huge and startled.
A Mien to move a Queen—
Half Child—Half Heroine—
Mom’s notebooks are not scientific journals. Although they do include a graph or two, some numbers and some measurements, they’re not the dispassionate, careful observations from the field that I expected.
They appeared to be our baby books.