Atlanta, 1983
I don’t remember Mom talking so much about money when Dad was alive. But I was only six when he died, so maybe she did and I was just too young to notice. After Dad’s accident, she started talking about money all of the time. I remember her bringing it up as soon as we returned home from Mimi and Papa’s house, where we had gone for two weeks after the funeral so that Mom could let her own mother take care of us.
“You and I are a team, Sarah,” she said, placing a bowl of Campbell’s Chunky beef soup in front of me for dinner. “And as a team we’re going to need to tighten our belts.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, digging around with my spoon for a carrot.
“Just that we are going to have to keep on a tight budget and not buy anything unless we really need it. And we probably won’t be going on any more fancy vacations. And I’ll hold off on buying that Mercedes convertible.”
Mom was joking about vacations and the Mercedes, trying to make me smile. She always said people who drove luxury cars were silly—even though her best friend, my aunt Eve, drove a Mercedes. And we never went on fancy trips, just to Georgetown to visit Papa and Mimi and up to Connecticut to visit Grammy Strum. Well, and we always went to the beach for a week each summer, but it was Daddy who loved the ocean—much more so than Mom ever did—so I figured we probably wouldn’t be going to Florida anymore. Turned out I was right about that.
Soon after Mom’s talk about tightening our belts, she installed a mini fridge and a hot plate in the guest room, which was in the basement, and started renting it out as a studio apartment. It had its own bathroom and its own entrance, so we didn’t really notice our tenant, a shy graduate student in the English department at Emory. Mom also stopped getting her hair colored. She still looked pretty, but she looked a lot older now that her dark hair was streaked with so much gray, especially when she stood beside Aunt Eve, whose hair was always bright blond.
Mom and Eve are like that—opposites. Like, they each say no to opposite sorts of things. Mom says no to private school, cable television, Jordache jeans, Laura Ashley bedspreads, anything that she thinks “costs too much money,” which is pretty much everything.
Aunt Eve rarely says no when it comes to buying little things for Anna and me, unless she decides something is “age inappropriate.” On Wednesday afternoons, which she keeps open so she can spend special time with us, she usually takes us shopping—sometimes to Lenox Square Mall, sometimes to Peachtree Battle Shopping Center. Usually when we go to Lenox, we just browse at Rich’s and Davison’s, get ice cream at Häagen-Dazs, and play with the puppies at the pet store. But the last time we were there, Aunt Eve bought Anna the coolest jacket. She said it was an early birthday gift, though Anna’s birthday was months away. The jacket was made of pale pink satin with a life-size Jordache horse head embroidered on the back. I really wanted the matching one in lavender, though I acted like I didn’t care that much about it, because I could tell Aunt Eve felt guilty about buying something so nice for Anna in front of me. She probably would have bought me the lavender one, but she knew Mom would have thrown a fit.
On the days when we go to Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, we’ll hit Baskin-Robbins first (Aunt Eve says the three of us are “a bunch of ice-cream addicts”), then spend the rest of the afternoon at Oxford Books. While Aunt Eve knows not to buy me clothes, she buys Anna and me as many books as we want. If we want to buy four or five apiece, Aunt Eve won’t even blink. She’ll just say something about how wonderful it is that we are both such “avid readers.” That is, unless we try to get her to buy us a Lois Duncan thriller, which she swears will put “sinister ideas” into our heads and give us nightmares. I’ve already read three Lois Duncan books, and while they creeped me out, they didn’t give me nightmares or anything. Still, Aunt Eve refused to purchase Stranger with My Face, even though I promised her that Mom wouldn’t mind.
The next weekend Mom took me to the public library so I could check out a copy. In that way, Aunt Eve is the one always saying no while Mom says yes. Like, Anna can’t walk anywhere by herself even though she’s almost eleven and Aunt Eve refused to let her go see Poltergeist, even though Mom took me to see it.
• • •
Last night, after I was supposed to be asleep, I finished Stranger with My Face. It’s about a girl, Laurie, who was adopted when she was little. She lives in this seaside village where everyone knows everyone. One night her boyfriend thinks he sees her out on the beach with another guy. But Laurie was home sick. It turns out that Laurie has a twin sister, Lia, who she was separated from when they were just babies. And Lia knows how to astral project, which is when you sort of will your soul out of your body, so that your soul is free to travel anywhere. When Laurie’s boyfriend thought he saw her on the beach with another guy, it was Lia he was seeing.
Well, it turns out that Lia is evil. She killed her foster sister and is now in a mental institution. But Laurie doesn’t know this. Not yet. All she knows is that Lia is teaching her how to astral project. It takes a long time for Laurie to learn, but finally she does. And then when Laurie’s soul is outside of her body, astral projecting, Lia’s soul jumps into it and takes over. Luckily, her little sister recognizes how different “Laurie” is acting and together with Laurie’s boyfriend, Jeff, they figure out how to drive Lia out with the Navajo charm Laurie was given earlier in the book.
Aunt Eve was right; the book did scare me. So much so that after I finished I crept into Mom’s bed and slept curled up next to her. But it also made my brain spin with ideas. I wasn’t thinking about Laurie and Lia’s story so much as I was thinking about astral projection and how I might learn to do it. If I could figure it out, I could go anywhere and my mom wouldn’t even know. I would just do my projecting at night while she slept.
The thing is, I don’t really want to visit my grandparents or go to California or anything like that. I want to project myself to the place where the souls of dead people go. I’m not talking about heaven. I’m not even sure heaven exists. But I have this idea that Dad’s soul is sort of hanging around this world, hoping to catch glimpses of Mom and me. Maybe I could find him—just to say I love him. Just to say how sorry I was that I acted like such a brat the last time I saw him.
I was mad because he was going to this stupid book reading instead of going with Mom and me to see Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown like we’d planned. The chair of the history department at Emory was the one giving the reading. Dad explained that he had forgotten about the event when we made plans to go see the movie, and he was really sorry for the mistake, but he was up for full professor that year and he needed to do everything he could to get on the chair’s good side. He asked me to please understand. He asked me to please give him a hug good-bye. I wouldn’t.
“Love you, Sarah!” he called as he left the house. “Poop the door!”
That was an old joke from when I was really little and thought that saying “poop” was funny whether or not the sentence made any sense. But I didn’t even smile or look up. I just kept my eyes on the floor. And then on his way to the reading, someone ran the light at Piedmont and Monroe and hit his car. We hadn’t even left for the movie when we got the call. Mom and I rushed to Crawford Long, where they had taken Dad. He was in the intensive-care unit. They finally let Mom in, but I wasn’t allowed. Something about kids and germs. Mom gave me money to get a Sprite out of the machine while she was gone. Later, after the doctor came to tell us he had died, Mom still didn’t want me to see him. She said his body was just too broken. She said it wasn’t really him lying there, anyway. That it was just his shell.
“Then where’s Daddy?” I asked. “If that’s not him?”
“I don’t really know,” she said. Then she added, “Wherever God is.”
It was the middle of the night when we got back to our house. Aunt Eve was waiting for us. Mom had called her from the pay phone at the hospital. Even though it was really late, Aunt Eve had fixed us pimento cheese sandwiches. I didn’t think I was hungry, but I ended up eating two.
• • •
The funeral was held at St. Luke’s because Aunt Eve was a member there and could arrange everything easily, and though Mom sometimes went to services at UUCA—the Unitarian church in Atlanta—she had never actually joined. Mom told Eve that she didn’t really care where the service was held as long as whoever presided over it didn’t try to convert new members during the homily by telling everyone to accept Jesus or else. “You know it’s not that kind of a church,” Aunt Eve had said.
The priest told stories about Dad, gathered from his colleagues at Emory, from Aunt Eve and Uncle Bob, from Grammy Strum, who stayed at Eve’s house while she was in town for the funeral because Mimi and Papa and Mom’s brother, my uncle Benjamin, who we almost never saw (he married a Japanese woman and lived in Kyoto), were all staying with us. And of course he told stories he learned from Mom. One of my favorites was about their first date.
They were both in college in New York. Mom was all dressed up in a silk blouse and a skirt with a crinoline underneath, and Dad had on a skinny tie. They were walking down Broadway, on their way to the subway station, when they heard mewing from behind some garbage cans. When they looked, they found a tiny orange-and-white kitty, defenseless and alone. They had dinner reservations in the Village, but of course they couldn’t leave the pitiful thing behind, so they got an empty cardboard box from a nearby liquor store and took the kitten back to Dad’s dorm, where Mom wasn’t allowed to go into his room with him because she was a girl. Dad ended up getting a friend to watch the kitty while they went to dinner, but not before Mom was kept waiting in the lobby for over twenty minutes. Still, Mom said his tender heart made her fall in love with him that very night.
• • •
I slept over at Anna’s house a lot the year Dad died. One time when I was there and couldn’t sleep, I got out of bed and started walking around. It was really late, past midnight, and the house had a quiet, hushed feel to it. I wandered downstairs and found Aunt Eve sitting on the sofa in the den, just staring off into space, a drink in her hand. She looked very far away, but then her eyes focused on me and she was back.
“Sweetie, are you okay?” she asked. And for some reason I told her all about how bratty I had been the last time I saw my dad.
“Oh, bless your sweet heart,” she said. And then she told me about how, during her wild, hippie days, she almost never came to Atlanta to visit and never saw her grandmother, who she was named after and who lived in a “darling” cottage on her parents’ property. And then one day her grandmother suddenly died, and it was too late. She had no choice whether or not to see her again.
“The death of someone you love is so, so painful. And what you’re going through is so real,” she told me. “But I promise, your father knows you love him and he knows what a good girl you are. Your daddy is looking down at you from heaven, and he is so proud of what he sees.”
“Do you really believe in heaven?” I asked.
“I really do, sweetheart, and I believe your father is there.”
I started crying, so relieved by Aunt Eve’s words. Whenever I asked Mom about heaven, all she could say was, “I don’t know, honey. I just don’t know.”
• • •
Anna’s neighborhood, Ansley Park, is really near ours, but it’s even nicer, with really big houses. I think Anna’s is the prettiest of all—it looks like something out of one of those Masterpiece programs Mom watches on PBS, tall and grand with huge front windows and columns. Mom says it’s “Georgian,” but Uncle Bob says that’s not quite accurate; it’s a “Georgian Italianate Revival.” In private, Mom says Bob is full of himself. When she’s feeling really mean she calls Aunt Eve a “limousine liberal,” but Eve doesn’t actually have a limousine or anything.
Mom and Aunt Eve have known each other forever, and Anna and I are always asking them to tell us stories about their college days. Our favorite is the one where Mom wasn’t let into any of the good sororities at Belmont because she’s half-Jewish and how Aunt Eve dropped out of the very best one, Fleur, to show how wrong it was that they wouldn’t let Mom in. The girls in Fleur were supposed to be her “chosen sisters,” but Mom was her “real chosen sister.” The next year the two of them transferred to Barnard, where Mom met my dad at Columbia.
Mom says that she and Eve drifted apart after she met Dad. She says she was so head-over-heels in love with him that she let a lot of things drop from her life, and she knows she hurt Eve’s feelings when she did. And then she was in law school, which she said kept her just as busy as falling in love with Dad had. Plus, Mom said that Aunt Eve was really wild for a couple of years, a “free spirit,” which is hard to imagine. She’s always so polished and put together. Eve says back then there wasn’t a protest march she didn’t join and that she “grew unaccustomed to regular bathing.” Eve always shakes her head when talking about her hippie days, as if she can’t believe she was ever like that, either.
• • •
Miss Ada has taken care of Anna and me since we were babies. She took care of Aunt Eve starting from when she was a baby, too. Aunt Eve says Ada is family, which I’m sure makes Miss Ada feel good, because Miss Ada lost her only son, Albert, in the Vietnam War. I once tried to interview her about him as part of my fourth-grade Forgotten American Notables Project. But Miss Ada said I was poking at a past that she didn’t like to talk about.
What Miss Ada does like to talk about are vegetables and how I should eat more of them. There is nothing she loves more than a vegetable! She says she practically has a whole garden growing in pots on the fire escape outside her apartment. She’s even in the “Green Thumb Club” at her church. Last summer she tricked me into eating a tomato. I told her I didn’t like them, that they were slimy and gross. She claimed that I hadn’t ever had a real one because all I had eaten were ones from the grocery store. She said a real tomato is sweet and tastes like stored-up sunshine. She said she’d share one of her homegrown tomatoes with me if I promised I’d actually try it and not just “turn your head after giving it a sniff.”
This all happened while Anna was away at summer camp in North Carolina. Anna wanted me to go with her, but Mom said that, while she had certainly loved summer camp as a girl, Anna’s was too expensive for our budget and too WASPy for her taste and that if I wanted to go to “socialist summer camp up north” one day when I was older she’d think about it. Then she made me promise not to tell either Anna or Aunt Eve that she had said that.
Ada held the tomato in her hand, her fingers thin and delicate, and had me smell it. I said it smelled like dirt, and she smiled, saying yes, it did, that it smelled like rich, beautiful soil.
“Course this is from a pot,” she said. “I used to have a proper garden, back when I had my house on Ormond. But a pot will do. Long as you’ve got enough sun and a place to mound some dirt, you can grow a tomato.”
Mom had told me all about Ada’s old house. It was downtown, in a neighborhood called Peoplestown, which always made me think of my Little People figurines. Mom said the Georgia Department of Transportation knocked down most of the houses on Ada’s street. Then they just built the interstate right on top of where Miss Ada used to live. Mom said that never would have happened if the people in Peoplestown didn’t happen to be mostly black and poor.
Miss Ada took two slices of Pepperidge Farm white bread, spread each one with Hellman’s, and placed a thick slab of tomato on one of them, seasoning it with salt and pepper before putting the other slice of bread on top. I was hooked the moment my teeth sank into the fluffy bread and bit into the firm, juicy tomato that Ada had somehow convinced me tasted like the sun itself.
Mom is not nearly as good a cook as either Miss Ada or Aunt Eve. Actually, she can make a few things that are really delicious—like her brownies, which are the same ones Katharine Hepburn used to make (Mom clipped the recipe out of a magazine)—but she doesn’t usually have the time. She says she’s more a “microwaver than a cook.” But tonight she fixed meatballs, which she served with Prego spaghetti sauce and noodles and that yummy garlic bread that you buy pre-made at the grocery store and just heat in the oven. Mom said there was something important that she needed to talk to me about. I thought she might say that she had decided I could apply to Coventry, the private school where Anna goes. I’ve been wanting to go there ever since Anna got to take creative writing for a whole semester (for an hour every day!) and got to write about anything she wanted as long as she used lots of action verbs and description.
Instead, Mom told me that she’s thinking about quitting her job at Henritz & Powers, where she’s worked since before I was born and where Anna’s dad is a partner.
“You’re not going to be a lawyer anymore?” I asked.
“Of course I am, sweetie. I just want to work with different people.”
“Will you make more money?”
Even though Mom said that she earned a decent salary, she was always worried about money.
She took a long sip of her wine. “Probably not. I’ve applied for a position at the Southern Center for Human Rights, where I’ll be helping defend indigent men on death row. If I’m offered the job and I take it, it will mean a pay cut. But the work I will be doing will be really important.”
“What’s ‘indigent’?”
“It means really poor. I’ll be helping defend men who didn’t get a fair trial in the first place, often because they were too poor to hire a decent lawyer.”
“And if you win, will the men pay you?”
Mom laughed. “God, no. These men have nothing. The Southern Center for Human Rights will pay me a salary. Not a great one, but enough to get by.”
“Are you at least going to be working less?” I could hear my voice getting louder. Mom used to say that was a sure warning sign that I was headed for a tantrum. But I hadn’t had a tantrum for years, not since I was little.
Mom took another big sip of wine. From the expression on her face I already knew the answer.
“So you’re quitting your job and going to work for really poor people who can’t pay you. And you’re going to be working more?”
“I know, honey. It will be a sacrifice for both of us. But if there’s one thing your father’s death taught me, it’s that our time on this earth is short, and the only thing that really matters is that we make our lives count while we’re here. Even though the work will be hard, I’ll be happy doing it. It will really fulfill me.”
“But why can’t I fulfill you?” I asked. “Why isn’t it fulfilling enough to be my mother? Why do you care more about men in prison than you do about me?”
I was too upset to stay at the table. I ran out of the kitchen and to my room, where I slammed the door and lay on my bed, trying to remember how to breathe.
Mom didn’t come after me. I knew she wouldn’t. She said that she learned a long time ago that when I was “all worked up” I needed some “Sarah time” to get myself back together. She was right. I couldn’t stand it if people tried to talk to me—or, worse, touch me—when I was upset. I just needed to lie on the bed and count my inhales and my exhales like Mom taught me to do: in for four, and out for four; in for four, and out for four.
Why would Mom give up a good job when she was already so worried about money as it was? Why would she want to take a job that would make her have to think about the death penalty all the time? A couple of times a year she went with a group from the Unitarian church to the prison in Georgia where they execute people. They would go on the nights when there was an execution, and they would hold candles and pray until it was over. She would always come back from those trips so sad. She said she would be happy in her new job, but how could that be? She was going to be sad all of the time, just like she was during that first year after Dad died.
Why couldn’t Mom just be happy being a mom, like Aunt Eve was? Mom had told me that back during the Vietnam War, Aunt Eve went to protests, just like Mom and Dad did. But now her number one job was being Anna’s mother. Now she was always thinking about Anna, was always so concerned with how she was doing. Like how she immediately hired a tutor when Anna made a B-minus on her math test. And she still sits down with Anna every night after dinner, just to see if she has any questions about her homework. And every year she plans Anna’s birthday party for months and the parties are always perfect. I still remember the party Anna had when we were in second grade, a “doll party” based on our very favorite book at the time, The Best-Loved Doll. We each brought our favorite doll, and there was a miniature cupcake for each of them and a big-sized cupcake for each of us. There were even miniature teacups and party hats. And at the end, Aunt Eve gave us all paper dolls she had made that looked like us. Mine looked so much like me that Mom put it in a frame.
I wished we could switch moms—just for a little while, like in the movie Freaky Friday. If I had Aunt Eve for a mother and Anna had Mom, it would be so great! Anna could walk anywhere she wanted; she could read every single Lois Duncan book; she could go see Poltergeist and whatever other scary movie she might want to watch. I wouldn’t care about stupid movies or not being able to watch something on TV; I would just soak up all of Aunt Eve’s attention. I would appreciate every surprise gift, every tennis lesson, every vacation to Sea Island or retreat to North Carolina for summer camp, where I would live in a cabin in the woods with seven other girls and learn which tribe I had been assigned to for Color Wars.
All of a sudden and without even planning it, I was willing my soul out of my body, willing my soul to travel to Aunt Eve’s house in Ansley Park, thinking, somehow, that maybe Anna and I wouldn’t have to trade places. Maybe I could just share Anna’s body with her. Anna was always so generous; maybe she would let my soul just sort of slide in next to hers. I wouldn’t stay for long, just for a little while. I was picturing Anna’s room, picturing her high-framed bed, the bumper stickers she had pinned to the corkboard on her door, including the one Uncle Bob bought for her that she thought was so funny but that never made sense to me that said: “Don’t steal. The government hates competition.”
My body began to shake, starting with my toes and working up through my legs. And then everything locked up. I could not move a single muscle even though I was straining with all of my might to do so.
I was paralyzed.
I don’t know how long I was frozen, but with a jerk I could suddenly move again, and I sat up fast but then had to lean back against the headboard because I felt dizzy. I was having trouble breathing. I couldn’t seem to get enough air in my lungs. I started crying, which only made it harder to breathe, but still I cried louder and louder, my sobs becoming more and more choked.
And then Mom was beside me on the bed, letting my body slump against hers, holding me in her arms. “Breathe, baby, breathe,” she said, repeating those words until I once again could.