A PLOT OF HER OWN

The church remained damp, and as the sun was still shining after my mother’s talk, we stood and walked outside. “I have a few more things to clear up for you,” Mom said, leading me by the hand across the soggy, slumping grass bays between the tombstones. “And for this bit of news I think you’ll need to brace yourself.”

I had always thought there would be an unmistakable line drawn between my childhood and adult life, like a red velvet rope that cordoned off one from the other, and once I passed beyond the rope I figured my past would be set forever like something dead and taxidermed—fixed. What I hadn’t anticipated was that there would be no solid ground to the present other than each stirring second that ticked off the clock like a log rolling in water. This left only the future landscape, which seemed vast and full of guesswork. It has happened, I thought as she told me to brace myself. This is the moment when I stop being afraid of the unknown in my childhood and start to be afraid of the unknown in my adult life.

I didn’t know if I was ready to be an adult, and as I held her hand I said, “Sister Nancy always says there are some mysteries that are better left unsolved.”

“That may be true when dealing with religion,” Mom replied, “but not in this case. You have to know that you are a Rumbaugh. But not just any old Rumbaugh. You are a Rumbaugh with a preexisting condition. You are either Abner or Adolph’s daughter.”

I stopped moving and felt something slip into place within me, as if an empty chamber was suddenly filled. But was it the chamber of a gun, and did what I now knew make me more dangerous to others? Or was it a chamber within my heart that now made me more dangerous to myself? I didn’t know which, and how could I when the answer was so far removed from the question?

And now she had told me I was a Rumbaugh—not just any Rumbaugh but either Abner’s or Adolph’s daughter.

“Either?” I repeated.

“Either,” she replied.

“You might as well tell me the rest,” I said, a bit dazed and wondering how we would work together on clearing up the mystery of either.

“Let’s walk and talk,” she suggested. “It will be easier for me.” She pointed to a row of squat granite tombstones, each a base for a large oxidized copper angel bowing with hands set firm in prayer, her guardian wings spread wide under the sun.

“You’ll notice,” Mom said, casually pointing at the stones, “there seems to be an unusual number of mothers buried side by side with sons—even when you look out at the cousins.”

I looked down the row of stones, and she was right. There seemed to be mothers and sons buried side by side, with the other children clumped together by themselves. I guessed some had the curse and some didn’t.

“Follow me,” Mom said, waving me forward. We came to a plain granite stone the width of a headboard for a king-size bed. The name IVY L. RUMBAUGH was carved beneath the word MOTHER into the middle of the stone, with her birth and death dates beneath her name. Then beneath the dates was a carved scroll with the words in script Eternal Love. To one side was Abner’s name; to the other, Adolph’s. Their dates were left blank.

Of course I noticed her name: Ivy. Before this, I knew her only as Mrs. Rumbaugh.

“They insisted on naming you after their mother,” Mom said as we both stared down at the ground with firm chins and denouncing eyes, like two old Puritans who could see through the soil and into the empty casket where the devil had done some mischief.

“How did you become pregnant by either of them?” I asked. I was utterly confused.

“It bothered me,” she started, “that I could get the boys to warm up to me only when they were without their mother. In the morning I greeted them cheerily, with a Good morning, Abner and Good morning, Adolph, and if their mother was still upstairs preparing her harsh public face, they would blush and grandly kiss my hand as if they were knights from King Arthur’s Round Table. They were very boyish, and I don’t think they knew the least bit about women. I’d make them coffee, and they would say it was the best they had ever tasted. If I complimented them on their matching outfits, they would blush until the blood in their cheeks welled and the weight of it tilted their faces forward. At those moments I knew they belonged to me. But as soon as the mother came down from her room, carrying the cash drawer and loudly clearing her throat, they no longer paid me any attention.

“Abner sorted the prescriptions the hospital sent over, and if a person came in with a last name that started with the first half of the alphabet he’d fill it, and if it was the second half, Adolph would. I turned on any display lights, checked the ice cream stock in the freezer, checked the mousetraps, put the floor mat out front, and swept the sidewalk. Each time I finished one small task, I looked up at their elevated counter and hoped one of the boys might notice me and say something like ‘Good job,’ or ‘Thank you, June.’

“The compliment that I really deserved and longed for was ‘We couldn’t do it without you.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t get compliments from my parents at home—they loved me—but I just needed compliments from outside the house. I was growing up, and I wanted the rest of the world to pay attention to my work and appreciate me. But even though the Twins were nice, with that mother around I didn’t feel needed there, needed in the way I was looking for. Sure, I helped them out, but I wanted something more. Something like love, I suppose. But whatever the Twins were capable of revealing about themselves, or showing me, was not inspired by anything I did or said. I suppose most people would just have given up on them, and I would have except I could see how their mother really had them under her thumb, and my resentment toward her made me sympathize with them.

“In some way I felt that they and I shared an unspoken conspiracy against their mother. I also knew that boys will be boys, and so I waited for my time. I’m not the kind to just give up on something. Had I quit trying to warm them up, it would have been more a reflection on my failure than it was a fault of theirs for being such mama’s boys.

“I took it upon myself to turn them around, turn them right side out like you would a pair of socks. But nothing seemed to warm them up, and the harder I tried to win them away from their mother the more I was obsessed with them. I thought about them day and night, imagined ways to trick them into having fun. I’d wake up in the morning and bake them braided bread and strudel. I studied German in school and would walk into the pharmacy and read aloud from the German newspaper, searching as I read for a smile or frown on their faces, for some expression or clue to their feelings.

“I was like a smitten puppy around them, constantly performing for their attention and constantly ignored as long as the mother was present. And although when they were alone I could easily get their attention, I realize now what I really wanted was for them to rebel in front of their mother and abandon their loyalty toward her and treat me more adoringly. I wanted to win her sons away. But she was more powerful, and it was maddening to watch them jump whenever she called to them from the back room.

“‘Zwillinge! Zwillinge!’ she’d holler in German. ‘Twins! Twins!’ Suddenly their ears would twitch like those of startled deer, and they’d drop everything and scramble toward her.

“‘Coming, Mother!’ Abner would call out as if answering the call of an angel.

“‘Yes, coming,’ Adolph would echo, as he nervously pounded across the wooden floor trying to beat Abner.

“They were too cheap to put a carpet down, and with their hard leather shoes they pounded the oak boards like a gang of Amish carpenters nailing siding on a barn. Even if they were in the midst of a conversation with a customer, they would dash off in midsentence. When they returned, one of them would step in and carry on with their usual brittle efficiency, like spring-driven windup toys.

“I just wanted them to appreciate me. I longed for it. I was at the age when a pat on the back, a hug, a good job meant the world to me, and the less chance I had of ever getting one the more I burned for it, and this is how, I think, I went from just trying to get them to appreciate me to flirting with them. They were old, but because they behaved like boys I guess I responded to them that way.

“One morning I tried on all the lipstick colors, one after the other, wiping one off and sliding another on. ‘What do you think?’ I’d ask, posing a bit and puckering my lips. ‘Like a parrot,’ one of them would say just to keep me at bay. I’d try on the blush and mascara. I’d make myself up like a Pittsburgh whore and walk the aisles like a tart. Every now and again, when the mirror was just right, I could catch them peeking at me as I bent over or rolled my hips as I walked. I wasn’t entirely innocent because I made sure they knew I was there. They may have been old, but the desire was still in them. Yet they were afraid of their mother. If she had not been around then they would have been far more attentive. But she glared at them, and me, and we all knew that she was the iron hand. I wished about a million times over that she would die.

“After a time I realized that playing games at the pharmacy with two old birds was just a waste of time. I was good in math and had been offered a scholarship to go to a banking trade school for women in Greensburg. I could take the two-year course, work in a bank, and then what? I wasn’t sure, but it would be a change.

“And then the mother had a stroke and fell right off her tall stool at the cash register. They carried her up to bed and I never saw her again, although she hung on for some time. I don’t think they called a doctor—at least I never saw one. Weeks went by, and the more time they spent camped out by her bedside the more they needed something to help deflect the pain of knowing her time was up. Ab started drinking the medicinal alcohol, and Dolph was doing all he could to fight off his desire for morphine—something he had used for a time after fracturing his ankle from a spill down the cellar stairs. He had set the bones himself. I knew he had also taken to giving his mother shots of morphine because I saw him carrying the loaded syringes up to their apartments.

“On the night they announced her death, I remember feeling something like relief, as if some stumbling block or great pain had been removed from my life. I also felt some guilt. It seemed cruel of me to feel good about the death, and so I tried to suppress my happiness. But inside I was delighted, because I knew for certain that her death would leave the Twins in my hands.

“The funeral parlor was called, and they sent a hearse out to the pharmacy. A few days later there was a service and burial—it was a closed casket, but with her lingering death and all, you expected it to be closed. The Twins were broken up. Most of the time they stayed upstairs in their apartments and I ran the store. They had to come down to fill prescriptions, but other than that and meeting with drug suppliers, they had me do everything.

“This went on through the summer months. They didn’t seem to sleep or eat or change their clothes. They really didn’t have much to say to me as they went through the motions. I knew they were brokenhearted so I didn’t push the personal stuff, and when they went down to the basement to work on their taxidermy, I just left them alone.”

She paused and looked at me, and bit down on her lips. “I’m not proud of what happened next, but you have to know.”

“At this point,” I said, “I need to know. Tell me.”

“In the fall,” she continued, and bent down to straighten out a little American flag that had fallen out of its VFW holder, “I had to make up my mind about business school in Greensburg. I explained my situation, and when the Twins thought I was leaving, they turned white. And then Ab, or it could have been Dolph, stammered, ‘But we need you.’ The other one said, ‘We’ll pay you anything to stay.’

“That’s when I figured I had a better opportunity managing the pharmacy, and the thought that I was needed really made me feel loyal to them—and the pay improved, too.

“They went through a bad stretch of time, but by Christmas they began to come around. They stopped drinking and using morphine, and it seemed to me that without their mother around they started to grow up some. That was good and bad—bad because they began to have desires like any adult, which confused them. Staying in love with their mother had allowed them to be children forever, and children are entirely self-involved. They didn’t want to get married, but they still had those unused adult passions, which turned them into ancient adolescents. And now they wanted their mommy in a different way. After a while they began to follow me about like a puppy. They’d set aside their pharmacy tasks and watch me refill the lipstick displays and organize toothbrushes and sort the Greyhound bus tickets we sold.

“Suddenly they were eager to solicit my opinions and be told what to do. They had been entirely dependent on their mother, and without her they needed someone to think for them, and I was more than happy to be that someone. I had watched their mother handle them for so long that I stepped right into her shoes, and soon they were no longer giving me orders but requesting orders. After a time I began to feel as if I was in control. But it was a false sense. I was naive, and they were using me more than I was using them. I drifted deeper into their world. I was eager to enter—after all, no one had given me an invitation in the past. And so the three of us formed a relationship that seemed as natural as if I were a member of the family. In a way I was. I had become the surrogate mother, and the pharmacy was turning a healthy profit again. It was my greatest achievement and I was very proud of myself.

“And they thought it was an accomplishment too,” Mom said, looking at me. “In an odd gesture they even gave me a cemetery plot in here.”

She pointed toward the back rusty iron fence. It bordered a field of untrimmed apple trees that were heavy with small fruit. “It was a peculiar gift, but at the time I thought it was an honor to be given a space in the Rumbaugh cemetery—even if I didn’t think I would ever use it, which now I know I will because, with you being a Rumbaugh, I am family. But what really gets to me is even back then they had their eye on me for carrying on that curse. As awful as that mother was, I can respect what she was up to with controlling those boys. I don’t think she wanted them to have children. She considered the love curse to be something more than an Oedipal fixation where the sons wanted to kill the father and marry the mother. She thought it was a genetic flaw in the bloodlines, and she wanted to put an end to that. By then the country had state-enforced sterilization to keep the unhealthy from producing unhealthy kids. As far as the mother was concerned the Rumbaugh genes were definitely unhealthy.”

“But what about their brothers and sisters?” I asked. “They could carry it on.”

“Maybe so,” she replied, “but as far as I know, Mrs. Rumbaugh never saw her other children again, and she forbade the Twins to contact them because she thought they would be a bad influence. I guess she figured if her kids didn’t live with her, then whatever blood curse they had died on the vine.

“But once she died, it opened the door for the Twins to have ideas of their own. After work one day one of the boys asked me upstairs. This caught me off guard because I knew with certainty that since the mother’s death no one had been up there. I thought it was another sign of them opening up to me, and so I followed up the back stairs. It was dark. We went down a hallway that was not lit. The streetlamp outside cast just enough yellow light through one of the oculus windows for me to follow his shape toward the front rooms. Finally we went through an open doorway, and he turned on a small wall lamp. I thought the room smelled like medicine. There was a chemical odor drifting through the air, something sweet and cloying, and then he turned and looked at me in a way I had never been looked at before.

“The only words he uttered,” my mother said as we reached her plot, “were sadly pathetic. Please do not talk, he said, because I don’t know what to say. He was like an awkward teenager. Then he leaned forward and kissed me, and I kissed him back. It was my first adult kiss and his, too, I thought. I don’t know why I thought I was kissing Ab when it just as easily could have been Dolph. I had my eyes closed, and even if they were open it wouldn’t have helped with them looking exactly the same. There was a bed in the room, and I fell back onto it and he lay on top of me. We kissed a bit longer, and then he let down his suspenders and lowered his pants, and not wanting to get undressed because it seemed so unseemly, I just pulled my skirt up. He stared to one side while I worked my underclothes off. Then it was over with in less than a couple minutes—it had to be. It was certainly over with before I could adequately figure out how it came to be that I was doing it with him. While it was going on, I just looked away from him, around the room, up at the ceiling, and then I settled my eyes on his backside in the mirror across from us because on his right cheek was a little red scar which attracted me. It was in the shape of a red A, and I wondered if it stood for Abner or Adolph. And that bothered me because suddenly I wasn’t feeling too proud of myself having just had sex with someone whose name I didn’t exactly know.”

My mother stopped talking for a moment. She had been speaking hastily, wanting to get through all of this, but now she seemed to run out of breath. Inside she may have returned to a well of shame or pity or anger. She didn’t say, but the tears ran down her face. She looked so young to me, like a friend my own age rather than my mother.

“Don’t get the idea that this sex was forced,” she said, pulling herself back together. “Because it wasn’t. I was willing, I just didn’t know what I was doing or why. And when it was over with he stood up and put on his pants while I straightened myself up. For a split second we looked at each other with confusion. How did this suddenly happen? For me, the evening had taken an awkward turn that I wanted to get over—like a little spat that you just hash out and then you move on to a better subject. So when he stood up and seemed to share that same confusion, I was relieved and thought the evening would just carry on and we would return to the rest of the work chores.

“I held out my hand for him to hold, and I leaned toward him thinking we might kiss as kind of an ending to the event. But he shuddered and pulled back in horror. He seemed very agitated and asked if I would go home at once because he had to meet his brother who was waiting for him down the hall.

“That’s how he put it,” Mom said. “That he was meeting his brother down the hall. At the time it seemed rude that he was going to run down the hall and tell his brother what he had done to me. It made me mad to think of the Twins whispering away like two old crows over what had just happened. It was creepy, too, as if they were in cahoots.

“After he left the room I just stood there. I didn’t know why exactly I had had sex with him. Maybe I was just bored. Maybe I thought doing something reckless would change the way I think, would somehow change my small world. Maybe I was so desperate I took a wild chance. Maybe I just wanted to try sex and figured it would be safe with them rather than with some blabbermouth around town. Believe me, it wasn’t something well thought out. It was more like mercy sex.”

That last line stopped us talking for a minute. She marked off an X on the grass with her foot.

“This is my plot,” she said, glancing over each shoulder to make sure of her coordinates. “It’s just inside the property line. They shoved me in a corner. I want a little stone with just the name: JUNE SPIRCO. From here I’ll have a good vantage point to keep an eye on them.”

I wasn’t paying any attention to her. I still couldn’t get over the phrase mercy sex. It seemed so merciless.

“Hold on,” I said, raising a hand. “Stop! Finding out the whole story is part of my birthday present. So what happened after the mercy sex? Did you go into the room after him?”

“Yes,” she said, reviving. “Absolutely! I got a little huffy and thought I’d straighten that old goat out some. I marched down to the back room, which had been the mother’s. I threw open the door, and that’s the first time I saw her stuffed. It was quite a shock. He was down on his hands and knees holding her outstretched hand and blubbering like a baby. He was so obsessively contrite with what he had done he had to go kneel before his stuffed mother for a while and hope she would make him feel better for his action. Now I understand, of course, that he never wanted sex with me for any other reason than to perpetuate the Rumbaugh curse. It was in his blood to procreate even though it was against her wishes. But he was driven to it.

“The whole thing was revolting! And like you did when you were seven and saw her in the basement, I promised myself I would never go back there again. All the way home I kept telling myself that I would move to Greensburg, beg my way back into the business school, and get the heck out of this freak-show town.”