1922–1938

In the summers, now, I make my way to the Grange Hall in Cushing most Fridays, but instead of swaying with the music and chatting with friends as they jostle on and off the dance floor, joking and laughing and carrying on, the bolder ones smoking cigarettes outside and tippling from a flask, I am consigned to the role of fruit-punch server, pound-cake cutter, molasses-cookie arranger. I pick up soiled napkins and wash dirty glasses in the sink behind a partition. Most of the women who play this role are older than I am and married. Only a few are my age: the unchosen and childless.

I have not gotten used to it. I’m not sure I ever will. For a while I continue to bring my dress shoes in a bag, as I always have, and put them on as soon as I arrive. But one evening when the hall is particularly hot, I excuse myself from the serving table, go outside, roll my stockings down, slip them off my feet, and put my flat-heeled walking shoes back on. What does it matter?

It’s a damp Friday in August and I’m walking to the Grange Hall with Fred and his fiancée, Lora, wearing a white dress I finished sewing hours earlier from a new McCall’s pattern, when I slip in a rut in the road. I put my hands out to stop my fall, but my arms aren’t stable enough to support my weight. I drop heavily into the muck and gravel, tearing my sleeves, scraping my chin.

“Oh!” Fred shouts, leaping toward me, “Are you all right?”

My chin drips blood, my wrists throb, I am facedown in the wet, soiled dress it took me weeks to sew. The skirt is bunched up round my hips, my bloomers and misshapen legs exposed. Lifting myself slowly on my elbows, I survey my torn bodice. All at once I am so tired of this—of the constant threat of humiliation and pain, the fear of exposure, of trying to act like I’m normal when I’m not—that I burst into tears. No, I am not all right, I want to say. I am fouled, degraded, ashamed. A burden and an embarrassment.

“Can you get up?” Lora asks kindly, standing over me. She crouches down. “Let me help you.”

I turn my face away.

“Doesn’t seem to be a break,” Fred murmurs, running his expert farmer’s hands over my wrists and ankles. “But you’ll have some bruises and swelling, I’m afraid. Poor thing.” He tells me to flex my hands, not the easiest maneuver even when I’m not in pain. When I grimace, he says, “Probably a nasty sprain. No fun at all, but it could be worse.”

Lora waits with me while Fred jogs back to the house to get the car. At home the two of them carry me through the front door and upstairs to my room, where Lora finds my nightgown on a peg and discreetly helps me undress and Fred gently washes my face and arms. Once they’ve shut the door behind them, I burrow into my blankets and turn toward the wall.

How did I go from being the maiden in a fairy tale to a wretched old maid so quickly? It happened almost without my realizing it, the transition to spinsterhood. Mamey said that in her day a woman who had not married by the age of thirty was called a thornback, named after a flat, spiny, prehistoric-looking fish. It’s what they called Bridget Bishop, she said. Thornback. That’s what I have become.

WHEN MOTHER’S HEALTH becomes so precarious that she and Papa need separate bedrooms, I offer to give up mine. She’s in pain; her kidney issues are worse, her legs puffed with fluid. She has started sleeping upright in a parlor chair. I move downstairs, where my bed is a pallet on the dining room floor that I roll up each morning and tuck in the closet. It’s not so bad; I’m closer to the kitchen and the privy, secretly relieved not to have to navigate the stairs.

In the mornings I prepare the noon meal and carry it through the narrow pantry to the round oak table in the dining room for Al and Papa and me, making a separate plate for Al to carry upstairs for Mother. Baked or boiled potatoes, green beans, roast chicken or turkey or ham, a stew of beef and carrots and onions and potatoes. Every few days I make bread with the sourdough starter. Watch the bread rise, punch it down, watch it rise again. In the summer and fall I can the berries Al rakes from their bushes and the strawberries he grows in the garden for jams and jellies, cakes and pies.

We mark the days by the chores that need to be done, the way farm families have always done. Al feeds the hens and horses and pigs, splits wood in the fall, slaughters a pig when the weather turns cold, cuts ice in the winter. I collect eggs from the laying hens and Al drives me into town to sell them. He times the planting so that by the Fourth of July we’ll have new peas and by September there’s a whole field of corn. Gulls lunge for a feast, ravaging the crop, so Al kills a few and hangs them from poles as warning. During haying season in midsummer, I see him from the dining room window in his visored cap, scything the hay by hand with six hired men walking abreast, forking the newly mown hay onto the hayrack. They haul the hay to the barn, where a block-and-tackle hoist lifts it into the mow. Swallows, disrupted from their nests, swoop in and out.

In late July and August, blueberry season, Al uses a heavy steel hand rake to harvest the small dark berries from their low bushes. It’s grueling work, stooping over those low bushes in the hot sun, dumping the berries into a wooden box to be winnowed and weighed, and all summer the back of his neck is burnt and peeling, his knuckles scraped and scarred, his lower back constantly sore.

Aside from the Grange Hall socials, the sewing circle I go to now and then, and the occasional visit with Sadie, I don’t see many people. Most of my old friends and acquaintances are busy with their new husbands and new lives. At any rate, I have little in common with most of the girls I went to school with who are married and having children. I can tell, when we’re together, that they are self-conscious talking about their husbands and pregnancies. But this difference only highlights what has always been true. I’ve never shared either their fluid ease of movement or their quick laughter. My wit—such that it is—has always been more sardonic, stranger, harder to recognize.

Now and then I leaf through the small blue volume of Emily Dickinson poems that my teacher, Mrs. Crowley, pressed into my hand. I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort.

It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn’t.

With no one to talk to about the poems, I have to try to parse the meanings myself. It’s frustrating not to be able to discuss them with anybody, but also strangely freeing. The lines can mean anything I want.

Much Madness is divinest Sense—

To a discerning Eye—

Much Sense—the starkest Madness—

’Tis the Majority

In this, as all, prevail—

Assent—and you are sane—

Demur—you’re straightaway dangerous—

And handled with a chain—

I imagine Emily sitting at her small desk, her back to the world. She must’ve seemed very odd to those in her orbit. A little unhinged. Even dangerous, perhaps, asserting, as she does, that it’s the people who lead conventional lives who are the mad ones.

I wonder about that chain that held her. I wonder if it’s the same as mine.

MY CATS, AS cats will do, have kittens. Al takes boxes of them into town and gives away as many as he can, but before long I’m feeding a dozen. They swarm underfoot, mewling and jumping and sometimes hissing at one another. Al grouses about it, pushes them off the table with an open palm, kicks at them when they wind around his legs, mutters about solving the problem with a rock-heavy sack in the pond. “It’s too many, Christie, we’ve got to get rid of them.”

“Oh? And then what, I’ll go around talking to an empty house?”

He chews his lip and goes back out to the barn.

LATE ONE EVENING, I’m lying on my pallet in the dark in the dining room when I hear a commotion upstairs, directly above me. Mother’s bedroom. I sit up quickly, fumble for a candle and match, and make my way to the foyer. “Mother?” I call. “Are you all right?”

No answer.

Al is out with Sam, playing cards. Papa is sound asleep in his room. (There’s not much point in waking him; he’s frailer than I am.) I haven’t been upstairs in months, but I know I have to get there now. I haul myself up the stairs as quickly as I can on my elbows, sweat dampening my neck from the effort. When I reach the top, I pull myself to my feet and grope my way down the hall to Mother’s door, push it open. In the moonlight I see that she is on the floor on her knees, fumbling at the quilt in a kind of panic, trying to claw her way up back onto the bed, her nightgown bunched around her thighs.

She turns and gives me a bewildered look.

“I’m here, Mother.” Stumbling forward in the dark, I collapse on the floor beside her. I try to help her up with my hands, my elbows, even my shoulder, but her weight is like a sack of flour, and I can’t get any traction.

She begins sobbing. “I just want to go to bed.”

“I know,” I say miserably. I feel helpless and angry: at myself for being so feeble, at Al for going out. After a few minutes, her sobbing turns to whimpering, and she rests her head on my lap. I pull her nightgown down over her legs and stroke her hair.

Some time later—fifteen minutes? Half an hour?—the front door opens downstairs. “Al!” I shout.

“Christie? Where are you?”

“Up here.”

Footsteps pound up the stairs, the door slams open. I see the confusion in Al’s eyes as he takes in the sight of Mother collapsed on the floor, me cradling her head in my lap. “What is going on?”

“She fell off the bed, and I couldn’t lift her.”

“Lord a mercy.” Al comes over and gently hoists Mother up onto the mattress, then pulls the quilt over her and kisses her on the forehead.

After he’s helped me down the stairs and onto my pallet in the dining room, I say, “That was terrible. You can’t leave me alone with her like that.”

“Papa’s here.”

“You know he’s no help.”

Al is silent for a moment. Then he says, “I need a life of my own, Christie. It’s not too much to ask.”

“She could’ve died.”

“Well, she didn’t.”

“It was hard for me.”

“I know.” He sighs. “I know.”

SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, about a week after Thanksgiving, I wake early, as usual, to stoke the fire in the kitchen and begin the process of making bread. The floorboards above my head creak with the ordinary sounds of Al getting up and dressed and going to Papa’s room to check on him, the muffled sounds of Papa’s deep bass and Al’s higher tenor. I scoop flour into the earthenware bowl and add a sprinkle of salt, my hands going through the motions while my head is free to plan the day: pickled beets and sliced ham, warmed in the oven, for the noontime meal; gingerbread cookies if I have time, a pile of mending . . . I add a scoop of yeasty starter, a dollop of molasses, warm water from the saucepan on the range, and start kneading, folding in the flour.

Upstairs, Al knocks on Mother’s door—or perhaps I only think I hear it, so accustomed am I to his routine. And then I hear, sharply, “Mother.” Furniture scrapes along the floor.

I feel it before I know it. I look up at the ceiling with my hands in the dough.

Al clatters down the stairs. Materializes, panting, in the kitchen.

“She’s gone, isn’t she?” I whisper.

He nods.

I sink to my knees.

The next day Lora brings a mourning bouquet to hang on the front door. It’s round and black, with long streamers and artificial flowers pasted in the middle. Mother would’ve hated it. She didn’t like fake flowers, and neither do I.

“It’s to show the community that this is a house of mourning,” Lora says when she sees me scowling.

“I suspect they know that,” I say.

The wind blew so hard all night it swept most of the snow into the sea. Neighbors swoop toward the house like crows, in groups of two and three, black scarves and coats flapping. They rap on the front door, hang their coats on hooks in the foyer, file past Mother’s body in the Shell Room. The women bustle into the kitchen. They know what to do in a situation like this: exactly what they’ve always done. Here is Lisa Dubnoff, unwrapping a loaf of spice cake. Mary-Violet Verzaleno, slicing turkey. Annabelle Weinstein, washing dishes. The men jam their hands in their pockets, talk about the price of lobster, squint out at the horizon. I watch some of them out the kitchen window smoking cigarettes and pipes in the yard, stamping their feet and hunching their shoulders as they pass around a flask.

These neighbors leach pity the way a canteen of cold water sweats in the heat. The slightest inquiry is freighted with words unsaid. Worried about you . . . feel sorry for you . . . so glad I’m not you. . . . The women in the kitchen stop talking as soon as I come in, but I hear their whispers: Lord help her, what will Christina do without her mother? I want to tell them, My mother hasn’t actually been present for a long time; I’ll get along fine. But there’s no way to say this without sounding harsh, so I stay quiet.

In the late afternoon of the third day, we huddle around Mother’s burial plot in the family graveyard, strafed by the wind, the sky as yellow gray as a caul. Reverend Carter from Cushing Baptist Church opens his bible, clears his throat. When you live on a farm, he says, you are particularly aware that God’s creatures are born naked and alone. Given only a short time on this earth. Hungry, cold, persecuted, afflicted, released. Each one of us experiences moments of doubt, of despair, of feeling unduly burdened. But there is solace to be found in giving yourself to the Lord and accepting his blessings. The best we can do is appreciate the wonders of God’s green earth, try to avoid calamity, and put our faith in him.

This sermon sums up Mother’s life perhaps all too well, though it does little to improve the general mood.

Before we leave the gravesite, Mary sings Mother’s favorite gospel hymn:

Oh, what joy it will be when His face I behold,

Living gems at His feet to lay down;

It would sweeten my bliss in the city of gold,

Should there be any stars in my crown.

Mary’s lovely voice rises and lingers in the air, and by the end of the song most of us are crying. I am too, though I still don’t know what those stars are meant to represent. My mistake, I suppose, is in thinking they should mean something.