“CAN I STAY WITH you?” was what I asked Arthur when I got to Uncle Billy’s house, and Arthur said no.
Arthur said, “It’s Uncle Billy’s.”
And the next night and the next night until I lost count of the nights I spent there in the house full of complete collections, sets and settings, hammered silver Christmas spoons and Dedham plates and books: a no-touch house. “Only look,” Aunt Frances said, and I looked.
“The dust!” Arlette cried, and my Aunt Frances cried, too, both of them with rags they slapped at books, yet Uncle Billy brought home more—more books, more figurines with china collars made to look like lace and sharp to touch.
“Don’t!” the women warned, unwrapping plates smeary with newsprint and cold from sitting in the trunk. Rhine wines, cordials, flute champagnes. Arthur was carrying in more boxes; they popped when slit open and exhaled. The women were unwrapping Mother’s house. That is what I saw on the table, plates I had eaten from. I knew the knife marks, the slashes made by Mother with her arms around my neck and cutting up my food from behind.
“More?” someone was asking in an astonished voice—more of just about anything anyone could think on shoes, salt-shakers, candlesnuffs.
Uncle Billy was promising more if I promised to be good, more souvenirs from wherever he was going if the requests he made were met. The requests he made were not too many: Use Kleenex, don’t snuffle; stop picking at your thumbs. Until I am back or while I am away was how Uncle Billy started. “I want you to be good.” His wife and Arlette and Arthur—all the help—heard him say, “I want you to be good, Alice. Do you hear me? Alice?”
I didn’t.
As soon as Uncle Billy was gone, Aunt Frances caught me at the cupboards, fining my thumb in Mother’s thumb-cut crystal glasses. “Snooping!” she said. “Your mother liked to snoop, too. Did you know that? Next time, ask.”
I was twelve when I swore I would never be like Mother although privately I still missed her very much. Once, I asked Arthur to drive me again to where she was, drive me in the jewel, my Uncle Billy’s car, that was emerald at night and took the light richly. Under the streetlights we were driving, under the downtown lights and the grayer, sidestreet lights; we drove through small-town darkness; and we were safe until we stopped at the town’s end, and I asked, “Would you? Would you take me again to the San? I’m not sure who I remember.”
Straight ahead was unused country.
Turned around we could also pass my street again and the entrance to school, but we were already late, and Arthur said, “I don’t want your Uncle Billy to worry.”
Arthur was a slave, I thought, with a slave’s point of view; but he said finally, “All right then, I’ll show you something.”
All ways were dark, but this way deeply. We only knew what things were as we passed them, dark stands of trees, rows of mailboxes, wooden markers, the start of hills—up, over, over and down—down a narrow, brambled road, as in a story, abruptly turning and traveling upwards again to a gawky house with finials, deep porches, churchy windows. Here was a spinster closed for winter. I couldn’t see inside although I tried.
“This was where your father came from,” Arthur said, and I was amazed. My father, the mysteriously dead and only ever whispered about—Arthur knew where Father came from.
I said, “You’ve been here from the beginning.”
On the occasions when Uncle Billy did the driving, we blurred past the countryside at speeds I wouldn’t look at with the numbers grown larger, long and skinny, wavery as numbers were supposed to be in dreams.
Uncle Billy said, “I’m in a hurry. Just tell me, can you see the FOR SALE sign? Should we send Arthur to shovel?” Uncle Billy asked me, but he answered himself. He said, “Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll get Arthur onto it.”
Arthur found my mother’s missing glove in the shoveling. He used the sharp edge of the shovel on the ice to get it out, her glove—one of the last parts left of what had happened to Mother at her own house.
Mother wrote back from her Florida, “So you remembered making a snow car! I’m sorry I didn’t see it. Do you remember how we used to dance to the Spanish music?”
I remembered more than that. That was the winter Mother never left the house but waved at me from windows to come in. “Come in, please! Come in!” she called from the house, the one I put my mouth to. Lip-prints or breath against the mirrors and windows, in such ways I could taste myself and the loose-earth taste of the house. We conversed lovingly, the house and I. Everything was in its place and sensate and easily hurt. The front stairs often felt neglected, and the basement knew itself as ugly. “Whatever was empty or kicked or slammed shut wept. I heard my father’s closet mumbling.
I knew this house. I was there for the bird that flew in and scraped itself against the ceiling in its wild, bloody flight. “Get out! Get out! Get out, you fool!” Mother was crying, but the bird slammed against the wall and died.
I pointed out to Arthur where near the trees it had happened: Mother broke her nose and bled; but Arthur said what I saw was shadow. He said what I saw was leeched from fallen leaves, pinking snow. What I saw, he insisted, wasn’t blood.
“Your mother,” Arthur said, “was excited to go. She knew it was time to get better, and she urged me to drive fast.” Arthur laughed at himself, saying, “She didn’t really like to drive with me. Your mother said I was too slow, and I am. I have always minded the speed limits, but your mother likes to go faster.”
“I am just the opposite of her,” I said, almost shouting it over Arthur’s chipping at the ice with the shovel. So much noise for a long time—chalk-marks when he hit the sidewalk—my worried ears grew hot.