WAVY GROUNDS, OLD TREES, floating nurses. Mother called it “the San.” I visited only once—too scared to go again—and remember that Mother’s shirtwaist dress no longer fit and strained the pin that pinned her. “Ouchie,” she said, a baby-voiced girl, and she fiddled off the pinhead then started to cry, saying, “Now I can’t stand up!” speaking as if to someone else though there was no one else but me in her room at the time. “I can’t see my little girl off. My skirt will fall down and my Alice will be embarrassed.” I was embarrassed by her and glad to leave Mother behind and took the stairs, which were faster, to the car where Aunt Frances was talking to a doctor, and Arthur was waiting to drive us away.
Arthur had, as part of his job, driving to do. Arthur did the errand-driving in any-old-day clothes, but he dressed in a coat when he drove Aunt Frances anywhere. With me he wore his leather jacket—smelly, cracked, collared in a matted yarn, brown. I don’t remember what he was wearing that day when he drove Mother to the San. It was cold, I remember.
“Miss Alice,” Arthur had called to Mother, “please get in.”
Mother was wearing the falling-leaves coat in the falling-leaf colors, a thing blown it was she seemed, past its season, a brittle skittering across the icy snow to where Arthur stood by the car, fogged in.
I attended to the drama of Mother’s clothes, the smoke-thin nightgown she wore before Arthur came; I wanted it. She wisped through the house in this nightgown and eschewed electric light and carried candles. “Go to sleep,” she had said, come upon me spying, and I said to her, “You, too!” but Mother was awake and moving through the house and out across the snow—Mother shouting back at me, “You’re not invited!” Later she cried, and I sat under the crooked roof of her arm and felt her gagged and heaving sorrow. “If your father were here …”
But my father was dead and my name was hers and everyone said I was surely her daughter, so why did she leave me except that she did? The next day she was off to her Florida, and I was off to mine.