Leaving Letitia Street

On the plane coming back to Louisiana for my father's funeral, I remembered a story he used to tell when I was a child. It was this: A little girl is crossing over a bridge. There's a troll under the bridge who doesn't like little girls; any that cross over, he eats them up. But this is a brave little girl; she's determined to get over the bridge. So-(at this point I am already tucked into bed, the covers tight at the sides; I scrunch under the blanket to make sure the troll can't get at me)-she takes the first step over the bridge. "Who's that walking on my bridge?" the troll asks. "It's only me," says the little girl. And my father tiptoes with his fingertips across the bed covers so I can see how scared the little girl is. "Who's that walking across my bridge?" the troll repeats. "It's only me," says the little girl, taking a few more tiptoes over the bed. And the troll begins to sway his body back and forth. My father is swaying back and forth; he loves this story. And the bridge begins to sway with him. By this time my father is putting some weight into it, the whole bed is creaking, swaying back and forth, back and forth. I've got the covers up to my nose; only my eyes are out; I hardly breathe. "WHO'S THAT WALKING ON MY BRIDGE?" "It's only me!" With this the troll can't stand any more. He jumps up, he snaps! his jaws together-my father is snapping his forearms, locked at the elbows-he snaps those great jaws and eats the little girl up. Agggahh! my father roars, and I am in an ecstasy of terror and pleasure. My father would make great gobbling sounds, vampire kisses, and satisfied smacking of the lips. He would pick his teeth: little girls were a great delicacy. I asked for this story every night, and every night, he told it.

I thought about that story, coming back on the plane after my father died. It was October, and early in the morning. Traveling businessmen ate cold scrambled eggs and drank orange juice with vodka. The one on my right, a widower retired from real estate, kept trying to show me coin tricks. He gave me his card, The Abracadabra Man. He was a magician now, he said-did shows at grammar schools. It was a long trip; I was a thousand miles from home. Auden was right: everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.

The story I heard when I got home was that my parents had been playing golf, the way they had every Sunday for the last twenty years. Later that day, they were to have had friends over for bridge, two tables. But this fall Sunday, on the back nine, shortly after my father put a fifteen-yard chip shot over the sand trap and then sank a seven-foot putt for a bogie, he returned his club to the back of the cart, complained of his left arm, and said he thought he'd better go home now. It wasn't a crisis, he explained, but he was very tired and wanted to go home. A few minutes after that, he was dead.

My mother drove him back to the pro shop, holding his body against hers, jouncing the cart over roughs, cutting across fairways and even the practice greens. Somebody rounded up a doctor in the clubhouse, a young obstetrician who tried to give my mother a Valium that she wouldn't take. She stood there in the pro shop, surrounded by people and racks of knit shirts and displays of putters; and when she was finally able to say something, the doctor could hardly understand her. But I could have told him what she'd say: "Will someone call my daughter, please."

 

 

 

My father was a man who adored women, and for a while I was the woman in his life. I lost a good deal of my advantage as I got older; you can't tickle the feet of a thirteen-year-old and throw her down, giggling, on the bed. And I grew up to be not at all what he wanted: a gawky, thin-faced kid, dark, unhappy, using time unwisely, given to evasions and deceit. I lied continually, a habit my mother called, with varying degrees of irony, a wonderful imagination. I was a movie star, a poet, a rogue, a racehorse: I was anything but myself. My parents couldn't figure it out. They had put in time, love, good schools, vitamins. They went to the PTA and supervised my choice of friends. Nothing took: and in spite of my father's stories, I wanted out. It was the 1960s, a brand-new decade, and the world I had grown up in was changing like a kaleidoscope. I wanted to get a look at it.

 

 

 

It was my mother who gave me ideas: "Don't get married right away," she said. "Work for a while. Learn to be on your own. Support yourself." She herself had never taken that advice. Married at twenty-one, she had gone straight from her father's house to her husband's, one man to another. My father was seventeen years older than she. He was a gardener; she was his flower. She never had a job, never owned a checkbook, never paid a bill or took a trip by herself.

But what she did, what he encouraged her to do, she did well. She was a golfer: city champion. She was a fundraiser: a new church wing went up. When she quit smoking, I thought she was going to make the whole world quit. She bought a film, One in Twenty Thousand. She bought a projector, a screen. The movie opens with a nice guy, an ordinary guy, strolling down the street. Camera pans to an X-ray truck. Two minutes later, and you're watching him being cut open. Where she got that stuff, a medical school, wherever, I never asked. And remember, this was 1955, nine years before the Surgeon General's warning. The knife goes down the smooth hairless chest, I can see it, the thin line of blood following, at a second's lapse, the surgeon's hand. Cut to gloved fingers, stainless steel: they spread back the ribs, expose the gray, necrotic, breathing lung. The masks, the sounds of labored breath. I smell the anesthetic, I hear the kids in the room squirming. Because my mother took this film to my junior high school, every junior high in the city. Kids watched it, they dropped like flies, especially the jocks. Teachers hustled them out, green themselves. Mama had people over and showed it in our living room, with cookies and Coca-Cola. Neighbors, church members, business friends of my father's, came and saw the light. And this is the point: in my home town, in my circle of friends, just about nobody smokes. Middle-aged men still come up to me and tell how my mother scared hell out of them when they were twelve.

The press loved her. We must have four scrapbooks, five, filled with clippings: Mama making her hole-in-one, Mama winning State, Mama refusing to let the electric company mutilate our street's trees, Mama taking a deep breath. She's got this big toothy smile and a poster tan; she looks like a lady who plays dirty if she has to. She's also got these big double-dipper breasts (they got in the way of her backswing, she said) and legs that didn't stop: it was no fun having boys come home from college and watching them fall all over themselves-for Mama. Was I jealous? Sure I was. But mostly I wanted some of that zip for myself.

 

 

 

Somehow-and chiefly by accident, but that's another story-after graduation I got a job on an island. Merritt Island, Florida. It was the jumping-off place for the world, the Cape: Grissom and Glenn, Saturn and Mercury, Atlas, Titan, the Original Seven. And I was there, a reporter, albeit the lowest, the worst-paid, the most questionably qualified, impatiently tolerated, and condescended-to reporter on the staff of Today. The education staffer in a town obsessed with space. ("What's an IQ?" my editor asked. "A number," I said. He liked that, and I had the job.) He thought I had the stuff, and I had to believe him: it was my life he was talking about. He was the editor of the best weekly paper in the United States: Time, that unimpeachable source, had said so. It was a good place to be in the Sixties, and I had fallen into it. And it was one thousand miles from home.

 

 

 

This can't be good, Daddy said.

Go to it, Mama said.

 

 

 

The morning I left their house, the sun glinted off the gravel in the driveway; I sat in my new blue Falcon, the back seat full of clothes, books, Joan Baez albums. My father, still in his robe and needing a shave, stood in the driveway beside the car. He kept cleaning his already-spotless glasses with a paper towel, standing in one spot and not saying much. Mama kept asking, "Are you sure you haven't forgotten anything?" and "Promise you won't drive if you feel tired. Call us as soon as you stop tonight."

 

 

 

"Call collect." My father gave me four fifties, which, added to what he had already given me for the trip, amounted to more than my first month's salary.

"I don't need this much."

"She's right," Mama said. "Let her manage. She'll call us if she needs anything. You think she's going to forget the number?"

"Just in case," Daddy said. "You never know what might happen."

I put the fifties in my purse.

"I don't want you breaking down on the highway," he said, although he had bought my car new expressly to prevent that.

I leaned my cheek against my father's and felt the early morning stubble. It surprised me, that, and the fact that I was nearly as tall as he.

Mama remembered something and zoomed back inside the house.

"I've got to go," I said. I wanted to make five hundred miles a day and it was already a half-hour past sunrise.

Mama reached in the car and put six-six!-bananas and two peaches in a plastic bag on the front seat. "Don't forget to call," she said, holding my father's hand.

"All right. All right!" From the end of the driveway I shouted, "I'll call you tonight!" and then I pulled onto Letitia Street, headed for highways south and southeast. The prospect of being paid to write stretched in front of me like the miles; I had wanted to be a writer since fourth-grade Mrs. Weeks had read my essays aloud to the sixth-grade class. The sun was at the corner of Letitia and Belmont Streets; by the time it set I would be in Tallahassee. Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia rolled past; the Gulf coast, with its trees all bent in from the ocean; then the red dirt hills. All of it seemed clean, autumnal, new as print. I rolled down the windows of the Falcon and sang along with the radio, loud as I could. The songs stayed the same while the announcers' accents flattened out. By the time I got to Florida's Route A1A, all my bananas were gone.

When I arrived at Merritt Island, I drove straight through town to an isolated part of the beach. I climbed over the dunes that separated A1A from the ocean, past the whine of the highway's cars, past the black ribbons of seaweed strung at the high-tide line. I squinted; the wind that always blows in from the Atlantic was blowing for the first time in my face. The wind smelled like ocean. I took off my loafers and socks and walked out on the hard coarse surface of the wet sand. To my left, the gantries of Cape Kennedy blurred in the humidity; right, the beach trailed and shimmered like a long white scarf. A foolish wave, colder than I expected, rolled to my feet, paused, and retreated. Sandipipers chased the foam, peeping and searching for food. They left, I noticed, three-pointed tracks, like stars with the bottoms cut off.

"Ponce de Leon!" I hollered to the gulls. "Balboa!"

My river-bound Louisiana soul unbuckled like the waves. I splashed into the Atlantic, not even rolling up my double-knits. I was twenty-one; I had a job on the best weekly paper in the country; I was inventing myself for real.

It lasted two weeks.

And then my father died.

 

 

 

A few days after the funeral, when it was time to reopen the store for business, Mr. Brant, our office manager, called from the U-Tote-M across the street.

 

 

 

"Would you try to find your father's keys to the store?" he asked me. "I hate to bother you, you know? But we can't get in the back warehouse."

"What?" Mama came to the phone, assuming it was for her. "The keys?" She had deep circles around her eyes, like bruises. "Where would they be? The keys, the keys . . ."

My aunt Adele was making coffee in the kitchen and she said to me, "What about the pants your father was wearing?"

Mrs. Morgan, our next-door neighbor, said, "Wouldn't you think those people would take care of that and not bother Virginia?"

"There was a package the ambulance people left," I said. "A paper sack with things in it."

"Well, there," Adele said.

Mama and I found the keys in the sack, drove over, and opened the back warehouse. I'm not sure my mother had ever been inside; I'm sure I hadn't. It was crammed with merchandise: Italian cane-back chairs, mattresses, Sealy, Beautyrest, Medi-Right. Tables, credenzas, breakfronts; Trouvailles, Sligh, Baker. Hotpoint appliances, Zenith electronics. Most of it wasn't unpacked; it was still in crates or vinyl wrappings. Here was thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, most of it not paid for, though we didn't know that yet. Mr. Brant flicked on the switch with his knuckle and thanked us for coming over. He was a smiling man, a good salesman who remembered people's names. My father had liked him. But today Mr. Brant looked like a man who was afraid he was going to lose his job.

"You don't worry about a thing, Mrs. V.," he said. "We've got the inventory. We're going to keep everything shipshape, just like Mr. V. would have wanted."

"I know you will," Mama said. "We appreciate that, Mr. Brant."

"Do you"-Mr. Brant looked somewhat embarrassed-"want to let us know what to do about the safe?"

"What's wrong with it?"

"Can't open it, Mrs. V. Don't have the combination."

And my mother, who could drive a wood off the men's tee with the best golfers in the club, who could put a wing on the Children's Hospital practically single-handed, didn't even know the combination to my father's safe.

 

 

 

"Sell the business," my aunt advised, who was dying to know how much my father had left us and eager to offer consolation provided the amount was not too much. "Sell! You don't need the trouble."

 

 

 

"I'm not sure what I'm going to do," Mama said. "I think Stella and I could handle it."

"You've got inflation," Adele said. "You've got bills. You've got long hours. You've got no-good salesmen." She recited woe like a Greek chorus. "What do you know about sales? What do you know about accounting? What do you know, Virginia?"

"I don't know anything," my mother admitted. "But I know I don't want to talk about all this right now."

 

 

 

That week people came over, day after day, night after night. Adele, my uncle Peter, their kids, Joyce and Petey. Also the couples my parents had played bridge with for twenty years. Also neighbors. They ate food that they brought and they talked to my mother, trying to cheer her up or at least distract her. To a certain extent, it worked-we had beers, we talked-but eventually everybody left and my mother and I were alone in the house. She let in Lady, the dog, who had always slept outside. Lady curled up at the foot of Mama's bed as though she had slept there every night of her life.

 

 

 

"You know something?" Mama said, standing there in her pink bathrobe, brushing her teeth. "I've always shared a room. My sister and I slept together until I got married. Then Arthur. I've never slept by myself. I'm afraid I can't."

She had certainly slept alone-my father had traveled to the furniture markets twice a year-but it wasn't the time to remind her. Instead I pulled on my nightgown and climbed into my parents' double bed, on the side where my father had slept less than a week before. I piled the pillows together and leaned back against the headboard while she stayed in the bathroom, brushing.

"When are you going back?" she called to me.

"I told them I'd stay a week." She didn't say anything right away so I added, "I can stay longer if you need me. I told them at least a week."

"That's good," she said. "I'm glad of that." She came back in the bedroom and said. "Tell me what it's like. The people you work with." She unscrewed a jar of Eterna 27 and smoothed it around her eyes with delicate upward sweeps of her middle finger.

"They're OK. We work all the time, seven o'clock every night. Sometimes later. Last Friday I was at the office until two in the morning."

"Why so late?"

"It takes me twice as long as anybody else. But I'm catching on."

Mama made an ambiguous bmm through closed lips, possibly disapproving my tardiness, possibly incredulous that I wasn't already surpassing all others.

"They're helpful," I said. "Really smart, too."

"Let me tell you something. Your father was sending you money, twice. He gave it to me, to send to you. You didn't get it because I didn't send it. That was my idea, to let you live on your salary, but I didn't tell him-he wanted you to have more." She wasn't apologizing, just setting forth facts. "I should have sent it."

"I didn't need it. I don't want it."

"I know, but your father wanted you to have it." She looked at me in a way that signaled the end of the subject. "Did you know that when I went to tournaments, he'd pack my bags?"

"No, I didn't."

"To make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. Even my clubs."

"Would you have forgotten them?"

"Maybe." She tried to smile, but, it didn't quite come off. "Who knows?"

 

 

 

They had been happy; when I was growing up, I thought all married people were happy. They had loved to go out. Mama would step out of the bath, fragrant and wet; she'd open the bathroom door to let out the steam. Her skin was tanned darker than her hair, and the white outline of her golf shorts and shirt made her seem twice vulnerable.

 

 

 

The dress she would wear hung in the closet. Her evening clothes cost hundreds of dollars, even in the Fifties, but my father loved the way she dressed. She would be fastening her merry widow and he would offer to help with all the little hooks. Then he'd slip his hands inside the cups. I, trespassing, was all eyes. Mama bounced away: "You'd better watch it," she said. "I love to watch it," he answered. She laughed; then he went off looking for his studs, looking tickled with himself.

When my mother was zipped, humid, teak-colored, and fragrant, and she and my father had left for their dance, I locked the door argainst the baby-sitter and stepped into a green satin dress Mama had decided against wearing. I pulled up the neckline-it flapped against my ten-year-old chest like a lowered mainsail-and hitched up the top with a safety pin. I hung my mother's pearls around my neck, dangled rhinestones from my ears. Then I dotted on enough perfume to drive the cat under the bed. I found my mother's green slippers, stiletto-heeled, and flopped over to the full-length mirror to admire.

Then the baby-sitter knocked on the door. "Time to go to bed," she said.

 

 

 

On the Friday before I was going to leave, my aunt Adele came into my room while I was writing a letter. She closed the door and began talking in a low voice. My mother was on the other side of the house, in the kitchen.

 

 

 

"Stella," Adele said, "I don't think it's a good idea for you to leave. Not right now."

"You mean stay another weeks?"

"No. Another six months. Maybe a year."

The suggestion seemed so impossible that I just stared at her for a minute.

"Virginia's scared to death," she continued, "but don't expect her to admit it."

"I can't stay that long. I have a job. They expect me to come back."

"They'd certainly understand if you didn't."

"They would, but I couldn't get that kind of job here."

"Does that matter so much?"

"It matters a lot."

"More than your mother?"

"Of course not!" I said, but Adele wasn't going to be interrupted.

"If you stayed with her for a while-who's saying forever?-she'd adjust better. And you could always go back to your job later."

"They wouldn't keep it open six months."

"Have you asked them?"

She knew, of course, in the way that people who ask rhetorical questions always know, that I hadn't.

Adele put her hand on my shoulder and regarded me with expectation. "Your mother's deceptive," she said. "She looks like she can do anything. But when it comes to the real business of the world-she doesn't know a damned thing. You've had four years of college, a job-you could help her right now, and she needs you. Don't you know that?"

"No," I answered. "And I think you're wrong about what she can do."

"Then you'd better think again about it."

After she closed the door I stared at the letter I had been writing until I could no longer see it. That my aunt was a meddling guilt-monger, serving it right up front like mother's milk, I had no doubt. She would have cheerfully admitted it herself. But that she could also be right!-and this was where the nerve met the burn-that was unthinkable. I think I hated Adele at the moment. She had seen the way I looked; she must have known how I felt. And she expected to win; her last shot was, "You see? You know the right thing to do." The tears in my eyes were her claim to victory. I couldn't answer her-I don't think I could answer even now. But I knew one thing: on Monday I was going back to work.

 

 

 

Saturday morning, five people were in the house. Adele and Mrs. Morgan were in the den watching a rerun of Garden Time-how to grow ageratum, begonias, petunias, and shamrocks from seed. In their Sears-bright slacks and sweater sets, they looked like petunias gone to seed themselves. Claire, our old housekeeper who had retired when her arthritis got too bad, was back: her outsized knuckles, whorled like tree nodes, gripped the handles of an Electrolux. The monotonous whir of the vacuum held its own with Garden Time. In the kitchen I was watching my mother fix lunch. She was slicing purple onions for a salad.

 

 

 

"Want some help?" I asked.

"How about a glass of sherry? You two want some sherry?" she called into the den.

"We'll get it."

"Sit tight," Mama commanded. "Stella will bring it."

In the refrigerator were remnants of quiche and a ham casserole left over from the wake, also two bottles of Harvey's. One bottle was almost empty, so I took both out.

"You drank all this?" I asked my mother.

"Last night, so I could sleep. Open the other."

"The doctor advised it, instead of sleeping pills," Adele called from the den.

"Well, that's too much," I said in a lower voice. I brought two glasses into the den, where a woman in high heels was showing the home gardener how to transplant seedlings that have been sprouted in egg cartons. "I can't hear the program in the kitchen," I told Adele. "Mind if I turn it up?" That fixed the eavesdropping.

"Take it easy," I told my mother back in the kitchen.

"I can't sleep. I'll pour it myself if it worries you so much."

"I'm not worried."

"I just can't sleep, is all."

I knew that: all night I could feel her throwing back the covers, covering up again; I heard her crying. I wasn't sleeping either; twice the night before I had been wakened by a dream: I was back in Cocoa Beach, on the island, a narrow spit of land two blocks wide between mainland and ocean. A storm approached, black cumulus clouds rolling in from the east. I was looking for my father, who was in one of the island's vacation houses. All the houses were on stilts. Rain began to fall-there was real rain outside, driving against the window-and water began to rise on the island. It covered the beach, the dunes, the highway. By the time I realized I needed to leave, it was too late: the bridge was down. The second time I woke up, I went downstairs in the dark, my bare feet freezing on the linoleum. I sat at the kitchen table, unable to stop crying or to shake off the dream. I wanted to tell Mama. Finally I went back to bed, and just before dawn, I fell asleep.

"What are we having?" I asked her now.

I lifted the lid of one of the pots on the stove. Inside were pole beans, lying on top of the collapsible steel colander that she steamed them in. I upended the lid like a shield to keep the steam from burning my hand.

"You can turn that off," Mama said. "They're ready."

I poured Bristol Cream into two stemmed glasses and set one on the counter beside my mother. She had finished with the purple onions and now she was tearing spinach leaves from their stems. Her hands moved quickly, and her work produced a moist and rhythmic sound. Her back was toward me, her head inclined slightly forward. She was standing, it seemed to me, as she had stood for the last twenty years, fixing oatmeal or coffee or the vegetables that she bought early in the mornings from the old man who used to peddle produce from a three-wheeled bicycle cart. He'd come down the street ringing his bell, often during breakfast; my mother and I would stop in the middle of oatmeal and rush out before he passed our house. The fruits and vegetables rested in slatted wooden crates on the bed of the cart. Mama showed me how to select pole beans; mottled or solid green, it didn't matter. Get them the same circumference, that way they cook evenly. Get them small, about one-quarter-inch diameter; they're younger, tenderer. She'd snap one: I learned to listen for the pop. I learned how to look at things from my mother.

"Richard thinks we should incorporate," she was saying in a voice beneath the television's cover. Her hands methodically tore the spinach leaves. "He thinks we could find a good manager. Maybe Mr. Brant would work out."

"Sure he would. But Mama, you don't need a lawyer to tell you that."

"You think." She looked up. "You think."

"If you can organize the women's golf association, you can run a business."

"Isn't that a little naïve"? Her voice when she spoke was flat. "I never walked in that office except to draw out money." She shook her head. "And these success stores . . . did you ever notice? They're all about young women. I'm forty nine years old." She seemed to have finished, then added, "One thing. Richard's right. We should incorporate. To protect us against debts."

"We have debts?"

"Yes, some. Not big ones. Not too big. The insurance . . . it's . . . I don't know what all these papers mean! What to sign, what to keep-" She loosed an audible breath across the kitchen. "You ought to look at them before you leave. I'll ask Richard to hurry it up. Could you stay for that?"

"Monday. Could we do it Monday?"

"I'll call and ask."

She finished with the spinach and tossed the salad in its mahogany bowl, the dark wrinkled leaves green against the purple onions. "There," she said, turning around to face me. "Doesn't that look good?"

 

 

 

I stayed at home five more days; the incorporation papers weren't ready until Wednesday afternoon. When my mother and I drove back from the attorney's office, my bags were in the back seat. We drove past supermarkets, past shopping centers with parking lots like gray lakes, out of the city, toward the airport. It was humidly cold, and the tires rotated against the pavement with a monotonous, heartlike beat. Mama leaned toward the steering wheel.

 

 

 

"I think Richard is overcharging harging us," she said. "Did you see the bill he gave me?" Without taking her eyes off the road, she rummaged in her purse and gave me a cleanly typed sheet with an engraved letterhead. "He's so afraid he won't get his money, he didn't even wait to mail it to me."

"Legal services," I read out loud. "$650." I looked up. It shocked me, too, but then I had never had bills of that size. "That must be for the incorporation." I kept reading. "Telephone consultation, October 8, $15. October 11, $15." There were two other telephone consultations.

"Mama," I said, "don't call him so much."

My mother stepped on the gas and pulled around a car in front of us. "I had to call him. What do you want me to do?" Her voice dropped, a sure sign that she was angry. "How much did your father ever tell me? Stella, I can't do all this by myself!"

"Maybe I can do something."

She rammed the bill back into her purse. "It's pretty hard to do anything when you're five states away."

There we were.

She concentrated, frowning, on her driving, and stared at the painted stripes on the highway. I listened to the tires thump the cracks in the pavement. It was a long drive to the airport.

When she and I had driven my father to the train station for one of his buying trips, Mama had always taken his leaving hard, no matter how many times he had gone before, no matter if the trip lasted only a week. We'd all wait for the train, Daddy looking good in a Burberry coat bought especially for the trip. It would be cold, but none of us wanted to wait inside the tobacco-dense depot. My parents stood on the platform holding hands while I sat on my father's Samsonite two-suiter or jumped up to ask, "How many minutes now?" Mama, every time, gave me the answer. When the train pulled up, all black steel and vibrations, massive loud threatening metal, my father embraced my mother, holding her head in his big hands, his fingers in her pale hair. Then he reached down and lifted me so that we were all eye to eye.

"Mind your mother," he said, "and I'll bring you something from Chicago."

"What?" I asked. "What what what?"

"Hush." Mama said. "Your father's leaving now."

I looked at her in surprise. Her eyes were wet, and my father hadn't even boarded yet.

"Goodbye, Arthur," she said. "Goodbye, sweetheart!" Her tears left a spot on the lapel of his new coat.

The memory caught me like the sight of his razor in the bathroom.

 

 

 

The airport waiting room was overheated. Outside, wind swept up occasional flurries of rain. The airplane attendants wore yellow slickers that were reflected in the tarmac's shine. In Cocoa Beach people would be walking the beaches in their bathing suits, but here, in this room, it was winter.

 

 

 

"I'm thinking," Mama said as we took adjoining seats, "that maybe I ought to rent out the house. Get an apartment."

"An apartment? Where?"

"Where Crissy Owens lives, maybe? She told me there's one available in her building."

"Would you like that?" I didn't like to think of my mother without trees and a gravel driveway out front.

"Who says I wouldn't? I'd be fine."

"What about our furniture?"

"Sell it. Or store it. I don't need such a big place."

"Who would you rent to?"

"I'd find somebody good. It would be income." She smiled in a way meant to be reassuring. "Not that we have to worry so much." I half expected her to reach in her purse and pull out a half-dozen bananas.

"No," she repeated. "We don't have to worry so much."

"I'm not worried." The loudspeaker announced my flight, first call. "I just don't think you should rush into anything. Richard said not to rush into anything."

People rose from their seats and scooped up packages. Some began to line up: little boys in white sneakers, caught in the viselike grips of their mothers; businessmen with leather envelopes; old ladies in mink stoles. Neither my mother nor I moved.

"I'll be back before Christmas," I said. "We can talk about it then, if you want."

"I'm not sure I want to wait until Christmas."

"Then I'll call as soon as I get home."

Home.

I tilted my head to kiss my mother; then I leaned down and hugged her. Did I feel my mother tremble? More likely it was myself.

The other passengers disappeared into the plane. Up close, my mother's perfume surrounded me like the green memory of a dress.

"Mama," I said as the stewardess waited for the ticket, "you know I want to stay don't you?"

"Oh, Stella. Can't you come back? Go, and come back?"

Behind her, the stewardess looked at her watch.

I knew that whatever I said, it wouldn't be right.

"I'll call you when I get there," I repeated finally. "You'll be OK, Mama, I know you will."

She gave me a look that said it: I don't know.

She didn't know.