The Smallest of Entryways

The Smallest of Entryways

She had her head cocked like a winter bud. The green faded tile floor with flecks of red, green, yellow color squares is much lower and me sliding around on it like drips of condensation down her window glass. The pots and pans, in and out of the cupboard, Lila's brussel sprout seeds sprouting on the windowsill with the quiet light breaking in in the morning before we wake up and staying there until I go into the puce livingroom to cut paper. Lila why are you so rough with the delicate antique flower thin China like a W. Whitman hillside? You take them from their stacks or do some such while I take the pans out and look at the metal vent, sliding on the big pot, the one for blackeyed peas and spaghetti. You don't want me in there, but you do. You want me to see. To see you make bread, to see you mix the yeast in the flour, to see your effort. Edward doesn't care. He won't even give you money for a coat, but he buys coffee. He's better than you, he thinks because he didn't have me. You had me to see. At least you gave me the kitchen. A whole shelf above the stove. Spices. You are an artist, Mama.
Black marks floating notes very much more than I could ever ask for when I'm alone. Thank you for giving me the option to diffuse into my room and into yours like the smell of a growing leaf. You sit outside my room, on the couch but that isn't that far from my room and you listen. I didn't notice because of how happy I am. You go into the kitchen and you start typing. You shouldn't be typing while I'm on the flute. It's disruptive and you only type when I'm home. I think you don't do much of anything when we're not home. I think you watch “Guiding Light.” I know you watch it because I've watched it with you when I had the flu. You know what's going on, I can tell.
The only thing at all like the kitchen is the garden. There are the stairs that then were good and the white trellis, all of these things donated you could say by the old pair who lived here before us. Squatting and dropping seeds – plip, plop, plip, into the divots in the rows like cake batter, little beans and tiny melons dnaed and happy to begin. The fence was nice back then and the honeysuckle bush I would run to like a comet.
At the Lincoln Log school the kids said push it push the snow in huge plow like fashion with their tiny red and white mittens over by the cannons at the park, and even then I stayed behind with the teacher because it was warm and I didn't have to do anything. Taking off their wet things slick with melted snow bragging like Montessori kids. Picking my nose in the song circle. Nobody noticed until the teacher said, stop that it's not clean. There are piles of garbage on my bed. I can only use one cup or I get yelled at: “Use the same cup!” There are moth larvae crawling on my ceiling. I listen to Van Morrison and Peter Tosh before bed to drown out the typing and yelling. A Cricket in Times Square and later a cigarette in the dark and a Hershey's Chocolate tin with a nice old fashioned girl as an ashtray.
The table is very big and the circle is easy to cut. At the next station there are fractions. Emily, my friend with the bowl cut tried to swallow her tongue and now her mouth sounds full when she talks. She turned her back and I colored Nebraska yellow and she got very upset. I helped my friend/crush Alexander tie his shoe. They only let me skip one grade because we came back from the island. It wouldn't have mattered if I'd graduated then. The horseshoe crabs taught me everything.
Edward wasn't there and then he was there hiking and playing baseball and telling me that my socks smelled like cat pee before we went to to Herfy Burger with the cow head plastic bust over the entrance like he and Lila and I used to. Lila and Mary and Michael and I shopped at Prairie Market. This was before Winchell's was there even and before the first store I went to with bar codes lost their last cash register with any sense of itself. Gum was the first to go, then canned stuff and later cooler items and even finally bulk foods. Nothing was dusty anymore. Edward became the bottom of some old brown stairs trapped near the university, tiny cakes on my plastic blue and white doll plates.
The July of my seventh year I tried to become part of the blackberry bushes that flanked the old garage we had never once used for anything, that remained shut like the cold room had, a science experiment, one of the many caves she set up just in case. I knew I could not do it, I couldn't walk into them and have them take me as I was, a tiny bird, a rush dweller, so I made do with gathering the blackberries into a bowl until Lila called me in, tidelike.
She poured sugar gently onto them and I went in and sat on the deep red brocade couch that had come with the house to listen to an old man tell the news. There were old men news men back then who you could not doubt. Dick was outside mowing the lawn. He had been in the front yard making a fool of himself with the electric mower cord and was in the side yard now with the bright yellow forsythia, which I had never liked even though I knew I should, but I did like it because Lila liked it.
I looked over at her through the doorway of the kitchen past the kitchen table in front of the stove and my mind filled in that she was stirring something slowly. I watched the old man with his white hair's mouth bob and the sound of the mower made it harder for a second or so to hear so I looked back over and saw Lila darting from the dish drainer to the kitchen table to slam a tall shiny knife through the tablecloth into its fibers. She ran past me to the edge of the front part of the livingroom and turned on the record player, apologizing to me but still insisting on putting on the LP “Cats.” She turned it up louder than the mower, scuttled over to the bureau like the land crab I remember seeing in the parking lot of Tom Thumb the day Dick had gone in to sell his first vile of mace when he was a salesman in the Keys and starting singing “Memory.” She was balling, bursting with song, ladling it out for certainly me, certainly Dick, and certainly the neighbors on either side to hear, crying as though I had just died, one would think, and I watched Les Charles, the anchorman, the old, stoic anchorman, went into his soul for a second through the tv glass, forgot my mom, meditated, as it were, up until Dick was there on the disgusting bamboo chair holding her, she resisting, but being the straightjacket she had ordered.
This morning, the morning before all memory, she is in bed in the livingroom, what the room became when she got too sick to get up anymore. On Saturdays I used to sit on the back of the brocade couch where I used to watch the Smurfs, the exact place where I got my first headache and experienced the relief of my first Tylenol, and watch all the cartoons I could think of with my mother cooking in the kitchen next to me, the windows open sometimes, often rain fogging up the windows and becoming a reason in of itself to love each other. This morning she isn't there and I am not, I got up late because I could feel her not awake, not to, and I lay in bed wondering if there was some way to make the window in my room not feel like that, not feel sad, feel sunny again, feel like the window to the outside, not just another picture on the wall.
Lila had been cut apart from herself when she was still unable to dress, when Ada still called to her that her bath was ready. She had a porcelain face with dark doll hair and wore layered dresses until she was 15 when she got to choose boys shorts and blue Keds with no comments from her lanky Ford model mother who had gone to UCLA and her father, the cross-dresser doctor; there was nothing wrong with that.
Her mother, her. There was no talking, no reasoning, just the heights. Never descending because valleys were clouded by the eternal force in her glass, tinkling around everything. Never would you think such a delightful sound could be so sinister. Tiny Lila never had a moment to relax. Ada tended her like a horse but without blood to do those things there is something missing. The ones who shared it were all like her mother and that's what she became too, a pause, the sound in between beats that cocks your ears in anticipation, the breath before a laugh.
The thing that was most different about Lila was there was no tinkling or fancy dresses, except the Jessica McClintocks Big Mama's daughter would send that I would scale the metal fence in to grab a quick glass of milk or the h'ors d'oevres Lila would make for me and my friends. You can take the debutante out of the ball, but you can't take the ball out of the debutante, it seemed. Our house in the old city was damp and sombre with pictures torn from art books of the Virgin Mary and streaks of mutterings on the walls melted there by her eternal frying and boiling. After Edward left the island we headed for was small, the cabin was small, there were bunk beds and faux wood and the reason for the lack of tinkling was Lila drank beer from a can. Cockroaches crawled in, and everything absurd was funny. We were teenagers, all of us. But I only wanted to learn how to talk to the bunnies and land crabs and learn who all the fishes were and the great white heron who came to visit while I was fishing and Lila sunning on the little white rocks. I woke each day hoping and for years not even penetrated by the typing and the memories of tinkling and the deep imprint of sorrow in her face.
I don't like to talk about Dick. I feel he has been drawn badly by Lila and he had a hard start because he came into my room while I was being alone with my tornado cellar thoughts and I had to stand by the mirror while he asked me ceaselessly if I would simply respond to him, in any fashion, preferably hello. He became a part of her, washed asunder by her tide, only to surface through stories of Norway and the conquerers, and his quintessential childhood, an upbringing thrown off by beauty.
He was the umpire, then the tour guide, the sense of reason, then the other voice in the hallway outside the bathroom. The Easter Bunny tooth fairy and finally the man on the couch, waiting to be escorted out by a teenage girl who had never learned to respect adults lying to themselves (sense of decency). For years I went again to the small Fishing and Hunting publishing building where I would check on him, see the photograph of Lila covered in a fishing vest and know that he was ruined, grab 20 dollars and build on my growing sense of relief that I was not and would never be that, whatever it was, that carried the past around not only not so obviously but at all.
In the ancient summer day he held her like a rock in his hand until she went back into the kitchen to make gumbo. That tiny thread like the rope around a boat edge had been bitten off when she was a small puff of steam. Everything was painted that way.
The morning of I came into the livingroom where my mother lay sunken into the waterbed, Saltines and beer next to her, the bent 1960s blinds drawn to cover the daylight.
“Can I watch cartoons? The dishes are done. The Smurfs are on. Fat Albert is almost over ...”
She feigned sleep or at least a daze. I walked back into the kitchen. I looked for a moment at the neat array of dishes in the dish drainer, wondering if I had put them in there in the right order, as an adult might have done. I removed the step stool, placing it under the sink, leaving the white washed kitchen washed in bathing daylight, the green flecked tile floor remembering me, remembering me to myself, and went into my room to play the flute. I left the door open a crack that I might not be trapped within my own room, or have a garden without light or appetite.

Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Portland/Summer 2009