You may have read a novel of mine called Fear of Obie. Or maybe you haven’t. One way or other, my new book Where the Time Goes is Fear of Obie in a new incarnation.
It is for women whose sons and daughters have gotten illegal tattoos in middle school using birthday money from respectable relatives, and for people whose mothers dropped out of college because they were pregnant, and women who dropped out of college themselves because they were pregnant but then went back later, and for women whose sons have run away and lived in the woods, breaking into the house at night to steal weiners and oreos from the pantry.
It’s also for people who have never had anything like that happen to them but who like reading about such things.
Seven short stories excerpted from Where the Time Goes have been published in a variety of literary journals, listed below. The following chapters are from the book.
Chapter One
Tara
Like Emily Dickinson
1
Don’t read other people’s mail. I don’t care how intriguing it looks. Even if it’s a gardenia-white letter, the envelope calligraphed with an antique pen and post-marked from, say, Easter Island in 1890. Or a note scrawled last week on scarlet origami paper folded in the shape of a kimono. Above all, don’t read any letter written to your mother by a stranger. Especially when you’re forty-three and your mother is in her sixties.
The letter I read was in a business-size white envelope postmarked July 6th of 1992 and had no return address other than a postmark from Seattle. I don’t normally violate privacy but summer of 1992 was a weird time for my family, so when the piece of mail fell into my hands I couldn’t help but be curious who sent Mom a letter just at that time, a letter from a city where she didn’t know anyone I’d ever heard of. As justification for prying I told myself the thing had been written almost thirty years ago, so any news in it must be very stale.
Wrong.
The old letter didn’t reveal anything unknown about my birth, like my father really having been the mail deliverer or someone my mom met at a party in her hippie-influenced youth. However, it did reveal glaring inaccuracies in the story I’d been telling myself about my life during most of my adult years.
I mean, I admire my mother in many ways. Her ability to make it through multi-tome 18th century novels. Her non-flashy, understated beauty. Her ability to teach people things. But she was a different kind of person from me, which was a big part of my identity.
2
In summer of 1992, the year I turned eighteen, Mom had an emotional meltdown where she withdrew from the family and moved in with Ellen Redgrave, the neighbor across the street. Ellen was a confidante of Mom’s and was in the midst of a divorce, so her guest bedroom seemed to Mom like a viable place to sleep after the incident with my father that temporarily broke her brain. To keep an eye on her, I stayed with her there on some nights. My sister Cress did too. Cress was eleven at the time. We’d bring blankets and pillows and camp on the floor next to Mom’s single bed.
Mom had a part-time job teaching English at a community college, and she spent the last weeks of the school year commuting to work from Ellen’s place. When the semester ended she drifted into an armchair there, and sat in her bathrobe staring at dust motes, even though Dad was moving us all, ostensibly including her, from coastal California to rural Maryland.
The movers would be coming to pick up our stuff in a few weeks. We were supposed to pack, but Mom said she wasn’t going, although this idea seemed barely credible. So I supervised my siblings in boxing the household goods. I myself packed her books, her personal computer, and most of her clothes, without her help.
She gave many reasons for refusing to live with her family during those weeks, and for refusing to go with us the day we finally drove off. Some of the reasons she gave were understandable, like the fact that she didn’t want to leave the place where she’d been happy, and that my father had done something horrendous, something I knew about, that she wasn’t sure she could forgive him for. But the reason she gave that stood out in my mind, years later, was that she was, maybe, not meant to be a mother of four. And that if it had been up to her she’d have opted to be an agoraphobic spinster that wrote a lot of poems, like Emily Dickinson.
One way or another it was surreal when she let him drive off with all of us. I thought she’d run to the driver’s window at the last minute, yelling “Buckley, wait! I’ll get my purse!” We all thought that.
3
Through the years people have sometimes let it slip that I’m in this world because of a diaphragm my twenty-year-old mom didn’t know how to put in right, and that she dropped out of college when she got pregnant with me. Before that she’d loved reading books written with feathers in former centuries, and had this whole collection of threadbare volumes with gold titles on the spines, and was an English major. But halfway through the Fall semester of 1973 she’d found out about my impending arrival and her life was never the same. She married my father as a result of my barging in, although I wouldn’t have advised either of them to go that far if I’d been asked.
After many years she managed to get her Master’s in English, but it was slow going because of me. And a few other people, like my brother Blake. And my brother Eli. And finally Cress, my little sister. She’d cooked and cleaned and told bedtime stories while taking one or two college courses at a time, and had also worked at low wage jobs, such as answering phones and house cleaning, to supplement Dad’s income. He was an intake counselor and basketball coach at a nonprofit that provided services to disabled veterans and didn’t get paid a lot. They were always strapped, but Mom wasn’t the kind of woman who could handle the stress of full time work on top of child care and school, so she worked part time and they made do. Finally, she got this job teaching English in a community college, also part time, and it supplemented Dad’s meagre income in a way she liked and was proud of.
She’d wanted me to go to college, and not to let anything bog that down but I hadn’t been sure I wanted to go quite yet. I’d told myself it would mean leaving her to deal with Dad, Blake, Eli and Cress all alone. And that’s why it was hard to look at her that June day in 1992, as she stood across the street, watching us pile into the van, clutching that torn robe around her.
The college application had lain in my backpack through the spring while we packed and Mom languished at Ellen Redgrave’s house. I took the backpack when we moved from California to Maryland without her, but it was a while before I thought about college again.
4
Three days after we left her standing on the curb I called to tell her we’d made it to our new home. We had no phone yet at the dilapidated house in a rural area; the nearest was in a booth at a gas station a mile away, down a cracked country road. The call cost a handful of change, and the quarters, nickels and dimes I’d brought were only enough to talk for three minutes. Ellen told me Mom had moved elsewhere and gave me the number, which I recognized by the area code. It belonged to Virginia Wallace, who was like an aunt to her.
I called Virginia’s place.
“Tara,” was all Mom said when she realized who it was. Her voice was remote, with that robotic sound.
“How long are you going to be at Virginia’s?”
“Till I decide otherwise.”
“Cress is having bad dreams.”
“I’m sorry. But I have to decide whether I’m going to live with your father again, or do something else.”
She gave no examples of what “something else” might be. She put it on me to tell my siblings of her whereabouts, and her plans, or lack of plans, and wouldn’t talk to my father at all. I drove back down the tar-patched highway and into the life of cooking, running errands and paying bills that used to be hers.
From time to time I wrote her letters. People didn’t have email yet, then, or cell phones, and the three-minute calls from the gas station, and the expensive long distance ones later, when we had a phone, weren’t long enough to explain all of the things that I thought should make her feel as guilty as possible. Like the fact that Blake had run off, that Eli was now eating an alarming amount daily, and that Cress’s nightmares were about Obie, an imaginary brother we all had. The symbolic significance of Obie was the item I thought would get to her the most. He was a figure from stories Mom had told us over the years and was supposed to be hilarious and lovable. The fact that he’d turned into a monster in Cress’s dreams, I imagined, should be a sign of things deeply wrong. However, mostly, the letters I wrote my mother that summer begged her to say when, or if, she was coming to rejoin us, which she eventually did.
We also, eventually, moved back to California. I went to college, worked, got married and had kids. But, through it all that image of Mom in her bathrobe, staring at dust, stayed with me as an emblem of all I wanted to avoid. It helped me get going on sluggish mornings, helped me respond to my children’s needs, after I had children, and was why I’d never worn a bathrobe any later than ten a.m. at the latest.
The unmysterious letter-size envelope, addressed to Mom, was given to me by Virginia Wallace, my Grandmother Whitson’s oldest and closest friend.
Chapter Two
Tara
Of Pandora
The part Virginia played in my life was something like a great aunt who loved champagne, Janis Joplin and life in the Sierra Nevadas. She was convinced that the sound of wind in pines was good for the soul and through the years had begged me to spend a weekend with her, just me. So after one frazzling week I left my three kids with Ben, my husband, and drove up a million switchbacks to tiny, conifer-scented Amarillo Pass.
I hadn’t seen the tall, wooden house in about five years. My family had visited from time to time when I was growing up and I associated the place with games of checkers in the sun room and raucous splashes in a nearby lake. This time Virginia unfrazzled me with Chardonnay, a walk in the woods and sunny hours in a lawn chair, watching her weed her flower bed, hearing Janis through the screen from the stereo inside the house. But midday Sunday, as I was about to leave, she set about loading me up on things she wanted to get rid of.
“Every woman’s entitled to a hatbox,” she announced, mounting a stepstool. She stood on tippy toe in front of a megalithic armoire and strained toward a shelf that was almost out of reach. She was in her eighties, the age when people fall and break their hips, and her teetering caused me very great alarm. The fact that she was in spike-heeled boots didn’t help.
The words “let me do that” had barely escaped me when she was down, the box in her hands. She set it aside to brush dust from her jeans.
“I’ve told you about that hovering, girl. Just because I’m a senior citizen doesn’t mean you can treat me like some hothouse flower.”
The round container, decorated with unfashionable Victorian roses, looked like something my mother would like. I took it from Virginia’s hands, not at all sure women needed such things. “It’s cute but I don’t wear hats.”
“You can put anything in a hat box, Babe. Pictures. Old letters. Do you have any use for a macramé key ring? I made this one, back in the ‘70s.” She picked through bead curtains and old madras bedspreads. I laughed, protesting that I already had too much stuff.
I was still holding the hatbox when Virginia gave me a leather string necklace with an abalone pendant in the shape of a peace sign, which I obligingly put in the box, wondering if I could palm the box itself off on Mom. I was backing toward the door, dragging my wheeled suitcase, when Virginia said “Wait. I can’t believe I forgot these.” She crammed a large manila envelope into my hands. “Carolina’s letters” was printed on it in marking pen.
“This is some mail people sent her when she was staying here. The summer when – well, you remember.”
My mother didn’t like being reminded of that summer, even after twenty-seven years. However I duly placed the envelope in the hat box with the other loot, trying not to think of Pandora.
***
Giving Mom’s letters back should have been the least of my problems, but she was sensitive about her mental collapse, or whatever it was, in 1992. She was even more sensitive about my having done her mother-job for an entire summer when I was still technically a teen. Especially since everyone felt that I’d done it well. Maybe even better, some people said, than she had. And I don’t know about other women but my relationship with my mother is full of strange glints that shimmer under the surface. Meaning that she reads criticism into my friendliest remarks. So I was afraid she might interpret my handing her these reminders of the summer of ‘92 as a passive-aggressive gesture.
I also suspected, sometimes, that I was insensitive about whatever had happened to her that year. I knew about the things that had driven her mad, and some of them were awful. But, privately, I liked to think if I’d been in the same situation I would have coped better. So I’d learned to just keep my big mouth shut.
Anyway, my mother and I had a very nice, friendly relationship most of the time and I found myself not wanting to mess that up.
So upon getting home I put the hatbox on the floor of the small office where I work from home, and began to mull over the stack of letters. Could I get away with, maybe, just throwing them out?
Virginia had bunched the seven envelopes with a paper clip. The top five were from me. I held them in my hands, remembering Mom’s remote, aloof voice on the phone, almost drowned out by crickets. Deciding not to revisit that, I placed them next to me on the couch, and picked up the other two. One was from my father. Whatever he’d said to her that summer was his business, and her business. I put it aside. The last one had been postmarked from Seattle with no return address.
We had no relatives in Washington State. Nor did I know of any friends of Mom’s that lived there. And although it wasn’t any of my business either, I shook the sheet of plain white stationery out of the envelope and read this message.
So you chickened out.
I waited at the 4th of July thing in Johnsonville all afternoon, expecting to see your face any minute, fearing you’d cave in to the lily-livered happiness spoiler within us all. You didn’t appear so I went on alone.
I could say it was cruel that you didn’t even call. But if we never meet again I don’t want you to remember me as a whiner. More a hybrid of, say, Captain Nemo if he were poorer and less autocratic, and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Therefore I won’t carp on my disappointment.
Listen, Carolina, no matter what happens, whether you change your mind and come live with me or stay with Buckley until your hair turns ivory I just want you to know I’ll always cherish our confidences in Drake’s Point. Also loved every minute of the time we spent together this summer. I know I came on too strong that night at the place with the wagon wheel chandeliers and that’s probably what scared you away.
I’m still hoping you’ll change your mind. And no, not just because of Dr. Jekyll and the red-headed gorgon. I think you’d be saving your life and sanity if you came here. I think your children would be fine. Young people are stronger than we realize.
J
PS I keep picturing you reading this, then running to an energy-matter transformer and being here in a split second. Seriously, I believe we could be happy.
I had to read it through five times to believe what it was saying.
Chapter Three
Tara
Ballads From Shakespeare’s Lifetime
“Are you reading Nana Lina’s private letters?”
Whitson, my fourteen-year-old, had entered the room without my noticing and glimpsed her grandmother’s name on the envelope. I said nothing, but slipped the thing back in the hatbox. There was a ringing in my ears. I’d only ever experienced that during a dire emergency.
“Who’s it from?”
“I don’t know.”
Whitson seated herself in my desk chair and swiveled to face me, her eyes like some wigged magistrate’s. Which meant “you read someone else’s mail like you’ve always told me not to do.” And also “what the hell did it say?”
I ignored her gaze and pulled the leather cord with the peace sign pendant from the hatbox.
“Virginia wanted you to have this,” I lied, with a subject-changing smile. “It’s from the 60s.”
“Cool.” Whitson smiled against her will. Fond of all things retro, she hung the pendant around her neck. She wandered away, but I knew it wasn’t the last I’d hear from her about it. She had to have noticed that my hands were shaking.
3
In another moment of solitude, late that night, I re-read J’s words in the room I share with Ben. I mean, change your mind? Evidently she’d consented to live with him at one point.
Whoever he was, J was sure of himself, cavalier about other people’s marriages, and a science fiction freak. He’d also spent a lot of time with my mother. Both before and during that summer, judging from his statements. He cherished their “confidences” in Drake’s Point, the coastal California town where I grew up, and where we all still live. Which implied that he was seeing her, and exchanging intimacies, even before her meltdown. He’d also loved every minute of the time he spent with her during the summer of ‘92, the summer I’d cooked and vacuumed and run the washer in rural Maryland, worrying about everyone. And especially about Mom. And who the hell were Dr. Jekyll and the red-headed gorgon?
“What’ve you got there?” Ben wandered in from his shower.
“An old letter Virginia gave me, addressed to my mother. It’s from some guy that tried to get Mom to leave my dad, and all her children, and run away with him.”
“Good luck.” Ben laughed, and reached for the handle of a bureau drawer.
“This was in 1992,” I said.
He froze.
“Oh.”
“Oh right.”
Ben found nightclothes.
“Tell me about it.”
I handed him the letter. He stood reading it for far longer than it takes to skim a few paragraphs. Which meant that, like me, he had to read it several times to believe it.
“That’s f’d up,” he said, finally. I was glad he’d had that reaction. I was starting to wonder if mine was out of proportion.
“Should I confront her?”
“Why would you?”
“Well, it’s a shock to find out she almost left us for a secret lover who thought he was a submarine captain from a 19th century novel.”
“It was a long time ago. And she never left you.”
“But it’s surreal that she’s never told me.”
“Surreal isn’t always bad.”
He turned away, looking deep in thought.
I love Ben dearly, but this wasn’t the kind of situation where he was helpful.
4
It was understandable that she might want to separate from my father. An old friend of his had compared their marriage to a music combo where one member wanted to do acid rock, and the other was committed to “ballads from Shakespeare’s lifetime, with zithers and tinkly little bells.” And then there was the crisis in the parking lot of a pizza joint. The thing she couldn’t forgive him for. The crisis in the parking lot is a whole other story, but it grew out of an escalating conflict about Dad’s Maryland plan.
The nonprofit he’d worked for over the last ten years had folded, and he was having trouble getting another job in coastal California where we lived. A cousin in Maryland had offered him one, managing a hardware store, and there was even a dilapidated house he co-owned with his cousin where we could all live rent free. Dad wanted to rent our Drake’s Point house out to tenants until such time as he could find reliable employment around there again. Then, ostensibly, we’d return to our old lives.
Mom believed he could get a local job, comparable to the one he’d lost, if he kept trying. She told him many times, and clearly, that she wouldn’t move across the country with him because it would mean quitting the teaching job she loved. Among other things. Still he went ahead with his scheme, thinking she’d change her mind.
But who was this “J”? And why had she never told me about him?
5
After Ben was asleep, and gently snoring, it occurred to me that the hatbox was a built-in device for confronting Mom about her relationship with Captain Nemo. I’d invite her out to lunch in some genteel, nonthreatening mother-daughter place, like Belle’s Tea Room. I’d tell her I had a couple of gifts for her from Virginia. I’d give her the hatbox, and that would take the edge off the moment when I produced the stack of letters.
Then what?
Read my next post to find out what happens next.
By the way, short stories excerpted from Where the Time Goes, have been published as follows:
“A Requiem for Agnes Weems,” Evening Street Review, Number 28, Spring 2021
“After the Solstice,” isacoustic, post of 9-28-2020
“The Ouroboros,” Potato Soup Journal, Spring issue, posted March 31, 2021
“Fireman’s Lift,” borrowed solace, Spring, 2021 issue
“A Kind of Ripple Effect,” The Atherton Review, vol. 104, Spring Issue, April 7, 2021
“Flowers That Come From the World,” October Hill, vol. 5, issue 3, Fall, 2021
All these stories were published under the name Mary Newton.
Contact me if you want to read Where the Time goes.