Read Online Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) by Tracy K. Smith - Free Book Online
Authors: Tracy K. Smith
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mouth. Furthermore, the path of communication leading from her to me was a zigzag guaranteeing that anything set upon it would lose momentum, rolling to a standstill just shy of my feet. She’d ask, “Does that little gal want some water?” leaving my mom to look at me with an expression meant to reiterate the question, which I would then answer meekly, watching as it was repeated for Mother at an audible decibel level. When Mother did speak to me directly (often calling me by the name of my younger cousin Stacy), my ensuing silence—a result of confusion about her accent or her funny words for things—would prompt my mom to repeat it for me. It was like being stuck in a relentless game of telephone.
My brothers and sisters grew up spending summers in Leroy,playing with a cadre of cousins; running around under the feet of Daddy Herbert and a younger, more easygoing Mother; racing up to the general store with the shiny coins they’d been given for sweeping the porch or folding laundry. But just when it should have been my turn for all that, the Mother everyone remembered seemed to disappear. Nobody said where she had gone or why she had left.
I admired the fact that my mom could stay afloat in this place that had me utterly confused, seeming as it did to rely upon a different language and currency. In her childhood home, Mom was herself and something more. She knew how to hold her own with Mother, how to put on an apron and become one of the women of the house, how to be silent without feeling chastised by the wordlessness of whole long segments of the day, even how to fetch Mama Lela her coffee can without wrinkling her nose at the dark funk of tobacco spittle. But that place—which had everything to do with the woman who’d made me (hadn’t it?) and yet seemingly nothing to do with any version of me that I could recognize or even imagine—left me locked out, stuck to my knees in mud.
The two weeks were sweltering and long. When Mama Lela and my mom sat quilting together or when Mom rode with Mother to pay one of the old folks a visit, I’d nurse thoughts of what it would feel like if I could magically wake up and speak the language of this place—if I could move around in this kitchen, emptying a cup of this and a teaspoon of that into a shiny mixing bowl; if I could manage to coax a laugh or even a smile out of Mother; if Dinah’s record were still around to catch the two of us up in its never-ending disco fantasy. I even sometimes imagined what I would sound like if I could borrow Dinah’s voice for the remainder of my visit. She had a slight stammer—it didn’t seemto cause her any embarrassment, and I quickly came to associate it with her sense of dominion, of authentic, uncontestable belonging not just to Alabama but to this big family stretching back for generations—and even that became emblematic of something I wanted. Other times, I fell into a deep longing for our real life, Mom’s and mine, but not even crawling into bed beside her at night or folding myself in her arms during the day could make me feel less out of place here, less of a stranger.
One day, Mama Lela said something peculiar, something I couldn’t quite understand. It made her laugh, and when I seemed confused, she said another thing that didn’t make sense, and she laughed at that, too. Later, when I asked my mom what Mama Lela had meant, she told me that sometimes when people get to be very old they experience something called senility , which makes them do and say things that don’t always make sense. Mom didn’t say that Mama Lela was senile, only that older people sometimes brush up against senility from time to time, like it was a wall of wet paint. “Some folks call it the Second Childhood,” Mom had said, and those words, in a single flash, made me trust Mama Lela. I felt comfortable around her, even when she said cryptic things that made her giggle to herself. It meant that from time to time she was a child, just
My brothers and sisters grew up spending summers in Leroy,playing with a cadre of cousins; running around under the feet of Daddy Herbert and a younger, more easygoing Mother; racing up to the general store with the shiny coins they’d been given for sweeping the porch or folding laundry. But just when it should have been my turn for all that, the Mother everyone remembered seemed to disappear. Nobody said where she had gone or why she had left.
I admired the fact that my mom could stay afloat in this place that had me utterly confused, seeming as it did to rely upon a different language and currency. In her childhood home, Mom was herself and something more. She knew how to hold her own with Mother, how to put on an apron and become one of the women of the house, how to be silent without feeling chastised by the wordlessness of whole long segments of the day, even how to fetch Mama Lela her coffee can without wrinkling her nose at the dark funk of tobacco spittle. But that place—which had everything to do with the woman who’d made me (hadn’t it?) and yet seemingly nothing to do with any version of me that I could recognize or even imagine—left me locked out, stuck to my knees in mud.
The two weeks were sweltering and long. When Mama Lela and my mom sat quilting together or when Mom rode with Mother to pay one of the old folks a visit, I’d nurse thoughts of what it would feel like if I could magically wake up and speak the language of this place—if I could move around in this kitchen, emptying a cup of this and a teaspoon of that into a shiny mixing bowl; if I could manage to coax a laugh or even a smile out of Mother; if Dinah’s record were still around to catch the two of us up in its never-ending disco fantasy. I even sometimes imagined what I would sound like if I could borrow Dinah’s voice for the remainder of my visit. She had a slight stammer—it didn’t seemto cause her any embarrassment, and I quickly came to associate it with her sense of dominion, of authentic, uncontestable belonging not just to Alabama but to this big family stretching back for generations—and even that became emblematic of something I wanted. Other times, I fell into a deep longing for our real life, Mom’s and mine, but not even crawling into bed beside her at night or folding myself in her arms during the day could make me feel less out of place here, less of a stranger.
One day, Mama Lela said something peculiar, something I couldn’t quite understand. It made her laugh, and when I seemed confused, she said another thing that didn’t make sense, and she laughed at that, too. Later, when I asked my mom what Mama Lela had meant, she told me that sometimes when people get to be very old they experience something called senility , which makes them do and say things that don’t always make sense. Mom didn’t say that Mama Lela was senile, only that older people sometimes brush up against senility from time to time, like it was a wall of wet paint. “Some folks call it the Second Childhood,” Mom had said, and those words, in a single flash, made me trust Mama Lela. I felt comfortable around her, even when she said cryptic things that made her giggle to herself. It meant that from time to time she was a child, just
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