Coming and Going
Sarah’s children rode their bicycles to visit the horses at the end of the street. They climbed on the fence and held out bunches of grass. Sometimes the horses would trudge over and take the offerings in their huge mouths, sometimes they just stood in the middle of their shade less paddock flicking their tails in the heat. And the children hardly noticed that the Bay was fat and sway-backed, and the Black was old, sweating, and bad tempered. In their imaginations they rode them wildly across fields, scrambled around boulders down into canyons, followed dry creek beds to discover old caves.
And at Sarah’s mother’s house, Sarah’s grandmother sat in her chair pretending to sew “something very pretty,” folding and unfolding a piece of Kleenex in her lap. Sometimes she would say, “Now if I could just find the right buttons ...” So Sarah would get out her mother’s button jar and pour some of the buttons into a bowl for her grandmother to sort through.
Sarah’s sister Anne was expecting her first baby that summer. Remembering the birth of her own first child, Sarah found herself awake at night wondering if Anne was awake too —- lying in the dark beside her husband’s breathing — afraid, the way that she had been. Afraid that she might not know when labor was starting, afraid that she might die when something as large as a baby tried to come out through something as small as her vagina.
Sarah had recognized labor and survived delivery. Then while she was being wheeled down a corridor, someone place a small white package beside her on the gurney. When she turned her head to look, there was an infant facing her, eyes wide open, lying perfectly still. In that instant Sara knew the irrevocable truth, their was a person inside that baby disguise. She felt small and amazed, and later, in her sleep, there was a scuffling of dry leaves and wind and night.
Annie had her baby in late July. Water from sprinklers ran down gutters, heat rose from streets with a smell of tar, and the children played into the dark of nine and ten o’clock, darting their moon-shadows across the driveways and lawns.
When it was too hot to cook Sarah would say, “There’s lots of food in the house so help yourselves.”
The children would find cheese and watermelon, cucumbers, and rice cakes with honey. Sometimes Eric, Sarah’s husband, would eat with the same abandon as the children, sometimes he would roll up a hot dog in a piece of bread and feel sorry for himself.
Sarah’s mother continued to take care of Sarah’s grandmother, wrestling her from bed to chair, from chair to bed. And she would not admit how tired she was, but it showed in her walk, uneven, stiff, as if some part of her hurt and she was trying not to move it. Sometimes Sarah would stay with her grandmother while her mother went out to have her hair washed or to buy groceries. Sometimes in the night Sarah’s grandmother would wake up calling her “mama”.
In August the children stopped going to visit the horses, and started playing Indians and Monopoly, fighting apart and coming back together again. Air drifted furnace hot in open windows, and Sarah began to sew clothes for school.
The sewing machine made five perfect button holes down the front of Caroline’s blouse, then jammed up on a cuff and left a pile of knots. Stitch by stitch Sarah removed the thread. The machine made two more perfect buttonholes on a scarab of material, but when Sarah tried it on a cuff it knotted up again. She rethreaded the needle, readjusted all the dials and tried once more. The machine made half a buttonhole, then stalled.
Sarah spent the rest of the afternoon in the rocking chair, with a glass of ice water, the clock chimes reminding her that she shouldn’t just sit there doing nothing. The next morning the sewing machine made a perfect buttonhole on both of Caroline’s cuffs.
In September Eric and Sarah made pies with the last of the apples they had rescued from the birds, the children went back to school, and at Sarah’s mother’s house, Sarah’s grandmother sat in the chair pretending to sew “something very pretty,” folding and unfolding a piece of kleenex in her lap.