Jill Talbot
I take the Jefferson exit off I-30 East, looking for a payphone I know my mother used once. 1974, 1975. I was four or five, watching out the window from the backseat of our orange VW Bug. I want to say it was raining.
(The way she hung up the black receiver and turned slowly in her coat
before settling into the passenger seat and telling my father
to drive home. 112 miles.)
My mother has been gone for a little over a year. It's July, hot and sticky in East Texas. I haven't been back to this town since my grandmother died in 1995, twenty-five years ago. I follow the directions to the address I used to write on envelopes as a child.
303 West 11th
Mt. Pleasant, Texas
75455
The single-story ranch house, built in 1951, sprawls across the half-acre yard on the corner of 11th and Johnson. A carport extends from the right side of the house, along with a gravel drive. I grew up visiting my grandparents here as a child. After my grandfather died when I was six, there was no longer a sentinel at the screen door, no one to answer my mother's payphone calls to say, "Not today." No one to call our house before the sun came up to warn against the visit, each ring like a door closing.
(I hear my mother pick up in the dark. The long moment between
his words and her settling the phone into its cradle.)
The pea green paint of the house I recall is now cream, and the carport where my grandfather's 1959 Red Chevy truck used to sit, empty. I stare at the three steps to the screen door and blink back tears.
(The kitchen sink, the Formica counter only shadows
through the mesh screen.
My mother reaches for the handle,
always with the same question.)
(I see a night we stayed, the porch light blaring.
That light like watered-down
bourbon at the bottom of a glass.
I'm standing in the kitchen on a muggy night,
yellowed linoleum. Here everything yellowed.
From smoke. From what's not spoken.
Even the water, minerals in the soil.
Moths flit against the light, the screen door.)
My mother only spoke about her childhood in flashes I tried to catch like fireflies.
I snap a photo of the house and the large tree out front, then pull away from the curb on my way to Rural Route 4, where my mother's childhood home sits just off the road. Another gravel drive, a light blue single-story with white trim. Cars speed past the spot where I've pulled over. As a child, my mother had to walk to the outhouse. The middle of the night, a dare. Behind this light blue house, hundreds of acres. What was once my grandfather's land, his cattle.
(I hear my mother mumble, "She drank or gambled it all away.")
(I turn to the road, see my mother at six, standing
in the middle of the highway
in her gown in the middle of the night,
where my grandfather finds her.
For some reason, I picture her like the young girl
in Dorothea Tanning's surrealist painting,
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.)
One night, a man stumbled through the front door of this house and passed out on the couch. My mother's bedroom was in the front of the house. (I stare at the window of what must have been her room.) She tiptoed to wake my grandfather, afraid of the stranger. Her father lumbered into the living room and roused the man, told him to go on home.
(At my grandmother's funeral, the gravediggers told my mother,
more than once, how much they had admired her father.
A good man.
It had been twenty years since his death.)
Turning back toward town, my tires fight gravel.
The Cattle Auction Barn still opens every Tuesday at 12:30. I pull into the drive, where a white iron gate keeps me from getting closer. My mother's friends, the ones who still live in this town, had given me directions earlier. They told me she worked here on weekends. I asked if she liked working for her father, and one of them laughed, "If she wanted to make the payments on her Malibu she did." Another sighed, "That car had no air conditioning. Those leather seats would get so hot."
In the days before this trip, I sign up for a trial membership to Newspapers.com, where I find decades worth of classifieds for my grandfather's cattle and a phone number (214-724-2657), along with two ads posted by my grandmother, a lost red purse (either at the Auction Barn or Hugo Highway), and a Bulova watch (either at the sanitarium (family secret?) or on the square). Both with a cash reward.
Before leaving town, I park in the lot of the high school my mother and her friends graduated from in 1963. It's an administration building now, and some of the high windows of the separate gymnasium frame only jagged holes in the glass.
(My mother rushes up the sidewalk to the front door of the school
with her friends in a white blouse, a poodle skirt and crinoline,
black and white oxfords.)
In the photo I take, the sun crests the top of the building. A majestic light. I linger in my car for a moment, staring at the two concrete benches framing the sidewalk. When I pull out of the lot, I take a left on First, back through the square. Turning onto Jefferson, I remember it's the street where my mother and her friends cruised on weekend nights.
(It's 1962, and I'm pulling alongside my mother driving,
her friends in the front seat, no seatbelts.
Patsy Cline. The quick turn my mother makes
leans them all into a slide across the seat,
and my mother grips the steering wheel
to hold on, all their laughter flying
out the windows. My mother's dark hair
lifts in the current.)
The way she pulled my hand up hard, twice, in her last moments.