Thanksgiving 1976
George was right to be afraid that his mother would smell the smoke in the library the next morning. The next morning, long before the sun came up, Mattie Luden did smell the smoke. Before Mattie Luden became mother again, before she returned to being keeper of the hearth, the house, shielding them all from chaos, she was sitting up in bed at four o’clock on Thanksgiving morning, hearing a dog barking and barking like spikes in the air. The barking was just punctuation as she sat rubbing her hands on the comforter (the new comforter she had bought last summer, now gray in the darkness, but brushed lavender cotton with soft pile). She rubbed and smoothed, sitting up in bed. She was not George’s and Missy’s mother, and she was not Gifford’s wife—this man who slept heavily beside her with his shoulder rising and falling in sleep. Behind her eyes her dream danced and faded, and she stared at without seeing the green face of the clock. At that moment, Mattie Luden was not Wife or Mother or any of those people. She was Mattie Dougherty, aged sixteen.
In her dreams now for what seem liked months, she had been sixteen or eighteen or twenty. Now in the darkness she was Mattie Dougherty, aged sixteen, sitting on the terrace of the Leviathan Tennis club, watching her sister play tennis with Bert Fields. The cold from the terrace cement seeped through her Bermuda shorts and she tucked her thin, brown knees under her chin. The tennis ball thwacked on the court in front of her. It popped, it sailed, it moved forever. Kay leaned a backhand into the ball, and the ball thwacked. Kay leaned and leaned. Kay had always been graceful in that flat-footed tennis way. Her white tennis shoes slapped and slid on the damp clay court and the court was dappled with sun. In her thick reddish hair, Kay wore the orange hairband Mattie had given her. Mattie watched. Sixteen-year-old Mattie watched. Forty-eight-year-old Mattie remembered her dream and shifted in bed, brushing her foot against Gifford’s thigh. Across from Kathleen, Bert Fields slugged the ball back.
Mattie shivered, skin-chilled in the early morning. She moved quickly, gently, sliding out of bed and stepping into her slippers while reaching for her blue silk robe. The dream was still running, still remembered, as she groped for the door in the half-light.
Kathleen was in the hospital standing next to the bed, yellowish against the white wall. The orange hairband Mattie had given her was slashed across her graying reddish hair, now thinning from chemotherapy. Kathleen stood topless, breastless, both breasts lopped off, cut off flat against the skin with two raised red circles on her chest, as if pressed by an iron. In Mattie’s dream, Kathleen’s face was smiling and anguished as she leaned against the wall.
As if she were a specimen, Mattie thought, going downstairs to the kitchen. As if she were being monitored, and all the doctors were around her, scrutinizing. Brave Kathleen. She never seemed angry, just amused at the irony of it. And Mattie imagined her, dear Kathleen, two years older than herself, standing against the white wall with her breasts cut off, with the orange hairband in her hair—Kathleen who was seven years dead saying, “I’ll never grow old, Matt, think of it, I’ll never grow old.”
Mattie, who felt as if she were growing old, who imagined her face age-lined, flinched when she remembered that voice. Did she really say that, she wondered. Did I dream that or did she say that?
Mattie was beginning to wake up now, but she did not want to, not in this silent house. The dream continued. It pulled her back and she wanted to go back, wanted to remember and she did not want to, because this was now and all these dreams were from the past. She paused at the bottom of the stairs, a pale grey form in the night, staring blankly at dim triangles of light on the landing.
She was in a silver blue dress that swept around her calves as she stood up from the powder room mirror at the tennis club. That dress swept, it whispered. She was twenty and that dress hushed around her legs. She was young and smooth and her eyes were bright dancing blue, her hair butterscotch blonde without grey. She was dancing to music that was profoundly beautiful, unearthly. She was dancing with Bert Fields. Light flew around the room and she felt Bert’s hand on her back, cool against her silver blue dress, holding her suspended like a marionette, and when she looked up he was there, the comb marks fresh in his hair. He smiled down at her, lifting her. He was twenty-two. Mattie Dougherty danced with Bert Fields at the tennis club in that dream summer, and the music, throbbing, carried them around the room. Bert smiled forever with his white teeth flashing.
Mattie leaned against the bannister. Bert Fields, she whispered, with a phantom smile in the darkness. She put a hand on her chest. Bert Fields. She winced and leaned more heavily. At that moment as she saw herself as young,dancing in that rich summer right after her sophomore year at Wellesley, with Bert’s hand cool upon her back, she knew for the first time for certain she would have married Bert Fields and felt those cool hands forever.
Her hand dropped from her chest. He disappeared after he came back from Korea. She must be getting old. She was dreaming of the past. That was an age ago. She had two children. She had George two years after she married Gifford, and Missy four years after that.
In the darkness of the kitchen, before she turned on the light, she thought of Elaine and George. They were nearly the age she and Bert Fields were that summer. They seemed so young—younger than she and Bert Fields. As she thought of George, her smiling son, her cajoling son with his graceful square hands like Kathleen’s, she was weak with love for him, sad with love for him. She thought of how he and Elaine, the first girl he’d ever brought home, murmured in the library—a private drone, saying what? Elaine seemed so secretive with her green eyes. They were lovely eyes really, but so inscrutable.
In the quiet dark, she went to the sink. Tea would calm her, would help her sleep. The water rushed loudly in the silent house—Mattie’s house. More than it was Gifford’s, who had almost paid for it, it was Mattie’s house. She could read it in the dark like Braille. She knew each crack in the plaster, nick on the wall. She knew the smell of each room. This was her house and she loved it like you love a worrisome child.
But Mattie Luden, her greying blonde pageboy mussed and tangled from sleep, was not thinking about her house. Bert Fields kept popping in and out as the teakettle began to steam. These kids today know nothing of romance, she thought. They sprawled in the library and never told jokes or sang songs. There was never that silence, that beating silence. They climbed into bed so fast they didn’t know what it was like to first feel the hands, the eyes, the touch on the cheek.
She snapped off the gas before the kettle whistled. As she poured water into a teacup she smelled the cigarette smoke coming from the library. Now she was fully awake. She rewrapped her robe, padded to the library door, opened it, and sniffed again. The air was stale and did not smell like dust and tweed as it usually did. It smelled like smoke and something else. She turned on the lamp by the door. The light was a loud yellow across the floor. The darkness of Mattie’s house was shattered. The family pictures hung slightly crooked, the ashtrays were clean, but that smell, that smell. She looked at the rag rug and saw a spot the size of her palm. She knelt to examine it. Beer? Coke? She touched the edge of it, then jerked her hand back.
Mattie Luden, George’s mother, protector of the house—no longer Mattie Dougherty—stared at the spot with a set, angry face, and wondered. And knew George and Elaine had made love on that spot. But she did not want to know, so she was indefinably angry. She set her jaw and thought about cleaning up after people, about cooking for almost full-grown adults. She wondered how either of them, George or Elaine, survived college. But she was not really thinking about irresponsibility, or messiness. Mattie was thinking about invasion. Kay, Bert Fields, cancer, disappearance—all this terrible change she had never wanted. Now these two oblivious children in her house.
Now the woman Elaine saw and feared, the woman her daughter Missy knew, the protector of the house, retrieved a yellow sponge and dish soap from the kitchen and returned to the library where the lamplight had shattered her quiet, where the spot had invaded her dreams and her reverie and more. She knelt by the damp spot, Elaine’s spot, George’s spot. She scrubbed it, smelling soap and smoke.
Upstairs in his room with the slanting ceiling, George slept. In the guest room, Elaine pulled her meager covers over her shoulder and sighed. Missy muttered in her blue gingham room, and Gifford, down the hall, snored slightly, unaware he was alone. Mattie scrubbed in the hard yellow light of the library, and in the kitchen in the darkness, her tea steeped black and cold.
Ann L. Hemenway’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Sport Literate, The Thing About Hope Is…, 2nd Story, and other publications. She teaches in the English-Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.
