Because of my father’s early death, my mom was considered unlucky. Our friends pitied us. “You two girls need all the help you can get now that you’re alone in the world,” they were always telling us as they dropped off their old stuff and casseroles. No one was superstitious about his death, though, except Mom’s family. Her parents and two sisters pestered her until she sold her car. That made some sense since my father died in a car accident, but it was a one-person accident. Without a car, we were actually in more danger, hurrying to cross each street before some bullish SUV decided it couldn’t hold back any longer.
Further precautions were ordered as well. Mom invested in multiple deadbolts. She overcooked our meals to avoid food poisoning. She gave away our curling irons and space heaters so we wouldn’t burn the house down. She avoided dating anyone new since her family sensed in her some inability to “pick ‘em.” They seemed to think that with enough good sense, you could determine someone’s propensity for freak accidents by getting a whiff of them. They had warned Mom to be careful about my father while they were dating, which they said was evidence of their insight. Really, they warned her about everything. They were always hedging their bets.
One directive Mom refused to take was she wouldn’t leave the city, downtown Birmingham, to live in her rural hometown forty-five minutes away. Our friends and her teaching job and my school and the traces of my father left in this world were in Birmingham. He died when I was so young, I could barely remember him, but I knew him from photobooks and Mom’s stories and Mom pointing out the bank where he used to work. He felt sort of like a fictional character, like King Arthur. On some level, perhaps I believed he was also destined to return. Like Mom, I preferred the city for many reasons, but we made concessions to her family by spending our Saturdays with them.
That is, we did this until I was nine. That year, we had a rupture with her family that was never repaired. I suppose I’m somewhat to blame.
We arrived as usual on Saturday morning to have brunch with the whole family—my grandparents, Aunt Tina, her husband Uncle Ray, her son Jeremy, and Aunt Lila. Jeremy was twelve, and we weren’t friends, but everyone was always telling us to play together. I didn’t hate him; I just didn’t like playing his sports games, and he didn’t like playing my dragon-and-fairy games.
After we ate our sausage biscuits, they sent me and Jeremy out to play under the giant ancient oak in the backyard.
The tree was often surrounded by mushrooms with extravagant caps. I believed gnomes lived there, an idea I’d gotten from one of my books where gnomes lived in large mushrooms and ate small ones. Though the grass prickled my knees, I loved to lie there and imagine the sturdy wooden furniture inside the mushroom houses and the many ways the gnomes prepared their mushrooms. One day, they’d have roasted mushrooms. Another day, they’d have them boiled and mashed. Another day, they’d boil tiny birds’ eggs to mix with raw mushrooms. Raw mushrooms and boiled eggs have a similar texture, and when chopped, I imagined the dish would make a wonderful squeaky sound against their teeth.
Jeremy had little patience for this. He said his mom would ask him what we played later, and he’d get in trouble if he hadn’t played with me. I was at least grateful Aunt Tina was too cautious to let him play soccer with me, because I was scared of the ball. We were allowed to play tag as long as we were careful, so as usual, I agreed to play the dull game for a little while so he could report it to his mother.
“You aren’t even trying!” he yelled at me after a few minutes.
“Sorry!” I said. But I didn’t start trying. I didn’t care if I won or lost. I just wanted to weave gently around the trees in the yard at a speed that didn’t make me lose my breath.
After a few minutes of that, he’d cry out in anguish and run off to kick his soccer ball against the side of the house, and I’d return to my mushrooms. Normally, they’d leave us alone while they talked inside, but that day, Aunt Tina came out to shout at Jeremy.
“Family is important, Jeremy! How many times do I have to tell you that?” She shook her head so that her permed blond hair resembled a lion’s mane.
“Mom, we played already! She just wants to sit there!”
“Jeremy, if you don’t make memories with your family, you’ll lose them! Just like Jeannie there lost her daddy!” I didn’t appreciate this diatribe. It sounded like my father died because I didn’t make enough memories with him. Also, I’ve always gone by Jean.
“She just wants to stare at mushrooms. Look at her!”
He shouted something else that was incomprehensible, threw his soccer ball as hard as he could at the side of the house, and ran away.
Having been so forcefully spurned, Aunt Tina crouched down next to me and tried her sermon about family on me.
“Jeannie, family is a rare gift, and we’re all we have.” She choked dramatically on her words for a second before continuing. “If the next generation can’t get along, then this family is done for. You can’t replace family. All y’all’s friends in Birmingham can’t replace your flesh-and-blood family. It’s precious, precious, precious. Do you understand?”
I nodded, then glanced away. I thought Aunt Tina was kind of annoying, but I felt guilty for thinking it. I knew I should treat her like her opinions were worthy of my childish respect.
She said a few more things in a huff, but I was able to tune her out until she left me in peace, and I turned on my back to watch sunlight dribble through the upper branches that protected me like so many skinny arms.
I fell asleep, I suppose, because when I opened my eyes again, Jeremy was shaking me and telling me it was lunchtime.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make her mad.”
“Oh well. She’s always mad.”
Inside, we crowded around Grandma’s electric skillet to see the browned chicken pieces resting in a shallow bath of canola oil, but they told us to stand back. I wondered if they were worried we’d breathe germs on the chicken or if they were worried we’d get eyefuls of popping hot oil, but no one specified.
The kitchen table had room to seat ten, though only eight places were set. Normally they made Jeremy and me set the table, and I wondered who had taken our job. Everyone was being sort of quiet, so Mom asked Grandpa when he was going to pray. He always prayed. We bowed our heads, and he let a moment of silence pass before beginning.
“Dear Lord, please bless us and keep us holy and humble. Lord, inspire us with thy wisdom. Protect Mary and Jean from wolves howling at the door. In Christ’s name, Amen.”
Everyone echoed the amen except Mary (my mother).
Wolves howling outside our door didn’t mean anything to me. Grandpa’s prayers were full of old-fashioned talk and creepy metaphors, and I never worried about what they meant. I focused on my plate. Jeremy made fun of me for making a little mattress with my mashed potatoes and putting a dripping drumstick on top so she could sleep. Apparently, I was holding up the food line, but I loved the mingling mouth-textures of slippery grease and sticky mashed potatoes.
Aunt Tina made Jeremy sit beside me. He slammed his plate down.
“I want to watch the game. I told you this morning, and you said maybe!”
I wasn’t offended. I thought Jeremy was okay, but anyone could see we weren’t going to be best friends. He was older, and his tastes were completely different from mine. I thought he was funny sometimes, and he liked some of my stories, so we weren’t enemies. Why wasn’t that enough? Why did the fact that our mothers were sisters (who also had nothing in common) have to be so important? At least my mother wasn’t pushing me to play with him. He had to hear it all the time.
Grandpa cleared his throat. “Jeremy, our family needs to unite ourselves right now. Jean and her mother need help remembering what a close family connection looks like.”
Mom said nothing. I noticed she was holding her fork like it was a skinny phone receiver, her tight fist around the stem. She rarely came out and told me how she felt about things, but I at least had some sense of whether she felt bad or good depending on how stiff she was. I don’t remember when dad died, of course, or the funeral, or the immediate aftermath, but I remember her driving me to school one day, her knuckles white as she held the steering wheel, all because I asked if my father could rise from the dead like a zombie. She didn’t answer my question, but her manner told me I shouldn’t repeat it.
“Jeremy doesn’t have to sit by me,” I said in a quiet voice.
It was probably the first time I’d ever countered the wishes of Mom’s family. I had always sensed some dangerous sparks in the air the way I can smell a thunderstorm coming, so I avoided saying anything at all and hoped I wouldn’t set the house ablaze. That day I was tired, though. I’d never seen Mom so stiff. I’d never seen Jeremy so loud and angry. Although I often felt scolded at my grandparents’ house, I’d never had a day where I couldn’t lie on my stomach and look at mushrooms without being accused of betraying my family.
Grandpa half-smiled at my statement. “You aren’t Jeremy’s boss,” he said.
“You aren’t his boss either,” I said.
That drew down a chorus of table-thumping and voices crying out, so it was hard for me to hear what any one person said. When the air cleared, Grandpa spoke out with his lowest rumbling voice, and everyone listened.
“I am the head of this household,” Grandpa said. “Jeremy’s parents are next in line, and they have a duty to tell him what to do to be an upright gentleman. Your mother has a duty to shape you into a polite young lady.”
“You aren’t the head of my household,” Mom said in what sounded like a robot voice. She dropped her fork, and it clattered on her plate.
I thought Grandpa and everyone would start yelling at her next, but they were silent. I only heard the sound of myself swallowing nothing, trying to ignore my hungry desire to taste the chicken and potatoes on my plate. It wasn’t the right time for satisfying my hunger. Mom and I were fighting some kind of battle, and you had to wait until after a battle to eat. I looked over at Jeremy, and he was managing to eat his food without making a sound. His eyes widened when he saw me looking at him, an expression I interpreted as a mixture of gratitude and fear.
Everyone looked at Grandpa now to see how he would react.
“Get out of my house,” he said, still in his rumbling tone but quieter.
Mom stood up, so I stood up. I followed her to collect her purse in the entryway, and then we got in the car and drove away. Neither of us said anything for the first five minutes or so of the drive.
“I’m sorry, Jean. I’m sorry for being so…” She never said what she was sorry for being. We stopped to get fried chicken and potatoes at a diner, and it was even better than Grandma’s.
What wolves howled outside our door? I learned later that week that Mom was dating someone. She introduced him to me, and he seemed nice. He had a three-year-old daughter, and I liked playing with her. They went out together, and sometimes we all went. It was that way for months, and then they broke up. Mom didn’t tell me why, and I didn’t ask. I never asked when we were going back to my grandparents’ house, either. I missed the lovely yard and the giant mushrooms and the oily chicken, but it was too dangerous there. Sometimes I prayed that the gnomes would stay safe.
When Grandpa died, Mom sat in the back pew of the church for the service. She cried. I was twelve then and annoyed by everything. I thought it was dumb we had to pay respect to someone who hadn’t been respectful to us. The next year, Grandma died, and we went through the same ritual, and I felt the same annoyance. I wasn’t vengeful or happy that they died. It was just that by then, they were unimportant in my life. On both occasions, the funerals forced me to miss going ice skating with my friends. Both of my grandparents had given up their ghosts in the bleakest parts of January, one year right after the other.
When they were dead, I expected Mom to start acting like a wild child, leaving blazing curling irons on the bed until the covers burst into flames and going to sleep with the front door unlocked. I thought she held herself so tightly because her family had tried to hold her that way, and once her parents were gone, she’d be like a butterfly. It didn’t work that way. Instead, she started warning me about everything. She didn’t forbid me from things the way her family did to her, but she warned me to death. She was often right. The guy I went to prom with was a jerk. My friend Laurie was trying to sabotage my grades out of jealousy. My car was broken into and my CDs were stolen because I didn’t lock my doors. She never got angry at me, though. She cried with me. Once I even got in an accident that I caused. Texting while driving. I only fractured my collarbone and mangled someone’s bumper, but I wasn’t sure if she’d forgive me after that. She did, though, and it only took a couple of months.
She didn’t start dating again until I left for college. I think she’s happy now. I think she was happy all along, but even the happy are mostly oppressed. I know my grandparents had hearts heavy as grand pianos, but I don’t know how or why.
I saw Jeremy once at the mall, and we stopped and got sugary pretzels and talked.
“I guess it was my fault we all fell apart,” I said, and he agreed with me. He hadn’t changed.
He did sort of reassure me, though. “It could have gone on the way it had been forever. Your mom would have kept hating us all, and Grandpa and Grandma would have kept talking about how hopeless y’all were when you weren’t around.”
“Bad either way, I guess,” I said, and he agreed with that, too.
He said he stayed away from his parents as much as possible, but he found himself doing the weird things they did—triple-checking the locks and scolding stranger’s children for throwing tantrums in stores. Stuff he didn’t want to keep doing.
I wondered if that was in store for me. So far, I’d been on the reckless side.
“Do you still think gnomes live in mushrooms?” he said.
I laughed, delighted someone remembered the dreamy kid I was back then. “I didn’t know you knew about my gnomes!”
“You got the idea from my book. My mom gave it to your mom when you were born.”
We exchanged phone numbers and promised to meet up again, but I figured we wouldn’t.
As I drove home, I felt a low burn of shame and anger that I’d gotten my special idea about gnomes from a book that wasn’t mine in the first place. It was a hand-me-down, and Jeremy had dreamed about them first. He’d dreamed about them and let them go, exchanging the fantasies for soccer balls the way I’d exchanged mine for ice skates and stupid boyfriends. Maybe if I could go back and find that beautiful tree and look at the mushrooms again, I could capture whatever made that fantasy my own. Surely Jeremy and I didn’t have identical thoughts and dreams about the gnomes.
My gnomes drank little wooden mugs of pink lemonade, and they had Christmas parties once a month, and they fell in love. Was that written in the book? I didn’t want to know. I made a promise to myself. If I never read the book again, I’d never have to know.
