Pure Romance, or Last Rites at the Rite Aid
Keely Bowers
North of Pittsburgh in a Rite Aid parking lot at dusk, my mother waited in my car for her vaccine appointment and showed me a picture of a man she thought might be her high school boyfriend, Jim Burden. He wore a camo jacket and a red knitted cap and stood in the fuzzy middle distance on a patch of snow next to a utility pole. She had asked a friend to search his name on Facebook, and the friend sent a screenshot of this man with a question mark. She had told me about the picture and couldn’t wait to show me.
Finger stretching the screenshot, I discovered, didn’t make the man’s face less blurry. He lived in New Kensington, where Mom’s boyfriend had attended high school in 1966. Firefighter was a word in his brief bio.
“Wouldn’t he be kind of old to be fighting fires?” I asked her. Mom was 73, which would make Jim 72.
“Well, maybe.”
February was as warm as April that evening, and we rested our elbows on our open windows. After the winter of lockdown and a year of screen staring, of breathing inside polypropylene masks and working from home on one sofa while my son endured eighth grade on the other, the soft gusts of muddy earth and snow melt drifting in tasted like a promise, like lives opening up.
We were half an hour early because Mom worried we’d get lost and she’d miss her vaccine, though I told her I knew how to get us there. There are roads near that little out-of-town plaza, curvy, hairpin, tree-lined roads through hollows and farmland where I learned to ride a motorcycle years ago when I was another person. Roads to Mars, to Evans City, to Portersville, where I’d peel off my sweaty clothes and wade into Lake Arthur on hot days, then motor back to my apartment in the dark, my body tucked inside the red glow of my instrument panel and the moving cone of my headlight, beyond which lay any possible danger—startled deer, spray of gravel, heartbreak, losses.
“Or maybe,” Mom said, “he’s a retired firefighter.”
“You mean maybe he just left out the word retired?”
“I don’t know.” Her hands rooted around in her big purse until she located a Ziploc of jellybeans. “Here.” She deposited a little pile on my palm and then hers. “I picked out the wintergreen. I know you hate those.”
I singled out a pinkish orange one, and a refulgent tangerine watered up my tongue.
“I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately,” she said. “Probably because I’ve been reading those poems.”
A couple of weeks before, I’d ordered Mom a book of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay because she had, out of the blue, asked me if I still had a little pocket anthology of American poetry she gave me when I was a teenager. It was her book when she was in high school, and before that, someone whose name was torn off had given it to her aunt: “Dear Carol, Best wishes for Christmas, 1945--”. The book had a frayed cloth cover and crinkly onion-skin pages and Jimmy written in Mom’s slanty teenage handwriting next to “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” and “Love Is Not All.” Somewhere in one of my many moves, I’d lost it.
Mom reads all kinds of novels, rarely poetry, and she never keeps books around. She hands them off to friends or to the library. There are no bookshelves in my parents’ home. Still, I felt bad about losing her old book, and to make up for it, I’d surprised her with Millay’s poems.
“She writes beautifully about death and graves,” Mom said. “I used to want to write like that when I was young. I had a dark sensibility.”
“You could write like that now.”
“I can’t write poems. I don’t have a mind anymore. And what would I write about with your father clomping around in his big slippers and complaining in the background, with his CNN turned up to here?”
“You could write a poem about that,” I said.
“About your father? That’s hilarious. I’ll bet Edna wasn’t married 52 years.”
“I think she died in her fifties. And she went by Vincent.”
“Vincent. That seems right. Very free spirited. Bohemian.”
In the drugstore window, a Chia Pet Bob Ross with an exploding green globe of plant hair grinned at us from the side of his box. Next to him, a Chia Bunny, because Easter would be here in six weeks, and they’d already put the candy out.
“She probably wore one of those bell-shaped hats,” Mom said, “with a flower on the side. And satin pumps with rhinestone buckles.”
I imagined the poet Vincent lounging across the seat behind us in a bell hat and buckle pumps, drawing a cigarette from a case with a gloved hand and smoking it relishingly, exhaling out my back window.
“It’s been so warm my tulips started to bud,” Mom said, “and the deer already chewed them off. I don’t know why I bother.”
“Maybe you should plant daffodils.”
“I hate daffodils. They’re so yellow and boring.”
“How does a person hate a flower? Okay. Crocus, then. Or hyacinths.”
“Vincent has a poem about spring,” she said. “It’s not what you’d expect a spring poem to be. It’s about loss. She says something like, no matter what babbling flowers bob up like idiots on the tide of April, death is always near.”
“Good pandemic reading.”
“I know!”
“You could write a poem about that picture of Jim.”
She studied the man on her phone again. “He was an empathetic person. He knew how to talk to people.”
This, I knew, was a mark against my father, who’s never said much to anybody.
“He was a social worker,” she said, “the last I heard. But that was a long time ago.”
“Back before he became a firefighter.”
“Smartass.”
“Maybe he switched professions,” I conceded. Because the hopeful part of me wanted to keep the door open with her, wanted to believe the blurry man on the patch of snow was the man whose memory she’d carried with her like a folded-up promise through decades.
“I drove to the New Kensington Giant Eagle the other day,” she said. “Isn’t that funny?”
You staked out a store for your old flame in New Ken?”
“I didn’t really think I’d run into him. It was just the idea. It was nice to visit a different neighborhood anyhow, instead of the same old, same old. I bought some good cheese with blueberries in it.”
“He might’ve been there just before you were, purchasing the same cheese.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not making fun of you.”
“The last I saw him was at The Lantern. That time he came in with his wife. That was a million years ago in the 70’s.”
“And you made one of your waitress friends seat them while you hid in the kitchen till you could get a grip.”
“You’ve heard all my stories. Maybe you should write a poem about Jim.”
“And when he came to the register to pay the check,” I continued, “you asked him how his meal was. And he took your hand in his for a long, tender moment and asked you how you were.”
“And I said I was fine. Because that’s what we do.”
“What else could you say in thirty seconds while you rang up his check?”
“And he looked at me—”
“He gazed at you.”
“He gazed at me. In a sweet and meaningful way, and there were all these unsaid things. And then he was gone.”
“Better you ran into him at the restaurant, at a place you loved, with all your friends around you, than running into him and his wife walking out of some bank or something.”
“Or out of the dentist office with a drooly mouth.”
I laughed. She was talking about me. Eighth grade, released at last from a horrible appointment at Dental Associates at the mall, my gums numbed with Novocain and stuffed with slobbery gauze because they’d pulled a couple permanent teeth from my too-small mouth, I ran into my homeroom crush next to the penny fountain in the center of the mall. He beamed at me for the first time ever, this boy who looked like the karate kid from that movie, and said, “Hey, Edie McAlister.” And I panicked, whirled around and fled, hot faced and puffy mouthed, into JC Penny where I found my mother at a makeup counter considering lipstick. When she saw my face she laughed, so I kept walking, through the store and out to the parking lot, where I slammed the car door and waited in agonized embarrassment.
“I can’t believe you remember that.”
“You were so upset,” she said.
“Who puts a dentist office inside a mall anyway? Do people really want to try on outfits and perfume after root canals and excised teeth?”
“I didn’t know you’d just been traumatized by a boy, or I wouldn’t have laughed. And didn’t I take you for a milkshake to make you feel better?”
“Yes. And you bought me bubblegum lip gloss and an eyeshadow called For Your Eyes Only, like the James Bond movie. You handed me the little bag in the car. It was shades of green.”
“See? I wasn’t always a terrible mother. Speaking of which, I’m sorry I made you drive us here so early. You were right. We could’ve left later. You know how I am. I just wanted to get here. Poor Jake’s probably bored to death with your father.”
Dad was at my house with drive-through cheeseburgers and fries, keeping my son company while he drew the progressive deterioration of our living room in three panels as an exploration of “The Pandemic and Me” for his virtual art class. The final panel was a sunken, dilapidated sofa, a boarded-up window, and a dark explosion of wires. I worried more about Dad’s navigating the stairs to the bathroom on his achy knee and the effects of extended isolation on Jake than about either of them being bored with each other.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s almost time for your shot. Fifteen minutes.”
“It’s nice being with you out in the world. Even just sitting in a dumb parking lot. I want you to get a shot as soon as they’re available for your age. I want all of us safe, and I want this pandemic over. I want to eat at a busy restaurant where people are all talking. I want to go to that little place by the river where we had catfish a couple years ago and warm cornbread and the waitress was so nice, the one that was studying to be a radiation therapist because her mom and sister died of breast cancer. You want some more jellybeans?”
I held out my palm.
Sunset pink had gone dark in my rearview, and we were bathed in drugstore neon. A woman older than Mom pulled a mask over her face and caned her way toward the Dollar Tree as if something wonderful waited for her there.
“Her hair is pretty,” Mom said. “Look how thick. Like whipped cream.”
“Yours is prettier.”
“Hers is the color of new snow.”
“I’ll bet it doesn’t stop traffic.”
“You’re funny.”
It wasn’t a joke. Strangers stop my mother on the street to love her hair. They shout it from car windows. On the left side of her head, a silver curtain like angel hair tinsel graces her jawline. On the right, a bold razor cut. She’s two different people, depending on where you stand.
In 2013, after much fighting and deliberation, Mom and Dad sold the little desert home they’d retired to and packed up and returned to Pennsylvania, a thing she thought she’d never do, to live out their days in another little gray river town near the one where I was born. For years she had dreamed of living in the desert. Because we uprooted and followed Dad’s phone company job from town to town across the state while I was growing up, he promised to move to a place of Mom’s choosing someday when he retired.
In Cottonwood, Arizona, she bought trail maps, hiking boots, a compass and a book on how to use it, a fanny pack, hiking poles, an emergency whistle. She roamed the high desert and mountain trails around Prescott, Sedona, and Flagstaff, and in nine years came to know them like the lines on her palms. She wasn’t thinking much about Jim Burden out where she could immerse herself in a new geography and empty her head in the wind.
She sent me exclamations. A coyote stood in my backyard, still as stone! … The desert is lunar! … A raven flew so high today, it was like a wish, small as an eyelash! The desert made my mother poetic.
She sent me pictures of wildlife that delighted her: a lizard on the porch next to my father’s slipper; a king snake looped like a bicycle tube over the cooler in the garage; a tarantula she tried to save after my father crippled it wheeling the grill across the patio. She kept it alive in a shoebox for three days and called me when it died.
“You hate spiders,” I said. “Even little ones freak you out.”
“I know!” And her refrain, “It’s just different out here.”
But the desert place she loved couldn’t fix decades of a difficult marriage. I’m so lonesome, she wrote. I wish you would move here and find a job. We could go hiking. The birth of my son infused her far-away loneliness with a more urgent and conflicted kind of longing.
A few months after their return, Mom sold her cowboy boots and chunky turquoise jewelry and all her bright skirts with a desperate resignation. She said she couldn’t carry the desert with her. She said it made her too sad.
She sat next to me now in a red hoody and what she called her granny pants—the elastic-waist jeans she said could fit two of her asses. In the time they’d been back, between her and Dad, there had been assorted afflictions and illnesses. New hips and a knee. Cataract surgeries, breast cancer, radiation therapy, osteoporosis. She said her bones were turning to sand. But her hair still stopped traffic, and she still brushed her eyelids with glittery shades of silver and indigo.
“If I ran into Jim at the grocery store,” she said, “he wouldn’t recognize me.”
“No one recognizes anyone in masks.”
“I don’t think I want him to recognize me. I want to see him, but I don’t want him to see me.”
“You mean, like, from afar? Like you’re a spy?”
“I imagine him in front of me at a checkout, or in an aisle picking out shampoo.”
“You’re assuming he still has his hair.” I was thinking of my bald dad. I was thinking of the mystery man in the picture with his winter cap pulled down over his ears.
“Jim had beautiful hair,” she said. “He used to complain about how fast it grew.”
“Like Chia Bob’s?”
“What?”
“In the window. Chia Bob with his plant hair.”
“Ha. Yes. Like Chia Bob’s. Except it was wavy and auburn.”
I took out my phone and, on a whim, searched James Burden New Kensington High School.
“I still remember what he smelled like,” she said. “Isn’t that funny? They say memory is most closely connected to the sense of smell. I wore his sweater to school. I’d sit at my desk and sniff the sleeves all day.”
This was something I hadn’t heard. “What did he smell like?”
At the top of my search results, an obituary listing appeared for a James Eugene Burden of Natrona Heights, the town where Mom and Dad lived now. A sound escaped my throat, the beginning of an oh.
“It was such a nice smell.”
I closed the screen without reading further.
“He smelled like…” She paused. “What’s the matter?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. What did he smell like?”
“He didn’t wear cologne,” she continued, contemplating. “How do you describe the smell of the person you love?”
Her question waited in the air between us, and I thought how the dearest love I ever knew smelled like worn leather, cigarette smoke, dandelions, campfires. He smelled like a lake in Michigan, black coffee in an old cup, mixtapes decorated for me with little star stickers. He smelled like late-night rockabilly gigs in musty bars, sweaty hair under a fishing cap, salty skin, breezy mornings under warm bedsheets. He smelled like home, and in my memory he still does, though I haven’t seen him in many years.
I wanted to bum one of Vincent’s smokes from the back seat. I wanted her to read us one of her graveyard poems. “You describe the smell like something else,” I said finally. “You say he smelled like dandelions. Or apples. Or a cotton shirt on a line.”
“Dandelions smell like armpits,” she said. “Would you want to kiss a man who smells like armpits? Babies smell like apples. Jake smelled like apples when you two visited Arizona and I lifted him into my arms at the airport and I wanted to eat his sweet cheeks. There were so many things I wanted to show that boy out there, so many adventures we didn’t get to have. Meteor Crater. Monument Valley. Moab.”
I had tried to talk Mom and Dad out of moving back to Pennsylvania. I stood in the muddy front yard of the Natrona Heights house they were about to buy, sight unseen—a squat little ranch with no mountains, no coyotes, no raven like an eyelash. Just a house near the town where Mom went to high school, the town she’d wanted to escape. The sky was as gray as old bath water. I sent her a message: This house seems sad. I don’t think you should move back.
“You want more jellybeans?”
“What was Jim’s middle name?”
“Eugene. Why?”
“I’ll do a search later. See if I have better luck than that blurry guy.”
“Yes. Do that. I don’t know how to find stuff like you do.” And then a definitive, “I’m going in. It’s time. Wish me luck. I hope this shot doesn’t make me sick.” She plopped the bag of jellybeans on my lap and pulled on her mask. “Lorraine got sick. Bud had to pull the car over on the way home so she could barf.”
She was talking about her neighbors. “Maybe it was Bud’s driving,” I suggested. “You said he drives like Mr. Magoo.”
“He does! He drove up a goddamn exit ramp last week and nearly gave her a heart attack.”
“Well. I promise not to do that.”
She shut the car door, walked into the drugstore with her big purse and her granny pants, stiff jointed and a little rickety, but looking like she meant business.
When she was inside, I read the obit.
He died in November of 2013 at a hospice center in Pittsburgh. He was a former director of social services. He loved boating on the Allegheny with friends and family. He was survived by a son, Nathan; a grandson, Robert; a sister, Holly. There was no mention of a wife. He must have been divorced. Or widowed. Mom and Dad moved back in May of that year. If she knew then he was dying, would she have tried to see him?
My only encounter with Jim Burden happened when I was two, when he met my mother and me at a park by the river in Kittanning and bought me an ice cream cone I managed to not get all over my dress as I fed breadcrumbs to ducks. I have no real memory of this, of course. I know him only from her stories. I know he always looked like he knew some great secret he was about to reveal. Because of what he endured at home—his mother was an alcoholic, unpredictable, exploded into rages—he made up for it by hamming it up with Mom on their dates. One afternoon he hit the brakes and screeched them to a halt in the middle of the road and looked at my mother in alarm, and she said, “What?” and after a moment his face collapsed into a smile, and he said, “D’you love me?”
They broke up when Mom was sent away to a home for unwed mothers and Jim was finishing high school. There’s nothing like a secret pregnancy and a secret birth in a secret place and the removal and handing off of the secret baby to secret strangers to wreck a high school girl’s dream of love.
That day in the park when I was two, she might have said to Jim, “This could have been us,” and gestured at the three of us, seeing me in the place of their gone son.
Knowing Jim Burden was out in the world going about his life while she went about her own had kept open the possibility of an encounter no matter how long it’d been since he touched her hand at the restaurant or fed ducks with us at the river.
I didn’t know how to tell her.
I masked up and got out of the car.
I found her wandering the body lotion aisle with a basket over her arm, post vaccine. “Did you get sick of waiting? They told me to hang around here for fifteen minutes in case I feel weird or pass out.”
“Do you feel weird?”
“No. I feel fine. It was easier than a flu shot. You need anything? Some lotion? My skin is so dry. I have lizard legs.” She opened a lavender lotion and lowered her mask to sniff and handed me the bottle. “Smell,” she said.
The scent was green and pungent and earthy, like a field after a rain. “Mmm.”
“Isn’t it wonderful? Let’s get us some.” She dropped two bottles into the basket, turned a corner, and I followed.
We sniffed hibiscus body wash, mango butter, pineapple scrub. We scrutinized wrinkle plumpers, teeth-whitening strips, magic wand hair removers, sea salt and kelp hydrating soaks. Rite Aid offered us a balm for everything.
In the makeup aisle before the Cover Girl eye shadows, Mom pointed out color pallets she thought were pretty. “Moonlit.” “Smokey Nudes.” “Adventurous.” A man appeared suddenly at the end of the aisle and stood looking at us, hands hanging at his sides. Cowboy hat, camo jacket, faded red bandana stretched awkwardly over his mouth and beard, an enormous white mustache bushing out like a shrub over the top. He stared.
“Can I help you?” Mom said.
“Pain reliever!”
“This is…the makeup aisle,” she said slowly, gesturing around us. He seemed to contemplate this answer. She motioned toward the rear of the store. “Ask the pharmacist. In the back.”
He nodded, shuffled off.
She turned and scrunched up her forehead at me. “Do I look like I work here? With my big purse and my hoodie?”
“Maybe that was his pick-up line.”
“His what? His pick-up line? ‘Pain reliever’?”
“Sure. It’s better than ‘Psoriasis!’ Or ‘Suppository!’”
She let out a laugh, paused so she could say something, but couldn’t speak. She quaked with laughter.
“Maybe he liked those granny pants,” I said.
“He looked like,” she choked out, “he looked like…”
“Like Yosemite Sam?”
“Yes!” she erupted, howling into her mask, “and I look like…like one of the Clampetts in these pants!”
I was laughing too. “At least you’re wearing a proper mask that covers your nose and your mustache.”
“Stop!” she said, doubling over, squeezing her knees together. “You’re going to make me pee!”
I would tell her about Jimmy weeks later on a blue spring day at the restaurant she’d been missing, the one on the river with the catfish and the radiation therapist. I would lean over my coffee cup after our lunch and tell her, “I looked up Jimmy Burden, Mom. I looked him up. And I found him.”
Her expression would shift from delighted anticipation to wary curiosity to a resigned sort of bracing as she registered the regret in my eyes and in my voice before I revealed the news she suddenly perceived was coming, the end of a possibility.
But right now, they were playing an old Blondie song, so we swayed a little to the beat in the makeup aisle. Mom handed me an eyeshadow pallet called “Pure Romance.” It was dusty mauve, pale cinnabar, a gold-flecked sand, and a shade the soft color of pink stone. “You’d look nice in these,” she said.
For a sweet moment, I was thirteen, she was my young mom again, and many things were still possible.
“They’re desert colors,” I said.
“I know! Aren’t they beautiful? They’d look so nice on you. I’ll get them for you.”
“How about this teal?”
“For you?” she said.
“For you.”
“Oh, that’s nice. Yes, yes. We want to look pretty, honey, when we take off these goddamn masks."
Keely Bowers
North of Pittsburgh in a Rite Aid parking lot at dusk, my mother waited in my car for her vaccine appointment and showed me a picture of a man she thought might be her high school boyfriend, Jim Burden. He wore a camo jacket and a red knitted cap and stood in the fuzzy middle distance on a patch of snow next to a utility pole. She had asked a friend to search his name on Facebook, and the friend sent a screenshot of this man with a question mark. She had told me about the picture and couldn’t wait to show me.
Finger stretching the screenshot, I discovered, didn’t make the man’s face less blurry. He lived in New Kensington, where Mom’s boyfriend had attended high school in 1966. Firefighter was a word in his brief bio.
“Wouldn’t he be kind of old to be fighting fires?” I asked her. Mom was 73, which would make Jim 72.
“Well, maybe.”
February was as warm as April that evening, and we rested our elbows on our open windows. After the winter of lockdown and a year of screen staring, of breathing inside polypropylene masks and working from home on one sofa while my son endured eighth grade on the other, the soft gusts of muddy earth and snow melt drifting in tasted like a promise, like lives opening up.
We were half an hour early because Mom worried we’d get lost and she’d miss her vaccine, though I told her I knew how to get us there. There are roads near that little out-of-town plaza, curvy, hairpin, tree-lined roads through hollows and farmland where I learned to ride a motorcycle years ago when I was another person. Roads to Mars, to Evans City, to Portersville, where I’d peel off my sweaty clothes and wade into Lake Arthur on hot days, then motor back to my apartment in the dark, my body tucked inside the red glow of my instrument panel and the moving cone of my headlight, beyond which lay any possible danger—startled deer, spray of gravel, heartbreak, losses.
“Or maybe,” Mom said, “he’s a retired firefighter.”
“You mean maybe he just left out the word retired?”
“I don’t know.” Her hands rooted around in her big purse until she located a Ziploc of jellybeans. “Here.” She deposited a little pile on my palm and then hers. “I picked out the wintergreen. I know you hate those.”
I singled out a pinkish orange one, and a refulgent tangerine watered up my tongue.
“I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately,” she said. “Probably because I’ve been reading those poems.”
A couple of weeks before, I’d ordered Mom a book of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay because she had, out of the blue, asked me if I still had a little pocket anthology of American poetry she gave me when I was a teenager. It was her book when she was in high school, and before that, someone whose name was torn off had given it to her aunt: “Dear Carol, Best wishes for Christmas, 1945--”. The book had a frayed cloth cover and crinkly onion-skin pages and Jimmy written in Mom’s slanty teenage handwriting next to “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” and “Love Is Not All.” Somewhere in one of my many moves, I’d lost it.
Mom reads all kinds of novels, rarely poetry, and she never keeps books around. She hands them off to friends or to the library. There are no bookshelves in my parents’ home. Still, I felt bad about losing her old book, and to make up for it, I’d surprised her with Millay’s poems.
“She writes beautifully about death and graves,” Mom said. “I used to want to write like that when I was young. I had a dark sensibility.”
“You could write like that now.”
“I can’t write poems. I don’t have a mind anymore. And what would I write about with your father clomping around in his big slippers and complaining in the background, with his CNN turned up to here?”
“You could write a poem about that,” I said.
“About your father? That’s hilarious. I’ll bet Edna wasn’t married 52 years.”
“I think she died in her fifties. And she went by Vincent.”
“Vincent. That seems right. Very free spirited. Bohemian.”
In the drugstore window, a Chia Pet Bob Ross with an exploding green globe of plant hair grinned at us from the side of his box. Next to him, a Chia Bunny, because Easter would be here in six weeks, and they’d already put the candy out.
“She probably wore one of those bell-shaped hats,” Mom said, “with a flower on the side. And satin pumps with rhinestone buckles.”
I imagined the poet Vincent lounging across the seat behind us in a bell hat and buckle pumps, drawing a cigarette from a case with a gloved hand and smoking it relishingly, exhaling out my back window.
“It’s been so warm my tulips started to bud,” Mom said, “and the deer already chewed them off. I don’t know why I bother.”
“Maybe you should plant daffodils.”
“I hate daffodils. They’re so yellow and boring.”
“How does a person hate a flower? Okay. Crocus, then. Or hyacinths.”
“Vincent has a poem about spring,” she said. “It’s not what you’d expect a spring poem to be. It’s about loss. She says something like, no matter what babbling flowers bob up like idiots on the tide of April, death is always near.”
“Good pandemic reading.”
“I know!”
“You could write a poem about that picture of Jim.”
She studied the man on her phone again. “He was an empathetic person. He knew how to talk to people.”
This, I knew, was a mark against my father, who’s never said much to anybody.
“He was a social worker,” she said, “the last I heard. But that was a long time ago.”
“Back before he became a firefighter.”
“Smartass.”
“Maybe he switched professions,” I conceded. Because the hopeful part of me wanted to keep the door open with her, wanted to believe the blurry man on the patch of snow was the man whose memory she’d carried with her like a folded-up promise through decades.
“I drove to the New Kensington Giant Eagle the other day,” she said. “Isn’t that funny?”
You staked out a store for your old flame in New Ken?”
“I didn’t really think I’d run into him. It was just the idea. It was nice to visit a different neighborhood anyhow, instead of the same old, same old. I bought some good cheese with blueberries in it.”
“He might’ve been there just before you were, purchasing the same cheese.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not making fun of you.”
“The last I saw him was at The Lantern. That time he came in with his wife. That was a million years ago in the 70’s.”
“And you made one of your waitress friends seat them while you hid in the kitchen till you could get a grip.”
“You’ve heard all my stories. Maybe you should write a poem about Jim.”
“And when he came to the register to pay the check,” I continued, “you asked him how his meal was. And he took your hand in his for a long, tender moment and asked you how you were.”
“And I said I was fine. Because that’s what we do.”
“What else could you say in thirty seconds while you rang up his check?”
“And he looked at me—”
“He gazed at you.”
“He gazed at me. In a sweet and meaningful way, and there were all these unsaid things. And then he was gone.”
“Better you ran into him at the restaurant, at a place you loved, with all your friends around you, than running into him and his wife walking out of some bank or something.”
“Or out of the dentist office with a drooly mouth.”
I laughed. She was talking about me. Eighth grade, released at last from a horrible appointment at Dental Associates at the mall, my gums numbed with Novocain and stuffed with slobbery gauze because they’d pulled a couple permanent teeth from my too-small mouth, I ran into my homeroom crush next to the penny fountain in the center of the mall. He beamed at me for the first time ever, this boy who looked like the karate kid from that movie, and said, “Hey, Edie McAlister.” And I panicked, whirled around and fled, hot faced and puffy mouthed, into JC Penny where I found my mother at a makeup counter considering lipstick. When she saw my face she laughed, so I kept walking, through the store and out to the parking lot, where I slammed the car door and waited in agonized embarrassment.
“I can’t believe you remember that.”
“You were so upset,” she said.
“Who puts a dentist office inside a mall anyway? Do people really want to try on outfits and perfume after root canals and excised teeth?”
“I didn’t know you’d just been traumatized by a boy, or I wouldn’t have laughed. And didn’t I take you for a milkshake to make you feel better?”
“Yes. And you bought me bubblegum lip gloss and an eyeshadow called For Your Eyes Only, like the James Bond movie. You handed me the little bag in the car. It was shades of green.”
“See? I wasn’t always a terrible mother. Speaking of which, I’m sorry I made you drive us here so early. You were right. We could’ve left later. You know how I am. I just wanted to get here. Poor Jake’s probably bored to death with your father.”
Dad was at my house with drive-through cheeseburgers and fries, keeping my son company while he drew the progressive deterioration of our living room in three panels as an exploration of “The Pandemic and Me” for his virtual art class. The final panel was a sunken, dilapidated sofa, a boarded-up window, and a dark explosion of wires. I worried more about Dad’s navigating the stairs to the bathroom on his achy knee and the effects of extended isolation on Jake than about either of them being bored with each other.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s almost time for your shot. Fifteen minutes.”
“It’s nice being with you out in the world. Even just sitting in a dumb parking lot. I want you to get a shot as soon as they’re available for your age. I want all of us safe, and I want this pandemic over. I want to eat at a busy restaurant where people are all talking. I want to go to that little place by the river where we had catfish a couple years ago and warm cornbread and the waitress was so nice, the one that was studying to be a radiation therapist because her mom and sister died of breast cancer. You want some more jellybeans?”
I held out my palm.
Sunset pink had gone dark in my rearview, and we were bathed in drugstore neon. A woman older than Mom pulled a mask over her face and caned her way toward the Dollar Tree as if something wonderful waited for her there.
“Her hair is pretty,” Mom said. “Look how thick. Like whipped cream.”
“Yours is prettier.”
“Hers is the color of new snow.”
“I’ll bet it doesn’t stop traffic.”
“You’re funny.”
It wasn’t a joke. Strangers stop my mother on the street to love her hair. They shout it from car windows. On the left side of her head, a silver curtain like angel hair tinsel graces her jawline. On the right, a bold razor cut. She’s two different people, depending on where you stand.
In 2013, after much fighting and deliberation, Mom and Dad sold the little desert home they’d retired to and packed up and returned to Pennsylvania, a thing she thought she’d never do, to live out their days in another little gray river town near the one where I was born. For years she had dreamed of living in the desert. Because we uprooted and followed Dad’s phone company job from town to town across the state while I was growing up, he promised to move to a place of Mom’s choosing someday when he retired.
In Cottonwood, Arizona, she bought trail maps, hiking boots, a compass and a book on how to use it, a fanny pack, hiking poles, an emergency whistle. She roamed the high desert and mountain trails around Prescott, Sedona, and Flagstaff, and in nine years came to know them like the lines on her palms. She wasn’t thinking much about Jim Burden out where she could immerse herself in a new geography and empty her head in the wind.
She sent me exclamations. A coyote stood in my backyard, still as stone! … The desert is lunar! … A raven flew so high today, it was like a wish, small as an eyelash! The desert made my mother poetic.
She sent me pictures of wildlife that delighted her: a lizard on the porch next to my father’s slipper; a king snake looped like a bicycle tube over the cooler in the garage; a tarantula she tried to save after my father crippled it wheeling the grill across the patio. She kept it alive in a shoebox for three days and called me when it died.
“You hate spiders,” I said. “Even little ones freak you out.”
“I know!” And her refrain, “It’s just different out here.”
But the desert place she loved couldn’t fix decades of a difficult marriage. I’m so lonesome, she wrote. I wish you would move here and find a job. We could go hiking. The birth of my son infused her far-away loneliness with a more urgent and conflicted kind of longing.
A few months after their return, Mom sold her cowboy boots and chunky turquoise jewelry and all her bright skirts with a desperate resignation. She said she couldn’t carry the desert with her. She said it made her too sad.
She sat next to me now in a red hoody and what she called her granny pants—the elastic-waist jeans she said could fit two of her asses. In the time they’d been back, between her and Dad, there had been assorted afflictions and illnesses. New hips and a knee. Cataract surgeries, breast cancer, radiation therapy, osteoporosis. She said her bones were turning to sand. But her hair still stopped traffic, and she still brushed her eyelids with glittery shades of silver and indigo.
“If I ran into Jim at the grocery store,” she said, “he wouldn’t recognize me.”
“No one recognizes anyone in masks.”
“I don’t think I want him to recognize me. I want to see him, but I don’t want him to see me.”
“You mean, like, from afar? Like you’re a spy?”
“I imagine him in front of me at a checkout, or in an aisle picking out shampoo.”
“You’re assuming he still has his hair.” I was thinking of my bald dad. I was thinking of the mystery man in the picture with his winter cap pulled down over his ears.
“Jim had beautiful hair,” she said. “He used to complain about how fast it grew.”
“Like Chia Bob’s?”
“What?”
“In the window. Chia Bob with his plant hair.”
“Ha. Yes. Like Chia Bob’s. Except it was wavy and auburn.”
I took out my phone and, on a whim, searched James Burden New Kensington High School.
“I still remember what he smelled like,” she said. “Isn’t that funny? They say memory is most closely connected to the sense of smell. I wore his sweater to school. I’d sit at my desk and sniff the sleeves all day.”
This was something I hadn’t heard. “What did he smell like?”
At the top of my search results, an obituary listing appeared for a James Eugene Burden of Natrona Heights, the town where Mom and Dad lived now. A sound escaped my throat, the beginning of an oh.
“It was such a nice smell.”
I closed the screen without reading further.
“He smelled like…” She paused. “What’s the matter?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. What did he smell like?”
“He didn’t wear cologne,” she continued, contemplating. “How do you describe the smell of the person you love?”
Her question waited in the air between us, and I thought how the dearest love I ever knew smelled like worn leather, cigarette smoke, dandelions, campfires. He smelled like a lake in Michigan, black coffee in an old cup, mixtapes decorated for me with little star stickers. He smelled like late-night rockabilly gigs in musty bars, sweaty hair under a fishing cap, salty skin, breezy mornings under warm bedsheets. He smelled like home, and in my memory he still does, though I haven’t seen him in many years.
I wanted to bum one of Vincent’s smokes from the back seat. I wanted her to read us one of her graveyard poems. “You describe the smell like something else,” I said finally. “You say he smelled like dandelions. Or apples. Or a cotton shirt on a line.”
“Dandelions smell like armpits,” she said. “Would you want to kiss a man who smells like armpits? Babies smell like apples. Jake smelled like apples when you two visited Arizona and I lifted him into my arms at the airport and I wanted to eat his sweet cheeks. There were so many things I wanted to show that boy out there, so many adventures we didn’t get to have. Meteor Crater. Monument Valley. Moab.”
I had tried to talk Mom and Dad out of moving back to Pennsylvania. I stood in the muddy front yard of the Natrona Heights house they were about to buy, sight unseen—a squat little ranch with no mountains, no coyotes, no raven like an eyelash. Just a house near the town where Mom went to high school, the town she’d wanted to escape. The sky was as gray as old bath water. I sent her a message: This house seems sad. I don’t think you should move back.
“You want more jellybeans?”
“What was Jim’s middle name?”
“Eugene. Why?”
“I’ll do a search later. See if I have better luck than that blurry guy.”
“Yes. Do that. I don’t know how to find stuff like you do.” And then a definitive, “I’m going in. It’s time. Wish me luck. I hope this shot doesn’t make me sick.” She plopped the bag of jellybeans on my lap and pulled on her mask. “Lorraine got sick. Bud had to pull the car over on the way home so she could barf.”
She was talking about her neighbors. “Maybe it was Bud’s driving,” I suggested. “You said he drives like Mr. Magoo.”
“He does! He drove up a goddamn exit ramp last week and nearly gave her a heart attack.”
“Well. I promise not to do that.”
She shut the car door, walked into the drugstore with her big purse and her granny pants, stiff jointed and a little rickety, but looking like she meant business.
When she was inside, I read the obit.
He died in November of 2013 at a hospice center in Pittsburgh. He was a former director of social services. He loved boating on the Allegheny with friends and family. He was survived by a son, Nathan; a grandson, Robert; a sister, Holly. There was no mention of a wife. He must have been divorced. Or widowed. Mom and Dad moved back in May of that year. If she knew then he was dying, would she have tried to see him?
My only encounter with Jim Burden happened when I was two, when he met my mother and me at a park by the river in Kittanning and bought me an ice cream cone I managed to not get all over my dress as I fed breadcrumbs to ducks. I have no real memory of this, of course. I know him only from her stories. I know he always looked like he knew some great secret he was about to reveal. Because of what he endured at home—his mother was an alcoholic, unpredictable, exploded into rages—he made up for it by hamming it up with Mom on their dates. One afternoon he hit the brakes and screeched them to a halt in the middle of the road and looked at my mother in alarm, and she said, “What?” and after a moment his face collapsed into a smile, and he said, “D’you love me?”
They broke up when Mom was sent away to a home for unwed mothers and Jim was finishing high school. There’s nothing like a secret pregnancy and a secret birth in a secret place and the removal and handing off of the secret baby to secret strangers to wreck a high school girl’s dream of love.
That day in the park when I was two, she might have said to Jim, “This could have been us,” and gestured at the three of us, seeing me in the place of their gone son.
Knowing Jim Burden was out in the world going about his life while she went about her own had kept open the possibility of an encounter no matter how long it’d been since he touched her hand at the restaurant or fed ducks with us at the river.
I didn’t know how to tell her.
I masked up and got out of the car.
I found her wandering the body lotion aisle with a basket over her arm, post vaccine. “Did you get sick of waiting? They told me to hang around here for fifteen minutes in case I feel weird or pass out.”
“Do you feel weird?”
“No. I feel fine. It was easier than a flu shot. You need anything? Some lotion? My skin is so dry. I have lizard legs.” She opened a lavender lotion and lowered her mask to sniff and handed me the bottle. “Smell,” she said.
The scent was green and pungent and earthy, like a field after a rain. “Mmm.”
“Isn’t it wonderful? Let’s get us some.” She dropped two bottles into the basket, turned a corner, and I followed.
We sniffed hibiscus body wash, mango butter, pineapple scrub. We scrutinized wrinkle plumpers, teeth-whitening strips, magic wand hair removers, sea salt and kelp hydrating soaks. Rite Aid offered us a balm for everything.
In the makeup aisle before the Cover Girl eye shadows, Mom pointed out color pallets she thought were pretty. “Moonlit.” “Smokey Nudes.” “Adventurous.” A man appeared suddenly at the end of the aisle and stood looking at us, hands hanging at his sides. Cowboy hat, camo jacket, faded red bandana stretched awkwardly over his mouth and beard, an enormous white mustache bushing out like a shrub over the top. He stared.
“Can I help you?” Mom said.
“Pain reliever!”
“This is…the makeup aisle,” she said slowly, gesturing around us. He seemed to contemplate this answer. She motioned toward the rear of the store. “Ask the pharmacist. In the back.”
He nodded, shuffled off.
She turned and scrunched up her forehead at me. “Do I look like I work here? With my big purse and my hoodie?”
“Maybe that was his pick-up line.”
“His what? His pick-up line? ‘Pain reliever’?”
“Sure. It’s better than ‘Psoriasis!’ Or ‘Suppository!’”
She let out a laugh, paused so she could say something, but couldn’t speak. She quaked with laughter.
“Maybe he liked those granny pants,” I said.
“He looked like,” she choked out, “he looked like…”
“Like Yosemite Sam?”
“Yes!” she erupted, howling into her mask, “and I look like…like one of the Clampetts in these pants!”
I was laughing too. “At least you’re wearing a proper mask that covers your nose and your mustache.”
“Stop!” she said, doubling over, squeezing her knees together. “You’re going to make me pee!”
I would tell her about Jimmy weeks later on a blue spring day at the restaurant she’d been missing, the one on the river with the catfish and the radiation therapist. I would lean over my coffee cup after our lunch and tell her, “I looked up Jimmy Burden, Mom. I looked him up. And I found him.”
Her expression would shift from delighted anticipation to wary curiosity to a resigned sort of bracing as she registered the regret in my eyes and in my voice before I revealed the news she suddenly perceived was coming, the end of a possibility.
But right now, they were playing an old Blondie song, so we swayed a little to the beat in the makeup aisle. Mom handed me an eyeshadow pallet called “Pure Romance.” It was dusty mauve, pale cinnabar, a gold-flecked sand, and a shade the soft color of pink stone. “You’d look nice in these,” she said.
For a sweet moment, I was thirteen, she was my young mom again, and many things were still possible.
“They’re desert colors,” I said.
“I know! Aren’t they beautiful? They’d look so nice on you. I’ll get them for you.”
“How about this teal?”
“For you?” she said.
“For you.”
“Oh, that’s nice. Yes, yes. We want to look pretty, honey, when we take off these goddamn masks."
