1. Reach
In my first memory, I am four and dreaming. I’ve crept from my first floor bedroom around the corner to the front door of my house where the mid-afternoon light is heavy and pink. The floor bows under my feet and the panes of glass ripple, but I can peer through them to see Martha at the trunk of her car. It’s an old black Volkswagen, parked as usual behind the tree that grows from the middle of our drive. She is wearing a blue and yellow flowered skirt. The door is open and the stoop is warm, but when I make the step down from the landing, the grass opens up and swallows me whole.
Underneath my yard, it seems, is a swimming pool, domed out of glass and filled with water. The grass is a lid, but it’s transparent from here and I can see the driveway, though it’s blurred and rippling. The coral is bright and all surfaces glisten. I quickly discover how slippery they are. I clamor to the surface and slide back down, shouting through the water for Martha to turn. She does, though she can’t hear me. I’ve caught purchase on a purple bloom and I’m reaching with my right arm and all of my might. Martha looks troubled and kneels, running her fingers through the blades of grass, whispering soundlessly.
II. Call
A long time ago, invoking Martha was easy. If any of my four-year-old companions asked about the woman on the park bench, I’d just say, “Oh, that’s Martha. She takes care of me,” which sufficed. After all, each of my friends existed within the orbit of some caretaker.
Still, it caught my attention that I described Martha with an action, not a name. My parents had told me that I could refer to Martha as my grandmother (my real grandmothers wouldn’t mind), but that never struck me as a solution. My grandmothers, both widowed and nearing 80, watched Dateline and sagged in their chairs, wearing perfumed scarves, eating cold beet soup. Martha was older than my parents, but not by very much. She was 52 when I was born, while my mother was 37. This placed her directly between the only two generations I knew, and the sum of her traits pointed only to agelessness.
Her skin was white, but covered in freckles and almost exotically wrinkled. She had false teeth, but not because she was old. She’d been 25 when her gums had sagged from disease and all of her teeth had to be removed. This seemed like an early-American problem to me, ancient in its distance. Yet Martha’s hair was unfalteringly brown and she wore skorts and jumpers and Keds, just like me in the summer. This woman could haul me around the house in a laundry basket and demonstrate a perfect flip on the monkey rings. Calling her grandma was out of the question. I sought a more rigorous explanation.
The explanation I received was this: Four months after I was born, my dad went back to work and my mom did as well, so they put an ad in the paper for a caretaker and Martha responded. Voilà: my guardian angel. Wasn’t that neat? She had landed in our lives from absolutely nowhere.
I mulled this over. From one standpoint, the story was satisfying. It made sense that Martha had been guided to me by a supernatural force. We were both free agents in this world, me an only child, she unlike any other person I’d known.
In another sense, however, I was disappointed. I was looking for a one or two syllable word to describe this figure in my life–one that I had, perhaps, overlooked in my preliminary survey of the universe. “Nanny?” my mother suggested. “Friend?”
On the night before I turned four, I’d refused to sleep for fear I’d wake up a year older. My mother held me at the edge of my parent’s waterbed. The comforter was patterned with fern-like feathers that had spots and eyes. I was resisting time.
But didn’t I want to turn four? Didn’t I want to be a big girl? No, I did not.
“What if we called you three plus one?” my mother asked hopefully.
She was clever—a scientist—but I called her bluff. “It’s the same thing!”
“But Sweetheart, I can’t keep you three forever, no one can. Who’s going to keep you three forever?”
Right away, I envisioned Martha’s house: the space in the kitchen between the table and the Pepsi-Cola waste paper can. She was there, busy, having dragged the upright jukebox from its home in the den, the glow of its neon tubes skimming the surface of the night. It reminded me of a rocket ship and I felt sure that God was inside. If anyone could rouse him and communicate my plight, it was Martha. Reaching her was my only chance to stop the clock before four, and I knew it wouldn’t work, but I had to try.
“Martha,” I said, to a slackened grip and a sigh.
III. Means
Here is a ritual from our finest hours: Occasionally when Martha picked me up from kindergarten, she’d announce that her car needed a bath. We’d rattle up to the pump of the only Sunoco in Hockessin, Delaware, and press the button for 10 gallons of gas and a five-dollar car wash. Then we’d drive around back and head inside through the door to the left of the hotdog counter. I had a gift for choosing the right ones, she told me, and I’d stand on tip-toe to examine their browning sheen, measure their plump and pucker, selecting two and plopping them into buns. I scorned condiments, but loved applying them. Martha would go to the counter while I heaped on relish: “We’ve got two dogs.” There’s no doubt the attendant thought Martha was my grandmother and we let him. When we were in on it together, those omissions were fun. Two dollars later, I’d be buckled in front and taking an eager bite while she piloted us slowly into place at the opening of the garage.
Riding through a car wash was often the most fascinating experience in my kindergarten day, and the fact that Martha knew that made her special. First, there was the push and pull of relative movement, the car and the machinery dancing backward and forward, but slow enough so that we were delightfully confused about which direction we were headed. We couldn’t help but feel baffled at our dryness as the soapy jets circled. I always remembered my hotdog midway through. It tasted even better as my senses struggled to understand why the bun wasn’t soggy with suds.
We’d pretend the purple bristles were alive. The tall ones that spun at our sides were whirling ladies whose bodies were skirts. Another set of side-slapping tentacles belonged to a giant octopus. But the very best bristles came last: great foot-wide linguini hanging from a frame above us, swinging back and forth menacingly as we approached.
“Whoa!” Martha would say. “Here come the elephants!”
“It’s a stampede!” I’d yell, covering my eyes to get the full effect. Tromp tromp tromp tromp. The heavy feet crashed into our windshield and pounded across the roof, giving us a final whack in the taillights as we emerged into the glistening afternoon light. Martha would say, “Did you get squarshed?!” I’d giggle “no,” but report on the likelihood that they were rhinos this time.
This was our golden era. I saw in Martha everything I could hope to see: an optimistic reflection of myself, a human gateway to every possibility of imagination and pretend. It was the era of bringing sock puppets to the grocery store, of dressing as a scuba diver to help her mop the floor. I certainly can’t imagine us closer.
Yet it wasn’t long before I was aware of some level of exchange. On some Fridays after my dad got home from work, Martha would start to leave as she always did and he’d come running around the bend of the kitchen saying, “Wait a minute, Martha! I’ve got an envelope for you.” They always met in a tucked away place, either in the laundry room, in the garage, or by her car at the end of the drive. Eventually, my inquiries about the envelope’s contents earned a response: “It’s just a little bit of money. For all the things Martha does for you.”
At first, I was delighted. How nice it was that my parents, both successful chemists, would so generously dote on my behalf. I had no money to give Martha for my skinned knees and splinters, for the Little Debbies and strawberry wafers that she kept for me in her car. But I must have said, “That’s nice” out loud because my mother found it necessary to explain.
“We pay Martha to stay with you and take care of you during the week. Actually, we only planned to keep her with us until you left kindergarten. But your dad and I make good money and we still like having her help.”
My mouth fell open in stunned defiance, brows furrowing beneath my bangs. My best friend had been hired. Yet, there she was in our driveway the next day, ready to take me to school, out of love, for work.
The fact is that Martha would stay on with my parents long past kindergarten—through elementary school, through high school, and after I’d move to Richmond, Virginia, for college. My mother often reminded me that, since Martha’s husband Gene had retired from his local truck driving job, she needed the work. She told me she was “generous” in compensation and “flexible” with her hours. I always hurried my mother through these conversations, knowing how they’d end: striking a resonant yet dissonant note by wondering what we’d do without our Martha. As a housekeeper or a second mother, I’d wonder.
My mother retired while I was still in middle school, after she was first diagnosed with uterine cancer. She was cured by the time I left for college—a claim oncologists don’t make lightly—but I think Martha eased the burden of illness for her, which became the chief reason for having her stay. She dusted and vacuumed and changed the sheets, keeping the house in order. But she also provided company while my father was at work and became an emergency caretaker if one of my mother’s complications flared. It’s difficult for me to think about—this era of Martha’s employment. I can’t escape the reality that we were fortunate to have enough money to keep Martha as family.
Once I graduated and landed a copywriting job at a marketing firm, it was both comforting and odd to come home and see Martha’s purse on the washer, to hear a “Hello, kid!” from upstairs where I knew she was laying clean sheets. I’d take her for ice cream at Woodside Farms or the grilled cheese shop she liked just to get us out of that house. It was a battle to pay, but I fought consistently and won half the time. It was the battle that pleased us both.
For years, my birthday took place in the apple orchard behind Martha’s house. Martha would pull the motor home out back and decorate it with streamers and we’d roast hamburgers and hotdogs over a fire and eat homemade cake.
Even before that, every Mother’s Day, my parents and I made the 40-minute drive down windy roads to Martha’s Methodist church. Our church in Hockessin was modest for being Catholic, but it was still big, echoing, cold, and filled with strangers. It made Martha’s church feel like a living room. I loved how small it was—small enough to make it down the aisle in just a few skips—and the fact that communion was cubed Wonder Bread and Welch’s. My mother liked the tiny church because it greeted the holiday with a great deal of homegrown fanfare. There was a presentation of potted flowers to the mothers during the service, games, and a big breakfast after. I’d end up sitting between my two matriarchs, swinging my patent leather heels, having given flowers to one, sharing cinnamon buns with the other.
On most visits, my parents were there, but every so often, I’d go on my own. I loved to help Martha with the chicken and dumpling dinners the church hosted for an old folks home nearby. For the most part, the community building was a safe place for me—one where everyone knew me simply as “Martha’s girl,” and there was never any need to explain. But there were discomforts as well. I registered that many of the parishioners were missing teeth and most how-are-yous were answered with news from the farm. At first, I saw everyone as different from Martha, but she filled her space so perfectly. She was a leader among them, and Gene, too: the nobility of Elkton’s working class.
“What did you want to be when you grew up?” I’d ask Martha in the kitchen. I asked her many times because I loved the answer.
“I always wanted to be an airline stewardess,” she’d tell me wide-eyed, as if for the first time. “You get to see the whole world that way.”
I’d smile, gratified, and turn to watch Gene. I remember him rolling out the dumplings on the same chipping false Formica tabletop that we used for crafts in Sunday school, and I’d wonder if we’d find glitter in the soup.
Martha hardly talked about her only son, Robert, but if I was spending the night at her house, if we were really alone, sometimes she would. He was 17 when, completing a routine fitness exam for swim tryouts, he suffered a rare form of heart failure and died. Susan had been only seven, and Martha not yet 40. Curled up to Martha on her bed, I’d ask her if he was sick or scared, and whether he really had to die. She would answer patiently, but wouldn’t hide it when she trembled. There was generosity even in her grief. Then she’d laugh and tell me how she’d worn an orange suit to his funeral, since it was his favorite color. Since then, she’d tell me, he’s visited her in other ways: through colors, blessings, Beatles songs. If she narrowly missed an accident in her home or on the road, she knew it was him: her guardian angel.
IV. Speech
At a certain point, my parents had to correct my pronunciation of “icing.” Somehow, their private-schooled daughter had learned to give the word three syllables (ice-ah-ning) rather than two.
“Where did you learn that? Your father and I don’t talk like that.”
“That’s how Martha always says it.”
She sighed heavily. “We should have seen this coming. Martha has a very different background. Her family is from the mountains and they didn’t have...”
“Like the Amish?” I avoided using Martha’s “Ameesh.”
“Sort of. She has some Mennonite roots. But what I’m saying is, she doesn’t say everything properly. Actually, this probably explains quite a bit about your spelling tests.”
I thought back to my insistent spelling of “liberry” in the second grade.
These days, I think in Martha’s glossary of terms, and often stop just short of using them: golly day, hot digs, gee whitacres, yoy shmo. My lands, no siree. Once, my father heard Martha respond to a grave circumstance with, “Well, hush my mouth and hang up the phone,” but I can’t seem to say it without some irony. When my parents called my attention to my wayward speech, I corrected it easily. Later, after I’d spent about a year in college sharing a room with a Classics major named Scheherazade, I called home during the day and the phone was passed to Martha. According to my mother, after she hung up, she said, “Does she really talk like that now?”
Settled in on campus, I openly viewed Martha’s “otherness” as something wonderful, though I was even more hard-pressed to explain her. Many of the students surrounding me had grown up with nannies of their own, but no doubt nannies of a different kind. It unnerved me to explain Martha backwards (work first, love second) though explaining her forwards never failed to confuse. If I got as far as “friend,” my listener would never guess her age, and if I used “adopted relative” they’d want to know how we met. If the conversations reached completion, there was a eureka at the end (“Oh! So she was your babysitter.”) and when they didn’t, it was because they had lost interest. Few could place her importance to me in any context of their own.
Notably, college was also the first time in my life that I’d been out of her sight for more than a week or two at a time, and I was unsure how to conceive of us now that our identities were hundreds of miles apart. It was much easier to demonstrate mutual possession where I could drape my arm across her shoulders, where she could bear hug me to her hip.
Plus, the chasm between our experiences was widening, and fast. I’d never considered the possibility that I would become interested in or value something that was almost impossible to express in the language I used with Martha at home. When I was younger, tests and papers were tests and papers. Martha understood them to be trials of wit and character and responded to my successes and failures as such. But on that campus, my mind immersed in ideas twice its size, it was difficult for me to call or come home and squeeze that experience into Martha’s glossary of terms. Oftentimes, I didn’t try.
During my junior year of college, I found myself somewhat accidentally enrolled in a film course on 1950s American Melodrama, but my professor soon won my interest. Dr. Grove was a new brand of academia to my ears. Other professors meandered beautifully to their points, but Grove struck her notes directly and hard, pulling quickly the correct word from her library of terms long before I had an inkling of her point. Her matter-of-factness was enthralling to me.
On one November afternoon in our classroom mini theater, we discussed the 1959 film, Imitation of Life starring Lana Turner and Juanita Moore. The film features a somewhat unlikely friendship between single mothers: Turner, a young white woman seeking Broadway stardom, and Moore, a young black woman with a light-skinned daughter of her own. To facilitate her friend’s pursuit of acting, Moore agrees to become caretaker of Turner’s daughter and moves into the guest wing of their house. From there, the film charges through questions of female identity and obligation, bearing witness to neglect, retribution, and alarmingly, the sudden, unexplained death of Juanita Moore.
“Now, we’ve been discussing this film largely as a feminist melodrama, but given the grandeur of Moore’s funeral in its closing sequence, it’s safe to say that Douglas Sirk intends us to read it equally as a mammy narrative. Who can tell me a few of the defining characteristics of mammy narratives?”
Hands popped up. It’s a narrative that involves the white appropriation of the slave narrative, like in Gone with the Wind. A nannie figure is too good to be true. She serves willingly and happily, despite being taken advantage of and demeaned by a hiring family.
“Yes. Let’s take a look at the funeral procession...”
I sat there in the dim, pen in hand, watching a slow-motion replay of Moore on her death bed, her specific requests for an extravagant funeral, the procession from the upper right to lower left quadrants of the screen. Sirk’s point was that, though Moore’s character is portrayed as being inherently, even gratefully servile, her final wishes reveal a pent-up revenge that she deigns to express only once she is gone.
Suddenly, I saw my childhood through eyes that were not my own. I knew for a fact that I never made my bed or helped Martha with the laundry. My idea of fun had been laying in the middle of the sheets she was trying to straighten, hiding in laundry baskets, complicating the process of washing the floor by insisting on dressing up in scuba gear to “help.” I realized, sinking inward, how my acceptance and return of Martha’s love was presumptive and insulting, whether Martha chose to recognize it or not. It also occurred to me that I’d known all of this already, and that my passive avoidance of Martha was really a more active avoidance of myself.
So what could I do? Out there, on my beautiful college campus, I was one of many empty vessel humans whose job it was to receive possibilities. I was being urged ever forward with no clear path back and the damage to Martha had been done. Making my bed would make no difference now.
Calling more would make a difference, I thought. And replying to holiday cards with holiday cards and not a guilty “thank you” in person once I’d already returned home. Like setting my hand on a hot burner, I considered what funeral Martha might want, then yanked away.
V. Body
Seven years earlier, when I was twelve or thirteen, I began having dreams and hallucinations in which my loved ones were dying underneath our dining room hutch, but I was glued to the handle of the refrigerator in the kitchen and couldn’t break free to save them. Often, in these dreams, the afterlife existed in a swaying drop of coffee inside my father’s favorite mug. I was newly afraid of dying, the dread just as fresh but clearer than on the night before I turned four. More than that, I was equally afraid that this world or the one after would leave me conscious, immortal, and alone.
I never shared these dreams with Martha, or more than a glimpse of my fears, but in the car one day on the way home from school, I realized that intuitively, she knew. I’d climbed in to the passenger seat heavily and given her a weak smile, when she pulled me closer by the neck to give my cheek a kiss. “You okay?” she asked, her voice faltering, her knobby fingers still curving through my hair. When I couldn’t answer, she removed her hand to press play on a heavy silver tape recorder balanced on her lap and set about driving us home. Ave Maria began to play. It was an old live recording from a long time ago in a church where I’d never been, but it felt incredibly close and meant for me. I wondered if Martha reached for this music when she was feeling lost, finding comfort in the blaring distortion of each crescendo and the crackle of the chorus. She, in respect, kept her eyes on the road as I cried in my confusion. I wanted her both nearer and farther in that moment, so the perfect balance she had struck made me more grateful for her than I’d ever been.
When we arrived home, Martha sat me down in the kitchen and said she had something to tell me. One night, about a week after his death, Robert had appeared at his mother’s bedside clear as day, shirtless, his swim trunks orange. He told her that he was comfortable and safe. “I’ve never told anyone else,” she said, “but I wanted to tell you.” I thought seriously about the idea of spiritual agency, and more, a spiritual community. I didn’t want her to go before I did.
I asked her if she’d visit me, like Robert did, one day when she was gone. “You bet,” she said, giving me a punch in the arm. “I’ll be in the breeze. If I can, I’ll wear something orange.”
When I was very young, the discovery that Martha had false teeth brought me into her mouth and around the corner, always begging for a closer look, to pull them out, hold them in my hands, stopping just short of trying them on myself. Decades later, after her first and only round of radiation to her spine, Martha lost any need for teeth. She’d been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia: a cancer of blood and bone. For years, her bone marrow had misbehaved, overproducing white cells, then allowing them to plummet. Then, with the flip of a switch, those cells became cancerous, and the first sign that anything was wrong was the debilitating pain from a tumor on her spine.
The radiation was aggressive and shrank the tumor to a fraction of its size, but it also scorched her esophagus, making it increasingly painful to eat and speak. Within a week, Martha lost her voice entirely. I’d call the phone in her room and wait for the rings to stop, which is how I knew she’d answered. On visits, I’d sit beside her bed and we’d breathe, her lips pouring endlessly into her mouth, her knobby fingers in my hair. I yearned for her to be free of her body. I thought it would be nice to let her share my own.
On our last phone call, I told her to come to my wedding and be in the breeze. I told her to wear orange. “She doesn’t think she’s dying,” her daughter said. It hadn’t yet been four weeks, but that night, she did.
She’s been gone for nearly eight years now. Yet, in some ways we might be closer than ever, each barrier between us of its own volition, knocked down. I spend weeks backpacking out of towns in Appalachia. I live in a blue collar town that reminds me of Elkton, with Methodist and Baptist churches lining the main street. But there’s something very alien about this new proximity. When once I longed to fall through her skin, I now cling to mine as protection for myself, especially at night in my bed in the dark. My nerve endings stand erect, on guard to hold fast the more dangerous wanderings of my mind.
I’ve found only one way to understand this fear and it’s a lesson I learned in college. A good portion of Milton’s Paradise Lost is a conversation between Adam and the angel Raphael, and it ends with a brief consideration of the skin and the soul. Just before Raphael departs, Adam asks in his childlike curiosity if angels make love and Raphael, blushing, says they do. He says there are no obstacles to intimacy. It’s “easier than air with air.”
Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring, nor restrained conveyance need,
As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.
And that’s all. The angel departs. Adam has gone on, verse after verse, wondering at the beguiling pleasure of being near to Eve—the pleasure of yearning to be nearer. Yet, to angels, closeness couldn’t be more quick and complete. We get the sense that unity could be accidental, mutual possession a passing breeze. Now that Martha is without a body, I’m suddenly grateful for my own. I’m afraid of becoming a communal spirit, afraid that the ecstasy I imagined in heaven will actually fall short and leave me feeling alone.
What a relief, to be bound by the resistance that makes human love. Thank God for repelling electrons and the tiny atoms of air between our skins. Our borders are precisely what give us the sense of closeness, intimacy less being near than wishing to be nearer. Without our bodies, how can we sense proximity at all?
She always had a way of understanding my fears. I wonder if she knows.
Here’s one of my favorite memories: You and I are at the bottom of the ocean and you’ve been trapped, again, by a giant clam. I’m developing a rescue strategy and checking the oxygen in my tank, my plots impervious to the periodic shuffling of feet around me. We’ve made the short drive over to the Hagley Museum of Natural History to visit one of our favorite spots. Sometime before, the museum had the brilliant idea of placing their sea floor preservations in the floor of the exhibit, so that, while admiring conch shells and starfish in upright tanks, museum-goers find themselves very suddenly stepping from carpet to glass, which reveals a replica of the ocean floor some distance beneath. The effect is always arresting, but today, two sprawling bodies have been added to the mix.
We’re both belly-down on the warm glass. I’m making the presumed slurps and snaps of scuba gear and telling you very professionally to hang on. You welcome passersby to join us in our game and emit the appropriate cries for help. I’m proud of us—of who we have decided to be in this radical community of two. I ask to visit Hagley all the time because I want our ritual to be public. I want the world to see us strain with every fiber to make contact, only to wiggle backwards and replay the whole scene, over and over again.