Fences

by Michelle Davidson Argyle

My entire neighborhood is comprised of fences. The fence surrounding my back yard is made of white plastic and is seven feet tall; there are no cracks or breaks between the slats. When I look out my window each morning, the sun gleams off the wall of white and opens my eyes a little wider. This fence was my mother’s choice; she was sold on the idea of permanence, so just as I can’t talk her into a less confining fence, I can’t talk her out of dying her red hair blond, or even get her to reconsider something as simple as dating again. A nagging pressure inside often compels me to mention these annoyances, but my mother only smiles in response and usually lights a cigarette. She says smoking calms her nerves, but her long, thin hands tremble anyway. “I can’t stop dying my hair blond,” she asserts each time the subject is mentioned. Her smile twitches as she sucks in the smoke, thinks, and then answers, “Nobody would recognize me. That’s a lame excuse, I know, but I’ll have a better one next time you ask.”

My mother lies whenever a situation threatens her security. This could be the reason why she has been fired from four different jobs in the past two years. Her latest project is to ‘get in good’ with the new family down the street. “The wife’s a beautician,” she sighed over her mashed potatoes at dinner. The fork in her fingers trembled with a moment’s pause. “She’s opening up her own place downtown. I have my license, you know. I should take her cookies or something.”

It rained that week. My seven-year-old sister, Katelynn, ventured outside with a Mason jar in one hand and a shovel in the other, claiming there would be some good worms to fish with the next day. As the rain continued for three more days, Katelynn filled three jars with worms that blindly writhed against the permanent glass walls of their prisons. As they writhed, the rain created miniature lakes across the lawn, flowers began to float instead of stand, and our three cats took up residence beneath my bed. They would occasionally saunter out with their velvety ears twitching to the beat of rain outside, then, as if an invisible pin had pricked them, they rushed back under the bed. “They’re afraid they’ll be washed away,” Katelynn explained, and sucked her bottom lip for several moments. “They like it under there. The rain can’t get them there. It’s safe.”

During the storm, my mother began occupying the kitchen at odd hours of the day. Within a few days, I became accustomed to the sounds of baking at three o’clock in the morning. Beneath my covers, I listened to the harmony of rain beating against the window and the whir of a mixer downstairs. These sounds lulled me to sleep every time; it became comforting to believe my mother’s creations in the kitchen were, in a small way, coalesced with nature’s miracle of rain. “I should make cookies now,” my mother replied one afternoon. “Melinda down the street said she’d hire me, but she has a few other people to interview. Perhaps cookies will help her make a decision because I’ve perfected an irresistible recipe.” I watched her pull eggs from the refrigerator, flour from the cupboard, butter, salt, sugar, vanilla, and I sighed. “She’s not going to give you a job for a plate of cookies,” I snapped. She smiled, shrugged her delicate shoulders and cracked an egg into the mixer.

As the cookies baked, she slept and I studied her long, thin body lying limp on the couch. Her eyelashes, frail and skeletal, fluttered against her cheekbones; she was wedged between dream and sleep, unconscious of the fact that I was breathing her in. My heart beat wildly at the remembrance of her taking me into her arms years earlier. I was eleven, and she had whispered into my ear that there would be times I would feel sad, but those times would pass. She caressed my forehead, her warm hand smelling of lilacs. That was the year he died, my father, her husband. That was the year she began to tremble, the year she hid her red hair behind golden curls, the year she put up the fence. Change advanced gradually—in layers so slight I was only now beginning to see them, and for a brief moment I caught a glimpse of how thick these layers, these gradations of change had become, but another moment of reflection brought me back to the deliberate acceptance I learned years ago.

From the window behind her, bars of yellow light fell across my mother’s closed eyes. For a moment, she was so hushed with some thought wedged in her mind that I could hear the leaves fall outside. It was autumn, a season of change, but with my eyes focused on my mother, I felt as if there would only be one season, one age that would stretch further than I could ever imagine. In the sunlight, my mother’s wedding ring glittered against her pale skin, just as it used to glitter when my father would take her hand at the dinner table, squeeze, and then let go. He observed what I was beginning to admire: my mother’s high cheekbones, pink with the glow of zealous blood, a small straight nose, lips he loved to kiss when he didn’t think I was watching. I breathed in sleepy air and watched my mother do the same, our chests rising up and down to some pulse that I knew separated us, but connected us too. The cookies burned that day, but neither of us said a word as I opened windows and doors to air out the smoke and she soaked and scrubbed the cookie sheet, her hands pink under the stream of hot water.

As autumn progressed, leaves from around the neighborhood began drifting into our backyard; they were eternally trapped by the fence, and gathered in myriad piles across the green brown grass of the season. Katelynn, who found joy in almost everything, spent hours jumping through the leaves after which she would rake them into piles as my mother had instructed. “They must be put into bags and thrown away,” my mother insisted. “I don’t want to rake them in the spring when they’re rotting and scattered everywhere.” Before the snow came, Katelynn and I did as my mother wished and began raking the leaves into piles in order to later place them in huge plastic bags. Katelynn, who stood just above my waist, handled her rake with commanding authority even though it stretched a few feet above her head. Her round cheeks were flushed with hard work; my own nose was numb, but Katelynn continued to rake and I smiled at the sporadic grunts issued from her throat. She resembled me in personality and my mother in countenance —both determined in volition and vigorous in actions. These resemblances endeared Katelynn to me—we, who lived within the same walls and were united with the same blood, endured, and in different ways, loved the same mother.

When we finished raking the leaves, Katelynn contemplated the five plastic bags with melancholy. “I’m going over to Jennifer’s house to play in her backyard,” she sniffed. “Her mother doesn’t make her rake up the leaves and throw them away. She lets them stay where they are.” She flipped her curly red hair to one side and marched past me into the house. Ten minutes later, my mother came outside with a cigarette in hand. She sat down on the steps and pulled a lighter from her pocket. “Thank you, honey,” she sighed. “Katelynn’s upset. I don’t know why. We do this every year, don’t we?” It was a rhetorical question, and I remained leaning against the rake in my hands, surrounded by bags of leaves, bags of autumn ready to be thrown away. My mother lit her cigarette and directed her eyes to me. “Katelynn is so much like you,” she murmured. “So insistent, so like your father.” I looked away and seven feet of white plastic stared back at me. “Shouldn’t you be driving Katelynn to her friend’s house?” I asked.

“She wanted to walk. It’s only half a mile, and she feels more independent if I let her walk. It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” I shrugged and bent down to pick up a bag. My mother stood up to help me while finishing her cigarette and reaching for another, but stopped when I focused my eyes angrily in her direction. “Mother, there’s fresh air out here. Do you really. . . .”

“Yes,” she snapped, “I do.” She lit the cigarette and we worked side by side without another word, our heavy breaths visible in the crisp air. Two hours later, we received a call that Katelynn was in the hospital. It was the first time I saw my mother cry in six years.

The fish tank in the hospital waiting room kept my mind off the inevitable fact that Katelynn was connected to tubes and machines down one of the sterile halls to my left. The fish inside the tank were tropical smudges of color sliding from one end of the glass to the other, trapped, as I was, inside a moment of time with nowhere to go. My vision was clouded with tears, but even through the blur, I could see my mother crying. Her hands trembled as she twisted her wedding ring around and around, the gold and diamonds glittering through my tears. “How could I have known?” she kept repeating through noiseless sobs and intakes of air. “How could I have known somebody wouldn’t see her, that somebody would just keep driving?” Her voice faded into a soft whimper as her eyes darted to mine, clearly expressing her horror of losing another individual so close to her heart. I avoided her eyes because I knew my own countenance would divulge the pain I felt watching her suffer.

We were later led into the room where Katelynn was sleeping. At the sight of the tubes and monitors, my mother’s first reaction was a sharp gasp which she held so long that when she finally let it go, her body appeared to deflate of energy and life. With one swift movement she rushed to Katelynn’s side and I turned to go sit in the hallway, unable to endure the tears burning behind my own eyes.

The rain began again when my mother and I drove away from the hospital. As we turned onto the highway, the rain smacked the windshield harder and harder with the growing cold. “It’s turning to slush,” my mother commented. Her eyes were dry now, but the edges of a damp Kleenex were peeking out from her hand around the steering wheel. “Did you hear what they said about Katelynn?” she asked. “They said her only injuries were a small concussion and a fractured hand. We’ll go back tomorrow.” I turned my gaze to the window and concentrated on the falling rain.

The second my mother pulled into the driveway, I stepped out of the car and dashed through the front door and up to my room in order to hide the tears I could no longer keep inside. An hour later, the sounds of cooking drifted from the kitchen to my bedroom door. Pots banging and the whir of a mixer worked their way through my sobs as I lifted myself off the bed, dried my eyes, and made my way downstairs. My mother was scooping flour from a glass jar when I entered the kitchen. “Two cups,” she muttered, “and a half. Three and a half. Four. . . .” Her concentration was broken when I cleared my throat, her eyes fluttering to mine as her hand slipped from the jar and brought it crashing to the floor in a cloud of white dust. A small gasp escaped my mother’s throat as she gaped incredulously at the fine layers of flour spreading across the linoleum. We stood silent for nearly five minutes waiting for a word of explanation, a word that would justify the broken glass and liberated flour, but instead of speaking, my mother stepped around the mess and walked past me to the back door. She pulled a cigarette from her pocket, opened the sliding glass door and walked outside. I watched her observe the sunlight peeking through dark clouds, the tidy lawn and the massive white fence, bright and gaudy and dripping with rain. For a moment she stood upright as she lit her cigarette, but as she began to smoke, began to relax, her shoulders slumped and she dropped the unfinished cigarette into a nearby trash can. She called my name a moment later and as I entered the backyard, she lifted her arm to a tree in the neighbor’s yard. “Look at that nest,” she breathed. “Remind me to buy some binoculars for when they come back in the spring.” I glanced at her bright eyes and disheveled hair, and smiled as she breathed in the chill air with what appeared to be a new fervor I hadn’t seen for years. “Since when are you interested in birds?” I asked.

She shrugged and peered at the soggy ground. “Always, I suppose.” Her eyes found their way to mine. “I figured it was a good reason to get you out here. You seem a little quiet, a little withdrawn. You know Katelynn’s going to be fine, don’t you?”

I peered up at the nest caged comfortably in the skeleton fingers of the tree. The birds had flown free only a week earlier when the cold began ripping leaves off branches, but it was no comfort to me that the neighbor children would soon find the nest and climb up to retrieve it. I mentioned this to my mother who only smiled. Her cheeks were growing red from the cold, but her hand was warm as she slipped it inside mine and squeezed. The season was changing and I felt it in my mother’s hand, felt it in the way we stood silently staring up at the nest rocking back and forth in the branches with the wind, our own bodies cold, yet warm and ultimately connected.