By the time I woke up in Andrew’s apartment that first day in Philadelphia it was early evening. I started to clean. First myself, in that awful shower of his, which I cleaned while standing inside the tub once the water had revived me. And then, even before I had even dressed, I moved on to cleaning the apartment. I found trash bags beneath the sink and filled them with anything that smelled or had no recognizable purpose. I scooted the wooden futon frame into the bedroom and hoisted the mattress atop it. I cleaned the dishes, the stovetop, the food from the refrigerator, and when I was done I swept from one end to the other. Along the way I found things. A ring of mystery keys, which I pocketed. More sketchbooks and journals and paintings. Behind an oversized portfolio, I found a two-person bicycle, an old Schwinn tandem from the ‘60s or early ‘70s that--other than a front flat--appeared to be in good enough condition to ride. I also found a stack of dog-eared dirty magazines in a milk crate by the bed. I flipped one open, thinking of those underwear model catalog pages I had found years before in the tree fort that had turned out to be Andrew’s. But the men here didn’t even have on their tighty-whities, and they were doing such things to each other that my ears began to burn even though no one else was around. Embarrassed, I threw the magazines away, then stacked Andrew’s drawings and writings by his bed to look through later.
It was a good thing I was done because the evening light had started to fade. The apartment would be dark soon. I rinsed off again, wondering anew about the garden hose in the shower that led out a small window there. Once I toweled off, I found an oversized T-shirt in Andrew’s closet and a pair of loose sweat pants to change into. I carried the trash downstairs to a dumpster out back, then stopped in AppleJack’s Deli and bought candles, a Diet Coke and a much deserved sandwich, my first Philly cheese steak, the kind of thing I hadn’t allowed myself to eat in years.
Upstairs, I couldn’t decide where to eat it. Andrew’s apartment was finally clean, and I didn’t want to mess it up again. I had a foolish hope that Andrew might walk through the door at any moment. So I went to the back balcony and climbed to the fire escape to the roof. Someone had created a garden there. Had it been Andrew? I caught sight of the green garden hose, curled at the far end, and figured it must have been. Perhaps my brother and Steven, working together. I thought of all the effort it must have taken to haul everything up. The planters framed an Astroturf carpet, which led back to more pots in the nook between Andrew’s building and the next. I took a hose and gave everything a good watering. The flowers were beyond recovery, but the herbs and perennials still showed signs of life.
As night started to fall, I settled into an old beach lounge chair and watched the lights come on in Andrew’s city, first the older buildings lining Broad Street with their filigreed cornices and old-fashioned tops, and beyond them, the high, new skyscrapers of the business district. I’ve since learned the names of
unfamiliar and Oz-like in my eyes. I felt I had crossed into another world, one Andrew hadn’t intended to show me, but had led me to nonetheless.
My sandwich was gooey and good, but its grease left me feeling ill. In the planter beside me, a few hardy herbs had clung on through the August heat. My recent dowsing had released their pent-up
fragrances, making me think of home. My stomach churned at the thought of calling Momma. I had left a note at work when I left, but still she’d be sick with worry and mad as hell. I’d deal with it tomorrow, I told myself.
I pinched off a few peppermint leaves and slipped them on my tongue, hoping they’d make me feel better. Their smell reminded me of the herbs Grandma Rose used to keep out back. I thought of her, and the other world she had shown me as well, long ago, the spring I was eleven going on twelve, when she took me and Elizabeth to her secret place in the woods.
* * *
Beneath our footfalls, the swinging bridge bucked and shuddered. I held my baby sister tight in my arms and followed Grandma Rose over the worn gray planks. Far below us Cheat River bent like a broken arm as it carved its path around our West Virginia town. With each step, every breath, the bridge jangled and swayed, and I wondered if spring floods had weakened its struts. Ahead, Grandma Rose moved toward the center of the span, spiriting us away to gather wild ramps--her name for spring onions that liked to nurse on creek water in the shade of the woods Down her back alley we’d come, following a weedy trail past old train tracks and an empty lot where the carnival set up each fall. Houses and electric lines grew small in the distance, while above our heads, the late-May sun burned brilliant inside a flawless blue. Beneath us, light glinted off Cheat River, pulling our eyes to the catfish there. When my grandmother stopped halfway across the bridge, I did the same.
The planks beneath us eased their tremors. From nests on the far bank several ducks paddled into the water, eager and expectant as they headed our way. Grandma Rose pulled a piece of bread from the apron she wore, crumbled it, let the pieces fall. She had done this before, I could tell. The ducks’ heads flashed iridescent green as they fought. Elizabeth kicked me with the heels of her feet. The swinging bridge rocked as I sat her down. Not yet ten months old and already she had taken her first couple of steps, would try to walk awhile if I helped hold her up. She leaned against a low support rail and stared down. Grandma Rose helped her drop some bread, and my little sister laughed at the frenzy she caused.
Bread gone, Elizabeth let me hold her again as I followed Grandma Rose back onto the sureness of land. It was late afternoon, and our shadows stretched before us. Half a mile on we found the right spot. Creek dampness flooded the mountain’s shady base, water twisting through fowlgrass and fern. Further back, beneath oak, maple and pine, the ground grew rocky in a steep upland rise. As we moved beneath the tree shade Grandma Rose turned to me and said, “We’re here.” I followed her to a hillock grown thick with green plants nearly as long as my forearm. I sat Elizabeth down on the blanket I’d brought, left her to pull
at the yellow lure of dandelions while I helped Grandma pick an apronful of the spring onions I had long heard her praise.
Without a word of complaint about the arthritis in her knees, Grandma Rose squatted low and began to teach me how to thin a ramp patch so the bulbs left behind could grow plump and divide, sending up more shoots come the following spring. Skin hung loose on her cheeks, yet still I could make out the planes of her face, the mix of Scotch-Irish and English in her blood. Behind her glasses, the smoky darkness of her eyes drew me in--a touch of Melungeon Daddy used to say; he could sniff it out in her pedigree, all those Guinea relatives of hers over in Phillipi. He had talked like he didn’t much trust that part of her, but I was suddenly glad for the history that circulated inside my grandmother’s blood, the way she knew to show me this.
The ramps were slippery and cool to the touch, white bulbs caked in dirt at the roots. We washed them in the creek, then slipped them into an old potato sack Grandma had tucked into the string of her apron. I listened to her describe the ramp suppers she used to go to in Helvetia, a tiny hamlet cradled among the mountains of Randolph County where each spring women of Swiss descent kept hand-me-down menus alive. “Ramps raw or fried to golden perfection,” Grandma described, “biscuits slathered with whipped butter, brown beans cooked in fatback and their own sweet juice….” The words hung loose in her mouth, as if she were savoring the taste of each one. “We’d pour the drippings over crumbled cornbread, mix it up, eat it down.” She smacked her lips so hard that she had to adjust her dentures with her thumb. I almost laughed, but caught myself. “Your Uncle Neil used to drive your Momma and me there, used to complain how the dust clung to his car. Good lord, how long ago was that?” Grandma Rose wondered aloud. Her eyes clouded over. I knew she had lost that son; her sister, Great-Aunt Inez, had told me so. One Christmas Eve, just weeks before Uncle Neil’s twenty-third birthday. Juvenile diabetes.
“Oh, never mind that now,” Grandma said, quick to pull the smile back on her face. “Let’s make us a fancy supper like that tonight. I’ll show you how.” Her efforts redoubled as she pulled at the shoots. “Won’t your Momma be surprised!”
Soon we’d amassed a worthy pile. I turned to find Elizabeth sticking a dandelion’s fluffed head into her mouth and hurried to take it from her. “Poison,” I warned, throwing the weed away. Elizabeth began to bawl.
“Not so,” Grandma Rose said. She lifted Elizabeth into her arms, hip jutting to bear the child’s weight. She pulled a juice bottle from her apron pocket and slipped it into my sister’s mouth. She explained to me how something as simple as a dandelion could be cooked up if you knew how to do it right. “Not once they’ve gone to seed,” she told me as she soothed Elizabeth. “But when the blossoms are still young they can be fried in cornmeal if you like. Yet if you ask me, their leaves taste even better.” She jutted her chin at the sprawl of dandelions. “Gather up some of those,” she urged as she tossed me a
Off I went. I picked all the dandelion greens I could find while back beneath the shade Grandma sat on the creek bank and rocked Elizabeth to sleep. The sun grew hot on my back. I lifted my hair off my neck, fixed it with a tie. By the time I presented my haul for inspection, my fingers hurt from pulling so much. Grandma Rose showed me which ones I’d pinched too low, and I snapped off the stalks, leaving only the freshest green. “Wash the dandelions as well,” she instructed. “I don’t want you muddying my ramps when you put them in the sack.”
A curve in the creek had carved out a small pond. Butterflies frenzied among the pickerelweed there. I made sure Grandma Rose wasn’t watching, then took off my sneakers and turned up my jeans. Stone to stone I stepped, out through muddy ringlets into deeper water. I worked my way to a tiny waterfall at the mouth of the pond, a better place to rinse. The water’s surface glow like a giant mirror. Momma would be returning from her work soon, walking through Grandma’s door, wondering where we were. But right then, time felt frozen.
I perched atop a mossy stone, braced myself against embankment rocks and leaned into the clear spill to douse the greens. Below me, the mirrored trunks of trees pitched so perfectly against their reflections that I felt poised between worlds. I fumbled, dropping a handful of dandelion leaves into the water. I sank to my knees and reached in. Minnows scattered. My fingers stretched, but not far enough. So I took a deep breath and stepped down into the chill of the pond.
Leaf-litter tickled the soles of my feet. The water felt so good I wished I could sink my whole body in, live in that world like a fish. I scooped up my dropped greens and swished them around. Muck stirred, clouding the water.
Happiness and sadness shifted through me. I wished Janet could have been there beside me. I thought back to the winter before when she died. While all the other grownups had tiptoed around any mention of mortality, Grandma’s sister, Great-Aunt Inez, had sat with me in the back row of the funeral parlor and told me about the death of my grandfather, Caleb Chenoweth, whose solemn face I recalled from old family photographs. He had been less than Daddy’s age when he died, a young man hard to picture as a grandfather. I listened close as Aunt Inez whispered in my ear the lurid details Grandma Rose had always refused to divulge--how years ago my grandfather had been found dead inside a coal mine. ‘Fumes from a faulty generator stole him away,’ Aunt Inez told me, ‘the same way your friend up there died from carbon monoxide.’ She jutted her head toward Janet’s casket. ‘Invisible killers are all around,’ Aunt Inez warned, and I wondered why she hadn’t imparted that advice to poor Mrs. Lambetti, who sang with her in the church choir. ‘So say your prayers and always ask for forgiveness,’ Great-Aunt Inez warned, ‘‘cause even children like you can die in their sleep’. I knew Andrew long considered Aunt Inez a crackpot who took perverse pleasure trying to scare us closer to God. But sitting beside her in the pew I couldn’t help but believe her. I asked her to tell me more about my family, my dead relatives, the line between life and death.
But just then her husband neared, and she sat up straight against her seatback. She patted my hands back into my lap. ‘That’s enough for now,’ she whispered. But I knew it wasn’t.
* * *
In the pond, a crawdad scuttled across my toe and I yelped. When I looked up I found Grandma Rose shaking her head. “You be careful, Allison. Snapping turtles mate in that water. Liable to bite off your toes.” Was she teasing or telling the truth? I couldn’t tell. I wasted no time gathering the greens in the handkerchief and starting back toward her.
“Hold on there, Allison!” Grandma cried. “Watch your step.”
I froze. Turtle, I thought--she must see its craggy shell creeping close. Where was it? In my mind’s-eye I pictured a sharp snout ready to blade through bone. But that wasn’t it at all, I realized, once my grandmother reached my side. She drew my eyes down to the shallow puddle where I stood.
“Girl, look around you. Watch what you’re doing.”
Elizabeth stirred in her arms, rubbing her eyes with a chubby fist, as Grandma stooped to lift a stalk of grass from the water, careful not to break it off. Dark jellied bumps clung to the reed like soggy
peppercorns. “See here?” Grandma asked. “Them’s toad eggs. You’re stepping on babies.” Gently she returned the unhatched eggs to their underwater incubation.
“You hear those frogs singing ‘round your house the last month or so?” she asked. “They’re mating in spots like this, springtime pools where all you need to see life coming into the world is clear eyes and open ears.”
She handed me Elizabeth and scooped up some water. I looked close. What I had previously mistaken for bits of twig now came to life as tiny tadpoles in Grandma’s cupped palm, their bodies plump and greenish brown, their tails flickering. “Bullfrogs and treefrogs’ll start mating soon as the snow melts,” she told me. “By June, these buggers’ll sprout legs and lose their tails, head upwoods to munch on insects.” She puffed out her cheeks, which made me laugh. Opening her fingers, she let the tadpoles stream home.
Next, she directed my gaze to salamander hatchlings, which darted for cover as she stirred the pond with a long stick. She used it to upturn a rock to show me what they’d become--funny flickering things, black bodies decorated with mustard spots as they scampered away. Grandma started touching plants and buds, reciting their names to me, and I let my ears attune to her lesson. Around us, the sound of the woods took on layers, became thick with a chorus of chattering birds and trumpeting toads.
“How do you know all this?” I wondered aloud. She told me how as a child she had come to places like this with her brothers, gathering by lantern light nightcrawlers for fish bait. With her stick she skimmed away algae to point out diving beetles and dragonfly nymphs. I held tight to Elizabeth and followed close, ever heedful of Grandma’s warning to watch out for ‘Old Snapper’ as she’d come to call her mystery turtle. When she rolled over an old log, a sharp exclamation escaped her. I flinched. But it wasn’t Old Snapper
another beneath that, a sad-eyed female--belly up and head pinned underwater--too tired to fight her late- mating suitors. At least that’s how Grandma explained it as she poked the second male in the belly until he let his bride-to-be go. The female twisted upright to gulp down air. “They’d sooner see her drown than let