Home  
From A Year and a Day, by Leslie Pietrzyk
William Morrow, March 2004                           
Copyright 2003, Leslie Pietrzyk  

A Book-of-the Month Club alternate selection
Selected for Borders Bookstores "Original Voices" series
Washingtonian Magazine Book Club's April 2004 selection

Chapter One: BIRD
1975

Mama came back three days after her funeral. That was my mother—as symbolic as they got. Three days, like she was Jesus Christ himself. "Alice," she whispered as I was frying up pancakes, willing the bubbles to pop so I could flip them. "It’s Mama. I’m back."

I reached for the spatula, oddly calm. I’d read the paragraphs in Dr. Spock’s baby book about the ways children cope with death. Okay, I was fifteen, not a child, but information was information. He didn’t talk about hearing voices. So was this real?

She said, "You’ve got that syrup turned way too high."

Sure enough, a brown scorchy smell was edging into the kitchen, and the syrup’s surface looked sticky and pocked. I turned the gas burner down to that barely-steady level where you don’t want to breathe because you’re afraid you’ll blow it out, then I flipped the pancakes. Maybe I should have started to panic. Instead, I stared down at the half-done pancakes, touched one with the tips of my fingers. It was warm, springy, real; I loved the shade of brown pancakes got when they were done just right. There was nothing else like that color. That was something Mama had always said: what she liked best was anything there was nothing else like.

Again: "I want you to know I’m right here." Her words floated like dandelion seeds, breathy, shadowy whispers—nothing like the way she had talked when she was alive, loud and too fast, so I always felt a sentence behind, my ears straining to catch up, not wanting to miss a word she said.

This was crazy. I yanked my germy hand off the pancake, cleared my throat. "Okay." My voice felt too big in the kitchen. Maybe this was a dream—though the smell of pancakes, the rising steam, the flour splotches on the counter all seemed real enough. I poked the spatula under the edge of one pancake—done—then carefully stacked the pancakes on a plate, draped them with a tea towel, popped the plate into the barely-warm oven.

"Aunt Aggy likes bacon at breakfast," she said.

"I know," I snapped. But I’d forgotten about the bacon. Wasn’t it enough that I was making pancakes the first Sunday after my mother died? She had always made pancakes on Sunday morning, so here I was. I banged shut the oven door with one foot then started to cry. My eyes were puffy and sore from nearly a week’s worth of crying, and my nose was rubbed raw, so I tried to stop, lifting my elbow to my face so I could muffle the sobs and blow my nose into the sleeve of my brother’s old Vikings sweatshirt. I had no pride about that sort of thing anymore. Last night at supper, I’d used the corner of our red-checked kitchen tablecloth after my paper napkin had soaked through into damp shreds.

"Oh, dear." And then she was gone. But how could she be gone if she wasn’t really there? It made no sense, like that question about the tree falling in the forest making no sound.

I smeared more tears on my sleeve, ladled batter onto the skillet, waited for the bubbles to pop, a trick Mama had told me. She knew a ton of secrets so her cookies came out perfect and the hash browns never burned. She was such a good cook she sold wedding cakes to practically every bride in town. None of us needed to learn a thing about cooking because Mama did it all. But now and then I’d help with pancakes. She hardly slept, not like a normal person anyway, and on Sunday mornings she was slow, sleepy, overflowing with yawns and murmurs. I could ask questions that sounded desperate any other time, like, Am I pretty? Who do you love best? Do blondes really have more fun like the TV commercial says? She’d ask me questions, too, not what other mothers asked, like why was I flunking chemistry, and not what adults asked each other, dull questions about Nixon and Watergate, but what did I think was really at the center of the earth and why couldn’t it be a gigantic diamond instead of boring molten lava; or how come no one made movies about people living in Iowa like us, and wouldn’t a movie about us be interesting, and who would I want to play her and who me and who my brother and who Aunt Aggy?  Sunday morning was my favorite time with Mama, the slow swirl of her questions coaxing out my own, worth getting up early for.

Plus now I could make pancakes that even my brother Will couldn’t tell from hers.

The kitchen door swung open, and Aunt Aggy walked in. She was my mother’s aunt, and though technically Mama had inherited this house from my grandmother, Aunt Aggy came along with it, like the brown plaid couch, the dinged-up kitchen table, and the rest of the furniture. She’d lived here when Mama was growing up and had never left. She was tall and thin and when she walked or sat, she leaned forward so much you could almost hold a protractor to her and say, "Eighty degrees." Will and I thought it was strange that Aunt Aggy had never been married even though she was already fifty-two, but Mama had said, "Not everyone fits into a happily ever after life." Aunt Aggy claimed she’d broken off six engagements "with the rings to prove it," not that I’d ever seen them.

"Alice," she said, surprised. She tightened the belt of her robe. "What are you doing?"

"Making pancakes for breakfast," I said.

"It’s Sunday?" She looked at her wrist, as if she’d find a calendar there when she didn’t even wear a watch. She stared for as long as it took me to flip the pancakes. Then she glanced at the clock on the wall. "Seven-ten," she said.

"Did you get any sleep?" I asked.

"No, thanks," she said. "Orange juice for me."

"I said, did you get any sleep?"

But she walked across the room and poked her head out the side screen door. A spring breeze whisked in, tickled my ankles. A cardinal trilled, the only birdcall I knew. "Beautiful day," she said. "There should be lightning and thunder. Tornadoes, floods, blizzards. A plague of locusts."

April in Iowa. It could happen. Anything could happen. Your mother could die just like that in April in Iowa.

Still looking outside, Aunt Aggy shouted, "How dare you mock me?" and strode out to the backyard, letting the screen door bang behind her. How secretly satisfying it must be to yell at the weather. But I’d never been dramatic like Aunt Aggy.

I added this batch of pancakes to the stack in the oven and ladled more batter. Through the window above the sink I watched Aunt Aggy stalk to the apple tree then back to the house, walking carefully as if she were counting her steps. Back and forth between the apple tree and the house she went, as I made pancakes, mixing up another bowl of batter, cramming three or four plates in the oven, each with a tower of pancakes so high they started to lean and tumble off. I liked watching those bubbles; I liked that there was one thing I knew how to do perfectly.

The bubbles had popped on my last batch when Aunt Aggy shrieked, "Come quick!" and I ran outside barefoot, spatula in my hand. She was crouched under the apple tree, staring at the ground.

"What?" The grass was damp, and last fall’s dry twigs cracked and broke as I tried to hurry in spite of my tender bare feet.

"Baby bird," she said.

I immediately slowed. How many baby birds had fallen out of how many nests and how many times had I tried to keep them alive in a shoebox under a light bulb? How many of those birds had been buried in a corner of the yard, their graves marked with tiny stick crosses that got run over by the lawn-mower? How many had been dropped in garbage cans with a sad thought? And, finally, how many had been left to die under whatever tree they’d fallen from? "Survival of the fittest," Will always said. Even Mama had told me not to feel bad that I couldn’t do anything, though she came to every bird funeral I had.

"I need a shoebox." Aunt Aggy started yanking thin blades of grass by the roots, making a little pile, then raked up dry leaves with her fingers. "We’ll make a nest and dig worms."

I reached where she knelt in the grass. The bird had no feathers: blotch-grey and quivering, its lungs pulsing impossibly fast, bulging eyes fused shut. "That bird’s going to die," I said.

"A robin," she said. "Or sparrow. Let’s name her Clementine. Clem if she’s a he."

Tears pushed behind my eyes. "Please don’t do this."

"Nothing should die nameless." Aunt Aggy picked up the bird in one hand. It let out a thin squeak. She flicked off a couple ants with her pinky.

What would Dr. Spock say about this? He wasn’t an authority on adults, but right now his book was all I had. Aunt Aggy had always been threatening to fall apart, constantly promising, "This time I mean it, I’m really going to fall apart." So we stayed ready, expecting a big bang— a noisy, messy, interesting thing with yelling and hyperventilating and maybe even fainting. I never thought falling apart would be like this, that she’d simply dissolve.

"That bird is going to die," I said, sharpening my voice. But what was the point? Aunt Aggy was Aunt Aggy, as Mama would say when I complained about how strange she was.

She hurried past me, into the house. I stood under the apple tree, staring up at the blue sky. This day couldn’t be prettier; there couldn’t be more birds twittering, the fresh, new grass couldn’t feel fresher or tickle my bare feet more. It was easy to hate a day like this.

I went back into the kitchen, but Aunt Aggy wasn’t there. I couldn’t believe how many pancakes I had made, several stacks keeping warm in the oven and three plates on the counter, each piled with a leaning pancake tower on the verge of toppling over. No one could eat this many pancakes, not even my brother who’d once eaten seven hamburgers at a cookout. I reached for the flour bin, but it was empty, so I stared at all those pancakes. Thinking about eating them made my stomach go queasy.

"Freeze some," my mother’s voice said, still breathless, but as distinct as if she were standing next to me. "Slip wax paper between so they don’t stick."

It was what Mama did, freeze up leftovers and forget about them because she’d gone on to new recipes. Every three months or so, when the freezer got too packed to fit even an ice cube, I’d throw out the petrified remains of meals gone by. It was like a scrapbook—"Remember when Mama was into potato soup?" I’d say to Will, "remember Mama’s experiments with fresh dill?" Why not toss the pancakes in there—months from now it would be: Remember when our mother killed herself, leaving us all alone in the world, and how I thought everything would be fine if only I made enough pancakes?

I pulled plates out of the oven, lined them up with the others on the counter, forming a little wall. Oh, brother. I yanked the tea towel off one plate, started wrapping pancakes in wax paper. Maybe I was the one going crazy—I mean, it was one thing to try to save a baby bird or to throw a baseball at a pitching net the way Will did all day yesterday. But this? Hearing your dead mother’s voice seemed to me a whole different kind of crazy.

My mother laughed, and it was her laugh, all right—sort of silvery, like ice clinking a cold glass. "Don’t worry," she said. "You’re not crazy."

Like hearing her say that would make me feel less worried or less crazy.

Aunt Aggy’s footsteps thumped down the stairs. "Found a shoebox!" She dashed past me, pushing the door open with her hip, ran to the tree, box in one hand, bird in the other. I watched her pile grass and dead leaves into the shoebox. Could a day already feel too long this early in the morning?

---

Home
Resources for A Year and a Day
Reading Guide for A Year and a Day
Pears on a Willow Tree