8. Lillian Gish

My brother and I knew our mother was a little weird. Other mothers were always doing something else when you wanted them to look at something cool you’d found; other mothers were always yelling at our friends to clean up the toys from the backyard or how could you have gotten those clothes so dirty so quickly? Our mother did most of the same stuff the other mothers did, she cleaned the house and packed our lunches for school and made dinner for us and then heated it up when our father came home, but we never felt like these were the most important things for her. She rarely yelled at us, and would stop whatever she was doing if we asked. If we wanted her to come out in the woods to look at a cool patch of mushrooms she’d do it, if we wanted to tell her a long story of how a teacher treated one us unfairly, she’d listen and take our side. If we wanted to make a castle out of cardboard in the room next to the garage we used for storage, spray painting the pieces gray and fitting them with glue, creating a drawbridge with twine and using a kiddie pool filled with water as the moat—she was into that, too.

Our mother didn’t hang out much with the other mothers, which my brother and I suspected was one of the reasons she hadn’t picked up their bad habits. She didn’t drive, and so had no choice but to be around the house most of the time. We also figured that was one of the reasons she liked to hang out with us, because she was bored. But we also felt like she’d probably want to hang out with us anyway.

Then this one summer my mother made a friend. Her name was Lillian, and my mother met her at church. As a family, we went to church only at Christmas and Easter, but occasionally my mother would wake up on a Sunday morning and decide to go by herself. She would make my father drive her; my brother and I would have to come along for the ride. Sometimes my father took us out to breakfast while we waited.  I think my mother would have said yes if any of us had asked to go with her, but we never did, and she seemed all right with that, too.

Lillian called a few days after one of these Sundays and asked my mother if she wanted to go to a pool where Lillian had a summer membership. My mother was excited when she told us about it. “It sounds like a really nice place,” she said. “It won’t all that muck on the bottom like that stinky Round Lake.”

We thought my mother liked Round Lake, where we went sometimes on weekends with my father, but my brother and I were open to something new. It had been a hot July.

Lillian was a talker. She drove over to pick us up—she not only knew how to drive, but had a car during work hours, which impressed me—and from the time we got into the car until we arrived at the pool, it seemed like there wasn’t a second of silence. It also seemed like my mother didn’t do anything but make sounds of agreement. I wasn’t listening closely, but from what I picked up Lillian was just talking about the usual stuff: how her lawn was dying from the heat, how difficult her husband’s job was. The plot of some police show she’d watched on TV the night before.

In the back seat with us was Lillian’s son, whose name was Alexander. He looked to be a few years older than us, maybe junior high. He was a little overweight and was dressed too nicely to go to a pool, in a shirt with buttons like you’d wear not just to school but to a special day at school where you had to look your best. He was the opposite of Lillian when it came to talking, gave us a halfhearted “Hello” but then didn’t say another word. He had a big stack of comic books in his lap, and he spent the ride over to the pool reading those. I could see they were mostly superhero comic books, Superman and Spiderman, which weren’t my favorite, but I did notice a Batman peeking out from the bottom of the pile. About halfway through the ride I asked if I could look at it.

“No, you’ll bend the pages,” Alexander said.

“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t even read it. I just want to look at the cover.”

“I don’t think so…” Alexander said, which made me want to reach out and grab it from him, but then Lillian chimed in. “Alexander is very particular about his comics!” she said, as though that explained everything.
I let it go. How she’d managed to hear what was going on in the backseat, given her own constant talk, I wasn’t sure.

The pool was great. The water was clean and warm, not too much chlorine, and there was an excellent diving board, and the lifeguard didn’t care if my brother and I went into the deep end. We’d been at a motel pool one time where kids weren’t allowed over the 3 feet mark.

Lillian and my mother sat on lawn chairs in the shade. Every time I glanced over there, Lillian was still talking. Lance never went in, just sat near the mothers and read his comic books.

“So, that was fun, wasn’t it?” my mother asked when we got home.

“Sure, it was good,” my brother and I said, which seemed to make my mother happy.

Lillian started calling my mother almost every day. As with the day at the pool, my mother mostly listened during these calls, although I noticed there were a few times she managed to wait Lillian out and tell a story of her own. We also started going to the pool at least a couple of times a week. It had been fun as a one-time thing, but neither my brother nor I were wild about doing it so often, especially because it was usually a full-day event that cut into the time we could spend with our friends around the block. We even had to go on a few outings with Lillian and Alexander to historical spots around where we lived, which I knew must have been my mother’s doing. She was constantly trying to get my father to drive her to these places.

No matter where we went, Alexander brought along his stack of comic books. And he never wore a t-shirt, only those shirts with buttons.

My brother and I fought back the only way we could: by complaining and making fun of Lillian and Alexander. “I don’t want to go to the pool, it’s boring,

 I would say. “I don’t know anybody there but Jeffrey and he’s boring.” Then Jeffrey would hit me, and I’d hit him back, and my mother would say “Stop hitting” but we still had to go to the pool. My brother and I started calling Lillian “Lillian Gish.” I didn’t even know who Lillian Gish was, I must have heard it on television, but it sounded funny to us. “Look, it’s nine a.m. and Lillian Gish hasn’t called, I hope nothing’s wrong!” I’d say with fake concern. My brother made up a song that rhymed “Lillian Gish” with “talks like a fish,” which didn’t make any sense but at least got at the talking part.

My mother, true to form of being a little weird, didn’t yell at us or tell us to shut up when we acted like this. She’d  just sigh and say “Chris.” Occasionally she’d go as far as to say, “That isn’t very nice.”

This went on for about 6 weeks or so, and then the phone calls ended. Just stopped dead. When I said things like, “Shouldn’t you be talking to Lillian Gish?” my mother smiled distantly. On a really hot day in August we even asked her to give old Lillian a call and ask if we could go to the pool, but my mother shook her head no.

One day toward the end of the summer when my mother and I were taking a walk around the block—my brother was over at the Deabold’s house for the afternoon—I finally asked outright. “So did you and Lillian Gish have a fight?”

“No,” she said. “Not exactly.”

“Why don’t you talk to her anymore then?”

“I talk to her.”

“You don’t. She hasn’t called in a while.”

My mother nodded, like she hadn’t noticed this. “She may have found someone else. Someone with kids for Alexander.”

“Kids for Alexander?”

“She said she didn’t think you and Jeffrey were very friendly to him.”

“That’s not true! He was the one who wasn’t friendly! He wouldn’t even let me look at one of his comic books!”

“You’re right,” my mother said, but she sounded sad when she said it.

I knew Lillian Gish must have been making an excuse. She just didn’t want to be friends with my mother anymore. I could tell from my mother’s voice that my mother knew this too. It surprised me adults would be so mean. Mostly, though, I was glad my brother and I had our mother back to ourselves again.

7. Cattails

We couldn’t believe this pond had been there the whole time we’d lived on the block, just through the vacant lot next to the Noble’s house. We always thought it was a vacant lot that led nowhere, the end of the world. But no: someone—and no one even know who it was, probably Philip Reich, he was the most adventurous of us, the most willing to get in trouble—found out that if you walked through those weeds, walked a long way, a mile or more, you’d end up on a street called Jean Drive, which was an older road with older houses, not a development like ours, and then if you walked a little way on Jean Drive you’d come to the Little Pond.

I don’t know who started calling it the Little Pond, either. 

You could fish there. You could catch frogs. You could skip stones. If you threw a good, flat one, you could make the stone skip all the way to the other side.

Best of all, there were these plants none of us had ever seen before. They grew right in the water. It was hard to get to them without getting your sneakers soaked, but they were worth it. They were brown, capsule-shaped, and had some kind of fur around them. You could rub them along your hands or face, they were that soft. And if you opened them up, they were full of white seeds—again, soft, like fur.

We met at the Little Pond every day after school. Even just to stare out over the water, to think that someplace like this existed for all the years we’d lived on the block and none of us had ever had discovered it before:  it was amazing to us. We talked about how in the winter, when it iced over, we’d set up nets, have ice hockey games. None of us had skates. We’d ask for them for Christmas. It would be easy to learn, at such a cool place as this.

I decided one day to bring some of the brown capsule plants home. I had this idea of growing them myself, in our backyard. Every time I looked out my window, I’d see them, and think of the Little Pond.

I knew the plants needed a lot of water, so I put them behind our willow tree where sometimes after a lot of rain the sewage flooded up from under the ground. I tore some of them apart, to free the seeds, but some I just buried halfway in the ground.

My father must have spotted them when he was mowing the lawn. “Hey, I noticed your little garden out there,” he said to me.

I worried he would make me pull them out. “It’s way in the back,” I said. “They don’t grow very tall. They’re called fur bombs.”

He smiled. “It’s okay. I don’t think they’re going to grow anyway. But you know what they’re really called, right?”

I nodded my head no.

“Cattails. We had some in a park in my neighborhood. I remember there was this one kid, I remember he used to douse them with gasoline and light them up like torches. Philly Lamarca, that was his name.”

Usually I liked listening to my father’s stories of when he was a kid: the other kids in his neighborhood, the stickball games they played, the sports teams he followed. He was a good storyteller.

“Where did you even find them?” he asked, but I’d already turned away. I was angry. Not that he’d found my garden. But that he knew these plants, which were so strange and mysterious to me, just like the Little Pond itself, that he already had his own story about them.

You don’t get to get to everything first, I was thinking. You don’t get to name everything for me.