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The Initiation
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Long ago in the summer when I was ten, something terrible happened to Mary Ann Copper’s mother. It was a hot, sticky, Philadelphia summer, the kind that in the 18th century had sent everyone scurrying to high ground to escape the yellow fever that festered in the swamps along the river.
Air conditioners were not yet a part of our lives and TV was only a sometime thing, an endless Saturday morning re-play of voiceless black cats scampering like cockroaches across the screen. It was a still time, a quieter time before the world went into fast forward and nothing disturbed the dull, steady rhythm of our lives. It was 1952 and we still had air-raid drills and huddled in the halls because we were at war with North Korea. Chicken wire covered our classroom windows and fear was everywhere like dust. But that fear had been far away in another world and had no concrete shape or form. This fear was different. When Mary Ann Copper’s mother went away, she left terror behind her, hard and cold as a penny on a plate. When Mary Ann Copper’s mother opened the door and walked down the street into oblivion, she changed our lives forever. Before, our lives had been simple, with smooth rounded edges and now there was a sharp corner, where a small piece had been ripped out, leaving a ragged scar. It was as if the moon had been suddenly lifted out of the sky like a soft yolk removed with a silver spoon, creating a small black hole. When Mary Ann Copper’s mother abandoned her, she somehow abandoned us all. Never again would we return from school and turn the knobs of our doors with confidence. Now there would always be a sharp little frisson of fear. The news had spread slowly, moving from house to house like a line of water sluggishly snaking down a wall. Then it began to swell, sweet and sticky like yeast bread rising. The day began to darken. The police cars came, garish as parrots in their red enamel skins. Pertinent questions were asked and answered. Neighbors swarmed on their porches like bees. There was a soft steady buzz in the air. We learned that she had been gone for several days but they had waited, of course, certain that it had all been some awful mistake, certain that she had merely gone out for a loaf of bread and lost her memory on the way or certain that she had left on a sudden impulse to visit a relative or a friend and the note she had left behind had simply fluttered unnoticed to the floor. She had taken no clothes, withdrawn no money from the bank. It was as if she had taken one giant step too many and had stepped off the edge of the earth. It was as if the very sky had swallowed her, had erased her with a cumulus brush, as if she had merely stepped outside for a moment to mail a letter and had mailed herself out of our lives instead. We sat next to Mary Ann Copper on her steps, our bodies bookending her in her grief. She sat there dressed in her very best dress, the one she always wore to parties that marked this day as special. She just sat there as if waiting for a gift and we all sat beside her like a row of blackbirds perched on a rope. We sat next to her but not quite touching her, as if we were afraid that her bad luck might somehow rub off on us as well, putting our own mothers at risk. We began to feel a slender crevice opening between Mary Ann Copper’s life and our own. She had taken on a slightly different color, as if she had received an extra brush stroke of a more ominous hue. We all had mothers and Mary Ann Copper did not. We began to wonder if the hard cold porcelain hand that had snatched away Mary Ann Copper’s mother was poised above our mothers as well. Mary Ann Copper’s mother was named Rose. She had a large black mole on her check just like Elizabeth Taylor. She wore gold wire-rimmed glasses and her patent-leather slick hair was pulled back firmly in a bun. She was a sensible person, a measured person, not at all the sort of person to go missing without a trace. Mary Ann Copper’s mother had always made her special lunches and we hated her as we ate our dry bologna sandwiches, bologna on both sides if we were lucky, some sort of mystery meat on the other side if we were not. We had apples and bananas for dessert. But Mary Ann Copper had Tasty Kakes and she always had a little bag of chips. Both sides of her sandwiches always matched. She had egg salad or chicken and always on a fresh Italian roll. We had only white bread, the kind that hangs like stalactites from the roof of your mouth. This set Mary Ann Copper’s mother apart from our own mothers and suggested an extra dimension, a deeper untapped layer where fitful creative fires stirred. There was clearly an extra level to her life that our own unimaginative mothers lacked and we wondered was it this mysterious extra dimension that had caused her to one day just walk out of her life and disappear? Where did she go, we often wondered, on that day she dissolved without a trace, slipping out of her life like a snake shedding its old skin and taking on something shiny and new? Where did she go we wondered that day she walked down our street one last time, turned the corner and never once looked back? In September when we went back to school, we prayed aloud each day for the safe return of Mary Ann Copper’s mother but the weeks quickly turned to months and she slipped into the past tense and we began to pray for other things as she drifted farther and farther from the center of our lives. We noticed that Mary Ann Copper’s lunches were different as if slapped together quickly by a hard uncaring hand. Her sandwiches were now only lunch meat and pasty American cheese and no longer any desserts to envy and no small plastic bags of chips. After a while, no one sat next to Mary Ann Copper in the lunchroom where she sat alone every day at the end of a long table by the window as the sun polished her lunch with light. She had become special, different somehow, like the three children of Fatima who had seen the Virgin and were separated from us all by grace. She WAS different. We all had mothers and Mary Ann Copper did not and we wondered what terrible thing she had done to make her mother close the door and leave forever to live her life in another place. It was as if we all feared that if we sat too close to her whatever evil was in her would pass through her skin into ours like a poisoned dart and then, through us, into our own mothers and drive them out of our houses to pour down the steps like lemmings moving doggedly to the sea. We never forgot that summer when the terrible thing that altered Mary Ann Copper’s life changed our own lives forever as well. We saw for the first time that the world was a dark and treacherous place tattooed with secrets, where nothing at all was certain and everything could change with the simple closing of a door. We knew that what had happened to Mary Ann Copper could happen to any of us as well and we never viewed our mothers in quite the same way as we had viewed them before that terrible day, the day Mary Ann Copper’s mother closed the door and went away. |
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