Ch 4: Whisperings
Mom reveals some things about my late sister, Marlee, while inadvertently revealing more about the web of secrets held in my family.
“Marlee would be twenty-eight today,” Mom murmured. She and I were the only ones home so I figured she was either talking to me or to herself. I didn’t look up from my book. I was curled up in Dad’s big, comfy chair and didn’t want to be disturbed. Instead, I said, “Wow,” and kept on reading. I was in the middle of The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, the third book in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators’ series. Mom loved Hitchcock movies and, at age 10, I loved these books.
In this story, Hitchcock asks the boys, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob, to visit a professor friend of his who has a mummy who whispers to him in some mysterious language. The boys’ job is to figure out what the mummy is saying and why he is saying it. When Mom’s mutterings interrupted me, I had just reached an exciting part where Jupiter disguises himself as the professor and gets the mummy to whisper to him. For a minute, when Mom spoke, I thought it was the mummy whispering.
“Maybe she’d be going for a horseback ride today to celebrate her birthday. She loved horses.” She kept talking, a little louder this time.
The horses caught my attention. I finally looked up and saw Mom standing at the kitchen counter. She was staring out the picture window, the one that offered views of thunderstorms crossing the ravine and descending on our house. Northwest Arkansas, the place we had moved a couple years earlier from Denver so Dad could work at the Daisy Manufacturing Company headquarters, was known for its thunderstorms. You could see them coming long before they arrived.
Jarrett and I used to run from one side of the house to the other—from one picture window to the other—to track a storm’s path. “It’s raining in the back of the house! Is it raining in front?”
“Not raining in front yet!” the other would yell back.
We’d soon correct ourselves, as if the storm heard us and wanted to prove us wrong. “Oh, here it comes!”
And when the rain finally engulfed the entire house, the accompanying lightning and thunder could be vicious.
One time, lightening came through the TV and burned the floor where milliseconds before Jarrett had been lying watching a TV show. Fortunately, the electrical energy that preceded the lightning strike prompted him to pop up and run to the back of the house, so he didn’t get burned. We only grasped the danger when we replaced the carpet a short time later and discovered the burned floor.
Today felt like a storm was coming.
Mom’s hand clutched a sponge, her arm frozen to the counter. I glanced up to see if she was crying, but I didn’t see any tears. No surprise there. Mom didn’t cry. Any tears she had stayed locked inside her. Still, I could tell she wanted me to listen to her. I begrudgingly put the mystery down and refocused my attention on another mystery, the story of my sister.
I uncoiled my legs and slipped from the chair so I could lean on the bar that separated the kitchen from the family room—and me from Mom. My book would have to wait. “I wish she could have taught me how to ride,” I pined. “I woulda liked that.”
I never knew my sister, Marlee. She died of polio six years before I was born when she was only eleven, a year older than I was then. She was Mom and Bob’s first child, born in Michigan in 1939, in the waning months of the Great Depression. I don’t know when I first learned about Marlee. There must have been a time when Mom told me about her for the first time, a time when I discovered I was not Mom’s only daughter, when I learned I was her third child, instead of the younger sister of my first-born brother. But I don’t remember when that was.
I had always wondered what it would be like to have a big sister who could have taught me to ride a real horse. My brother didn’t want his little sister hanging around anymore. I figured it might be different with a big sister, even one eighteen years older. Since Mom had already interrupted my reading, I decided to take advantage of this rare opportunity to see if I could find out more about my sister.
“What else did Marlee like, Mom?”
Mom looked at me -- a weird smile grew on her face, “She was quiet and liked to curl up with a book, just like you’re doing. But she loved her friends, too. She and Marcia loved to go horseback riding and playing at the beach. Each summer, when we’d go to the beach in Ludington, they’d build big sandcastles.” Mom gestured as if the sandcastles were right in front of us. I could almost see them. “And the two of them could swing for hours.”
I didn’t really like swinging, but maybe if I had a big sister, I would have liked it better. As she described the swing hanging from the old apple tree in the back of their house, Mom started to rock on her feet, like she was swinging right there with her. For a moment, I was jealous—I didn’t remember Mom ever pushing me on a swing.
Then, as quickly as she started, Mom stopped rocking. She glared at me as if I had grabbed the rope holding her imaginary swing. I didn’t know what to do so I slunk back to dad’s chair and picked up my book. I didn’t feel much like reading anymore, though. Instead, I pretended to read to give Mom her privacy while I thought about how, like the three investigators, I had a mystery to solve, a mystery Mom kept locked inside her. I had a feeling that if I knew what it was, I would find out more about Mom and more about me and my red hair. I wished I had the three investigators to help me unravel it. Better yet, I wished that, like the mummy in my book, my sister would whisper to me in a language I could understand and tell me everything she knew about our mom.
A couple years later, Mom told me something that helped me understand her reticence to talk about Marlee. We were in Mom and Dad’s bedroom looking through old photographs we kept in a big built-in drawer behind the door. The vertical wooden blinds on the windows made an unsettling noise as the air conditioner came on. The blinds were part way open, allowing just a sliver of light into the room, the way secrets work in my family.
“Your dad made me throw away all the pictures I had of Marlee and Bob,” she said, as she shuffled through a stack of photos of Jarrett and me when we were little.
“He what?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I heard her right.
“He wanted to be your only dad so badly. He didn’t want any reminders around of what it was like before him,” she replied, her voice trailed off at the end of the sentence, and I had to strain to listen.
“So, you don’t have any pictures of Marlee?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That’s why I’ve never seen a picture of my father, Bob. And why I’d never seen one of my sister.
Her eyes shifted down and then around. “I kept one,” she said, her voice sounding like she was confessing a sin in a confessional booth.
Although we were alone in the house, she looked around to make sure no one else could see her. She walked over to her dresser and eased open the middle drawer, the one where she kept her sweaters. The smell of a lavender sachet wafted up – Mom put them in my drawers too. I usually made a scene about them when she did it, but I kind of liked the smell – I just didn’t want her to know I liked something so feminine.
She dug down into the drawer, underneath the sweaters, and pulled out a weathered photograph. “This one is from right before she got sick,” she said. I could see Mom’s eyes redden, and the corners of her eyes contract as if they might erupt at any minute. That was the closest I had ever seen her come to crying. She handed the photo to me like it was one of those Catholic relics Dad kept in his dresser – a relic of the true cross or of a piece of some saint’s bone.
The grainy photograph showed a young girl who looked to be about ten. She sat on a horse, in a Western saddle, her back straight, her hands loosely holding the reins, which rested comfortably on the saddle horn. She wore a long-sleeved plaid shirt and pants that in my era would have been jeans. Her slender legs and seat relaxed into the saddle, exuding experience and confidence. Her shoulder-length hair was dark and wavy, like my mother’s.
From the look in the girl’s eyes, I could almost hear her say, “Mom, hurry up and take the picture. I wanna ride.”
As I studied it, I wished I could be that comfortable on a horse.
Mom said, “She always loved horses.” That’s one of the few things I already knew about Marlee. “This picture is right before she got sick,” she repeated, and then she sat down on the bed, her shoulders slumped and her eyes closed.
I tried to see myself in this girl, my sister – my much older sister, though she was younger than I was then. It was like the picture froze her in time. Marlee, on her beautiful horse, with her dark-colored hair. Because it was a black and white photo, I couldn’t tell the exact color, but I knew it didn’t look like mine. Should I ask Mom about my red hair?
“I wished I’d known her,” I said when I handed it back to her. She pressed the photo to her heart, then kissed it, and slid it back into the bottom of the dresser drawer.
It wasn’t the right time to ask.
She glided the drawer shut with both hands, so it didn’t make a sound. I wondered how many times she had opened and closed that drawer that way so she could look at her daughter’s picture without one of us asking her what she was doing.
“I’m going to my room now,” I announced, and before she turned around, I slipped out of their room and into mine. I eased the door shut as quietly as she had closed the dresser drawer and took a deep breath. I walked over to the record player and put on Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” I liked bluesy and depressing songs, and this one seemed appropriate for my mood.
I stood there and listened to the music for a minute and then collapsed on my bed. I grabbed my “Make Love Not War” pillow, a purchase from a headshop near the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville I recently snuck into with a friend. It was the ‘60s after all. In opposition to the sentiment expressed there, I gave the pillow a punch. How could he have asked her to throw away pictures of her daughter? What’s the matter with him? My head felt like it was on fire. I punched the pillow again.
They were pictures of my sister and my father. Though my mother would never see the pictures again, I would never see them at all. In that moment, I felt Marlee’s and Bob’s loss in a way I’d never experienced before. I longed to learn their stories and to understand how they intersected with mine. But Dad had ripped their lives from the pages of our family’s history and let them be blown away like leaves in a thunderstorm. Did he do it so I couldn’t discover the truth, whatever that might be? And if so, what did he, did they, not want me to know?
This was the first time I remember feeling anger toward my father, and more than any other time in my life, I point to this moment as the time when I first recognized the destructive power of men’s control of women’s lives. Dad was not mean. He was just an ordinary man of his time. Mom complied with his demands because she understood that to be a requirement for their life together—for our life together. Mom complied because she had no other option.
It was in this discovery when secrets stopped feeling quite so harmless and the real questions began.
Mom never showed me the photo of Marlee again, and I never asked her to see it, although I would encounter it at another time, in another place. It was as if the photo and memories of Marlee were re-wrapped in a mummy waiting for someone to whisper their story to.
Read “Chapter 5: First Clues” coming on March 10, 2024.
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So poignant, Annette, and one of those pivotal moments we all have - I've got some moments like that where I remember exactly where I was standing and who I was with when I learned something unsettling or momentous.
Such a different kind of relationship in those years, where the men said something and the women generally did it. I felt the loss of those photographs, you wrote it so well.