It
takes time to guide her up the sidewalk and to negotiate the two porch steps to
get her into the house. Outside, the day
is overcast and spitting snow. Inside,
the kitchen is dark. I am the only one
of the four children who brings Mom home, and I don’t know why I need to sit at
the table where I fade into the shadows.
I must be acting on a very old impulse to restore an essential
configuration of home: two women talking
at a kitchen table. She and her mother
sat in a bright breakfast room, drinking endless cups of tea while yellow
grosbeaks pecked at seeds on a platform window feeder in February
sunshine. Jersey was always warm and
bright this time of year when the wood of the blueberry bushes flushes red (a French house roof red) that stands out against the grays and browns of winter, and the farmers know that it is time to prune. Mom and her sister, Ruthellen, would sit
together right here, at this same table, in the blue cape cod at 22 Sylvan Avenue,
sipping cans of beer, puffing Kools, while they unwrapped their antique finds,
looked up prices, and made lists of guys they had kissed. I was there, too, present in the shadows,
listening and watching. I cannot give
that up—not yet anyway.
Mom
plops into her chair and raises her head to peer at things around her, finds an
ashtray and locates her pack of cigarettes.
We settle in to wait for the “lamp guy.”
She’d dropped off old kerosene lamps at a local antique store, The Manor, for him to fix back in September,
and we’d had a terrible time pinning him down to a pick-up time. Bit by a tick, he'd been in and out of the hospital for complications from lyme disease. He was to have rewired three Rayo lamps (one
for each daughter) as well as Mom’s brass store lamp that hung for years over
the kitchen table. When the hanging lamp
broke, my brother replaced it with what to Mom’s taste was a very ugly modern
fixture. The so-called “lamp guy,” whose
name is Jason, was supposed to arrive between 12-1, but the knock at the door
turns out to be Dick Sullivan from two houses away. He is a wiry birdlike upstate guy who worked
for the telephone company, bearing four cartons of Kool cigarettes that he buys
cheaper in New Hampshire. As I count out
the $268 dollars, I have to wonder how Mom will ever smoke her way through all
these packs when her local kids don’t support her habit since it complicates
their lives and the routines of the staff at the assisted living “home.” I stir clam chowder in a pot on the stove and
listen with half an ear to Dick move fluidly from memories of the cabin at Glen
Lake—“the one with the carport” (the same cabin where we lived until I was four
years old!)—to the difficulties of pumping out Paul Cedarstrom’s flooded cellar
while my old ninth grade English teacher is vacationing in Florida. Dick’s a good neighbor, and I like his blue
eyes and bushy eyebrows, but I’m hungry.
After two hours of unrelenting storytelling, the good neighbor heads
out, and Mom and I scarf down small bowls of soup. It’s all the food we have for the time being.
Two
hours late, Jason arrives bearing lamps.
He’s bearded and soft-voiced and, for all I know, may be a genie just
out of one of the lamps he’s polished to perfection. “Oh, don’t they look beautiful?” my mother
asks rhetorically, and all the frustration of waiting five months for them
melts away. Jason sets to work,
patiently re-threading three sets of brass chains through the spaces in the ring
that holds in balanced suspension the lamp fixture and counter-weight fitted
inside a cup of brass worked to look like a big pine cone.
There is something beautiful about a young
guy who has taken time to learn how to care for and restore such delicate old
lights. I say something like that and he
replies, “I just love to find old things and bring them back to life.” As he works he tells us about his parents’
house in Hartford where he has hundreds of oil lamps hanging—some so low you
have to watch your head or bump into them. But
his special love is something called “Vaseline glass.” It is handmade glass of a yellow-green
color—some pieces are mixed with cranberry—that was made with traces of uranium
before the element was needed for the cold war in weapon production. “It has lost popularity,” says our
lamplighter. His theory is that Vaseline
glass looked better in an era when people lit houses with candles because then
it really glows in the semi-darkness. He
pulls out his phone and shows me pictures of vases made in imitation of
jack-in-the pulpits, tree trunks with twigs, and flowers with all manner of
vines and tendrils, and it’s no wonder with that spring green color and the
inner glow that signifies life. Jason
tells Mom and I that he grew up in Fort Edward, and he talks about missing the
trails he rode bikes on when he was a kid (all gone) and the old houses he
remembers on Eddy Street (gone, too). I
used to ride with Mom sometimes when she’d take Pop to work, and I remember
Eddy Street as the short road that led to the mysterious gates of the paper
mill beyond which I never got to go. His
father, like mine, worked at Scott Paper, but he was a jack of all trades and
taught his son the mysteries of electricity, of wires crossing wires so that
the current of flows uninterrupted, until it POPs. Mom and I jump as something causes the
hanging lamp to short out. We climb over piles of junk in the cellar to get to the fuse box, and Jason finds parts of
old lamps—“this looks like so much fun!" He offers to "help" clean out the cellar in the spring but promises, short-term, to "come back tomorrow" with a bolt of the proper length and an antique medallion that matches the fixture better. We offer him a chocolate brownie for the road, but he’s on his way
through Hudson Falls to pick up Chinese take-out on the way back out to the wide open spaces of Argyle, Hartford, and his little kingdom.
When
he leaves, I’m dreaming of some paradise where houseplants winter in
greenhouses, sheep wander the wan brown slopes, and pigs fatten in warm
barns. But mostly I’m thinking about the
uranium glass—eyes behind clouded cataracts—moving and glowing in the dark. Until Jason returns to finish the job, Mom
and I have to do without overhead light in the kitchen. I prepare to bake a fish dinner in the
gloaming. Peggy Tulley comes to the door
with an amber ashtray that Ruthellen mailed to her house, “big enough to hold
lots of butts” reads the pink sticky note on the rim of it. Outside it’s dark ocean blue over the
mountain and Peg steps inside our house where she hasn't been for decades
since the bridge parties of the olden days.
Later on she says on the phone, “it’s sad that she has lived like that,”
and I imagine that Peg is referring to the clutter, the pall of smoke, and the
general darkness. I think that if only I
had lit the two candles on the table, then Peg might have noticed the little
lamp on the threshold of stove room’s deeper darkness. “It was probably meant to light up a train car or a ship,”
Jason observed, and I feel the rocking of rail car or boat as the name "Seashore Line" pops into my head: it's the railroad that connected Philadelphia and Atlantic City. In candlelight, maybe Peg would have seen the
Bartlett print of the rickety house and bridge over the falls at Glens Falls or the large round Indian basket with the wooden handle resting on Uncle
Philip’s old high chair. Jason noticed
all these things, and I saw how they glowed. Even without candlelight, there had been
something iridescent about the memories retrieved and moments restored that
afternoon in the synaptic space between mother and daughter just sitting in the
dark with the lamp guy working somewhere over our heads in the comforting configuration of home.
