 ITHIN
A FAMILY, some events that an outsider might consider important are allowed
to pass almost unnoticed and are soon forgotten; yet others, which seem
trivial to the world at large, may be elevated to positions of such eminence
that they acquire the status of milestones. In
my family, for example, no one remembers my birthday, but they all remember
the day my
mother tumbled from her lawn chair.
 In
the years that followed her tumble, if talk around the dinner table turned
to Mr. Beaker, a former neighbor, my mother would often ask, wistfully,
I thought, "Do you remember the night he threw his desk lamp through the
window? When was that?"
Someone
else, usually my grandmother, would answer, "Why, Ella, don't you remember?
It was the day you fell out of your lawn chair."
It
is comforting, when one feels a bit "lost," to be able to put one's feet
up, close one's eyes, and look back, as it were, along the road that one
followed from wherever one once was to wherever one may be now, to "retrace
one's steps," and find, along that roadside, familiar milestones. It is
certainly comforting for me; for if I am feeling a bit "lost," when I begin
such a backward ramble, I am often lost during it as well, wandering on
someone else's road, or backing out of a cul-de-sac, and it is always a
great relief to come upon one of these milestones, or, if you prefer, landmarks.
It is a particularly great relief if I stumble upon the milestone that
marks the day that, for the rest of my family, came to be known as "The
Day Ella Tumbled from Her Lawn Chair" and is, on the map of my childhood
memory, labeled "The Day I Was Chasing Kittens," for it is from that day
that I date all the rest.
However, I
began writing
"My Mother Takes a Tumble" not with the aim of commemorating that event
but to find a woman for Mr. Beaker.
When
I was a child on No Bridge Road, living with my parents in my grandparents'
house, Mr.
Beaker lived next door, alone. I knew very little about him, and as
far as I can recall I never set foot inside his house. He visited my grandparents
from time to time, and he always stayed just a little too long. He worked
for the Babbington Clam Council, writing advertisements. Later, I think,
he became president of the council; I'm not certain. He considered himself
a fine craftsman with an uncanny knack of echoing, in each of his advertisements,
the tone, style, and yearnings of potential clam consumers.
 Mr.
Beaker relished his work and labored at it longer and harder than was really
necessary, often working at home well into the night, when there were fewer
distractions and his vast unseen audience seemed to draw in around him,
like a group around a campfire, and lean forward, waiting for him to spin
a yarn about the succulent mollusk. Between his house and my grandparents'
grew a young oak that never fully lost its leaves until the very end of
winter; when Mr. Beaker was at work at night, when I was in my crib, the
light from his desk lamp would throw the shadows of its branches across
my crib, across my parents' bed, and onto the opposite wall, where a door
opened into a hall that led into the living room, where Gumma and Guppa
and my parents sat listening to the radio or talking, quietly and uneasily,
for living together was difficult for all of them.
Whenever
Mr. Beaker was visiting and the time had come for him to go home, his face
would grow long and dark, and he would begin praising my grandmother's
cooking and my mother's figure. "Dudley," my father would say after he
had left, "needs a woman."
Years
later, I was walking along one fall day and smelled the unmistakable odor
of burning leaves. It brought to mind, for reasons I will explain shortly,
the years I spent on No Bridge Road, and Mr. Beaker, and all the rest,
ending with my father's saying, "Dudley needs a woman." I realized that
my father had been right, and that Mr. Beaker had thrown his desk lamp
through the window that night because he was alone and hated it; so I
created Eliza
Foote, arranged a meeting, and let events take their natural course.
Some
readers will be interested in knowing the sources of one or two other fabricated
details.
My
grandfather, Guppa, is a Studebaker
salesman in "My Mother Takes a Tumble." In fact, he was not. Making him
a Studebaker salesman was, I admit, simply an easy way out of a difficult
situation. Let me explain.
The
smell of burning leaves made me recall my years on No Bridge Road because
it brought to mind quite clearly a fall ritual that began with the raking
and burning of leaves: as if in response to some silent bell, men up and
down No Bridge Road would rise from their breakfasts one fall Saturday,
pull on old sweaters, step outside with rakes in their hands, and begin
raking leaves into enormous piles on their lawns. Then the children of
the neighborhood would jump into these huge piles, run through them, and
scatter them. (At that time, any decent leaf pile came up to my waist,
and in some I could get buried up to my armpits, but today I am hard pressed
to accumulate a pile that reaches to my knees. Either there are fewer leaves
now than there were then, or the art of piling leaves has decayed.) The
men would rake the leaves into piles again and then begin carrying them
to the street. They would make a number of small piles in the street, in
the gutter, which was merely a shallow valley at the margin of the roadway,
not defined by a curbstone, and burn them, one pile at a time. Up and down
No Bridge Road, men would lean on rakes and watch their leaves burn.
The
burning of leaves was followed by the second part of the ritual: the crushing
of shells. Everyone on No Bridge Road had a clamshell driveway; many people
in Babbington still have clamshell driveways, but they are not so widely
favored now as they once were. They were cheap and serviceable, and required
little maintenance other than a yearly addition of new shells to replace
the bits of crushed shell that had been carried away by the wheels of cars
and bicycles or the soles of the mailman's, milkman's, and breadman's shoes
or washed into the gutter in rainstorms. The men would drag out burlap
sacks of clamshells that had accumulated since the last fall and dump them
onto their driveways. The children would pick through the shells and set
aside a few of the shapeliest, the most clamshell-like; these paragons
would be used for ashtrays or made into knickknacks. The others, the not-quite-right,
the deformed and broken, the men would spread up and down the driveways.
Then, and at last we near the point of this reminiscence, they would drive
their cars up and down the driveways to crush the shells.
So
vividly did the smell of leaf smoke return the memory of those fall days
to me that I could see all the men driving up and down their driveways
and hear the clamshells crushing under their wheels. Quite suddenly, I
realized something that had never struck me when I witnessed this scene
as a child. All the men were driving Studebakers. I looked more closely,
straining to see all the way to the corner. There was no doubt about it:
every car on No Bridge Road was a Studebaker. This put me into quite a
tizzy, because I knew that if I included this remarkable fact without explanation
the reader would regard it as gratuitously absurd. So, to make it plausible,
I made Guppa a Studebaker salesman, and a very good one, although in fact
he was a foreman in the culling section of the clam-packing plant.
In
the scene set in Whitey's barroom, I have repeated the word barroom
far too often, I know. I have no excuse; I repeated the word simply
because I enjoy coming upon it when I read, for I cannot help reading it,
no matter how strong the context, as the word my childhood chum Raskol
used to use to imitate the sound of a mighty explosion: "Boy! You should've
seen it when old Roundass's clamboat got hit by lightning. He's right in
the middle of the bay, minding his own business, taking a break to wipe
his sweaty brow, and thinking that maybe he'll eat a sandwich, when suddenly
there's a big flash of light, and then barroom!"
One
more point. In "My Mother Takes a Tumble," all the houses on No Bridge
Road are stucco. (That is, they are faced with stucco. Such houses are
in Babbington called simply "stucco" instead of "faced with stucco.") That
was not actually the case. All the houses on the north side of No
Bridge Road were stucco, but on the south side was a hodgepodge of small
vacation houses and shacks, unevenly spaced and poorly painted, with no
garages and, as I recall, no Studebakers, despite the efforts of my grandfather.
I omitted any mention of the differences between the two sides of the street
because I knew that if I mentioned the difference I would have to explain
it, since if I did not explain it, many readers would consider my not explaining
it significant, nodding knowingly and saying to themselves, sardonically,
as Porky White did when I tried it out on him, "I see what this is. It's
all class differences. Peter is born into the tight-assed and striving
lower middle class, a class that literally lives behind a thin and fragile
facade: stucco." He put his fork down and took a swallow of coffee. "You
know," he said, "the lower middle class is very interesting, if pitiable.
This facade they work so hard to erect and maintain is, well, it's like
the frosting on this cake." He poked with his fork at the slice of cake
I had given him. "It's pretty white frosting, but it has no real flavor;
it's just sweet. The good part of the cake, in fact the essence of cakeness,
is the cake itself: its texture, its chocolaty-good flavor, even its shape.
So the people in the class into which Peter is born, to sum up, are hiding
their true vital essence, their essential vitality, behind a sort of icing.
Ahhhh -- " He waved his fork at me. " -- but across the street Peter sees,
and maybe yearns to join, the haphazard, sweaty, lusty, and fundamentally
richer life of the unfrosted sometimes-working class. Right?"
Peter Leroy
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Brief Reviews Not-So-Brief Reviews Where to Find It Dedication Contents "My Mother Takes a Tumble" Copyright © 1982 by Eric Kraft "My Mother Takes a Tumble" is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. Now available in paperback from Picador USA, a division of St. Martin's Press. |
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