Nines
By the time I get to the nines, I am plain tired. It is the annual
family corn roast at the Pentwater Beach and the whole family
flocks around the huge glovebox grill set at the back of the Ford
pick-up where the tank of corn is soaking in sugar water. People
are clustered in small groups that form and reshape like interlocking
whirlpools. They line up picnic tables in a sloppy, uneven in
sand. My aunts and in-laws arrange the food tables, anchoring
tattered sheets with clothespins or flat stones from beach. I
am wandering among the arms and legs of relatives, reciting my
times tables to myself. I have had such trouble with numbers that
I am in a summer program. To catch up on basics, my teachers say.
I have a test tomorrow. Seven times six is 42? Maybe 48? No, something
else equals 48. Lake Michigan’s slow roar holds the tiredness
I feel about those numbers. On the page, the eights, marked off
in columns--four times eight is thirty two-- feel like the table
tops, cluttered and disorderly.
At
one lone table, three aunts and my mother have come to rest around
Barbara. She is hiding her eyes. She has said so little for days
that her husband, my mother’s brother has come to talk to my mother
about it. My mother looks at me warningly but Aunt Stelle, sitting
across from her, the one with the big breasts, grabs my arm and
pulls me under hers so that I am nested beneath the large warmth
of her full fleshed arm. “There’s nothing here we can’t say in
front of her.” My mother goes quiet. Great Aunt Mary pulls out
her handkerchief and spreads and folds and spreads and folds.
Aunt Evelyn studies her hands and twists the ring with the semi-precious
jewels, one for each kid. They talk while I mutter numbers and
half listen. I hear words about birth and “born blue.” They are
talking about Barbara’s lost baby. The one who died just three
weeks ago after what my mother had calls “killer labor.” Their
voices are water: resonant and constant, with surges of slow waves.
Their voices hold the world and all the food.
I
am working on the nines. They are hard. Big numbers. The last
ones I have to learn. I confuse them with sixes. I look at the
folded paper in my sleeve and start over.
Barbara
looks up as though she would like to hurt me.
Her
face.
The
surface of the lake on a windy day. Rough. Held in place only
by flat stones.
Coal
and water mix in her eyes. Even I can tell she knows too much.
Her skin has that funny coloration my mother tells me some women
get during and after pregnancy. Tan gone spotted. Her voice cracks.
“Don’t you know the trick about the nines?” I shake my head. Table
goes quiet. “You add ten and subtract one.” I mull. My toes, worming
in sand under the table wrap around a cool stone. She speaks again,
tearing a dinner napkin into little pieces. A gull comes squawking,
thinking bread, struts near, thinking wherever so many women are
gathered, it will be fed.
“Start,”
Barbara says. My mother nods. This is the most Barbara has spoken
since they have joined her.
“Nine
times one is nine. Nine times two is--”
“Stop.”
Voice edged with foam. “Start with the nine and add ten. What
is it?” The water in her eyes spills over but she’s looking at
me clean through it.
“Nineteen.”
The stone in my toes is now warm. All the stones on this beach
are secretly warm at this time of the summer. The men in the distance
pour charcoal, unload beer.
“Now
take one away. What is it?” This time her voice cracks but there
is no backing out of this. Inevitable is the way family works.
“Eighteen.”
“That’s
the answer to two times nine.”
My
mom watches, her head tipped downward. The gulls croak overhead.
This is the year Uncle John died of a heart attack coming back
from Christmas Eve Communion. She has cared for Aunt Mary since
then. It is also the year Uncle Butler, who lives up the road,
died of pancreatic cancer and my mother learned how to inject
morphine and gave it to him all through the winter, walking the
quarter mile three, four times a day through the cold to make
sure he died more or less without pain.
“I
don’t get it.”
“What’s
next? Her fingers are rolling the pieces into small gray coils.
“Nine
times three.”
“Take
the eighteen and add ten.” She’s nodding through breaths in little
spurts. Trout whooshing in bugs.
“Twenty-eight.”
“Now
subtract one.”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Bingo.
Now nine times four. What do you do?”
She
says it with such need in her eyes, I know if I don’t get this
right it will be like losing the baby all over again. I say, “I
add ten. That’s thirty seven. “
“And...’
She draws out the and, a soft fog horn. She has always been my
favorite because she wouldn’t let us call her aunt.
“I
take one away. And that makes thirty-six.”
“Keep
going.” Aunt Janet and Aunt Ella join us from the potato salad,
watchful, as though this were something holy and fragile. As though
this were a pure white clam shell we had all found. And now Barbara
is staring out at the lake, not looking at any of us, and she
is reviewing the pattern, her voice soft as in lullaby. I say
nine times five and she says toward the drift of cirrus over a
lake so wide we brag we can’t see the other side, “Now add ten.”
And then more softly through the ragged breath of the lake and
her own body, “And minus one.” And I say forty-five. And nine
times six, and add ten, and the gulls scream overhead, and subtract
one. Over and over we run the nines until I don’t need the pattern.
The numbers enter my head and I say them, letting them coach me
until we are all quiet. And the aunts sit in the long moments.
They have called out the pattern, and the waves ache against the
shore as though it were new skin.
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