she would stop and cover her embarrassment by chopping something or rattling a pan.
When Mama had free time, she would sit at the dining room table and write. She would open a notebook and then fuss with her hair or scrape together a pile of eraser dust for a minute or two. But then her pencil would suddenly start racing across the paper.
“What are you writing?” I would ask. Even when I interrupted her, she never got angry.
“A novel,” she always answered. She seemed to actually prefer having me around. She would watch me intently, as though the next word in her story might be hidden somewhere inside me.
“Why are you writing that?”
“Because I want to. That’s all. But we aren’t going to tell Papa, okay?”
“Why not?”
“Because your father is a real artist.”
In fact, I have no idea whether my father was a real artist or not. It’s true that he made things in his studio, but it was usually nothing more than a pipe for himself, a pencil box for me, a nameplate for the front door, or a collar for the dog. Mama must have been very impressed by the pendant.
On nights when my father was going to be out late or when he was away on a school trip, Mama would come to my room. After I had changed into my pajamas, she would sit me down on a chair and read to me from her novel.
To tell the truth, I don’t remember the story at all. I suppose it must have been much too difficult for a ten- year-old to understand, but that never seemed to bother Mama. She seemed to like her audience of one.
What I do remember is her low, powerful voice, which sounded odd coming from such a tiny body. The pages rustled when she turned them, the pendant swayed gently at her breast.
Even long after my bedtime, she would still be reading, staring at the notebook without looking up. I sat, hands on my knees, trying to look interested. Mama’s lips would get dry and cracked, and her voice would go hoarse. Eventually, she started to slur her words, and her voice quivered so much I worried she was about to cry. I would pray for her to stop; I didn’t like to see Mama suffering like that.
The woman sitting next to me had taken all sorts of things out of her bag to help pass the time while we waited for the train to start moving again. Postcards, her knitting, some mandarin oranges—objects emerged as if by magic. Now she was busy with a crossword puzzle, and when she came up with an answer, she would excitedly tap the pen on the magazine and scribble in the blanks.
Across from us were two girls who looked like university students. They were simply dressed and wore little makeup; their conversation sounded very serious. In fact, it sounded like an argument of some sort, the kind that goes in circles. One of them would say something and they’d talk about that for a while, and then the other one would say something else and they’d go back to the beginning. They took little notice of the train delay, or of my fidgeting anxiety that I might miss Mama’s funeral.
The children in the front of the car were well behaved, sitting quietly and amusing themselves as best they could. When their teacher began handing out candy, they waited patiently and ate it in silence.
The wind blustered again and the snow swirled outside, covering the woods and grass, the roofs of the farms, the earthen bank along the track.
It was snowing like this the day Mama and I went to the zoo. Mama proposed the outing. I’m writing about a zoo in my next novel and I need to go see one, she’d said. So we went, despite the weather.
The zoo was empty—just Mama and me, and the sour lady at the ticket window. I was wearing a brown coat with artificial fur at the collar and cuffs, earmuffs, gloves, and two pairs of socks. We held hands as we walked, and when a gust of wind came we would huddle close together.
“What animals do you want to see?” I asked.
“Let’s see all of them,” she said. She looked even tinier and more fragile bundled up against the snow. Her boots were barely big enough for a doll, and her body seemed to vanish into her coat. We walked around the whole zoo, stopping to peer into each cage, but perhaps because of the cold, they were nearly all empty.
Cheetah, Bengal tiger, puma, camel, antelope, lion … I read the nameplates as we stood for a moment in front of each cage. Dry leaves floating in a water dish, traces of blood clinging to a bone, droppings scattered about—and the snow piling up on everything.
My only concern was Mama. Was she seeing enough? Had she found what she needed for her story?
Rhinoceros, llama, flamingo, ostrich …
Only the penguins and the polar bears were out enjoying themselves. The snow suited them fine. The penguins were busy diving in their pond, while the polar bears paced their cage, thick necks swaying from side to side. The snow glazed their fur with a sparkling crust.
Anteater, sloth, gibbon, cobra, hedgehog, crocodile …
Eventually we found we could imagine the animals even without seeing them. The tiger yawning, the llama twitching its ears, the sloth shifting its grip on a branch.
“Why do you suppose giraffes have such long necks?” Mama said, brushing the snow from the railing in front of the cage.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It seems absurd, doesn’t it?” I nodded vaguely, not quite sure what “absurd” meant. “Long necks that serve no purpose. An elephant uses its trunk to take a shower, an anteater eats with its nose, but a giraffe’s neck is useless.”
“That’s true,” I agreed.
“I suppose they learn to live with them somehow, but if I were a giraffe, I’d want a normal neck.” She sounded terribly sad.
When we had been around to see every cage, Mama bought us soft-serve ice-cream cones at the snack stand. She took off her gloves in order to dig the coin purse out from the bottom of her bag. Her fingers looked numb as she counted out the change. We sat down to eat them on a bench. It seems ridiculous now that we wanted ice cream on such a cold day, but at the time it felt perfectly natural.
The snow fell on our cones, and we ate it along with the ice cream, but it didn’t have much flavor. Mama looked at me from time to time, and not wanting to disappoint her, I tried to appear as though I were enjoying myself. We could hear the animals howling over the wind.
I wonder whether Mama ever wrote her story about the zoo? In any case, she never read it aloud to me.
“We apologize for the delay. Thank you for your patience.” The announcement played over and over, and was greeted by sighs up and down the car.
“‘A shooting star with a long tail.’ What could that be?” said the woman next to me, tapping her pen against her temple.
“Comet?” I suggested.
“It’s six letters,” she said, counting “c … o … m … e … t” under her breath.
“Meteor,” said one of the college students across from us.
“M … e … t … e … o … r. That’s it. It fits perfectly. Thank you.” She eagerly filled in the blanks.
“Not at all,” said the girl, turning back to her conversation.
It was difficult for me to believe that Mama had grown old. In my memory she was unchanged from that day at the zoo, and younger than I am now. When I finally arrive at the funeral and see her picture on the altar, will I feel that I am looking at a total stranger?
“It says her body was discovered by the paper boy,” my girlfriend had said. “He thought it was strange that no one answered the door even though he could hear the TV. She was found with her head resting on her desk, as though she’d been writing something.”
“Did she have a heart condition?” I asked.
“It doesn’t say. But she hadn’t published much in almost ten years, so none of our editors had ever met her. But…” She hesitated.
“Tell me what it says,” I prompted. “I want to know.”
