Orchid of the Bayou: A Deaf Woman Faces Blindess, The Kitty Fischer Story

6. Mama

6 And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land ofthe dead. -We H. AUDEN, ''As I WALKED OUT ONE EVENING" During my elementary years, the focus of my life was increasingly my friends and school, though my family remained my security. Then I was yanked back forcefully to my family in a terrible cloudburst , a storm of sadness, when I hadn't realized that there was a cloud in the sky. I was thirteen. First my poor weakened grandpa died. My parents were each the youngest in large families, and as a child I went to many funerals . I don't even remember my grandpa's. All I remember is that he was gone. Then there was Brother's wedding. I was shocked when Nana told me he was getting married. The girl was pretty, I guess, but I didn't like her. She looked at Daddy, Mama, Nana, and me as if we were unsavory, some kind of side dish that no one had ordered. Her family owned a drugstore and lived in Opelousas. For a long time, I thought they might be old-fashioned city Creoles, looking down their noses at us Cajuns. Brother says no, the family was Cajun just like us 66 c../\;tama and not all that rich until much later. Only the girl was crazy, he says, and he loved the rest ofthe family even after he couldn't stand her. For me-for all of us-the relationship was a mystery from the beginning. Brother says Mama knew the girl wasn't right for him. He says she even tried to talk him out of the wedding. She waited too long though. When Mama came to his room, Brother was to be married the next morning. She sat on the edge of his bed, just like when he was little. She asked him flat out if he loved this girl. Brother allowed as he sure thought so. Mama thought for a while, and then told him that being married and living with someone was hard work. "Ifyou don't love the person, it's just about impossible," Mama said. Later Grady heard this as a warning. But before the wedding, he couldn't hear anything, except maybe the roar of his loins. Otherwise why would my brother, who loved hunting and fishing and the marsh that surrounded our home, move away? Why else would he accept a stuck-up girl who wasn't nice to the rest of his family? I was excused from school to go to his wedding-a fancy one by our standards. Brother's new wife glared at me and I glared right back. I was glad to get back to school, and I didn't go home again until summer. At first, I had no inkling that anything else was amiss. I was in my usual state of ambivalence about leaving school, partly excited, partly nervous, and dismayed when A~nt Happy, Nana, and Mama arrived to take me home. My friends and I said tearful good-byes, promised to get together sometime over the long holiday, and wondered how we would pull it of£ Thelma said her mama had promised her a car when she was sixteen, and that was just a year away. Jeanette Fruge had become my best friend, and she lived in nearby Crowley. Perhaps Mama would take me to see her. Surely David would be there. I always had to put up with him. As hard as I tried to deny it, David and Jeanette acted like sweethearts. Last summer, David had hitchhiked all the way from 67 Orchid ofthe'Bayou his home up in northern Louisiana to visit Jeanette. And I knew that she was hoping he would come again. There just seemed to be no separating those two. I didn't have a boyfriend. Boys, however, had become new and ever-blipping lights on a radar screen that I didn't know I had. They seemed to demand my attention, even while I vehemently denied their existence. I was pleased that Mama and Aunt Happy brought Nana with them. If Mama's face was paler, I didn't notice it. I didn't even notice her cough right away. I guess I'd come to expect it. The cough would begin with just a little catch below her throat, a small motion as if she...