Katydids

by Natalie Ponte

The day I wrote your mom the letter, I found a frog in my basement.

This must have been four or five years ago. The wind had blown the patio umbrella clear up out of the table and onto the yard, bent the stalk of the umbrella like a flower, rendering it useless. The storm split the old maple tree in the front yard practically in half. The broken branch showed the tender orange-colored wood inside, all ragged and splintered. Hanging from the broken branch was a swing my husband made for the kids, a thick wooden board suspended from jute rope. On that day it rained so much the basement filled up with a big puddle, and that’s why the frog was down there. This happens sometimes: the frogs come into the basement through cracks in the walls during the rains and then they can’t get out. Sometimes I find their crispy little corpses down there, after the rains stop and the puddle dries up.

I was writing the letter to your mother because she was recovering from surgery. She’d had her knees replaced and was stuck in that rehab facility in Florida for a month. You kept me updated by text message, an unusually regular stream of updates: on the surgery, her recovery, her low opinion of the reading material available at the facility. I asked if there was anything I could do to cheer her up and you said maybe a letter, maybe some magazines. I had never written her a letter before, but she’d written me plenty over the years. Birthday cards, holiday cards, that kind of thing. I remember a card with a pencil drawing of a white fox, back arched, leaping above a snowbank, presumably about to pounce on its prey. A birthday card with a black-and-white photograph of Dorothy Sayers in a fur coat with a human skull on her lap. I’m not sure if your mom recognized Dorothy Sayers or if she just liked the picture.

There was never enough room inside the cards for her to say everything she needed to say, and usually the letters would spill over onto whatever scrap paper she had lying around––a Post-it branded with the name of a local electric company, or a lined to-do list with cartoon cats on it. She would fold up the note and tuck it inside the card. I remember what the paper looked like but not what she wrote, and I wish I could go back in time and keep all of them in an envelope like I did with your letters. I didn’t think to keep any of them.

 I wrote her the letter on four pages from a small notebook, the paper frayed on the left where I ripped it from its spiral binding. I didn’t mention you. I didn’t mention my husband or my kids, and without my kids I didn’t know what to write about. This is what happens when I try to write letters these days. What is there to say? Remembering that she was an avid birder, I mostly wrote about the house sparrows making their nest in the eaves of the roof, which I could see from my bedroom window. They took up residence in the boxwoods in the front yard, dropping their little grey poops all over the mulch and the bluestone walkway. I wrote to your mom that I loved all God’s creatures except those sparrows. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to remove the nest from my roof. A few weeks later I paid a landscaper to do it, and to rip out the bushes entirely.

I am writing to you now from my mother’s secretary desk. She’s in the backyard kneeling on her foam gardening mat, digging up weeds. She has a little tool that makes the weeding process easier for her, keeps the dirt from collecting under her fingernails. In her kitchen my kids are watching a teenager prank his friends on YouTube. Next to me I have an envelope with your address on it. It’s stamped, but I don’t know what’s going inside it yet. It might be this letter, but I might send you a condolence card instead. I have already selected it, just in case, a white card with the words “With Deepest Sympathy” written in silver cursive across the front. My mother has ten of them, identical, in her greeting card collection. Your mother would never have kept ten identical versions of anything in her house.

On the day I wrote your mom the letter, I caught the basement frog with my hands and put it in a jar to show my kids when they got home from camp. Inside the jar the frog pushed his face up against the glass, but not his little frog hands. Just his nose. He looked at me with his doleful eyes that were black and golden. His green skin was also somehow golden. He was a beautiful frog. A beautiful sad frog, probably imploring me to set him free, but I didn’t. I gave him some water and a twig to climb on and then went upstairs to write the letter to your mom.

Before mailing it I took photographs of the letter with my phone. One photograph for each page. I wasn’t sure why I did that, except that I didn’t feel like I could let go of this letter, which was hers but also, in a sense, mine. To whom does a letter belong, anyway? I wonder if she kept it, if you’ll find it when you pack up her things down in Florida.

A few days ago, after you told me she died, I went up to the attic with my kids, hoping I had saved one of her letters, or something she had knitted or quilted for me over the years. I didn’t find anything, but I stayed up there for a little while. My kids like to look through my old treasures: half-naked Barbies with matted hair. Clip-on earrings and a stopped watch with a stretchy gold band. While they fought over toys and jewelry I read my old diaries, which I need to hide before they start reading well enough to know what’s in them. I was never a good diarist. Not consistent, not nearly detailed enough. Or rather, detailed in the wrong ways. I remembered all the things I wrote down and what I wanted to remember were the things I didn’t.

I hardly wrote about you at all, in the diaries. I didn’t write about the time you came over on a Friday night after the football game. You were dating that big sweet dumb linebacker named Bill but you only ever called him William. You went with everyone else to the diner for late-night french fries and ice cream sundaes, and then you drove to my house. You were still in your cheerleading uniform when you showed up at my door. I remember your legs were tanned and smooth and your hair was in a high tight ponytail. It was one in the morning when you showed up, but I was awake, sitting alone at the kitchen table playing solitaire. The real kind, with a deck of cards. Your eyes were gleaming. You wanted to play Scrabble. I was wearing my matching pajamas, crisp cotton with pink polka dots that buttoned up the front. I wasn’t wearing a bra, but who cared? It was just you. I went into my father’s study where we kept the board games on a tall shelf, and I reached up to grab the game, steadying the other ones with my hands when I pulled it out like a Jenga tile––I remember this, the feeling of the other board games shaking, threatening to fall over––and when I turned back around you were right in front of me, your breasts bound back by the tight polyester of your uniform and nearly brushing against my chest. I looked at you in your clear bright eyes. I looked at your lips. And then I tickled your ribs so you’d get out of my way and we played Scrabble all night. Later, after you left, I rubbed myself over and over and over again thinking about what it would have been like if I’d kissed you in that moment.

So anyway. There’s nothing about that night in my diary.

Up there in my attic, next to the box with the diaries, there’s another box, a clear Tupperware bin, and inside that bin is one large manila envelope, padded, and the envelope holds every letter you ever sent me. Letters from sleepaway camp, notes you folded up into little origami discs and slipped into my locker, postcards from college when you studied abroad in Melbourne. The notes are full of inside jokes I don’t remember, written in your confident rounded letters. You wrote most of them in pencil and every time I read them they’ve faded a little bit more and I know, eventually, the letters won’t be legible at all. In your house, probably in your attic, you have all the letters I ever sent to you in a box. Or at least, you used to. Your mom mailed them to you in a box of old things, after you bought the house you live in with your wife. You texted me and asked if I wanted you to keep them, and what could I say? I said they were yours, to do with as you pleased. But I confessed I still had the ones you sent me, and when I said that I felt like a clam opened up to daylight.

I am staying at my parents’ house this weekend, with my kids, while my husband is away on a golf trip with his friends. Pebble Beach. Yesterday, I took the kids to the backyard to use the pool. I sat on a chair and half-read a Sally Rooney novel while they swam. When my kids came out I wrapped them in sun-warmed towels and there was a smell––the chlorinated water evaporating off their skin, off the hot stone patio, the faint mildew in the towels, the plastic in their swimsuits, the fresh-cut grass, my mother’s roses in bloom––and I was transported to the summer after freshman year of college.

I thought about the time you came over to my parents’ house and we stayed in the pool all day, until it became nighttime. My mom brought out little snacks for us, crudités and cheese and grapes. My parents’ pool was kidney-shaped, with a round hot tub attached to it. The hot tub had a little waterfall that poured into the pool. When the sky darkened and the air cooled we moved from the pool into the hot tub. From inside the house one of my parents switched on the lights under the water so the pool and the hot tub lit up from below, throwing an ethereal glow all over your face. Your pink cheeks. You were trying to tell me about this friend of yours, this new friend you had made in college. Her name was Delphine. I kept diving into the pool, leaving you mid-sentence, trying to save the same five katydids from drowning. I would scoop one up from the surface of the cold pool with my hands and carry it over to the edge and deposit it on the stone tiles and then get back into the hot tub. You would tell me something about Delphine, how you went to an Ani DiFranco concert, how she took you to get matching tattoos, infinity symbols on the inside of your wrists, and I kept my eyes on the pool, watching for katydids. When another one dropped in I would dive back in to rescue it.

A few weeks later, you came out to your mom. Ultimately that’s how you came out to me: by telling me how your mom reacted when you came out to her. She reacted exactly the opposite of the way my mother would have, which is to say she didn’t kick you out. She treated the news as if it were both inevitable and something to celebrate. She embraced you. She cried tears of joy. She invited Delphine over to visit for Rosh Hashanah and again for Columbus Day, when we all had a long weekend. You told me she made a big pot of her signature potato leek soup, with vegetable stock instead of chicken because Delphine was vegetarian. I could picture your mom at your kitchen counter, which was made of butcher block. I could picture her slicing up the leeks with her big merciless knife, the delicious crunching sound it made, how she soaked the leek rings in cold water before caramelizing them in a blue enameled pot. I had seen it so many times, I told myself, it didn’t matter if Delphine got a chance to see it too, but of course it mattered. You told me your mom didn’t act weird about the two of you sharing a bedroom, and she sent Delphine back to campus with chunky hand-knitted mittens, the kind with the tops that flip back to reveal fingerless gloves underneath. You had a pair just like them. You invited me to meet Delphine, too, but I was always busy. I made sure of it.

They were attracted to the lights in the pool, the katydids.

They thought it was the sun, or maybe the moon.

There is a conversation I have imagined having for years with you. In this imagined conversation, we go to a diner. Not our regular diner, but one that looks like the diner from When Harry Met Sally, where Meg Ryan fakes the orgasm. We have an uncharacteristically frank conversation about our friendship, how it’s hard to define. To make a point, I order a milkshake. The waitress brings me the milkshake in a fluted glass with a straw, places it down in front of me. It’s a strawberry milkshake. I don’t know why. Next to the fluted glass she places the large metal cup in which the milkshake was mixed. This cup is filled about halfway, the extra milkshake that didn’t fit in the fluted glass and didn’t have anywhere to go. I imagine that I push this cold metal cup toward you and I explain how this is like our friendship, like my feelings for you. There is too much of it to fit into the friendship cup. But there isn’t enough milkshake to fill two cups, the two cups necessary for a romantic relationship. In this imagined sequence, you listen and then you look at me and say: but what if the fluted cup is the romantic relationship? What if the way we feel about each other is too much even for that? And to that I do not have an answer.

We will never have this conversation in real life and now that I have written it I know for sure I won’t send you this letter. I will instead send you a condolence card, from my mother’s collection.

It’s not entirely true, what I said about my mom. It isn’t that she would have kicked me out if I’d come out to her. I don’t think so, anyway. That would have been too difficult to explain at the country club. I think she would have simply ignored it. She would have said, that’s nice, dear. She would have patted my wrist and gone back to ordering Dutch tulip bulbs from the catalog. If I’d brought a girlfriend home she would have insisted on calling her my friend. That’s still how she refers to your wife, by the way, even though she babysat the kids when we went to your wedding. You looked so beautiful that day, your blonde hair slicked back, your tailored tux and black stilettos. When you kissed your wife tears sprang to my eyes and my husband squeezed my hand.

Before I met my husband, and sometimes after, I fantasized that I came out to my mom and that she did kick me out. I fantasized that, with nowhere to go, I’d show up on your doorstep and your mom would take me in. She wouldn’t ask any questions, not because she couldn’t handle the truth but because she already understood. She would make me a cup of herbal tea. We would watch something cozy on TV, something like The Golden Girls or This Old House. She would cover me up with one of her homemade quilts and I’d fall asleep on the couch. This is something she did once, when I took a nap at your house. And this is sometimes, still, what I think about when I can’t fall asleep at night. I think about your mom covering me in the heavy quilt, the weight of it, the smooth cotton against my cheek, its smell like cedar and eucalyptus.

These days, anytime my phone rings when I’m not expecting it, I expect the worst. The school only calls when the kid spikes a fever and has to come home; the doctor calls when the test results are concerning; your best friend calls to let you know her mom has died. When I saw your name light up my screen, I think I already knew what you were going to say. I picked up and at first you didn’t say anything. I didn’t, either. I sat there listening to you breathing. I heard you sniffle. You said, “She’s gone.” You didn’t say whom you meant, but I knew. It was heart failure, sudden. It was quick, you said, and that was a relief, but the smallest, cruelest part of me wished it had been cancer. Not because I wanted her to suffer, but because I wanted time. I would have written more letters. I would have visited. I tell myself that, anyway.

I always thought one day your mom and I would go out to brunch. We’d sit outside the restaurant at a little bistro table and eat Belgian waffles in the sun. She’d be wearing one of her broad sun hats, woven from straw. After a few mimosas, she would lean forward and say to me, all conspiratorially: I always thought you’d end up with my daughter. And I’d laugh at first, but then I would tear up, and I would say: I always thought so, too. She would reach over the table, grasp my hand, and we’d look at each other meaningfully. I imagined this conversation would somehow heal me; if she could see it too, then maybe it was real. Maybe it wasn’t all in my head.

But this conversation never happened. She moved to Florida, we lost touch, and then we lost her. When you called me, I said I was so sorry. We were quiet again, both of us just breathing on the line, and then you said you had to go, and I nodded even though I knew you couldn’t see me, and you hung up, and I sobbed. The sob consumed me. There was no sound, no tears, just my body heaving with grief. I sobbed because your mom was special to me but mostly I sobbed because she felt like my last tangible connection to you.

In the sympathy card, which I have next to me now, I will write something pleasant and airy, something about what a light your mom was in the world. I will write how sorry I am to miss the funeral, that I simply can’t get away, the kids, you know. I will write it with an inky black pen, and it will look beautiful on the thirsty paper. Every word of it will be true and every word of it will be a lie.

About the frog: the kids were delighted. They loved the frog; they wanted to keep it as a pet. I knew we should let it go but I relented. Just for a day, I said. You can probably see where this is going. We forgot about the frog. A few days later, when we remembered, the frog was floating on its back in the water, its white belly turned upward, bloated with death. A film covered its golden eyes. We buried it in the yard.

Published January 8th, 2023