To Be, Rather Than To Seem

iii

In the past week, he developed a habit, a distraction than anything else, a more comforting pastime than it should be, out of watching the sprawling live oak in front of the farmhouse—or rather, its sudden gray beard and hair since his Thanksgiving visit. (A festoon of Spanish Moss dropped off by some oriole, as per Nana Sue.) If he tried, the oak is an ever-changing picture of faces and creatures.

Today, he saw his mama. Precisely, that photograph she looked at (whenever troubled, he had a feeling) from the adaptation of The Seagull (the finest role she ever played, she insisted) performed at the Chapel Hill theater during her third year of university. She was in a white dress, simple yet sublime, overlooking a faux lake, her reflection staring back—the undulating blonde wig framing her face, like the Spanish Moss, making her look naive.

I am a seagull— He smiled, almost hearing his mama's thespian voice— no, no, I am an oak— He thought, laughing.

Actually, when tilting his head slightly, if the wind was breathing, it was then flying seagulls.

He missed his parents. That love felt most in their hugs and kisses before the days leading up to departure. After enrolling him in a public school, they left for New Orleans, only staying in South Carolina for four days.

He had accompanied them for the appointment at the school—an L-shaped red brick facade bearing a signboard that said Sunnyville Elementary. When he stepped in through the doors, there was a mural of the mascot on the left, a silly illustration of the sun in aviators, saying welcome, which did little to lift his spirits. As his parents filled out the packet of papers, the guidance counselor took him aside for a "little test" to check if he had the grade-level knowledge of children his age—a few geometrical questions, recitation of multiplication tables, some basic science quizzing, made him read a book (James And The Giant Peach) off the bookshelf at random and even the time on the office clock—and all the while, he wondered if the classroom lessons would be likewise, thought he maybe will acclimate.

Now, with a month until the school year started, he (mostly) pushed its thoughts off his mind. However, his parents invaded that clearing, leading to the mulling of their parting promise that how things stood was only temporary and then brooding too much about what temporary meant.

It wasn't that he wasn't comfortable with Papa Tommy and Nana Sue. They were the kind of people who made everyone around them comfortable. But it was different somehow in the little things he noted when living with them.

For instance, the strangeness of having a whole room to himself; even if there was a familiarity in its space as he had lodged there once during the holidays, growing up in tiny apartments and sharing proximity to his parents, that much space all to himself needed attuning that he chose to use the bedroom for a minority of time, for mostly those eight hours of sleep. Even stranger was the luxury of sleeping on a bed. However, as with everything in his life, he would condition himself to these differences with a chameleon-like ease.

"Will," Nana Sue stood at the front door threshold, her flowery apron fluttering in the breeze, "Come have lunch." All the time he had lived at the farmhouse, that old-time apron was as much a part of her as her ever-present smile.

He uprose from reclining against the wall and followed her toward the back of the house. Even though there was a long farmhouse table in the dining area, Nana Sue and Papa Tommy preferred to eat on the dinette out on the wraparound porch.