Our house is rivered with need, with talk that pools under the talk that talks. It is about money; not enough, not enough. It is that my dad wants to plant some new field but there is no money for seed, that the cows have been sick and the vet will not come, that machinery is broken. Somewhere beyond us something called communism is spreading, and an atomic bomb might, right now, be in the air, falling. The Russians can do that. I think. And there is no money. All this is in my mother and father’s talk even when it is not. And now it seems we have a house of holes. My mother is worried about the holes, our shoes with holes, shirts with holes, sweaters and coats with tears like mouths open and panting. Holes. The fronts of our coats flap like doors in wind. Winter is coming.
I am not yet ten, but I have already been taught the world is round. I don’t believe it—too scary. In science class, I have seen the picture, pieced together parts of the world from those rockets that entered space for the first time so you could see the curve, supposedly proving at last that this place is not flat, but round. Still I know it is false, like the fake money in Monopoly— it just looks a little real. The world is certainly no egg of iron and lava, as my science teacher has tried to say. If you climb the hill behind the barn, you see all the way to the lake, the edge. Flat. Flat.
“But then why does the lake disappear?” My mother argues with me. Her question is full of the holes where knowing lives.
Because you’ve come to the end of it, I think to myself.
Don’t say it. Because where the sky starts, that’s the end of the world. Don’t say it. She’ll be mad for me sassing.
I love that I can see my whole world.
She says, “Don’t forget, something’s always past the edge.” As though she has read my mind. And what happens there? My hands turn cold. The things I don’t know. My heartbeat turns into the sound of rain. These are thoughts I get lost in when I am trying not to get lost in the worry about the holes.
One day, a farm auction in Mears, one of those villages where the farms “go under.” I don’t know what that means but when it happens, everyone feels bad, but then they go to the auction happily enough, and buy stuff, hoping it will be cheap enough to afford. My father is looking for a better plow. After rummaging around for a long time, my mother buys a round box, gray and dark with time, a faded red rim and a gray ribbon stretched across the dust-shadowed top. No one else wanted it, so it’s cheap. She tells us it’s a hatbox but it doesn’t hold a hat. It holds something heavier. I can tell by the way she carries it to the car, or maybe it just seems heavy because my father has not been able to buy the plow he needed. The holes echo out across the fields.
That night in the autumn dusk, after the dishes are cleared of venison soup, and the table wiped of spilled milk, Mom calls me and my brothers and even my sister Marijo toddles in. My mother’s voice is sharp as scissors. Now she wants whatever must be done to be done quickly. As she thuds the hatbox down, the old box knows it is done, the yellow glued-together seam splits apart, and buttons burst out from the hatbox, spilling a scattered river of dark stars, white moons, and flat suns, a too-strange night sky spread on the oak table. A few skitter to the floor. My brothers scramble for treasure.
In our house, buttons hold small round answers to the plain questions that pop off shirts and pants.
“How did you lose another button?” Sigh sigh.
In our house, buttons are little monies like coins but they close the holes. A button slips through the buttonhole and holds two parts together. Buttons get cut from old shirts to use on not-quite-as-old shirts—so we don’t have to buy a new shirt. When we lose a button, she looks for a close match in the button basket. She picks out the button, sews it in place, threading in and out of the holes, and the shirt gets worn until it too has holes.
In our house, the buttons living in our basket are gray, black, or white, or with little swirls like milk in coffee. They are round with two or four tiny holes in the center. Plain as a plowed field.
But this. We pick up the buttons. We gather our hands around them, cupping the mounds as though they were living animals. It makes us happy, this much abundance. We breathe in like clouds before storm. These are from another world, from outer space—like the comic book aliens, these buttons, space ship equipment? And not all of these buttons are round. One button, close to my fingertips, a triangle shining with tiny black sparkles around the edge. In the center, a silver eye. I stare at it. It stares back. Then I see another. Two.
“Are these really buttons?” I put them side by side. Both eyes look at me.
My mother sees the two. “See if you can find more like that.”
Is she too from another world?
But I am caught in this rare too-muchness to wonder, already picking up a round red button with gold swirling on its surface, then a tiny one that sparkles with a single rhinestone. Then my fingers stumble onto another, silver eyed. A triangle of eyes. A trinity. Like in church, like God? My brother finds four green buttons shaped like tiny birds. Now, it’s a game. Now we are putting like with like. Matching. While we hunt, my mother cuts cooking string and threads the alike ones together so they make bracelets, all the same on one string.
She sighs hard, watching us, telling us when she sees a match that we missed. When the boys drop them, she says, “Don’t you lose any.”
“Are we going to put them on our clothes?” For a moment, I’m so happy I could fly.
She huffs, answers the real question. “These are fancy clothes buttons.”
The real answer: we don’t have fancy clothes.
Then why is she putting them together like this? If she will not use them? I see her linger over the white pearls. She fingers each before stringing it. I remember a little sweater with pearl buttons she used to wear for church, but baby Patti spit up on it so many times, she couldn’t get it clean. Did my mother like these buttons? Would she keep them?
“You could use that for church coat?” I say. Church coat has a top button missing that she covers with a winter scarf.
“Too uppity. And these aren’t the right size anyway. Need something bigger for the hole of the button.” The button must match the hole. Things must fit inside each other. But I can see her thinking about a button for church coat. She likes this idea.
My brothers get bored when the easy sets are all together and they have to hunt harder. They drift away to make forts with the old Lincoln Logs. I would like to do that, too, but because my brothers have gone, I can’t. Then Mom leaves the table to put Marijo to bed, to check on the baby. I stay with the buttons. I keep trying to find the ones that match. For some sets, we have only two, but for some we have many strung together, little circled nests.
Have I ever seen more of anything so pretty?
She comes back with used envelopes and drops each string of button sets into a separate envelope, crosses out the old addresses, and writes on the outside of the envelope the color and size and number.
I touch the creamy white pearls, each surrounded by tiny sparkling glass. Twenty. “What dress would have this many fancy buttons?”
She sighs. “Those? From a gown.” She sees my confusion: “A dress that goes to the floor.”
“Like a bride?”
“I suppose.” She stops. “They might have been down the back of the dress. Bodice buttons.”
A swirling. Someone dancing, turning in the light, looking over her shoulder, the line of shimmer down her back. Cinderella in Walt Disney’s movie.
I pick up another set, gray and solid metal with a raised face on the front, and hold them out to her.
“Those are military buttons. From an army uniform.” Oh, here is something. A uniform to go with the gown, a groom for the bride?
My mother murmurs into the envelopes, “Probably formal.”
Another word for uppity, I guess. “How did they wear out?” I know that clothes with this kind of buttons would be saved for good. So how did they get old enough to lose their buttons?
What she says next is a story rocketing in my head. “I think there was a fire. I think the clothes were ruined. See this one?” She picks up a single gray pearl that looks bubbly on one side. There are others like this one, gray-shadowed, and I realize, melted.
“Whoever had to throw away the clothes saved the buttons. Cut them off. Looks like heat damage to me.” Words play among the buttons . . . Heat damage. Bright thoughts come in shards of night.
I want to hold the dress,
button the buttons in a shard of light.
I smell the old smoke.
Silk sears.
Someone the age
of my mother snips,
fingers stained
with ash and tears.
Is this how the world begins to curve? Curving around a seeing that is beyond the edge of a lake that you thought was flat?
Who is she that she can take the edge from me, give me round?
“Can I have the . . . ?” I ask, reaching for the red and gold swirly ones.
“No.” Her voice cuts, too firm to argue. “I’m going to sell them.”
“Sell them?” I finger a brown one like a dried leaf.
“Someone will pay good money.”
The river rises. Rises. She is going to sell the stories that are spreading out now on the table like a pool of spilled water. The gown and the uniform. I will never see them again. I want to beg, but the river runs hard. The holes are deep.
We are almost done. She points to the pile of odd ones that have no matches. “These probably aren’t worth anything—no one wants a single button. Take one. The rest go in our basket. We’ll get some use.”
I paw through the ordinary ones looking for one I like, and here, mystery, wonder, a half thing, not half a disk, but half like half a quail egg, or a tiny Easter egg cut in half, blue as sky at dusk, shot with slivers of light, like it has some clouds in the dark, like if I could see even more of the pieced-together picture of the world from science class, it would look like this. It’s heavy and the hole for the thread is on the underside, hidden, a tiny circlet of metal—so the top is a place uninterrupted by holes. I lift it and hold it out to her to ask. She is surprised. She has not seen this button.
But she doesn’t see what I am asking. Her mind remembers a hole, the church coat button hole.
Is this how it will be with us? How we will be together but miss what the other means?
“Well,” she says with a small smile as she seals and labels the last envelope. “It doesn’t match anything else, so it’s perfect for that top button.” Yes, I know this, make it useful. Fill where the cold comes in. Close the hole. My fingers touch hers as I hand off the button. She is smiling, my mother who does not smile very much, is smiling, warm in the ever-cool farmhouse.
“What is the shape?” I ask, knowing there is a name for this moment.
“That’s a sphere, or rather half of it. If there were two, you’d have a whole sphere. Like the Earth.” She looks pointedly at me. “But then it wouldn’t close anything.” We look at each other for a moment.
Then her little sharp breath cuts the world apart again, and she reaches into the pile, seeing what I have missed. Another half world. A button to match. She picks it up, puts them together.
“A pair we can sell,” she announces.
No half world as my own. No closing the church coat for her.
Two rolling in her hand. She runs the strong thread through the metal loops, ties them with string so tightly that these half worlds cling to each other. The science class picture completes its curve of Earth.
I see it at last. We are not a disk floating in space, edged by ocean or space. We are sphere, separate, not separate. We are broken, then one, pulled together by string and metal. What has she done? To us? To me? I don’t speak these questions. They rise, tying together inside me. And if the world is like this, a rounding to each other, halved and one, divided and whole, I am suddenly afraid of who we will become, how we have made our world go round.
Anne-Marie Oomen recently won the AWP Sue William Silverman Nonfiction Award 2021 for her forthcoming memoir As Long As I Know You. The chapter “Buttons,” appearing in this issue of Hypertext, is from that manuscript. She wrote Lake Michigan Mermaid with Linda Nemec Foster (Michigan Notable Book, 2019), Love, Sex and 4-H (Next Generation Indie Award for Memoir), Pulling Down the Barn (Michigan Notable Book); and Uncoded Woman (poetry), among others. She edited ELEMENTAL: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction (also a Michigan Notable Book). She teaches at Solstice MFA at Lasell University (MA), Interlochen’s College of Creative Arts (MI), and conferences throughout the country.
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