Tag: mother

Blueberry Season

Photo by University of Delaware Carvel REC/Flickr

By Patrice Gopo

My youngest daughter tilts her head up at me as I buckle her into her car seat. She asks, “Can we go pick blueberries?”

I think, There is no blueberry season in Charlotte.

Her request comes just a week or two after our Charlotte strawberry-picking season. She recalls how I took her and her older sister to a farm flush with rows of low strawberry bushes. She tangled her fingers in the leaves and thin branches and found fruit the color of rubies. We later gathered around the kitchen table and lingered over strawberries rinsed in a colander. We discarded stems and mashed fresh fruit in our mouths. On the heels of the late-spring strawberry season and prior to the mid-summer descent of peach season and well before the tangy tart of apple season—when we leave Charlotte and drive two hours to the mountains for the day and pull ripe apples from a lush and giving orchard—my daughter says she wants blueberries.

“Too hot,” I tell her as I consider everything I’ve ever heard about blueberries, how they need cooler northern climates and mild summers. Charlotte is too hot in the summer for blueberries—and for me too if I consider the weight of the summer rays, the thick humidity that clenches the air, and the sweat beading around my hairline and dripping down my back. The air conditioner inside my home calls to me like a pied piper. I respond without protest.

“We need to go to Alaska,” I say to my girl. “We need to travel to a place with a real winter.” I think of Anchorage, where I come from, the city I left twenty years ago.

“Will we drive?” she asks me from the back seat as we join the traffic on familiar Charlotte roads and pass storefronts I’ve seen each day for six and a half years.

“Yes,” I tell her and catch her eye in the rearview mirror. “We’ll drive to Alaska, and we’ll pick blueberries.” Waves of my imagination roll over me, and I plan how we’ll drive days home to Alaska and fill our plastic pails with mounds of violet fruit. For the few moments I have the attention of a preschooler, together she and I dream. I plant a story of a long, winding road trip across the country, along the coast of Canada, and into Alaska, all in search of berries I think we can’t pick here in Charlotte.

This is my seventh summer in Charlotte. Six and a half years now in a city I thought might be a passing-through home. But my husband, my girls, and I, we are still here—beginning our seventh summer. Seven. The days of creation, the colors in a rainbow, the number of completion. Is seven also the number of years that signifies Charlotte is now the foundation for my family’s life?

Many summers ago, when I was a child in Alaska, my parents, my sister, and I collected pails of high-bush blueberries from first the slope of a mountain and then later the valley close by. We hiked into the hills near Anchorage and plucked the jewels that clung near tiny leaves, handfuls plopping in the bucket and at least as many more bursting in my mouth.

“Blueberry jam,” my mother declared, and she used a recipe a friend with extensive Alaskan roots had given our transplanted family. A recipe to boil the berries, stir in cups of granulated sugar and other ingredients I can’t recall. We set a row of jelly jars across the kitchen countertop and inhaled the fragrance of syrupy sweet. My mother poured the deep violet jam into each jar, and my sister and I helped tighten the lids. We used black permanent markers to write down the date and lined the pantry with jars of homemade blueberry jam. For the next few months whenever we wanted jam with warm slices of toast or paired with peanut butter sandwiches—perhaps all the way until that spring—we drew jars of jam from the pantry, unscrewed the lid, and remembered the slope of a mountain and the taste of fresh blueberries.

My mother is planning to leave my hometown of Anchorage and move to my Charlotte neighborhood. My father left when my parents’ marriage ended years ago, but my mother stayed and has remained now for forty-three winters of navigating ice-caked roads. And forty-three summers in mild weather offering just enough respite from the snow. My mother wants to be near her granddaughters. She wants them to come spend weekends with her and visit her on sweltering summer days. My mother has never spent a full summer in Charlotte, but soon she will. Sometimes in the midst of the Charlotte summer, when the heat bears down with an even greater intensity, I think of my Anchorage mountains. I think of temperatures ten, twenty, thirty degrees cooler. I think of days perfect for the flourishing of wild Alaskan blueberries—and overcast heavens spilling forth the crisp comfort of home.

•••

On the phone, on an ordinary day this summer, my mother tells me that she will put her house on the market in autumn, that she will pack her possessions, leave Alaska, and create a home down the road from me in Charlotte. The distance between my family and her will compress to mere streets, to a number of houses between, no longer the stuff of a thousand miles thrice over. I know these happenings usher in a time of the beauty of generations entwined, but I taste a slight bitterness in my mouth and the words slow.

“Wow. It’s sad,” I say when I think of her home sold and the way I’ll no longer be able to tell people my mother lives in Alaska.

My mother echoes my words. “It is sad,” she replies and there is a long pause in our conversation.

My daughters play down the road at a summer camp, running around a playground, sucking on ice popsicles, and living the lazy days as I once did far away in Anchorage. I stand in my garage, preparing to leave to go pick them up from a day of fun. My mother is coming to us. Next year she may be preparing to go pick up her granddaughters from a day at camp, bring them back to her house, and watch them create imaginary games at the edge of the woods in her new back yard. As I drive the couple of miles down the road, I recall my mother’s back deck and the mountains the color of blueberries in the distance and the way we were living like Alaska would always be home. I have gorged myself on the reality of a life rooted somewhere. Even as I’ve left Alaska, my mother’s presence there allows me to taste these ties to a familiar place. And with my mother’s words, with the few months left, I find the flavor I long to hold beginning to evaporate into nothing but memories.

I pull into the camp parking lot and pause a moment to glance at the height of the surrounding trees and the expanse of the manicured lawn. The months ahead will bring with it laughter and long hugs, shared meals and creation of the future—something new to alleviate the weight of the loss of my childhood home pressing against my chest but perhaps never dissipating.

•••

Days after I speak with my mother, my family and I spend a Saturday a few hours from Charlotte. We pass the afternoon on a farm on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, sipping cold drinks, seated on stools in an open-air tea house void of walls, windows, and doors. In each direction we turn, we spy plants and shrubs used in this eco-friendly business. Lavender and jasmine. Hyssop and hibiscus too. A couple of hummingbirds hover near a clump of leaves, their wings a blur. Bees buzz around, and I envision raw honey sold in canning jars. When I purchase my glass of lavender lemonade, I spot a sign that reads, PICK BLUEBERRIES HERE.

Blueberries? Here on this plot of land lit with summer heat, never knowing the chill of real winter cold? The girls and I wander past picnic benches and a makeshift playground to rows and rows and rows of blueberry bushes. We pluck the berries and begin to fill a quart-size crate to brimming, working steadily in the shade of a few trees, stripping each bush of its bounty. My girls want to move further down the row, but I keep us in the shade, the brute sun sure to transform the fun of berry picking into absolute drudgery. After we fill our quart and before we wander back to the tea house replete with spinning fans and cups of ice water, I take a photo of my youngest holding the cardboard container of berries. We stand not on the slope of a mountain, but instead on this flat patch of ground beneath a grove of trees.

“We didn’t have to drive all the way to Alaska,” I tell my daughter as she poses with her blueish-purple treasure. Here, just a few hours from our home, the blueberries grow in quantity enough to satiate and satisfy.

•••

PATRICE GOPO is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. She is the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way (August 2018), an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. She lives with her family in North Carolina.

Read more FGP essays by Patrice Gopo.

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It

Driving Home

Photo by Gina Easley

By Dana Salvador

As I slipped away from the city lights on the four-lane highway, the land opened up like a collapsible box. The sides, filled with trees and undulating rises, slowly flattened to make room for the prairie, the sky as wide as intention. In my beat-up Riviera, I drove towards our abandoned farmhouse, suffering from nostomania, an irresistible compulsion to return home.

The ache for my family and our farm—torn apart by my father—radiated through my body. After twenty-eight years of marriage, my father walked through our farmhouse, took his clothes from the closet, and left—an action so out of character that over twenty years later I still struggle to reconcile the man I thought he was with this moment. I’ve no idea how long my father cheated on my mother before he moved in with his mistress, four miles away. The veil of secrecy my parents created about their marriage, and the deceit my father displayed leaves the events of my memory out of focus, a grainy film that never uses the correct camera angle.

After my father left, and my mother was uprooted, I walked through campus as if a piece of bailing wire were tied to my breastbone. Suddenly something pulled the wire taut, and I’d drive away from Greeley, Colorado—the ugly stepchild of the Front Range where I attended college—to the prairie. I could be eating a bagel for dinner, studying at a coffee shop, or talking to a friend on the phone and a moment later find myself in my car headed east to an empty house.

On this particular night in the fall of 1998, it was almost ten, and I had classes in the morning. I knew it was dangerous for a woman to drive alone down deserted roads—a flat tire would mean I’d spend the night in my car waiting for enough daylight to change it and risk who might stop to help. I also knew if I drove fast, I could make it to the farm in two and a half hours. Usually people drive as quickly as they can through the prairie. They want to get somewhere. I drove the speed limit to take my time.

These moments are the impulse of youth, the moments I fear for my young twin sons who I hope never have to make such pilgrimages to their childhood home. Somehow, back then, part of me felt that if I returned, even for a few hours, I might make the divorce, the abandonment less real, that my presence could conjure my family’s existence. But maybe I just wanted to float out to the deepest part of my sorrow and wallow.

While I’d lived in Greeley attending college for several years, I hadn’t adjusted to the horizon obscured by houses and businesses, the streetlights and traffic, the fast talkers and strangers living on the other side of the wall of my apartment. The house became a Siren, something I couldn’t pull myself away from. I traveled the prairie like an ocean.

•••

Houses nestled next to the road became less and less frequent. Sweet grass grew in wisps like cats’ tails around the posts of barbed wire fences. Purple thistle filled pastures on either side of the road. In the moon’s white-gold glow, clumps of yucca and sagebrush gleamed like forgotten glass ornaments fallen off covered wagons years ago.

Occasionally, I passed iron gates with family brands and cattle guards marking the entrance to large ranches. The gravel driveways led to houses, outbuildings, and barns far enough off the highway to be covered in darkness. I imagined the people in these houses asleep in front of the TV or in bed, curled up like kittens beside each other, just like my own family is now if someone were to drive by our stucco house in Albuquerque.

On the interstate, a stream of headlights greeted me heading in the opposite direction, towards Denver. The farther east I drove, the more traffic thinned. I passed Ft. Morgan as steam billowed from the two concrete columns on the south side of the interstate. I breathed the decayed fumes from the beet processing plant, a smell as stale as dog breath.

After fifteen miles, I took the Yuma exit and followed the two-lane road. I thought about turning around, heading back, but there was nothing waiting for me in Greeley, either.

•••

Wide stretches of pastureland lined the highway. Every few miles, at an intersection, I saw mailboxes. Some sat on top of fence posts like ours at home. Others rested on homemade wrought-iron stands. Yard lights dotted the countryside. I saw few cars. I knew my friends from college, all city girls, would be nervous driving for miles without seeing another car. The isolation comforted me. There are times now, living in Albuquerque, when I still long for this isolation, for space around me and for the comfort of solitude.

In sixty miles, I passed through two small towns, each only a few blocks long. Clustered streetlights glowed like a lighthouse miles before I approach the town. Pickups lined the main street outside the local bar. In Yuma, at one of three stoplights, I turned north onto Highway 59.

I rolled down the window; the cold air smelled like plowed fields. Short blades of green wheat sprouted out of dark soil near the edge of the road. Once in a while, I spotted evergreen windbreaks. Some sheltered foundations of houses that fell apart years ago.

Highways in the country are narrow; few allow for a shoulder. Reflectors, paced every hundred yards or so, lead the way. I watched for deer. Almost everyone I know has hit a deer or had a close call. I’ve been taught never to swerve. It’s better to pump the brakes, take the blow—swerving might cause the car to slide into the ditch, flip. Maybe that’s what these late night drives were about: facing the hurt head on.

After twenty-five miles on asphalt, I reached Clarkville, an abandoned community.

Thistles and sunflowers grew waist high around the two remaining buildings. White paint peeled and cracked on the siding of the church and left boards exposed to the harsh sun, the cold winters. Maybe it’s all changed now. Maybe the church collapsed. Maybe the trailer’s gone.

I left the solid feel of pavement underneath the tires and turned onto gravel roads.

•••

As I drove closer to home, stories attached themselves to places void of meaning for most: the corner where my brother and sister wrecked their car, putting both of them in the hospital; the airstrip on the edge of a field where Mr. Hadler landed his spray plane in the summer; the old Holcomb place where the bus picked up children for several years and then one day the family disappeared, blown like chaff to far away places. Their house, like so many houses in this area, still stands empty.

Even though it was one in the morning, I worried about seeing another vehicle on the narrow gravel road. I might meet someone checking cows or getting home late from the bars. Great-uncles and aunts, countless cousins and neighbors will recognize my car. They’ll tell my dad or my grandparents they saw me. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want my grandparents, who live just four miles away from our house, to worry about me driving so far alone at night. I didn’t want my dad to call me. If they found out, I’d lie. I’d tell them I forgot something I needed, which wouldn’t be as much of a lie as intended.

Eventually, I saw three silver bins like metal cairns on the left hand side of the road. I’d reached our field.

•••

Rounding the corner, my chest swelled. I knew every inch of this mile. I ran on this road when I was in high school and the past two summers when I returned from college. I jogged in the morning before I started chores. As the sun came up, wild sunflowers in the ditch raised their heads towards the light. Rabbits and field mice scampered across the road. Cows bawled as I passed by, and the gravel crunched beneath my weight, my breath labored but even.

Sometimes, I ran at night. I could only see a few feet in front of me. The maintainer’s blade left a strip of dirt on either side of the road. I used it to navigate the road’s edge. Every noise—crickets chirping, wind blowing through milkweeds, coyotes’ calls—magnified itself in the darkened silence. From the ditch, the glow of stray cats’ eyes followed me; at least that’s what I told myself. It could have been skunks or coyotes or raccoons. At night, I only went to the nearest corner, a quarter mile away, and back several times. Fear held me back from pressing further into the darkness.

To most people, there’s hardly a dip in the road. But I knew every washboard, every soft shoulder, every drainage route. I’m home.

The elm trees my great-grandmother planted stood like guards beside the road. I entered the driveway and toke note of the wild mustard, at least a foot tall, growing up through the lava rocks in front of the house. There must have been a storm because part of the gutter over the garage hung off the roof. Small branches had fallen onto the overgrown lawn. The elm tree my parents planted on the south side of the house had doubled in size. As I followed the driveway around back, I noticed the suckers growing at its base.

The headlights glared on the large deck my father and brother built. My mom talked about buying whiskey barrels and loading them with flowers to put on the deck. She never did. She’d say, “We should put lights along the sidewalk” or “We should plant new trees.” Action was never her strong suit. She also didn’t realize everything would fall apart so quickly.

I got out and heard the echo of the car door shutting. From the glow of the yard light, I noticed dandelions and sandburs growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. Buffalo grass encroached the gravel driveway. The deck needed another stain. I paid attention to these things because they were my jobs—weeding, mowing, staining.

Cows gathered in the corral. A few bawled. When I look up into the sky, the Milky Way and a thousand other stars seemed strewn across the sky like seeds thrown by a pioneer from a grain bag slung over his shoulder.

I unlocked the door with one of two house keys we ever had made. I’m not sure how I ended up with one. I walked through the garage, up the wooden steps to the side door.

•••

During the divorce settlement, my mother had a choice: keep the house or sell it to my father. With all the siblings’ consent, my brother said, “Sell it.”

We assumed my father wouldn’t let go of the house—there’s little market for farmhouses. He didn’t need the house. The day he left my mother, he moved in with his girlfriend, Susie. I knew nothing of their relationship. She’s a ghost who has stolen my father and haunts the rest of us.

Three months after my father left, my sisters and I helped my mom move to Greeley, into an apartment. We took essentials—her bed, sheets, a few pots and pans, her clothes, the kitchen table and chairs, a love seat and recliner. My mother wandered around the house, unsure what to take, unsure what to leave. She’d point to the TV cabinet or the floral living room sofa, and ask, “Do you think this can fit?” We’d shake our heads, compromise on something smaller. By afternoon, we loaded all we thought could fit into the small two-bedroom apartment my mother and I’d share for two years.

The apartment never felt like home. In fact, even with a husband and children of my own, nowhere has ever felt so truly like my home except the farm. But the apartment my mother and I shared felt like a stopping point on the way to somewhere else—somewhere better. Living together while we both went to college reversed our roles. She relied on me to help her adjust to college and living in town. From day to day, I didn’t know what to expect. Some days we’d talk and laugh about classes like roommates. Other days, I’d find her sobbing at the kitchen table. I’d talk her through getting flipped off in traffic or prioritizing the myriad projects due for her classes. Most of the time, she couldn’t be a mother. I didn’t expect her to.

•••

When I visited the house, I wanted my mother to be at the table sipping a cup of tea, reading a book, waiting. I wanted my father to be asleep in his chair like so many other nights. Always, I imagined the idealized version of my parents, the version I’d actually had for many, many years, rather than the desperate pair I last witnessed: the woman who locked herself away from us; the man stumbling home, drunk.

I opened the door to darkness. Staleness filled the air like in an empty grain bin. I turned on the hallway light and wandered from room to room like a sleepwalker. I don’t know what I was looking for—I don’t know what I expected to find.

From the garage door, I walked into the kitchen. A towel hung in the refrigerator door. A teacup and plate rested in the dish rack. A 1996 calendar on the wall showed the month of March, the month my father left.

•••

I could’ve grabbed the cookie sheet or the over-sized pan my mom talked about missing. I could’ve taken the flower-print sheets for her bed from the hallway closet filled with towels, sheets, and linens. But I didn’t. I wanted it to stay the same like a shrine or museum. If I took something back, my mother would know I visited the house. She thought I was out with friends having fun.

We had an understanding—I can come back to the apartment whenever I want without question, as long as no boys stay the night. I didn’t want to see the men my mother might have stay the night at the kitchen table in the morning, either. Yet, I shouldn’t have worried. My mother has never been on a date. I’m sure she worried about me, but it would’ve compounded her worry to know I made trips to the house.

As I wandered into the combined living room and dining room, the absence of the table, chairs, and recliner reminded me everything had changed. Shannon’s basketball and track pictures stood on top of the TV cabinet, though the TV is missing. I walked into the hallway to my parents’ room.

I saw the imprints in the carpet where their bed had sat. I looked at the long, oak dresser with a mirror attached. On top, my mother always placed a crocheted runner, her Chanel perfume, our school pictures, and a framed wedding picture to one side. As things deteriorated in the marriage, she took everything down but the framed 8 x 10 wedding picture in the center of the dresser.

My parents stand at the altar facing empty pews of the congregation. They are young; my mother holds a bouquet in manicured hands; my father looks stiff in his white jacket and black dress pants, a crew cut. It’s the only picture my mother ever displayed of their wedding. They had an album, but my mother rarely let us look at it. She didn’t want us to put fingerprints on the pictures. She wanted it to be perfect. Though so many times, even before my father’s affair, her distance and moods created strange obstacles we carefully navigated like cows walking on ice.

I don’t know why she left the wedding picture on the dresser. I like to think she wanted my father to see it, that she wanted to show she’d always been committed, that she’d done her best.

I didn’t stay long in my parents’ room; I couldn’t make myself. I turned off the hallway light and headed downstairs.

I entered my room at the foot of the stairs. I scanned a few framed photos of high school friends on the wall and wandered over to my bureau. I opened the top drawer and shuffled through papers: canceled checks, notes from an old boyfriend, and birthday cards from my grandparents.

On top of my bureau sat a jewelry box with a small drawer for earrings or bracelets. Because I only have a couple pairs of earrings, I put cash inside. When I opened the drawer, a wad of bills spilled out. I counted thirty-seven dollars. I shoved them back into the drawer. I must’ve been saving for something. I don’t remember what.

I scanned my closet filled with old clothes. I hadn’t had time to pack them for Goodwill the day we moved my mom. After a while, I switched off my light.

I knew it was late. It must have been close to two in the morning. I should go back. But I didn’t want to leave. Even though it was abandoned, even though only memories lived there, even though I couldn’t actually stay, I longed for the place even more.

•••

Upstairs in the kitchen, I pulled out drawers filled with silverware, dishtowels, and recipe books. I rummaged through the junk drawer filled with duct tape, Christmas bows, and birthday candles. I opened each cupboard. I looked at the canned soup and vegetables, Tupperware, plates and glasses. I stopped in the hallway just before the garage door and looked at the bulletin board on the wall.

An old school menu and a few jokes clipped out of the newspaper were tacked to the board. Our kindergarten pictures lined the bottom of the bulletin board. But at the top was a family picture, one of only two we ever had professionally taken.

I’m about two. I sit on a stool beside my father’s chair. My father is in the middle of the photo holding Shannon on his lap. Lisa props herself up on her hand on the floor by my father’s feet. My brother and mom stand behind my father on either side, their hands on his shoulders. We wear our best seventies outfits in the color of tangerines and avocados.

While Shannon and I have blank expressions because we’re too young to know what’s going on, the other four seem happy. Darren smiles as though he’s heard a joke. Lisa’s heard the same joke but won’t allow her teeth to show in her smile. My parents look bright, content. They seem to have no inkling of what’s to come—the joys, the heartaches, and everything in between.

I locked the door behind me.

•••

In August 2000, my sister and I were back in mom’s apartment in Greeley for the summer when my father called. He decided to rent the house to a couple with twins. The young man had moved back home to work on his family’s farm, like my father had, over thirty years before.

I hadn’t visited the house for almost two years. To accommodate the renters, we drove from Greeley to the farm three times in one week. Darren had to work; Lisa lived out of state. On the first trip, we wandered around for hours putting a few items in boxes, but mostly we were mesmerized. One of us would find an object—the cast from when I broke my wrist in fourth grade, my mother’s wedding china, the dress Shannon wore for prom—and we told stories.

The next time we made a plan to work room by room. It helped us focus. The third trip, we brought a moving truck. Like a cowboy trying to zip a winter jacket with too many layers underneath, we crammed the truck full, barely leaving space to close the door. We left odds and ends inside—an old bookcase, bunk beds, a broken record player, among other items. We figured my father could move the rest.

After we loaded the truck, each of us took one last walk around the house. Near dark, Shannon said, “We should go.” My mother asked for a few more minutes. She went to the front living room, pulled back the sheer curtains and looked out across the lawn. It hadn’t been mowed. The limbs of the elm trees swayed slightly. The pasture across the road was brown from the August sun. Tumbleweeds caught in the barbed wire fence dangled and thrashed against the barbs, trying to break free.

The setting sun left brush strokes of orange and red across the horizon. My mom turned from the window and said, “I’m ready.” Before we walked out the door, I put the key on the kitchen counter.

•••

Last June, my husband Miguel and I drove by the house with our boys. We were traveling through on our way to work a summer teaching job in Nebraska. I hadn’t been back inside the house since that August, almost fifteen years before. I asked Miguel to slow down as we approached. Wild irises bloomed at the lawn’s edge. A large flowerpot filled with petunias sat on the cement steps leading to the front door. Fewer trees stood in the backyard, and a plastic infant swing swayed in the breeze on an elm bordering the road.

Because Miguel drove slowly, the boys thought we were stopping and said, “We get out Papí? Get out?”

“You have to ask your Mama.”

“Get out Mama? Get out?”

I leaned over to look at them in their car seats, their hazel eyes wide with anticipation then turned back to the house. I scanned the yard, the line of trees, and the outbuildings. I examined the front window and envisioned the formal living room the way we left it so many years ago: the piano against the south wall, the couch tucked between two lamp tables facing the large windows, the swivel chair to the side; a place just big enough for everyone to return.

I thought of all the secretive trips—how I couldn’t stay away. I want to talk to that girl standing in the kitchen. I want to tell her she needs to stop holding on to everything with clenched fists; she needs to let go. But I’m sure if the younger version of myself and I could be in the same room together, she might say the same thing back to me.

What would that girl think if she knew years later she’d still be troubled, that she’d be married but have paranoid moments when she thought her husband would leave, that no other place had yet felt like home? What would she think if she knew she’d so internalized the shape and feel of the land that memories would never satisfy her?

I knew if I asked, the family who lives there now would open their door, would let us wander through each room. But it would be their furniture, their pictures on the wall, their memories filling the house. I want my sons to see where I grew up, to somehow understand, but that would mean breaking the spell, the one that holds my childhood family suspended in time, just beyond the sheer curtains in the front windows.

I turned and said, “No, not yet. Not yet.”

•••

DANA SALVADOR’s work is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and has been featured in Fourth Genre, Cold Mountain Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Literary Mama, among others. Additionally, she’s the recipient of a Vogelstein Foundation Grant and the recipient of the 2016 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She sometimes leaves posts at www.danasalvador.wordpress.com.

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It

My Mother Is Not This Blanket

Photo By _overanalyzer/Flickr

By Daisy Alpert Florin

The blanket, still in pieces, sits in a bag in my attic. I take it down sometimes, run my fingers over the soft white cotton, yellow now with age. If I let my eyes blur, I can almost see my mother crocheting in front of the T.V., a cigarette and glass of white wine on the nightstand beside her. Her needle moves in a jerky, seemingly haphazard way, but when it stops, a delicate white hexagon appears. Later, she will crochet these hexagons together to create the piece of blanket I am holding now.

My mother started making the blanket back in the 1980s to replace one her mother had made that was stolen from a weekend house we once owned. That house was constantly being broken into, so there wasn’t much to steal. This time, the thieves took whatever was left—a crappy television set, some dishes, a couple of beach towels. And the blanket. The police said they probably used it to carry out the rest of the stuff, then dumped it somewhere.

My mother cried when she heard that. Her mother—my grandmother, who still lived in Sweden where my mother was born—was blind by then and while she could still crochet, she’d never make anything as beautiful or intricate again. So my mother announced she would make a new one. She worked on it for years, was still working on it when my grandmother died in 1998, and when she died two years later, the blanket remained unfinished.

I have it now, zipped up in the navy blue Longchamp tote bag she kept it in. Inside are several dozen loose hexagons, a sewn-together piece not quite big enough to fit a twin-sized bed, a pattern book, crochet needles, several skeins of yarn. Everything I need to finish the blanket is there, but I can’t because I don’t know how to crochet. My mother never taught me.

It occurs to me now that perhaps the blanket is a metaphor of some kind.

•••

I don’t always think of my mother as an immigrant, but that is what she was. She left her home country, Sweden, in her early twenties, and never went back. She wasn’t an immigrant the way my father’s parents, Jews who’d fled Eastern Europe never to return, were. The forces that brought her here were neither political nor global.

But like all immigrants, my mother was escaping something, a poverty of some kind or another that propelled her to reinvent herself on foreign shores. As her daughter, the child she rooted here to stake her claim, there would always be a part of her I wouldn’t know. Something lost in translation.

•••

“Maybe you could find someone to finish it,” my father says when I ask him what I should do with the blanket.

“Oh, yeah?” I say. “And who might that be? A crochet fairy?” I picture an older Nordic woman with braids and a mustache who would charge me a fortune to finish something no one actually wants. My father, who, I am certain, believes such a person exists, sighs and changes the subject. He’s never been one to pick a fight.

My parents met on a blind date in New York in 1967. Legend has it my mother was wearing a pink rabbit fur coat. My father visited Sweden for the first time the following year, for Christmas.

I can still hear the wonder in his voice as he describes it: Christmas—in Sweden no less— through the eyes of a Jewish boy from Brooklyn. “My family never celebrated Christmas,” he tells me. “We never celebrated Hanukkah. We never celebrated anything.” No wonder he married her.

I can understand what attracted him to her. I’m not immune to the desire to be with someone who offers a pathway into a different life, one you couldn’t possibly be expected to create on your own. This is why my father loves the blanket, thinks it worthy of repair: because it reminds him of that Christmas and all the ways he was seduced, not just by my mother but by Sweden itself. If my mother was fleeing something when she left Sweden, my father was fleeing something, too.

My parents’ marriage ended not long after the blanket was stolen, but that doesn’t stop my father from telling people who he hears speaking Swedish on the street, in restaurants, or in elevators, “My wife was Swedish.” Your ex-wife, I want to say but don’t. I know this is a point of pride for him, proof he took a chance once, for love. Maybe difference isn’t enough to build a life on, I want to tell him. Maybe the fault line at the center was too much to overcome. But because I love my father, I let it go.

•••

To me, making a blanket by hand would be an impossible labor of love. But that was what Swedes did: they made things. Blankets, scarves, mittens, sweaters, dresses—everything by hand, knitting and sewing and crocheting late into winter nights that began at three o’clock. “We had nothing else to do, Daisy!” my mother would say, laughing, and her older sister, my aunt Marianne, who used to hook her own rugs, would nod in agreement.

When my mother came to New York, Marianne was already here, and the two Swedish sisters—a phrase that always sounds like the set-up to a raunchy joke—lived together in a fourth floor walkup apartment on East 54th Street. After my mother married my father and I was born, we moved to a larger apartment on the Upper East Side.

There were a lot of women like my mother on the Upper East Side, Swedes married to Americans—Jews, specifically—but my mother was different. For one thing, as she liked to point out, those women were married to men a lot richer than my father. But there were other differences, too. Their children spoke Swedish and had Swedish names and spent summers in family homes on Sweden’s cold and rocky shores. We did none of these things. Whenever I asked my mother why she never taught my brother and me to speak Swedish, she would say, incredulously, “Why would you ever need to speak Swedish?”

I sometimes thought the other Swedish women judged her for not passing on her Swedish traditions. Perhaps I judged her for that, too. But my mother seemed all too happy to cast off her history. Her children would grow up knowing little about the country of her birth, and she was okay with that. “Your mother was an American from the day she arrived” is how my father puts it. And he’s right: there was something about her Swedish-ness she wanted to leave behind.

•••

A blanket is a shopworn metaphor, one that conveys warmth and home and all the things that are lost when a mother dies. But that is not what I want to say about my mother, or about the blanket.

The blanket is made up of hundreds of small white hexagons. Each hexagon is divided into three triangles; on each triangle are six raised bumps arranged in a pyramid design. The bumps are, I suppose, what give the pattern its name: Swedish Popcorn. When crocheted together, the hexagons transform into an undulating pattern of six-pointed stars. Looking at it almost makes me dizzy: I can’t tell where one star ends and another begins.

My mother was not a blanket. She could be critical and reserved. She wasn’t exactly the kind of woman who wrapped you up in a blanket of her love. As for the blanket, well, it’s really more of a bedspread. Decorative rather than functional. Also, it’s cotton and, because it’s crocheted, full of holes. It’s pretty, if you go for that sort of thing, but not exactly warm or cozy or any of the things you might think of when you think about a blanket.

I resist the urge to have it stand in for my mother in part because it feels too maudlin—a concrete symbol of her unfinished life and everything she didn’t have time to teach me—but also because that wasn’t her. When she died, my mother’s closets were full of blazers and skirts and pants with factory-sewn tags—J.Crew, Saks, Banana Republic. She could still sew and knit and crochet. She could even reupholster furniture. But over the years, she did all of this less and less as Sweden moved further into her past. Besides, this was New York and she wanted things she could buy.

•••

Before my mother moved to New York, her father made sure she could type. Quick and clever and affable, she was in high demand as a secretary, and it wasn’t long before she rose in her chosen field, fashion. My mother was always a working mother, and she didn’t feel conflicted about it. She didn’t come on class trips or help me with my homework or pick me up early for mother-daughter shopping trips. I used to chalk this up to her foreignness, that these were things she didn’t know she was supposed to do because she wasn’t born here. But eventually I came to understand that she didn’t do these things because she didn’t want to.

My mother’s parents divorced in 1948 when my mother, the youngest of their four children, was five, and my grandmother remained financially dependent on my grandfather for the rest of her life. Back in the early 1990s, when she first discovered Suze Orman, my mother realized how watching the financial dynamics play out between her parents had had an impact on her.

“Every Sunday night, my father would come over for dinner,” she told me once. “Before he left, he would leave an envelope with cash on top of the wardrobe in the front hall. There was no discussion of how much he would give her. He decided how much she would get and that was that.”

It was important to my mother to be financially independent, but she didn’t know how. Whatever money she made, she quickly spent. My parents fought often and bitterly about money. I remember my father telling me once, in anger, that my mother had spent $30,000 that year on clothes. When my mother left my father, she bought a $4,000 rug for her new apartment that the cat threw up on.

In 1998, when my grandmother died, my mother and I went to Sweden for her funeral, and I asked her to show me some of the places she’d lived as a child. We pulled up in front of a neat, two-story attached house.

“My brothers had the front bedroom,” my mother said, pointing at the windows, “and Marianne and I shared the one in back.”

“Where did your mother sleep?” I asked.

“In the dining room.” My mother was quiet for a while. Then she started the car back up and said, “What a life.”

There was something in her voice that day that made me think this—the mother in the dining room, the envelope of cash in the front hall, a life circumscribed by children and circumstance—was what she was running from, the hole she was always trying to fill. My mother wasn’t forced to leave Sweden. She could have stayed. The life she left wasn’t terrible or unbearable. It just wasn’t enough. There are times I wonder if that’s why she decided to remake the blanket, to atone for a wrong that had been done. The burglary, yes, but also the leaving.

In the short window of time when my mother was motherless, I saw her cry about it only once, on the day we got the news that my grandmother had died. “I just don’t like the idea of not having a mother anymore” is what she told me. As if that’s what a mother becomes after so many years away: an idea.

•••

My mother never became an American citizen. It wasn’t possible to do so at the time without losing her Swedish citizenship. “And I might want to go back someday, when I’m old and sick,” she always said with a laugh, “so Sweden can take care of me.” I used to believe her, imagined her packing her bags and heading back across the ocean. But as the years went on, she must have known she was never going to go back, that the life she’d built here mattered more than the one she’d left behind.

There is something else inside the Longchamp tote: a Ziploc bag with one hexagon inside it, a golden needle shoved through its center. I remember she used to carry pieces of it like this when she traveled for business so she could crochet during layovers or on overnight flights to Hong Kong. I hold it now, the oils from my fingers mixing with the shadow memory of hers, move my thumb across its bumpy Braille-like texture. I wonder when she realized she would never finish it, not because she was dying but because she simply lost the will.

In the end, she managed to make and sew together more than a hundred hexagons. But the blanket will never be finished because I will never finish it. Maybe my mother never taught me because she thought we’d have more time. Or maybe—and this seems more likely—she didn’t teach me because she thought it was something I’d never need to know. Maybe that’s what immigrants do—what mothers do—imagine worlds for their children that are bigger, vaster, and more electric than their own.

And maybe that was part of why she came here, to raise an American daughter far from Sweden’s dark winters and limited possibilities. A daughter who knew this much at least: that we aren’t always meant to finish what our mothers leave behind.

•••

DAISY ALPERT FLORIN’s essays have appeared in Full Grown People, Ms. Magazine and Under the Gum Tree, among other publications. Her essay “Crash” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2016. She is currently at work on a novel. Read more at www.daisyflorin.com.

Read More FGP essays by Daisy Alpert Florin.

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It

The Stars In The Sky

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jennifer James

I was sitting in the dermatologist’s office, waiting to be seen for what I was convinced was a killer mole. Killer. I couldn’t quite get a full lung full of air, but over the last few months, and several futile visits, my general practitioner had listened to my chest, put me on antibiotics, and assured me I could breathe just fine. After my third visit to her for what was apparently an imaginary ailment, I went on with my life, hoping that she was right, that I could breathe just fine, even though I really, really couldn’t. My oxygen levels were fine, according to the professionals. But those fuckers had missed my malignant mole.

I was determined to live, against all odds, so I bypassed my worthless primary care doctor and took myself straight to the specialist. I waited for forty-five minutes, which was normal for this dermatology practice, I knew. The doctor in this office was notorious for his friendly, long-winded office visits. I’d seen him a time or two before for warts and skin tags—definitely minor issues—and had left the office in in a little under two hours, from check-in to walking out the door. Large medical conglomerates would seizure over the disturbing amount of time this man spent with his patients—often discussing his children’s college plans or the weather, or anything else that crossed his mind. But I knew the guy, and at this point, I just wanted to get what I knew would be the bad news and get on with an aggressive treatment plan.

Dr. Pike bustled into the room like Santa Claus. He was jolly and friendly and happy. He shook my hand and asked why I was here. I took the deepest breath I could manage and showed him the offending, obviously atypical mole on my right wrist. He adjusted his glasses and examined the spot thoughtfully. Too thoughtfully, for my taste. Just say it, I thought. He took off his glasses and looked at me.

“What we’re looking at here is a kind of pigmentation change that comes with age, Mrs. James. It’s normal, nothing wrong with this bit of skin at all.”

“Okay, thank you…” I said shakily. Dr. Pike smiled encouragingly and checked my chart. “So you’re thirty years old, right? Do you have any high risk factors regarding your skin? Because you’re pretty young to be worried about this sort of thing unless you had some specific reason to be concerned.”

I recognized this routine now: it was a kind of variation on the talk my general practitioner had given me about my breathing. The message was essentially, Lady, you’re fine. We’ll check you out because you’re here in front of us, but you might be just a little nuts. This was familiar and increasingly becoming true: I WAS a little nuts.

“No, not really,” I said.

Dr. Pike looked me in the eye and smiled gently. “So … how’s your health otherwise?’

I could feel my mouth turning down and my chest opening up wide. I sobbed and sobbed. I couldn’t make words come out, and all the while, Dr. Pike looked on kindly, passing the tissue box and making reassuring, non-judgmental noises. I loved him for this.

After a while, I blew my nose, and wiped my face. Dr. Pike sat patiently, perched on his little stool with wheels, waiting for me to get my shit together. When I could talk again, I told him, “My mother died. She died almost six months ago. Ever since then, I can’t breathe. And the doctors can’t find anything. But I can’t ever get a big, deep breath and I don’t think I’m ever going to be okay.”

Dr. Pike nodded. “I understand. There’s something inside that breaks when your mom dies. I remember going outside one night not long after I lost my own mother. It was a perfect night, kind of cool, but not cold, and the stars were bright, bright, bright, bright as I’d ever seen them. And I looked up at them and thought: Huh. Just stars. I knew they’d never look the same to me, that I’d lost something so enormous that even the most beautiful starry night meant nothing.” He paused and I don’t remember what I did, but I remember feeling a tremendous lifting, the feeling that finally someone understood how fucked up the world was because my mother had died, that someone spoke my language.

Moving on to actual medicine, he said: “Now, as for your breathing, let’s do this one thing at a time.” He concurred with my general practitioner that it was probably nothing, but also strongly recommended that I find a new doctor. “I believe in the power of negative test results,” he said confidently. “We need to be sure that it’s nothing, and the only way to do that is to test for the things it could be.” He continued talking, lapsing into his signature story-telling mode, telling me all about a friend of his who’d displayed all kinds of horrifying neurological symptoms, had undergone extensive, invasive testing, only to learn that his symptoms were a blip…benign. No underlying, lethal cause. “You need to have some testing,” he said. “Get some answers and then go on.” He didn’t offer any bullshit assurances that everything would be fine, and that I didn’t have anything to worry about—another reason to love the man. I was relieved to be talking to someone who got it: things were fucked and they could get more fucked. Get your shit together as best you can and take a step.

•••

A year earlier, I’d still been nuts but in a much more manageable way. I’d been working at a dead end job as a receptionist. I was looking for a new job and had romanced myself into thinking that if I returned to teaching, I’d finally be happy. I applied and applied and finally found a position in a classroom. The job description was fluid—I’d be an assistant in a classroom, unless a full-time teaching position opened up. I didn’t care; I was excited to be getting out from behind the receptionist’s desk and to be making more than seven dollars an hour.

My husband and I had no children at the time. We’d made some sketchy decisions early in our marriage, beginning with our choice to make his rural hometown our permanent home. It turns out that small hometowns make lovely movie backdrops but don’t provide a robust job market. We started out really poor and managed to become really, really poor. Right before my mom died, we were on the verge of getting our collective shit together. My husband had landed a job with health benefits. I had resumed my education, trying to fashion a career that I didn’t really want from classroom experience and good intentions, and about a month before we found out my mom was sick, I’d started as the director of the infant program at a Montessori school. I was really trying to love it.

My grandmother, Gladys, was an interesting woman. She was cultured and funny and kind. She was also the kind of person who could suck all of the air out of any room she passed through. My parents had divorced about fifteen years earlier and as my grandmother grew older and my mother grew poorer, they combined households. My grandmother moved in. These two women had been the most imminent, consistent presences in my life and even now I have trouble explaining how they got along. Or didn’t. One phrase might be: unconditional love, as in, no matter what, these women never really let go of one another, regardless of distance, circumstance, or the emotions involved. Another phrase might be: toxic codependency, also as in, no matter what, these women never really let go of one another, regardless of distance, circumstance, or the emotions involved. It was quite a mess. Like most families.

It was a cool, September evening in 1998 when my grandmother called. In her throaty alto, she said, “Well, dear, don’t be alarmed, but your mother was admitted to the hospital this evening. She was having just a little trouble breathing. She’s much better now, though! Everything will be fine. But it would be so lovely for her to see you…” I planned to come up the next day after work, leaving the classroom full of babies behind and spending a long weekend with my mother who was, reportedly, “much better.” I would only miss one day of work at my new job and could go see about my mom. It was manageable.

My classroom full of babies was not so manageable. The babies themselves were fine. But I had some serious doubts about my return to the classroom. The business of caring for babies is sacred to me; they are some of the most precious, vulnerable people on the planet. I went into the classroom with the idea that my mission was to care for the children. I had forgotten about their fucking parents. Parents who drove up in their Mercedes to drop off their twelve-month-old with an ear infection. Parents who demanded that their child nap at school, even though the child sobbed through nap time. Parents who dropped their babies so they could go golf. Not that there weren’t lovely parents there, too, parents who came at lunch to breastfeed their babies, parents who took days off of work, just to spend time with their babies, but I wasn’t seeing those folks as clearly. I committed a cardinal sin in teaching: I judged the parents. Now, twenty some years later, a parent myself, I have a little more compassion for everyone involved. At the time, I thought, Jesus. I fucked up again. I need ANOTHER new job.

So when my grandmother called, there was a part of me that was actually relieved, grateful that I would have the coming Friday off from the babies and their whiny-assed parents. I would see my mom and my grandmother, they would annoy me, and I would go back to my life and try to learn to love it as it was, or at least grow into it gracefully. I didn’t feel particularly sad, even. Rather, I had a kind of dysfunctional anticipation of a crisis. “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out,” wrote Chekhov. I wasn’t very good at the day-to-day-living. A crisis sounded a little bit lovely.

My sister and I talked later that evening too. My sister is four years younger than I am, but many years wiser.

“It’s cancer,” my sister muttered. “You know it’s cancer.”

On my end of the line: “Maybe. You don’t know for sure…” I believed myself, too. My mother was…well, my mother. She had survived all kinds of unlikely, life threatening illnesses, and it seemed silly that life would smack her down at this point. My sister, on the other hand, took the view that it was a fucking miracle life hadn’t smacked her down before this point. It seemed too soon to say.

The cold, hard truth was that my mother had been smoking since she was twelve years old. When I got this phone call, she was fifty-five years old and had just celebrated her birthday with a traditional lobster tail dinner that she just couldn’t eat. That should’ve been a sign, my grandmother said later. At five feet, four inches, my mother weighed probably a hundred pounds. She’d looked suspiciously thin for years, seeming to survive mostly on nicotine and pure sugar, with the occasional navel orange (she always peeled them artfully, leaving the entire skin in one, unbroken spiral) or bowl of rice for variety. This was who my mother was, though. Quirky and kind of depressed, relatively happy to go to bed early most nights with a thick novel, a pack of cigarettes, and a bag of gooey circus peanut candies on her nightstand, in her odd little nest of a bed. There would be too many cats sleeping on her feet and two big dogs flopped on the floor beside the bed (they were too big to fit on the actual bed) and she drifted in and out of sleep fitfully, smoking a cigarette or two during the night in the dark.

The following day, I went to school and explained the situation to the Head of School. She nodded, her big brown eyes concerned. “Of course, take tomorrow,” she said. “Hope your mom is okay; we’ll see you Monday.”

My mom was not okay. I got to the hospital and could see that. My grandmother was lovely in a kind of lethal way; she couldn’t hear much, didn’t want to hear much, and couldn’t believe that anything could be really wrong with her daughter. On the trip from my mother and grandmother’s house to the hospital, my grandmother chatted serenely, telling me about the fluid they drew off my mother’s chest, how she was breathing so much better, and how it was so nice that I’d been able to come this evening; I could see the doctors in the morning and surely they’d figure something out. I nodded and smiled—this was always the best approach with my grandmother.

My mother was in the ICU. Her private cubicle (the only fabulous thing about being gravely ill—you get much better hospital care than the less gravely ill) was lined with monitors. The ubiquitous bag of fluids was hooked up and she wore that tiny oxygen cannula in her nostrils. I suddenly felt everything. The corners of my mouth turned down and an actual sob came out of my mouth. My mother, truly one of the kindest people I’ve known, snapped: “Oh for heaven’s sake. Stop being so dramatic, Peanut.”

There is a scene in the movie, Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence allows a match to burn all the way to his fingertips without showing a reaction. When his friend attempts the same trick, it hurts! Lawrence says: “Of course it hurts. The trick is…not minding that it hurts.” This was how my mother lived her life. She swallowed pain as a life mission. She didn’t expect people around her to make a big deal about it—that was incredibly poor form. Which is why she got so mad at my boohooing.

My mother was a complicated person. She was exceedingly generous, funny, and kind-hearted. Once she let a diabetic, homeless man live on our front porch (only on nights when he couldn’t get into the shelter because he was too drunk). When our cat brought her a half-dead mouse, she nursed it back to health and we kept it as a rescue/pet (named Templeton) until spring came and she could let him go without worrying about him freezing to death. When she worked teaching English as a second language to students in downtown Washington, D.C., her car was the only one which remained unvandalized in the church parking lot. To be fair, it was a pretty shitty car, but the real reason my mom’s car stayed intact was that she was a smoker.

When she stepped out to the parking lot to smoke between classes, she’d make conversation with whoever was also out there smoking, which seemed most often to be a group of aimless-looking young men. She would chat amiably, smoking along with the boys, sharing her point of view with such a warm smile that those boys let her say ridiculously cheesy things like: “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You shouldn’t have beat that fellow up. Now—why aren’t you in school?” I never witnessed any of these conversations, but I know her smile and her voice, and I’m certain when she smiled at the guy, he felt like she genuinely cared about him, and was letting him in on a little secret: that he shouldn’t have beat that other dude up and that his ass should be in school! When she scuffed out her butt and tucked it into her pocket or a trashcan (nobody likes a litter bug), she’d wink at him and his friends and say: “Now, boys. You try and stay out of trouble, now, okay?” I don’t think they stayed out of trouble because of her. But her car was never fucked up, either.

The diagnosis was, in fact, cancer. Lung cancer. Advanced lung cancer. Today, I know what that diagnosis means. Then, I had no fucking clue. My mother died five weeks later. In five weeks, and two chemo treatments, she dropped another twenty pounds or so, lost all her hair, and had spongy patches of yeast growing inside her mouth. She was conscious until the last three days of her life, when she slipped into that world between the worlds, the one where morphine and cellular failure meet. One of the hospice workers told us we’d need to start using diapers with her; she died twenty minutes later. None of her family believes that timeline is coincidental—my mother would rather die than wear diapers.

•••

It surprised me how weirdly my mother’s dying fucked me up, what strange ideas fluttered through my brain as she died. For example, I felt compelled to take pictures of my mother while she lay in the funky hospital bed in the den. It wasn’t that she looked otherworldly beautiful or anything at all like that. She was bald and haggard and irritated that death had come to sit on the bed beside her. Even so, I wanted a picture, because I knew that was the last I’d see of her in this life: her frail, bony skeleton wrapped in fragile skin, her breath whispering in and out, in and out, the oxygen pumping, the air purifier purifying, the fan blowing a constant, ridiculous breeze on her face. The nurses had advised keeping a fan blowing toward her, to create the illusion of fresh air, the concept that she actually could breathe. Just so you know, I didn’t actually end up taking pictures of her, I didn’t. But I thought about it a lot.

I didn’t want to wash the sheets after she died. How fucked up is that? Understand, we did wash the sheets. They smelled like yeast and bleach and death. But they smelled like my mother’s death and I didn’t want it gone yet. Not just yet.

The end came way more quickly than we’d thought it would. I kept taking time off from the babies, and each time I’d go back to the classroom, the parents of the babies would say, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re back,” and list everything that had gone wrong while I was away. I tried to quit entirely, and the Head of School said no. If my mother had lived another week, I would have, just never returned. As it was, there was no need. I was free much sooner than I hoped.

When I came back after the funeral, and after I’d written thank you cards to everyone who’d attended, brought casseroles, I was changed, not for better. My first “real” day back in the classroom, I brought in a tasteful (I thought) harvest-themed floral arrangement someone had given me as a condolence offering. The flowers looked authentic and added a nice feel to the room (I thought). The Head of School walked in and lifted her eyebrows. She didn’t say a thing. After she left, one of my co-workers said: she hates fake flowers. I will say that having my mother die helped me with my codependency issues quite a bit. Fuck her, I said. See? What a little thing, right? And at least some of you reading this also hate fake flowers. Which is, under normal circumstances, okay with me. That day, I thought I’d take those fake flowers and fling them right at The Head of School. Fuck her very much.

I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t stand my life without my mother in it.

By the time I got to Dr. Pike with my imagined lethal mole, I was undone. I couldn’t breathe, I hated my job, and I wasn’t talking to God. Fuck Him. I broke up with Him after a flukey ice storm killed the power in our area on Christmas Eve. I’d made it through my mother dying, cleaning out her house, tolerating my job, and when I finally got a break, everything got cold and dark, every bullshit metaphor brought to life.

Dr. Pike helped me, though. He heard me. I think losing a parent is like becoming one. People can help you, be sympathetic, be kind. But until you experience it yourself, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You can’t. It’s another language altogether. And the stars in the sky, they get sketchy. Breathing: also sketchy business. Dr. Pike spoke the language, and in his way, helped me turn back to the living place, a place where maybe the weather wasn’t out to get me, where some jobs just aren’t right, and where maybe, just maybe, the stars would find a way to shine once more.

Finally I could breathe.

•••

JENNIFER JAMES lives with her family in rural Virginia. She writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and has been published in Full Grown People as well as Life in 10 Minutes. She has completed a novel and has just begun work on her second one. In her free time, she enjoys reading all kinds of books and discovering new podcasts. Above all, she loves a good story.

Some names have been changed. —ed.

Read more FGP essays by Jennifer James.

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It

The Presence of Her Absence

Photo by Cristian Iohan Ştefănescu/Flicker

By Liane Kupferberg Carter

“Is there hidden treasure up here?”

My eleven-year-old son Jonathan followed me up the creaking wooden stairs to the unfinished third floor attic of my father’s house one Saturday summer afternoon. What was he imagining? A secret stash of Spanish gold coins? Purloined jewels? But I knew what he meant. As a child, this Moorish-style house built in the late 1920s had always exuded mystery to me too.

“Let’s hope,” I said.

My eighty-three-year-old father had decided it was time to move. My mother had died two years earlier, a week short of her seventy-second birthday, after a drawn-out wasting illness. We’d grown so accustomed to the hiss of her oxygen tank that after her death, the silence was jarring. My father had removed the chair lift, the bed pans, the medications, and medical equipment. He’d taken to wandering through rooms in search of things to straighten and fix.

My husband Marc, our sons, and I were moving soon too. I had the unenviable task of emptying two houses at the same time and finding homes for all the soon-to-be-discarded books, house wares, tools, and toys. But I was grateful for the distraction. It kept me from focusing too much on the pain of closing up the only childhood home I had ever known.

“Let’s start here,” I said and opened the door to the attic bedroom. It was painted Pepto Bismol pink, a color my parents had chosen to welcome my teenage cousin Carole. She’d come to live with us after her mother Frances died. One unshaded light bulb still hung from the ceiling. Jonathan and I sat on opposite sides of the full size bed. But the old mattress was so soft and deep that we sank and rolled against each other, clonking heads. Giggling, we hauled each other out.

I seated myself at a built-in plywood desk tucked under the dormer, dragged open a warped drawer and dug in. Not the hidden treasure Jonathan hoped for, but treasure to me: a stationer’s box of faded invitations for my parents’ 1951 wedding at a long-gone New York hotel. Birth announcements for each of my fifteen first cousins. An envelope with a return address that said only, “War Bonds.” Braille manuals. A round-tipped Braille stylus, oak tag, a masonite board, and a hinged metal slate I remembered playing with. My mother had made books for the visually impaired; in later years, she recorded audio books for The Lighthouse. Reading was her lifelong refuge. Even as a child of ten, in the midst of the Depression, she’d told me, she’d sit on the floor and read three-week-old newspapers as avidly as if they were the latest screen magazines. At ten she read books by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Woolf. “I didn’t understand most of it,” she once told me, “I just read whatever I could get my hands on.” Was that why she’d dedicated so much time to producing those Braille books? To share that love of reading she’d also imparted to me? I closed my eyes and ran my fingers over the indecipherable bumps.

Then I unearthed a landmine.

I stared at a pair of similar printed cards. The same date. The same time. The same cemetery. I’d been barely two that terrible day in August. Grandma Anna and Aunt Frances died within twenty-four hours of each other. Mother and daughter. Frances, from mysterious symptoms that might have been lupus; Grandma, of complications from diabetes. I hadn’t known there had been one funeral to bury them both.

I had only the dimmest visual memories of Grandma Anna, my dad’s mother: a kind, billowing woman in a wheelchair, an afghan concealing her lap. I was not allowed to climb on that lap. Only years later did I learn why: her leg had just been amputated. “But even on just one leg,” my mother marveled, “she balanced herself on crutches because she said she had to bake. It was Purim, she had hundreds of hamantashen to make.” Her absence was a phantom limb presence in my childhood. I had ached for the grandmother I didn’t get to know.

I looked at Jonathan. He was reading one of my old book reports. “This is pathetic, Mom,” he said. “How old were you when you wrote it?”

“Those were simpler times,” I said. “You must be bored if you’re reading that. Why don’t you go see if Grandpa will play Connect Four with you?”

My mother had adored her mother-in-law. Anna had filled some of the void her own mother’s early death from cancer had left. My mother’s mother Liane died long before I was born. I’d been named for her. I knew Grandma Liane only through my mother’s stories. A woman so kind and beloved in their Yonkers community that five hundred people had come to her funeral. The only picture I’d ever seen of my grandmother was printed on the back of a small round mirror that fit in my mother’s purse. It was a faded photo of a woman kneeling in a polka dot dress, embracing a small blonde child who grew up to be my brown-haired mother.

“Why don’t you have more pictures?” I’d asked. She never answered. It had frightened me to hear my mother’s sad voice, to see the shrouded look in her eyes, so I stopped asking. Years later, I learned that a year after my mother’s mother died, her father remarried a widow named Helen. Helen resented my mother’s presence in the house. She tried repeatedly to drive her out. One day, my mother returned home from work to find that Helen had taken my grandmother’s photo albums and her set of the Harvard Classic Books series. She’d dumped it all in a metal trash bin in the back yard. She’d incinerated it all and erased my mother’s childhood.

Because I was named for my grandmother, I’d grown up feeling that I was the repository of all my mother’s fantasies, hopes, and longings. I’d also believed that names and words had a dark magic presence. To name a fear was to breathe life into it, so I learned early on not to ask about the things that scared me most. My mother had been only seventeen when she lost her mother. I worried my mother would leave me too. Because I bore my grandmother’s name, I also feared I might die young the way she had. I remember lying in bed at night, searching my seven-year-old body for cancer lumps. It was a typical fear for any child, but I worried more than most. I knew firsthand that mothers could and often did die before their children were done needing them. I am now past sixty. My mother has been gone twenty years, I am still not done needing her.

I continued to search. Cleaning out, but hunting too. I found a metal box full of index cards, scribbled over in my mother’s backward slanting hand. I began to read. “Patrick Mulcahy: August 23, 1949: black skirt, Ohrbach’s; white ribbon blouse; movie: ‘On the Town’; dinner, Caffe Reggio.” Each card contained the name of a man she was dating, with relevant details about what she’d worn and where they’d gone. There were scores of cards. She’d once told me, “Back then I only had two skirts and three nice blouses. I washed and ironed all the time so I wouldn’t repeat an outfit from one date to the next.” She’d been a poor young woman, sleeping on her brother and sister-in-law’s sofa bed in a Stuyvesant Town apartment. She worked at an advertising agency high up in the Empire State Building. She’d been popular. My dad once told me, “I had to fight off half the male population of Manhattan to get her.”

“I encouraged that fantasy,” she said and laughed. I like to imagine her looking like Rosalind Russell in His Gal Friday, delivering snappy lines of dialogue and wearing great hats.

I marveled at the volume of what she had stashed away in the attic. The file cabinets were crammed. My grade school loose-leaf notebooks, still bulging with yellowing compositions. Forty years’ worth of cancelled checks. A clever musical parody she wrote of The Mikado. Large, rolled-up photos in cardboard tubes. I unfurled them, and studied the panoramas of dinner dance crowds, women in taffeta gowns and rhinestone studded eyeglasses, balding men proud and portly in their tuxes. I recognized many faces, people who had once looked so old to me. I was now the same age, probably even older, than they had been when those photographs were taken.

I slid open the warped closet door and found her emerald green strapless satin evening gown. I’d loved to dress up in it. I swam in it then. What would it feel like to try it on now? But the gown sagged under the weight of its own whale boning. The glamour was gone.

Instead, I stepped into the long closet, slid the door shut, and stared at the pinpricks of light at the far end. One day Peter O’Leary, the imaginative older boy of five who lived next door, locked us into the closet together, pointed out the holes of light in the far wall, and said, “Those are witch’s eyes! She’s going to get us!” I remembered my terror when I couldn’t open the door. How I’d screamed and screamed until my mother found us and comforted me.

Slowly I began to fill large black plastic trash bags. In went the piles of torn pink bedding thick with dust; files full of raffles and receipts from the temple bazaars my mother used to run; rotting suitcases, the seams infested with tiny, larval debris that made me shudder.

“I wish I could be as sure of other things in this world as the fact that the housework will still be here long after I’m gone,” she often said.

I thought about the essential unknowability of my mother. The mysteries of our parents’ inner lives. Did she mean to leave me this tantalizing trail? More likely, she’d assumed she still had time left to sift and to sort the half-written stories, the faded photos, the letters from long-gone lovers. Why had she kept the boyfriend index cards? The snippets of lace and cloth? The feathered bits of millinery? The Braille books? Why had she valued these items above others? What had these totems meant to her?

I will never know for sure.

Her stepmother had destroyed the talismans of her own childhood. Had she preserved finite, fragile clues, bits of an adult life she’d cherished, to give me what she hadn’t had? Wanted me to know her in ways she’d been denied knowing her own mother? Reassembling these shards from my mother’s life was an emotional archaeology.

And then, finally, I found what all along I must have been seeking without even knowing. It was in a stationery box filled with unsent greeting cards. A note written to my husband Marc from my mother, on the eve of our wedding. I had seen it when she’d given him an antique silver Kiddush cup. Marc must have dropped the note during the excitement of that evening. I’d forgotten it. My mother had saved it.

The note said simply, “May Liane give you as much joy as she has given us.”

Did she know that I would find it one day? How much comfort I would draw from it? Could she have known that note would be what I’d treasure most? I’d like to think so.

Joy. I’d given her that.

And in return, she anchored me. The home she created was tender and safe. It is a lifetime since I lost her, but I still bask in the warmth of her sustaining love.

•••

LIANE KUPFERBERG CARTER is a nationally known writer and advocate for the autism community. Her memoir, Ketchup Is My Favorite Vegetable: A Family Grows Up With Autism, is a winner of the 2017 American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Book Award. Her articles and essays have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Brain Child, Literary Mama, The Manifest-Station, and Brevity. www.lianekcarter.com

 

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It

McCleaning with the Dustbuster

By gwire/Flickr

By Brooke Champagne

My mother twice bought the pitch of a salesman at the door, and both were, in one way or another, a response to one or another of her failed marriages.

The first sell came in 1992 from David Vitter, chinless Republican candidate for the Louisiana House of Representatives from the 81st district, running on the amorphous platform of family values. He was conducting, in his words, a traditional, old-school campaign, knocking on constituents’ doors and actually listening to their needs and concerns about the future. My mother invited him into our dustbusted living room. My father had been a radical Vietnam/Watergate leftist, lying across the busiest intersection of Robert E. Lee Boulevard in New Orleans to protest the draft, kicking a hole into the TV during Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” telecast. After a few of years of marriage, his behaviors lost whatever charm they once possessed. When Vitter arrived at our door, my parents had been divorced for eight years. For my father, politics was sacrosanct, and supporting a Republican was anathema to everything he believed to be good and true. It was perhaps on this ground alone Mom promised Vitter that he could count on her vote.

Soon afterward, another salesman introduced us to the exorbitant Tri-Star vacuum cleaner, a silver, futuristic-looking contraption with a long hose separating the motor from the power brush. The Tri-Star promised everything: healthier environment, enhanced home appearance, peace of mind. My mother was finalizing her second divorce—she required some sense of “here is something I will never have to think about again.” The Tri-Star, purchased around the time Vitter was sworn into the state legislature, has lived through more than a dozen political cycles, including the public admission by Vitter in 2007 that he’d habitually solicited DC prostitutes over the years. His wife Wendy joined him in solidarity at the press conference. Hands clasped at her front, she wore a form-fitting leopard print dress while her husband repeatedly asked her, his constituents, and God for their collective forgiveness. She said nothing. They remain married today.

My mother passed that Tri-Star vacuum cleaner on to me just after my wedding. Nearly ten years later I remain married to my husband, breaking my mother’s record for her first two marriages.

•••

Dusting my writing desk I recall a foremost precept of cleaning: dust accumulates most quickly in unused spaces. Thus, I am not writing enough. If I wrote more, the dust might more readily fall upon the nightstand, on the oscillating fan next to it, on the sewing machine in the corner of my office which I never use because, as my mother has joked more than once, women shouldn’t learn to sew—they should divorce if it came to that.

Dusting is the minutiae of moving objects around. So is marriage and, sometimes, so is divorce.

I bump my silver philodendron too forcefully with my dust rag—its soil dumps neatly into the small cubic space between my writing desk and bookshelf. The Tri-Star’s hose attachment is broken, and I can’t sweep away the wet soil because it will grind into the carpet. If only an appliance existed, I consider, that will pick up just this dirt, in just this small space.

•••

I have forgotten all about the Dustbuster. For children of the eighties, dustbusting was an invigorating verb. After dinner it was my job to dustbust the crumbs from the table and sometimes, gleefully, from my little sisters’ shirtfronts. Through easy tasks like dustbusting we learned the virtues of responsibility and cleanliness, in the Mc sort of way. My eighties were filled with Mc-food (frozen or fast), Mc-parents (stepfathers), and Mc-neighborhoods (subdivisions built up in a few weeks with the same three house plans multiplied endlessly down the block). Mcs were shoddy replacements for the real thing.

One summer afternoon I attempted a cleaning shortcut: rather than vacuuming the living room, as I’d been tasked, I resolved to dustbust every inch of its twist pile carpet in long, straight lines. But the Dustbuster clogged on my third row, and it died on the fourth. To clean it out, I detached the nozzle from the handle and spilled crumbs everywhere, for which I reluctantly lugged out the Tri-Star.

•••

The Dustbuster was invented in 1979, the same year as the McDonald’s Happy Meal, and a year after that, both the Chicken McNugget and I were born. Carroll Gantz, Black & Decker’s Industrial Design manager, marketed the Dustbuster as a portable suction device for picking up light dirt and debris. But that was the thing: it didn’t do much else. It sucked the surface grime but couldn’t penetrate to the root. In the eighties I knew, McDonald’s Mc-fed and the Dustbuster Mc-cleaned.

•••

The original Dustbuster was a cream-colored plastic duckbill with a single brown button to rev its tiny motor. To charge one meant matching it up to its opposite-shaped wall holder. It looked like two hands clasping together. Like a prayer.

Our Dustbuster hung next to my mother’s wood carving of the Serenity Prayer, which seemed the most permanent thing in our house by virtue of its basically being a letter to God—God, grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change—though I never heard Mom ask God to grant her a thing. It might have been during one of her fights with my stepfather when the prayer was knocked from the wall. Once rehung, the carving remained askew for a long time, a rearrangement I thought appropriate.

•••

Were my mother’s remarriages what Samuel Johnson called “the triumph of hope over experience”? Or, ultimately, the failure of assignation? Promises weren’t just made at the end of a church aisle, I intuited. A couple’s foundation wasn’t so simple as “man and wife,” and the sickness and health and love and death weren’t even the half of it.

Often before those bigger tests play out, a couple lives together, slowly ages together, moves around in lockstep or with four left feet, depending on the day. And rather than acceding to the unequal dynamic of our earlier parent-child relationships, in which the parent figure dictates appropriate rules and chores for the child, a married couple makes up the rules together.

Both my stepfathers were natural tinkerers, so they’d be our home’s occasional handymen—cleaning gutters, repairing the toaster, performing tasks inconceivable for my idealist father who was versed in the oeuvre of Graham Greene and themes in Don Quixote but couldn’t hang a picture frame. And my mother, in her postfeminist sensibility that women could do anything and have it all (and much more secure in that ideal than most women I know today) reflexively took up the mantle of “You do the tinkering, and I’ll take care of everything else! I’ll dust and cook and clean and work full time and do pretty much all the kid stuff and still love you unconditionally, because I’m that strong and powerful!” In other words, rather than balancing their duties or at least having a conversation about them which might allow for future fluidity, it was: mother = everything, Mcfather = whatever he’s in the mood for.

At some point, probably when the burden of her constant doing began outweighing her husband’s facility with a screwdriver, or how hilarious he could be when drunk or stoned, my mother’s purview on their respective roles and personas sharpened considerably. Both my Mc-parents, for example, were—in the beginning—described by my mother as real men’s men: handy, diffident, fun. After a few years they were lazy, selfish drunks, that last word always like an uppercut—there was nothing more to say or think about who they were. That lovely marriage pronoun, the we, was gone. Each spoken I became a towering, dauntless god, while the you was a stub of the toe, a malignant growth, something grossly foreign and unrecognizable. Marriage became a war with clearly-defined sides, and as with most warring parties, both sides saw themselves within their struggle as the victims and heroes.

In my adolescence, when my mother was gradually falling out of sync in her second marriage, she became enamored with an epigram of unknown origin, pithy and reductive enough to sound to my young ears like a frightening admonition regarding my future: “Men may work from sun to sun, but women’s work is never done.” The couplet became such a popular refrain for her that, in seeming solidarity, my second Mcfather occasionally parroted it as well, letting us all know he too was aware of its truth: men, in effect, have a singular job in a marriage, while women own all of them. To me the phrase sounded dirty coming from him, a prolix substitute to the beautiful brevity of “thank you,” or “I’m grateful.” But it was even more cringeworthy coming from her, equitable to the “it is what it is” shrug of the shoulders. Why did she accept a position within her own home that drove her crazy? Was it the married woman’s fate to passive-aggressively, ineffectually complain? Was every marriage doomed to stasis until at some point both partners tacitly agreed to stop working on it altogether?

Here’s how, in each of my mother’s marriages, the stopping started: more and more frequently after one of their fights in which words were no longer sufficient to communicate their disgust—his hands on her throat, her nails in his cheeks, each sound and scene a rolling pin across my insides—the most interminable sound became their protracted silence. Weeks without acknowledgement of each other, ghost parents floating around the house. The standard emotional cleanup following a fight—the I’m sorry, honeys and never agains—regressed to a spit-and-shine job at best, hardly even Dustbuster-worthy. Eventually, every ignored resentment piled up too high and deep for anyone to tackle. Betrayal and fear shoved into every closet, mutual antipathy ground down into every thread of our twist pile carpet. I wanted to dustbust the marriage detritus, dustbust her justifications, but I’d already learned: the Dustbuster can only hold so much.

•••

In my marriage I’ve broken all the rules I made for my future self as a child: I’ll never yell, he’ll never drink too much, I’ll never swear or shove, we’ll love just enough to forever keep us in an orderly, perfect alignment. I didn’t know then that getting dirty isn’t a choice—it’s inevitable.

In my marriage, we fight. In our fights my past is often transmogrified. We get mad, we ruin dinner, I break a remote, then break another, he slams a door, punches the wall, I throw myself off the porch and scream into the grass. Yet the difference is the aftermath: that incontrovertible grime it leaves behind that we willfully, immediately recognize, and labor at once to scrub away. Rather than allowing our bitterness to slowly boil then hopefully evaporate with time, mirroring the paradigm of fights I grew up on, we call out the other’s mess when we see it. With every why and what for and please can we not anymore and what did you mean, we wipe down the obvious films of dust and move on to where decay resides: those concealed psychic baseboards and window panes, the forgotten space behind the toilet. We take on this grit together to see clearly where it is we live, and with whom. It is not in a carving on the wall but in this work where we find our prayers, and help each other answer them.

•••

Still, despite these ideals, in my marriage I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit parsing out whose mess is whose. Sure, I’m happy to dust my desk in my office, but when my husband announces our dining room table looks dusty, I ask “Does it?,” give him a look, and wait for him to clean it. The longer I’m married, though, the more I wonder who is delineating the his role and the hers. It’s difficult to unlearn what our childhoods have encoded, what we never believed but enacted for the families who would accept nothing else, because we were playing the parts they’d prescribed.

According to my mother, I should grow up to never take shit from men, let them clean up their own messes. According to my Mc-fathers, I should become the kind of woman who doesn’t give men so much shit. It’s through the continual polishing of my relationship that I’ve been able to gradually reject that either/or dichotomy. The more time we spend dusting ourselves off after a fight, or spot-cleaning our marriage when we’re not, the more the influence of Mc-everythings from the past starts to subside.

Because there is no precedent for the scene in which I often find myself: my husband in our kitchen, mixing sauces for Chicken Mario or a red pepper and tofu stir-fry, working purposefully toward each meal that feeds us fully. We never eat from the paper sacks of my youth. For an aesthetic sense of parallelism, and as a gesture of gratitude, I make sure we eat his lovely dinners on my shiny tables. No: our dinners, our tables.

When the Smithsonian acquired an original model of the Dustbuster in 1995, the year my mother began her third marriage, 100 million had been sold. McDonald’s, meanwhile, heavily marketed the Arch Deluxe sandwich in an effort to cultivate a more adult image. Only, no one bought it. It was a standard burger with all the regular fixings, but with the lagniappe of sweet Spanish onions and, as noted in one advertisement, “a secret sauce for grown-ups.” The problem, it seemed, was the tremendous effort and dollars spent in the narrow hope of catering solely to adults. Millions of sesame seeds atop their potato flour buns went uneaten, went unspilled upon the twist-pile carpeted floors of America, went un-dustbusted. McDonald’s experiment with maturity resulted in one of the most expensive flops in the history of branding.

•••

Black and Decker now sells nine popular models of the personal vacuum that pivot easily to pick up larger debris, use lithium-ion technology powered by cyclonic action, offering a more hygienic cleanup with less clogging than ever before. The world apparently still needs the Dustbuster, but I don’t. When I spill plant soil on the carpet I vow to get the old Tri-Star repaired. I’ll accept no substitutes if we’re going to go all the way, because a real partnership calls for a real vacuum.

•••

BROOKE CHAMPAGNE was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her work appears in Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, Louisiana Literature, and Bending Genre online, among other journals. She is at work on her first collection of personal essays.

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It

Rent

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By María Joaquina Villaseñor

2006

Relief as I arrive at the rental office with moments to spare before it closes to pick up keys for my new home: an eleven-hundred square foot townhouse with a small backyard, a garage, and more space in the closets than I have stuff to fill closets with. I wonder if the large downstairs closet by the front door could be used as a study; I contemplate it seriously.

I furnish the town home with two tables, a small stone-colored couch, a rustic Mexican wooden television stand with shelving—all furniture that my mother and stepfather have given to me from their own home. My queen-sized bed is a hand-me-down I got from my sister; I’m pretty sure my niece was conceived on it.

About a year later, a friend from Berkeley, a former roommate, visits me there. After staying with me, she gossips to another friend that I still have all my furniture from grad school. I’m hurt since it is obviously not meant to be a compliment; but she’s not entirely wrong either. The décor of the townhome is more than a little patched together, the furniture worn and perhaps more starkly so against large, bright white freshly painted walls and new carpets. I want to paint the walls, but it’s a rental and I don’t want to lose my security deposit. Grad student poverty is still my day-to-day reality. But the new place is to me, palatial and above all, spacious with possibility.

I am 189 miles away from Sacramento where I was born, the furthest I have ever lived from that city except for the year I lived in Mexico as a girl. I am a new Assistant Professor at a public university on California’s central coast with a freshly completed a doctorate from UC Berkeley. I traveled from the Sacramento area in a caravan with my mother and stepfather in a small U-Haul truck, me driving the 1987 Volvo that my stepfather purchased for me for $750. I am twenty-nine years old, the Volvo is my first car, and I am a newly licensed driver. My mother and stepfather are doing all they can to help me. So many things are new.

2005

I’m embarking on a nationwide job search, and I interview at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There, after actually complimenting the coffee at a restaurant in which we have dined, a graduate student accuses me of being a “Berkeley food snob.” She says: “People who come here from Berkeley are always like, ‘Oh, well, in Berkeley we have blah blah blah, and in Berkeley we have wah wah wah.’” Seriously—that’s exactly what she says.

If the apartment in which I live can be taken as any indication of the kind of status that enables one to become an anything snob, then this graduate student’s accusation is a verifiable impossibility. I live in a basement studio apartment of an old white Victorian home on Hearst Avenue, in Berkeley not far from campus. I select it solely on the basis of its location and the fact that it is “affordable.” It is not really affordable, since I have to take out roughly ten thousand dollars in student loans to afford it, but I’ve reached the point that many graduate students reach: I simply can not deal with the idea of having yet another roommate and have no idea how I will be able to write anything while having to negotiate others’ schedules and habits. I’ve been a student having student money problems and roommates for eleven years; I’m desperate to be done.

I should have known there is something up with the basement apartment when the landlord asks me to give him twelve postdated rent checks for eleven hundred dollars each when I sign the one-year lease. I have never signed a lease on my own before, and I understand Berkeley to have an odd and difficult rental market, so I agree to his request. After all, he says this is the only way to secure the apartment and make sure he doesn’t rent it to someone else. I give him over thirteen thousand dollars in postdated checks.

I’m sick almost immediately and this lasts pretty much the entire year. The damp, musty basement apartment grows molds and mildews in places I didn’t know mildew grew. As a child, I lived in some poorly ventilated homes and apartments; I’m used to the green black creep of mold on bathroom ceilings, to the mold that grows around window sills. But this apartment has that and more. I discover that mold is even growing in the one small closet in the apartment. My clothes begin smelling like mildew. A girlfriend tells me about a product called Damp Rid, a container of crystals that gets put in places where moisture leads to mold in order to absorb the dampness. I have no idea such a thing existed, and after complaining to the landlord who does nothing, I think I should give it a try. I have three containers of Damp Rid in different parts of the four-hundred square foot studio including in the musty closet. I write my doctoral dissertation next to containers of Damp Rid with a constant runny nose, itchy eyes, and allergy-induced headaches.

Some young men live in the flat above. I can’t tell if they’re students or if they do something else for work. I hear them exclaim, “Oooooh! Oooooohhh!” in loud unison about once a week. I imagine they are involved in some kind of weekly circle jerk and don’t really know what to think about that. I guess I’m curious about it but I mostly stay away from them. Eventually, I figure out that they’re vociferously playing video games. A disappointment. I have a very regular writing routine and remember every day that I moved to the Hearst Avenue basement apartment because I didn’t want the noise or the distraction of roommates. One day, I begin to hear hammering right outside my window. I try to tune it out and don’t worry about it much until the hammering goes on day after day. I am distracted and irritated. I see that my neighbors are building something brown and hairy on the back of a truck. Over the next few days, it begins to take shape…some kind of an animal. A…Snuffleupagus? On a truck? One day, I ask them about it. And that is how I learn about Burning Man.

I think I will be happy and in better health once I move out of the Hearst Avenue basement apartment, but the move takes place abruptly. I file my dissertation on a Friday afternoon in May, and my grandmother dies the day after on Saturday morning. My deceased grandmother is in Mexico, and though it’s time for me to move out of my Berkeley basement apartment, I leave suddenly and take a flight to Guadalajara to accompany my mother to my grandmother’s wake. After the wake and after my grandmother is cremated, we transport her ashes to Ciudad del Carmen, my grandmother’s hometown and the place where my mother was born and raised.

Back in Berkeley, at move-out time, my stepfather and my sister pack the contents of my apartment into a small U-Haul truck. I tell my twin sister where the cigarettes I hide are, and all the things I do not want my stepfather to see; as always in my life, I entrust her with my secrets. I leave the apartment with a little clothes, a certificate attesting to the completion of the requirements for my doctoral degree, and some uncertainty about the future though I am certain I will not return to that mold-infested place. I’m grief stricken, exhausted, worried about my mother, missing my grandmother already, and overall considerably less happy and healthy than I thought I would be at this moment.

1999

I’ve walked by the 1970s era building thousands of time since I moved to Berkeley in 1995. There’s a storefront on the bottom floor and the store sells Turkish rugs, beaded jewelry, baskets, and other imports. The building is pretentiously called “The Glen Building” and it has a top floor studio apartment that I rent with he who is my first serious long term romantic partner. I’m twenty-one and just learning about what that means. The studio apartment interior is very basic and has fresh paint and a new carpet, the way I hope and expect a rental will have. The carpet has very little padding and matches the 1970s industrial storefront feel of the building. It has a full but very tiny kitchen with a sliding door onto a balcony with a view of the Bay Bridge far in the distance. We move in a queen bed that’s just a mattress and a bed frame with no headboard and an old red easy chair and a table from my parents’ house. While we live in that place together, my partner Ryan and I travel to Mexico, the first time I have ever taken a love there. After returning from Mexico, I make a complete travel scrapbook including ticket stubs, stickers, and countless photographs of us with cousins, aunts, and uncles, on the Zocalo, at la Casa Azul, in Coyoacán, in Xochimilco, in so many magical Mexican places.

I want our studio apartment in the Glen Building to be more like Mexico. We paint the bathroom Frida Kahlo blue and the kitchen a Mexican avocado green. The painting of the kitchen and the bathroom is an investment and a grownup undertaking both because of the effort and because of the cost involved between the painting supplies and the forfeiting of the deposit money. There is a basketball hoop over the sole closet door in the apartment. The closet is not like a regular bedroom closet. It’s very small—more like a hall closet or linen closet. I share it—happily—with Ryan, and we jam our clothes in there and do not complain. I have a bad habit of leaving my wet towel on the bed when I get out of the shower. It is one of only two things that Ryan ever seems unhappy with me about. The other is that I sometimes go on and on talking, and I don’t listen to him very well. I stop leaving my wet towel on the bed and learn to be a better listener.

I learn to fry tofu, I learn to make soups, I learn to use a rice cooker. We host friends sometimes overnight, even though we have no separate guest room or even a futon. One of our friends, a fellow undergraduate, and also poet, gambler, and sports fan, stays with us several times, sleeping on our floor next to us in the queen bed with no headboard in which I learn about what it means to have an adult sexuality. Another friend comes out to me in the stairwell outside of the apartment, confesses that the protagonist of the sex and romance stories he has told me is a man, not a woman as he had made me believe. I’m unfazed; we’re figuring things out and finding our way. We host parties in our cramped studio apartment and create traditions. One of these new traditions is hosting Christmas dinners the week before we leave for our respective families’ holiday gatherings. It’s a way that I can make sure I have a good Christmas. I make roasted legs of lamb and experiment with cooking other things that are brand new to me and like nothing we ate in the homes in which I grew up. With Ryan, I learn what it means to create a chosen family; we flirt with being a family of two ourselves. For the first time in my remembered life, I share a home with a man with whom love and safety are feelings I have all the time and in abundance. I am free.

1992?

We live in a rented house in a suburb of Sacramento on Ash Street, having returned from a year of living in Ciudad del Carmen just the year before. The house is a boxy, light brown two-bedroom house where I live with my stepfather, mother, twin sister, and my two younger brothers—sweet, rascally, fun, little boys. My twin sister and I miss living in Mexico and long for the embrace of my mother’s family, the literal and figurative shelter they give us.

Between, say 1984 and 1995, I live in at least six different rental homes and apartments excluding the year we live at my grandparents’ house in Mexico. In one of the apartment complexes where we live, my mother and stepfather are the resident managers, living rent free in exchange for being the on site go-to people for our neighbors in the apartment complex. A Korean family who own a donut shop are our upstairs neighbors there. The woman of the household teaches my mother to make kimchi and they sometimes bring us fresh donuts from their shop. Some of our homes have unfinished floors. Some of our homes have roaches. All of our homes have holes that my stepfather has punched into doors and walls.

The holes in walls sometimes get covered and repaired, but they sometimes stay—or multiply—while we live in those places. The holes in the wall remind me of the imminence of the “cocos”—what my stepfather calls the knuckle punches on the head he gives us—that is his most frequent physical punishment of us kids. For a while, we are hit with the hard, grey plastic handle of a paddle for a raft I only vaguely remember us owning. But I do remember the raft paddle … its sting, its heft, the fear it inspires even after the welts were gone. There are slaps, too. Hair pulling. I believe, hope, pray that my mother will make it stop.

But she is being hit, too. The sounds of my mother and stepfather’s yelling and arguments are often preludes to sounds of thuds and later to the sight of my mother’s eyes—red and bleary and puffy from crying—or to the mark of welts or bruises on her. Occasionally I see a ripped blouse from her being pulled, yanked on, or dragged. My sister and I learn to drown out the sounds by turning up the volume on the TV. Against reason, we hope our little brothers do not hear what we’re hearing, do not see what we’re seeing.

Once my mother has us pack a few things as we flee to a battered women’s shelter—a “safe house.” I do feel safe in that house though I’m also scared that my mother will go back to my stepfather. Which she does. In the safe house, I desperately want my brothers to somehow feel like things are okay and normal. Though the hand-me-down towels, sheets, and other kids’ hand-me-down stuffed animals point to the anything-but-normal nature of our situation. One of the rules of the safe house is that no one is permitted to give out its phone number and address to preserve the secrecy, anonymity, and so the thinking goes, the safety of the women and their children. We can’t tell anyone where we are or how to reach us. It does not feel normal.

2017

Today, almost thirty years later, I long to remember the faces or names or stories of others who were in that safe house with us, experiencing something similar. But I don’t. We were there just a few days and I was preoccupied with our own situation, where we would go after. It turned out to be that where we went after was the same house we had left. After that, there were promises of no more beatings, which was a promise he mostly kept. After eight years or so of much torment, he (for the most part) stopped hitting us all, instead sticking to yelling, punishing, general volubility, and the maintaining of a home environment where walking on eggshells was the norm.

Of course, we kids did sometimes have fun and experienced joy in our childhood family homes, but these feelings were rented, and we were always aware that we could be evicted from joy at any minute. My siblings and I continued to be kids together until my sister and I moved away to college; we loved and still love each other with the passion of people who know that sticking together is survival.

I’m now a tenured professor, a wife, and a mother of twin daughters. I married my husband just over two years ago, on a beautiful, sunny afternoon on a beach in Maui aptly named Baby Beach since we spoke our vows with our two babies by our side with no other family present. In the midst of our wedding planning, and after thirty years of marriage, my mother and stepfather were in the middle of a bitter divorce the dregs of which I could not bear to have at my wedding.

Beside a shimmering Pacific Ocean, my groom read poems I saw him write on the plane ride without knowing what he was writing. We had one friend in attendance, a dear mutual friend and colleague we learned would coincidentally be in Maui at the time of our wedding. Our friend valiantly did quintuple duty—as our sole guest, videographer, on-site child safety specialist, best man, and maid of honor. I marveled at our luck. Actually, I marvel at my luck every day, as the man with whom I share my home and life shelters me with love, harmony, and understanding, opening my eyes daily to all that is possible for me, for us, for our life together. What is this happiness that I dare to call my own, beyond all my younger self could have imagined?

For the first time in my life, I live in a home that is not a rental home though it is in the same campus housing complex where I moved as an Assistant Professor just over ten years ago. The home I bought with my husband is only slightly bigger than the home I rented just over ten years ago on my own. Not long after we moved in, my husband and I went to the furniture store and bought a brand new couch and coffee table, another first for me. We didn’t buy an expensive couch because we have two small children who spill and stain things the way small children do, but it’s probably still the nicest couch I have ever had.

Last month, my youngest brother hand delivered a letter from my stepfather. The letter was sort of a group letter—asking for reconciliation with my mother, with my siblings, and with me. My name was written on the envelope in handwriting I will always recognize, but there was no address on the envelope under my name. My stepfather has never seen the first and only home I have owned, and does not know where I live. Sometimes the dull ache of the past tugs, but peace reigns in the home I have made, and I relish it.

•••

MARÍA JOAQUINA VILLASEÑOR is a professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. She is a co-author of The Historical Dictionary of U.S. Latino Literature, and an essayist whose writing has been published in Remezcla and The Acentos Review.

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It

Clothes Call

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Lesléa Newman

“So, Dad,” I sit down at the kitchen table, face him, and speak loudly so he can understand me. “I think it’s time to go through Mom’s clothes. What do you say?”

My eighty-nine-year-old father puts down his cup of instant Maxwell House coffee laced with Sweet ’n’ Low and stares at me. “What?” he asks.

I give him a look. We both know that despite his hearing loss, he knows what I just said. It’s been four years since my mother left us for what she called the great Sak’s Fifth Avenue in the Sky and I ask my father this question every time I visit. And each time I ask, my father answers: “Not yet,” in the tone of voice he used throughout my childhood, which always signaled the end of discussion.

I repeat my question even louder, and my father surprises me by not offering his usual response. Instead, he says nothing for minute. And nothing for a minute longer. And then he lets out a huge sigh as if he’s finally admitting that my mother is never coming back. “I suppose,” he sighs again, “it’s time.”

While my dad turns on the TV and settles down in front of a blaring Yankees game with a can of salted peanuts and a glass of diet Coke, I trudge up to my parents’ bedroom. Off to the side is my mother’s “boudoir” which contains a makeup table, a fainting couch, and two enormous closets, each one bigger than the sixth-floor walk-up I rented in Manhattan four decades ago when I first graduated from college.

Where to begin? I had tried over the years to get my mother to at least start cleaning out her clothes but she wouldn’t let me touch a thing. “If it can’t hurt you and you don’t have to feed it,” she’d say, shaking a sharp red fingernail at me, “just leave it alone.”

I enter the closet on the right, lined with double racks on either side, and I’m immediately overwhelmed by blouses, skirts, sweaters, slacks, dresses, hats, belts, scarfs, gloves, stockings, slips, and shoes. I gaze in wonder at stripes, polka dots, plaids, paisleys, sparkles, sequins, lace, and leopard print. I run my hands along silk, velvet, velour, wool, cotton, leather, suede, and satin. I take a deep breath and inhale my mother’s unique scent: a combination of Chesterfield Kings, Arid Extra Dry, Chanel No. Five, and Aqua Net. Suddenly, I understand my father’s reluctance to let any of this go. Everything in this closet contains my mother’s DNA. Every blouse at one time was filled with my mother’s pale, plump arms. Every skirt swished around her short, shapely legs. Every pair of pants cradled her zaftig belly and hips. Standing here, I can almost pretend my mother is downstairs with my father, screaming at him to turn down the damn TV. Getting rid of all this is like saying goodbye to her all over again.

But as my father said, it’s time.

I head to the back of the closet where I come face to face with six hanging shoe bags, each one with sixteen pockets, which according to my quick calculation, adds up to ninety-six pairs of shoes. My mother’s love affair with footwear started long ago when she was a young bride working in the shoe department of Orbach’s. All day long, squatting on her heels, she measured feet and fit them into fancy footwear she couldn’t afford. Plus, she and my father lived in a tiny basement apartment in Brooklyn. “The windows were above my head,” my mother told me. “I looked out at the street day after day and all I saw were shoes.” At the time, my father was a law student at NYU and, as he has told me numerous times, my parents were so poor they “didn’t have two nickels to rub together.” My father promised my mother that when he became an attorney, he would buy her anything she wanted. And clearly what she wanted was an Imelda Marcos-size collection of shoes.

So many shoes! One shoe, two shoes, red shoes, blue shoes, black shoes, white shoes, left shoes, right shoes. I feel like a character in a Dr. Seuss children’s book. Or like the child I was once, clomping around in my mother’s high heels with one of her beaded evening bags slung over my shoulder. How I wish my mother were here to tell me the story of all these shoes. For surely each pair has a story to tell. Here are the pink satin pumps dyed to match the gown my mother wore to my brother’s Bar Mitzvah in 1966. Here are the gold lamé tassled flip flops she always wore to the “beauty parlor” when she went to get her monthly pedicure. Here is a pair of red stiletto sky-high heels that showed off her stunning calves (it’s not for nothing she was known as “Legs Levin” during her salad days). And here are the most heart-breaking shoes of all: the flat navy blue sneakers she wore when the cancer made her feet so swollen, she couldn’t squeeze them into anything else.

Just for kicks, I take down a pair of black patent leather three-inch heels with a bow across the toe, and, feeling like one of Cinderella’s ungainly step-sisters, try to stick my feet inside. I know they won’t fit. Unlike me, my mother had lovely feet. Size six and a half. Baryshnikov-worthy arches. Alabaster skin. Delicate toes. Toenails expertly trimmed and buffed and polished candy apple red. I have no idea where my mother got her gorgeous feet.

Her mother’s feet were a sight to behold. Squat, flat, wide. Flaky, crusted skin. Gnarly prehistoric toes. Thick yellowed nails. Great big bunions. Still, like my mother, my grandmother loved shoes. When she moved into a nursing home at the age of ninety-nine, she marched in on white open-toed, high heeled T-strap sandals. The nurse took one look and told me to bring her some flats. “The last thing she needs is to fall,” she said. Since my grandmother didn’t own a pair of flats, I returned the next day with a pair of my own. My grandmother slipped on the moccasins, took two steps, and promptly fell down. “Please mameleh, can I have my heels back now?” she begged. I returned them and my grandmother wore them till the day she died.

How I wish I had my mother’s dainty feet! “Mom,” I say aloud, “I could wear your shoes as earrings.” Standing in her closet, my mind wanders back to the last day of my mother’s last hospital visit. She was lying in her hospital bed on top of the blankets in a sweat. “You have such beautiful feet,” I said to her, for even at that point, her pedicure was perfect. “I wish I’d inherited them,” I went on. “I have your mother’s feet.”

“And her face,” my mother said, gazing at me with love for the last time. “You have my mother’s beautiful, beautiful face.” And then she shut her eyes. And now I wipe at mine.

No wonder my dad didn’t want to go near my mother’s closet. Though we buried my mother four years ago, this feels like a burial all over again.

“You can do this,” I tell myself. I step out of the closet to fetch a cardboard box big enough to sit in and start chucking my mother’s shoes into it. Each one makes a dull thud that reminds me of the sound made by the clumps of dirt we dumped onto my mother’s coffin on that blistering August afternoon long ago. That was the saddest sound I’d ever heard. Until now. “I can’t,” I say aloud. My mother’s voice appears in my head. “One step at a time,” she says, as she reminded me so many times when she was alive. “Brooklyn wasn’t built in a day. You can do anything you set your mind to.” And she was always right.

Somehow the afternoon turns into evening, and by the time my father comes upstairs to tell me that the Yankees have lost, I have seven huge boxes of shoes and pocketbooks, fifty enormous plastic bags of clothing, and two empty closets. I am exhausted. My dad is amazed.

Since we scheduled my mother’s clothes to be picked up the next morning between seven a.m. and noon, I set my alarm for six. When it jars me awake, I leap out of bed, pull on some clothes, and lug everything out to the driveway. Then I drag myself back inside, crawl between the covers, and try to go back to asleep. But a minute later, I throw off the blankets and creep outside again. I can’t leave my mother’s clothes out there by the curb waiting to be picked up like trash. Soon I hear the front door open and see my father coming towards me. We stand side by side, each of us with one hand raised to shield our eyes from the glare of the morning sun, as if we are saluting my mother’s wardrobe. Neither of us says anything, for what is there to say? My head tells me that these are only things, but my heart disagrees: these are my mother’s things. There’s a big difference.

An hour passes and my father goes inside to get ready for work—though he is about to turn ninety, he’s still practicing law. I stand guard over my mother’s clothes until ten a.m. when a big yellow truck pulls up to our driveway. “Thank you for choosing Big Brothers/Big Sisters,” says the driver as he tosses bag after bag into the back of the truck. It takes him all of five minutes, and then he is gone.

And so is she.

•••

LESLÉA NEWMAN’s seventy books include the poetry collection, I Carry My Mother which explores a daughter’s journey through her mother’s illness and death, and the children’s classic, Heather Has Two Mommies. From 2008-2010, she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. Currently she is a faculty member of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA in Writing program. Her newest poetry collection, Lovely will be published in January 2018 by Headmistress Press. More information here: http://www.lesleanewman.com/newbks.htm

Read more FGP essays by Lesléa Newman.

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It

Coming Home

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Hema Padhu

As I saw my mother walk out of the international terminal at the San Francisco Airport barely able to push the cart stuffed with two enormous suitcases, I hardly recognized her.

The mother of my childhood was a stout, severe-looking authoritarian. “Don’t just sit there wasting your time—do something!” was her favorite mantra. She played the role of a mother, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, and career woman with a sort of zeal that was impressive, intimidating, and almost always exhausting to watch.

Now my eyes rested on a short, drooping woman in her late sixties. Her shoulders curved in weighed down by some invisible burden. Her once long, dark hair, turned salt and pepper, was gathered in a small bun at her nape. White sneakers stuck out conspicuously, at odds with her festive silk saree and the bright red bindi on her forehead. She blinked nervously, scanning the crowd for my familiar face. When exactly did my mother, the invincible superhero of my childhood, shrink into this fragile, vulnerable person? The transformation felt both rapid and stealthy (hadn’t I seen her just a few years ago?). I was not only unprepared for it, I was suddenly aware of the role reversal and unsure of how to navigate this new shift in power.

I hurried towards her, trying to mask my surprise, and gave her a hug, breathing in the familiar smell of Ponds cold cream and coconut oil. I felt her papery lips kiss me on both cheeks and sensed in her touch both excitement and trepidation as if she couldn’t believe she had crossed the ocean to visit her daughter in America. The country I had chosen over my birthplace. The country I now called home and to which she had lost me almost fifteen years ago.

•••

When I left Madras for Chicago, I was twenty-five and too old to be living at home with my parents, but this was the early nineties and Brahmin girls like me left home either married (usually arranged) or dead. Neither option was particularly appealing to me. Luckily, I wriggled through a loophole that middle-class India, especially Tamil Brahmins, couldn’t resist: education. I headed to Northwestern University to get my master’s degree.

That day, our home was a tornado of activity, and my mother was at the eye of the storm with a single-minded goal—sending her oldest daughter safely to America. Dad reconfirmed my flight, and my brother was dispatched for the third time to check on the taxi’s arrival. My sister, with rising exasperation, was stuffing my suitcase with things my mother deemed necessary, if not critical, for my life abroad: rice, lentils, spices, pickles, a pressure cooker, and an Idli steamer. I, of course, had no say in the matter whatsoever. “When you land in Illinois”—my mother enunciated the s at the end with a hiss—“and want to make sambar, you’ll thank me.”

I was raised in a traditional “Tam Bram” (short for Tamil Brahmin) home, and my mother had decided that her primary duty was to equip her daughters with skills essential to fulfilling their life’s mission: finding a suitable husband and raising a family. This included learning to cook all the traditional South Indian dishes, studying classical Indian music and dance, and learning the bafflingly nuanced rites, rituals, and superstitions that came with an orthodox Tamil Brahmin way of life—touch your right elbow with your left hand while lighting an oil lamp, prostrate two or four times (not thrice!) at the feet of an elder, and my favorite, when you leave the house never shout, “I’m leaving,” say “I’ll be back.”

I watched my mother juggle the binding responsibilities that accompanied a woman born into an orthodox Brahmin family and a career in banking (unusual in those days) with only a high school diploma. She could have a career as long as she didn’t neglect the duties and obligations of a good Brahmin woman. This meant she was the first to rise, often as early as four a.m., and the last to retire. She kept up with all the rituals and traditions expected of her, tended to the needs of our five-member household while advancing her career and doggedly pursuing her various interests that ranged from learning Sanskrit to playing the violin. Like a bonsai tree, she found a way to grow within her established confines and she somehow made it all seem effortless. She had, without explicitly intending to, passed on her independent, ambitious spirit to me.

My mother careened between pride and despair as the days of my impending journey neared. Part of her was deeply dismayed about sending me to a country thousands of miles away, one she had only seen on TV. She worried that the conservative values she had so painstakingly instilled in me wouldn’t withstand the liberal assault of the West. Part of her was very proud and excited that I was making this westward journey—a first for our family and a woman, no less. She had dreamed of becoming a doctor but had to give up her education to care for her sister who had been incapacitated by polio. She married my father at the tender age of nineteen and had me at twenty-one. My siblings followed shortly thereafter. Her life was never carefree, and she wanted more for her daughters. She wanted us to live freely without societal expectations clinging to us like a petulant child.

I, on the other hand, was already in Chicago. In my mind, I had left the familiar landscape of my Indian life far behind to stroll the streets of Evanston, drive along Lake Shore Drive, and soak up campus life. After years of living under the iron fist of a highly competent but controlling mother, who had either directly managed my affairs or influenced my life decisions, I couldn’t wait to leave it all behind and start fresh in a new place. A place she couldn’t get to easily.

My mother responded to my excitement with an equal measure of fire and ice—one minute sending the household into a tizzy with her rapid-fire marching orders to prepare for my departure, and the next sulking in the prayer room with her books and prayer beads. When friends or neighbors threw a party for me, she would make excuses not to attend. I was annoyed by what I misjudged as petulance (she should be happy for me!). I failed to understand that my eagerness to get away from the home and family she had worked so tirelessly to create only substantiated the fact that I could leave. She couldn’t even if she wanted to.

Three weeks later, as I was navigating the aisles of the local grocery store in Evanston, I stood there, teary-eyed, unable to choose from among the numerous brands of neatly stacked shelves of tea. My mother would have picked out just the right type of black tea to make that perfect cup of chai. My sambar never tasted like hers, and my kitchen could never smell like hers—a seductive mix of sandalwood, turmeric, and curry leaves. I missed her strength, her confidence that everyone’s problem could be solved with a good home cooked meal, her remarkable faith in some universal power that would make things work out just fine for everyone, especially her children. I missed her rare and awkward display of affection (“you’re so thin, eat some more” or “don’t be out in the sun too much, you’ll get dark and then who’ll marry you?”) I even missed her marching orders.

•••

Fifteen years had passed since I left my hometown and a lot had changed in both our lives. My sister married and moved to Malaysia. My brother followed me to America. Suddenly, empty nesters, my parents were nearly strangers. Their marriage, a brittle shell they both chose not to shed. A marriage that was once bonded by children was now held together by familiarity and obligation.

My mother followed my life from afar, reading and hearing about it through snippets in e-mails and static-filled phone conversations: graduation, new jobs, new homes, new adventures in new cities with strange names. Each step forward in my American life seemed to drive a wider wedge between us. The more independent and confident I became, the less I relied on her. She had a life scripted for me: a successful Western life on the outside—respectable education, career advancements, and professional success—and a traditional Eastern life on the inside—a successful (preferably wealthy) Indian husband, a couple of adorable kids, a suburban home where I kept all the Tam Bram traditions alive. I couldn’t blame her—it was what she wanted for herself.

While I happily embraced the former, I resolutely rejected the latter. I married a kind artist who lived modestly after abandoning his career as a geologist to pursue his passion in filmmaking. Although a South Indian like me, his Tamil was terrible. He could barely sit crossed legged on the floor (a basic requirement for a Brahmin) let alone be well versed in all the Tam Bram traditions. Neither of us wanted to have children, which bitterly disappointed my mother. She was convinced that I was missing out on a defining life experience. I refused to blindly follow the Brahmin traditions, declaring myself spiritual and not religious. With every passing day, I was becoming more of a stranger to her. She struggled to understand my new life and the different set of values I was embracing. Yet secretly, I wanted her approval, wanted her to accept my choices, even as I defied her traditional wisdom.

When my husband and I separated amicably after seven years, I agonized for days about sharing this news with my mother. This was yet another first in our family and not a first to be proud of. I had to share this news across a transcontinental phone line, not an ideal medium for such a personal conversation. I mentally prepared myself for her reaction. How would I respond if she reproached me? What would I do if she hung up on me? What if she started to cry or scream at me? I had replayed all these scenarios over and over in my head and crafted “mature responses”—take the high road, I told myself—for each of these potential outcomes.

Finally, one morning I gathered the courage to call her. She listened patiently. After I finished, there was a long pause. Just when I thought that she had hung up on me she asked, “What took you so long?”

It was the one scenario I wasn’t prepared for. Surprised, I blubbered incoherently and she said simply, “I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to spend a minute longer in a life where you are not happy.”

She refused to let me dither about in self-doubt and pessimism and with her trademark unflappable spirit she reached across the ten-thousand-mile divide—I could almost feel her hand on the small of my back—to guide me gently yet firmly towards a brighter future that she was certain was waiting for me. She was in my corner after all. In fact, she had never left.

Over the next few years, our bond, which had floundered due to distance and years of separation, strengthened. I found myself sharing fragments of my life I had never dared to share with her: my fears and anxieties, my stumbling dating life, my travel adventures and misadventures, my hopes of rebuilding my life after my divorce. In the beginning, she mostly listened, but slowly she started to open up. About her own dreams, disappointments, failures, and joys.

I felt privileged. Singled out from my siblings. Her confidante. I remembered a time, not too long ago, when we couldn’t have a conversation without either one of us bursting into tears or storming out of the room. We argued incessantly about everything from hairstyles to grades to boys. After years of mother-daughter strife, we found ourselves embracing our strengths and vulnerabilities, instead of being repelled by them. We were connecting as adults, as women from different generations trying to find our own place in this world.

Now she was finally here. I would have her all to myself for three whole weeks. Our past stood between us both binding and dividing us. My life here continued to puzzle her and I was just beginning to piece together hers. Somehow we managed to establish a connection between our divergent worlds and we found ourselves clinging to it. Each day provided an opportunity to strengthen that fragile bond. As I walked her to my car, my arm around her thin shoulders, I felt that same anticipation that I felt years ago when I left her home. Only this time, I couldn’t wait to bring her into to mine.

•••

HEMA PADHU is a writer, professor, and marketer. Her writing has been published by Litro Magazine and American Literary Review. She lives in San Francisco and is working on a short story collection.

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It

Crosswords

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Melissa Ballard

Remember that time you went to a therapist because you were having vivid, disturbing dreams you were convinced were part of a past life, but you ended up talking about shopping with your mom for your prom dress in 1970?

On the rack of springy pastels, you found the perfect dress: empire waist with puffed sleeves, the white top covered with white daisies, the rest a soft brown. You and your mom stood in that tiny dress shop on Lorain Road, where the owner remained in the back pretending she couldn’t hear anything, and your mom said, in her outside voice, “Why do you always have to be such a Plain Jane? What will people think if you wear a brown dress to prom?” You hated when your mom used your middle name, Jane, to make fun of you, and you cared a lot what about what people thought, though you’d never admit it. But brown was your favorite color, the dress fit you perfectly, you refused to try on anything else, and, finally, your mom gave in.

Remember that time you wrote an essay about your grandparents, and you asked your mom for stories? And she told you that she bought a beautiful black and white two-piece dress for her at-home wedding, but your grandmother had a fit and said, “No daughter of mine is wearing a black dress to her own wedding. Take it back.” And your mom did. She bought a cream-colored dress. When she told you this story, you said, “Did you like the second dress?” She thought for a minute before saying, “It was okay.”

Remember that time you and your husband were eating dinner out after spending time at your mom’s house? In between bites of blackened salmon and roasted vegetables you were gulping your wine and recounting the hurtful things she’d said to you, and your husband said, “She’s competing with you,” and you said, “That’s ridiculous. We’re nothing alike. There’s nothing to compete about.” And you ordered a second glass of wine.

Remember the time the women in your extended family got together, and you and your mom stayed in a hotel suite together? And every morning while you took a shower, your mom started to do the crossword puzzle in USA Today. While you were making your coffee, she read clues out loud to you. “What’s a three letter word for ‘Yale student’?” she asked, and you answered “Eli,” not telling her you only knew that because you watched Gilmore Girls. When she asked for longer words, you said, “I have to see it, Mom.” Then she gave you the puzzle, and you tried to finish it as fast as you could, between sips of coffee, so you could plunk the completed crossword down on the counter like it was no big deal, because words were your thing, not hers.

Remember when your daughter said her two-month-old was “verbalizing,” and you corrected her and said “vocalizing,” because you’d studied language development in college for five years and it still comes back to you sometimes? She has jokingly mentioned this since, and that makes you think of all the times you said the wrong thing to her, or used the wrong tone of voice, or said something when you shouldn’t have, or didn’t say something when you should have. And you hope you haven’t irrevocably damaged the delicate ecosystem of your mother-daughter relationship.

Remember when you finally realized your mom said nice things about you, just not to your face?

Remember when you and your husband were cleaning out your mom’s condo, after she died? You were sorting everything into piles: “donate,” “trash,” “take home to sort through later.” And, at the bottom of an antique trunk filled with drawings your daughter, an artist, had made, you found a zippered portfolio case, which you assumed contained more drawings, but when you opened it, you found a copy of everything you’d ever written, including the terrible poem in your high school literary magazine and letters to the editor? You started to have trouble breathing, so you looked away from those pages you were holding, and all around you at the boxes, and piles, and trash bags.

You had so much left to do, and you hoped you wouldn’t forget anything.

•••

MELISSA BALLARD has written essays for Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things, Under the Sun, and other publications. She writes far too slowly to even consider regular blogging, but you can read her work here: https://melissaballardsite.wordpress.com/

Read more FGP essays by Melissa Ballard.

Email, RSS Follow
Pin It