A Mother's Love (25 page)

I seem to have found this way of recording, communicating, exorcising the past. I recall my dream of the rat that wouldn't let me out of a room and realize that
rat
is
art
turned inside out. When I do not do my work, the rat takes over. On my work table now, images begin to emerge again, the contours of a woman's face. Not an abstract, really, but rather more like a picture coming slowly into focus. Around her I have painted in photographic detail as if I were some eidetic artist—memory artists, they are called—old motel keys, Chaplain on Call cards, a tornado alert, receipt from the Eureka Hotel, Eureka, Kansas. And the landscapes—dinosaur tracks, endless vistas broken
only by the red flattops of buttes, a ghost town on a hill. These I draw as well.

Now I look and see the face as I had not seen it before—recognized would be a better word. It is the image I have assumed to be the fabrication of my mother's features, though from time to time other women emerged—Mara, Dottie, Sam. Now, looking more closely as I draw, I wonder how it is possible. The face has been so familiar, yet so foreign. How could I have missed it? For it is my face I see. It has been a self-portrait all along.

S
ITTING at my work table, I imagine this. Bobby is eight, and we are in a car, driving. It is like a picture I could paint with my eyes closed. We have been driving for a long time. He dozes, breathing heavily, his head bobbing from side to side. When he wakes, he stretches and stares out at the flat prairie he has never seen before. “Where are we?” he asks. The grass flows reddish and yellow. I have not seen it in years myself, but I know that beyond the grass lie the mountains and on the side of the mountains is the desert that I know. “Kansas,” I tell him. “This is what Kansas looks like.”

He takes out a coloring book and begins to draw. Cowboys and Indians. Horses. We bought the book for this trip. It is what he imagines the West to be. I promised him all kinds of things on this journey. Antelope, buffalo, the Navajo reservation,
the Grand Canyon. So far, he has been patient with the long drive. When we stop, he eats all the hamburgers and French fries he wants. That is part of the deal.

I look at his legs and can't believe how they've grown. His hair is thick and dark. Matthew, whom he does not see, must have once had this hair. Otherwise he takes after me. People assume the man I've been seeing is Bobby's father. I met this man at an opening of my own work. When people refer to him as Bobby's father, I don't correct them. Neither does Bobby. But no one else is driving with us on this trip.

Bobby is still a child but on the brink of change. I can barely recall your babyhood, I want to tell him. Those little expressions you once said. The invisible people you believed in. The misspoken words. Once you heard my “footprints” downstairs. The wonder of discovered things. That snake you caught in your bare hands one summer in Maine. Now it is almost lost to me. We have entered this new phase. He is strong, beautiful. He still drinks chocolate milk and colors in coloring books and curls up beside me for stories at night, but each night I say to myself maybe this is it, maybe this is the last time. I'll lie down beside him, and he'll say, “Hey, Mom, cut it out.” Or “I can read that book by myself.” Now he plays soccer (which I've learned to like) and talks about girls with a slight look of longing in his eyes that is
unmistakable. When he asks me to, I toss a baseball with him, but even my own son says, “Mom, you throw like a girl.”

We stop for the night, then drive again, then stop for another night, and soon the landscape shifts. As we drive past the lower rim of the Rocky Mountains, the land turns red, huge red buttes appear, rising out of the blood-red earth. He pauses from his drawing and looks out. “Wow, this is awesome,” he says.

“Awesome,” I agree.

We enter Navajo land. I know the way without looking at a map. I could drive it with my eyes closed. This land before me, red, arid, vast, is what I've always known. Let me tell you a story, I say. He puts down his book and I tell him of the ghost of Coal Mine Canyon. There are many versions of this story, but the one I've known since I was a little girl is the one my mother told me when she brought me here—about the maiden from the Bow Clan who became distraught, and nothing and no one could comfort her. One day she paused at the edge of Coal Mine Canyon, among the ghostlike rocks, and felt that her troubled spirit belonged to the beautiful canyon. Or perhaps a spirit beckoned to her.

When the Hopi discovered her body they left it where it had fallen. With the full moon her form appeared on the rocks, though this wasn't strange
to the Hopi, for to them wherever someone dies, the light of the spirit shines through.

I remember the whole story. How some say that unrequited love killed her. Others, that it was the death of her son. I have walked the rims of canyons with my own mother, fearful that at any moment she might jump. In a sense I suppose she did. Now I can stand with Bobby and look down.

All time is around us, I tell him; this is what the Indians believe. He looks up at me, his face squinched the way it is when he thinks I'm putting him on. Then he shrugs, smiles, and begins to draw again. This present moment encompasses the future and the past. It's not only what the Indians believe, I tell him, touching his hand. I believe it too.

Bobby has missed some things in his childhood, but he has had others. He asks about his father from time to time, but he seems to have made peace with what we have. “I had you because I wanted you,” I tell him when he asks.

L
ATE ONE NIGHT Mara called. At first I couldn't tell whether she was laughing or crying, but then it sounded as if she was doing both. “You won't believe it, Ivy, what my day was like. I just don't know where to begin. Where to start to tell you everything that went on. It was my day to bring snack to Jason's day care center. They have this horrid system where the parents must bring the snack one day a month and you have to sign up, but what you bring is preordained. Things like blueberry granola and celery sticks. Very New Age. No sugary cake at birthday parties. Oh God, I found that out the hard way. Did I tell you? I brought a chocolate ice cream cake with apple juice, I'll admit, and the teacher, this woman named Uriel or Ariel, some ethereal spirit, she shrieks and says, double sugar, they can't have double sugar. I brought hats, blowers, cake, candles,
the works, and she makes the kids gulp down the cake in five minutes and then run around the yard for an hour to wear off the chocolate.

“Anyway, that was last month, but this month, it's my snack day and it was, you guessed it, blueberry granola and celery sticks and some organic juice. I feel like I'm back in the sixties out here. Anyway, I got a late start and had to go to three stores to get everything we needed—you know, this at the health food store, that at the produce market. I was running late, and I must have hit a rock. It made a big thud under my car. I get to the school and green liquid is streaming out of the car. Just pouring out. I take Jason out of the car seat in back, grab the snack food, and race in. And there are thirty militant three-year-olds, forks in hand, already at their tables, pounding for their snacks. So I turn the food over to the teacher and head out the door, worried about the green liquid. Thinking if I take the car to the garage and it has to stay there, who'll pick up Jason at two o'clock, who'll get Alana at three o'clock?

“So I'm driving along without thinking much, except about my car, and all of a sudden these two guys in a Roto-Rooter truck come up alongside me. They're honking and waving like crazy. ‘Lady,' they're shouting, ‘your baby! Your baby!' So I look at where they're pointing, and there's the back door of my car open and the car seat flung up, just as if the kid has fallen out. I just wave at
the guys. ‘Don't worry,' I tell them. ‘No problem. It's okay.' And they shake their heads, and drive away …

“So this is my life now,” she says. “It really isn't so bad. Of course I'm lonely and maybe it was stupid to move away, but the kids are outside all day long and there's a nice duck pond nearby, and we got a puppy at the Humane Society, and really I have to say it isn't so bad.”

I
T WAS a cold midwinter day as I made my way to Grand Central Station, weighed down as usual with Bobby's stroller, a bag for him, one for me, some gifts for Mara and the kids, and Bobby in hand, toddling along on shaky legs. “We're going bye-bye,” I tell my son. “We're going away on a choo-choo for a few days.” I used to think women were fools, talking to their children this way, but now I find myself mimicking them. I told Bobby we were going to see Jason and Alana and Mara and their new puppy, and though I couldn't be certain he'd remember them, he smiled at their names.

We arrived almost an hour early, so I bought our tickets and we strolled through the station, beneath its vast arching dome. We paused to buy cookies and to admire the huge photo that spanned the wall overhead, a Vermont farm complete with
skaters on a pond, snowy hills, icicles dangling from a red barn, a place I promised Bobby I'd take him to someday. “Maybe we'll live somewhere like that,” I said. “Would you like it? You would, wouldn't you?”

We stood in the middle of the station munching on our cookies as I explained the place to Bobby—the platforms, the clock, the tickets and trains. Suddenly there was a flurry as commuters raced for early Friday afternoon trains. People rushing in from the doors, down the stairs, pouring in from the subway. Now the station, which was empty moments before, was deluged by commuters headed for their four o'clock trains. I grabbed Bobby by one hand, stroller in the other, and braced myself against the throng.

I was happy to be going to see Mara. It was several weeks since she moved away. And I was happy to be getting out of the city. I had just begun to feel that something was behind me and something else was ahead—not just because I was making new friends or my work was getting out there again, but because I believed that somehow I had been tested and had passed, and something was over and something else was about to begin.

It was then that I saw her coming toward me. I recognized immediately the red hair, the subdued, even sad but determined—always determined—expression in those eyes. And of course the distinguishing trait—the birthmark by which I always
knew I'd know her—that graced my sister's cheek. She walked quickly with her briefcase, in sneakers, Walkman on her head, racing for a train she seemed desperate to make. It was how I'd thought of her—directed toward a goal, no matter how small, often the wrong goal at that, but the one she was determined to make. Her mouth, her jaw were set, the way I'd seen them so many times when she could have told on me but never did. Yet I stood perfectly still, stunned, for in all my imaginings of her—in all my nights of sitting up, wondering about Sam—I never once thought of her here, in this city, working in these buildings, walking this pavement. Living this life.

She was coming straight at us, but of course she didn't see me. Or if she saw me, there was no way for her to know me. But I'd have known her anywhere. I would always know that face with its dark and light sides, distinct even in this crowd. I was dumbstruck and could not move. She was walking so quickly, veering off to the left, and at first I did not follow her. Before I knew what was happening, she headed in a different direction, toward a train she was about to miss.

I called, but she didn't hear. I cried out louder, but she didn't turn. Others did, dozens of people who looked askance at me. But this meeting was just as I'd told O'Malley, the detective, it would be: I'd see her face in the crowd, the face I'd know anywhere, in an airport, a shopping center, a train
station, and I'd rush to her. What will O'Malley say when he hears this? I wonder. Won't he be surprised.

But she had not heard me. She had not seen me. She did not stop, but headed off like the White Rabbit, racing toward its hole. Realizing I must chase her, I started to run, but I had Bobby, and his stroller, and our bags, and didn't have the strength to lift them all off the floor.

Except for Bobby, I dropped everything, leaving it in the middle of Grand Central, as I ran after my elusive past. But I was losing her. If only I could run faster. If only I could put Bobby down, just for a few moments, I could catch her. I recalled the old ethics problem, the one I'd confronted in high school. If you are fleeing a burning building, what do you take with you? A rare painting or the cat? I'd always answered the painting. I figured you could always get another cat. But now I had Bobby and I would not put him down.

People looked at me as if I were mad when I started to run across the expanse of the station, pushing through rushing commuters, trying to get to the gate through which Sam had disappeared. I shoved people aside. I raced toward tunnels, but there were so many gates, so many trains, so many ways to go and turn. Still, I couldn't catch her. Once more I thought that if I put Bobby down, just for a moment, I could overtake her. But this
was not possible. This was not something I would do.

Standing there with my son in my arms, I lost her again, if, in fact, she was ever there. Apparition, mistaken identity, or the real thing—I would never be sure. Perhaps I'll come back to this spot, empty-handed and expectant, each Friday, hoping she'll take the same train. Or perhaps I won't, for I'll have other places to be and other things to do. And maybe it's just this once that she's taking this train. If I do come back, maybe I'll find her, and through her find the way to my mother. But for now she is lost to me once again, and no matter where I go or turn, somehow I am alone, even though I hold my son in my arms.

It all comes sweeping over me and—as if it has just happened—I miss my mother. I want to run my life back like a film and rewind it so that she can see me grow up, be with me as I go off to school, leave home, marry. I want to make it all happen again so that she can watch Bobby on an evening when I go to a movie with a friend. I want to start it all over at the beginning as if my life thus far were merely a dance routine still in rehearsal, not one I was expected to perform on the stage.