Pieces of My Mother (16 page)

An hour later, I peek back into the bathroom. The blood has been wiped clean from the floor. My mom is asleep. I tiptoe over to her, feeling a sudden strong desire to touch her. I stare at the shallow dish that has formed below her high, freckled cheekbone from her lack of eating. I could place a warm brown egg there and it would stay.

As she sleeps, my brilliant, reckless mother appears peaceful for the first time since I can remember. I wish I could stay here and study the lines and contours of her face for hours. What might I discover if I just slowed down and accepted her as she is now? I'm still searching for something here and I can't find it. I lean in closer to look at her.

Suddenly, she grabs my arm with what seems like a newborn's reflex, looks up at me, and opens her eyes wide—strange, like a fish coming up to the surface for a bubble of air. All the muscles and thin flesh of her face pull back so that I can see her eyes, the yellow whites and the deep blue staring up at me. She holds her gaze on me, almost like a Kabuki actor in the moment of their
mie
—the wide-eyed moment when the character's truth is finally revealed.

I try to read her. Is she saying, “Look at me” or “Take me in one last time” or “Help me”?

Her intense gaze sends a current, cold and startling, down into my throat. Then her eyes fall shut. I place my hand near her lips to feel for her breath against my palm.

I call out for my aunt.

“What? What's happening?” She races into the room.

My mom's throat begins to rattle like a carburetor.

“I–I don't know. She did something strange and I thought something was wrong.”

My mother's breathing softens and she's back in a deep sleep.

“I think she's just tired again.” My aunt sighs. It's clear that my mother's rally has faded. Now there is nothing to do except wait.

“I'll sit with her for a while,” my aunt says.

I retreat upstairs to take a shower, longing for the water and steam to help me relax. But instead, the noise and pressure of the water heightens my emotional state. Everything swells inside me—and I am thankful for the falling water and the whirring fan overhead that mask my unbridled sobbing.

When I return to the bedroom, I gather her letters and attempt to put them in some kind of chronological order. I need to pull these pieces of my mother together into a complete portrait that I hope, in some strange way, will make me whole as well. I know that some of her letters were written before she left us—but others were written after she left and the divorce was still pending. And then she was suddenly traveling abroad and debating what her future might hold. Honestly, rather than a history, the letters are more like messages from bottles that have washed ashore from different continents.

I start at the beginning.

Dearest Gran,

I am in my usual state of disgrace with myself for having failed to get in touch with you. My friend Karen calls me from work yesterday and asks me to meet her for lunch. I come bipping up expecting to hear we have been fired, or worse, and she pounces on me with “We are both handing in our resignations on Wednesday and leaving for Europe in the beginning of October.” I thought she was being facetious, but by golly, she isn't—and it is infectious. So infectious that I already have a ride to New York on the 15th of September! Karen will be going to St. Louis on the 19th with her brother who is—thank the Lord, pray the Lord—returning from Vietnam. She will then come back to New York, and we'll be off. We would be gone about two months and home in time for Christmas. So, Gran, you can see how I have had quite a bit on my mind as of late.

The children are all so beautiful and doing so well. Darling Melissa just had her third birthday, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for her present. I gave her an Austrian music box, and she just delights in watching the little peasant girl on top spin around while it plays “Hi-Lili.” The boys have learned how to swim—though Eden refuses to swim on top of the water. Both little fishes. Melissa is content to paddle around in her ring. Hopefully she will soon learn not to fear the water. She howls bloody murder anytime anyone splashes her—imperiously demands that they stop right away. A regular little queen she thinks she is—but still full of love and good humor.

I will keep you abreast on the Europe plans—I only hope I can manage finances. If I do manage to go, you will have to think of something very special you want me to bring you. Maybe a goat from the Swiss Alps?

Now I realize that this was the trip that got postponed, or “scotched” as my mother put it in her other letter to Gran. Regardless, what was my dad thinking when she told him of her plans to travel to Europe for two months? Maybe he believed she would return from these travels restored and ready to come back to the family. But it's clear she pulled further away instead.

In this next letter to my aunt, my mom is in the midst of her travels.

Happy Halloween, my sister!

At least I think today is the 31st. Oh, I am sad right now—but rather deliriously sad. O my Redeemer, but your sister has done a loon bit again. Now I am hopelessly gaga over a Yugoslav boy who was a waiter on the ship we came down from Rijeka on. Lucien Bugoni speaks little English. What a giggle our conversations were. He'd probably bore me to death if I could really talk to him. Poor me and my affinity for young, blond non-sophisticates.
Pas
de
quoi.
I will love him forever and ever!

Prior to meeting Bugoni, I was all decided to come back home and attack J. without mercy 'til he agreed to remarry. I'll have to return to that thought in a few days' time perhaps. Karen has met a Yugoslav doctor who lives in Blato but vacations here three months of the year. I have not seen her in a while. Needless to say, we are not digging much culture right now.

Rijeka was awful. We were literally chased through the streets by a lunatic and ducked into a café for sanctuary only to find all men who couldn't speak or understand English or French, whereupon they threw a bottle of beer in my face and started a brawl. Fortunately the police returned our passports. Jane would faint dead to hear some of our adventures and circumstances. This is not a typical letter from a cultured young lady traveling abroad. So I am not particularly cultured—but a good letter may bore you.

It comes back to me now, the photographs of my mom on the boat with Lucien Bugoni. And the photos with her friend Karen. She told me about this trip to Europe when Bella, Dominic, and I came to visit her in Olympia several years ago. Bella sat next to me at the kitchen table drawing a fully clothed bunny. I asked my mom if I could look at some of her old photos, and she pulled out a tattered box full of loose pictures. Many of them I had never seen before.

In one photograph, my mom is strikingly beautiful. Her smile, as wide as I have ever seen it, caught in a frame of laughter. A white, tailored button-up shirt and a short tweed skirt. Sexy bent legs. There are wavy curls in her hair like she's paid special attention to it.

I lifted my eyes from the image. Here was my mom sitting across from me at her kitchen table, penciling in the Sunday crossword puzzle. Her eyes were slightly swollen and the color in her face a jaundiced yellow. She had aged radically in the past year (but that of course was before we knew about the cancer).

“Someday, I'm going to get all those photographs in a proper album,” she said.

I looked back down at the image. It was an old-style color photo, four-by-four square with a white border. My mom in her tweed skirt, another woman in tall boots, and two men flanking them. All four are smiling for the camera, standing in front of an ocean and a postcard-blue sky.

I asked her about the photograph and who these people were. She came around behind me, picked up the photo, and held it at a distance. She paused and squinted at it as if she were flipping through pages in time, traveling back to that day in a matter of moments.

She told me the photograph was taken in Greece. “Corfu, to be exact.”

She pointed to Karen, her roommate from San Francisco that she lived with for a brief time in Haight-Ashbury. She can't recall the names of the two men. “A couple of Greeks who offered to take us out to lunch,” she said. “We were good-looking gals traveling alone. We got a lot of offers, and we usually accepted them.”

She smiled and stepped away to refill her coffee mug. I looked over at Bella concentrating on the small buttons and details of the bunny's dress. She didn't like to miss a single detail.

I found more photos with the same bright sea, foreign men, and white borders. The handsome dark man with the chiseled jaw and thick cream-colored sweater seemed to be the favorite subject of my mom and her friend.

“What year was this?” I asked.

She paused again. “That was '69.”

It's an easy calculation for me. I was four then.

“How long were you in Greece?” I asked, keeping my eyes on her smile in the photograph.

“Couple of months. But we didn't just go to Greece. We traveled all around Europe.”

I didn't say anything else. I knew we were on completely different boats, and I couldn't bridge the ocean between us. She looked at the photo and recalled that youthful time of freedom. I looked at the photograph and thought,
I
was
four
and
I
wanted
a
mother
. She was in Greece, smiling in a white, tailored button-up shirt and a short tweed skirt. Sexy legs. I kept staring at the photograph, drawn in by her youth and beauty. She is happy, undeniably so.

I imagined another photograph, one that might have been taken on that same day. One where my mom is home with us on the steps outside our San Jose duplex with the peach tree in the backyard. I can see my brothers and me next to her. They would be shirtless, and our lips would be stained by orange Popsicles—or maybe our faces would be dirty from the Carnation frozen chocolate malts that we ate off flat wooden spoons. Jamie, Eden, and I would be smiling.

But I can't see my mom's smile in that image. She wouldn't be smiling anything like the way she was smiling that day in Greece. She wouldn't have those soft curls in her hair. There's no way she would have been that happy.

At that moment, I reached my hand out to my daughter, Bella, and gently squeezed her forearm. It felt so warm against my palm. I smiled with closed lips, full of love for her. She looked up from her drawing and gave me the same smile back. Our smiles were neither wide nor full of Greek laughter, but we were fully present in that moment.

It's my mom's last birthday. She's made it to sixty-five. I wake up thinking that we should get her a cake with dark chocolate frosting and sixty-five striped candles. My aunt subtly reminds me that my mother doesn't have the strength to blow out candles. How stupid of me. My aunt shrugs and says, “The thought still counts.”

My mom and I haven't spent many birthdays together. My aunt Janet, who was married to my father's brother, recently revealed to me that our grandmother Rita used to ask her to send gifts to our house on our birthdays and pretend our mother had sent them. My dad had to play along, even though this really bothered him. I do know for certain that the handmade doll from “Merry” was from my mom. I also know for certain that this is the last birthday my mom will have.

I sit on the upstairs bedroom floor holding a letter she wrote to me long ago and never sent. The paper is still bright yellow, as if it never saw much light over the years.

Melissa,

I have sharpened tomorrow's crossword pencil (already, because there are things I REALLY want to say to you…and it seems that there is very little opportunity). Let's accept that it's due to the ever-present “embarrassment”—a symbol of the distance that we have kept between us. Oh Kumquat! I do miss you so very much. Ever have I missed your girl-self—the contained but centralized you in a phantasmagorical childness. But now—oh baby-mine—I feel so deeply your destiny. Suddenly—to me, cuz we spend sporadic time together—you have so many facets. I want to explore them with you, darlin'. I have this enormous need for us to be honest with one another. I feel that we keep reaching for each other, ironically, tentative touches. Somehow we tend to back off…too often. I am unburdening myself as dawn pinkens. Memories, Sweet Pea, Loo-Lah, Liddy Bumpkins. And sorrow for all I forsook. There is no need to forsake more, however—at least I hope not.

Her ink is permanent. I feel her reaching out to me here—maybe overreaching with her whimsical language. (“Phantasmagorical” is a word I need to look up, for example.) But she liked to play with words that were colorful and elevated, and I love that piece of her.

May I please come back into your life a little more? Can we maybe help each other more often? I wrote you months ago and said I would be really direct and forward with you, but I have failed miserably at that. No more?? The next time one of us tries to get a bit inside the other and the “embarrassment” gets in the way, maybe we could wink or something—give a signal that it's okay, we're trying. I've been realizing how long it has been for you, recognizing me as the person I am as opposed to the figure I am supposed to represent. You sure are something, darlin'—you've hung in a long time. Perhaps a while longer?

It's clear she
was
yearning to be close with me…at least at some point or on some level. It seems like this should satisfy me, but there's a nagging question inside my head: Am I the one who's failed her? Was it me who was too afraid to let her in?

When I was in junior high, my dad pleaded with my mom to leave Washington and come live closer to us. He told her she needed to be “more goddamn involved” in her children's lives and that we could all benefit from having the guidance of another parent around. She wasn't committed to a job or a boyfriend at the time, so she acquiesced and drove down from Washington to California in her red Datsun.

I was ecstatic to help my mom find the little blue Victorian house by the railroad tracks downtown. Now she was a bicycle ride away. She got a job serving cocktails at the local bar, the Bit-a-Honey, and quickly hooked up with one of the regular customers. Things seemed okay for a while.

Until she came into my room late one night.