Pieces of My Mother (21 page)

I still my thoughts and quicken my pace.

It is the orange Camaro sitting like a tiger in the overgrown grass that tells me I have found my way back to the cabin.

I sit outside on the steps of the deck, shaking and cold, but afraid to go in. This night has been all about being in the wrong places. I know this. There are lyrics from The Beatles playing in my head—“Nothing's gonna change my world.” All my spinning thoughts come down to a single sentence. I repeat it to myself so that I will never forget it.
This
is
not
what
I
want. This is not what I want.

The back door opens. It's Jay.

“Hey, you're back.”

I stay glued to the porch steps.

“You ought to come in. Hannon is totally passed out.”

Thank
God
, I think to myself and stand up. Jay stands in the doorway, his shadow filling the frame. He must be pretty drunk.

“You are beautiful. You know that?” he says, moving closer to me. I look up at him. His green eyes, kind and surprisingly focused, rearrange my thoughts. Nobody has ever called me beautiful.

Beautiful is
not
a person. It's an object in an antique store, a pink tea rose, a hillside covered with buttercups. All at once, I am a thousand flowers beneath the glass. A millefiori.

“Beautiful,” he repeats. There is heat coming off his body and I want nothing more than to be warm. I let him kiss me with his drunk, sweet lips. I'm kissing the wrong guy. He has a girlfriend. He moves his hands across the skin of my back like he's putting the final polish on his fender.
Nice
, I think. I let him kiss me some more.

He lifts my chin and says, “Man, you deserve better than that jerk.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“I can't stand up anymore. You want to lie down with me?” he asks.

I kiss him again. “No, I can't. Maybe someday though.”

He staggers into the cabin and falls onto an empty mattress.

I crawl to the space opposite Hannon and lie down on my back. His mouth hangs open like a Venus flytrap waiting to snatch its prey. But he also looks harmless, the way he sleeps with his hands quiet and curled near his chin. No, he's still a jerk.

Wide awake, I stare at the dark wooden beams above me. I stretch my arms out across the mattress as if they are wings that could carry me to another place. Something inside me is creaking open like an old iron gate that has been wrought with vines and rust for a long time. Nothing touches me as I close my eyes—not my clothes, not the cold air, not the mattress beneath me. I am floating out of this place and into another place, a better place. Because an apple
can
fall far from the tree.
Because
this
is
not
what
I
want.

Instead of going back upstairs, I push open the screen door and exit my mom's blue house. I need to walk, to feel my feet against the hard winter ground, and shake the numbness from my body. The field where the ponies roam is three hundred yards away. I venture into the darkness with only the moon as my light. For all I know, I could be standing outside the cabin in Clear Lake twenty-five years ago. But I am here outside my mom's house where the cold air blankets my body and reminds me how alive I am in this moment. My mom won't ever experience this sensation again. Is this what it feels like right now for her? Is she stepping out into the dark or the light?

I feel my mom here with me under the stars. I lie down on my back and stare up at the sky. I am not afraid. This ground will hold me up. This same ground will swallow my mother's body. I suppose I will always be the girl looking for answers in the stars and the bent trees overhead. If I had the fortitude, I'd pull myself off the ground and go shake my mom awake and tell her how much I love her. But I can't yet.

I lie still in the pasture, listening to the sound of the ponies breathing and the leaves rustling. I remember the feeling of being eight months pregnant with my first baby—my belly full and taut, my insides being kicked and pulled and stretched. The sensation was both magical and frightening. I imagine my mom lying down in an open field like this with me kicking around in her belly. What did she hope for? Was it too frightening for her? How strange it is to imagine that I once swam in the warm darkness of her belly. Her eyes were the first I knew and trusted. Here in the night field, grass and earth beneath my body, I listen for my mother's heartbeat. Her breath and mine, connected. What else is there left to do except open myself to every possibility?

By the time I pull myself from the ground, my whole body is cold and I hurry back inside the blue house. Upstairs, with my mom's letters in hand, I find myself wondering what kind of mother I will be when my children hit adolescence. What will my children say about me? That I held them too tightly? Or that I let them fly from the nest on crooked wings?

For several years during my adolescence, my mom became even more distant. Maybe it was difficult for her to suddenly see her little girl growing into a young woman. Maybe I was pushing her away.

A letter titled “Dear Mommy” sits in the file of letters never sent. Maybe one of the letters my mom wrote while she was in rehab—since it's a letter written many years after her mother died.

Dear Mommy,

I try to remember you ever holding me, and I can't. Who'd want to hold a brat? I remember spitting at you after you spanked me. I also remember thinking how beautiful and perfect you were—until I was ten or so and I saw your lipstick was on crookedly one Christmas in Florida. And I hated you and felt pity for you after David was killed.

Have I always missed having a mother? How many horse shows did you come to, Mommy? [None.] How many riding lessons was I late for because you were not into taking me—or not into me, period? You were always sleeping through my nightmares unless Jo woke you up.

We won't even mention the years of your drunkenness. You were gone then—really gone. Get your spirit together and help me for once in this life. Release me. Please, please, please. I know you weren't a very happy person—you had so many demons. I am sorry—really I am. But I have suffered your demons, and I am tired, tired, tired. Please help.

Your daughter,

Mikel

History repeats itself again and again. The past and present collide in my mother's words. Daughters never stop longing for their mothers. So where does this thread of broken mothers begin and end? And if it's true that things are fated to repeat themselves, what did I think I would find different here in Olympia?

I think about my brothers and wish they could be here to say good-bye with me. We share this history of longing for our dazzling mother.

Around the time Jamie, Eden, and I were old enough to leave the nest of our big yellow house, our dad's financial situation had spun out of control. He was heavily in debt and in danger of losing the house and everything else he owned. None of us were ready to say good-bye to the house that had held us for so many years.

The day of the auction, I learned that the things that matter to people can so easily end up in the wrong hands. In our yellow house, the things all disappeared in a single day.

Downstairs, everything from our yellow house is neatly laid out in categories. Bidding numbers are attached like toe tags to each item. Grandma Rita's china and silver have been moved out of the dark oak cabinet and stacked onto sale tables in Jamie's room. Pictures and paintings have been taken off the walls and placed on upright easels. Smaller items have been organized into group lots. The powder-blue fish plates in Lot 49 are stacked high with their tails and fins going in mismatched directions.

“Those are Limoges,” I hear someone say behind me.

Pretending to be a shopper, I slide my fingers across each item and note its lot number. I stop in front of my grandmother's dessert plates, each one hand-painted with a different kind of flower—red poppies, yellow roses, pink cherry blossoms, black-eyed Susans, white lilies, and blue forget-me-nots. A set of six. My dad told me once that those were his mother's favorite plates. They were mine too. I thought that they would always be stacked there in the dark wood cabinet, waiting for me to use if I ever had a family of my own.

A trifold flyer for the day's event has fallen to the floor, and I stare at it in disbelief. The auctioneer helped my dad design it. The bold, black print reads:

PUBLIC AUCTION. COMPLETE ESTATE OF
1735 CENTER ROAD. RAIN OR SHINE.

EVERYTHING GOES…TO THE BARE WALLS!

On the flyer are black-and-white photos of our furnishings—paintings, carpets, Victorian lamps, dressers, desks, the stained-glass windows, and the ice-cream-parlor table and chairs. Certain items for sale on the flyer have stars and exclamation points as if they are more important.

I should have been paying more attention. I should have taken my dad's word when he told me that all he had left were the coins on the dashboard of his van. He said not to worry because he was going to work things out “no matter what,” and I trusted him. After all, he was my dad, and he had always stuck by us, always worked things out for us one way or the other.

I knew things were getting worse when the power and water kept getting shut off month after month. Whenever PG&E called to say our electricity was going to be turned off by 5 p.m. if the bill wasn't paid, my dad would tell me to say the same thing: “Tell them to just put the check back through.”

I didn't understand what that meant, but I knew it rarely worked. Sometimes eating dinner by candlelight with candles flickering all around us was magical. We argued less and talked more softly. When the power was restored, the spell was broken.

On the long table in Jamie's room I notice Grandma's set of fancy cordial glasses with the twisted stems. Each one is a different color—rose, lavender, and icy blue—the colored glass as thin as puddle ice in spring. Even Boris, the stuffed wild-pig head, is to be sold. Almost every friend of mine has touched his pink shellacked tongue on a dare.

Our 1965
Collier's Encyclopedia
set and the
Great
Books
are stacked in two tall towers and numbered. I open one of the encyclopedias and flip to the color plates in the center. I look at “Birds of the World” and “Mammals of the Americas” one last time.

Then, from across the room, I spot her slender arms reaching toward the sky, her face still smiling. A number in bold, black ink dangles from her wrist. Item 152, the Good Fairy, the small metal statue my dad brought home from the antique fair so many years ago. The floor beneath my feet seems to shift as if I have missed a step. She is my favorite thing in our yellow house. Like me, she is a young girl cast in a single moment with her arms outstretched wide and standing on her tiptoes.

It's not right to sell the Good Fairy. The first time I noticed her in the windowsill in my father's room, I felt such hope—like I too could reach out beyond the borders of our yellow house. I wonder if anyone would notice if she went missing from the auction, if I shoved her under my coat and walked away with her. But that would be a stupid thing to do when my dad is trying so hard to get enough money to save our house.

My dad told each of us to set aside our “necessary” things from our bedrooms so they wouldn't end up in the auction.

“Antiques can be bought and sold and replaced. It's that simple,” he says.

My friend Rhonda, whose mother makes her bed every morning after she leaves for school, asked me if I was mad about my dad putting on an auction to sell all the stuff in our house. “What would you rather have? Your house or all the things in it?” I asked her.

“Both,” she said.

She just doesn't get it. And why would she? It's not a choice she has to make.
I
get it because I know I can't change things. I feel bad for my dad. This is not what he wants; it is what he has to do to save our house.

Quickly, I turn away from the Good Fairy, bumping my hip against the corner of a table. Nothing is where it usually is. Overnight our house has been transformed into a crowded shop—not unlike my dad's antique shop. In the living room, I sit in my grandmother's blue chair—the big easy chair with its down cushions and deep, low seat that came to us the summer after she died. My brothers and I still fight over who gets to sit in the blue chair because it is, we have all decided, the most comfortable chair in the whole world.

I sink down into its soft cushions and set my elbow against one of its big arms as I study the faces of people milling about. They look greedy, every one of them, a flock of magpies flapping from room to room, circling over our stuff. What do they really want with our things anyway? Do they understand that no one has died here but that they're taking from us as we watch them scavenge?

A man in a corduroy sports coat looks down at me and smiles broadly. “How's that chair? It sure looks comfortable,” he says.

“No, not really,” I reply.

I stand up and walk out on the upstairs balcony. Down below, beneath the big oak tree in the yard, are rows of folding chairs, red and white balloons, free beer, and strangers clutching lists of the items they will bid on. I feel transparent—a ghost girl, wandering from room to room in a house I once skipped through.

The auctioneer who my dad hired wears a constant smile as he watches the steady stream of people arriving. More people, the “right” kind of people, mean a bigger commission in his pocket. My dad must be relieved about the turnout as well. The auction is his last card. He recently had to rescue our yellow house from being auctioned off on the front steps of City Hall.

He's explained that he has a debt to pay, and if he sells everything on the inside of the house, he might have enough to pay the bank off before they try to take the house from us again. I don't completely understand the details, but I know that my dad has been borrowing money from a lot of people to get himself out of this mess.

“Don't worry, Melissa. I'm not going to let you down,” he tells me this time.

I don't know what's going to happen if we lose our yellow house. Jamie dropped out of high school to join the marines, so I don't see him much these days because he's in training camp. Eden comes and goes between our house and different friends' homes. My mom is back living in Washington with a new boyfriend. Last I talked to her, she said that my dad ought to set the house on fire and collect the insurance money if he truly wants to get out of the situation.

When all the folding chairs are filled, the auctioneer takes center stage on our front porch. He's a slick cowboy with snakeskin boots and a black-and-brown-plaid shirt. His stomach bulges over the ledge of his silver belt buckle. As he takes command of the crowd, his voice booms into the microphone. His way of speaking is slippery and fast. I spy Eden standing in the back row with his arms crossed. The bidding begins in a frenzy, cardboard numbers jumping high over heads of buyers like determined salmon spawning upstream.

I don't expect Eden to be upset once the bidding begins because he is the one who has always complained about the “stupid and useless antiques” in our house. “What good are things you have to be so damn careful with?” he always says. He hates the fact that our dad sells antiques to make a living. He likes things new and modern—and he reminds us of this all the time. Yet, when the bidding begins, Eden is the one who is desperate. He runs between the rows of folding chairs.

“Dad, what are you doing? You can't sell all this…It's going too cheap!”

I can see it in his face. He wants to save everything, but it is all happening too fast.

Eden marches to the back row of chairs and holds a bidding number high in the air for the small Maxfield Parrish painting of the lady standing in the bright, blue water. The auctioneer ignores his number and gives the Parrish to the high bidder in the first row. Standing behind the people, Eden begins a rant.

“Can you believe this shit? This is my grandma's! And that is my dresser and my desk. And those are our family heirlooms. Jeez, how can you even watch this? This is not right.”

There are times when I wish I had the guts to be bold like Eden—to rant, to yell, to call it like it is. But I turn inward and go silent. I am the watcher, the one whose voice is still tangled in her throat.

My dad marches across our gravel driveway and pulls Eden out of the crowd. “What are you doing, being a smart-ass out there? Since when are you interested in antiques?”

Eden yanks his arm away. “This is a circus, Dad! And you're the clown here, man.”

My dad doesn't yell. Instead, he calmly looks at Eden while his hands twitch close to his sides as if to say,
What
can
I
do?
He sighs. “You can't bid on anything unless you have the money to pay for it, Eden. People here are going to get angry, and you need to start saving money to live on your own.”

Eden stares straight ahead at the stage as if he's going to charge the front porch. “I got some money to get a few things.”

“Please, sit down or else you need to leave.”

At that moment, I look away from Eden's face, so I don't know why he suddenly chooses to stop fighting. I want to focus on what's coming and going on the front porch. I need to watch the things go so that I can remember them. A familiar sadness creeps inside me. How do you say good-bye to things you love? You don't really. You just watch and hope they will come back someday.

Eden and I sit in fold-up chairs and watch everything disappear, lot by lot. Two smartly dressed men sitting a few rows from us bid on almost every item and pay top dollar, which makes me feel oddly grateful but also hate them. It's like they are going to furnish a whole house to look just like ours.

An antique dealer hurries away down our gravel driveway with a tea set and a box of our grandmother's silver. My favorite painting of the cowboy in his yellow hat is gone in less than sixty seconds. The 1940s calendar print of the starlet with bare shoulders and candy-apple red lips brings more than a hundred dollars.

When the Good Fairy comes onto the porch, I turn away from the house. I don't want to know what price she brings. I tell myself that I don't care—that I'm being too girlish in wanting to keep a fairy. When I look back toward the porch, I only see her outstretched arms as she is carted off in a flimsy cardboard box.

By late afternoon many of the bidders are gone. With the less valuable pieces remaining, the prices begin to drop. Despite my dad's wishes, Eden starts bidding again, but he mainly throws up a number to “up” the prices so things don't go so cheaply. It's not legal to do this. He claims he's got a stash of money from selling pot at school.

Then the blue chair is carried onto the porch, the blue chair that came to us after Grandma Rita died. The blue chair that we all agree is the most comfortable chair in the world.

The bid opens at eight dollars.

“Eight dollars!” says Eden. “Shit, that's nothin'.”

My dad is nowhere in sight.

I don't really think it through. I raise my hand, even though I don't have a number.

Then Eden's hand shoots up. And then the man's hand in front of us goes up. We are all bidding on the blue chair.

“You don't even have a number,” says Eden.

“Eden, please let me use your number just this once. I'll get the money and pay you back,” I say.

“But I want that chair,” he says.

“Do I hear twelve dollars?”

“Who will give me fourteen dollars for this cozy old chair?”

I grab Eden's number and keep my hand raised high.

The price keeps going up.

“Twenty-two? Can I get twenty-two?”

The man in front of me turns to his friend and says, “Just let the girl have the chair.”

When the auctioneer says, “Sold to the young lady,” I think he's joking.

For a second, Eden gets mad at me, but then I catch the corners of his mouth turning slightly like he is glad.

“That's alright,” he says. “I got the painting of the swans when Dad wasn't paying attention.”

Was it really this easy? Why hadn't I bid on other things—like the Good Fairy?

I paid twenty-two dollars for our grandmother's blue chair.

My dad doesn't mention anything about my purchase but I know he knows about it. He and the auctioneer celebrate the success of the auction over a lot of rum and red wine. They have good reason to celebrate. The auction was a success, which means my dad can probably pay whoever he needs to pay.

I wake up later in the night and find my way to the blue chair, which has been pushed to the far end of the porch. I drop myself down into it and pull my legs up close to my chest. Everything is quiet except for the wind that rustles through the leaves of our giant, old oak tree. The first time I skipped across the porch of this yellow house, I knew it was a good house. It was the one solid thing beneath my feet. A nest, a mother, a yellow house. I remember what I said to Jamie the first day we were here.