Pieces of My Mother (4 page)

We are moving to a new house in a new town. I'll be in kindergarten as soon as we get there. My dad tells me all about the house as he stuffs newspaper into the tall beer glasses from our kitchen cupboard. He tells me it's a giant farmhouse with a fenced-in pasture, a little barn, a plum tree, and an apple tree that grows golden and green apples.

“You won't believe it,” he says, “but I rescued the house. The fire department was going to burn it down. They thought they could use it for a practice fire.”

More than anything, I want to know what color the new house is. “It's a yellow house, a big yellow house,” he tells me. That makes me smile. It's a perfect color for a new house.

Then he tells me something even better. “The house comes with chickens.”

That night, I can't sleep because I keep thinking about the house that comes with chickens, and I have so many questions. I imagine chickens that are cream colored, black, and speckled. There must be red hens that lay warm brown eggs. There must be white roosters with bright red combs and yellow legs like pencils. I wonder if they are tame, if I can pet their high tail feathers. I turn from side to side, over and over in my bed, until I can't stand it anymore.

I tiptoe down the hallway to my dad's room. I watch him through the crack of the door as he tosses his shirts and stretchy black socks into a cardboard box. His hair is a wild mess on top of his head. He and I both have the same type of curly hair that grows taller rather than longer. My dad picks up a can of beer from the top of a box and takes a long sip. He drinks a lot of beer lately. I know this because our garbage has been full of red-and-blue crumpled cans.

He catches me peeking at him from behind the door.

“Melissa,” he says, “you're supposed to be in bed.”

I tell him I can't sleep because I keep thinking about the chickens.

“It is way too late to be thinking about chickens.”

As I stand in the doorway searching for words, my chin starts to shake. I don't want to cry but it's too late. I am like the red water balloon that burst open in my hands yesterday.

“What's going on?” my dad asks.

“Nothing,” I say as I curl my toes into the thick shag carpet and straighten up my face.

He sets down his beer and looks at me, and I think he might be trying not to cry too.

“I was wondering if Mom has the directions to the house. I know she likes chickens. She always said so.”

“Darlin',” he says. Then he stops and turns his face away from me and sighs. “Your mom's kind of doing her own thing right now. Remember?”

“Okay.”

“Listen,” he tells me, “your mom can come see you anytime she wants—wherever we live.”

“But Jamie says she went far away.”

“Not true,” he says quickly.

I can tell he's mad at Jamie for spilling that secret by the way he says “Not true” in a hurry. I wonder if my dad even knows where she is. I wonder if he misses her as much as I do. I think he does.

My dad lifts me up and takes me to my bed. It helps when he gives me a back scratch and tells me more things about the big yellow house. He says the house is more than one hundred years old—that it has an attic big enough to live in, that it has room for a garden, and that we are going to plant corn and tomatoes and giant watermelons in the summertime. I hope Mom finds out about the yellow house that comes with chickens and decides to stay with us.

• • •

It takes forever to get to our new house. Finally we turn onto a bumpy dirt road.

“What's this place?” yells Jamie from the backseat.

“This is it,” my dad says.

“We live on a dirt road?” asks Eden.

“Someday it will be paved,” my dad responds.

Our car turns a corner, and there it is—a massive, old three-story farmhouse that is yellow just like my dad promised. I eye the enormous oak trees surrounding the house. Climbing trees, I think to myself. Trees to hang rope swings off, and trees to hide in.

Jamie, Eden, and I run up the steep stairs to see our new house. We race across the shiny linoleum and hardwood floors. The whole house echoes with the sounds of my brothers and me.

“Which one is my room?” shouts Eden.

“I get the top floor!” says Jamie and races toward the staircase.

Then we almost run smack into an old man sitting on the stairs. We all freeze. He has white hair and thick gray teeth.

“So you're the kids moving in, huh?” he says.

We stare at each other and then back at the creepy old man. Only Jamie is brave enough to speak. “Yeah.”

“Where's your pop?”

“Uh, he's outside.”

“Well, why don't you get him, because I've got a few more things to tell him about the place.”

We scramble back down the stairs and tell Dad about the old man in the house.

“That's the owner. I mean the former owner, Mr. Bonner.”

I follow my dad back into the house. Jamie and Eden run out to the biggest tree in the yard and start climbing.

My dad shakes hands with Mr. Bonner, who is still sitting on the steps.

“Listen up,” the old man says to my dad. “I'm leaving you that white freezer. It's full of meat—there's a whole cow in there.”

He looks down at the ground like he's talking to himself. “Should never have done it. I just couldn't take care of that cow after my wife passed. It was her pet. Thought it was the right thing to at least get the meat out of her. But it wasn't the right thing, after all. I won't go into details, 'cause I never believed in superstitious stuff before, but my wife has been letting me
know
.”

“Well, is it a good cow? I mean, is it okay to eat?” asks my dad.

“It's good, all right. I don't know how to explain some things anymore, but I think it's best it goes with the house, like the chickens and all the white furniture.”

My dad looks confused and says, “Why don't you go find those chickens, Melissa?”

Mr. Bonner grins at me with his gray teeth and says, “Go out around the barn. That's where they do their hanging out.”

I'm out in the field in no time. It's hot, dry, and sweet smelling. The yellow grass brushes up over my ankles and I wish I hadn't worn my flip-flops. I could run faster across the field in my blue Keds.

The little barn in the center of the field leans to one side. It looks more like an old fort, but inside are bales of dusty hay, burlap sacks, empty nesting boxes, and cobwebs everywhere. I reach my hand into one of the sacks and pull out a handful of cracked corn. It's gritty and leaves a fine white powder on my palms. I think it must be the chicken food for sure, so I take a handful with me and walk around the other side of the barn. I hear cheep-cheeping sounds.

It's even better than I imagined. Not just chickens, but fuzzy baby chicks all in a row following their mother hen. Then I see a big red-and-black rooster coming my way. His tail feathers look black but shimmer green in the sunlight. I throw my handful of corn, scattering it in a fan all around me. The mother hen scratches at the ground, and all her little buff-colored chicks copy her. More chickens, white and black, come toward me, and soon I am surrounded by a giant horseshoe of chickens.

It is the best place in the whole world. Suddenly I feel like the little barn is also a new house, like this is a place that I am going to spend a lot of time. A strong, good feeling leaps into my chest.

I run across the field, back toward the big yellow house. I see Jamie and Eden climbing in a different tree, a tall oak with spiky leaves. I see my dad and old Mr. Bonner coming outside.

“Dad, Dad! I found baby chicks!”

Mr. Bonner looks down at the ground and shifts some dirt around with his shoe. “That's Mudder-Mudder,” he says. “She's been here forever. Always has a flock of chicks following behind her. She'll take care of anything that comes along too. Once she took a wild duck under her wing. She's the best chicken here, and an Araucana, you know.”

“What's an Araucana?” asks my dad.

“Lays colored eggs.”

I think he's joking at first. There are such things as colored eggs? But he talks too seriously and slowly to be joking. He looks at me. “You take good care of Mudder-Mudder,” he says.

We spend the whole day exploring our new house.

There's just one thing I'm not sure about. It's the whole cow in the white freezer. I'm trying to think how a cow could fit inside a freezer. The more I think about it, the more worried I feel about it. I stand in front of the freezer, which definitely seems too small for a cow. I tell Jamie about what Mr. Bonner said. How he froze his wife's pet cow and says he shouldn't have.

Jamie says, “That man was weird. I say we keep that freezer shut forever.” I think that's a good idea.

Then Jamie jumps up from the floor and says, “Let's go find Mudder-Mudder and her chicks again.”

I am right behind him, taking big steps like him. “Isn't this the greatest place we ever lived, Jamie?”

“I think it is. I think it is,” he says.

And when Jamie says something twice in a row like that, I always believe him.

The speckled hen dashes out the back entrance of my mom's room and I push the heavy door closed behind her. This room is a mess. Orange plastic pill bottles, lip balm, and crumpled candy wrappers decorate my mother's bedside table. The dogs sleep on the bed, constantly shedding dander and black fur onto the blankets. Damp towels are strewn about, and socks hang over the backs of chairs like bats.

I want to clean it up but I don't feel like it's my place to do it. I don't want to offend my mom's husband, who seems to be doing all he can to keep her comfortable. Throughout the day, he enters and exits the room frequently with little to say. It feels like we are in a theater production and he and my aunt are the stagehands responsible for rearranging the set pieces. I am the understudy who showed up just in time for the final show.

As I look at the things this room holds, my head starts to hurt. I rub my left temple and eyebrow. I've been prone to severe headaches since I was a young girl. They hit me without warning and can linger for days. The pain has intensified over the years, sometimes so much that I want to detach my head from my body. I'm well acquainted with the sharp, stabbing symptoms of an “ice pick headache” and the nausea that accompanies it. The migraine triggers are so varied that I've never been able to understand why they happen.

This time, though, I feel a wave of overwhelming anger bringing on the pressure in my head. My mom's room is a knickknack shop filled with collected curios and crap. Up high in the window are colored bottles in blue, ruby red, and green. Netted glass balls from the sea, old slag-glass insulators, and a few tinted cordial glasses with delicate stems. A lavender Mason jar holds a hundred or so marbles—many of which she “borrowed” from my marble jar back at home on her occasional visits. The rickety bamboo shelf across from the bed is cluttered with an assortment of boxes and carved animal figures, as well as handfuls of jewelry, hair clips, and scattered Guatemalan worry dolls.

I sit looking at all of her treasures, searching for patterns and similarities between us. I don't have to look far—the hoarding gene runs deep. Even my father has lost control over the sheer amount of stuff he owns. He doesn't own a home anymore, but he pays rent on four buildings to house the antiques he buys and sells. He's become a hoarder of rare and exquisite things. I've talked to him about this affliction but he's stubborn. He knows that the “right buyer” will eventually come along and pay his price. Yet some of his pieces for sale have sat in the shop for more than twenty years. Sometimes I imagine him bent over like a contorted man, dragging every object and treasure he owns behind him. The parade of his possessions stretches for miles.

Likewise, my mother covets these “treasures” in her house. Why do I have the urge to smash every one? I want to take my arm and clear the shelves in a single swipe—hurl all her things out into the field where the spring grass will grow tall and hide them. Not one of these objects will keep her alive. Not one of them will take away the gnarled tumors from her liver—nor stop the ammonia from building up in her brain and destroying her brilliant mind.

What if I just did it? Smashed her beautiful things so that she could focus on what's important during her last days on this earth. If I were bold enough to take such an uncharacteristic action, perhaps she'd wake up and pay attention. I won't, though. I am still the silent, small girl hoping that my mother will come back.

And if I am honest with myself, I am a hypocrite. I too suffer this affliction of hanging on to things. I give value and meaning to ephemera and small objects. There are boxes of childhood treasures gingerly packed in our garage that I refuse to let go. A ball of tinfoil that a handsome boy threw at me in the seventh grade, a piece of driftwood named Elmo that I've held onto for thirty years, a collection of broken glass animals and earless horses. A set of seven metal jacks I used to play with. These are the things that I protected when my dad got into a huge financial mess. I despise this part of me that clings to the remnants of the past, and yet I often find myself holding on to them tightly.

In our yellow house, the antique I treasured most was the Good Fairy who lived up in my father's room. She was a small Victorian statue that he brought home from the flea market one year and placed on the windowsill above his bed. A foot tall and made of smooth white metal, she stood on her tiptoes with her slender arms open and outstretched toward the sky. She was young like me, caught in a moment of undeniable joy. Beneath her feet were the words “The Good Fairy.” When I'd lie on my dad's bed and stare up at her, I felt just like her—like I could reach out beyond the borders of our yellow house. Like I could become anybody I wanted to be.

Sometimes when I looked up at her, she would tell me stories. Stories about the sparrow king, the black crows, and the storms and wars that were fought in the sky. The Good Fairy was a sure thing. And in our yellow house, things that were certain were the best—like the gravel rocks that led me down the driveway and back home from school each day, like the blackberry thicket, the pink tea roses, the marble collection in my room, and the five-hundred-year-old Chinese mud man sitting on his lacquer pedestal.

My mother, my father, and I hold onto things—we give them meaning in a world we cannot control. I wish I could sit next to my mom and just appreciate the beauty of each item in this room. Yet right now my mother's cherished objects feel untouchable to me. And though part of me feels an urgency to gather up as many pieces of her as I can before she leaves this world, I don't know what I'll do with these objects when she dies. Will they only remind me of her absence?

I remember that every year around Christmas, I waited and wondered when—and if—a present from her might arrive. It never did on Christmas Day or New Year's. By mid-January I always had given up hope. Then one February a giant package landed on our front porch.