Strange Cowboy (27 page)

A dog, is it?

A dog?

“Hope,” my mother said. “Oh, we had lots of Hopes. Except of course the only animal
we called by Hope, it was a rooster.”

—Mother revives—a party must be thrown—you don’t need a barn to hang your star—did
I teach you how to bow?—I am dead—making herself over—the via Dolorosa—a chair that
loves me—something younger than she ever was—the Roman dentist—her unlivable desires—Mama
cracked—I move us to Golconda—made to wing one—I know this story—we arrive at the
butcher’s—browbeat them with blood—Hopey is a brave, good dog—home at last—no light,
no wife—I am way past time—gone for sausage—name the change—a different kind of quiet—and
then—we took that bath together—isolating theatres of self—I come from Mama’s scar—shameless
guilts and glancing ardors—but a party!—some brighter, brand new hours—our last good
looks—tonight, all good guesses will be true—the son may speak—I love you—am I funny?—sleep
fast and remember—

Mother stuck. We could not finally lose her. She revived. A birthday, after all. A
son, a grandson, two boys, once and twice descended from her blood were born, and
here we were, her proof, she lived, she had forgotten, said that certainly, of course,
a party must be thrown, balloons must be arranged, cakes frosted, tables set, stars
hung, planets, comets, moons; the blessed Virgin and her holy son, according to my
mother, must not go unremembered through the celebration of our seasons. Lincoln and
Lincoln.
Joseph, she said, Mary, Jesus. We are born. Something must be meant, our being born
so near to Him; something must be made through which a guest might easily perceive
how “each and every one of us,” in His creation, is illumined as the blessed vessel
of His holy meaning. That means you, and you, and me. We are needed, placed, beholden
and responsible. No accidents. No soul of us unsparked. “Granted,” said my mother,
“some sparks big, some little,” but from the big the little could be made a little
bigger; from the vision of our savior bearing forth His cross, “your Grace Dendaris
of the world can see a point to what they’re doing.” Yes, naturally, my mother said,
a person needs a scene to see what he is meant for looks like, though to stage a scene,
she said, you do not need a trough. Nor do you need a beam from which to hang your
star, nor a hank of baling wire to make one. Think tub, Mother says, think sink, think
screwhooks in the ceiling. According to my mother, you can pick a mess of paper flowers
up at Bi Rite. You can find a slew of party favors at the Rexall. You may boil weenies,
dye punch, plug a record on the jukebox.

“Know this,” Mother says, “Grace Dendari wants to dance.”

If she isn’t dead, my mother says, then Grace is surely lonely, older, more the same,
and yes, again, of course, very much—what did I think?—she wants to dance. According
to my mother, Grace has seen her weight fall from her chest, and through her hips,
and past her thighs and knees to gather at her ankles, and she has known that all
her life her hands were meant for kneading dough, and that her feet were meant for
dancing. Trouble is that these days she can’t lift them. Likely never could. Some
can’t. Though most remember that they could, can, and did, though they did not. In
the early a.m. hours, as my mother sees her, Grace Dendari stands before the full-length
mirror, plucks the hem up from her baker’s
apron and recalls a girl who danced, tells herself, “I danced,” and sees another,
slimmer leg, a lighter foot than this reflection of a foot she feels is nailed down
to the carpet. Oh, it moves, this foot, it isn’t really nailed to any carpet, but
it isn’t light, it drags, it clumps, you could not call it dancing. Her shoe is wrong,
her hosiery, there is a fatness at her kneecaps. She holds her hands out to herself,
acceptingly, shapes a space out with her arms as if she has embraced a partner. Drag
and clump, clump and stagger. Is this elegant? What should she say? She has been to
parties. She reads the magazines. She wants to say she wished she lived where people
ate more scones than doughnuts. She wants not to feel so many stories left to her
are prefaced by
In my day...
She is short of breath, she cannot breathe. Help her, says my mother, invite her,
show her how to dance a simple step, ask her where she’s got her hair done, tell her
she is just as I remember.

“And when her song has played out, and you’re finished,” says my mother, “don’t forget
to bow.” Says my mother, “Did I teach you?”

My mother picks her brush up, touches it against her hair, smoothes her palms against
the places she has touched without her palms quite touching. She was waiting, I think,
for an answer, traction, some response of mine to help inspire and direct her. She
had begun, I think, must have felt herself to be at a beginning, and yet how many
times must she have heard herself? How often, every day, had she passed over Grace?
How many times must she have picked her brush up, brushed, smoothed, begun to touch
her hair, and known enough to not quite touch it?

“I’m all burned up,” my mother says. “They say with some it never happens, but I never
met the person yet who takes her dose that doesn’t get her hair fried.”

“They gave us ham,” my mother says.

She says, “Vernon says these spots will run together one day, and I’ll look like I
have got a tan.”

You saw her looking to us for her tone, I think, a sense of audience, somebody, somehow
she must play for. Should she be angry with us? With herself and her condition? Bewildered,
was she? Was she touched? What did we two think? Would we like for her to shame us
for our youth, our health, our beauty? She could empathize, she seemed to say, she
knew how the boy must feel, she could, if he liked, invent a party which would fall
out from the marrow of his feeling. Something new to her, an old story, remade for
the boy, just let her know, just give her something she might go on. She was beginning,
did we see her, had we heard, she knew she was a bore, she must repeat herself “just
something awful.”

She says, “You get the wearies, hearing so much ping-pong.”

She twists a lipstick from a little silver cylinder.

“I am invited,” she says, “aren’t I?”

She says, “He died of water.”

And, “I have got a wind-resistant sportsuit.”

She tells us we must turn our backs, wants us please to step out in the hall, if we
don’t mind, make ourselves scarce, close our eyes, at least, “A lady needs a little
privacy.” Then she turns her sleeve up, shows us where they could not find her vein.
My mother asks us would we like to see her ankle, or her knee, asks us would we like
to see where they have cut the rib out.

“I’m all bruise,” my mother says. “I don’t dare wear short sleeves out in public.
I bump up against a doorjamb and my skin breaks. Say I’m visiting with folks, well,
then I am last of us to know that I am bleeding.”

Says my mother, “Died of water. We are made of water.”

She says, “Scares me how much nothing hurts.”

My mother asks me please to fetch a blouse for her, wants for me to fix the hook on
her brassiere.

“Don’t look,” she says, says, “Do you see a lump there, just below my neck, to the
one side of my backbone?”

Me, the son, my mother’s son, I do not look; I do as I am told to do, in part, as
I believe my doing will best suit me. Me, I poked around my mother’s drawers and shelves,
looking there, and not, and through the jars of pills and syrups, the wrinkled tubes
of creams and jellies, I saw Hope, saw burlap and Visqueen, the butcher’s bones, my
son at play with Hope and happy.

By and by, because I wanted her to know we listened, that I, at least, had heard her,
I said, “Mama. Mama, nobody believes these days too much in Jesus.” I said, “I think
Grace is dead.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said my mother. “Folks believe a whole lot more than they let on,
and Grace is only all about who’s living.”

My mother rubbed a salve into the raw spots on her wrists. She sifted through her
jewelry box, held up gold and green and blue and cast-and-chiseled silver things against
her throat and earlobes, judging for effect. We would not help her. How does she look,
she wanted to know. How about this, she seemed to say, too gaudy, too formal, do you
think, or this necklace with this blouse, too loud? But we did not help, we could
not say. We were all hands and pockets, slouched, red-faced and foot-focused, dumb.
My mother turned back to her mirror, dismissing us, I think, as men. She chose according
to herself. She had begun, she seemed to say, I will not go back, I will make my own
way newly. We watched how she applied her base, what she chose to highlight, saw her
hang herself with jewels. She stood. She began again, with a difference. Lily Fong’s,
my mother said, the renderer’s, a vet; what
on earth, my mother wondered, did I believe she ought to know about Humane Societies?
Was this visit really all about a dog then? Was I to let the boy believe a dog meant
more than people? More than family, Mother said, more than generations, our histories
preserved in blood?

“Bow,” she says. “Let’s see if you remember anything at all I’ve taught you.”

My mother lifts her chin at me.

She is smaller than a girl.

She says, “I thought so.”

To the boy, my mother says, “And you, who teaches you your catechism?” She said, “Gracey
is the one she makes your doughnuts.”

She took his fingers in her hand and laid them on her wrist and asked him what he
felt there. You could see her coming into focus. I think I understood that she would
not be lost, not by us, not this night; this night, she was saying, we would not mistake
her.

“That’s me,” she told the boy. “That’s you. That’s the heartbeat you can feel that
keeps us living. That’s blood. On earth, when you’re alive on earth, your soul lives
in your blood, and that heartbeat is your soultime. You’ve got more beats left to
you than I do. You’ve got a lot more soultime, understand, all your life on earth
for keeping quiet. I could die tonight, you know, and you’ll be sorry someday that
you didn’t talk to me because you lost a doggy. Do you know what I want, I want to
hear you say what you would like to see there at your birthday. Don’t you worry,”
said my mother. “You take care of people, and your dogs will follow. I’ll tell you
what, how’d you like to hear about the party I once gave your
daddy—did he tell you?—when he was turning five, the shindig I put on to celebrate
his birthday?”

Well, to hear her tell it, you would have thought it was another mother’s party. To
see her, you would not have guessed she was a woman who had dressed away her pretty
days in corduroys and sweatshirts. You would have seen her as she might have seen
herself, the wearer of a mateless earring, that silver hoop, an arresting woman, “carelessly
luxuriant,” a mother who has saved herself against her motherhood, an idea of her
motherhood not hers, no, not hers—she, my mother, she was fashioned from herself,
ahead of her time, an idea any girl once might have had of Mother and forgotten. She
was free to go. You could believe she went. You could believe her son once sneaked
into her bed when she had risen just to smell her. You understood his want to rub
her underthings against his cheek and then to one day wear them. She had hips, breasts.
When they looked, the son, the father, men who had a lover’s eye for women, they could
not have said with any certainty that hers was the lap through which a child had passed,
swelling and distending, cleaving her and sucking, gnawing and scratching, needing
her and crying through her sleep for her and needing her and needing.

My mother seemed to me then to be growing. In that room, under that light, the more
she spoke, the more I saw her bones fill. You looked at her when we walked in and
would have said her bones were hollow, more shell than bone—her skin, her flesh more
of a yellow moss, I would have said, a drapery of antfood, maybe, guppystuff. She
was dying. This year, she said, this was it. She dreamed it. She had seen it many
times; she was a little girl, she wore saddle shoes, flowers fell her way, oceans
called, she watched a porter wheel her trunk across the gangway, she was dead. Ants,
tiny
fishes, she saw, worms. She said so on the telephone, I am dying, she said, a priest
last night massaged my feet, an angel offered me a biscuit, I am dead. And then you
walked into her room and saw her eyes float and her hands shake and you heard her
say my name and you believed her. Yet here I heard her voice succeed itself, uninterrupted,
and I saw her bones somehow becoming bones, thicker seeming, denser, marrowed, an
able carriage for the skin I saw was skin, the flesh I saw was flesh, nothing to be
fed upon, nothing static, not to rot, my mother’s body able to advance itself untaxed
from one place in the room and to another, powdering itself, applying to itself a
stripe of brick-red lipstick, rouge, mascara, a modest drop or two behind the ears
and knees and ankles of perfume.
Shindig,
she was saying, and
soiree,
and her bones filled out, and she commanded them, her bones, her body, my mother
was in charge,
getting herself up,
she said,
making herself over.

This was the lie. The lift. When she smoothed her hair again, brushed and smoothed
and sprayed her hair, rinsed her mouth, pulled her cuffs down past her wrists and
straightened up the collar of her wind-resistant sportsuit, I do not think she saw
herself a fright. Grace Dendari, Amelia Dangberg, dear love Vernon, Owen, Papa, my
son, my wife, me, myself—she left us all a long way back behind her, way down underneath.
She was flying now. Untracked. Unbound. She had begun. In her eyes I thought I saw
the far blue I recall we were to see in Rome of Michelangelo, ceilingless, the colorway
through which she passed from home and to the soul of her religion, from the poplars
to the frescoes, from the calves to the cats, from the squeeze-chute to the coliseum,
my mother passing peacefully, swathed, in blue, uncorruptively ascendant.