Strange Cowboy (28 page)

So what was Mother on? What drug? What dose, I asked myself, and how long would it
last? Her euphoria, what antidote might interrupt it?

She was saying
Rome.
To the boy. She had been there. “Oh, many times,” she said, “since I was just a little
girl, just your age, by train, in those days, to New York, and then by boat,” the
same lie I had heard her lying all my life, yet true, credible, at least, to the boy,
apparently, and through the boy, to me—true, and seeming truer still the farther she
would stray from what could be the truth, the higher you could see her rising to the
place where her regrets appeared to be forgotten, and fear was not foreseen, and every
want she knew was answered
yes
so long as she continued in her story.

“Your grandad,” she was saying, “he didn’t come along. But he didn’t stop us either.
He took us to the airport, and he kept the postcards on his dresser, and I remember
when he met us coming back he’d brought me flowers.”

She infected us. Mother, her talent, a woman’s talent, any aging bearer in the world
of children must possess it, this talent to infect; me, at least, I felt her marrow
in my marrow; I could not recover to myself a worry over where a story was begun,
what was true and not and where a truth was softened up, omitted and extended. You
compose yourself for Father. You remain composed for Grace. You may argue. You may
pity. Yet Mother, any worn out, dying matron on the bus bench, well, I did not want
to sit by her; I did not want to touch the peaches she was squeezing in the market;
I did not want to know she bathed; I did not want to hear that she had kissed a man
once with that mouth; I did not want to hear another word about another dream another
mother had of dying.

Yet Mother wasn’t dying, as we watched her, Mother lived. Cowardice, a meanness, my
ingratitude—whatever I would feel come weighing I could feel my mother was relieving.
My skin itched. My brain slipped. A kid, I think, some kid was shooting slingshots
in my chest; behind my eyes some boy was sleeping with his feet up to his ankles in
the freshet; though I could not have said so at the time, I am pretty sure a man in
me was fingering around for anything he could recall had made him happy. Certainly,
I felt high enough and elsewhere, there with Mother; I was rising on the swimmy rapture
of my wants; I saw them swim as if in silted water, never coming clear enough to say
beyond what each want might have felt like—this want calm, this want light, these
wants hopeless, simple, smiling, fearsome. I could not say Rome. I could not name
a saint. I saw no infant suckled from the bosom of a virgin mother, no galleries of
weeping Christians gathered at the foot of any savior’s cross. I had no color. I had
no certain way of being taken. I was calm, hopeful, happy, scared, according to my
wants.

I think really I was having fun. I think that I was glad then to be given over. This
was play, I must have felt, Mother’s game, infectious, I must have wondered what her
rules were, how a son might best compete, what was fair or not and were there handicaps
and was I handicapped or Mother? I know that I was dizzied, hyper-and desensitized,
felt as if my veins had been injected by my mother with a heavy dose of an anesthetizing
stimulant. I remember that the stain I saw on the seat of Mother’s wingback would
not keep itself a stain. It dissolved, seemed to me to lose itself, its shape, as
a stain, seemed to blur into the color and the pattern of the fabric while I watched
it. It was unexceptional, not a flaw, I understood, this stain was
meant to be there.
The tear in my mother’s bedspread,
the patch she stitched to mend the tear, these, too, were meant to be there. They
disappeared, being there. Too soon, I could not make out that antiseptic odor I could
typically make out, nor the faintly acrid urine stink, nor the stink of bad gums,
open sores and loneliness a guest made out beneath the antiseptic, nor the pots of
potpourri my mother spread about her room to scent the whole mess over. Here, then
gone. As if my senses meant to tell my brain,
So, what the hell, this place is just like any other place, a place is only what you
make it.

My mother, I believe, was saying something about a broken heel, and cobblestone, and
cars competing six abreast—
charioteers,
I think she said,
like gladiators,
she was saying,
like they were driving chariots, from ancient days, right there on the via Dolorosa,
right there in their little cars and modern suits
!—and it occurred to me I could not hear the quiet there, in her room, the sound through
her wall of her neighbor’s television—more bad news, an oil spill and a car-bomb and
a scandal in the White House, the belated isolation of those pathogens responsible
for her neuralgia, or his phlebitis, for their sciatica, glaucoma, carcinoma, their
stout, degenerative hearts.
Ain’t that the way,
I heard, and,
Just when you are drowning in the poop, they offer you a carrot.
Typically. Typically, my mother did not speak, neither of us spoke, not in the presence
of the other, we were quiet, saving up for phonetime, and through the quiet I could
hear the news, yes, and the commentary on the news, and the gameshows and the soaps—the
lights and bells, septuagenarian recipients of speedboats, gas grills, ATV’s and Caribbean
Cruises, citizens you saw with one foot in the Anchorage and one foot in the den,
where they, too, were channeled on to Days of Our Lives, All My Children and Another
World, falling dozey through another week of vows, betrayals, and amnesiacs, the resurrections
from the dead and the arrival, on a Friday episode, of Duke, the delinquent son the
honest Doctor Bob is shocked to learn—on the eve of celebrating two-and-one-half decades
of connubial fidelity to Kim, one-quarter of a century to Kim, to Kim, to Kim—is his.
I thought that I could hear my mother’s neighbors staying tuned till Monday. Typically,
I thought that I could hear the lids come off of jars, the labored twistings of the
crippled fingers, the sparing application—not too much, not too much, you don’t really
need
it, remember The War, remember The Depression—the
dabbing on,
then, of the liniments to stiffened, swollen joints; I thought I heard them thinking,
an old gal practicing the speech she had rehearsed for when she picked the phone up,
redialed Everald Wilson, Grievance Communications Unit, this old gal praying for the
strength to not conclude herself politely; this old man praying for the strength to
say a word or two at this week’s funeral; these old boys and girls, I could be pretty
sure I heard them praying not to wet the bed, heard them trying to remember to affix
the bridgework for the grandkids, heard them calculating pocket change, recalling
eight-year droughts, one-night stands, regretting choices from the menu on a rare
night with the sons and daughters out to dinner, pondering what might be said, in
the common room, later in the evening, during TV Time Discussion Group, about the
state of a world in which the script demands a sinning, two-faced Doctor Bob. Typically.
I heard, and figured what I heard was health, the heated, busy, decomposing mulch
thrown thickly over what it
meant to be here. Doesn’t mean I’m dying. Doesn’t mean I haven’t got another place
to go. Doesn’t mean I haven’t got a son who loves me. You get old. You age. You do
this. Play ping-pong. Eat popcorn. Goof around. Is your life really any different?

My mother spoke, uninterrupted, and I think I lost my way with her, the sound of her
voice against that little voice I used to raise against the quiet, my
No,
my answer to the question
It’s not this way where you live
? She came over me, winningly, I wasn’t ready to play, could not compete, not yet,
I had been counting on a lull here, a reprieve. No, I should have said, not me, it
isn’t mine, not my game, your life, I have a child, a wife, a job, a lawn to mow,
a walk to clear, a fence to mend and a roof to patch, a garden I will help to weed
come springtime and a chair that loves me.

I said, “Mother,” and she offered me her elbow. I said, “Please,” and she was saying,
“Shall we?”

I think I understood then that the only end of Mother’s game here was desire, who
could want the hardest, who could want the most, a simple game, child’s play, an instinct,
untaught, the survivor’s code for an uncivil, civil kingdom:
Make them want what you want and you win.

So, Rome. Well, why not an elephant to celebrate my birthday? Why not a clown, the
magician who had sawed a woman half in two because I always liked a circus? A dancing
bear, she told the boy, a juggler, a man who swallowed fire, a circus, a real-live
Russian outfit, and food as catered by the French, in favor of Amelia Dangberg’s Irish.
She was escorting us, conducting. We moved slowly out the yellow hall, my mother’s
arm hooked through my elbow, my mother drawing pictures with her free hand of the
big top and the catacombs she meant for us to see there.

She told the boy, “I had a toothache once in Rome, and I was scared because a dentist’s
place back there is not what we know here. There was cracked paint in that place,
and that nurse, I tell
you she was rinsing off those tools in water you could see was only luke.”

We should have kissed her. We should have told her we were happy to have stopped off
with the No. 7, appreciated her performance, promised her to do our best to honor
her performance while confessing her performances, in memory and in fact, were likely
to survive the lives of several Dahls without an urgent rival. I might have told my
mother,
Sit down, now, Mother, you are tired, it’s late for lipstick, it’s time I get back
to my own chair.

My mother said, “And then, late on in the evening, your great grandad, my daddy, your
daddy’s grandpa Al—he was a little tipsy, and a prankster like you never saw—he took
and led that elephant from straight out of the barn, straight out through the snow
for folks to ride him.”

My mother walked us from her room, down the hall and through the spryer ancients gaggled
in the lobby, my mother lifting up her voice to call us back to when it came up her
turn to ascend the elephant, insisting on an image of herself a little difficult,
outside of cinema, to feature. She, a woman, all in white, as she recalled, “riding
all of Africa,” a long-toothed trumpeter my mother said the Russians borrowed via
hush-hush Roman brokers from the Pope.

“You could hear the music from the barn,” she said, “and I had the light on me, and
I could feel the people down below me, looking up.”

She waved. Maybe she was blowing kisses. I did not prevent her, my son did not prevent
her, nor the ancients. A person might have wondered where she could be going. Dressed
as she was dressed, made up, irrespectful of the season, where could we be
taking her; this time of night, her age, our town, where was there to go?

“Golconda,” said my mother, as if she had been asked, as if she meant to punish with
her answer, “
Pancake Summit
.”

So Mother stuck, intuitively, I thought, physically; she stuck to us, she
acted.
A good grip, I was thinking, for an old gal, a forceful mind, pungently directed.
Something younger than she ever was was up in her, pushed us through the door and
asked us please to turn our faces up to catch the falling flakes. Such beauties, she
was saying, every one of them unique. She did not tire of her inventions. She did
not stray. I ought to have quit with her, interrupted her, insisted, for the boy’s
sake, on the facts. Yet I must have hoped that she would come to them, the facts,
her nuts-and-boltsy self. She was old. Soon, surely, she must run up on a damaging
confusion. I drove us, and I watched her for the moment she must stop herself to look
at me, and at the boy there in the back seat with the dog, my mother asking of herself
how much our being there required her to take back from this latest story she was
telling of her life and its unlivable desires. Yet my mother knew her story well enough,
spoke as if she had lived what she said she had lived, as if she were remembering
and not inventing, as if she all along had known we could have lived the life she
was describing, all of us together, and been larger having lived it. She could accommodate.
She could include. She was never wholly absent to the present. I was there, the boy
was there. My father. She was infectious, nothing too far-fetched, you saw through
Mother that the life you came to was the life you left behind, the vital riot lifting
through your bones of scenes in loves you had and had not chosen. People went to Rome.
Amelia Dangberg went to Rome. My mother could have gone to Rome. It would have been
so easy. I could have walked with her,
been handsome on her hand, she might have been so pretty. Sure, too, there might have
been a place for us to sit, a place she told my son where she once sat, outside of
Rome, not far, “at the gates of Rome,” she said, on the counsel of her Roman dentist.

“He failed me,” said my mother, “or I failed him. All I know is that he rapped my
tooth here with his poker, and I hollered, and I guess he was surprised because he
jumped and let that poker fly smack at the ceiling! Well, the paint’s coming down
and I am up from his chair and all but holding out the cross around my neck to keep
him off from me in case it’s harm he’s shouting my way in Italian. He wasn’t happy
one iota. You wouldn’t say that this man here would be the same man who directs me
to the part of Rome where God and Jesus and the major saints all took vacation from
St. Peter’s. But he sent me there, with a map and a name, prescribed a jar of pills
I learned were working best when I would swallow them with good old U.S. bourbon.
It was called a
villa,
this place, an old man and his lady seeing to it. The man of the two, when I asked
him why he’d got there, he just shrugs his shoulders and he opens up his palms to
point me down the hill as like to say he’d got there for the reasons anybody got there—by
his eyes, he’s saying, thumping on his chest, and by his heart. I tell you, that first
day, those folks took my bags and showed me to a stone bench in a garden where you
could not think exactly what to call its colors. Reds and pinks that weren’t exactly
red or pink, purples not exactly purple, whites you saw that some were greenish, some
whites orange and others yellow. All different sizes and shapes, and packed in tight
together, so if you looked and looked again you kept on seeing more than what you’d
seen the first look. A wee, wee tiny thing, hiding close out to the ground, or a vine,
I can recall, that it just was sprouting out in trumpets. So
many leaves. Furry looking ones, and spikey, some leaves wide and waxy, then a leaf
it looked like velvet. Blooms as wide as any face you kissed when you were just a
baby. Such perfume. And such a reach! I took my shoes off and I practiced looking
far and near and far and then the notion came to me that these same gardens must be
growing all the way down there to Rome. Maybe this was bourbon talking to me, or those
pills, or maybe my poor tooth, but I saw this garden, you know, growing down to Rome,
same colors, same shapes, same perfume, even where the day before I’d seen the cafes
and the Pantheon, those men in suits I told you I was seeing on the sidewalk. I couldn’t
see these flowers finished. I saw them way back home, even, way out in the desert.
That garden there, fountain sounds, and garden birds, water songs and paths you walked
through statue heads of men and women you supposed were gods and saints and martyrs—I
saw them in the hay fields and the meadows and the sage and in the driest, whitest
dust that blows across our playa. I was not afraid to die. Right then, I would not
have said that it was possible to die. I don’t know what to call what I was doing.
I watched the fireflies. I listened to the frogs and crickets. I wore a dress. My
knees were smooth. I sat there till the bugs bit. They called it Kosmos, the place,
the old man and his lady, and do you know that if you look it up in Greek, that’s
beauty.”