Study in Perfect (22 page)

“Why are you such a Hitler?” she asks.

Laura and Rita want to drive to Morehead to camp, this time without us. Oh my. The eastern Kentucky woods in an unreliable, eighteen-year-old Toyota Tercel. The morning news influences our decision: A stripper in New Jersey pulled off the road when her car broke down. As she checked under the hood, she was blindsided by a passing vehicle. The driver kept going. So did the next three, even after they felt the jolt of her body under their wheels.

And the young man accepted at Yale who fell asleep at the wheel and careened over a cliff in Colorado. And teenagers and country roads without yellow lines. And the dark, and the dark beer they'll surely be drinking. And Laura last year on the spearmint lake at Disney World in her own little powerboat careening about like a demented waterbug. Rocks, pilings, piers. A ferry's boiling wake. Other unpredictable boats. And Laura traversing the waterfall, Laura with her nonchalant springy step, her inexplicable mixture of shyness and daring. Her parents holding their breath.

So: No. No, sorry, no. While your father and I can still say it. No.

My mother said no too, and I trotted downstairs to my bedroom with its strung-up Christmas ornament like a modern-day gazing ball. Then I cranked the little wheel on my window and slipped out to Rob and his van, his pot, our brand-new sex under maniacal cicadas in the dense Washington night.

When Laura comes home one night with a red mark like a
Luden's lozenge at the base of her neck, I feel justified. She was supposed to be sleeping at Danielle's house. Just who gave her the hickey? Danielle? Not that I have a leg to stand on, which is why my outrage is tinged with hilarity. The Chinese said it first: children are creditors collecting for the sins of our past lives.

Again, I have the dream, not uncommon among women. Back at college for the summer term. The Ohio heat is suffocating, grass brown and rigid as toothpicks. Students less than half my age move about without even a glance in my direction. I'm not interesting; I'm too old to be here. But I've forgotten to turn in my paper for some literature class, or take that last PE credit (here the details vary), so my degree is at risk. Where's my family, everything I've accomplished? I'm nothing and the countryside too has lost its landmarks, uniform beige surrounding the college like Beirut.

My husband and I agree that Laura needs more than her public-school-twenty-four-year-old-baseball-coach-disaster-ofan-English-teacher can provide. We sign her up for the Reynolds Young Writers Workshop at Denison University, where she will study with Erin McGraw, a real fiction writer. She receives a large scholarship and before we know it, we're in the airport gently pressing a reluctant sixteen-year-old toward the boarding gate. She won't let us kiss her good-bye, annoyed that we've forced her into this. But a quick glance before she disappears
into the plane reveals all—she's terrified. I let my husband drive home, too upset, convinced we should never have forced her into this. “Never have ideas about children,” said D. H. Lawrence. “Never have ideas
for
them.”

Three days pass and her first email finally arrives from Denison. Subject heading: “Blue Haired Freaks Can Suck My Bumper.”

Family! How are things la? Last evening Erin McGraw gave a reading from her unpublished new novel. We are the first ever to hear the opening chapter. She is an amazing writer and even with the typically short attention span that dominated this particular audience, every one of us listened with awe. My story is going to be workshopped on Sunday. I'm really struggling with this one. I need to concentrate on the plot now, as opposed to character but I made the mistake of writing it in the first person instead of third…. OH, and at 2:00 a.m. we TPed the TA lounge and called random room numbers unpleasantly waking anyone who'd gone to bed.

She was knee deep in the joy of an unmanufactured epiphany. On the phone she gushed: “I've learned more in one day than I did in four years at Manual. Dad, do you know David Foster Wallace or Lorrie Moore or Marilynne Robinson? They are my heroes.” Denison was just the sort of experience she needed to anchor the indefinite future. Now she had a road sign to set her sights on.

On July 30, 1980, during one of the hottest summers in D.C.
history, my mother died of cervical cancer. Most cases are curable; this one moved to her lymph nodes and beyond shortly after diagnosis. She was just fifty-one. Her legs and arms puffed with fluid; her belly bulged under the sheet as if she were six months pregnant. For over a month, my sisters and I had shared the task of keeping her comfortable. We said our goodbyes in caretaking—washing her hair, poaching the egg she would never eat, reading E. B. White's letters out loud, transcribing her farewell notes, which amounted to just a few words each in virtually all—”Please know how much I care about you. So very sorry to bring this into your life.” She declined medical treatment, hastened the end by refusing to sip ice water from the tumbler we set on her bedside table. After five days of this, her irises glittered an unnatural ice blue. Her intention was to make things easier for us, but it meant there was little opportunity for the many questions we had. And no time of course for future weddings, careers, accomplishments she could share. After she was gone, I kissed her cooling forehead. It seemed as conclusive a farewell as there could be.

Little did I know that in dreams and daylight visions, she would return again, a diminished version of herself. She dressed in a blue-and-white-striped garden apron, jeans, and clogs. A mother with a prolonged cold, a chronic disease, but reasonably content in her new life. She lived in Portugal, in Southern France, or lately, in Newfoundland. Once I could feel her hanging onto the roof of our Toyota as we sped up the coast to Connecticut.

And now she appears in Laura's long legs, splayed feet, and angled posture. My mother's chiseled Lutheran nose catches me by surprise when Laura cuts her bangs, or ties back her hair.
She hates to hear this stuff, doesn't want to be associated with a dead person she never knew.

Besides, there's a difference. Next summer Laura will circle back, but not as a ghost, not a diminished, but an enlarged being. This reassures and unsettles me, for isn't it the natural order? And, isn't it my place she's taking?

In the new and improved dorm room at Laura's college, complete with microwave oven, tiny refrigerator, and private bathroom (tuition has increased by 700 percent since I went to school), I'll be steeled for the big moment. I don't expect much—a ritual peck on the cheek, which she will instantly wipe off.

I'll drive the van home, park under the silver maple, if I'm lucky and there's a spot. The house will be much the same as before. There, the crumbs from her onion bagel and video games spread out on the floor. She never did learn to put them away. There, the OxiClean, Q-tips, spray of face powder across the sink. The ubiquitous collapsed pajamas. I'm not imagining things—she's gone, and the time for grieving is underway.

Or, perhaps I'll turn to her sister Bonnie, ready to inherit Laura's room, her car, her status as the grown-up one. Bonnie, with less than two years to go.

When my mother died, I began to smoke Kents, as she had during difficult times. It didn't last long. I was never a determined smoker.

I tried to pray with absolute attention. I enjoyed the Our Father for its symmetry: “on earth / as it is in heaven,” and “forgive us our trespasses / as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But my mind rambled. By “now and forever,” I was making a list for the hardware store, wondering which fertilizer would save the Japanese maple by our front porch. A more practical kind of consolation.

If only I knew her intimate habits and feelings. Then the space she left behind would not seem so stark.

I pictured her figure open to the elements, birds plucking bits of cotton, skin, hair, carrying them off to line their nests. Rain drawing her blood into the soil; tissue, tendon, and muscle battered
with air. Finally bone, returned to its chemical components and scattered like microscopic hail.

Perhaps a body is perfect not when it is complete but when there is no longer anything to take away.

I can't recall my mother singing. Not even a shout or robust coughing. Was she preoccupied by minute workings of blood through her temples, an ear filament flaring out, or cells turning mean, flipped over to their dark side like microscopic playing cards?

When I think of my mother's inner life, I see a Kleenex, its powdery edges twisted into sculpture. She gripped it while the party wound down.

After she died, I removed a crumpled one from her purse. Dry, but sudden too, as a splash in my hand.

Maybe heaven is textured like a river after it falls over rocks. Maybe it is nothing. Perhaps we are suppressed or superreal. Unaccompanied, or linked by our hair to everyone who has died.

My mother was given twelve baby-shaped beans to hold tightly as she went over, the grandchildren she would not meet in this life.

Burn her sweaters, party shoes, and skirts so she can wear them if she wants.