The Land of Mango Sunsets

  “But I have you, Miriam Elizabeth. I’m oh so very grateful for that.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Yes, I mean it with all my heart. I would hate to come to the end of my life all alone. And knowing you has made it so much richer.”

  The hour was growing late, but perhaps because my heart and my hormones had been given a stir, I wasn’t sleepy. It seemed to me that Mother wasn’t particularly fatigued either. We continued to rock as the thin clouds followed the moon across the sky. In a rare moment of unsolicited affection, I reached over and put my hand on top of hers. Even in the darkness, I noticed that her knuckles were enlarged. Her hand seemed awfully thin and felt cold to me. For the first time in years, I thought about the fact that in all likelihood she would precede me in death. I couldn’t bear the thought of it. There were too many issues to settle, and besides, we hadn’t done enough living together.

  “Are you listening to me?” she said.

  “I’m sorry. My mind wandered. What did I miss?”

  “I said, how was your date with Harrison’s friend? That Manny fellow. Was he nice?”

  “Oh, well, it wasn’t exactly a date. He belongs to a church out on Highway 17 North, and we brought a quail stew he made as part of a huge covered-dish dinner. Lots of people were there—probably a hundred? Anyway, we didn’t talk much because we were pretty busy serving plates. I worked in the buffet line with him.”

  “Harrison brought me some. It was delicious. But this man took you out to dinner and put you to work? I’ll tell you, this is some world!”

  “Oh no, no. It wasn’t like that. Manny’s a really nice man—a great cook, for sure. Did y’all go to the movies?”

  “No. Just for ice cream. And? Is there chemistry?”

  “Mother? You drink a little wine and everyone seems more attractive, don’t they?”

  “I imagine so. Are you going to see him again?”

  “He said he would call but who knows? Next visit, maybe.” I sighed and said, “Oh, me! I almost hate to go back to New York tomorrow.” I didn’t tell her or ask her if she knew whether Manny might or might not still be married. I saw no reason for extreme disclosure.

  “I thought you were staying another day…”

  “Couldn’t get the flight, but I’ll be back. This is so pleasant. Gosh. There’s something so bohemian about being outside at this hour, don’t you think?”

  “Bohemian? What on earth do you mean?”

  “Well, you know…the world around us is asleep and we’re out here stealing the night. I haven’t been up this late in years!”

  “You have a little courtyard, Miriam. Don’t you ever go outside at night to look at the moon? Wish on the stars?”

  “Are you kidding? Somebody might hop over the wall and get me!”

  Even in the blue light of deep night, I could see that Mother was incredulous. Her eyes were narrowed in such a way that she need not have said one word and she didn’t. Her face said, Why are you living like a prisoner, Miriam? A paranoid. But I didn’t feel like I was living like a prisoner. I was living the life, or the crumbs of the life, that Charles and I had built. Granted, the road I walked was potholed with sadness, but it was also rather satisfying at times. Besides, who didn’t have sadness? And fears?

  Then Mother dropped the bomb.

  “Tell me about my grandsons, Miss Mellie. What’s going on with them?”

  I cleared my throat and thought for a minute. “Well, you know how it is. Charlie’s busy learning to save mankind from disease. Dan and Nan have their lives with their little ones. God, I swear, California just seems like another country sometimes.”

  “Why don’t you go and visit them? I mean, it’s just a plane ride.”

  “What? Whose side are you on, Miss Josephine? Aren’t the children supposed to come to the mother? I mean, when my boys were little, did you ever spend Christmas in New York with us? Noooo. You insisted that we come to Charleston, remember?”

  “What are you talking about? I never insisted on anything of the kind.”

  “You would always say, ‘Oh, why don’t we have Christmas together in our home? I just want to see my family together here one more time…’ What was I supposed to say?”

  “I don’t know. But I was always glad you came. So was your father. It was so nice to have the delightful squeals of little boys on Christmas morning as they found their Santa. I used to make them mountains of silver-dollar pancakes. I can smell the warm maple syrup. Can’t you?”

  “Not quite. I mean, coming to Charleston was the kind of thing that couldn’t please everyone. Anyway, I think children should have their holidays in their own homes. If I had it to do over again—”

  “What possible difference would it make?”

  I tried to think of the right words before I answered her and decided to just put my opinion out there on the table for her to hack to death.

  “Look, Mother, this may sound a little crazy, but here it is. Maybe the more memories children have in their own home on holidays, the harder it is to break family ties later on, do you know what I mean?”

  “Do you mean to say that when they look back in later years they don’t see you as the matriarch? That they see me?”

  “Yes, making it that much easier to walk away from me. And to not care.”

  “Hogwash. Being home with us at Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter gave you a chance to be a child again. Did you think about that?”

  “But I never wanted to be a child, Mother. You know that. I hated being a child.”

  “Miriam?”

  “Yes?”

  “That is the most pathetic explanation I have ever heard for why your children aren’t as attentive as you would like them to be. Seriously. It’s pathetic. And if you think children should celebrate holidays in their own homes, why don’t you practice what you preach? Go to California.”

  “I’m not comfortable doing that.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’ve never asked me to come.”

  “Oh, mol-asses! Since when do you need an invitation to visit your own children?”

  “Well, Nan’s a little stiff.”

  “Stiff? Holy moly, Miriam Elizabeth Swanson, if you’re calling her stiff, she must be in rigor mortis!”

  “Oh, thanks. Summers here were good, though. Maybe I could coax them to come here for a visit. Probably not.” Was I really blaming Nan? And my mother?

  “I’m having none of this,” she said.

  She was provoked. I had caused it but it was time to have my say. Gently. Politely.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” I said, taking small steps into the quagmire.

  “Angry? I’m not angry in the least. Like my grandmother used to say, that’s all a lot of stuff and nonsense. Stuff and nonsense.”

  The Queen of Denial had spoken again. The princess sang the chorus.

  “Well, it just seems bizarre that the life you chose for me is the one you ultimately threw away.”

  “What do you mean chose for you? You chose your own life.”

  All my old anger began to rise like the rolling boil of custard left on a high flame.

  “Mother? You can’t possibly believe what you are saying.”

  “I most assuredly do!”

  I could feel my breath quickening and glanced at my wristwatch. The hour had passed to talk about these things—too late in the night and too late in the game to change them.

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m not. It’s almost morning.”

  “Miriam? I want an answer from you and I want it now. I have been listening to you whine and complain since the day Charles left, and I will not go to sleep having you believe I am the reason for your troubles. You, my dear daughter, are the cause of your own troubles. Not me.”

  That was a damn lie. In fact it was the most damnable lie to ever fall from her lips. But I wasn’t going to have an argument with my mother at that hour over something I couldn’
t change. She could say whatever she wanted to say. I knew the truth.

  “Well, everything is perspective; isn’t it, Mother?”

  “Yes, it is, and the way I see it, you could have changed your life a thousand times and you didn’t do it.”

  “Change my life? And do what? Go become a surgeon? A mathematician? A rocket scientist? Aren’t you the one who told me I would be a smart cookie to drop out of college to marry Charles?”

  “Let’s try to tell things as they were, all right? You were very anxious to marry Charles and be a grown woman with your own house. You couldn’t wait to think of yourself as an adult…”

  “Yes, but—”

  “When you were nothing of the sort. And by your own admission, you didn’t love to study. Your father said that forcing you to stay in college was just throwing good money after bad and—”

  “He said that? He actually used those words?”

  “Honey? He’s been dead for a long time. I don’t remember his exact words…”

  “Excuse me, Mother, but aren’t you the one who just said we should try to recount the past as it actually was?”

  “Yes, I did. Okay. I apologize. Are you looking for a fight?”

  “Absolutely not, but I think it’s important for you to realize certain facts.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, you had an enormous influence on me. I am your only child. You got married young? You pushed me into marrying young. You did tons of volunteer work to secure your family’s position? So did I when you pushed me. I joined every committee I could instead of going to NYU or something.”

  “I never told you not to finish your degree.”

  “Yeah, sure. You would have lectured me, saying that it took away from the time I should be spending with the boys and Charles. And you know what? I think you would have been jealous if I had gone on to get, God forbid, a degree in anything except home economics.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “No, it’s not. I followed in your footsteps as closely as I could, and what did I get? Two apathetic sons who won’t give me the right time of day. A husband who mortified me in front of every person I know. A gay man for a meaningful other and a tenant who’s a whore. And no career. Nothing to fall back on except my back.”

  “But Kevin is a dear man.”

  “Don’t be condescending, but yes, he is. Thank God for Kevin. But it’s not much, is it?”

  “I never had a career and I managed to stay happy, you know.”

  “But Daddy didn’t deceive you the way Charles did me. Daddy didn’t have two other children on the other side of Charleston as Charles did. And Daddy didn’t leave you nearly destitute as I was left.”

  “And it’s all my responsibility? My fault? Tell me how that’s so.”

  “Because I did every single thing that I thought you wanted me to do and it all blew up in my face.”

  “You need to get over it, Miriam. I never told you that your life had to be a Xerox copy of mine.”

  “Maybe not, but it was surely very strongly implied. Just as you’ve been implying for months now that my life in New York is meaningless. You see? Now that you’ve become a hippie, I should, too? Well, I’m not doing it, Mother.”

  “You know what, Miriam? Your anger is as misplaced now as my supposed bossiness may have been then. But I can’t believe you would even think such a thing…”

  You didn’t know her then, when I was a younger woman. I did. She wasn’t merely bossy; she was insistent. When I was on the threshold of marriage, she used every manipulative trick and maneuver she knew to mold me as her junior.

  Darling, you have to have linen fingertip towels for the guest powder room.

  Who’s going to iron them?

  Hire someone. Miriam, watch. Here’s how we make “Cinderella’s Slipper.” Isn’t this a wonderful napkin fold?

  Wonderful.

  And this one’s called the “Artichoke”! Perfect for a breadbasket!

  I had to take lessons in flower arranging, learn to make a pound cake and biscuits from scratch, to do needlepoint and crewelwork, and perhaps most important, how to write a sincere thank-you note. I didn’t believe she had malicious intent and all of these skills bore merit. But they were jammed down my throat like a religious fundamentalist doctrine and they gave me only a heightened sense of her, not of myself.

  What if I had strung Charles along, finished college and gone on to study international finance or electrical engineering? I think she was afraid to let me live my own life. I might have become something or someone she didn’t recognize and then what? Who would she be? Her tutorial took place while I was still malleable. I was always afraid that I wouldn’t do as well as she had or that I wouldn’t live up to her expectations. And she knew it.

  It was all deep in the past, and oddly, she seemed not to care any longer. Maybe it was her advancing years. Maybe she thought her project with me had failed. Or perhaps there was another reason. Maybe she had mellowed or forgotten and just plainly did not understand my resentment.

  That was all I could think about the next morning as the plane ascended high above the Lowcountry. I watched the blue-and-green shoreline and the curlicues of inlets and streams, tracing them with my fingertip against the window, missing them before they passed from my sight.

  Soon we were suspended over fields upon fields of the thick white mounds of endless clouds. Soon I would be back on Sixty-first Street talking to Harry, having a cocktail with Kevin, telling him about Manny, who had not called, and hearing about Liz. Over the next few days I would organize my address lists for the invitations committee, paste a smile on my face, and deal with Agnes Willis. I thought I knew what was waiting for me. I could not have been more wrong.

  Chapter Nine

  THE BIG SPILL

  Dear Mrs. Willis,

  Enclosed please find my address list for the spring gala invitations. I look forward to participating on the committee and to seeing you again.

  Cordially,

  Miriam Elizabeth Swanson

  The tone of my note to her was terse. So what? Let her figure that out, as if she cared anyway. At least I got it in the mail as soon as I got back to New York.

  Returning to New York from the Eden that is the Lowcountry of South Carolina was always a considerable shock to the nervous system. The arrival hallways of LaGuardia Airport were too small for the masses of humanity who pushed their way through them. Your bags did look like everyone else’s, and you were right to think that the woman who bumped against you in the taxi line might be an accomplice to the man who’s trying to pick your pocketbook.

  Knowing these things makes it a little easier to confidently maneuver the obstacle course that is life in the big city, but these are not the details you savor. So you put on your street face, hold your purse firmly under your arm, keep your eyes open, and try not to get in the taxi with the Stanland terrorist schizophrenic who’s off his meds. The reorientation continues in a cab with no shock absorbers over the bridges, down the FDR Drive, and somehow, the unseen but irresistible lure of living in Manhattan sinks its hook squarely in your heart. It always took me by surprise.

  Every minute of the day and night, lights are on, things are happening, people are dying, being born, being cured. Deals are being cut, careers are made and ruined, products are launched and discontinued, beauty is lauded in every sector, and people are falling in love. Tap shoes at Radio City and on Broadway are lifting the hearts of thousands of patrons with each performance. Over at Lincoln Center, ballet dancers are in flight, sopranos are hitting impossible notes, while the genius Rembrandt and Monet wait in their glory in the museums. There are rolling racks of clothes propelling across Thirty-eighth Street, dirty water dogs and pretzels are being consumed by the ton, and at night, in orchestra seats at Carnegie Hall, old men are sleeping off the wine they drank with dinner, completely missing the first act of a visiting symphony’s interpretation of the work of Mahler or Stravinsky.

 
By the time you pay your cab fare and open the front door of your house, you feel rich, blessed, and somehow a little smarter than the rest of the population because you own a piece of the rock. And strangely, the place—any place—you left behind seems less appealing than it was the day before when you sang its glories. The Big Apple was my adrenaline and I was thrilled to be back.

  In contrast to that, I had only been gone for a few days, but it felt like a week. I was relaxed and well rested, ready to take on Liz Harper and Agnes Willis. Harry was in his cage and got excited when he saw me come in.

  “Hello, sweetheart!” I said to him, and looked inside the refrigerator to see if there were a few grapes for him. “I missed you!”

  “Good morning!” he said.

  I opened his door, he climbed to the top of his cage, and I fed him the fruit. As he stood, his head twitched this way and that as though he wanted to be sure it was me. Then he wagged his red-feathered tail and stretched his wings like an archangel.

  “I’m glad to see you, too,” I said.

  “Charles is a horse’s ass.”

  “You know it, bubba.”

  The mail from the past few days was neatly stacked on my kitchen counter and my message light was blinking, which I ignored. It was only three-thirty in the afternoon and already getting dark. I switched on every full-spectrum light in the house as I walked to my bedroom rolling my luggage, gearing myself up for the unpleasant task of unpacking. I was returning lighter, since I had left my sneakers under Mother’s house and my flannel-lined baggy jeans in a heap on the floor of the closet along with my old cardigan.

  As I put away my toilet articles, I caught a glance of myself in the mirror. My hair was unkempt and my face was bare. I started to laugh, knowing this wild-girl look would never get any traction in the fully coiffed world to which I had returned.

  After an application of cosmetic war paint and a quick toss of dirty clothes into the washer, I decided to go to the grocery store. I rebundled to face the elements, putting on my camel-colored coat with a wide brown leather belt. I stuffed my crazy hair in my favorite crocheted hat, trimmed with dyed brown fox, and wrapped my neck with a man’s brown cashmere scarf that someone had left at my house. I put my cell and bank card in my pocket with my keys and left the house.