All We Know of Love

  She doesn’t know me, but she figures it out in a matter of seconds, infinitesimal, lingering, endless nanoseconds.

  “Natalie?” she says.

  I always thought, when I saw my mother, I would look into her face and somehow become healed, sort of in the way those evangelical ministers do on television. Pressing their hands onto the forehead of some blind girl or crippled boy, thrusting them forward almost violently until they collapse, relinquish their will. And suddenly, they can see or walk or hear or speak; all blemishes vanish. All wounds healed.

  But it isn’t like that at all.

  This is real life.

  The cars are still driving by, at a slow but steady rate, in the street directly behind me. The earth is still revolving around the sun, at a speed so great, almost sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, that it cannot even be felt. Seven blackbirds sitting on a wire that stretches from the corner of one building to the corner of another suddenly fly away, all at the same time, as if they’ve spoken together. And just then, from the apartment next door, from one of the upstairs windows, a man in a white wife-beater leans on the sill and blows the smoke of his cigarette out into the world.

  All this is real.

  When I don’t answer my mother, because I can’t, her face crumbles into a thousand pieces. I watch it happen, but there isn’t anything I can do about it. I should have known.

  “Natalie,” she says again. This time softer. It isn’t a question anymore. It is a dirge.

  She is smaller than I remember, and her hair cut short and blunt. For a moment I remember her wearing an elastic headband to keep her long hair off her face while she cooked dinner or did the dishes or gave me a bath. But I don’t remember the streaks of gray.

  Her eyes are taking me in, and they seem to redden with an immense pressure behind them. But she doesn’t cry this time. Instead, she takes a deep breath. “Do you want to come inside?”

  This is an interesting question. I am no longer narrating my own story and imagining Adam listening to me tell it. Now I have to take responsibility for the fact that I am here. I have set an event into motion, and I have to follow it through.

  “OK,” I say.

  She hesitates, as if she is unsure whether to turn her back and have me follow or step aside and usher me in. I don’t move one way or another. One way or another, and yet I can still let life move me along. I take my first step toward her.

  I can still sail as the wind directs, even if it is I who has built the boat and set it out at sea.

  Her apartment is on the ground floor. When I rang her bell, I could see her door open inside the foyer of her building. It opened just as far as the chain lock would allow. I presumed that whoever was inside that apartment could see their visitor through the glass and decide whether to ring them in or not. I watched the door close and then immediately open all the way.

  It was my mother who came to the door to let me in.

  Now I am following her inside. She is wearing a sweat suit, the kind where the top and bottom match. Gray satin with two black stripes down the legs, like rappers wear. Or old Florida ladies walking the mall. And apparently, my mom.

  I wonder for a moment, Did she used to be fashionable? Didn’t she once pay attention to what she wore, her hair? Her toenails? I don’t remember.

  “Are you alone?” she asks me. She looks back toward the glass doors. Is she expecting someone else? My father?

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I am oddly blank. Oddly absent from inhabiting the inside of my own body. I am standing in my mother’s apartment, four years since the last time I saw her, and I feel absolutely nothing. All I can do is look around, take it in.

  The floor is covered with a large durrie rug, frayed at the edges. There is a beige-colored corduroy couch against the wall, with one of those daisy-yellow and green crocheted blankets crumpled on one end. There is a low coffee table in front of the couch. Maybe she had been just sitting there. A book is lying facedown on the table, beside it a mug and a balled-up tissue.

  Suddenly I have this weird memory. Of tissues. My mother always had a tissue in her pocket. Often they’d make their way out and be lying around our house, on the kitchen counter, in the key dish, next to the bathroom sink.

  “Dana, do you have to?” my dad would say. “It’s really disgusting. Can’t you just throw it away after you use it?”

  But she never would. Not if she could get three or four or five more nose blows out of it. I never minded, though. She always had one stuffed into the sleeve of her sweater, just in case she needed it. Sometimes they’d fall out and land on the floor. I knew my mother was around when I saw them, a Hansel and Gretel trail I couldn’t follow.

  Here I am.

  I am on a mission, aren’t I? I have a job to do. I wonder if my heart is beating so loud she can hear it. Is it beating at all?

  “Can I get you anything to eat or drink?” she asks. Then she laughs, a kind of forced, sad laugh. “Not that I have much to offer. I mean, I didn’t know . . . I never have too much.”

  “No, thanks,” I say. “I’m not going to stay. I just came to . . .”

  I am not ready to finish that sentence. I came here to ask you something, Mom. I want to know what you were going to say.

  About love.

  But what I really want to know is why you left me. How could you do that? How could a mother do that to her child? Was I that unlovable?

  “You’re not?” she says. “Of course . . . why? I mean, what? Will you sit down a minute?”

  There is an air conditioner in the window cranking away. Sheer curtains hang on either side and move in and out, like they are waving to me. I sit down in an upholstered chair. My mother sits on the couch.

  It is her face. The same face. If I look too long, my heart will break.

  Above the couch is a painting, some kind of abstract oil painting, but it is not framed.

  “I just came to ask you something.” I say this like I still believe it, like I ever did. The colors of the painting swirl of their own volition.

  “You did? How did you get here?” She is holding her own hands, and I remember her fingers. Her skinny bones, the freckles of her skin. Small hands, not like mine.

  “Bus.”

  “Does your father know?”

  I shake my head.

  Her eyes fill up with tears as the swirling colors in the unframed painting turn faster and faster. The sienna and fire red blending with, yet remaining separate from, the midnight blue and raging violet.

  “You really don’t want me to cry, do you?” she asks. She is looking right at me.

  “No.”

  “Then I won’t,” she promises. “I’ve been working on that.”

  The last time my mother practiced her leaving on me, she was gone for two whole days. It wasn’t until around eight the first night that my dad noticed she was gone. He had come home from work late, as usual.

  He said hello to me while I sat doing my homework in front of the TV. He was holding the New York Times tucked under his arm, his briefcase in one hand and his car keys in the other. I knew he was already annoyed. The paper had been sitting at the bottom of the driveway since early that morning, and it had drizzled all day long.

  I remember thinking, I should have brought it in when I got home from school, but usually my mom did that. I had just started sixth grade. It was about a week before she walked out on us for good.

  That afternoon when I got off the bus, something compelled me to walk around the house. I don’t know why, since I had come home to an empty house before. I had my own key on a long rope, tied inside my backpack just in case, and it had happened at least three or four times. Sometimes my mother was late coming home from shopping or had an appointment. But I was never alone for more than an hour.

  The house was spotless. All the beds in the house were made, even mine, which I was sure I had left in a messy heap that morning. The laundry was done, but not put away. It sat at the bottom of the stairs, fol
ded and tucked, like a new baby in a basket.

  There wasn’t a spoon in the sink. Not a crumb or a water ring on the counter. The dish rack was emptied.

  In the living room the pillows were fluffed. The throw blankets set perfectly over the ends of the couch. The toothbrushes in the bathroom were all standing in their holders. The sink wiped clean of any toothpaste. The toilet paper rolls were new.

  All this I noticed when I got home.

  And then it all began to come together. A week earlier, my mother had hired this guy with his flatbed to come to our house and load up everything she considered garbage. She had gone through my whole closet, draining it of all my clothes that didn’t fit, too old, too stained. She gave away all my old baby books, paperbacks, jigsaw puzzles we had done once and were never going to struggle through again.

  Spring cleaning, she called it, even though it was fall. It was early September.

  Then I notice a casserole in the oven. Not cooked, thawing. Ready to be heated. And I knew she was not coming home. And it hardly surprised me.

  I turned the oven on, 350 degrees.

  “Where’s Mom?” my dad asked me. He had finished reading his soggy paper.

  My stomach growled with hunger, and my math homework blurred on the page in front of me. I shrugged, but I knew, didn’t I? I knew, but I didn’t want him to know.

  “Dinner will be ready soon,” I heard myself saying.

  I think I was just hoping I could buy some time.

  When my mother came back two days later, she apologized to us both over and over and cried and cried on and off for weeks afterward.

  Florida.

  I accept a cold drink from my mother, and I hold it in my hand, but don’t drink it.

  “I’m sorry, Natalie,” she tells me. “It’s almost funny, isn’t it? That you are here? I mean, it’s been four years.”

  “Four years, four months, fifteen days . . . sixteen days.”

  “Four years? Four months?” She says this like the words are rocks in her mouth. “Sixteen days?” When she says it, she looks lighter.

  “Yeah, sixteen.”

  People say that Christmas or Thanksgiving are the hardest times when you’ve lost someone. I never understood that. At least you are prepared for holidays. You know they’re going to suck. It’s the moments that blindside you that hurt the most. Like in school, in sixth grade when we got to go into a new kindergarten class and read to one kid. We all got paired up. You met your buddy in their kindergarten room and sat in a cute little corner on a colorful kindergarten rug.

  My buddy came toddling over, clutching his favorite book, Are You My Mother?, to his chest.

  God, I almost couldn’t read the damn book, not one word. The sounds just caught in my throat. Are you my mother? This stupid bird can’t find his mother.

  After that, hell, Thanksgiving is a breeze.

  “I know how awful it must have been for you,” my mother is saying.

  No, you don’t, I think.

  “I’m really sorry.” She says it again, and there is something almost brave about it. Like she means it, whether or not I accept it. For once, she is doing something that doesn’t depend on my reaction. I can feel it.

  It’s her problem, not mine. And I don’t have to say anything, so I don’t.

  “I came to ask you something,” I say, because I need to focus.

  “What? Go ahead.” She looks like she is bracing herself, physically. I see her fingers imprinting on the cushion of the couch.

  “That day . . .” I am starting. “That night you left . . .”

  All she does is nod. Someone must have taught her this. To listen. To say sorry without needing anything in return. Like some kind of dance: a twelve-step two-step. Maybe it’s a good thing.

  “You were saying something. You were going to tell me something.”

  “I was?” She looks like she is really thinking, really trying to remember. She is kneading her thumbs, one on top of the other.

  “I was so messed up that night, Natty. . . .”

  “I know, but you were going to tell me something. You said it was very important.”

  “I did?” She is leaning a little closer to me. I can smell her now. Her shampoo. The coffee on her breath.

  “Yeah . . . don’t you remember? You said Nana told you stuff . . . that it was wrong. That you had it all wrong, and you wanted me to know something. . . .”

  I hear the rising in my own voice. I am so tired. All of the last twenty-eight hours are flooding back into my mind, the hundreds of stories that never get told, simply because no one is there to hear them. The hundreds more that get locked up inside until you are so angry you forget who you are.

  I am so tired; all the faces blend into one and it’s funny, when I close my eyes they all look like me. As in a dream, where words are understood but you cannot remember what they are. And feelings are powerful and real, but there are no words to describe them. The kind of dream you would sound crazy retelling but that you feel has all the answers, if only you could just decipher it.

  I think of Paul Brown, Claire and Charlene, and Tevin, the little liar that he is. The waitress at Our Dog House, which seems like a million miles away, and a million years ago. I even think of that woman on the bus and this makes me think of Sarah, and I hope it isn’t too late.

  Sarah.

  My dad.

  It is all melding together until I can’t separate reality from dream, past from the present, want from need. Desire from caring.

  And Adam.

  Oh, my God, Adam.

  I haven’t checked my cell phone since Jacksonville. No, not since the bus stopped in Savannah, Georgia. I haven’t thought about Adam. Not once for at least five hours, six maybe. Something about that makes me want to laugh. Really laugh. Die laughing.

  “What?” My mother is smiling, I guess, because she doesn’t know what else to do. “What? What’s so funny?”

  I can’t stop. I am laughing so hard it hurts.

  It’s true. I laughed too much, Charlene, just like you told me, I laughed too much and I cried.

  I am a little girl. I am loved and I am wanted. My mother has her arms around me. There is no other feeling like this in the whole world. I could fall asleep right now and everything would be OK.

  This, I can have again, I say to myself.

  When I started crying, my mother got up off the couch and came toward me. At first my shoulders tightened and I almost cringed at her touch, but then, after all, it was too much. It was too hard and too easy to just let go. Even though I knew what was behind those floodgates.

  They had to open.

  She caught it all. I can feel her lips on my hair, on the top of my head whispering to me. “It’s OK. Just cry. You can cry. It’s OK. I’m here now.” I can feel my whole body collapse to the will of another, my mother.

  As if in a time machine, I can feel the years going backward. I can feel spaces inside of me filling up, holes I never knew were there. I could soar.

  I can fly.

  “Why did you leave?” I am crying. “Why didn’t you want me anymore?”

  She is petting my hair, petting my wet cheeks, and rocking with my rhythms.

  “It wasn’t you,” she is saying. “It was never you.”

  But I hardly hear her.

  “You never wanted me. I was a mistake. Is that why you left?” Now I am babbling like a baby.

  She lifts her face away from mine. “What are you talking about, Natty?”

  “I found it. Sarah and I found your marriage license. In the box, on the top shelf of your closet. We found it. I know.”

  “Know what, Natty? What do you know?”

  “I was a mistake. You were pregnant when you married Daddy. Three and a half months. It was all a mistake. That’s why you left. You never wanted me.”

  And I am so sorry. So sorry I’ve said this. Sorry if it’s true. Sorry if it’s not. There is no good answer here.

  Her reflection in the m
irror is gone. There is only me.

  “Natty, listen to me.” My mother takes my face and pulls it away from her body so she can see me. Still holding it in her hands, she says to me, “That had nothing to do with why I left or what’s wrong with me. I wanted you more than anything on this earth. The day you were born, I was born.”

  I am aware that my nose is running and my eyes must be nearly swollen shut. I get all blotchy and red when I cry. It is not a pretty sight. But you are always beautiful to your mother, aren’t you? She is the one person in this world who thinks you are the most beautiful, important person. The most special.

  “Then why?”

  She is quiet for a while. Gathering thoughts, I now know, she has been thinking about for years.

  “I love you, Natty. And I love Daddy. I just didn’t love myself,” she is saying. “I know what a cliché that is, what an excuse, you must be thinking. What a load of crap, right?” She tries to smile, but her smile doesn’t extend completely across her mouth, as if she suddenly thinks better of it. As if she doesn’t think she should.

  “But my love for you couldn’t be all I was. It couldn’t be all that got me up in the morning. Even though for a long while, it was. When you were very little, it was more than enough. But when you started to move away from me, to grow up . . . even at five, remember? You were always so full of life, always running off, always wanting to explore.”

  I am listening. I hear what she is saying, but it doesn’t really explain anything.

  “I was wrong, Natalie. Terribly wrong, but once I had left, I didn’t know how to go back. I didn’t know if I should,” she is saying. “I thought you were better off with your dad.”

  Then my mother goes on, “I know what I did hurt you, even though that’s the last thing on earth I wanted to do,” she says. “You didn’t deserve that, Natty.”

  What a funny phrase. You didn’t deserve that.

  Deserve.

  Perhaps if I were given the power to delete a single word from the English language, this would be the one, along with all those inadequate phrases, and all those misunderstandings and misconceptions. Neither good nor bad.