And I would say, "No. I mean yes."
"What?"
"I forgot," I would say, and turn and flee.
in the wedding photos they wear white against the murky dark of trees. They are thin and elegant. They have placid smiles. The mouth of the father of the bride remains in a short, straight line. I don't know who took these pictures. I suppose they are lies of sorts, revealing by omission, by indirection, by clues such as shoes and clouds. But they tell a truth, the only way lies can. The way only lies can.
another morning, I heard my parents up early in the bathroom, my dad shaving, getting ready to leave for school.
"Look," he sighed in a loud whisper. "I really can't say that I'll never leave you and the kids or that I'll never make love to another woman—"
"Why not?" asked my mother. "Why can't you say that?" Even her anger was gentle, ingenuous.
"Because I don't feel that way."
"But… can't you just say it anyway?"
At this I like to imagine that my parents met each other's gaze in the medicine cabinet mirror, suddenly grinning. But later in the hospital bed, holding my hand and touching each of my nails slowly with her index finger, my mother said to me, "Your father. He was in a dance. And he just couldn't dance." Earlier that year she had written me: "That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls—we all have a bit of that—but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery."
These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding gifts—a tray shellacked with the invitation, an old rusted toaster—but the touches and the words and the moaning the night she dies, these are what you seize, save, carry around in little invisible envelopes, opening them up quickly, like a carnival huckster, giving the world a peek. They will not stay quiet. No matter how you try. No matter how you lick them. The envelopes will not stay glued.
"Dear Mom, The extra courseload makes life hectic, but I think I'm getting used to it. Spring break is the 19th. Yikes. So much to do before I can leave. See you then."
when i was thirteen, my mother left rice burning on the stove and half-tried to drown herself in the lake. At seven o'clock, my father not home yet and James late at Chess Club, I stepped out the back door and called for her. It was March and the lake was not even completely melted yet—a steely slate green with a far-off whitish center, like some monstrous wound. I walked down to the dock; sometimes she went down there "for air" just before making dinner. I found her on the shore—we really had no beach, just a stoney straggle along the water-line for jogging and rock-skipping. She was on her back, her blouse soaked and transparent, her black hair plastered in strings across her face, water lapping at her like an indifferent cat. She was clutching fistfuls of gravel and smearing them across her cheeks, down the front of her body, her legs still but her mouth opening and closing noiselessly, twisted and stretched, the first of two such expressions of hers I would witness. I couldn't move. Even years later I would see that face—in my own, in photos, in mirrors, that severely sculpted anguish moving behind mine, against mine, against my less dramatic bones and thick, squarish mouth, struggling to emerge. I cried. I didn't know what to do. I ran back to the house, burst into the kitchen, and saw my father, who had just gotten home, scraping black smoking rice angrily from the bottom of the pan. "Mom, it's Mom," I panted, and pointed toward the lake. And he shouted, "What?" and hurried out and down the path. At eight o'clock an ambulance came and took her away. She came back, however, the next morning, looking a little pale and raccoon-eyed, trudging upstairs on my father's arm. She glanced at me, it seemed, apologetically.
my father spent that next day down on the dock, singing out at the lake, something Italian, a Puccini aria or something. He actually did this about twice a year while I was growing up, a way of releasing things inside of him, my mother said, in a way, he hoped, that would not disturb the neighbors (who were a quarter of a mile away on each side). Sometimes I would stare out the back-door window and be able to make out the outline of him, sometimes sitting, but more often pacing the dock cross-planks, his voice floating up toward the house. But not his school voice or his theater voice—this was something else, a throbbing, pained vibrato, like some creature that lived inside of him that he didn't understand, that embarrassed him, that he didn't know quite what to do with. Sometimes I would leave the house and go for a walk in the opposite direction, up past the road, through the woods, across the old train tracks. There was a boarded-up building, a small factory of some sort, and an unusable old road, bordered with ancient gaslight posts with the jets yanked from them, hollowed as skeleton eyes, and James and I both would sometimes go up there to look for berries and make up stories and dares. Dare to run to the door and back. Dare to tear off the private property poster. Dare to climb in the window. To touch the electric fence. To this day it remains a mystery to me what was inside the place, or what its original function was. All nailed and shuttered and papered with no trespassing signs. Sometimes we swore we heard noises inside—James would call it grumbling, but I always thought of it as being like my father on the dock, blockaded and alone, singing in its strange foreign language, a need to be exploded somehow, a need to disgorge an aria over the lake. Finally some people came from the city and did blow it up. Laced it up with dynamite and blasted out its corners, its flat roof, its broken windowpanes, its black insides laid bare and smoldering in the daylight, neighbors well beyond a quarter-mile off hearing it at breakfast, kids talking about it at school, and bits of nails and plaster we found later stuck like shrapnel in the posts of the gaslights, like a war, like there had been a war.
another photo of my mother in her wedding dress, standing next to her mother, whose smile and hat are too big for her face; she seems vaguely eyeless, noseless. And her daughter looks not at the camera but off to one side somewhere.
i was fifteen when my father left us and my mother had her mastectomy. Both things happened suddenly, quietly, without announcement. As if some strange wind rushed in and swept things up into it, then quickly rushed out again; it simply left what it left.
When your parents divide, you, too, bifurcate. You cleave and bubble and break in two, live two lives, half of you crying every morning on the dock at sunrise, black hair fading to dusky gray, part of you traveling off to some other town where you teach school and tell jokes in an Italian accent in a bar and make people laugh.
And when your mother starts to lose her mind, so do you. You begin to be afraid of people on the street. You see shapes—old men and spiders—in the wallpaper again like when you were little and sick. The moon's reflection on the lake starts to look to you like a dead fish floating golden belly up. Ask anyone. Ask anyone whose mother is losing her mind.
when i was sixteen, I came home from school and found my mother drunk in her bathrobe, lying flat on the coffee table in the living room, spread out on top of the magazines. She was out of control with laughter, hysterical wine-tears trickling out of the swollen slits of her eyes.
"Mom, come upstairs. Let me put you to bed," I said, setting down my books and helping her upstairs. She was leaning on me, still laughing helplessly. "My god," she said. "They lopped off my breasts, can you believe it? Lopped them right—" and she made a quick motion with her hand in the air.
I tucked her in and kissed her face and she cried into the neck of my blouse. "I'm cold. I'm thirsty. Don't leave me, honey. You're warm. If you leave I'll have to put on a sweater."
"Get some sleep," I said softly, pulling up the blue quilt, drawing the blinds, standing in the doorway, just a moment, to watch her fall asleep, the lake beating like a giant watery heart against the dock.
she takes long, silent showers, slumped against the ceramic wall, the steady jets
of water bouncing off one of her shoulders, splashing against the plastic curtain, shampoo lather drizzling down into her mouth.
"Even his I love you's," she said, "were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but who is incapable of a passionate confession, of melting into a sob."
I tuck her in. I kiss her.
a series of pictures here of mothers and daughters switching places—women switching places to take care of one another. You, the daughter, becoming the mother, the Ceres, and she the daughter, kidnapped to hell, and you roam the earth to find her, to mourn her, leaving the trees and grain to wither, having no peace, you have no peace.
"what is beautiful is seized," my mother said a final time, speaking of my father, whom she said had been destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. "It came to me in bulky bandages, seeming much larger, much more than it really was."
my mother, thin and gray in a nightgown, staring off and away, not at the camera.
"you reach a point," she wrote me once, "where you cannot cry anymore, and you look around you at people you know, at people your own age, and they're not crying either. Something has been taken. And they are emptier. And they are grateful."
when my mother died, her groaning woke the elderly woman in the bed next to hers who was supposed to have her pancreas operated on the next day. "What is happening?" cried the old woman, sleepless and distraught. Something had seized my mother in the back, arched it, stiffened her limbs, her mouth a gash across her face, revealing only her teeth, yellowed fine as old piano keys. An awful astonishment pervaded her features, her bones, as if she never really believed death would be like this, a bludgeoning by tubes and contractions, and by the time—only a minute—the nurses responded to my shouts and came running, the sweat and urine soaking into the sheets already seemed cool and old and my mother's eyes were wide as eggs and she was dead. I clutched at things—her robe, a plastic pitcher, a cup—and looking around the room, the window, wondered where she had gone, she must still be, had to be near, somewhere, and the lady with the pancreas, beyond the screen next to the bed, had heard it all and now wept loudly, inconsolably, and they gave her a sleeping pill, although she pushed it away, saying, "Oh, please, god, no." Nothing moved. I bent over the bed. "Mom," I whispered, kissing her lips, surgical carts rackety in the hallway, a voice in the ceiling paging Dr. Davis Dr. Davis to the nurses' station, figures in white slowly gathering around me, hands on my shoulders, hard, false as angels. "Mom," I breathed.
Jacob Fish came to the funeral with a pretty brunette woman who looked like a high school French teacher. He seemed somehow like a nice man. At the end of the burial, he escorted the woman back to the car and then went off by himself, over to a tree, and ran his hands through his hair. I never really got a chance to talk with him, although I'm not certain what we would have talked about. When he was through at the tree and had thrust his hands back into his pockets, he rejoined the woman in the car and drove off.
My father did not bring anyone with him. He came up to me and hugged me tightly and for a moment the red rushed to both of our eyes. "Lynnie," he said, and I stepped to one side. I looked away from him. I looked at his shoes. I looked at the clouds. "I loved her more than you think," he said, and I listened for the needles, the safety pins. James, home from medical school and standing next to me, shook my dad's hand, then quickly embraced him. Everyone was dressed in black. "So much black, so much black," I kept repeating like some nervous mynah bird.
That night James and I left all the casseroles at my mother's apartment and went out and got drunk at a Howard Johnson's. James made me smile reminding me of the time when I was little and insisted that if you were in the woods and had to go to the bathroom really badly, all you had to do was eat a piece of bread; it would absorb everything, and you wouldn't have to go anymore.
"James," I asked him, carefully. "Do you ever think about your other mother?"
"No," he said quickly, like a doctor.
I looked at him, dismayed, confused.
"I don't know," he sighed and signaled the waiter. "I guess it's not basic to me. God, I can't get my feet all tied up in that. Why should I?"
"I'm not sure." I looked at my lap, at my shoes. I reached under the table for my purse. "Check's on me," I said.
"Dear Mom. Thanks for the cookies. I got them yesterday. Was sorry to hear about the hospital thing. Hope you're feeling better. I've got tests by the millions! Love, Lynnie."
driving back from dropping James off at the airport, I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror. It seems old, with too much makeup. I feel stuck, out of school, working odd jobs, like someone brooding, hat in hand in an anteroom, waiting for the future as if it were some hoop-skirted belle that must gather up its petticoats, float forward, and present itself to me. I wonder what else I could have written, those winters, looking out and seeing snow lining the elm grove like an arthritis and finding no words. I didn't lie: there were a lot of tests; I had a lot of tests.
The roads are empty and I am driving fast. I think of my father, imagine him long ago at night casually parting my mother's legs with the mechanical indifference of someone opening a cupboard. And I say to myself: I will leave every cold man, every man for whom music is some private physics and love some unsteppable dance. I will try to make them regret. To make them sad. I am driving back toward my tiny kitchen table and I will write this: forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.
"That's how much it costs, Miss," says the attendant at the gas station where I stop, looking rather numbly at the price on the pump.
"Oh," I say and fumble for my wallet. The oil cans stacked against an old truck tire are wordless, hard, collusive. But the triangular plastic flags strung at one end of the island flutter and ripple in the wind, flapping to get my attention, my compassion, like things that seem to want to sing but can't, things that almost tear themselves in trying to fly, like rainbow-colored birds, hung by string and their own feet.
* * *
The Kid's Guide to Divorce
put extra salt on the popcorn because your mom'll say that she needs it because the part where Inger Berman almost dies and the camera does tricks to elongate her torso sure gets her every time.
Think: Geeze, here she goes again with the Kleenexes.
She will say thanks honey when you come slowly, slowly around the corner in your slippers and robe, into the living room with Grandma's old used-to-be-salad-bowl piled high. I made it myself, remind her, and accidentally drop a few pieces on the floor. Mittens will bat them around with his paws.
Mmmmm, good to replenish those salts, she'll munch and smile soggily.
Tell her the school nurse said after a puberty movie once that salt is bad for people's hearts.
Phooey, she'll say. It just makes it thump, that's all. Thump, thump, thump—oh look! She will talk with her mouth full of popcorn. Cary Grant is getting her out of there. Did you unplug the popper?
Pretend you don't hear her. Watch Inger Berman look elongated; wonder what it means.
You'd better check, she'll say.
Groan. Make a little tsk noise with your tongue on the roof of your mouth. Run as fast as you can because the next commercial's going to be the end. Unplug the popper. Bring Mittens back in with you because he is mewing by the refrigerator. He'll leave hair on your bathrobe. Dump him in your mom's lap.
Hey baby, she'll coo at the cat, scratching his ears. Cuddle close to your mom and she'll reach around and scratch one of your ears too, kissing your cheek. Then she'll suddenly lean forward, reaching toward the bowl on the coffee table, carefully so as not to disturb the cat. I always think he's going to realize faster than he does, your mom will say between munches, hand to hand to mouth. Men can be so dense and frustrating. She will wink at you.
Eye t
he tube suspiciously. All the bad guys will let Cary Grant take Inger Berman away in the black car. There will be a lot of old-fashioned music. Stand and pull your bathrobe up on the sides. Hang your tongue out and pretend to dance like a retarded person at a ball. Roll your eyes. Waltz across the living room with exaggerated side-to-side motions, banging into furniture. Your mother will pretend not to pay attention to you. She will finally say in a flat voice: How wonderful, gee, you really send me.
When the music is over, she will ask you what you want to watch now. She'll hand you the TV Guide. Look at it. Say: The Late, Late Chiller. She'll screw up one of her eyebrows at you, but say please, please in a soft voice and put your hands together like a prayer. She will smile back and sigh, okay.
Switch the channel and return to the sofa. Climb under the blue afghan with your mother. Tell her you like this beginning cartoon part best where the mummy comes out of the coffin and roars, CHILLER!! Get up on one of the arms of the sofa and do an imitation, your hands like claws, your elbows stiff, your head slumped to one side. Your mother will tell you to sit back down. Snuggle back under the blanket with her.
When she says, Which do you like better, the mummy or the werewolf, tell her the werewolf is scary because he goes out at night and does things that no one suspects because in the day he works in a bank and has no hair.
What about the mummy? she'll ask, petting Mittens.
Shrug your shoulders. Fold in your lips. Say: The mummy's just the mummy.
With the point of your tongue, loosen one of the chewed, pulpy kernels in your molars. Try to swallow it, but get it caught in your throat and begin to gasp and make horrible retching noises. It will scare the cat away.