1. A small tube in which patterns of colors are optically produced and viewed for amusement. My mother was a laughing woman. She must have had pain most of the hours of her life; still my first memory is her smiling face above my crib. Next comes the comfortable calico sense of her holding and the hum of her voice and the private breath that was only hers, that came up at me from the handkerchief I took from her purse in the bedroom the night she lay stiff, painted, unrecognizable in the long box in the front parlor—the breath that faded at once. She was a deeply serious
woman who could make a whole roomful of people rock with merriment. Everyone
knew that. But perhaps only I knew that in the laughter rocking round the
kitchen table at the mistakes in my own first story, her hand held my shoulder
and its gentle pressure telegraphed the message that it is all right to make
them laugh, even unintentionally, because laughter is life-giving. A second
secret came to me that night as well: there is always something grave under the
laughter, though the jesters are sometimes the only ones who know. But she was a betrayer, too.
She blocked me in my flight from the belt in my father’s red hand. She held me
as his shouting face came down at me and then she yielded me to him. Was she
watching when he stripped down my underpants, flung me over his knees, and
struck the hot leather strap against my flesh? It has been years of midnight
gall (though she comes in my dreams with warm milk and tears) and eons of
burning eyes as I probe tomes in dry lamplight (though I find her under the
writing on every page) before I’ve been able to whisper, “Yes, I see why you
did not stop him,” (though my skin still cries out, “Why couldn’t you?”) The present is full of the
past. If I lift my hand to strike my child I feel the sting where my father’s
belt has just left my burning buttocks and I sink into his rage. But then I
descend deeper than rage into the terrible thrilling news of birth and my
father’s slap and my first screaming breath that kills me as I feel it swarming
into me. My father’s hands received
me from my mother’s womb and slapped me alive, my mother lying sick, spent, and
the doctor trapped in a broken car miles away down a muddy road. Why was no one
else there? No friend? No neighbor woman? Only my twelve-year-old sister who
sprang into instant motherhood as she took the receiving blanket into her small
hands and felt the weight and awesome movement of an infant, and thus began her
long life of nurturing, while our own mother suffered slowly into a recovery
never completed, managing only with sheer will to hold death at bay for fifteen
years so that she could complete at least that much of her last child’s
shelter. She was always sheltering.
Betraying me to my father’s anger, yet still wanting shelter. Even when she was
without substance, even then, creeping though my dreams, she tried to shelter
me against the chill seeping through the rips in the fabric of my faith in god,
state, work, love. When the gypsies came and I
raced to escape them, she clicked the locks of the doors and put her arms
around my shoulders. When they had charmed me with the Babylonian splendor of
their attire and the caress of their music and their vivid smiles sparkling
with promises, I would have run to them if not for the warmth of her fingers
and the small melody of her murmur. The things shift and change
as I try to perceive them. If I turn away for a moment, they become something
quite different. Sometimes I do the opposite of what I had intended. A time came when I thought I
would suffocate in the warmth of my home. When my mother heard that, she opened
the door. She told me how she had wanted to study music in the city but had
been prevented from leaving. Much later when the dream witch invited me to come
away, my dream mother said, Go with her. My son said, “I’m going to
Selma, Alabama. It’s the right thing to do, you taught me that.” My mother
opened my fingers and I let him go out into the murderous night. It was my
mother’s calico that enfolded me in the cold silence that followed the deaths
of the man and the woman who had marched with my son. When at last his words
broke through the telephone, it was her voice that I wrapped around him. 2. Mirrors reflect light transmitted through bits of loose colored glass contained at one end, causing them to appear as symmetrical designs when viewed at the other. Bits of loose colored glass:
A chip of diphtheria. A chip of prayer transmitting light through lamb shanks
transmogrified into saint’s relics, survival lies into martyr’s visions and
protestation placards on the doors of cathedrals. My rebellious sister crumpled
in my mother’s arms. Outside the quarantined house, the preacher’s shouting at
the sky. Inside, a solicitation. Do you
take me? said Death. My sister laughed. And lived. My own infant looked at me
without laughter but with a wisdom I could not comprehend. And died. My mother
came into my dream holding her. Then my son said, “We don’t
know how long my child will live.” My mother breathed into me and held my hands
steady on the phone. And my son took his sleeping bag and unrolled it in the
hospital room against the cries of the nurses. And held the baby’s hands in his
hands, which I held too, because my mother held mine, as in a symmetrical
design. And in the morning my mother’s great grandson smiled. 3. A constantly changing set of colors. Blue. Because of her eyes,
which mirrored intensely the blue hat and the blue dress that became her death
garb. Or pink and white like the
May blossoms around her tomb. Or red and green like the
apples which saved us in the first summer of her desertion—fried, baked,
sauced, pied—an apple resurrection, Eve apples replete with knowledge of good
and evil, life and death, now and never. Or lilac like those in the
vases lining the corridors of the church, hugging her casket, spilling the
fragrance of birth and decay along the pews, trailing out into the bell tower
and through the door onto the steps where sat those who arrived too late to
squeeze into the chapel of her departure. Empty of color like my
thoughts. I could not understand why, if they loved her, they had stayed silent
while she fought against corruption. And if they did not love her, why did they
close the school, the stores, and the bank when she died? Why did they trail
her box to the grave in a parade they never gave her living self? Black. Like her coffin. But she will not stay in
that blackness. She is white when she comes to stand beside my bed in the night
of that first year after her death, when the drought of Nebraska had dried my
grief. Or she is brown, a solid
earth block between me and my rage at my father. She will not let me sever the
connection. At the same time, she shrouds my gypsy love in a sheltering mist
and breathes understanding through my dreams. He was taught he must not spare the rod, she says. Brown, brown is
the color of tradition. Still, she is mostly red; not the color of anger but the blood color, the color of life. 4. A series of changing phases or events. My mother told me story after story about her father, a glorious man, strong, rich, imposing, magnetic. It seemed as though she had observed his achievements over a long, long life. Much later I realized that he had died when she was only two years old. Was it all her fantasy then? Or her own mother’s as she agonized over the absence of the young lover who had already become president of a bank, owner of an estate, lord of a mansion holding seven fireplaces, but who would never be older than twenty-nine because that was when death came, that old seducer. Or was my mother’s portrait
of her father the true one? There were stories she never
told. How was it that her inheritance was lost? Why was her father’s genius
forgotten? Why did the energy of that family run out? My mother was a storyteller.
When she spoke, events rearranged themselves. Everyone felt happier. She was a highly moral woman
whose strict code of behavior allowed for survival bending so that she could
surreptitiously accept the bag of relief flour that my father proudly refused,
and could swear her youngest child to secrecy from that father. God understands these necessities, she
whispered. Tuberculosis curved her
spine. Asthma choked her. Yet she was strong enough to denounce the corruption
of mayors and elders. Arthritis crippled her fingers. Yet she could still make
the piano weep. When there were no more jobs, she found people who would pay
her to clean houses, wash clothes, write news stories about those who still had
jobs, could still give parties, wedding receptions, even commemorative
ceremonies for the dead. When there were no clothes, she accepted castoffs and
created fashionable dresses. When there was almost no food, she split apples
and potatoes into eighths. And lo, the miracle happened for those who had even
greater need. The hoboes of the thirties thanked her by inscribing signs beside
our gate. But when there was no more
breath in her, she died. And drought followed upon her death as if she were the
grieving Demeter. I cannot explain the secret
of her design, though every mirror reflects her light and my hands are aware of
her constantly. Watch them. If there is any sign of caring, even the lightest,
most furtive touch, that will be my mother. |