And what of my mother's shame, like a boulder between us? I thought we had told each other everything after we both came out and were beyond the silence of her suppressed lesbian years. How terribly guilt-ridden she must have been, to never speak of what had happened.
But then I thought further. There were my own silences, the taboo learned early onâfrom whom, I'm not sure: Don't be angry with your mother; it's not her fault she's sick. My fury had leaked out toward her in mean and scornful remarks like plutonium from a sunken Russian submarine, unacknowledged but still lethal.
I imagined another conversation.
My mother tells me about putting Happy to sleep. “Can you forgive me?” she asks.
I reach toward my mother, take her face between my two hands, hold us eye to eye. It is time for naming.
I tell her, “Mom, I have hated you. This moment, I hate you. Can you forgive me?”
Chapter 50. Sinai
BY THE MIDDLE OF her second week home, my mother was becoming more agitated and incoherent. She whispered, she muttered, she yelled sentence fragments over and over.
I leaned over the side of her hospital bed, stroking her hair. “Shhh, shhh, it's all right, Momila.” I tried to make eye contact, but her pupils were dilated and she seemed to have gone some manner of blind. She was far from me; I could not find her.
Her arms raised, her hands fluttered in the air. Although her words formed no sentences, I could hear her distress, feel her deep restlessness.
Brenda came into the bedroom and checked the catheter bag. “You won't be able to speak with her,” she said flatly. “She's too far gone.” When Brenda left, I closed the bedroom door.
I knew there was a place beyond words, this ancient connection between my mother and me. I began to sing, simple songs, singing the words over and over:
We all come from the Goddess,
and to her we shall return
like a drop of rain flowing to the ocean.
MY MOTHER QUIETED, her arms lowered, her face relaxed. She joined me in singing, not word for word, but humming, singing one word now and then . . .
goddess . . . ocean
.
I reached my hand toward her and laid my palm and spread fingers on her breastbone. “My heart to your heart,” I said. “My heart to your heart.” She whispered, “My heart. Your heart.”
Then I sang to my mother the names of all the women who loved her, and the names of all the women she had loved. “Chana loves Gloria . . . Dana loves Gloria . . . Arlene loves Gloria . . . Reva loves Gloria . . . Carol loves Gloria . . . ” on and on. She sang her name, drawing out the syllables, “GLORâIâAAA.”
I sang her Hebrew prayers and Yiddish
niguns,
wordless tunes whose nonsense syllables vibrated with memories, with meaning and meaninglessness.
Hida hida hi diddy di da hida hida hida . . .
There was life between us, my mother and me. We found a place to meet when spoken words were no longer possible. Beneath words, behind naming, lived something else.
Â
Â
THE NEXT MORNING, I arrived to find my mother muttering gibberish and sentence fragments, sometimes in a whisper, other times shouted. Most of the time her eyes were closed, but when she
opened them, they were unfocused, not recognizing what was right around her. Not seeing me, sitting right there next to her. She didn't respond to my voice or my singing. She would open her eyes and stare off into some unfathomable distance. I wonderedâwhere was she journeying? What wilderness called her?
Amidst her muttering, two sentences, so potent with history that they were in some ways a life summary. I could make out each word clearly:
“Abe is not good for Gloria. Gloria prefers women.”
Later that day, she whispered, “
All the wild things, wild, beautiful things.
” Repeating it over and over,
“Wild things, wild, beautiful things . . . ”
Where was she traveling? I wanted to go with her, like we had on that camping trip in the Sinai Desert. I wanted to lie back in our sleeping bags laid out on warm sand, staring into a desert night ablaze with stars.
My mother, whose spirit was like an elf's, with her twinkling eyes, her wild-hearted lust for womenâthat desire that would not be crushed by the modern-day Inquisition of electroshocks and psychiatric drugs. My mother, who loved the wild places of the earthâthe sea, the mountains, the forestsâand the wild places in our hearts; who danced with abandon in lesbian bars; who laid her body in the roadway, protesting nuclear bombs; who meditated to Ram Dass tapes and introduced me to sunflower sprouts; who looked me in the eye when she asked, “Am I dying?”
She was leaving me. Standing on the wild threshold, saying goodbye.
Chapter 51. Shiva
AFTER MY MOTHER died, I dreamed of her each night and woke with a start to a motherless morning.
Grief descended on me with its thick animal musk, a beast with ragged, muddy fur, muffling all my senses. My mouth was dry, my chest hollow. I covered every surface of the living roomâmantel, coffee table, end tablesâwith photos of my mother. I was nearly blind to the friends who came and went, bearing casseroles and soup, barely noticed Dana's presence or absence. I knew that visitors were supposed to be a comfort, but it strained me beyond capacity to turn my face toward them.
It was a chilly, damp fall. I kept a fire going in the stone fireplace, its flames an orange haze. I sat in an armchair. Nothing warmed my bones.
On the eighth day after Gloria's death, close friends gathered in our house for a small private ritual. I felt like a groundhog poking my head up above its hole to check:
Is it spring yet? No, snow all around.
But now, just a bit, I could take in the comfort of being
surrounded by those who loved my mother or me or both. We shared memories and stories of Gloria, sang together.
A few days later, I drove up into the Berkeley hills. I parked the car at an overlook, got out, and stood on the edge of the precipice. The entire Bay Area spread out beneath me: the flatlands, the gray metal of the Bay Bridge bisected by the knob of Treasure Island, the bay itself ringed by the skyscrapers of San Francisco and the silhouette of Mt. Tamalpais, and, spanning the bay's entryway, the Golden Gate Bridge. Below me, waitresses were serving meals, executives were sitting at board meetings, prostitutes were turning tricks, women were giving birth, people were falling in love, being mugged, painting on huge oil canvasesâI knew all this, but it seemed inconceivable, bizarre. Didn't they know the world had been rent asunder?
Â
Â
OVER THE NEXT FEW months, every now and then, I'd get this irresistible urge to pick up the phone and dial my mother's number. I would hold the receiver tight against my ear, leaning in. Always, now, the same female computer voice stiffly intoned: “You have reached a number that is no longer in service . . . ” The sinking feeling. The weight of my arm, lowering the phone.
Then, one day, the inevitable. I called and a voice said, “Hello?” She sounded young. I wanted to cry out,
This used to be my mother's phone. Who
are
you? What matters to you?
I remained silent. She repeated, “Hello? Hello?” There was a
click,
and then a dial tone.
Breathe in, breathe out. Another motherless day.
Chapter 52. Thermals
IN EARLY OCTOBER, as the first anniversary approached, it was as if my body were remembering each day of the year before, each stage of those last weeks of my mother's dying:
This is the day she came home from the hospital, this is the day she could no longer speak
,
this is the day I sang to her.
Our living room was no longer covered with her photos. I'd condensed her tribute to an altar on a side table. Candles, photographs, seashells, and a small owl statue were arranged around the ceramic vase that still held her ashes. Although I'd gone to Hawaii the past spring, I hadn't brought along her ashes. I wasn't ready to feel her sifting through my fingers, couldn't yet bear to let her go.
Now, each day for a bit, I would sit in a rocking chair facing the little altar, memories flashing through my mind.
On the anniversary of my mother's death, Dana and I drove up the Berkeley hills to Tilden Park. We took a long walk on a trail that looped over a ridgeback, through stands of eucalyptus and bay laurel,
their fragrant leaves crunching underfoot. As we hiked, I calmed and loosened, the hills under my feet grounding me, the pungency of eucalyptus in my nostrils bringing me into the present. I felt how I loved my life, my life with Dana.
On the drive back, we pulled into an overlook and shut off the engine. The city and bay spread beneath us. We were quiet for a long while, just looking down at the Bay Area pulsing below, the sun lowering toward San Francisco Bay, sky glowing orange, lights just on the edge of blinking on.
The hills here were steep, dropping to the flatlands of Berkeley and Oakland. I sat wondering if the warm air currents called thermals rose up these hills, as they did in Calistoga, as they had that time they held me aloft. And then I was lost in memory:
One year, after Gloria's move to California, she and I are driving north to the Napa Valley town of Calistoga, known for its hot springs, to celebrate my birthday. Along its one main street are the spas boasting various treatmentsâmud baths, hot whirlpools, massageâbut we have not come to seek the waters. I long to soar, to lift into quiet far above the world's din, and my mother is giving me the gift of flight: a glider ride in one of those motorless little planes.
My mother has never gotten over her fear of heights. She no longer goes into the panic that would overcome her driving when I was a child, but any precipice, cliff, grandstand, or steep balcony seat makes her hyperventilate, stiffen, and sweat.
Nonetheless, my mother wants her daughter to fly. At least, she makes a brave show of it, smiling at me before I walk off toward the plane. I know her fear lurks underneath, but we both ignore it as she says cheerily, “Have a great time!”
I walk onto the tarmac, where the pilot waits next to the glider. It looks like a blown-up toy, a narrow white fiberglass body with long thin wings and a domed clear hood. The pilot adjusts something in the tiny cockpit, then ushers me into my seat directly in front of him, gets in, and closes the Plexiglas lid that bubbles over our heads. The clear nose of the glider encases my legs. After I strap myself in, I can't even turn to see the pilot behind me. It's just me and this tiny bubble of plane.
The small twin-engine aircraft that will lift us aloft taxis into position in front, and with a rough tug pulls us down the runway. I watch the tow plane lift, and then we rise. Just before the hills, the plane cuts us loose and banks away. We're catching the thermals that let gliders soar, those warm pockets of air that rise from the valley up the mountainsides. The noisy plane disappears, leaving us in the quiet, the hills green and brown below me.
The
whoosh
of the air currents over the wings is the only sound. I know my mother is down there on Earth, waiting for me, but as the glider dips, sensation roars through my capillariesâdrowning out anything but the moment. To be free to forget my mother is her greatest gift to me. She has reclaimed her own happiness, and I have let go of constant vigilance toward a depressed mother. Now, she's been well for over ten years, though her phobia of heights remains.
Hawklike, we swoop and glide, taking in the hills below, the tiny rows of vineyard grapes, the dots of houses. I am filled with wind, sound, and light. I must have laughed, the joy bursting out of me. The pilot, who has been respectfully silent, asks, “Would you like to do some stunts?”
“Sure,” I blithely respond.
Barely a beat passes, and the pilot puts the plane into a full dive. The Plexiglas nose in front of me is now headed directly for the earth. Nausea lurches in my stomach. My intestines are both jelly and hard knots. If my chest belt is digging in, I don't feel it because I am screaming like a middle-schooler on a roller-coaster ride, full-out roaring. When I find words, I yell,
“Stop, stop!”
The pilot pulls us out of the dive.
“I guess-that's-why-I've-never-been-on-a-roller-coaster,” is all I manage to choke out. I think of my mother then, her breathless terror of heights, the silence of it. There were never any screams. I have a sense of it now: how it must have felt in her frozen body, stiff and sweating, with her choked breath, her panicked eyes. I remember the sour smell of her fear.
Oh, Mom.
My banging heart regains some of its steadiness as the glider resumes its gentle arcs. I release my own breath, come back to pleasure in the soaring.
Mom is waiting for me. She is standing next to her car in the parking lot that butts right up against the airstrip. One hand is shading her forehead, as if she has been squinting into the distance for a long time. A lit cigarette dangles from her other hand. When she sees me coming toward her, she drops the cigarette and stomps it into the gravel, then smiles at me. I can tell from her smile that she did not see the plane suddenly dive toward the earth.
“How was it?” she asks.
I hesitate, just for a moment. Then I tell her the truth: “It was the most amazing thing ever.”
Her face breaks open, fully lit, and we stand there beaming at each other. “I'm so glad, sweetheart.”
Across the bay, the skyscrapers of San Francisco were backlit by the last vestiges of the sunset. The lights of the Bay Bridge were sparkling against an indigo sky. Late in life, but not too late, my mother had arrived, fed me meals, listened to my troubles, and, with her joy, launched me into a realm that was further off than she could go.