I looked at her cheekbones, as sharp as they had always been—
almost painful now in her cadaverous flesh. Who will love me? I thought, and then banished this question by looking out at the birch leaves in the fading sunlight. I had been there all day. I hadn't even called to cancel at Westmore. I saw the empty space on the platform in Life Drawing 101 and the students, at their easels, staring at my absence, the useless charcoal in their hands.
I knew that if I did not move, my mother might sleep for hours, and darkness would come. I pictured my friend Natalie looking for me in the halls of the art building, vainly querying the students in class. Natalie would call my house—perhaps drive over alone or with Hamish, her son. The doorbell would ring in the empty house, and then Natalie would imagine that something must have happened to me or to Sarah or to Emily.
I lifted my arms up under my mother's arms and raised them slightly off the carpeted stairs. First one and then the other, like manipulating a life-size doll. To have controlled her as easily as that, impossible. I had to get through this without calling my
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daughters. This was something to be done on my own. I twisted out from under her, and she moaned like a collapsing bag of air.
I sat by her body on the stairs. The house had a weight and a force that I knew could crush me. I had to get out of there, and I thought, suddenly, of the bathtub among the rocking horses in the shed.
I left my mother dozing and turned and ran up the stairs, darting into her cluttered bedroom for blankets, and the pink powder room for towels. In the mirror over the sink, I checked myself. My eyes seemed smaller and even bluer than they had been, as if the intensity of the situation affected color and its perception. For years now I'd kept my hair so short that I could almost see my scalp. When I'd walked into my mother's house, she'd taken one glance and said, "Don't tell me you have cancer too. Everyone has cancer these days." I explained that my haircut made life easier, from exercise to gardening to work. It was the ambiguity that got to me—would she have cared if I had had cancer or would it have just been competition for her? Her intonation pointed toward the latter, but it was hard to believe this of one's own mother.
I stood at the top of the stairs with the blankets and towels. I kept at bay my realization that she would never see these rooms again and that now they would become, for me, empty shells littered with possessions. I noticed the hush in the upstairs hallway and looked at the pictures on the walls, pictures that would soon be gone. I imagined the dark squares they would leave behind them where no sun had reached for years, and the echoes that would resound from the curtainless storm windows and the thick plaster-and-brick walls. I began to sing. I sang nonsense.
Cat-food commercials and childhood songs, the latter a habit that had been handed down from my mother, a way to stave off the onset of nerves. The need for noise overwhelmed me, but as I headed down the stairs, I grew quiet again. I saw that my
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mother had slumped down and lay on the floor, her body on the old wine-red Persian rug.
"No, Mother, no," I said, realizing as I did so that it was more useless than talking to a dog. A dog cocked her head. A dog gave you a soulful look. My mother was a passed-out bag of bones who reeked of shit.
"Why like this?" I asked. I stood over her body with my arms full of blankets and towels, and I began to weep. I whispered a prayer that no one would knock on the door, that Mrs. Castle would not think to check on us, though right about now Manny the handyboy might help me tote and haul.
I placed the towels on the bottom stair and took my grandfather's red-and-black Hudson Bay blanket, spreading it out on the floor beside her. It extended into the dining room. Then, so the wool would not scratch, I put a white Mexican wedding blanket down on top of that. I was not thinking sanely; I was wrapping fish or making spring rolls; I was thinking, Super Giant Mother Burrito.
I bent down, taking air in and neutralizing my spine—thank you, Stella, at World Gym—and put my arms up under my mother's armpits.
Her eyes snapped open.
"What on earth are you doing?"
I blinked. With our faces reversed to each other, I felt she could suck my eyes into her mouth. The rest of me, like the tail of a lizard or the end of a flat noodle, would swoop in and be gone in mere seconds. I kept my arms tense. Would she ever be powerless?
"Daniel!" she brayed. "Daniel!"
"Dad's not here, Mom," I said.
She looked up at me, her face dimmed and then reignited again, like a match flaring in the dark.
"I want that bowl," she said. "Now!"
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To be that close to her. To be holding on to her and to see her brain open up like that, its scrambled insides, it was all I could do to keep to my task. As she spoke about things—Emily, the
"pretty baby" (Emily had just turned thirty and had babies of her own); the kud2u near her father's cabin that had to be cut back with a scythe (the cabin was on land that was at the base of the Smokies and long out of our lives); and the stealing, conniving, not-to-be-trusted neighbors—I placed her body in the blankets and made an open-ended package with her talking head sticking out. Then I rested the towels on top of her chest and breathed slowly, counting to ten before I spoke.
"We are going on a sleigh ride," I said to her. And in my fists, I balled up the two free ends of the blanket, partially lifting her body off the floor. I heaved her over the carpet of the dining room, in through the kitchen, and out the side door.
"Toot! Toot!" she said. "Toot! Toot!" And then she grew silent and stared at the outside like a child in front of flickering Christmas lights. I wanted to ask her, When was the last time you went into your backyard? When was the last time you smelled a flower or trimmed a shrub or just sat in the rusted white iron lawn chair?
Grief was coming heavily now. Something about being outside, being in the fresh air, away from the acrid scent of her and the mothball smell of the closed-up house. My mother lay in her blanketed cocoon on the small raised side porch, which thankfully was at least partially shielded from the next-door neighbors by vine-covered latticework.
I went down the three stairs to the cinder-block path and walked around to the back of the porch, where as a child I had sat and kicked my legs over the edge and where now my mother lay as if on a shipping-and-receiving shelf. I was sweating, but I knew by the slant of the sun at my back that it would be less than an hour before light slipped below the houses that surrounded
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my mother's and left us alone in the last long night we would spend together.
I touched her treasured braid again. Some years ago her hair had passed out of its wiry stage and become soft. It had always been her crowning glory. Her brief life as a lingerie model before she met my father was one I'd envied growing up. Whatever else she was, she had been the most beautiful mother in the neighborhood, and watching her had taught me everything I knew about physical beauty. It was a bitter truth—-my discovery—
that daughters were not made in cookie-cutter patterns from the genes of their mothers alone. Random accidents of ancestry could blunt a nose or tip a forehead until beauty's delicate tracery gave way to an ordinary Jane.
Outside, with the air rushing over her, the fecal scent dissipated and I could think realistically again. I would not make it to the shed. What had I thought? The damage of dragging her down the three steps, of trying to heave her off the porch. And what would I fill the ancient bathtub with? Cold water from the backyard hose? The bathtub would be dirty and full of old lumber and broken bits of refuse that I would have to clean out. The last time I'd been in the shed, I'd noticed that my father's tool board, with all the ghost shapes of tools, had fallen off the wall and pitched forward against the tub. What had I been thinking?
"This is it, Mom," I said. "This is as far as we go."
She did not smile or say "bitch" or wail some final lament. I like to think, when I think about it, that by that time she was busy taking in the scent of her garden, feeling the late-afternoon sun on her face, and that somehow in the moments that had elapsed since she'd last spoken, she'd forgotten she'd ever had a child and that, for so many years now, she'd had to pretend she loved it.
I wish I could say that as my mother lay on the side porch and the wind began to pick up more and more so that the crows
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clinging on to the tops of the trees took flight, that she made it easy on me. That she pointedly listed all the sins she had committed during her long life.
She was eighty-eight. The lines on her face were now the cross-hatchings of fine old porcelain. Her eyes were closed.
Her breathing ragged. I looked at the tops of the empty trees.
There is no excuse to give, I know, so here is what I did: I took the towels with which I had meant to bathe her, and not thinking that near the latticework or by the back fence there might stand a witness, I smashed these downy towels into my mother's face. Once begun, I did not stop. She struggled, her blue-veined hands, with the rings she feared would be stolen if she ever took them off, grabbed at my arms. First her diamonds and then her rubies briefly flickered in the light. I pushed down harder. The towels shifted, and I saw her eyes. I held the towels for a long time, staring right at her, until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died.
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My clues to my mother's life before me were not many. It took me a while to notice that almost all of them—the Steuben glass paperweights, the sterling silver picture frames, the Tiffany rattles that were sent a dozen strong before she miscarried her first, then second, child—were chipped or dented, cracked or blackened in various ways. Almost all of them had been or would be thrown either at a wall or at my father, who ducked with a reflexive agility that reminded me of Gene Kelly tripping up and down the sodden curbs in Singin' in the Ram.
My father's grace had developed in proportion to my mother's violence, and I knew that in absorbing it and deflecting it in the way he did, he also saved her from seeing herself as she had become.
Instead she saw the same reflections of herself that I pored over when I snuck downstairs after dark. Her precious still photography.
* * *
When my father met her, my mother was fresh from Knoxville, Tennessee, and made her living as a showroom model of underwear and support garments. She preferred to say, "I modeled slips." And these were the photos that we had so many of.
Framed black and whites of my mother in better times, wearing black slips or white slips. "That one was eggshell," she might say from the corner of the living room, not having said anything to anyone all afternoon. I knew she was referring to a specific slip in a specific picture, and sensing this, I would choose the white slip I thought could be eggshell. If I got it wrong, the moment would burst—as fragile as a blow bubble glistening in the yard—and she would slump back into the chair. But if I chose right, and I would come to memorize them over time—there was the bone, the ecru, the nude, and my favorite, the rose-petal pink—I would bring the framed photograph to her. Hanging on to the thin cord of her smile, I pulled myself into the past with her, making myself small and still on the ottoman until she told me the story of the photography session or the man involved or the gifts that she had received as partial payment.
The rose-petal pink was my father.
"He was not even the photographer," she would say. "He was a junior water inspector in a borrowed suit with a pocket square, but I didn't know that then."
These were the years of my earliest childhood, when my mother was still powerful, before she collected what she considered the unforgivable flaws of age. Two years short of her fiftieth birthday, she began covering all her mirrors with heavy cloths, and when, as a teenager, I suggested we remove the mirrors completely, she objected. They remained there as she grew infirm.
Her shadowy, silent indictments.
But in the photos of the rose-petal-pink slip, she was still worthy of her own love, and it was this love for herself that I tried to take warmth from. What I knew, I think, without wanting to
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admit it, was that the photos were like the historical documents of our town. They proved that long ago, there had been a more hopeful time. Her smile was easy then, not forced, and the fear that could turn to bitterness had not tainted her eyes.
"He was the photographer's friend," she said. "He was having a big day in the city, and the suit was part of his friend's lie."
I knew not to ask, "What lie, Mom?" Because that took her to a bad place where her marriage was just the long, arduous playing out of an afternoon con between schoolboy friends. Instead I asked, "Who was the shoot for? "
"The original John Wanamaker's," she said. Her face glowed like an old-fashioned streetlamp lit from the inside. Everything else in the room disappeared as if into a dark fog. I did not realize then that there was no place in these memories for the company of a child.
As my mother drifted into the past, where she was happiest, I appointed myself the past's faithful guardian. If her feet looked cold, I covered them. If the light left the room too dark, I quietly crept over and turned on a bookshelf lamp that would cast only a small circle of light—not too big—just enough to keep her voice from becoming a scary shapeless echo in the dark.
Outside, in the street in front of our house, the workmen who had been hired to install the stained-glass windows in the new Greek Orthodox church—green because for some reason this color of glass was cheaper than most—might walk by and make a noise too loud to ignore. When this happened, I would meet the drowsy blank stare that came over my mother with ushering words meant to slip her back to the dream-past.