He looks at the seed packets I have chosen and then looks around the garden for some open space. He squints in the sun as he reads the directions on the back of the flat packet. “Okay,” he says. “Just so you know, some of these are annuals and some are perennials.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
He holds up two of the packets. “These are annuals. These won’t come back once they bloom. They bloom once and then they die.” I nod.
“These are perennials,” he says, holding up the other packets. “These will come in the spring or summer—then go away and come back once a year.”
I think about this.
“Sort of like Mom,” I say, pushing the lettuce seeds down into dark soil. I keep my head down, afraid to see his face, but I can tell he’s looking at me as I smooth out the dirt with my hands. The silence doesn’t feel right.
“It’s also like the lilacs,” I say to break the quiet between us. “Those come back every Easter.”
“Yes, like the lilacs,” he says at last.
One year my mom came when the lilacs bloomed. Another time she came when the corn and lemon cucumbers were ripe. We never see her in the fall. Fall is back-to-school time. The garden begins to thin out, and the squash leaves turn yellow and crisp. We don’t see her in December or at Christmas. The garden is always empty during those cold months.
As I lay out the seed packets on the ground in front of me, I also think about the wildflowers on our back hill—how every spring the bright, orange California poppies come back, as do the lupines, the bluebonnets, the buttercups, and the small purple ones that no one seems to know the name of. Now I know that my mom is the perennial type who visits and blooms once a year. When her petals begin to wilt, she hitchhikes out of town and we don’t know when we will see her next. I want to tell her that someday I will bloom too.
NOW
mementos
Two days in, my mom is still unaware that I am here in Olympia—let alone in the room. She mumbles mixed-up phrases. She opens her eyes once and asks for a “lemon necklace,” then falls back into a deep, medicated sleep.
I imagine Death circling around the house like a black crow, silent in its flight, noisy when it lands.
I sit on the stiff chair next to the bed and watch her eyes shift back and forth beneath her eyelids as if she is scanning the pages of a book. I wonder what she dreams about now. My phone vibrates, telling me I have a voice message from home.
I hold the speaker close to my ear and listen. “Hi, Mama. It’s me, Bella. When are you coming back? I miss you…Ok-aaay, bye.”
“I miss you too,” I whisper.
There is no way I could have brought my family here. My excuse for going alone was that it would be too difficult for Bella and Dominic to see Grandma so ill. But that’s not the whole truth. The reality is I don’t want my children to see me. I am terrified that some hideous part of me could surface when my mom dies. I don’t want to lose control of my carefully guarded self.
Besides, here at my mom’s side, my job is to be a compassionate daughter, not a mother. I can’t imagine tending to my children’s needs right now. How would I nurture them when I am wrapped in my mother’s death? Shouldn’t I focus on being a better daughter to my mom during her last days?
She looks almost peaceful in her medicated state. I lift one of the curls away from her cheek and hold it between my fingers. It is as coarse as the garden twine my dad strung between the pole beans. I am seized by an urgent desire to steal a lock of her hair.
In the bathroom I find a pair of scissors stored in the medicine cabinet. I open the blades near my mother’s cheek and snip the curl away from her. She flinches, as if she can feel the hair being taken—as if it’s painful. But her eyes remain closed. I hold the curl, a capital C, between my fingers and quickly wish that I could put it back. Why do I feel I have to steal pieces of her?
I walk back upstairs with the curl and pick up the antique tin box that I gave my mom just last Christmas. This tarnished tin caught my eye immediately at the flea market. Small and unique boxes have always captured my attention. When I picked this one up, my breath caught at the sight of the letters MM embossed on the front, the initials my mom and I share.
Below the letters were the words “Christmas 1914” and a portrait of a young woman with her hair swept up. The seller explained the story behind the box. Seventeen-year-old Princess Mary of England commissioned nearly a thousand of these tins—packed with sweets, mementos, prayer cards, and cigarettes—to give as Christmas gifts to the soldiers fighting “the war to end all wars.” I find comfort in objects that tell a story and resurrect a specific moment in history. I suppose that is why, like my father, I collect antiques. It didn’t take but a moment to pull twenty-five dollars out of my wallet and buy the Christmas box for my mom.
As a child, when my mother showed up to see us, I took great pride in showing her the antique treasures in my room—my stamp collection, my glass animals, or the new marbles I had found. These were easy and safe things to share with her.
This family trait of collecting pieces of the past sometimes feels like a curse, or maybe just a distraction. But I can’t let it go. Since my mom has not been able to part with anything throughout her illness, I will take Princess Mary’s box home with me and find a place for it on my shelves full of memories. I move my fingertips over our shared initials on top of the tin, open the hinged lid, and place her curl inside. And suddenly I am back in my childhood room, seven or eight years old, surrounded by the treasures that provided a comfort and a steadiness I couldn’t find elsewhere.
THEN
prized possessions
My dad stands in the doorway of my room, watching me as I rub an old dusting sock across the top of my dresser. I keep my back to him intentionally because I want to be by myself this morning and really hate it when he starts telling me how to clean my room. I know how to take care of my things.
“Whatcha up to?” my dad asks.
“Stuff,” I say without turning. I pick the root beer–colored glass horse up off the dresser top and polish its smooth body with the sock.
“I was wondering…” He pauses. “I was wondering if you’d like to come down to the shop with me for a couple of hours.” My dad rents a store now where he has a business stripping furniture and selling antiques. He transforms shabby old chairs, armoires, travel trunks, and writing desks into pieces of furniture fit for a queen.
I do love going to his shop, but not right now.
“No, that’s okay,” I say.
“We could go to Perry’s Deli for lunch. Get a BLT?”
“No thanks, Dad. I just want to stay home today.”
I ought to tell him that I already have my Saturday planned. I have a hundred knickknacks that need dusting and rearranging, and drawers out of order. I need to get out the pink Twinkle polish and shine the brass knobs on my bed too.
I continue to rub the root beer–colored glass horse, focusing on its delicate black hooves and the tiny bubbles trapped inside its see-through body. I silently chant to myself, Go away, Dad. Go away, go away. And not to be mean. I just want to be by myself in my room. This is the place where I can hear myself—a ticktock pulse inside me, the sureness of my footsteps across the floor. Here in my room, I allow myself to time travel and even become other girls if I need to. Here I become the grand-prize winner in the International Room Cleaning Competition, my own private game in my own private world.
The IRCC is a very specific contest in room cleaning and, most importantly, design. The IRCC judges arrive wearing navy-blue suits. They carry clipboards with thick pads of yellow paper. They are immediately impressed with how I have so carefully arranged the things in my room. The striped bed quilt is stretched flat without a single crease. The window ledge is slick with Old English furniture polish—and each freshly polished brass knob on my bed practically wink
s at them.
I hear the judges chat among themselves as they point to my glass animal collection. They like that I have allowed the wild glass tigers to mingle with the domestic fan-tailed birds. They turn and admire the old chandelier crystal that hangs on clear fishing line in the window and makes a thousand rainbow prisms dance around the room when the afternoon sun comes in. They peer into the glass cabinet that holds many of my most valuable knickknacks. They give me high marks on attention to detail and arrangement.
One of the judges asks me to show them my most prized possession.
“There are so many,” I say. I look around, trying to remember what I showed them last time. I want to show them something they haven’t seen before.
I open the lid of the leather box that belonged to my grandma Rita and take out a small red bean no bigger than one of my molars. I hold it up for the judges to examine. Attached to the top of the bean is a tiny rice-colored elephant. I carefully tug at the little carved elephant and the top of the bean comes off—revealing that it is hollow inside. Now comes the best part: I turn the bean upside down and spill into my palm seven of the teeniest elephants imaginable—all the color of rice and as small as typed letters. They lay flat, like sprinkled confetti in my hand. The judges nod their heads in approval over this herd of elephants living inside a hollow red bean.
“Show us more,” they say.
I feel certain that today is a perfect day to win another room-cleaning competition.
“Please…” I hear my dad say faintly. His voice is a whisper, a feather floating across the room toward me.
I turn to my dad framed in the doorway. There are tears in his eyes.
“Please? I need you to come with me.”
I feel something run up my spine and nestle itself underneath my hair. I touch the back of my head where it tingles.
“What’s wrong, Dad?”
“I just don’t want to be alone today. Please?”
The tears change everything. I don’t know how to respond. I stare back down at my glass horse, suddenly wishing I could throw it against the hard surface of the floor and shatter it into jagged pieces. But as much as I want to break something, I can’t. Just like Jamie says, I am a “chicken girl.”
Sometimes I want to be like Jamie. I want to know how it feels to throw glass bottles in street gutters, hurl eggs at Mr. Rivasplata’s car, steal salami from the grocery store, hear the sound of my fist breaking through Sheetrock, and dodge the Novato police. But I can’t. I’m the good one, the quiet one, the one who never gets into trouble. A skinny toothpick holding up the whole house. I am the one my dad counts on.
My carefully planned day slips away. I set the glass horse down and slide it across my dresser like I am making a well-thought-out move on a chessboard. I push its front hooves to the edge of the dresser and there it halts.
“It’s okay, Dad. I’ll go with you.”
“Thanks, darling.”
As I lace my shoes, I think about my dad’s tears and the night he came home and told us his mom had died. I had so many questions about how she died but my dad wouldn’t say. Jamie and Eden hadn’t spent a lot of time with Grandma Rita, but I had. A year or two ago, my dad put me on a plane and I flew by myself from California to LaGuardia Airport to visit her. A driver picked me up to take me to her house in a town called Katonah.
Grandma Rita was in bed when I arrived. After I gave her a hug, she told me she’d always wished for a little girl but she only had sons. I sat beside her and we talked for a bit. Or rather she asked me lots of questions. I was terribly shy. I had so many thoughts that I couldn’t get out of my mouth: What was I going to do while I was here? Why hadn’t my brothers come? Why was she staying in bed? Where was I going to sleep?
I spent that night in the upstairs room, listening to the sound of the cicadas and the attic window rattling. What I remember most vividly about my visit is peering into her dining-room cabinet filled with beautiful china and glass objects. A red swan, hand-painted plates, and an ornate emerald egg perched on a gold stand.
When Grandma Rita died, my dad’s tears startled me but they made sense. He was going to miss his mother. I’m guessing that my dad is upset now because his girlfriend broke up with him a few days ago. He’s had a lot of girlfriends, but he never picks the marrying kind. Usually they are much younger than him and not interested in having three instant kids. Not that we’re interested in a young mom who’s not our mom anyway.
When my dad has a steady girlfriend, I feel like I can take a huge, deep breath and slip away from always having to pay attention, always trying to keep the peace. I hate being the only girl in a house of boys.
On the way to his antique shop, we stop at Perry’s Deli and buy two Pepsis and BLTs.
My dad’s shop is packed with antique furniture angled in every direction. I walk through the maze of desks, dressers, tables, cabinets, armoires, old-fashioned barber chairs with red velvet upholstery, and shelves full of green and pink Depression glass. The antique medical cabinets have thirty-five skinny oak drawers in different sizes made for doctors’ scalpels and tools. I could hide a lot of treasures in a cabinet like this. I’d love to show it to the judges of the room competition.
But I can tell that I’m going miss out on the International Room Cleaning Competition, and the IRCC judges are going to pick someone else to win the grand prize today. I’m not certain when my mom will come next, but when she does, I’m going to make sure that my room is the best and most interesting place she’s ever seen. She’s going to be amazed—just like the judges of the IRCC.
NOW
between paper and pen
My aunt Joanna taps on the bedroom door. “I’m going into town for an hour or so. Do you want to come with? You might find a treasure at a post-Christmas sale to bring back to the kids.” She’s right. I’ll need to bring something back to Bella and Dominic. But I can’t focus on that right now.
“I think I’ll stay here,” I say.
“You doing okay?”
“Yeah. So-so.”
“It’s just hard, isn’t it? There’s not a lot we can do, except be here with her.”
I nod. “I’d feel better just staying here.” She smiles in a way that tells me she understands. I watch from the upstairs window as she starts the car and drives down the gravel road.
I’m glad for time alone. It’s deeply wired in me. The long stretches of time that I spent in my room as a young girl balanced me. In my room, the world felt small and manageable. Whenever the shouting between my dad and brothers escalated, I had a place to hide. And when Eden and Jamie fought after school (which seemed like every day), the pitch of Eden’s piercing screams kept me in my room where I was safe. Jamie always preyed on Eden in the absence of adult supervision until he cried out “Mercy.” I felt sorry for Eden but I didn’t know how to protect him.
As a mother now, I struggle to find a similar kind of solitude—and I desperately need it. I’d be more balanced, more patient, less stressed out with my children and husband if I gave myself a time-out in a room of my own. But I can’t just say, “Hey kids, I need to go spend a couple hours—or a day—alone in my room.”
Whenever I can, I steal stretches of time to be by myself. When my children were younger, I’d sometimes strap them into their car seats at night and drive until I could hear the silence of them sleeping. If they didn’t fall asleep right away, I’d turn up the radio to quell the anger percolating inside me. I was tired and desperate for time to think, to be, to breathe by myself for a minute. In those moments, I couldn’t help but resent my mom even more, imagining her driving off alone to wherever she wanted to travel after she left us, never having to think twice about anyone but herself.
Before I left home to come here to Olympia, I came across notes I’d scrawled in journals. These were thoughts that I intended to keep to myself.
Mom,
There are times I wish I could flee too. Even when the kids are their worst, I do not strike them. I never will. As I carried Dominic’s tired and angry body up the stairs tonight, I felt the heaviness of love. This is the burden I choose. You know, Mom, you did not do the same. You left—you took the easy road out. I wish I could trust you. Sometimes I wish I had that mom—someone I could have curled up next to and felt completely safe.
Now, finally alone in the upstairs office bedroom, I sit and pull open the bottom drawer of my mom’s metal filing cabinet. Inside a manila folder, I discover a colored-pencil drawing that is without a doubt my brother Jamie’s work. It is an intricately drawn fish, a marlin I believe, with the word “MOM” woven into its black and blue scales. Jamie is the artistic one; he’s never been able to stop drawing. That’s what he did on the borders of his seventh-grade math homework papers instead of solving the problems and on every small scrap of paper he found in the house. The backs of the PG&E bills and the phone bills were covered with red-and-black ink-pen drawings. He even drew on the unfinished Sheetrock in his bedroom closet.
Much of what he chose to draw was strange. Creatures that were half-fish, half-men. Devil faces with distorted tongues and foreheads. Arms floating in the sea. Fish with sharp, vicious teeth. Men with scars all over their bodies. Hearts, bleeding or struck by lightning. But sometimes what he drew was beautiful. A rainbow trout jumping out of calm waters. A fish swimming inside another fish. Or this marlin decorated with a hundred shimmering scales. But Jamie didn’t always like his drawings. He’d get mad and crumple them up or turn something nice into a screaming man with needles sticking out of his body.
I was jealous of how well Jamie could draw. I could only manage to draw flowers and stick people. Eden couldn’t have cared less about Jamie’s drawings. He was more interested in building model rockets and dissecting old circuit boards and CB radios. I remember my dad telling Jamie he was going to flunk out of school if he didn’t shape up and stop goofing off with his doodling. But Jamie was so good with a pen that he could change his grades from Fs to Bs on his report card (at least until the parent-teacher conferences came up and my dad discovered the truth).
Pieces of My Mother Page 5