Pieces of My Mother

by Melissa Cistaro

  “My mom lives in Washington. The state,” I tell her.

  “Oh,” she says. “My house is that brown and white one at the end of the court.”

  We pass Carmen La Goy’s silver bike thrown down on the sidewalk outside her house. A lot of yelling in Spanish is coming from inside the house.

  “There’s always screaming at Carmen’s house,” Tracy tells me. “I’m not supposed to walk on this side of the street anymore.” Tracy suddenly veers across the road and I am a step behind her.

  “So where does your mom live?” I ask.

  “My mom is dead,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say. I keep my eyes down on her shiny white shoes.

  “Yeah. You want to know how she died?” She sounds almost perky all of a sudden.

  “Alright,” I say, stepping carefully over the cracks.

  “She hung herself on my fifth birthday. Right in our garage. With a rope.”

  The sidewalk turns wavy, back and forth like the lines are trying to trick me. I want to turn around and run. But it’s too late. Tracy opens the front door to her brown and white house and calls out to her dad.

  Her dad is old, way older than my dad. He has silver hair and deep creases across his forehead. He’s holding a curvy pipe in one hand, while the other hand is pushing a wooden spoon deep into a cooking pot on the stove. The smell of meat and musty pipe smoke fills the kitchen.

  “This is Melissa, Daddy,” Tracy says.

  He says hello with the pipe still pushed in his mouth and keeps stirring the pot. Tracy gets on her toes to look into the pot.

  “What’s in there?” she asks.

  “Stew,” he says. Then the room is quiet, except for a fan whirring above the stove. I want to look into the pot and see what the stew looks like because I wonder if Tracy’s dad put dumplings in his stew. Stew isn’t stew without thick, gummy dumplings floating on the surface.

  Tracy motions for me to follow her down the hallway. Just like she said, she has a shelf full of statue horses—more than I have ever seen. There are colorful posters of horses thumbtacked on her walls. She has a bedspread with pink horseshoes on it.

  I’d like to keep my mind on all the horses, but all I can think about is what Tracy said about her mom. Why would her mom hang herself? On Tracy’s birthday? Maybe Tracy Jane is one of those kids like Eden who lies and makes up stories sometimes.

  We talk about horses for a little while. She has a palomino with a gold bridle that I love more than any of the others in her collection. It’s the one I’ve always wanted. But I’m not a very good guest at her house. I keep thinking about her mom. I have a terrible picture in my mind of what she looked like when she was hanging. My stomach is twisted up like the towels when they come out of the washing machine.

  Tracy perks up again. “You want to see the garage where my mom hung herself?”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  She looks very disappointed with me and grabs the palomino horse out of my hand. “You have to, Melissa, because I say so and besides I’ve got more horse things in the garage.”

  She stands up, and I feel so small and out of place sitting on the floor of her bedroom. I look at the palomino horse dangling from her hand, and I know that I am never going to have one like that.

  She tells me that we have to sneak past her dad in the kitchen. But as soon as Tracy starts to open the side door to the garage, her dad comes toward us with the long spoon still dripping with stew. “How many times?” he yells. “Out. Now!”

  I know now that what Tracy said about her mom is true. I see it in her skittish brown eyes and I hear it in the rattle of her dad’s voice. It is horrible and scary, and I don’t want to be here.

  “I have to go home now,” I say.

  Tracy gallops like a horse down the hallway and slams her bedroom door shut. Her dad goes back to stirring the pot on the stove. There are no dumplings in that stew; I don’t even have to look.

  I see myself to the front door. I want to run down the street, but I measure my steps, careful not to step on the cracks. I pass Carmen’s bike, still out on the sidewalk. I think about her riding that bike in the blue-and-white-checkered dress on picture day, and how things are not always as they seem. I think about the pink lotion that Mrs. Holman covers her hands with every day. I think about Tracy’s mom, and I wonder what she was wearing that day in the garage.

  As I cross onto Center Road, there is no road I would rather be on right now. I don’t want to live on Storybook Court or one of those cul-de-sacs, or on the same street as Tracy Jane and Carmen La Goy. For now, the big yellow house off Center Road is just fine with me.

  NOW

  naked

  I’ve lost my sense of time here at my mom’s blue farmhouse. I wait, I eat, I hide, I wait. I sit next to her, I read. I drift off to sleep with her letters hidden beneath the bed. I wake, I read. There is no logical sequence to my mom’s letters and dabbles. Why does she refuse to date anything? I need order right now. As I read through more, I’m piecing together a patchwork quilt of papers and trying to stitch them all together. There must be some secret sewn into the edges here or a dark thread that will lead me closer to understanding her.

  I find a card she never sent that is addressed to me, or Lou-lah, as she liked to call me sometimes.

  My Dear Lou-lah,

  As yet, things are uncertain about the future. I long to be with you and will do all that I can to make that happen. In the meantime this card, although not too well designed, expresses a bit of my feelings. I DO want the rainbow to touch your shoulder always. May you be surrounded by all the colors to light your way. I love you, sweets—XOXO, keep it in mind.

  The first time I saw the series of Xs and Os at the bottom of one of the letters she sent to me growing up, I didn’t know what they meant. Was it some kind of code that I needed to figure out? Our live-in at the time explained that the Xs were kisses and the Os were hugs. I liked the symbols she was sending.

  Back at home, I have a nine-by-twelve envelope that contains each of the letters my mother sent me when I was growing up. Though she rarely saw us, she sometimes sent us cards and letters. The postmarked envelopes are from different towns, the stationery from different stores. Some letters were written on light-blue airmail paper, others on small, lined sheets with perforated edges, and a few on white butcher paper from the time my mom lived with the meat cutter. Many of her letters are written with a black cartridge pen on opaque paper—“onion-skin parchment,” she liked to call it. A few are typed—those are from the later years.

  I prefer the letters written in her beautiful black ink. As a child, I wanted nothing more than to have handwriting like hers—something between cursive and calligraphy and print. So uniquely her, lovely and free-spirited.

  I remember getting her letters and trying to copy her handwriting, but I could never match it. It was like she had the exclusive rights to the style. But I changed the way I scripted my letters anyway, in hopes that someday my hands would move across the page in the same way hers did.

  Because I usually couldn’t see her in person, I fell in love with her words, the ink, the feel of onion-skin paper, and the way she phrased things in clever ways. She was smart with words—New York Times crossword puzzle smart. She played with made-up words and double meanings. There were often words—even whole sentences—that I couldn’t quite understand, but I didn’t mind because the words were meant for me.

  Now I’m finding these passages from a long-lost story. Her letters never sent—and addressed to no one in particular.

  Hallo!

  I was a bit startled when I woke last night with regular pains, but they abated by morning. I saw the doctor last week, and though he is a wonderful fellow, I’m furious at him. I was counting on having a nice little baby in August, but he says that he counts on an “oversize baby in September.” Happy days. I’ll fool him—th
ough my weight is really out of control. I try to diet, but my appetite knows no bounds. Actually, I am keeping down somewhat, but every ounce shows in an “unpregnant fashion.” Our family physician has promised to rid me of all the ill effects of my frequent childbearing—broken capillaries and what not—and is awaiting J.’s word on making certain I don’t get pregnant again. I don’t voice my opinions to J., but I certainly am tired, tired, tired of bulging bellies and messy diapers and no-no’s. I love my babies, but I am sort of swamped. My “light” is the realization that it is possible that I can have my family, be through with the constant pressure babies give, and still be 25 or 26.

  She’s surely referring to my arrival here since I came into world on August 21. Perhaps from the womb, I heard her wishes for me to come early. There’s a nagging question though. She’s clearly overwhelmed but not to the breaking point. Was I the one that pushed her past the point of no return and caused her to come undone?

  Impulsively, I shut the door of the bedroom and strip off all of my clothes. I stand naked in front of a full-length mirror, daring to see my body exposed. I hold onto such shame and hate when I look at my body. I don’t know when this first began. My long and lean torso comes from my mother. My petite stature, from my grandmother Rita who had narrow hips and birdlike bones.

  The structure of my cheekbones and the arches of my eyebrows come from my other grandmother, the glamorous Joan Igou, who danced on Broadway and died too young. And from my father comes the distinct slope of my Irish nose. Several times, my mother suggested I have it “bobbed” as soon as I turned eighteen because it was going to grow too long on my small face.

  I used to think that my eyes were an interesting shade of blue like that of a blue-winged teal, but they have turned gritty and gray. My golden hair, now wavy and unruly. And then there is the birthmark on the small of my back that is the shape of a tiny country. France, says my husband. And these breasts have never been big enough, except for the years I nursed my son and daughter. (Then, they were full and fantastic!)

  In light of my mom’s bodily angst, I want to accept this naked armor of mine—its vitality, endurance, and strength. But here and now, all that’s apparent is that my body, like my mother’s, will someday fail me. Where is the girl with long, blond hair and bright eyes, the one who could gallop a horse full speed and ride unaccompanied through the woods at night? Where is the girl who once ran naked and unashamed into the ocean?

  NOW

  tethered

  I wake up groggy and unclear about what day it is and if I’m still in Olympia. I’ve had a horrible dream. In the dream, I see my mom up close—but physically we are a thousand miles apart. She is standing on a hardwood floor wearing yellow. That should have been a clue that I was dreaming. She hates yellow.

  I call out to her, “Mom!”

  She nods and acknowledges me from a distance—a thousand miles away, yet somehow in view. She watches me as I hunch over and clutch my stomach. I am bleeding. There are cramps deep inside me and I feel something slipping out of me. Like afterbirth or bits of placenta—like the wobbly pieces of thick blood that came out of me in the days after my children were born.

  But when I see her face, I see that she is in pain too. She also is doubled over. I try to understand what is happening between us. Then I realize what is coming out of me: it is her liver, in pieces, sliding out of me. I squeeze my legs together to keep it all in. But the pieces are thick, slippery, and filled with veins and blood.

  My mom’s diseased liver is coming out of me. I am birthing it, delivering it. I shove my hands between my legs to push it back. But the contractions are too strong. We are a thousand miles apart and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

  Shaking myself fully awake, I hear voices downstairs, coming from my mom’s room. I put on the same sweater and jeans I’ve worn for the past three days and go down to hear the hospice nurse speaking loudly. When I turn the corner, I see my mom propped up with pillows.

  She looks at me and says, “Hi, darlin’.”

  Am I still in the dream? She has color in her face. Her eyes look blue. She recognizes me for the first time since I arrived. She seems to have come back from the edge of death.

  “Your mom is just amazing,” the hospice nurse says to me. “She looks great today.”

  My heart is nervous and kicking. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Mikel, you’ve rallied!” my aunt says.

  Rallied, I think to myself. What does that mean? This is the nurse who said Mom wasn’t going to make it to the new year, and now my mom is sitting up in bed looking like she’s going to ask for a cigarette and a plate of prime rib.

  I watch the nurse take my mom’s vital signs and rub her feet. My emotions are racing around the room, uncertain of where to rest. She recognizes me. This is closer to how I remember her looking the last time I was here in Olympia.

  I want to say that I’m relieved and filled with joy that my mom has rallied, but I am confused. My best friend Alison’s words race back to me: “You only get one chance to hold your mother’s dying hand.” When she said this to me after I called to tell her the news about my mom on Christmas Day, I knew I had to come. Alison’s mom died when we were growing up, and Alison was there in the hospital holding her mom’s hand when she stopped breathing. I want this last moment. Yet I promised my daughter that I’d be back by New Year’s Eve to welcome in the new year as well, and that date is creeping closer and closer. How long does a rally last? I can’t stay here indefinitely.

  I transfer my gaze to the collection of colored bottles on the windowsill beside my mother’s bed, ashamed to make eye contact with anyone in the room. Afraid that I am transparent. I don’t want her to know that I have her letters and was reading them. There must be some reason for her to have woken up like this. Does it mean that I will have the opportunity to connect with her before she dies? Could it be that she woke up to tell me the things she has always wanted to say? Is there some treasure she will put in my hands?

  My mom’s little dog Sparky—a Toto look-alike—parks herself near my feet. I reach down and rub her black and gray fur. I recall how my mom said she wanted to give Sparky away a few years back.

  “She’s too needy,” my mom told me.

  “I should leave Sparky here at your house,” she said to Bella on a brief visit to Los Angeles.

  Bella stared at her grandmother in disbelief. “Why would you do that?”

  “Oh, she might like living here with you.”

  “But you’re her mom. She would miss you too much.”

  Sensible Bella, calling it right. But I had to wonder if there was a pattern emerging. Every time that something seemed to become a responsibility in my mom’s life, she dumped it or ran away. Was that perhaps why she left us as well?

  The hospice nurse talks fast and louder than anyone else in the room, as if she is the announcer on a game show. I am irritated by her cheerfulness. She parcels out handfuls of colorful pills into their tiny compartments. Why did I believe her proclamation about how much time my mom had left?

  I sit near my mom, lean over, and give her a cautious hug. She’s feels light in my arms—a tumbleweed I have been chasing for years. She asks me how the “kidlets” are. Maybe I should have brought them so she could see them one last time.

  My mom says she’d like to go outside to feed some apples to the ponies. “Sure!” replies the hospice nurse. The thought of walking next to her through the crisp winter air lifts my spirits.

  But after she sits up awhile longer and doesn’t succeed in swallowing anything other than her medication, it’s clear that the journey across the yard to the ponies will be too strenuous.

  As soon as the nurse helps guide my mom into the bathroom and closes the door, I run upstairs to put the letters back in the file cabinet so no one can tell I’ve been snooping around. I wish I knew what to say to my mom now that she is awake. I a
m confronted by the familiar distance between us and the way I suddenly become smaller in her presence. Her personality has always been bigger, more theatrical and colorful than mine.

  Unable to bring myself to go back downstairs just yet, I call home but there is no answer. I’ll wait until I hear the hospice nurse shut the door and drive away from here. I am ashamed that I am not downstairs right now, spending every moment with my mom. Instead, I’m alone again, looking for something to ease the reality of what is happening. I reach back into the folder of letters never sent.

  I must sit—even though I can’t find a proper pen—pencil will have to suffice while I wait for my pie’s fate in the oven. If I don’t watch it, Eden will come toddling off the potty and gobble up my Cuba Libre before I can say Phhftt. And then he’ll be sauced—in as much as a Cuba Libre is a hoity-toity for rum and Coke—same type pseudo as Shirley Temple—and will be more of a pill than ever. He is off his bottle but back on his tranquilizers. Poor little creature is either deadpan or flooded with emotion. He got so excited in the kiddie pool this afternoon that he just lay flat down on his back and nearly drowned. So funny—he was scared to death of the thing at first but now he’s like a bloomin’ porpoise. He charges like a bull elephant and flings himself headfirst into a foot of water. This can hurt but he couldn’t care less—even about scraping his shins on the side which he inevitably does.

  Eden was put on tranquilizers as a toddler? This is utterly distressing, especially considering how Eden has struggled with substance abuse for much of his life since then. Did he get hooked as a little boy? While I understand the desire to calm an overactive child at whatever cost, I cannot imagine what my mom was thinking. Wasn’t she the one that might have benefited from something to ease her own anxiety and depression?