The Seasons of My Mother

by Marcia Gay Harden

  Hours later, several Goddamn sons of bitches later, many grunts and plenty of laughs later, the near-drowned dancer was bundled up in a moving blanket and laid catty-corner in the Cadillac trunk, ropes still attached and ready for the home stretch. Once we arrived, she was pulled in the red wagon to the backyard, where Mom mixed concoctions of bleach and soap and with a scrub brush began to scrape the mud and gunk off of the tutu, out of her hair, and clear from her scarf. Dad set about designing a stand for her. He bought rebar from the lumber yard, and cement. He poured cement into a box, and sturdied the rebar in the middle of it so the dancer would have a place to stand. He helped Mom bleach the wood to get all the bugs out, a process that took several weeks. They worked well together, and lovingly, and it is one of my finest memories of him helping her. Finally, one weekend afternoon, they stood the dancer up on her toe, and positioned her in the perfect arabesque on the stand. Mom had discovered as she picked at the dancer’s hair that what we thought was a scarf was possibly another, smaller dancer, a child in flowing gauze, arched backward over the dancer’s arm. Now the important discussion was about to take place. Should she stay outside? She was driftwood, after all. Or should she come inside?

  She came inside. She danced into the den and stood en pointe, hovering near the window, where the Japanese vases and old books were on display, where the Greek warrior gazed upon the brass table. She stood poised and posed, keeping the television and my dad company, observing the crochet and flower books of my mom, and dreaming of the day when she would be adorned with flowers and dance her way into an ikebana demonstration my mother would perform at the Smithsonian, and again years later, at the museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

  She has lived a good life, this dancer rescued from the Potomac. My mother has stood watch over her for years, and now Giselle stands watch over my mother. From a corner of the entry hall in her home on the lake in Texas, Giselle greets the neighbors as they come in to pay their respects to my mother. Danny, who helps us repair things at the house, comes to visit. He comes to “fix things that need fixin’,” hands his Texan cowboy hat to Giselle . . . which she politely holds, arms curved over her head, leg pointed straight back under gauze and tutu, until he leaves.

  Giselle cannot rescue my mother as she was once rescued, so she resigns herself to quietly watching over her. Some evenings, when classical music is playing, my mother’s eyes settle slowly on the brown wooden grain. Mom’s eyes study the bark and grainy tutu, and she tilts her head, listens, and closes her eyes. In this moment . . . does Giselle dance? When the small speaker on the counter trills notes of Tchaikovsky and Haydn, does Mom hear those notes and dream of Giselle dancing, and dream of spiraling outward herself with the dancer? In her mind, does Mom arc backward over Giselle’s arms, leap in a grand jeté over neural synapses and empty spaces, dancing in between forgotten movements and long lost memories? The music crescendos, and Mom smiles.

  Where do the thoughts go? Where do the actual memories go? They surface, like the wet brown hand, bobbing through the murk, then disappear again beneath the choppy layers, disappear into the whirlpool synapse. Again a hand surfaces. A thought. A word. A spark of recognition. Lips forming words carefully. I want to rescue my mother with ropes and red wagons, red wagons filled with laughing children, as her memories should be. I want to rescue her with drives in the Cadillac, and trips to the wooden walkway in the marsh where hundreds of “Good eye, Beverly” red-winged blackbirds saucily revealed their red lingerie to our not so sneaky binoculars. I want to rescue her, to free the thoughts so they are only flying upward, only leaping higher, a grand jeté, dancers in a snowy ballet soaring through the sky, the prima ballerina landing happily in a strong lover’s arms, a lover dressed in a dark blue navy uniform, his arms holding the ballerina high, and twirling, twirling, twirling, then gently setting her down again as she ends the dance in a graceful ritual of the reverence, and final swan bow.

  My mother is a bottle of extra virgin olive oil

  MOM WAS ABOUT TO HELP me welcome her eighth grandchild into the world, and I was already two days overdue. “Let’s go out to the beach and pick up trash!” she suggested. “When I was pregnant, my mother always said that walking and bending were the best ways to stimulate contractions!” Mom was in her element. All of her senses were on high alert with pleasure. The sky was a bright cloudless blue, the September day warm, the salty air pungent but refreshing. The orchestra of waves and birdcalls and childrens’ laughter created a lively symphony, and to top it all off, she had a maternal sense of purpose.

  Like Mother Goose and her duckling, we made our way down Venice Beach. Mom paused for a moment from our sandy march, gingerly stepping over the seaweed and plastic detritus, letting her feet sink into the wet sand as she inched closer toward the sea. The sunshine was beating on the white canvas of the many sailboats peacefully navigating the wind, and we watched in silence as a pelican dove its neck-breaking descent toward a school of unseen fish.

  “I’ve always loved the ocean,” Mom breathed. “I love looking out across the vast, uncluttered water. It really lets you stretch your eyes.” She glanced over her shoulder, back the way we had come, pleased to see that on either side of the long line of double footprints, the sand abutting our cool, concave steps was sparkling clean. In our hands, we each clutched white trash bags that whipped violently in the shore wind, and as I waddled to the next plastic bottle on the sand, Mom would cheerfully instruct:

  “Bend!”

  Waddle. Waddle.

  “Bend!”

  Waddle. Waddle.

  “Bend!”

  Waddle. Waddle.

  The salt water caressed my swollen feet and chilled hers, the sound of the waves played like a noisy hum in my head. We walked past sand dollars and broken shells to the next cigarette butt or Coke can, scattering sandpipers that hurriedly returned to pecking at clam bubbles exposed by the receding waves. As seagulls dove and fluttered and cawed about us, Mom practically sang out:

  “Bend!”

  She had arrived three days before, stepping through the exit tunnel from the plane in her red-flowered cotton skirt. She was weighted down by a bag full of kenzan for the Japanese ikebana class that I had begged her to teach while she was visiting me in Venice Beach. The kenzan were heavy, made of steel. They were the spiky flower holders we would use in the bottoms of the vases to create the ikebana triangle, and I was impressed—jumbled up with gratitude and pride—that she had hand-lugged those twenty-odd pounds, along with her big Canon camera, and the usual carry-on bag full of flower magazines, garden ideas, and ikebana books, all the way from Fort Worth. As I had come to learn the hard way, you couldn’t have an ikebana arrangement without a triangle, and it was very hard to have a triangle without the kenzan. Mom knew this, of course, so she had brought various sizes of kenzan for the class to make sure that the line material of the arrangements was accurate, placed at the correct angles, and bent to the precise degrees.

  The points of the three-dimensional ikebana triangle, of course, were called shin, soe, and hikae, or heaven, earth, and man. Or, as she explained to her grandchildren, tall, medium, and small.

  “Think of a ballerina in fourth position,” Mom once told me. “Imagine a line from her toes right through the center of her head and going on up into the sky. Now imagine that her toes are the kenzan. The highest line of our arrangement is the arm above the head, so we will place a branch of line material like a curving arm, just ten to fifteen degrees to one side of the imaginary center line. That’s her arm, reaching to the heavens. The second line is her other arm gracefully curved to the front. So we will place the second branch—which is shorter by a third than the first branch—at a forty-five-degree angle, and curved to the front of the arrangement, also on the same side of the imaginary line. That’s her arm, hovering over earth. And the final point of the triangle is the head of the dancer, so we place the flower, or third and shortest line, at a seventy-five-degree angle toward the base of the arrangemen
t.” That is mankind, the hikae.

  I didn’t really understand it until I started studying the diagrams and line drawings that Mom used to accompany her teaching, but the image of the dancer’s arms above her head always stayed with me.

  “Mooooom!” I squealed at the airport. “Thank you for bringing all those kenzan!” She took one look at my enormous belly and grinned, “Finally!” Pointing to her skirt, she said, “I wore red because in China, it brings good luck for the baby.” I hugged her hard, glad to have her with me, glad to have her quiet voice and soft smile and steady eyes fill me with comforts of the familiar, comforts of “Mother” with a capital M. She had been present at the births of each of her seven grandchildren thus far, and I was thrilled that I would finally get to go through the ritual of hand-holding and rhythmic breathing as my daughter Eulala—my very first child—pushed past my contractions and through the tunnel of my body into the hands of Life. In truth I was nervous: at thirty-nine, I felt old to be having my first child, and my paranoia was starting to get the best of me. Mom had come just in time. On my huge Staples calendar at home, a heart circled the September 9 square in red Magic Marker announcing MOM ARRIVES, and on the next day, another red heart and Magic Marker announced, EULALA DUE!

  Eulala apparently hadn’t gotten the memo. She was quite comfortable in the warm salt water of the womb, and grandmother’s arrival or not, she had no intention of arriving at her “scheduled” time: September 10, 1998. Not a contraction in sight, not a dilation to measure, just a few well-placed kicks were the only indication that a birthing was soon to occur.

  Mom was unflappable. She had given birth to five children herself, sometimes with her mother in attendance, always in a hospital, and always with my father present. I must have been just five when my brother arrived, yet I remember waiting in a hospital corridor with my father, watching him sit, head bowed, hands clasped, and thumbs circling each other. Circling, circling, me sitting next to him, mimicking the circling thumbs as a way of getting close to him, wondering what he was so worried about that he would be circling and circling his thumbs like that. For the most part, fathers weren’t present in the birthing rooms in the 1950s and early 1960s; they were relegated to (or chose?) the corridors, sitting in hallway chairs lined up against the wall, invited in only after the pain and mess and blood had been cleaned up and the baby was presented fresh and rosy with a pink or a blue cap. The father would hold the baby and his wife’s hand, and the mother would be stitched from the episiotomy where they had cut her to make the passage easier (and a bit itchy, as well, because her nether regions had been shaved completely, as was the practice at that time). Ice chips and lime-green hospital Jell-O were delivered on the bed tray, and soon the family was headed home, with the baby clutched in the mother’s arms, no child seats and perhaps no seatbelts, either.

  Five children, two miscarriages, and attendance at the births of many grandchildren, my mom was to be trusted when she said not to worry, that the firstborn was often late, and that I should get used to Eulala being the boss anyway.

  Over the next few days we passed time by taking inventory of my hospital necessities: cute new travel bag holding toothbrush (check!), hairbrush (check!), clean underwear (check!), and pretty nightie (check!). Mom presented me with the short pink satin “receiving jacket” that Mammau, my grandmother on my father’s side, had worn. Mammau had given it to my mother to wear when she gave birth, and Mom had carefully packed it in tissue for me to wear, as well. This jacket was something we passed down from generation to generation, connecting me like a lullaby to my heritage. I showed off my brand-new baby car seat. Mom prepared her camera in case we were in a last-minute rush. My husband, Thaddaeus, made morning coffees and double-checked the crib to make sure the sides slid down easily, and while Mom sipped her black coffee and watched the sunrise over the waves from our oceanfront apartment, he rearranged the bassinet from one spot in our room to another. We were ready.

  The room where Mom slept was lovely. I had decorated it for Eulala in greens and pinks and wheat-colored curtains with English florals swirling gracefully to the ground. I had sewn them on my college graduation present—a Pfaff sewing machine that Mom had given me—and made bed skirts to match, then pillowcases with the wheat floral material and green-checkered material mixed together. Mom was impressed. She was proud that she had given me something useful years before when I had graduated from the University of Texas. I guess you’re never sure if what you give your kid as a symbol of growing up and moving on at graduation will be used, but Mom had given the sewing machine to me, remembering how my sisters and I had sewn gowns for the navy cotillions we had attended when we were in high school. Using an old Singer machine, we had sewn beautiful gowns: dark purple velvet gowns, light blue eyelet lace gowns with rose ribbon trim, polyester cream satin-flowered halter dresses with peach trim, laying out the McCall’s and Butterick or Simplicity patterns on the floor and cutting them out at night after our homework was done. We snuck around and sewed the hems after lights-out was called, knowing Mom could hear the hum of the machine just under the hum of my father’s snoring. She had probably smiled at the thought of her daughters sewing dresses for the cotillions where they would dance with naval cadets in uniform, scratching off names on the little list that was attached to their wrist with a black ribbon. Now Mom walked around Eulala’s room and admired the bed, the curtains, and the diaper bag, and she complimented me on my straight stitches. Then she pulled from her duffel bag a three-foot Raggedy Ann and Andy that a friend in her garden club had hand made just for Eulala, and placed them on the bed near the crib. Room complete!

  In our little Venice Beach enclave we had established a sweet community. We were surrounded by a wonderful group of mostly gay men and some young newlywed couples. The other three apartments in our building housed author Ron, psychiatrist Chris, and activist Victor, and across the street was the fun couple Brad and David. Several streets down were Pete and Sima, then Phil and Mylin, and around the corner an old buddy of mine from New York—funny, funky, talented Nancy Hower. We played volleyball on the beach on the weekends, and we had a lively book club. I was known as “Momsha” even before I got pregnant.

  As the news of Eulala’s delay began to circulate around our little group, the excitement started to build. Mom was a bit shocked—yet tickled, too—at the group’s openness.

  In the mornings Brad would yell over his hedge across the alley to my open window, “HAVE YOU DILATED YET?”

  “NOT YET!” I would yell back.

  Mylin in her beach shorts and brown legs would yell from the volleyball net up to our porch, “ANY CONTRACTIONS?”

  I hollered back, “I DON’T THINK SO . . . I THINK IT’S JUST GAS!”

  Mom and Thad would shake their heads and sip their coffee. My decorum gene seemed to be missing where birthing was involved, and all this yelling and celebration and noise was so . . . public. They were somewhat alike in their gentler, more conservative natures. Both Capricorns. (Horoscope: “Known to seem melancholy and stern because they live by self-discipline and responsibility.” Or as StarScope wrote: “They evaluate everything and they don’t take daring chances without weighing the advantages and disadvantages first.”) Regardless of her star sign, I think for Mom this fever of voices bouncing back and forth across the alley—bouncing with the volleyball on the beach, bouncing with my belly as I waddled down the apartment stairs—was simply unladylike and in danger of being “out of control.” Quite unlike her quiet Dallas upbringing and, later, well-enforced military boundaries, quite unlike the hospital births that were women’s and doctors’ business, and certainly not the business of the entire neighborhood. She was the mom who insisted that we always wear clean underwear, because what if something terrible happened and we suddenly had to go to the hospital? We had better be in clean underwear!

  And now . . . “What if something goes wrong?” she worried. “You would have to explain it to the entire neighborhood!”

 
; Now she was making me anxious: “Well, Mom, in truth if something goes wrong I would have to explain it to the entire neighborhood anyway—I mean it’s not like they don’t know I’m pregnant! I will have to explain it to the entire world, for that matter! I’m the size of a small condominium!” I was starting to panic. “This is not a well-disguised pregnancy, Mom! Do you think something is wrong?” We were looking at the Staples calendar for the hundredth time, as if just by looking at it, by concentrating on the black lined squares, we could will Eulala to arrive on a given day. Mom nevertheless sipped her black coffee gingerly.

  “Well, maybe it’s best not to discuss the nitty-gritty quite so . . . openly.”

  “But it’s funny. All the neighbors are my friends, and they make me laugh. Dilation is funny.”

  She stared at me. Dilation, or lack thereof, was definitely not funny to her.

  “Mmmmhmmm.” she said, pursing her lips slightly. Another sip of coffee.

  “Mom, are you worried?” I squeaked. “Tell me! Do you think something is wrong?”