Poor Your Soul

by Mira Ptacin

  Mom thought the idea of electrocuting Gonzo was cruel, so after the fence was installed, Dad strapped on one of the shock collars around his neck and patrolled the perimeter of our yard to assure her that the electric shock couldn’t be that bad. From the kitchen window, we all watched as Dad tiptoed around the grass, listening for beeps and buzzes. Eventually, he walked right through the front gate with the band still around his bare neck just to prove to his wife that the jolt was puny and bearable and humane, even though later Dad confided in me that the shock hurt like a sonofabitch.

  “Ready, Mom?” I ask and she presses her lips together and inhales the cold air. She dyed her hair for our visit—this time it’s vampire black with two hot-pink brush strokes along her temples—and she’s wearing serious red lipstick, a bold shade of scarlet. Always wear lipstick. That’s one of Mom’s mantras—always wear lipstick, even if you’re only going for a hike. She always looked good.

  “I’m always ready. How far should we go?” she asks.

  I suggested a family walk around St. Mary’s Lake but Mom said it would be just the two of us. We step out of the garage, down the driveway, through our front gate, and stroll along the edge of a crusty, beige-colored lawn. Our neighbor’s lot. The Crandalls. Duane and Stella Crandall are both dead. Duane passed when I was eleven, and Stella died just a few years ago after smoking for nearly forty-five. Now their house belongs to their daughter, Duana, Stella and Duane’s only child. The Crandalls’ yard looks just as drab and lifeless as Stella’s rock garden.

  I can barely remember Duane, neither his face nor his funeral, only that several uniformed men shot a cannon at his memorial service and that he was soft-spoken, was always wearing denim overalls and always fixing something, but I remember Stella. As a child, I loathed Stella, and could never figure out what my mother saw in her. Why was she was so nice to her? At Stella’s funeral, our neighbors all made speeches about how nice she was, how she was the bedrock of our neighborhood and all that hogwash, but all I could think about was how each year Stella was the first to set up her garage sale and how much of a grouch she was, always yelling at us kids for stealing the spiky chestnuts out of her backyard for our chestnut wars, which Stella hated. She smoked Merit 100’s on a bench in her rock garden, and read romance novels—paperbacks with pictures of burly men on mountain peaks and big-breasted women clinging to their ankles. And whenever Mom couldn’t find a babysitter, she’d send Jules and Sabina and me to the Crandalls’, where we’d get stuck clipping newspaper coupons and watching soap operas with Stella until Mom telephoned and we were released back home, reeking like ashtrays.

  “Were you aware Stella was a poet?” Mom asks.

  “No way. That old grump?”

  “Really, Mira. After Stella died, her daughter found hundreds of her poems,” she says. “Stella was a clandestine poet. A secret artist.”

  I had only been in the Crandalls’ house once since Stella passed and Duana moved in. It was the very first day of the year, New Year’s morning. The night before, just before the clock struck midnight, I had been outside taking out the compost when I found a cat in the middle of our yard, dead as a rock. Mom knew exactly whose cat it was: Duana’s, a tabby that she had recently rescued and adopted. The next morning, the first day of January, she sent Dad to go deliver the news. Before he left the house, Dad knocked on my bedroom door, woke me up by saying, “Mira, would you like to learn how to tell someone something they loved very much is very much dead?”

  On the way to the Crandalls’, Dad compared his technique of breaking the news to the act of ripping off a Band-Aid. “You just gotta do it. None of that, ‘I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news’ bologna,” he said. “You just gotta be quick, and to the point.” It was good advice. And so we trudged over to the Crandalls’ property, up their stone sidewalk, and pressed the doorbell. And before she could even say “Happy New Year” from behind the screen door, Dad just came out and said it: “Duana, your cat is dead.”

  We buried the cat right afterward, right behind Mom’s compost pile and beneath the three pine trees where we buried all our pets that had passed. The ground was frozen, but we went for it anyway, with two spade shovels and lingering guilt. About four feet later, we set the stiff cat in a black garbage bag, covered the hole, put a recognizable rock on top of it, and when we were all finished, I asked my dad if maybe we should say something. “I guess maybe we should,” he answered, and after meditating on it for several seconds, my father said, “Cat? We respect you.”

  We pass the Crandalls’ driveway, and with great effort I conjure up some words to represent the feelings I am itching to share, knowing that they will come out jumbled and all wrong, then gracelessly release them:

  “Mom? How does one feel better? I mean, what was it like for you after Jules died? How long did you feel bad? When did you start to feel better, or heal, or move on but not forget, you know?”

  Mom points to a rectangle of dry, patchy grass behind the Crandalls’ house. “It’s such a shame,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “It’s such a shame no one takes care of Stella’s garden anymore.”

  I continue clumsily, “I mean, it’s just that I am always so frustrated and angry and gloomy, like I just left a funeral or a wake, and I’m always so irritated and livid and tense, it’s getting worse,” I ramble. “How do I feel better? I just can’t feel better.”

  She wrinkles her nose. My insides instantly stiffen from the extra feeling that I have said too much too fast. Mom stares hard, her eyes fixed on something I can’t see, and, in words as thin as a pastry shell, she says, “Do you know what precious treasure I kept after Jules die?”

  “No,” I say, this time delicately.

  “His big shoe,” she sighs. “In back of my closet, I keep Julian’s big gym shoe he wore on de day when he died,” she tells me, then walks forward.

  Ghosts of our past have been taking up residence in every yard we pass. The Ferraris’ house, the Smiths’ house, the Kunitzers’, the Millers’. Carol Miller was still breeding the Samoyeds, the white, puffy dogs that pull sleds in places like Siberia. We walk in tense silence.

  “After Jules die,” she finally says, “I’d cry and pray. Pray that Jules was safe, that somehow he’d give me a signal in some way that he is okay. I prayed to God but never got angry at God.” She explains that she never believed God was this guy who had this idea that Julian would be killed, like a manager who meddles in our lives. “After Jules died, I still believed that God existed. My faith was that everything that is beautiful is the work of God. That there is no chaos in the world unless there is man-made chaos; that often, people just mess this world up a lot.” She tells me that we are here to make our own decisions, we have free will. That she prayed to God for faith and peace, and with prayer, she found peace. “The peace was probably self-induced,” she says. “But still, I have faith.”

  As we walk, Mom tells me that a while after that, she saw Jules. She dreamt that she woke up and saw Julian alive. He was sitting at a picnic table somewhere in some kind of park or garden, some kind of place with bright greens and blues, a place that looked like paradise. Mom and Jules sat across from each other, holding hands. They just sat there, looking at one another and smiling. Then Jules said, plain and simple, Mom, I have died. I am in a great place. Don’t cry. I am happy.

  “That is when I started to think about him differently. I let go and gave in to the truth.” She allowed it to exist, both within her and separate from her. She stopped fighting. That’s about the time she started to heal.

  As we advance past Carol’s tall, brown fence, we smell dog poop. For as long as I can recall, that stink has always seemed to magically rise up from behind the dogs’ breeding cages, over the shrubs, and into the street, never to leave the area. And I have never heard Carol’s dogs not barking. As kids, whenever my sister and I tried to sneak out on weeknights, howls would crescendo once we app
roached the Miller’s house, and we had to either make a run for it or turn back home as fast as we could before we got caught with our pants down and were grounded for weeks. We pass the Lindows, the Burkes, and the Waters homes. Behind a stack of bricks at the front of his gate, I see Mr. Waters shining his red convertible with a waxed rag. Even though Mom and I have always had our own interpretations of each neighborhood landmark, our sentiments about Mr. Waters have always been the same.

  “His place looks like a Chinese restaurant,” I say.

  “I concur. I don’t understand why he builds that huge brick wall next to his driveway.”

  “It’s to keep you pesky immigrants out, Mom.”

  The two of them never got along, and I can testify it’s because Mom is a foreigner. Mr. Waters never welcomed her into the neighborhood; he did the opposite, treated her as if she weren’t a real person just because she wasn’t a “real” American. So many times, so many people figured my mother was stupid just because she talked a little different or arranged words in her own kind of way. Sometimes people would speak louder and slower, even yell as if my mom were hard of hearing, or dumb.

  “He hates Polish people,” Mom says.

  “But he likes to Polish his sports cars,” I tease.

  In Chicago, after she’d first met Dad, and for a long time after they got married, she felt like an outsider in her new family. She thought that Dad’s sisters, Mary Madeline, Mary Virginia, and Mary Joan hated her. She said Dad’s mother was cold to her; and she thought his parents only reluctantly came to her wedding, which she paid for with all the savings she had been storing since she immigrated to Chicago. She thought it was all because they wanted Dad to marry an American woman, not a Polish woman. I think it’s because she never held back from speaking her mind, no matter the time or place or language. But we all have our own interpretations.

  “What was it like with your mom, Mom?” I ask and then remember: questions like this are never simple ones that elicit direct answers from her. Questions about Mom’s childhood always stir up a hearty stew of memories, painful ones, recollections of things that drove her out of Poland. And no matter what, no matter where she has moved, Mom has never been able to get away from what she ran from. And no matter what questions I ask, I will never be able to totally understand. Her relationship with her past has always been a push-pull, love-hate kind of relationship, and it will probably be like that for the rest of her life. My fingers start to cramp, so I move to Mom’s right side and take her other hand.

  “My mother taught me what is essential: You take good care of yourself. You take good care of you husband. You take good care of you family, and you know how to cook,” she says as she accepts my hand.

  I think hard about Andrew, my brand-new husband who is back in the kitchen of my childhood home, preparing a pomegranate and kale salad for tonight’s feast. I think about what Andrew was doing before that—earlier in the day, when I caught a glimpse of him from the living room window. Andrew had taken Gonzo outside with him to do some yard work. While the big dog dragged small sticks, Andrew voluntarily reengineered Dad’s woodpile, clearing rotted logs and restructuring the stack of firewood next to Jules’s dogwood memory tree.

  While Andrew was outside at the woodpile, I was in the kitchen stuffing Cornish hens and listening to Mom talk on the phone with her brother Matteo. She was speaking quickly, and in Polish. I barely paid attention—the only words I caught were dobry, żądza, and diarrhea, but I could tell they were arguing.

  Mom was taking care of Uncle Matteo yet again, and I couldn’t understand why. In Poland, after their parents’ death, Mom got stuck taking care of her brothers because the only things that seemed to matter to them at the time were tall women, downhill skiing, and sports cars. But then she left Poland, and she thought she’d said goodbye to all, that but she hadn’t. Everything just seemed to follow her, or maybe she just felt sorry and let it back in, again and again.

  Over the years, he was up and down all the time. Divorced twice. He was behind on mortgage payments and refused to sell his Jaguar to pay for his three children’s tuitions. At first, Mom said he was like a badly behaved child that needed to be disciplined. Then Mom said he was sick. And apparently, Uncle Matteo got sicker and sicker until, one day, Mom said he was a manic-depressive person who needed help badly, and for some reason, she couldn’t let her brother fall. What he needed was his family, and their love. And so my mother and his ex-wife Mary, and their children Mark and Maya stepped up, and put him on the road to recovery. The family regrouped and reunited. Love is patient. Love is kind.

  Life ain’t fair, I think to myself. Never has been, and never will be. Those three words became the mantra Mom and Dad poured into our heads since before we could even stand on our own fat baby legs. Life wasn’t fair. It was a good thing to be reminded of, and it was even better to be warned, so you could be ready for whatever hit you when you least expected it. Life ain’t fair. I had got it back then, but back then I didn’t realize that my parents weren’t always referring to me and my problems when they said it.

  “Besides,” Mom chimes, “I never got a chance to get to know my mother once I became a grown woman. After I became a woman, she died.”

  “Mom?” I want to ask her what she thinks of her daughter. If she is mad at me, if she has forgiven me, and I’m afraid of her reaction. But I need to know. “What would you have done if you were me?” I ask. “I mean, with the pregnancy? In the end?”

  “I’m not a believer in abortion,” she says, and I tense up. “In July, when you called and told me what doctors found, my first thought was for you to wait and see. I thought, Miracles can happen.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” I feel defensive, and she picks up on it.

  “Wait, Mira. Listen. When doctors told us there was no hope, and it made sense your baby wouldn’t live . . . well . . .”

  I hold my breath. I want an answer because I didn’t know what the right thing to do was at the time. I still don’t. But deep inside me, I wanted to feel forgiveness. I felt ignorant. I was worried that I hadn’t changed much since I was seventeen. My selfish behavior before Jules died, the loss of my baby, I was afraid that, deep down, my mom held these things against me. I was worried that I kept doing things over and over again that made her resent me. That I was a bad person and couldn’t help it. I wanted her to love me, no matter what. I wanted to be accepted and understood, not to stand out.

  “What would you have done?” I ask and hold my breath while my heart beats in a state of suspended animation for what feels like eternity.

  “I think that if I were in de same story,” she says gently, “I presume I would have done de same.”

  The same thing?

  “You are strong,” she tells me, and the affirmation makes me swell. I feel light, as if an invisible burden has been lifted.

  I want to talk more about it. I ask her more questions, and she does the same with me. She explains her views: If there was no chance at life, if the fetus couldn’t survive, she wouldn’t have delivered either because of the trauma and pain of the delivery.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  She says she wouldn’t be able to cope. If there is no hope, there is no point.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I see ‘Right to Life’ in Catholic Church,” she says, “but there are other parts church is forgetting: death penalty, immigration, eldery care, poverty. So many people without medicine, without health care, without love. So many ‘rights to life’ the church does nothing about.”

  We start down the hill, past the Hamiltons, past the Redmans, past the Benkes. We turn the bend around Jukas’s house. Two thick, stone pillars frame his driveway, standing alone and unconnected to any kind of fence or gate. I look down the asphalt path for Jukas’s car.

  Jukas graduated from college the same year that I did, but I left for Maine and he stayed with his
parents, camped out in their shag-carpet basement, and mixed drugs, which he always pushed onto all the other kids around the lake. Once, when I was home for Christmas, Jukas gave me and Joey Kunitzer a bag of dried herbs called Salvia divinorum. I had no idea what it was. “Merry Christmas,” he said and explained that he boiled the herbs down to make their medicinal qualities more concentrated and potent, and that if we smoked it we’d go straight through a rabbit hole. I told Joey Kunitzer that I wouldn’t be touching any shit called saliva and Joey told me that it wasn’t saliva, but Salvia, and it was legal. “It’s called ‘the sage of the seers,’” Joey said. “And it’ll make you shit stars.” So we took the Salvia down to the shores of St. Mary’s Lake and sat on a giant rock. We looked for satellites and watched Gonzo walk on the ice while we puffed and passed the herb back and forth, and waited for it to kick in. Then I started to get really warm, then really hot. Next, my face melted and I touched a constellation, and then it was all over.

  “Everything looks different in life at the moment when you’re dealing with things than it does when you’re looking back on them,” she says.

  My mother tells me about a woman who was pregnant with twins. One twin died while in utero and the mother carried it until she went into labor with the other one. She never miscarried. She never aborted. She carried the dead baby around with her so that the other one would survive. “She was special,” Mom says.

  “And what about Nicole?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “Nicole Carpenter.”