Bukowski in a Sundress

by Kim Addonizio

  • • •

  I SWEAR ON a stack of Bibles that some men really will want “to fuck your poems.”

  • • •

  MY HEART IS not “a Mississippi chicken shack.” It is an organ, and I don’t mean a Hammond B3. It’s about the size of a fist, or a sopping wet tennis ball. Neither is my heart “a landing strip with no runway lights.” I have heard of some women shaving their pubic hair in that manner, but I am not one of them. I happen to like pubic hair, and lots of it.

  My mother played tennis extremely well. I miss her.

  • • •

  IT IS A big fat lie that the kitchen door in the house I grew up in “was kicked in to hang by a hinge.” Nobody kicked it. My father and oldest brother fell into it while they were fighting, so it was clearly an accident and not at all intentional, as the poem falsely implies. Usually, when they fought, my other brothers and I stayed downstairs in the rec room smoking pot with our friends and laughing, unless we heard our mother getting involved, trying to separate the combatants, at which point a few boys would head upstairs to extricate her.

  As for the babies I described floating in Limbo, their faces “stretched like balloons,” how could I know what the hell they looked like? And I threw Satan in there even though I stopped believing in him when I was, like, seven.

  That I hated my oldest brother “with a great purity of feeling” is another whopper. How can something pure make you feel so contaminated? Aren’t we supposed to love one another? Does God hate us—is that why He allows evil to exist?

  • • •

  THERE WAS AN actual tsunami on December 26, 2004. According to Wikipedia, the earthquake that caused it lasted nearly ten minutes, and more than 230,000 people died. The planet vibrated. Just as I wrote, souls were arriving and departing, though the departure gate was clearly more crowded. I made up the Akashic angel whose job it is to write everything down, pausing for an instant and then furiously scribbling, detailing names and faces, memories and unfulfilled dreams, keeping track. No one keeps track except us.

  • • •

  ALL THAT YEAR my friend wanted to kill herself. She would call me late at night, drunk and sobbing, talking about her gun. Finally I convinced her to throw it into the river. Eventually she got much better, but I still worried about her. I thought of her as the little bullet-size ballerina on my jewelry box, spinning and slowing, then spinning again. That she gave me the box was a complete fabrication. She did not give me the box. What she gave me was a picture book called Six-Dinner Sid, about a cat that goes from door to door getting fed by everyone on the block, and another one about a farting dog at a garage sale, and once, to celebrate the publication of my first novel, she gave me a plastic baby bottle with a blue ribbon on it. The truth is that she’s much better now. The truth is also that I still worry.

  • • •

  IT IS POSSIBLE to feel “happiness after grief,” just as I wrote, though when I saw my neighbor’s two-year-old granddaughter running around naked except for a fox stole, I wasn’t grieving. I may have been a little depressed. Then again, I may have been merely bored and slightly anxious, sitting at my desk and staring out the window hoping something poetic would happen out there so I could write it down, go play with my cat, and pick up some taco fixings for dinner with my boyfriend.

  I confess to happiness; that’s no jive. Especially since I got back on Celexa, I no longer feel that the world is a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of failed romances and Fuck-yous. I confess to grief, to death like a stone well, loved ones falling in, never to surface again. I confess that a kelson of my creations is love. The poems are not the life. “Liar, liar, pants on fire, nose as long as a telephone wire,” the little girls outside my window are singing, skipping rope, and, singing, into my litany they go.

  Flu Shot

  FIRST I HAVE to convince my mother to go. She has somehow missed the scheduled on-site flu shots, and my brother Gary has asked me to take her over to the drugstore. I’m sitting in her ugly room at Summerville Assisted Living in Potomac, Maryland. Why don’t they ever name these places truthfully? They aren’t fooling anyone. Sunrise Villa, Tranquility Manor, Renaissance Gardens, Spring Meadows. I’d like to see End of the Road, or Senior Warehouse Outlet. Summerville should properly be called Soon Dead of Winter.

  “Come on, Mom, up and at ’em,” I say, inanely. Up and at ’em? Where did that come from? Let’s go tackle that flu shot right now. She can barely bring herself to lift her head. She lies in her bed, looking at the wall.

  “Wait,” she says.

  “The sooner we go, the sooner we can come back.”

  “Huh,” she says.

  On the wall of her room is a painting: my mother as a young woman, wielding a tennis racket like a rapier, lunging for a low backhand. Her famous backhand. My famous mother. Wimbledon Singles champion in 1946, four times US Open champion. The artist has painted her on a path in a forest. Is she supposed to be aiming for a tennis ball that has landed in the light-dappled duff, or about to bash in the head of some forest creature? The painting is dumb, the room sterile. A few broken shelves hold books whose type she can’t quite see. I’ve bought her every kind of magnifying device I could find, but she’s grown too confused to use any of them. There are some leftovers from her once-extensive collection of miniature pianos. She used to collect clowns, too, but those have disappeared, along with the windup statuette of Elvis at the piano that played “How Great Thou Art.” A basket of Oreos languishes on the table beside a bouquet of exhausted flowers in greenish water. The curtains, made of some white plastic material, are always closed. Sometimes I have to go to the window and peek out there, just to make sure the world hasn’t been replaced by blankness, that there really is a place where trees sprout new leaves and birds sit on the branches. Though, as soon as I have done this, I immediately think, “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

  My mother used to sit and read in the library down the hall or walk around and around the garden courtyard for exercise. She also used to sneak out and make a dangerous crossing to the shopping center across the street, I suspect hoping to be hit by a car. But now she is mostly confined to her room, too weak for much of anything else.

  Eventually, if she lives long enough, she’ll have to go Upstairs. Upstairs is the third floor of Summerville, a place my mother knows of and fears. It’s where people go when they can’t cut it any longer with the level of care they are getting on the first two floors. The first two floors are bad enough: wheelchaired stroke victims and vacant-eyed residents slumped in matching chairs. She’s depressed about being here. Who wouldn’t be? I walk into Summerville and no matter what my mood, it instantly drops about thirty degrees. Summerville makes me think of what Denis Johnson wrote in his short story “Beverly Home,” after describing the residents: “They made God look like a senseless maniac.”

  “Wait, wait,” my mother says. She doesn’t want to go get a flu shot. She wants to sleep. There is no way to move her if she doesn’t want to go.

  I came from California for this visit, planning to get a few things done. In previous visits, I accomplished the Clipping of the Toenails and the Buying of the Shower Mat, tasks that on my private scale of difficulty fell somewhere between challenging and overwhelming. My tendency is to hide from the mundane tasks of the world, to prefer imagination to reality; this is one reason I became a writer. Most of the year, Gary does the truly hard work with our mother. He visits her daily, takes care of the bills, the doctor visits, the complex negotiations with various infernal bureaucracies.

  Yesterday I managed the Cleaning of the Dentures, prying them out of her mouth, plopping them into a glass with an Efferdent tablet to fizz away bacteria, applying the powder meant to help the dentures grip the gums. I used to stare at my grandmother’s teeth, which spent their nights in a glass of water in a bathroom of our old house, and now I found myself staring at my mother’s teeth, this part
of her body that I had dislodged. I wanted to get them back in as quickly as possible. I never imagined her old like this—my slim, athletic mother. But now it’s hard to imagine her any other way: her stoop-shouldered walk, her stained clothing, her closed eyes as she lies in bed waiting for her daughter to return her teeth.

  Her eyes are closed again. “Mom?” I say.

  She’s sleeping, or pretending to. I reflect on the good luck of having nearly all my teeth. I play weekly tennis with a friend, do yoga and weights at the gym. I’m taking the poet’s advice: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” I have become a poet myself, have racked up a few of my own victories, books and grants and prizes. If my luck holds, no one will ever paint me writing on my laptop in a forest. The overhead smash of Parkinson’s won’t blindside me, as it did my mother.

  I think about opening her curtains, now that she is sleeping, but I can’t seem to get up the energy to get out of the leather swivel chair by her bed.

  After half an hour she wakes up. Her head turns, her eyes open, and she blinks, surprised to see me.

  “Mom,” I say. “You need to get up. We have to get you a flu shot. And listen, while we’re there, I’ll buy you some Cheez-Its.”

  My mother has developed an unholy love for Cheez-Its. If she doesn’t have at least a couple of boxes, she gets that look in her eye, the look of an addict down to the last of the heroin, filled with anxiety that there won’t be a wake-up shot for the next morning. Once, there were sports columnists following her every move, and visits to the Riviera with her friend Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress once married to Cary Grant. There were doubles matches with Groucho Marx as her partner. (She took so many of the balls that came their way that he left the court and came back with a sleeping bag and unrolled it in the service box.) My mother dated Jack Dempsey. She had a fling with Spencer Tracy during one of his breaks from Katharine Hepburn. He gave her a gold bracelet that read, TO THE CHAMP FROM SILVERTOP. My brothers and I used to look at it and fantasize that Spencer Tracy was our real father, not because we didn’t like our actual father but because we were seduced by the idea that famous people were better than us. For my mother, who by the time she was my mother was only a formerly famous person, there had been the Wimbledon and US Open championships and the finals of the French Open, the Wightman Cup team, exhibition matches, and newspaper photos. There had been golf and jogging and swimming. When she took me to London in the eighties for an event honoring the female Wimbledon champions, we ate strawberries and clotted cream with the Duke and Duchess of Kent. There were daily rides to the tournament in the special green Wimbledon minicars, and chats with Martina Navratilova. Now there is Summerville, and fumbling at the buttons on her sweater. Now there are Cheez-Its.

  “We’ll get three boxes,” I say. Never mind that there are a couple of boxes here already. It is impossible to be oversupplied.

  “Oh,” she says. “Okay.”

  Trembling, she manages to sit up, with me supporting her. Luckily she is already dressed. If I had to dress her, too, I’d likely just give up on the idea of the flu shot and sink back into my chair while she sank back into her bed. But she’s dressed, in a stained blouse and sweatpants, and I’ve told Gary I will do this one small thing before I go back to California to feel guilty that my mother needs me and I am not there.

  I get her into a coat, afraid of breaking her thin arm as I guide it toward the sleeve. Does she know what’s going on? At times it’s hard to tell. She has some dementia. And my mother rarely disclosed her feelings, so now it is very hard to tell.

  Come to think of it, the only one in our family who freely expressed himself was my oldest brother, though mostly his feelings were “Fuck you” and “I hate you.” He had no problem screaming or trashing the furnishings, chasing his siblings around the dining room table with a kitchen knife, stabbing his mother with scissors. He threw punches at our father once he got big enough to have a shot at doing some damage. There were five of us kids—four boys and me, along with a nanny for several years, plus my grandmother. Our father was nice enough (toward most of us, anyway), but as a sportswriter he traveled a lot, and when he was at home he rose after we went to school and came home after we were asleep. We saw him mostly on weekends, mowing the lawn or sitting with his back to us at MacDonald’s Raw Bar. Our mother pretty much lived on a tennis court, the way some mothers live in the kitchen whipping up meals and desserts. Our big split-level house was like a vast African savanna where we roamed around hunting for food, staying out of our oldest brother’s way, occasionally having savage encounters.

  I don’t recall my mother ever approaching me to hug me. What I remember is that at some point I started hugging her, telling her I loved her, and that she then said, “I love you, too.” Probably, though, my memory is faulty and has lied. And my mother wasn’t cold. She was kind to everyone, and witty, and as her only daughter I felt we had a special bond. But she was also private and, I’ve come to believe, damaged early in some way that led her to withdraw from us, to focus her life on tennis. She fell in love with a sport, gave it everything, and it loved her back for most of her life.

  She manages to stand, and we push her walker down the hall. It says CHAMP in Magic Marker on a piece of masking tape on the front. We leave it in the lobby, since it won’t fit into my rental car, and besides, she wants to walk to the car on her own. I hold her hand, ready to lunge to keep her from the ground. Hours, lifetimes pass just getting her into the car. She bends down to the open door. Surely she’ll fall now. She’s fallen often this past year, getting bruised and banged up, once landing in the hospital with a femoral fracture. I keep my hand near the top of the window frame so she won’t hit her head. Then she’s in. She doesn’t sit back in the seat; it’s more like she contorts into its general area. I wrestle the seat belt around her.

  The street in front of Summerville has surprisingly heavy traffic. It takes a while just to pull out of the driveway. When I get to the shopping center, there isn’t anywhere to park near the drugstore, and I’m not sure what to do. I can’t just leave her at the curb while I find a space. She’ll fall, or wander off. So I circle the parking lot, which properly should be called the Aquarium, the Fish Tank of Mortal Life, all of us circling and dying, circling and breathing and still moving. At last there’s a space close to the store, and I take it.

  “I can do it,” she says when I try to help her from the car. Bracing her hands on the seat, she tries to rise, putting in a mighty effort, giving it her feeble all, and nothing happens. I reach for her but “I can do it, I can do it”—this is my mother after all, the tennis champion with the killer instinct, cover of Time magazine, September 2, 1946. Underneath a color illustration of her face superimposed on the head of a tennis racket, it read, CALIFORNIA’S PAULINE BETZ. THE SPICE OF HER LIFE: COMPETITION. The price then was twenty cents. The racket was wood; her hair was blonde. The article described her as “a friendly, attractive and aggressive American girl” with “a terrifying determination not to lose at anything.”

  I stand, waiting, and finally, miraculously, she does it; she rises from the car. I take her arm and steer us across the parking lot. How long before she collapses—two more steps, five? I can see she’s flagging badly, and we’re only to the curb. There is still the wide sidewalk to get across, the store to enter, and the pharmacy is in the rear of the store. But it’s too late to turn back. We are on an expedition.

  Inside the store, I lead her toward the Minute Clinic, the destination, the grail of the flu vaccine that will keep her from dying of influenza this winter, that will keep her alive. For what? I think. And then, What is wrong with me? I pray that she doesn’t need an appointment, that we haven’t made this journey for nothing.

  Another woman stands at the computer by the clinic, signing in. My mother collapses into a chair and takes on the look of an abandoned pile of dirty laundry. The passing shoppers are probably wondering whom that poor ol
d woman belongs to. I have the urge to walk away from her. How long would she sit there before somebody grew concerned? There is definitely something wrong with me. She wasn’t a bad mother, just a flawed one. Who can say of their parents, “They were perfect; they didn’t damage me in any way”? No one I would count among my friends.

  When it’s finally her turn, I hoist her from the chair and take her into the small room where they give the shots. I try to unzip her coat, but the zipper is stuck at the bottom, separated; no matter how I tug and fiddle with it, I can’t undo it. The Minute Clinic clinician—call her the Angel of Mercy—suggests pulling the coat off the shoulder and unbuttoning my mother’s blouse to bare her arm for the shot. Does she feel humiliated, my mother who smells bad, who wears no bra, as the nice woman unbuttons her drool-encrusted blouse? No matter, I feel humiliated for her. She gets the shot.

  I hand over my Visa, take some paperwork, and guide her back to the car. I turn back into the same heavy traffic, go through two lights, and then there is a left turn into the facility (which should properly be called “the difficulty”). It takes several minutes to make the turn, all the cars schooling toward me, no one giving an inch, everyone getting somewhere. At last there’s an opening I can shoot through so I can pull the car up, get her out of it, and sit her down in the lobby again while I park.