I can only elaborate on the small things, like her smallness, and how light her fists were—how she pinched the fat of my fingers to tell me she loved me. She was always aware of her struggle. A single mother with four children is destined to die from exhaustion, unless there is a miracle of fortune or justice.
We came close to fortune and justice when I was a kid. Paul Simon needed correspondence, and my mother had written long before to an inmate named Salvador Agrón for a Broadway play about Sal’s life—he was convicted young and earned a degree on the inside: he became an activist and that’s how he met Mom.
She spoke about Sal like I speak about you. We should have wanted for simpler things, but in many ways my mother taught me love was divine—like a hermitage or vision or picking from the tree of knowledge. Mother didn’t like the Bible, but I appreciate it for how suffering is related to profundity.
Paul Simon called while I was watching TV. Our landline was screwed into the old seventies wood panel of our kitchen wall. I was ashamed of the house. The room was barren. There was an orange, thrift shop dinette set, and a shrine on our counter for Stevie Ray Vaughan. It was a picture of him surrounded by barks and sage my mother picked, with red ties and turquoise jewelry. The bracelets and rings were gifts from my uncle Lyle, a jeweler who idolizes Elvis and wore a bouffant until old age turned it into a less voluminous side part.
Mom was in the bath. Paul’s voice was timid. He asked for Mom. I yelled to her that Paul was on the line. Mom told me to keep him on the phone while I heard her body emerge—splashes and her small wet feet running.
“How old are you?” Simon asked.
“I’m ten. What do you do?” I asked.
“I’m an artist,” he said.
I told him that was nice and asked him what kind of art. He laughed at me.
My mother, wrapped in a towel, ripped the phone from my hand. She carried on several conversations like this. I began to suspect they were flirting when I went with Mom to the library to look up if Simon had a wife. I didn’t want Paul Simon to be my new father. I saw an album cover once. He wore turtlenecks. He was pasty. He had beady eyes.
“He’s married to some redhead, I think. White woman,” Mom said. We had seen some news clippings and rented a biography. He was a god, and not the personalized one of benevolence, but the type who could take things away.
She sent him every letter between herself and Salvador Agrón. I had read the letters in our basement. There were images of horses and dirt and bodies, and nothing of love until it became all about love. Simon was inspired by Salvador’s plight.
Mother’s narrative was eventually drowned in Simon’s version of it all, and nowhere was Sal’s story. He was dead.
We became self-important Indians with every call. Mom floated around the house after three-day shifts at a group home and became happy. After years of writing manically in her room, someone was finally using her words. A camera crew came to interview Mom. I recently saw film of her, where a narrator with a rich English accent said, “Paul Simon and his team researched every detail of the story. They even located Wahzinak. She offered Paul Simon her intimate memories of Sal’s character.”
“He was much more beautiful in real life,” my mother said. “He just illuminated. His prose was phenomenal. He could talk about the prison life. He could talk about his poverty. People come along and they grace your life, and they make it extraordinary.”
After the interview my mother cried into the phone, and she didn’t speak to us. She didn’t sit at the table; she sat on the floor. I watched her body shake. Maybe it was having cameras in our rotting home. It was infested with mold and ladybugs and old furniture we didn’t wear down ourselves. Maybe that’s my shame talking. Maybe it was that Indians are at a ripe age when they’re fifty, and Mother was there. Maybe it was that Salvador was kind.
She met a serpent in prison who was my father. The same provocation and sentimentality drew her in, and he wasn’t kind. The legend is that he was banished from the house after many transgressions, and that we all waited by the door with weapons in case he came back, even me, a baby then, holding a hammer or a bat or a broom or a doll. The story has shifted because it’s not funny anymore.
Simon gave us a choice: American dollars or a family trip to New York. Julia Roberts attended the opening. A woman who would later star in Grey’s Anatomy played my mom. We missed the opportunity to see it all to buy school clothes. Mom spent the rest on bills, food, and things.
It could have redeemed her, like my words on the page—like I would have myself believe articulating her grace and pain could be redemptive. I didn’t want Paul Simon to be my father, but I wanted him to save us. More than a few thousand—I wanted him to see us and decide we were worth a play in our own right. I wanted him to see my mother, beyond a groupie, or a cliché, or an Indian woman—because she was more. He didn’t see her.
The play reduced Mom to an “Indian hippie chick,” as Variety’s Greg Evans called her. A “prison groupie,” and I had only known her as an outreach worker. Prison was part of that, getting them to write or draw, to find sanity in isolation. I’m trying not to make excuses, because she did fall. It’s in the text and on my mind every day how she fell. It could be like Eve. The old texts say we get menses for the fall, feel pain for the fall. God couldn’t watch it; he sent us his boy, but I doubt he watched his son die. I think he just waited for him on the other side.
One of my mother’s old friends, Richard, wrote about her breasts and Salvador’s womanizing for his non-fiction book. He wrote with provocation and sentimentality while the iron was hot. Dick flew from California to Seabird to show Mom the book. He told me about his Jeep and that he would take me to the city someday, and Mom grew suspicious. He handed her the book after tea. She went to her room, came out, and told him to leave. Mother cried. I found the book underneath her bed and understood the contents like Hildegard, a prophet without an education. Her heart was inflamed, and she knew the scriptures and the gospel. She didn’t understand the tenses or the division of syllables, but she could read it.
The pain was a process to understanding. Men were born to hurt my mother in the flesh and the text, and she was my savior. The language was always wrong. Even in this account I can’t convey the pulse of her. In her sleep I couldn’t turn away, in love with her heavy breathing. She rarely slept, but, when she did, it felt generative and sacred like a bear’s hibernation. Her small palms were red with heat. She always fell asleep with a book on her chest. It was the illumination of living light.
You were my only visitor this week. I’m surprised you came. I said nothing I meant to say. You said ambiguous things: Maybe in the future . . . You want the best for me.
You are going to Colorado for Christmas. You brought a bra for Patricia like I asked.
Patricia cried when I gave it to her. Her family lives away from her, and when her husband died, she wanted to die. She seemed certain that it was her time. Sometimes suicidality doesn’t seem dark; it seems fair.
The therapist says that instead of thinking of the loss of you, I must visualize a space for myself and focus on the details of that space. I have old spaces in my registry to recall. I think of you often, but there are still spaces unchanged by you.
Uncle Harold’s shack: a teal, crisp marshmallow since his wife allegedly burned it down, with him in it. I can imagine the charred teddy bear in the middle of his den. I run my hands over the craggy ends of every black cupboard. I wonder what Uncle Harold looks like in his grave. His hair is twelve dead strands that stick to my hand. His knuckles look like Liberace’s, because, thank god, my mother and her siblings were flamboyant. He has long, white cuffs. His slacks are wool and pleated. His brown mouth is closed and tight. I’ve gone mentally to Uncle’s home, and his grave, because of the intrusive thought that while I color in the evenings you are sitting across from a woman at a restaurant table. While I’m
walking along dull-blue lines or gluing Popsicle sticks, you are with a white woman named Laura. She plays tennis. She’s an ethereal white woman who thinks dogs are people too. You think, Isn’t this nice. You’re tempted to mention the sad woman in the hospital, your ex. It might assuage your guilt or get you laid, and it might kill me to imagine this here.
You tell her that your last relationship was all-consuming.
When you told me that I want too much, I considered how much you take.
Laura tells you that she got out of something too. She has a frailty I don’t have. Even if I never ate again, I could not present myself so meekly: bird-boned Laura. You treat her like a pal and are happy with the passionless art of settling—of forgetting.
I try not to imagine you laughing at her dog stories.
I return to Harold’s home. It’s dark. Abandoned. It’s night. The old, dead walls are illuminated by the truck stop across the street. I can hear you telling me that the shack will fall on me. By the time I get out of this hospital you’ll be missing the smell of her on your pillow.
I tried to cry into a wall as silently as I could. I tried to call my friend to get me from your house. It would be dangerous to forgive you for that kind of abandonment. I think it’s dangerous to let go of a transgression when the transgressor is not contrite. I think of myself in black lingerie, crying against your adobe wall.
It might hurt you to know that another man loves me, but I’m not sure. For several days I did crazy things before I committed myself. I begged you to see me. I went to your bar, and my friends let me have my grief, in long drives, close to your home, while they explained that love is like this. They read endless letters of mine and told me that it was all enough. I was enough and sometimes people break up. I felt juvenile. A friend is in love with me, and when the town lit the luminaries outside of your bar on a December night, I told him that I was not finished loving you.
At the bar, he and I sat next to each other. I felt like a child—I was too short on the stool, resting both hands on my coaster. I told him that none of his caring made me feel better. He knows you’re not my only problem. My relationship with you felt integral. Many things were infinitesimal. Combined, there’s a whole thing I can’t bear. I needed you. I told him that I turned you off so many times, and he refused to believe I was the problem.
“You cried.” He shrugs his shoulders. “He could have let you be fucking crazy, and then just brought you a beer.”
I start to cry and he says no repeatedly and quickly. He has ADHD, and since I’m manic, we’re aligned in reaction. He takes my hands from my face and puts them on the coaster.
“Indian women die early,” I say. “I think this up and down . . . and it’s not the first time I’ve centered myself in the love of a man . . . My son doesn’t need to witness this. I should have been spared from the life my mother gave to me.”
“Statistically, white men are more likely to kill themselves. If you’re going to go, it will probably be something else. Don’t die. Casey’s an asshole. You’re not perfect—but this type of fucked-up you got, it’s not that bad, Terese.”
He consoled me in letters and visits with books. Before I came to the hospital, he stopped me outside of an editorial meeting. He told me to be strong. He put a letter and a book, Just Kids, in my hands.
I don’t think that I am lonely. I think that I am starved and maybe ravenous for the very thing you withhold from me.
The first chapter in your book is titled “Wanting/Not-Having.” You and I had a joke between us that I want you back, time and again, because I prefer wanting. Even when I am there with you, beneath your breath, I still feel you withholding. It’s like your breath—that I know you’ve never had a cavity. You lean back and open your mouth. Your mouth is so large and unashamed. I feel jealous and amorous when you tell me that.
I am partly sorry for the night I cried in front of you and began to hit myself. You had never seen me do that before. Before, I was just temperamental about breakfast. The therapists reiterate that when I’m suicidal nobody is beholden to me. You have the right to walk away. I don’t understand, though, why you would look at me the way you did.
They have given me brochures about being the child of a narcissistic mother. That’s laughable. They tell me I don’t fit the criteria of histrionic, but I thought I did after speaking to some of the other women who were diagnosed like that. I fit the criteria of an adult child of an alcoholic and the victim of sexual abuse. I reiterate to the therapists several stories about my eldest brother’s abuse and my sister’s. I often have felt, in proximity to their violations, that I mimic their chaos.
They moved my release, and they want me to stay the full seven days, which means I’ll miss Christmas Eve with my son. I wish I could exchange my time with Laurie. She’s being released today. She told me that if she had insurance they would have kept her in the hospital, and that they’re keeping me longer because I have good insurance. I can’t say she’s wrong because an insurance representative works with my psychiatrist concerning my release and my progress.
I’m upset to stay here longer than I expected. But I think I like these walls. It feels artificial but good. The psychiatrist likes to speak to me more than she does the other women. She calls me in, and sometimes our discussions become more general and conversational. She wants to know whether I’ve considered contacting you after this. I told her that I don’t believe you’re a hindrance, and that I am not prideful in love.
“He isn’t telling me to leave him alone,” I said.
“You’re an intelligent and attractive woman. I doubt that this is easy for either of you,” she said.
“I think I could leave him alone.”
She gives me the full report of my conditions. I have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and an eating disorder, and I have bipolar II.
“When you get out I hope you have a good Christmas,” she said.
The girl with the tight braids, Jackie, keeps looking at me and saying that something isn’t right. I ask her if I have crazy eyes, and she says no. She talks to me all day and French braids my hair. She likes to drink, and she doesn’t know why I can’t just find another man. “I guess it is that easy,” I say. “If I wasn’t sentimental.” She only dates thugs, she says. She runs down the ways she meets men, and it sounds exhausting.
Jackie encourages me to eat, and the things I’ve eaten today were reasonable. There was rice pilaf and broccoli, and I still drank the prune juice the cafeteria workers put aside for me.
I weigh a hundred and twenty-six pounds now. It is progress that I know my weight is not the issue. Still, I’ve obsessively weighed myself, and it’s inconvenient for the nurses, because they have to escort me to and from the gym before meals.
On Christmas, I wake up at four in the morning. The nurses let me sit by a window, and I look out at the highway and imagine that the people driving to work are good. I feel like I could master containment that way.
Josue came from behind me and tapped me with an envelope.
“You’re getting out today,” he said.
“Santa,” I said.
“Can I give you a hug?” he asked.
He hugged me until the tension in my back relaxed. His Christmas card simply said that I had talent, and that part of what makes me a good person is that I can be struck by emotion. He also included the picture of me he took.
I’ve been released, but I am not better. I can’t work, and I won’t leave the house. Outpatient treatment: Because I am not crazy enough to be sedated in a madhouse. They think I’m better. I am a cat in heat—something my mother would say. I am unraveling in the dark kitchen. I am scattering my wet eyes looking for signs or something significant. I am incorrigible when I’m like this. I wish I could do anything but stand alone in a dark kitchen without you.
Every Christmas after Grandmother died, my mother locked herself in
her room to cry. We always stood on the other side of her door, looking at each other as if she might never stop crying. Some years she didn’t come out until the morning. Some years she came out with red eyes, and she could barely speak. She’d motion to get the presents from under the tree. We passed them around, and I can’t remember a single present I ever received.
I lock myself away as she does. Some things seem too perfectly awful.
I only have crude things to say to you. I won’t fuck you anymore so it can mean less. I might be gone, but you can still see me with a black light in your mattress. There is permanence in physical craft. Laura isn’t absorbed in any beds. She barely perspires. She requires twenty-four-hour protection from her own scent. She keeps her bra on. She wears practical clothes. Her fleeces and cargo pants and that smell of non-scented goat’s milk lotion for dry skin—that must do something for you.
My body left resonance that can’t be dismantled or erased. I don’t know if men think about what seduction is. It was reading the work you love, and buying clothes, and making polite conversation with your friends—convincing your mother that I could mother you like she does. It was laying warm towels across my legs before I shaved so that when you touched me, I was soft. It was withholding from you at the right times, and listening to you with my eyes and ears. I worked hard to assert intent on your bed and your body. I’ve soiled all beds for you with my wanting and preparation. I prepared myself for you as if I wasn’t working as a server, going to college, or raising Isaiah. The weight and the dust of me are in every thread of your mattress. Love is tactile learning, always, first and foremost.
When you loved me it was degrading. Using me for love degraded me worse. You should have just fucked me. It was degenerative. You inside me, outside, then I leave, then I come back, get fucked, you look down at me and say, “I love you. I love you.” I go home and degenerate alone. The distinctness of my bed and its corners are fucked by my fucking you. My agency is degraded. For comfort, I remember my hospital bed and the neutrality of the room I had. I was safe from myself and from you. I’m stupid, waiting for the phone to ring, thinking you might call. I’d drive to you and be no better for it.
Heart Berries Page 4