by Kris Radish
Shaun is not hurt. Just bruised and battered and that is the memory I hold in my hand as I jump into my car and head toward my mother's condo. She is well. She is. She has to be, because I finally have figured out who she is and who I am becoming.
When I storm through her door, she is doing yoga on a mat the size of my pants. I see her body moving, silently, in a way I never imagined.
“Quiet,” she says, putting her finger to her lips as if I am a child. Her child. So I sit and I watch and very quickly I realize that my mother has become way too centered and whole and together to have a lump that is a tiny, malicious ball of cancer. She has let go of something harsh and hard that held her in place for so long that a tiny lump formed in her breast. It was her place of sameness and security. She could reach her hand there, just below her heart, and know exactly who she was and what she needed to do next.
I let out a huge puff of air and she gives me one of those, “Damn it, I told you to be quiet” looks. But I do not listen to her silent scolding. I move from the chair to the floor and I put my hands on her head and then move them down so that I am cupping her face.
“I was scared, Margaret. I wasn't sure. I willed it not to be cancer, but I didn't know.”
“What did they say?”
“They said do more yoga.”
I laugh, but know that is probably exactly what they said. For years my researcher friends and I have felt that stress and living a life without honor and truthfulness, living a life designed by someone else, could cause cancer. We talked about it all the time as we digressed from our intellectual conversations and fanned our thoughts into places where we dissected the inner lives of people we knew who were ill. We seldom talked about ourselves.
“No cancer.”
“Pre-cancerous cells. I have to be careful. Go in more often. Tons of mammograms. But . . .”
She trails off, and I want to know what she is thinking. I desperately want to know.
“But what?”
“Now that the lump is gone, well, I know, I just know it will never come back and that I won't have any other lumps.”
“How? Tell me, Mom.”
She moves against me and I think that this is the first time in my life I have been strong enough to support her, to hold her weight, to be able to understand and accept anything that she has to tell me. Anything, absolutely anything.
“When your father died, I started to let go. I couldn't do it before, we've talked about this, but every month, every week, I let something else slip away. Does this make sense?”
“Oh yes.”
“Maybe it takes some of us longer. Maybe if your father were still alive I'd be dead by now from holding everything inside of me.”
“What did you hold inside, Mom, what was it?”
“You know, the pieces of a life that fall away. Your brother . . . your aunt, my dreams of college . . . the way you drifted into the same place and made me wish I could have been stronger, could have changed the direction of my own life.”
She stops, and I let her have her time. She is gathering up the power to tell me something important. I can feel it rise from below her knees and through her stomach. I can feel it, and when she talks she moves against my head as if it is something magnificent that has been dying, literally dying, to get out.
“I fell in love with someone else.”
I am certain my mother can feel my heart accelerate. “Are you serious?”
She laughs, and the very essence of her laugh moves right inside of me, so that I feel as if her hands are dancing against my heart. Who? I want to know who it was. When? What happened? Jesus. Just when you think you know everything.
“It about killed me,” she explains, nestling against my own breasts as if I am the mother and she is the child. “You were in high school. Remember those months when I came to work in the office because Mrs. Shompston was ill?”
“Keep going, Mom, get to the good part.”
“It was John Halinger.”
“Are you kidding me? The football coach? My chemistry teacher? Halinger?”
“Do you want to hear what happened?”
“Go, Mother. Talk.”
Breathless. I am breathless inside of a novel that is being written at the edge of my own skin.
She tells me a story so lovely, I close my eyes halfway through the telling of it. He simply came to the office to get his messages, looked at my mother and their hearts jumped, my mother remembers having to grab the desk to steady herself, and Mr. H closed his eyes too, thinking he was dreaming, and when he opened them my mother was still there. They talked. They went out for coffee. He was married, she was married—and they fell in love. Love where you are throwing up and losing weight and where you can't sleep and your whole body is filled with such physical wanting that you forget how to breathe.
“It's the year I lost twenty pounds, started walking at night and cut my hair. Everything changed.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
“Everything's about sex to you kids, isn't it?”
She is not laughing when she says this, but then I know that she did sleep with him, and I wonder if she will tell me about it.
“We both knew that we could never be together, that we had family obligations and that we had met the right person at the wrong time. My God, Margaret, it was the first time a man let me hold him and cried and told me every single thing I had ever dreamed a lover would tell me. We did sleep together, damn you, we did, and I have lived on the emotion from those few nights all these years. It has kept me alive. It has.”
I wonder if she has tried to find him, and when I ask, she looks astounded.
“I never thought of it,” she says, sitting up. “Why? Why have I never thought about that? Could you help me? Maybe, maybe he's still around. He retired. I remember that he retired, but . . . Oh, Margaret, why did I never think of trying to find him again?”
Why, Mother? “Because,” I want to say, “we have both been trapped like so many women into believing that Magic doesn't exist. We have stretched our hearts so many times to cover things that we did not want to choose or acknowledge. We have watched our hearts shrink in size so that our chests cave in and we grow lumps in our breasts. We have given away the very power that fuels our souls and keeps our dreams in ovens the size of the Colorado River.”
“Mom, if I have learned anything these months, it's that it's never too late. It's never to damn late. You can still look, Mom. You can find him. You can do anything.”
She turns into me when I talk to her and grabs the sides of my arms as if she is hanging on to the only piece of wood in the middle of an ocean, and I see for the first time that she needs me and she trusts me and I have said something that can help her. My mother needs me. Not to drive her to the hospital or hold her hand, but to give her something truthful.
“Mom,” I say, shaking her like a doll. “You have buried people you love, the man you married and your sister, you have raised kids and survived a cancer scare. You have made love to a wonderful man who touched your heart. A man who saw you, truly saw you. You can do yoga and live alone. Add it up. Mom. Count. Should I keep going?”
She looks away, past me and through the window that looks out beyond the driveway, where everything is green and trees the size of small mountains guard her little home.
“Mom?”
“It's wrong for me to be frightened now, isn't it?”
“Never wrong, Mom, it's not wrong.”
“I never imagined I could even look for him. Why?”
I grab her close when she asks this. I want to pull my mother inside of me so she can see what I have just learned, what I know now as the truth and what I have chosen as a part of who I am.
“Mom, it's just the past. It's all those years of everyone telling you things and you imagining that they were true because it's all you heard above the roar of your own heart. You know he's out there. You know if you close your eyes you can see him golfing past this very house
or picking up coffee at Slanger's down by the freeway or waving to you as he flies off alone to the Bahamas for a few weeks. He's there, Mom. He's always been there: it just took you a while to realize it was okay to go looking for him again.”
We talk for a very long time about the things we did because we belonged to a church that told us when to sit and stand or a family that expected us for Christmas even if we really just wanted to stay home and read by the tree. We talk about sacred vows that can only be sacred if you really understand what you are saying, and about how obligations can get in the way of reality. We talk about nakedness and about letting go and about how lumps of fear can grow and turn into patterns of life that control every single thing that we do and say but not how we really feel when we stop to take a look.
“Here I thought I was going to be some brave hero for you and help you on this new life,” she tells me when we finally gather our twisted arms and legs and stand.
“So?” I ask her.
“So I start calling and then I see,” she says, moving her hips in a circle and stretching her hands over her head. A woman unlike my mother. This woman is new. She is.
Then she becomes my mother. She spins me toward the back window, where the garden is in full bloom, in the spot just months ago where I kicked my feet through the dirt when we moved her in and said I doubted if the sun would reach this spot.
“Remember?” she asks now.
“I remember.”
“Your life now, it can be only what you want. Think of where you were three months ago. Think. Oh, sweetheart, isn't this all so great?”
We stay in our circle for a very long time, holding hands and dancing into a place that we both acknowledge will not always be easy, but it will be our place. A place we design and no one else. We agree on that. It will be our place.
The house sells in an instant. I am not kidding.
The very first couple who came to see it, not the guys, but the short man and the tall woman, write out a check before they leave the living room.
“What?” I say to Golden Dan, the real estate man, who is really Daniel G. Balestreri, a gorgeous Italian man with wide dark eyes who could make me buy back my own home for more than my own asking price.
“They want it. Have cash. Want to know if they can move in . . .”
He hesitates, and I think he might say “tomorrow,” but he doesn't. Two weeks. They are willing to pay an extra $5,000.
“What the hell, Dan—are they your mobster cousins?” Bob asks him as we meet at Dan the Man's office to discuss the offer.
“No, it's the schools.”
“You're kidding?” I say, not realizing all the mothers my age have helped turn this school district into one hot property. Parent volunteers. Great teachers. All the building referendums pass because the voters are terrified of what the mothers might do if there are not enough votes to build the new wing of classrooms or to put in a science lab or to purchase new computers.
“Didn't you know?” Danny asks in total seriousness.
Bob and I look at each other as if we have never heard the word school. Nope. We did not know. The house, which cost us $92,000, nets us nearly $400,000. That's what Bob and I will split. I want to run to the bathroom but I cannot move. I may have to wet my pants in front of Dan and Bobby.
“Bob, can you help me get out of there?”
He smiles and nods, but I quickly ask Dan to leave. I want to negotiate one more thing. I will not sign unless Bob agrees to put enough money in an account to pay for Katie's undergraduate schooling and to pay off Shaun's student loans. I really want to start over. I don't want to have to ask Bob for another thing. Ever again. Nothing but maybe a dinner every year or maybe not. We'll see.
He agrees. We settle on a price and write up a contract that he says he will have his banker take care of. Before we let Dan back into his office, I ask Bob for a good-bye hug.
“I can't.”
“No?”
“It's too hard, Meg. It's harder than I thought it would be. I loved you. I need some time. I'll hug you again, I will, but I can't do it now. I just can't.”
Okay. It's all okay. Selling the house is quite a sign, I tell him. It's the end and the beginning and it was—for all those years—it was us. You and I. Bob and Meg and Katie and Shaun. A family. We were not always happy or honest. But we were. And we, I tell him softly, holding on to the edge of his sleeve so neither of us will fall, we will always have all those memories and days.
“Take what you want from back there,” I say, moving my hands in small circles on his upper arms because I have to touch him. “Sometimes I think what we remember will not be so good, but that was part of it too. I'm going to eventually get to the place where I choose to remember things, like how I never had to shovel the driveway, how much Katie loved to sit on your lap when she was a baby and . . .”
I can't go on. My throat closes up, and he moves his hands to cover mine, and without saying anything he tells me he will try too.
We devise a workable plan. He gets the first week to go in and take what he wants. “Not much,” he says. He promises to call if he isn't sure about something he wants to take. I get the second week, and I will need every minute of the first to prepare the apartment, to what? Oh my God. My heart starts to move as if it has left me behind.
“Do you have any idea how much we have to do?” I wail.
This makes him laugh, and he touches me lightly on my arm again. A feather, his fingers not certain.
“Meg, all these years, one thing after another, you never thought you could do it. The babies, your degrees, the house, your father and aunt, Shaun pushing us away. You always questioned yourself, and look where you are right now, look what you have done.”
Who is this man? Where has he been? More important, where have I been?
“What are you saying?”
“I'm saying you can do this, damn it, Meg. You can do anything. What do you want to do?”
This time I smile, and I put my head against his long arm even though I know it might make him uncomfortable. I do it because it is what I want, what I need.
“I guess I'm doing it.”
He does not move, and I freeze the moment because I know I am not done with my stuff, with his unfaithfulness, with how each of us lingered too long in a place that had grown stale and sad. I want to remember the way he didn't move when I put my head on his arm and how when I shifted my weight just a bit he held me, without moving his hands. I want to remember how he didn't argue about the terms and how he agreed to go first and how he maybe knew me better at the end than at the beginning, when we were so fresh and wild.
When I lift up my head, he turns to look out the window, avoiding a kiss I might have landed on his cheek. I have not been this close to him since the night we had dinner, and before that it must have been months and months, maybe a year since I'd even kissed him or touched him or stood close enough to see if he was wearing cologne. I see how the lines around his eyes have deepened and how the skin under his chin has softened and how his hairline is starting to creep toward the back of his head. I imagine the geranium woman moving her hands alongside of his face and I have to stop myself from telling him that I am glad he has someone, that I think he cannot be alone, that when Geranium leaves, he will quickly find another, because the silence and aloneness would eat him up. He will find that out himself. He will, someday, Bob will know what I now know standing here for the last time in the tired hands of what was once us.
I know too that when we open the door and Dapper Dan comes back in to see our signatures and to count up his commission, that something huge will have shifted. A curtain will drop and everyone will have turned to face a new direction. The seasons will have rotated and the walls in the hall will have mysteriously changed colors. There will be a band in the lobby and the sunset will be pink twenty-six days in a row. Nothing will ever be the same, and that is a wonderful reason to hear new music and let the sky skip across my heart in an entirely ne
w direction.
Before I open the door, while Bob shuffles papers and checks the figures, I say one more thing.
“Bob, I'm not guessing. I'm doing it.”
“Oh,” he says, not sure for a second what I am talking about.
“I'm doing it,” I say one more time and the words become a tattoo, my mantra, the words that will flash in front of my eyes when my knees weaken and I might not be sure.
They become me.
I catch the phone a second before the recording clicks in. It is under a pile of towels, below the front steps and behind three sets of bookcases. The house has exploded, and the only things left standing are the walls. There are boxes everywhere. It's my week to recover what I desire to take to my next home, and there is Tomas on the phone. I hear his voice and everything stops.
“Beautiful lady, the doggies miss you.”
“Tomas, how are you? Is everything okay?”
He is generous and polite before he gets to the point. His father has slipped into a coma. The doctors promise nothing but weeks and days of waiting for his lungs to fill and his heart to stop. My own heart stops with this news. I reach to steady myself against the bare wall.
“He drifted in and out for days. He talked mostly of your aunt. He whispered and talked for hours and hours. I think that he was going over every precious moment of his life so that he could hold it all one more time before he moved through his ‘transition.'”
“His transition?” I ask, wondering how this nice man with the polite voice and the insight of angels has come to be in my life at such a rare and interesting time. Aunt Marcia would tell me it was because I finally “let myself open up.” She would be right; she always was.
He laughs and tells me that his father had a dream years ago where a group of men and women dressed in red robes appeared to him and told him that life never really stops and is endless but that we just move from position to position, from one universe and dimension to the next, kind of like a soft transition to a new place.