"You're gonna have to get down on your knees and give it some elbow grease."
"Fine," I said and stood up.
"I didn't think that would last long." She didn't even look up.
"I'm just going in to put on something else, I don't want to get these shorts dirty," I protested and ran into the house. I dug my bathing suit top out of the drawer, slid on my cutoffs, and then checked myself in the bathroom mirror. After pulling my hair back and then readjusting my bangs, I lubed up with some cocoa butter and went to the door.
"Don't stand there with the door wide-open, Becky! How many times do I have to tell you, we can't afford to air-condition the outdoors!" she screamed from her rocking chair. She was finished and had taken up her customary seat on the front porch to smoke. I shut the door and slunk into the chair beside her.
"This ain't the prom, Becky, it's just yard work. I swear, for a sixteen-year-old, you sure don't have much sense." She laughed, her cigarette bobbing up and down on her lips. She had noticed the lipstick I smeared on my lips just before I walked out the door. I snarled. By this time of the summer her hands were rough, her nails were jagged, and she had a farmer tan all the way down to built-in socks and the most awkward stripes across her thighs and back from too many different tops and shorts. Her outfits, as well as the tan lines, were a running joke between us.
"Well, I'm sorry if I don't have any farmer gear," I said, thinking that I couldn't get tan even if I dipped myself in chocolate.
Sweat dripped down her temples, and she grabbed the wet rag off of her shoulder to drag across her entire face and neck. "Well, I guess asshole and that slut he's been seein' ain't gonna drive by and flaunt themselves today," she said and punched out her cigarette in the clay pot filled with sand she kept on the front porch. Then she added with a sarcastic snarl, "And I so wanted him to see my new flower beds. I put them out just for him." My father had driven by the house only once with his new girlfriend since he moved out last October. But with my brothers off at college, the divorce had left us alone and once was enough. I still wanted to kid her about her tan, but I knew that it was too late. It was normal for her to change subjects in the middle of a conversation, especially if it was one I had begun.
When I returned from getting the sunscreen she instructed me to put on, she was already on the third hole for the garden arch. The sun was getting lower, giving a sheen to the handle of the shovel as her sweat dripped past her hands and slid down the slick wood.
"Becky," she wiped the sweat off her forehead with the rag she still kept over her shoulder when doing yard work, "go unwrap those poles and start assembling them for one side, while I finish up these holes."
The poles were white and made of a hard plastic that wouldn't bend even if you ran over them with a truck. I pulled each one out of its individual plastic wrapper and lined them up on the ground: long with long, short with short, curved with curved, then all of the skinny round ones that connected the back to the front. My mother was on the last hole so I skimmed the instructions and began piecing it together by glances at the diagram.
By the time I had one section of the garden arch assembled, Mother was working on her third cigarette, letting it dangle from her lips as she handed me the next pole. I pressed the top pole for the front left side down over the bottom half which had been cinched for the fit. Beads of sweat rolled into my eyes and I grabbed the bottom of my shirt to wipe it away.
"Here," she handed me her rag, "you'll stretch your shirt
out."
I took the rag though it was drenched in her sweat already and wouldn't do me much good. I dabbed it across my hairline and gave it back. "Hand me the arched piece, Mama." She hesitated but gave me the long curved piece of hard plastic. She pulled the rag across her face again. My sweat didn't bother her.
As I reached to slide the arched piece onto the long poles, I stepped backward and my right foot went sideways into one of the holes. I fell onto it with all my weight and went down onto my side, the arched piece still in my hand. My ankle throbbed.
"Well, what in the hell did you do that for? You knew the holes were right behind you." She had been watching me.
I didn't cry, but I wanted to. Not because of the pain, though it did hurt, but because I knew that I wasn't going to be able to tell her like this. I knew she would say that I hadn't been careful enough, that I knew there had been a risk of tubal pregnancy, but that if I had been careful about it I wouldn't have lost the chance to ever have children.
I didn't stand right away, but I moved the pieces of the arch to my side. I just sat there and refused to speak as she stood over me looking at my foot. I thought of all the things I could tell her instead of what had really happened: that I decided that I really didn't want children, that Terry had left me and I was upset, that it was the doctor's fault, not mine. Anything but that I got pregnant to save my marriage and prove a point even though my doctor told me to wait until my body was stronger, until the endometriosis was under control, until I was healthier and I had more time and less stress. Anything but that I knew better and did it anyway.
When I was in the third grade my nicest white shirt with fitted Victorian lace sleeves was ruined when I got hit with a rock at school. I had begged to wear it and she had conceded, reluctantly. After it happened my grandmother had to take me to my mother because she was having her hair done. I saw my reflection in the glass door before I went in. My hair was matted at my temple where it had brushed up against the blood. My eyes were swollen from the tears, and the blood that had run down my face and onto my shirt had dried leaving flaky streaks down my cheeks. The blobs on my shirt were darkening to a smeared maroon mass. I rushed past the counter with my head ducked and went down to the stall where my mother was. She didn't see me approach and I had to tug on the shiny black smock, almost unsnapping it, to get her attention.
My mother had a look of confusion, concern, and humor all at the same time. "What have you done now? And look at what's happened to that beautiful shirt," she said like she was holding back a laugh.
I could feel my cheeks flush and my face get as red as the dried blood. "Are you OK?" she asked, like it was an afterthought, and I shook my head with more big tears welling up in my eyes. "Well, I guess you're probably gonna need some stitches." She sounded disappointed, like it was something I'd done on purpose.
Finally, I stood up although I knew my ankle was swelling and would be covered by a purple and green pigment in a few hours. I grabbed the arched piece and slid it into its slots.
"You all right?" she asked in the same afterthought way she'd had about my head.
"I'm fine, hand me the hammer, Mama, I'm almost done with this side." I tried to sound excited but it came out more like frustration.
Mother hunched over and yanked at the weeds when she finished the last hole. Her legs were muscular and tan. The veins in her arms bulged from the work. She looked young and strong enough to still have her own babies, but that's when it happened.
She pulled at one more weed and then stopped, but stayed hunched over, and then grabbed her stomach. She didn't say a word but went to her knees and looked up at me in a panic. I dropped the plastic poles at my feet and knelt beside her.
"Mama, what is it? What's wrong?" I reached for her arm.
"I think I'm having female problems," she said with an emphasis on the first syllable of female.
"Oh." I hesitated, "I mean, what?" I helped her to her feet and we walked toward the house. Bright red blood had soaked through the seat and part of the leg of her pants. I felt my face go cold and pale.
"My periods have gotten really bad lately," she explained almost out of breath as we reached the door and went inside. "I'm flooding like this all the time. I think I might have to have something done about it." She went into the bathroom and closed the door. "Get me a change of clothes, Becky."
I rummaged through her drawers and found a clean pair of panties and some pants. She cracked the door and I handed them to her. "
Get my purse and bring me the cordless phone."
"Do you want me to call someone for you, Mama?" I asked standing outside the door already with the phone.
"No, I've got to call. Just get my purse."
When she came out of the bathroom she still couldn't stand up straight and tears were welling up in her eyes. "Are you sure, Doctor?" she said into the phone. "OK, I'll be there in a few minutes." She hung up and handed the phone back to me. "We've got to go to the hospital, Becky. I may have to have surgery."
"What? Surgery, why?"
"I've been considering having a hysterectomy for a while and with all the trouble I've been having, the doctor thinks we may have waited too long." I grabbed her arm and helped her to the car.
A nurse was hovering just inside the door when I got up to her room that night. "Shh! Be quiet now, she's still resting from the surgery." The nurse spoke in a stern whisper that probably would have woken my mother up before any noise that I would have made. I sat down without a reply and pulled at a piece of the plastic fern by the bed. The room was cold and the window small. Stiff gray curtains hung past the frame in an attempt to make it look larger. The TV was off, but the room vibrated with a dull hum. I wanted to leave. The cinder block walls reminded me of a padded cell. The only light on in the room was a reading light above my mother's head and I wondered how she could look so pale and sunken yet swollen at the same time.
My grandmother was reading a romance novel in the chair beside me. On the cover was a woman in a torn white cotton dress with ruffles that hung over one shoulder. Her hair was a stringy blond that flew back from her face with the imaginary wind. She clung to the chest of a large man, almost twice her size, with a furrowed brow and a hand on his hip like he had been playing king of the mountain and won.
"Did it go all right?" I asked in a whisper softer than the nurse's had been.
"They said she'll be fine, no difference between a regular hysterectomy and an emergency one." My grandmother went back to her book while I stared at my mother sleeping.
Weeks after her stitches were removed her scar remained red and it drew up the skin around it. She made a point to show me that they had shaved off all of her pubic hair. She looked bare, stripped. They had sliced vertically, directly down her stomach, and the scar was set deep into her skin with her belly swollen on either side.
"Look at that, from my belly button down to my impossibles," she told me. She was standing in her room holding her nightgown up and looking into the full-length mirror on the door. "Now I've been cut into twice." She turned away from the mirror and dropped her nightgown to tell me this.
This was news to me. I may have been told before but I didn't remember another scar.
"The first time was from when I had you and like to have died. Now I've had two emergency surgeries," she glared over the words like I ought to apologize.
"You almost died from having me? I thought you were so happy that I was a girl and that you didn't even believe them until they put my butt in your face?" This is the story I liked to remember.
She brushed through her hair, straight back, and then scrunched it with her fingers. The brush was still in her hand as she spoke. "I sure enough did make them put your butt in my face. I was so happy to finally have a little girl I couldn't see straight. But afterwards, I had my tubes tied and they didn't hold my stomach."
"Why would they need to do that?"
"I was coughing and they were supposed to hold my stomach so that I didn't rupture any of the stitches. Well they didn't and I came untied and hemorrhaged. They liked to have let me die. I kept telling them that I didn't feel right, that something was wrong. But they didn't listen."
I interrupted. "Why didn't they listen? Couldn't they tell?"
"Well, you'd think so, I was swole up like a toad frog. But they just kept telling me that it was normal to feel that way after having a baby or some such nonsense. I told 'em that I knew just exactly what it was like to have a baby; this was my third. But they still wouldn't listen. Finally when the nurse came in to check my blood pressure I was damn near dead and they had to do emergency surgery."
I crossed my legs under me and sat up higher in the desk chair.
She repeated herself, "I was bleeding to death. Those nurses weren't watchin' me like they were supposed to."
I grabbed my side of the completely assembled arch and lifted while my mother lifted the other side. She was finally able to get out and work in the yard again, but now everything was just about done blooming and it was almost time to get the yard ready for winter. "I want to get that arch in before it gets cold, Becky. That way next year the wisteria will just run up it," she told me. We angled the arch beside the holes, then lifted it in. It slid in with a clunk and one of us had to hold it while the other packed the dirt around the poles. I volunteered for the dirt.
"Get the water hose over here and wet that old clay. It'll harden like concrete around the poles," Mother said, pointing toward the hose cart at the side of the house.
After reattaching the hose to the faucet I wheeled the cart to the flower bed where the arch now stood with my mother's support. The water was cool. When it hit the hard, cracked ground it didn't soak in right away but splashed against my legs.
I shoveled the mud into the holes and knelt down to pack it with drier dirt at the top.
"Now, that's just right," she said and let go of the arch.
The project had been a success. In a year or so the white plastic arch would be dripping with cones of purple petals. But I still hadn't told her.
She was already smoking when I got around to sitting down with her on the porch.
"Mama, I'm sorry if. .. ," I started to say, trying to fight back the tears as they inched into my eyes, but she seemed to have softened a bit. Her body was relaxed against the back of the chair, and she was rocking. "I know I'm not exactly what you expected in a daughter."
She stopped rocking and looked right at me. "Oh honey, yes you are. You're independent, full of life, everything I ever wanted." She leaned back in her chair again and looked out over the yard. "Never mind that silly husband of yours, and doctors can do so much these days; you may have children
someday if you want, just look at what all has happened to me. All the problems I'm still alive to tell it."
"No, you don't understand," I protested.
"I know you two aren't getting along. He hasn't called all weekend, not even to see if you got here safe. You don't need him anyway, and you should be grateful for that. It wasn't like that when I got married."
"That's not what I meant. How did you know I lost the baby?" I tried to be pathetic, but it came out hard and cracked.
"It's been three months since you told me you were pregnant. You haven't said much about it since. At first I thought it was because I was sick but you have been completely avoiding the subject. Besides, you're shaped just like me. If you were three months along you'd already be swole up and big all over." She gave a half grin when she said this.
"Mama, I'm never gonna have a baby," I blurted and glared at her.
"Do you really want children? I mean, you have so much more. Just look at me and what all I've had to go through with my body. When I was your age I thought that children, and a husband, was all there was. But you have a choice." She took the last drag of her cigarette and put it out.
I couldn't believe this was the same woman who put me through ballet, piano, tap, and a myriad of other things to try and make me into a lady so I would grow up and marry well, have babies, and repeat.
She leaned back and propped her foot against the porch post. "You probably only did it to prove a point anyway." She laughed.
Instead of crying or screaming, I leaned back in my rock-ing chair and grabbed one of her cigarettes.
"I just thought a baby would ..." I stopped to take a long first drag from the cigarette.
"Yeah, that's what we all think at one time or another. Now, I love you kids and I wouldn't have it any other wa
y than having had you. But children won't solve your problems."
Even over the smoke, a floral smell still hung in the sticky air. The garden arch was a brilliant white against the rough black dirt at its base and the green of the wisteria all around it. I thought about the day I miscarried and the champs that woke me up at six in the morning. For about a week afterward all I could think about was sex, though I neither felt like having sex nor wanted to be anywhere near Terry.
"I think my hormones are out of whack," I said.
"Maybe you're about to go through menopause," she laughed and I laughed with her but it wasn't because it was funny. "I don't guess I will ever have to really go through that," she said with a tone that suggested a change of subject.
I held the cigarette awkwardly between my thumb and my forefinger. "The slugs are bad at my house this year. Slimy old things. I can't stand 'em," I complained.
"Pour salt on 'em. They'll just wither up and go away." When she said this I felt like the Morton Salt Shaker girl, without an umbrella of protection over my head, holding my life in my hands, which was still a reflection of her life. I thought about the store-bought wisteria shriveling in my front yard and decided to ask her for a cutting.
"Sure, they just grow up wild around here. I couldn't tell you how long it's been there." She got up to get the shears. After clipping a small branch with lots of leaves and an unopened bud, she brought it over to me. "Now, don't say thank you or it'll die."
"Why's that?" I took the cutting and twirled it in my hands.
She shrugged, "Old wives' tale."
ROB: What we need always to be in search of is the way in which a character's yearning is manifested. Stories are driven forward by causality. All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing for something. The complications ensue from the drive of those yearnings and the attempt to get around the impediments and difficulties that thwart desire.
From Where You Dream Page 17