by Sam Michel
“You wouldn’t think she had such taste,” I heard, “you wouldn’t guess a woman of her size could be so delicate.”
So far out, they said, so little here to work with, well, the ladies simply failed to see the way my mother did it. But I saw how she did it. Elbow grease, is how. Boots and nails, hammers, boards and muckrakes. Foresight, I remember, hindsight. I tell my wife I can recall my mother running all the stock out from the barn a good week prior to the party and opening all the doors up. She hung braids of herbs and pine wreathes on the stall doors. She burned, sprayed, and scoured, set up rat traps for the pigeons in the rafters, played a radio throughout the night to warn the skunks off. She said she did not want to hear a single woman moaning over stink this year; she didn’t want to see a single man embarrassed over what he’d stepped on in his town shoes. She said she did it all for me. Without me, she said, none of this would come to pass. Looking back, I see I must have been as wise to her as I was pretty. I see me walk about the barn with both thumbs hooked into the pockets of my blue jeans, squinch-eyed, head-high to a hipbone, undeluded by the management of surface. I weigh maybe fifty pounds. Too big for my britches, said my mother. She said it never bothered her, my being lost to Easter bunnies and to Santa Claus, but her heart aged for me sorrowfully the day she saw me sitting on the fencerail with my legs crossed. Next thing she could see for me was hand-rolled cigarettes, a cafe in a European capitol, a sneer, a book, contempt for her and for my father, a closet full of black. One day I would be too clever to discover anything at all I could believe in; I would lay my head against my horse’s chest and not be moved to love him. With me, she said, there would be no reason for a dance; no drink, she said, no food, no party. Apparently, I was a complicated boy. What would come to pass, it seemed, would pass with me as well as it would pass without. I didn’t say so at the time, but I remember thinking if this party truly was for me, and my mother meant this party to be blessed for me by magic, then she ought not to have made me an accomplice in its fabrication.
Still, I knew enough to show my gratefully excited side. I was eager, for her sake, to call our barn a dancehall. On the party’s eve, I was happy to conduct a tour with her, jotting down minutia on a notepad with a pencil. She held my hand, I can recall, and led me from the door the guests would pass through, to the tables, and the places at the tables where my mother had arranged the cards that told each guest where he or she would sit. We blew up balloons. We raised and lowered strings of lights, determined whether we preferred it if the lights were blinking, or were steady, or if they might be festivest in combination. We sat in Papa’s place, pretended we were Uncle Ikey, said that we were Grandpa Al. We admired, from each place, and we corrected, according to the eyes we were pretending we were seeing through of Grace Dendari, or Amelia Dangberg, and Vernon’s first dead wife, Althea. If we were sitting at a table for the fat folks, we pretended we were fat. Or else we sat across the barn, pretending we were thin, or loud, and quiet, politically inclined, or agriculturally, or were inclined to tell a joke, or not, and were inclined to feel that jokes were told by those who felt their lives were jokes, whose punchline would not overcome them, so long as they foresaw it. My mother and I, we foresaw enough to bend our knuckles over sticks, pretending we were arthritic. Or else we ate our food off hayhooks, pretending we were droll. We stepped onto the dancefloor, where my mother picked me up, and we pretended we were two, a newborn, flushing couple, sated, wary, looking out for tricky seamsplits in the plywood.
I had my one arm hooked around my mother’s neck, the other arm extended where she led it. She was strong, she carried me; my bottom rested in her elbowcrook, my lap supported Mother’s bosom. She said for me to hold on tight, at certain times, and at other times she said for me to try and seem as if I hardly touched her. I remember she smelled mothery to me, like her favorite sweatshirt, maybe, nice, voluminous and sort of pissy, really, regular. Her voice was soothing, dancing, I liked to feel it through her chest against my lap. I told my mother, No, ma’am, when she asked me could I smell a barn nearby, and, Yes, ma’am, when she asked me could I understand at all what we were doing. I did not tell her I thought dancing without music was for sissies. Nor did I tell her I thought only sissies would be caught out dancing with their mothers. I think I told her only that I thought I must be learning. My mother rubbed her cheek to mine, said, Yes, that’s right, she thought I must be learning. She squeezed me, said I’d grown so big, so fast; she said it made her tired to try and hold me. She let me down, and then she thanked me, and she curtsied, and then she seemed to study me before she said it might be time for me to learn the proper way of bowing. She stood the two of us apart. I was to watch. I saw the funny, silky way her eyes would close and open at the bottom of the bow and at the top, how her eyelids seemed to be descending at the same rate as her bow descended, slowly, falling finally closed when she had gone as low as she would go, and then opening, slowly once again, but not too slowly, following a kind of nod her head made at the bottom of the bow to indicate that she was coming up now, my mother’s eyelids coming open from the little nod and looking like to say, “Don’t mention it,” only nearer to the classy way she thought the same thing might be said by men of finer breeding. My pleasure, Not at all, my mother said, like that.
As for me, I botched it. I bent too far, too low; I closed my eyes, my mother said, as if I had a dirty trick in mind; I opened them as if I thought my partner ought to be amazed with me, as if the thing that I had done—bowed—required of my partner an ovation. It would not do, my mother said. If I wanted to attract the cows, she said, then keep on acting like an ox. She told me that my father might have been no good for town, but one thing he could do was dance, and the other thing he did was bow. She put my one hand on my belly and my one hand on my back. She reshowed me how to do my eyes. My mother was explaining how the best of women shunted men who seemed too green, or insincere, or men who were too proud to think that bowing to a woman was important. I did not want a woman who would find my wink too fetching. I did not want a woman who was taken up by gifts of rhinestones, or by women’s magazines and talkshows on the radio or TV. I did not want a woman who required much improvement.
All of this I understood. But still I struggled. I felt spastic, gawky, severed—“a chicken with his head cut off”—I feared I was a little ox, a lumox, a lumberer whose bones had grown beyond the jurisdiction of the signalways that meant to move them. I could not feel myself. My mother must have seen this. She held me, put her one hand at my waist, pressed me with the other at the shoulderblades. She put her fingertips against my eyelids. She said, “Feel?” She asked me, “Can you tell the difference?” And then my mother let me go it on my own awhile; and then she picked me up again, and we rehearsed the whole routine, from the proper introductions and the proper dance, to the proper curtsies, bows, and proper partings. My mother said, “That’s it,” and, “Yes, you’re doing fine,” but I knew I was not. My mother tapped me on the forehead, told me I should think, and don’t forget, but it was more to me like giving up then than succeeding, it felt to me as if remembering would be unthinkable, a willful reproduction of a tender failure—masochistic, in the long run, awfully Catholic, maybe, not too shrewd.
She walked away from me. And then my mother asked me, as if she had forgotten she had asked me once already, “Does it smell much like a barn in here?” She said, “Are you sure you know what we are doing?”
My mother turned to me, just enough to show me what I thought of as her good side, where her hair came down across the eyebrow, just above the cheekbone, exposing just the very bottom of her earlobe, where she wore an earring, a tremendous, mateless, silver hoop, which put me at the time in mind of someone not a mother, a woman more alone than mothers were, and prettier, I might say now, predatory, I suppose, wan and catlike; she must have seemed to me a great, hunted cat, wounded, abandoned in the dusk to pant and bleed and wanly ponder what had struck her.
I think I knew that it was P
apa.
I think my mother knew I knew that it was Papa.
My mother pinched this earring, she rubbed it; she was thinking, I thought, looking forward to the end of something she was trying to remember.
My mother said, “I wasn’t going to have you with your daddy. I wanted you to see the world, all the oceans and museums. When I was just a little girl,” she said, “I used to play-pretend that you were walking with me through a slew of foreign airports. You were just as pretty as you are. We were both so pretty. I was younger. People looked at us. We wore the smartest clothes. We were mostly on our way to see St. Peter’s. Or we were coming back from there. My friend, Amelia, Mrs. Dangberg—Owen’s mommy?—she went over there and brought back home a T-shirt and a metal pigeon. She said that giant negroes sold them. Skinny ones. She says if I could see how beautiful—and also scary—a giant, skinny negro was, then I wouldn’t be so quick to call her metal pigeon ticky-tack. But in my heart, I wasn’t having any piece of Rome Amelia Dangberg was describing. I went right on having us be over there. For us, whenever we would go, we had a favorite secret color. It was blue. That way, every day the sun was shining, we could always see a little bit of home, when we were at St. Peter’s, and we could always see a little of St. Peter’s, when we were back at home. I was just a girl. Teenaged. Funny, how much clearer of her life a girl can be then. We were lying on our backs, and it was cool, like maybe May is on the mountain, with the wild iris, and the lupine, and the creek full up with melt and sounding over in the aspens. You could smell the snow still. You knew the dirt was good and dark, and it seemed as like the meadowlarks could sing through noon in August, and when we reached our hands up, it was just like we had grown the muscles of that painted Adam—we were strong—and God was reaching down His hand from Rome to touch us.”
My mother said, “We could have done it, you know, gone there. This place wasn’t always in a pinch. But do you know what your papa says? He says that he does not believe he left his keys in Egypt. Everything he needs is here, he says. He said it when the place was flush, says it now we’re looking broke, and I suspect that he’ll be saying it when he is dead and gone to heaven, so as not to look back down and see how little this place ever needed him to need it. We’ll recover, he keeps saying, we’ll get over there, don’t worry. But in the meantime, how about us? There isn’t any place for us, not even any placecard, did you notice? You forget yourself,” my mother said. “Don’t do it.” She said, “This place here is Grace Dendari’s. Do you remember her? The lady-baker? Know why I have got her sitting here? Men. Men is why. Ten men I have got her sitting with, and a lady way too young to go by Velma. Ugly, ugly Velma. Mean, too. But I will wager Velma will have made her way up to the dance floor times enough that Jesus in His cradle might mistake her for His Mary, while poor Gracey won’t have caused a man to take her past His manger even once. Different folks don’t go together. That’s why the fat with the fat, and the old with the old. That’s why I believe that Gracey is a baker, because she doesn’t go with anyone. Grace goes with the cold and dark, her flour and her oven. But she is starved for men, you know, so I give her ten men who are starved for women, and a woman who is cactus on the palate. But you watch and see. I’ll bet you Grace won’t dance enough for Jesus even to mistake her as herself, let alone save Mary. There’s a lesson here: Do not get yourself mistaken. We are not Grace. Myself, I am your mother, your daddy’s wife. In my heart, where it counts, I know I’m not mistook. When you were born, it hurt. Pain is proof. Your daddy says it’s just like with a heifer, but it isn’t. I’ve got feelings. I wanted you. I’ve seen mothers thinking they were martyrs. Not me. There’s human dignity in me. I only asked your papa for the doctor. I think I knew that you would be the only one. I wasn’t trying out for drama. I could have bled to death. To this day, I think it was the phone call. Doctor said he’d come for free, but your daddy, I believe that he was thinking what it cost to make the phone call. Roberto was the one who finally called. Said he was afraid your papa was about to reach his hand in me and find a hoof on you so he could winch it. Doctor shamed your papa. He told your papa he had half a mind to strap him down and have a go at him with the emasculators for pulling such a stunt as not to call him. No local, says the doctor. Rusty cutters. That doctor, he didn’t want to let your papa hold you. But when you came, and I first held you on my chest here, I didn’t have a bone of grudge in my entire body. I let your daddy hold you same as if he’d had as much to do with you as I did. I was so happy then. You were my boy. You were red. And mad. Wasn’t till you fell asleep that we could see what you might look like. Myself, I wanted just to look. My only want while I was healing up was just to be alone with you and look and care for you and look. I talked to you. I thought I understood you. I called you my raccoon. Every day I tried to see myself in you but didn’t. Your daddy kept on opening the curtains. Took to sleeping down the hall. He said he’d give you just one month of sleeping in our bed before we moved you to your own room. Seemed like nothing I could hear or see was not a cause to start me crying. If you peed on me I cried. I cried to hear the geese. I was dopey, understand. I wasn’t right. Doctor didn’t need to tell me. You would be my first and only. I wanted to save you. Everything. My idea was to just be quiet for awhile, and private, study on the shape of things, what came when, why it was I felt the way that I was feeling, how I might arrange to feel that way again some day when I was blue or ever lonely in the future. I don’t know why we try so hard to have our hearts break. You broke my heart. I told your daddy, I said, I don’t want you and your buddies parading through my room to see me when I’m hurting. But he never listened. He said, Isn’t you they’re coming out to look at. Proud, I suppose. It’s pride sometimes will make a person disrespect another person’s dignity. I’m telling you, you never saw your daddy on the phone so much as after you were born. Come and see, come and see. Passing out cigars. Entertaining with champagne and pricey whiskey. Fed folks our entire winter’s worth of freezer meat. It’s you he said would put us in the poorhouse in the name of celebration. Do you think that’s true?” my mother said. “Do you think you’ll put us in the poorhouse? Poor boy, are you hungry? Are you freezing? You’re my little man now, aren’t you Lincoln? You know I love you, don’t you? Tell me, is the debt owed on a mother’s love too onerous for sons to service? Your papa thinks so. Onerous, he says. Here he’s spending interest on a gang of bulls that don’t know steers from heifers, pays out by the month on tractors, oats, and combines, floats a loan to drill a well, pumps the water from the desert’s heart to get its skin wet; but here we see the debt that sends your daddy to a dictionary to say how hard it is to service, is the debt of love he took on from his mother.” My mother said, “Not with us, okay? With you and me, there won’t be any payback. No onerous. It’s your birthday. You’re the birthday boy. Your mommy’s love is not a loan, you can keep it all your life,” she told me, “as a present.”
“Well, I was scared,” I tell my wife. “I was a real boy. I liked dirt. I might have had to pee. I don’t think it was a child on earth my mother had the mind or heart for raising.”
I tell my wife that she seemed swimmy to me, Mother did; I thought it looked as if she’d crossed the barnyard on an icy day, when the wind was dry, and grainy, and her eyes had watered up to keep themselves from cracking. I watched her. She was on the second go-around. She fingered bulbs, adjusted tablecloths, eyed the shadows for the maverick pigeon scratching in the rafters. She moved trees; she redirected creeks; she plucked her sweatshirt from her body where it stuck from where I pressed it. I recall my mother’s want for quiet. To study. See the shape of things. She bore me once, she said, and then was barren. She said that she would recreate me. She recreates me still, she says, when she is lonely, and is blue, and would rather not be holding any grudges. She says she wants to keep it light these days. But she cannot be light. There is no levity in recreation. Each remembrance, she discovers, is a memory of a memory, and memory is the warp through wh
ich experience is leavened into weight.
“Do you understand me?” says my mother. “Not good,” she says, “not bad. Just awfully, awfully heavy. You get to be your mother’s age, remembering begins to feel like faith. I do not ask questions. The hows and whys and wherefores. There isn’t anything to know, nothing to get. You’ve just got it, your life, and it sits there like this lump of coal inside you, just waiting for some blessed soul to come around and light it up or help you to forget how fast the lump is growing. Vernon does that,” says my mother. “Helps me to forget, puts a match to what’s remembered. Vernon’s grateful. It’s a brand new desert Vernon sees. He’s still got the old one, says he knows it’s right directly underneath the new, it’s what the new one’s built on. You know, the Roxy once was also new. My grandad said he could remember going down to watch them turn the earth up when they built it. Imagine, what a novelty, balconies, loveseats and those velvet curtains! And you watched them tear it down, did you? And now you’re crying none of this was here with all the rest? Let me tell you something, there will come a day when none of this was here will be a whole lot truer than you want it to. That lump of coal grows like a cancer. It splits. It scatters off itself in pieces. I look some days at one teat and I can’t imagine that I ever had the other. Or another day I look at the one and can’t imagine how it got to be the one I’m seeing. I saw it every day, washed it, dressed it, sprayed it with perfume. But I never saw it getting stretched. I think I just waked up one day and said, Well, what on earth! When did all this happen? Same with burying your daddy, you know, or getting thrown by Jelly Bean, or ever being young enough to dream I’d be a girl who spoke another language in a foreign city. Italian!” says my mother. “Rome! It’s all my life,” she says, “but I’ve felt it move through me so many times, so many different places, it starts to seem like I keep bumping into parts of me and asking, Don’t I know you? Have we been introduced? I get to saying, None of that was there, you know, I think: Bonnie Dahl, you must be terribly mistaken.”