by Sam Michel
“You know,” I told the bunch, “deety-deet, deety-deet?”
“She’s the one just got her hair done,” I explain.
“Slight?” I say. “Yea high?”
“The one who likes to talk, the one who holds opinions.”
Dahl, I might have said, sweet on a fellow here called Vernon? All her natural teeth? Quit smoking? No drinking? Always leaves a smidgen of her supper near the center of her plate? Ranch days, she has maybe told you, she lost her taste for food by boiling years of Idaho potatoes? Spud, salt, butter, spud? Lettuce being iceberg? Eaten first? From a bowl? Shake your vinegar and corn-oil in that special bottle with a packet of Italian? Fried a lot of eggs and bacon? Fried onions, squash, and too, too many freezerfuls of stringy rangemeat?
Well, so, and maybe she had mentioned her interpretation of the bow. Maybe spoken more than once about the possibility of Rome. Sure she would retire to a life of steamer trunks and postcards. Would have built herself a house whose windows showed on Tuscan grain, and olive orchards, and the vineyards and chateaus of old Bordeaux, I think, on a stony cliff, high out on the headland, where the lighthouse shines out on the sea, her sea, an Atlantic, far in from the heart of her America, where she might look up from a poem and tell herself that yes, this is my tranquil widowhood, my claims from life of living. She would like to say, I got around. She would say, You won’t catch the grass grown up on me. She would be closing in on eighty. Twenty years at least must yet be left to her. She needed twenty years, she said, twenty tranquil years, uninterrupted; she had lived so much she must remember. She rocked. She nodded. A poem lay in her lap. She was entitled. She postponed, had compromised desire. Yet here, in her lap, lay a poem. She felt she understood it. She was old, old, would live to be one-hundred years and more; she suffered upward to a sense of humor.
“Surely you must know her,” I said. “Cancer? Puny thing, not much left inside her? Surely you must know her,” I said, “Mrs. Dahl?”
Yet no one seemed to know her.
“Maybe she has typed an angry letter,” I suggest. “She said that she was going to collect some names, see about petitioning for better help?”
Yet no one seemed to have received my mother’s letter, nor did they mean to seem to know much of the English language. Mum was their word; the game here was to show us nothing more than grunts and shoulders. Because of course, of course, they knew my mother. Of course, perhaps, they did not like her. Perhaps, too, it was me they did not like; me, perhaps, they did not trust. Could I be the son? What was really in that box? Who was this child? What provoked his silence? And if I were my mother’s son, then how come I must ask them where her room is?
Well, you understood them. Even so, I tried not to go too hard on myself, not to take myself too personally, convinced myself that I had somehow been construed as news, an instance of a broadcast, an item or a topic, living proof of this or that abstract debate I overheard my son and I had interrupted. Corruption, pollution, violence, malevolence, unholiness, a universal disrespect for elders. To a man of them, and to a woman, you would not catch them being young. The way things are, it was agreed, “why these days, it’s an outrage.” And there we came, my son and I, how-things-were-and-would-continue-worsening-to-be, youthful and outrageous. Right away you understood how you could not compete with them, could not argue for your place beside them, could not match them with your mother’s anecdotes, quantity for quantity in suffering. Had things turned out much differently, I would have kicked them in the catheters and crutches. I think we all were breathing easier when there arrived at last an Anchorage authority to help excuse us.
“May I help you,” said this woman, the authority, and my son and I were led down through the narrow, yellow halls to Mother’s.
The authority’s brief? Mrs. Dahl has turned in early. You may find her partially sedated. These days, Mrs. Dahl is keeping to herself. And the authority’s manner? A sensible step, a flat white shoe, a ballpoint pen attaching to a clipboard by a beaded chain. Notes, peckish pauses. Two taps with the clipboard on a door unfavored by the photographs and postcards or the articles of written speech and strings of popcorn or a simple declaration of a name which might have made it Mother’s.
“Here we are,” the woman says. “Mrs. Dahl? Here is your son. He’s brought your grandson here to see you.”
So, Mama.
I bet eighty-seven pounds. Milk-blue eyes, pink scalp through the silver roots. She held a hairbrush in her fist. Wore a floral cotton robe. Bare feet. Bare hands. A magazine across her lap devoted to our current stars. She was, she said, a fright. Said we should have called. Pilly robe, her hair, said a lady needs fair warning. Interns, girls, that’s who cuts your hair here, did she say so? Hope? she said. A dog? Yes, but had she introduced us yet to Vernon? A nice man, Vernon, minded his manners, said that one day soon he’d take her to the top of Pancake Summit. Mother, this was Mama. We see her pick the little pills off from her robe, touch her finger to her tongue and turn her pages. We learn the big-armed man has died. Died, too, the man with seven fingers. Says she disremembers how the big-armed man, Vernon’s competition, older than he looked, she disremembers. We hear the other drank himself to death. Water. Had a theory water made him hurt less. Set a chair up in his shower, drank until his cells were floated too far off from one another and it killed him. She is certain she has eaten. She turns her pages. Stars and stars, celebs. Big teeth and cleavage. We are not to mention slippers. Hope? she says. And, No. 7? Ninety-two, my mama says, the last time anybody weighed her. And what else? A visit from the second-grade, try-outs for the chorus, a fire in the greatroom, had we seen it? She wonders: Was she spoken of, out there? Had anybody missed her? Give her time, she says, not to worry, she’ll be ready.
She says, “I am off my guard, dear.” Says, “I’ve got nothing here by way of food to feed you.”
Her pink scalp, liver-spotted, bowed down to the glossy pages. A leading lady in divorce court. A princess in a minefield.
A dog, is it?
A dog?
“Hope,” my mother said. “Oh, we had lots of Hopes. Except of course the only animal we called by Hope, it was a rooster.”
RECAPITULATION
—Mother revives—a party must be thrown—you don’t need a barn to hang your star—did I teach you how to bow?—I amdead—making herself over—the via Dolorosa—a chair that loves me—something younger than she ever was—the Roman dentist—her unlivable desires—Mama cracked—I move us to Golconda—made to wing one—I know this story—we arrive at the butcher’s—browbeat them with blood—Hopey is a brave, good dog—home at last—no light, no wife—I am way past time—gone for sausage—name the change—a different kind of quiet—and then—we took that bath together—isolating theatres of self—I come from Mama’s scar—shameless guilts and glancing ardors—but a party!—some brighter, brand new hours—our last good looks—tonight, all good guesses will be true—the son may speak—I love you—am I funny?—sleep fast and remember—
Mother stuck. We could not finally lose her. She revived. A birthday, after all. A son, a grandson, two boys, once and twice descended from her blood were born, and here we were, her proof, she lived, she had forgotten, said that certainly, of course, a party must be thrown, balloons must be arranged, cakes frosted, tables set, stars hung, planets, comets, moons; the blessed Virgin and her holy son, according to my mother, must not go unremembered through the celebration of our seasons. Lincoln and Lincoln. Joseph, she said, Mary, Jesus. We are born. Something must be meant, our being born so near to Him; something must be made through which a guest might easily perceive how “each and every one of us,” in His creation, is illumined as the blessed vessel of His holy meaning. That means you, and you, and me. We are needed, placed, beholden and responsible. No accidents. No soul of us unsparked. “Granted,” said my mother, “some sparks big, some little,” but from the big the little could be made a little bigger; from the vision of our savior bearing forth His cross, �
�your Grace Dendaris of the world can see a point to what they’re doing.” Yes, naturally, my mother said, a person needs a scene to see what he is meant for looks like, though to stage a scene, she said, you do not need a trough. Nor do you need a beam from which to hang your star, nor a hank of baling wire to make one. Think tub, Mother says, think sink, think screwhooks in the ceiling. According to my mother, you can pick a mess of paper flowers up at Bi Rite. You can find a slew of party favors at the Rexall. You may boil weenies, dye punch, plug a record on the jukebox.
“Know this,” Mother says, “Grace Dendari wants to dance.”
If she isn’t dead, my mother says, then Grace is surely lonely, older, more the same, and yes, again, of course, very much—what did I think?—she wants to dance. According to my mother, Grace has seen her weight fall from her chest, and through her hips, and past her thighs and knees to gather at her ankles, and she has known that all her life her hands were meant for kneading dough, and that her feet were meant for dancing. Trouble is that these days she can’t lift them. Likely never could. Some can’t. Though most remember that they could, can, and did, though they did not. In the early a.m. hours, as my mother sees her, Grace Dendari stands before the full-length mirror, plucks the hem up from her baker’s apron and recalls a girl who danced, tells herself, “I danced,” and sees another, slimmer leg, a lighter foot than this reflection of a foot she feels is nailed down to the carpet. Oh, it moves, this foot, it isn’t really nailed to any carpet, but it isn’t light, it drags, it clumps, you could not call it dancing. Her shoe is wrong, her hosiery, there is a fatness at her kneecaps. She holds her hands out to herself, acceptingly, shapes a space out with her arms as if she has embraced a partner. Drag and clump, clump and stagger. Is this elegant? What should she say? She has been to parties. She reads the magazines. She wants to say she wished she lived where people ate more scones than doughnuts. She wants not to feel so many stories left to her are prefaced by In my day... She is short of breath, she cannot breathe. Help her, says my mother, invite her, show her how to dance a simple step, ask her where she’s got her hair done, tell her she is just as I remember.
“And when her song has played out, and you’re finished,” says my mother, “don’t forget to bow.” Says my mother, “Did I teach you?”
My mother picks her brush up, touches it against her hair, smoothes her palms against the places she has touched without her palms quite touching. She was waiting, I think, for an answer, traction, some response of mine to help inspire and direct her. She had begun, I think, must have felt herself to be at a beginning, and yet how many times must she have heard herself? How often, every day, had she passed over Grace? How many times must she have picked her brush up, brushed, smoothed, begun to touch her hair, and known enough to not quite touch it?
“I’m all burned up,” my mother says. “They say with some it never happens, but I never met the person yet who takes her dose that doesn’t get her hair fried.”
“They gave us ham,” my mother says.
She says, “Vernon says these spots will run together one day, and I’ll look like I have got a tan.”
You saw her looking to us for her tone, I think, a sense of audience, somebody, somehow she must play for. Should she be angry with us? With herself and her condition? Bewildered, was she? Was she touched? What did we two think? Would we like for her to shame us for our youth, our health, our beauty? She could empathize, she seemed to say, she knew how the boy must feel, she could, if he liked, invent a party which would fall out from the marrow of his feeling. Something new to her, an old story, remade for the boy, just let her know, just give her something she might go on. She was beginning, did we see her, had we heard, she knew she was a bore, she must repeat herself “just something awful.”
She says, “You get the wearies, hearing so much ping-pong.”
She twists a lipstick from a little silver cylinder.
“I am invited,” she says, “aren’t I?”
She says, “He died of water.”
And, “I have got a wind-resistant sportsuit.”
She tells us we must turn our backs, wants us please to step out in the hall, if we don’t mind, make ourselves scarce, close our eyes, at least, “A lady needs a little privacy.” Then she turns her sleeve up, shows us where they could not find her vein. My mother asks us would we like to see her ankle, or her knee, asks us would we like to see where they have cut the rib out.
“I’m all bruise,” my mother says. “I don’t dare wear short sleeves out in public. I bump up against a doorjamb and my skin breaks. Say I’m visiting with folks, well, then I am last of us to know that I am bleeding.”
Says my mother, “Died of water. We are made of water.”
She says, “Scares me how much nothing hurts.”
My mother asks me please to fetch a blouse for her, wants for me to fix the hook on her brassiere.
“Don’t look,” she says, says, “Do you see a lump there, just below my neck, to the one side of my backbone?”
Me, the son, my mother’s son, I do not look; I do as I am told to do, in part, as I believe my doing will best suit me. Me, I poked around my mother’s drawers and shelves, looking there, and not, and through the jars of pills and syrups, the wrinkled tubes of creams and jellies, I saw Hope, saw burlap and Visqueen, the butcher’s bones, my son at play with Hope and happy.
By and by, because I wanted her to know we listened, that I, at least, had heard her, I said, “Mama. Mama, nobody believes these days too much in Jesus.” I said, “I think Grace is dead.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said my mother. “Folks believe a whole lot more than they let on, and Grace is only all about who’s living.”
My mother rubbed a salve into the raw spots on her wrists. She sifted through her jewelry box, held up gold and green and blue and cast-and-chiseled silver things against her throat and earlobes, judging for effect. We would not help her. How does she look, she wanted to know. How about this, she seemed to say, too gaudy, too formal, do you think, or this necklace with this blouse, too loud? But we did not help, we could not say. We were all hands and pockets, slouched, red-faced and foot-focused, dumb. My mother turned back to her mirror, dismissing us, I think, as men. She chose according to herself. She had begun, she seemed to say, I will not go back, I will make my own way newly. We watched how she applied her base, what she chose to highlight, saw her hang herself with jewels. She stood. She began again, with a difference. Lily Fong’s, my mother said, the renderer’s, a vet; what on earth, my mother wondered, did I believe she ought to know about Humane Societies? Was this visit really all about a dog then? Was I to let the boy believe a dog meant more than people? More than family, Mother said, more than generations, our histories preserved in blood?
“Bow,” she says. “Let’s see if you remember anything at all I’ve taught you.”
My mother lifts her chin at me.
She is smaller than a girl.
She says, “I thought so.”
To the boy, my mother says, “And you, who teaches you your catechism?” She said, “Gracey is the one she makes your doughnuts.”
She took his fingers in her hand and laid them on her wrist and asked him what he felt there. You could see her coming into focus. I think I understood that she would not be lost, not by us, not this night; this night, she was saying, we would not mistake her.
“That’s me,” she told the boy. “That’s you. That’s the heartbeat you can feel that keeps us living. That’s blood. On earth, when you’re alive on earth, your soul lives in your blood, and that heartbeat is your soultime. You’ve got more beats left to you than I do. You’ve got a lot more soultime, understand, all your life on earth for keeping quiet. I could die tonight, you know, and you’ll be sorry someday that you didn’t talk to me because you lost a doggy. Do you know what I want, I want to hear you say what you would like to see there at your birthday. Don’t you worry,” said my mother. “You take care of people, and your dogs will foll
ow. I’ll tell you what, how’d you like to hear about the party I once gave your daddy—did he tell you?—when he was turning five, the shindig I put on to celebrate his birthday?”
Well, to hear her tell it, you would have thought it was another mother’s party. To see her, you would not have guessed she was a woman who had dressed away her pretty days in corduroys and sweatshirts. You would have seen her as she might have seen herself, the wearer of a mateless earring, that silver hoop, an arresting woman, “carelessly luxuriant,” a mother who has saved herself against her motherhood, an idea of her motherhood not hers, no, not hers—she, my mother, she was fashioned from herself, ahead of her time, an idea any girl once might have had of Mother and forgotten. She was free to go. You could believe she went. You could believe her son once sneaked into her bed when she had risen just to smell her. You understood his want to rub her underthings against his cheek and then to one day wear them. She had hips, breasts. When they looked, the son, the father, men who had a lover’s eye for women, they could not have said with any certainty that hers was the lap through which a child had passed, swelling and distending, cleaving her and sucking, gnawing and scratching, needing her and crying through her sleep for her and needing her and needing.
My mother seemed to me then to be growing. In that room, under that light, the more she spoke, the more I saw her bones fill. You looked at her when we walked in and would have said her bones were hollow, more shell than bone—her skin, her flesh more of a yellow moss, I would have said, a drapery of antfood, maybe, guppystuff. She was dying. This year, she said, this was it. She dreamed it. She had seen it many times; she was a little girl, she wore saddle shoes, flowers fell her way, oceans called, she watched a porter wheel her trunk across the gangway, she was dead. Ants, tiny fishes, she saw, worms. She said so on the telephone, I am dying, she said, a priest last night massaged my feet, an angel offered me a biscuit, I am dead. And then you walked into her room and saw her eyes float and her hands shake and you heard her say my name and you believed her. Yet here I heard her voice succeed itself, uninterrupted, and I saw her bones somehow becoming bones, thicker seeming, denser, marrowed, an able carriage for the skin I saw was skin, the flesh I saw was flesh, nothing to be fed upon, nothing static, not to rot, my mother’s body able to advance itself untaxed from one place in the room and to another, powdering itself, applying to itself a stripe of brick-red lipstick, rouge, mascara, a modest drop or two behind the ears and knees and ankles of perfume. Shindig, she was saying, and soiree, and her bones filled out, and she commanded them, her bones, her body, my mother was in charge, getting herself up, she said, making herself over.