by Sam Michel
This was the lie. The lift. When she smoothed her hair again, brushed and smoothed and sprayed her hair, rinsed her mouth, pulled her cuffs down past her wrists and straightened up the collar of her wind-resistant sportsuit, I do not think she saw herself a fright. Grace Dendari, Amelia Dangberg, dear love Vernon, Owen, Papa, my son, my wife, me, myself—she left us all a long way back behind her, way down underneath. She was flying now. Untracked. Unbound. She had begun. In her eyes I thought I saw the far blue I recall we were to see in Rome of Michelangelo, ceilingless, the colorway through which she passed from home and to the soul of her religion, from the poplars to the frescoes, from the calves to the cats, from the squeeze-chute to the coliseum, my mother passing peacefully, swathed, in blue, uncorruptively ascendant.
So what was Mother on? What drug? What dose, I asked myself, and how long would it last? Her euphoria, what antidote might interrupt it?
She was saying Rome. To the boy. She had been there. “Oh, many times,” she said, “since I was just a little girl, just your age, by train, in those days, to New York, and then by boat,” the same lie I had heard her lying all my life, yet true, credible, at least, to the boy, apparently, and through the boy, to me—true, and seeming truer still the farther she would stray from what could be the truth, the higher you could see her rising to the place where her regrets appeared to be forgotten, and fear was not foreseen, and every want she knew was answered yes so long as she continued in her story.
“Your grandad,” she was saying, “he didn’t come along. But he didn’t stop us either. He took us to the airport, and he kept the postcards on his dresser, and I remember when he met us coming back he’d brought me flowers.”
She infected us. Mother, her talent, a woman’s talent, any aging bearer in the world of children must possess it, this talent to infect; me, at least, I felt her marrow in my marrow; I could not recover to myself a worry over where a story was begun, what was true and not and where a truth was softened up, omitted and extended. You compose yourself for Father. You remain composed for Grace. You may argue. You may pity. Yet Mother, any worn out, dying matron on the bus bench, well, I did not want to sit by her; I did not want to touch the peaches she was squeezing in the market; I did not want to know she bathed; I did not want to hear that she had kissed a man once with that mouth; I did not want to hear another word about another dream another mother had of dying.
Yet Mother wasn’t dying, as we watched her, Mother lived. Cowardice, a meanness, my ingratitude—whatever I would feel come weighing I could feel my mother was relieving. My skin itched. My brain slipped. A kid, I think, some kid was shooting slingshots in my chest; behind my eyes some boy was sleeping with his feet up to his ankles in the freshet; though I could not have said so at the time, I am pretty sure a man in me was fingering around for anything he could recall had made him happy. Certainly, I felt high enough and elsewhere, there with Mother; I was rising on the swimmy rapture of my wants; I saw them swim as if in silted water, never coming clear enough to say beyond what each want might have felt like—this want calm, this want light, these wants hopeless, simple, smiling, fearsome. I could not say Rome. I could not name a saint. I saw no infant suckled from the bosom of a virgin mother, no galleries of weeping Christians gathered at the foot of any savior’s cross. I had no color. I had no certain way of being taken. I was calm, hopeful, happy, scared, according to my wants.
I think really I was having fun. I think that I was glad then to be given over. This was play, I must have felt, Mother’s game, infectious, I must have wondered what her rules were, how a son might best compete, what was fair or not and were there handicaps and was I handicapped or Mother? I know that I was dizzied, hyper-and desensitized, felt as if my veins had been injected by my mother with a heavy dose of an anesthetizing stimulant. I remember that the stain I saw on the seat of Mother’s wingback would not keep itself a stain. It dissolved, seemed to me to lose itself, its shape, as a stain, seemed to blur into the color and the pattern of the fabric while I watched it. It was unexceptional, not a flaw, I understood, this stain was meant to be there. The tear in my mother’s bedspread, the patch she stitched to mend the tear, these, too, were meant to be there. They disappeared, being there. Too soon, I could not make out that antiseptic odor I could typically make out, nor the faintly acrid urine stink, nor the stink of bad gums, open sores and loneliness a guest made out beneath the antiseptic, nor the pots of potpourri my mother spread about her room to scent the whole mess over. Here, then gone. As if my senses meant to tell my brain, So, what the hell, this place is just like any other place, a place is only what you make it.
My mother, I believe, was saying something about a broken heel, and cobblestone, and cars competing six abreast—charioteers, I think she said, like gladiators, she was saying, like they were driving chariots, from ancient days, right there on the via Dolorosa, right there in their little cars and modern suits!—and it occurred to me I could not hear the quiet there, in her room, the sound through her wall of her neighbor’s television—more bad news, an oil spill and a car-bomb and a scandal in the White House, the belated isolation of those pathogens responsible for her neuralgia, or his phlebitis, for their sciatica, glaucoma, carcinoma, their stout, degenerative hearts. Ain’t that the way, I heard, and, Just when you are drowning in the poop, they offer you a carrot. Typically. Typically, my mother did not speak, neither of us spoke, not in the presence of the other, we were quiet, saving up for phonetime, and through the quiet I could hear the news, yes, and the commentary on the news, and the gameshows and the soaps—the lights and bells, septuagenarian recipients of speedboats, gas grills, ATV’s and Caribbean Cruises, citizens you saw with one foot in the Anchorage and one foot in the den, where they, too, were channeled on to Days of Our Lives, All My Children and Another World, falling dozey through another week of vows, betrayals, and amnesiacs, the resurrections from the dead and the arrival, on a Friday episode, of Duke, the delinquent son the honest Doctor Bob is shocked to learn—on the eve of celebrating two-and-one-half decades of connubial fidelity to Kim, one-quarter of a century to Kim, to Kim, to Kim—is his. I thought that I could hear my mother’s neighbors staying tuned till Monday. Typically, I thought that I could hear the lids come off of jars, the labored twistings of the crippled fingers, the sparing application—not too much, not too much, you don’t really need it, remember The War, remember The Depression—the dabbing on, then, of the liniments to stiffened, swollen joints; I thought I heard them thinking, an old gal practicing the speech she had rehearsed for when she picked the phone up, redialed Everald Wilson, Grievance Communications Unit, this old gal praying for the strength to not conclude herself politely; this old man praying for the strength to say a word or two at this week’s funeral; these old boys and girls, I could be pretty sure I heard them praying not to wet the bed, heard them trying to remember to affix the bridgework for the grandkids, heard them calculating pocket change, recalling eight-year droughts, one-night stands, regretting choices from the menu on a rare night with the sons and daughters out to dinner, pondering what might be said, in the common room, later in the evening, during TV Time Discussion Group, about the state of a world in which the script demands a sinning, two-faced Doctor Bob. Typically. I heard, and figured what I heard was health, the heated, busy, decomposing mulch thrown thickly over what it meant to be here. Doesn’t mean I’m dying. Doesn’t mean I haven’t got another place to go. Doesn’t mean I haven’t got a son who loves me. You get old. You age. You do this. Play ping-pong. Eat popcorn. Goof around. Is your life really any different?
My mother spoke, uninterrupted, and I think I lost my way with her, the sound of her voice against that little voice I used to raise against the quiet, my No, my answer to the question It’s not this way where you live? She came over me, winningly, I wasn’t ready to play, could not compete, not yet, I had been counting on a lull here, a reprieve. No, I should have said, not me, it isn’t mine, not my game, your life, I have a child, a wife, a
job, a lawn to mow, a walk to clear, a fence to mend and a roof to patch, a garden I will help to weed come springtime and a chair that loves me.
I said, “Mother,” and she offered me her elbow. I said, “Please,” and she was saying, “Shall we?”
I think I understood then that the only end of Mother’s game here was desire, who could want the hardest, who could want the most, a simple game, child’s play, an instinct, untaught, the survivor’s code for an uncivil, civil kingdom: Make them want what you want and you win.
So, Rome. Well, why not an elephant to celebrate my birthday? Why not a clown, the magician who had sawed a woman half in two because I always liked a circus? A dancing bear, she told the boy, a juggler, a man who swallowed fire, a circus, a real-live Russian outfit, and food as catered by the French, in favor of Amelia Dangberg’s Irish. She was escorting us, conducting. We moved slowly out the yellow hall, my mother’s arm hooked through my elbow, my mother drawing pictures with her free hand of the big top and the catacombs she meant for us to see there.
She told the boy, “I had a toothache once in Rome, and I was scared because a dentist’s place back there is not what we know here. There was cracked paint in that place, and that nurse, I tell you she was rinsing off those tools in water you could see was only luke.”
We should have kissed her. We should have told her we were happy to have stopped off with the No. 7, appreciated her performance, promised her to do our best to honor her performance while confessing her performances, in memory and in fact, were likely to survive the lives of several Dahls without an urgent rival. I might have told my mother, Sit down, now, Mother, you are tired, it’s late for lipstick, it’s time I get back to my own chair.
My mother said, “And then, late on in the evening, your great grandad, my daddy, your daddy’s grandpa Al—he was a little tipsy, and a prankster like you never saw—he took and led that elephant from straight out of the barn, straight out through the snow for folks to ride him.”
My mother walked us from her room, down the hall and through the spryer ancients gaggled in the lobby, my mother lifting up her voice to call us back to when it came up her turn to ascend the elephant, insisting on an image of herself a little difficult, outside of cinema, to feature. She, a woman, all in white, as she recalled, “riding all of Africa,” a long-toothed trumpeter my mother said the Russians borrowed via hush-hush Roman brokers from the Pope.
“You could hear the music from the barn,” she said, “and I had the light on me, and I could feel the people down below me, looking up.”
She waved. Maybe she was blowing kisses. I did not prevent her, my son did not prevent her, nor the ancients. A person might have wondered where she could be going. Dressed as she was dressed, made up, irrespectful of the season, where could we be taking her; this time of night, her age, our town, where was there to go?
“Golconda,” said my mother, as if she had been asked, as if she meant to punish with her answer, “Pancake Summit.”
So Mother stuck, intuitively, I thought, physically; she stuck to us, she acted. A good grip, I was thinking, for an old gal, a forceful mind, pungently directed. Something younger than she ever was was up in her, pushed us through the door and asked us please to turn our faces up to catch the falling flakes. Such beauties, she was saying, every one of them unique. She did not tire of her inventions. She did not stray. I ought to have quit with her, interrupted her, insisted, for the boy’s sake, on the facts. Yet I must have hoped that she would come to them, the facts, her nuts-and-boltsy self. She was old. Soon, surely, she must run up on a damaging confusion. I drove us, and I watched her for the moment she must stop herself to look at me, and at the boy there in the back seat with the dog, my mother asking of herself how much our being there required her to take back from this latest story she was telling of her life and its unlivable desires. Yet my mother knew her story well enough, spoke as if she had lived what she said she had lived, as if she were remembering and not inventing, as if she all along had known we could have lived the life she was describing, all of us together, and been larger having lived it. She could accommodate. She could include. She was never wholly absent to the present. I was there, the boy was there. My father. She was infectious, nothing too far-fetched, you saw through Mother that the life you came to was the life you left behind, the vital riot lifting through your bones of scenes in loves you had and had not chosen. People went to Rome. Amelia Dangberg went to Rome. My mother could have gone to Rome. It would have been so easy. I could have walked with her, been handsome on her hand, she might have been so pretty. Sure, too, there might have been a place for us to sit, a place she told my son where she once sat, outside of Rome, not far, “at the gates of Rome,” she said, on the counsel of her Roman dentist.
“He failed me,” said my mother, “or I failed him. All I know is that he rapped my tooth here with his poker, and I hollered, and I guess he was surprised because he jumped and let that poker fly smack at the ceiling! Well, the paint’s coming down and I am up from his chair and all but holding out the cross around my neck to keep him off from me in case it’s harm he’s shouting my way in Italian. He wasn’t happy one iota. You wouldn’t say that this man here would be the same man who directs me to the part of Rome where God and Jesus and the major saints all took vacation from St. Peter’s. But he sent me there, with a map and a name, prescribed a jar of pills I learned were working best when I would swallow them with good old U.S. bourbon. It was called a villa, this place, an old man and his lady seeing to it. The man of the two, when I asked him why he’d got there, he just shrugs his shoulders and he opens up his palms to point me down the hill as like to say he’d got there for the reasons anybody got there—by his eyes, he’s saying, thumping on his chest, and by his heart. I tell you, that first day, those folks took my bags and showed me to a stone bench in a garden where you could not think exactly what to call its colors. Reds and pinks that weren’t exactly red or pink, purples not exactly purple, whites you saw that some were greenish, some whites orange and others yellow. All different sizes and shapes, and packed in tight together, so if you looked and looked again you kept on seeing more than what you’d seen the first look. A wee, wee tiny thing, hiding close out to the ground, or a vine, I can recall, that it just was sprouting out in trumpets. So many leaves. Furry looking ones, and spikey, some leaves wide and waxy, then a leaf it looked like velvet. Blooms as wide as any face you kissed when you were just a baby. Such perfume. And such a reach! I took my shoes off and I practiced looking far and near and far and then the notion came to me that these same gardens must be growing all the way down there to Rome. Maybe this was bourbon talking to me, or those pills, or maybe my poor tooth, but I saw this garden, you know, growing down to Rome, same colors, same shapes, same perfume, even where the day before I’d seen the cafes and the Pantheon, those men in suits I told you I was seeing on the sidewalk. I couldn’t see these flowers finished. I saw them way back home, even, way out in the desert. That garden there, fountain sounds, and garden birds, water songs and paths you walked through statue heads of men and women you supposed were gods and saints and martyrs—I saw them in the hay fields and the meadows and the sage and in the driest, whitest dust that blows across our playa. I was not afraid to die. Right then, I would not have said that it was possible to die. I don’t know what to call what I was doing. I watched the fireflies. I listened to the frogs and crickets. I wore a dress. My knees were smooth. I sat there till the bugs bit. They called it Kosmos, the place, the old man and his lady, and do you know that if you look it up in Greek, that’s beauty.”
“You never saw a snow like this in Rome,” my mother said.
She said, “Your grandad had a saying. He used to say, I didn’t leave my keys in Egypt.”
Piazzas, fountains, cypress; poplars, silos, mesas—we see them, yes, such beauties, I think that nobody must finally refuse them. And yet I refused them; someway I have made myself the origin of small, insidious refusals.
&nbs
p; I told my mother, I said, “Mother, you were never once in Rome.” I said, “Lincoln, understand—about the elephants?—your grandma here is just pretending.”
She was sitting straight up, Mother, just beside me, leaning forward, as I saw her, chin up, eyes up, hands clasped at her breast, a jawbone and a sheen of moistened, painted lip, a gaze, forward, wide, unblinking. I allowed myself to think I saw the people and the places she described as if they lived before her. Particles and waves, forms enacted by a massy, supple, shadowed light, creased and reaching, voiced, Roman, a demitasse, a saucer, laughter, smooth stone and a long view—I saw these beauties of my mother’s call her from a past she had not lived enough till now to see transpire. I let myself see in through her beneath her coat, her wind-resistant sportsuit, clear down through her ribs and to her lungs and heart and to the valved and urgent, branching ways she was refiring in breath and blood and her confirming, other-earthly spirit. Anybody saw where Mother went; we know by now how Mother gets there.
“Gaga,” Papa called it, Mama cracked.