by Ariel Gore
“Can I tell you a story, Tiniest? For my memoir? I’m too tired to type.”
“Sure.” I took the laptop from her. “I can type it.”
So my mother told me a story.
“ONCE UPON A time, Tiniest,” my mother started. She gazed up at her crow painting on the far wall. “A little girl went missing.” She swallowed. “That’s how you start a story, isn’t it, Tiniest?”
“Sure,” I said.
And she coughed. “It was the first time I’d ever heard of such a thing. Of missing children. I was seven years old and we lived in G. I. housing in the Pacific Palisades. On Temecula Avenue. Almost all the houses had the same floor plan. For years I could still remember that little girl’s name, but I’ve forgotten it now. She was the same age as me. Search parties went out looking for her.”
My mother shifted, looked out the window. “I was terrified the little girl had fallen into one of the open trenches in the neighborhood – they were everywhere, the trenches dug for the sewer pipes. It was scary to look into those trenches. They were deep and narrow and muddy.”
My mother pressed her morphine button. “There were incinerators in people’s backyards. We burned our own trash in those days. Everything that could be burned. My father was just back from the war – he’d been a pilot, his plane downed in the South Pacific, he’d been a POW – and now he’d cram the incinerator full and he’d throw in burning kindling and pretty soon his fire raged and raged in its concrete container and he’d pick me up in his thick hands and he’d hold me over that roaring fire and he’d say, “You want to go in there, Evie?” and he’d motion to throw me in.
“I screamed and clung to him, but I was so scared, the “no” hardly came out. Madre couldn’t hear me. I knew she couldn’t hear me. I only had the person who would throw me into the fire to cling to. I understood that.”
My mother didn’t cry or smile as she told me her story, just kept watching her crow, pushing the morphine button.
I’d read someplace that it takes four generations to recover from war. By this math, and assuming no further deployments, Maia and Maxito’s children might be free.
My mother coughed. “One day they found the body of the little girl who’d been missing. They found her in one of those deep muddy ditches. She’d fallen in and died. I wish I could tell you her name.”
The hiss of the oxygen tank.
“That’s sad,” I said.
But my mother shook her head, scolded me: “It’s more than sad, Tiniest. It’s a lie. I spent my whole childhood terrified of those trenches, of falling, but that little girl didn’t fall. Little what-ever-her-name-was. Someone murdered her, obviously, and they disposed of her body, just threw her into the sewer. Evil doesn’t just happen, Tiniest. People don’t just fall into the earth like that. Evil is what we do to each other.” She closed her eyes. “It’s what we do.”
I sat there at her bedside, watched the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed through her oxygen tube. I sat there until I knew she was asleep. And then I crept out, quiet as I could, the way you do when you’ve just put a baby down.
I SAT AT the medicine desk we’d set up in the laundry room, wrote checks to the caregivers. We couldn’t afford the 2,4-7 help forever. Abra had suggested giving notice on our little adobe outside of town, the two of us and Maxito moving back in to the former duplex. My mother said she liked that idea. She wanted us here with her. But I wasn’t ready for this house to be the only home I had.
I took my mother’s car keys from a basket on the kitchen counter, poked my head into her room. “Mind if I sell the Prius?”
She smiled weakly, resigned to it. “Sure,” she said. “Don’t get ripped off.”
The Prius would buy us another month of caregivers.
THAT NIGHT I sat on the porch of my old adobe, cracked open a State Pen Porter. My phone buzzed. My mother’s landline.
“Tiniest,” she whispered. “You have to fire Sherman.”
“All right,” I said. “Any particular reason?” I sipped my beer, imaged he’d done her hair up like a poodle’s.
But my mother sounded stricken. “He found my morphine stash, Tiniest. I had enough to end this. Sherman told on me. They took it. Who does that? He told on me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and knocked back the rest of my beer. “Consider him fired.”
I didn’t have Maxito that night, so I curled onto my bedroll with a copy of Rose: Love in Violent Times. Maybe all times were violent times.
“CAN THE LAST part of my memoir be a screenplay?” my mother asked as soon as I stepped into her room the next day. She’d been pushing her morphine pump twice as much as usual, according to the log, but the thing had its programmed limit.
My mother’s memoir seemed a harmless enough project, but a part of me felt like a cad for humoring her. We only had a few pages so far. There would be no book, no movie. Still, I said, “a screenplay? Sure.”
She smiled. “Not too unconventional?”
“I think it could be interesting,” I said. “Multimedia.”
Cloud brought my mother a cup of herbal tea, set it on her bedside table.
Her hand shook as she lifted the cup, but she took a sip. “What do you know about trauma, Ariel?”
This was one of those questions my mother often asked me, not because she wanted to hear what I knew about trauma from my own experience, but rather she wanted to be sure I’d been listening to her all my life, that I’d been learning these things she considered imperative.
There were right and wrong answers to questions like this one.
Eve-family pop quiz.
I knew from trauma, knew from being kicked in the ribs when I’d expected a lover’s tenderness, knew from standing in front of a family court judge waiting for the decree that would tell me whether or not I was fit to be a mother. But I also knew that the correct answer now was something more academic. “ Trauma,” I said, “by its very definition, can’t be fully experienced in the moment. Due to the suddenness or the enormity of the traumatic event, we just can’t take it in. So we have to go back to it at some point – either literally or symbolically – to integrate whatever happened. We can do that consciously, in some safe way, or we’re destined to revisit the trauma over and over again as the violence of life.”
My mother nodded. This was the right answer. “What do you know about abuse, Ariel?” Pop quiz question number two.
I knew something about abuse, too, knew sexual violence and jagged steel keys bashing into a naked forehead. I knew words chosen solely to make a person feel worthless and crazy. But I knew the answer to this question, too. “Abuse needs a witness,” I said, “either in the immediate present moment or revisited later – like in some kind of therapy or confessional – if there’s to be any hope of healing.”
My mother nodded. I was two for two. “What do you know about evil, Tiniest?”
I didn’t answer. I had some ideas about evil. And I knew she wanted me to tell her about Bobbie Harris back at San Quentin. About the way he was beaten out of the womb. About the way he killed those boys, but that’s not what got him the death penalty. About the way he ate their leftover hamburgers after he shot them. About that’s what made him cold blooded. But I stayed silent. I was getting tired of this game.
My mother gazed out the window, looked so sad. “John died all wrong,” she said.
John. My stepdad. The priest. The one she killed unless they were in on it together.
“What do you mean all wrong?”
She was quiet for a long time. “We talked about it,” she finally said, “but when I gave him the poison it was all wrong. I didn’t feel anything. I should have taken the poison too. I should have lain down with him and died. But I just gave him the poison. I went into the living room and I turned on the TV and watched Anderson Cooper. Just like some cold-blooded killer.”
Cloud peeked around the door frame just then. “Ronaldo’s here,” he said.
And my mot
her gasped. “ Tiniest, My hair –”
“Give us a minute,” I whispered to Cloud.
“Sure thing.”
I BRUSHED MY mother’s gray hair, fastened a silver comb to keep it from her face. I filed her nails, took the blush from her make-up bag and dusted her cheeks.
“I just need to look alive,” she whispered.
“Lipstick?”
She smiled at me. “That would just look fake, Tiniest. I want to look natural for Ronaldo.”
32.
Seven Swords
I LET MAXITO SLEEP IN.
It must have been after 9 a.m. when he finally tip-toed into the kitchen of the little adobe, rosy-cheeked and rubbing his eyes. “Good morning,” he said. “I want a sandwich.” He squinted against the morning sun. “And let’s make you some coffee, Mama.”
He stood up on his wooden step stool and I watched his little hands as he pressed the button to grind the coffee beans for me.
I remembered when I was pregnant with Maia how terrified I felt that I would abuse her. That I would torment her. And I remembered the flood of relief when I realized unabusive motherhood wasn’t so very hard. That sure – it took a diligence, probably more diligence when emotional violence was my first language. But that in the end it isn’t so hard not to ruin everything we love. It meant deferring to my child when I felt that wit’s-end rage bubble up, meant stepping back to remind myself that she was the baby here, that I was the grown-up. It meant reminding myself to behave in a way I would be proud of. It meant not always needing to be right, apologizing when I was wrong. It meant a lot of pause-taking. But it wasn’t so very hard.
I made Maxito a banana sandwich.
We sat outside. The first warm morning in March.
He fed his bread crusts to the chickens, climbed the branches of the plum tree he called his own. A blossom. “It’s getting springtime,” he said. “I love being in a tree.”
I should have had him at daycare two hours earlier, but I liked it here in the late warm morning. Just feeding the chickens. Pretending we didn’t have anyone else to care for.
MY BUDDHIST FRIEND in Albuquerque texted me the name of a gym she knew in Santa Fe. She wanted me to start lifting weights, she said. She wanted me to stay strong. And have you tried going to the dump and breaking plates? It might be a good way to get any anger out of your body without hurting anyone. She was meditating, she said, on swords that cut through delusions and into the heart of things.
I texted my Buddhist friend back: I think I’m learning something about those swords.
And now the chef texted: I want to get my African violets colored in. Tattoo date?
My stars had healed.
Yes. I wanted more.
What was a tattoo anyway, but a visual reminder of pain and healing. The memoir inked into our skin. Some symbolic way to integrate the enormity of everything.
I grabbed one of the three copies of the new Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ book I’d gotten for Christmas, remembered an image of the pierced heart of Mary somewhere in those pages. “The swords through your heart are not the ones that caused your wounds, but rather, these swords of strength were earned by your struggle through hard times.”
Here it was, “the unruined heart” pierced by seven swords. I didn’t think I’d earned all those swords yet, but maybe the pierced/unruined heart could become some self-fulfilling prophecy. Like right now I insist that right now some beautiful girl is sitting on the bank of a river with a copy of this book in her hands and right now she has a rose in her hair.
I texted the chef back: Yes, please. Tattoo date.
MY MOTHERS’ ESTRANGED best friend’s daughter was flying in that night. Karin. She would sit by my mother’s hospice bed, read her Mary Oliver poetry. She would sing to her. She would pour me a glass of wine in the custom kitchen, shake her head, and say, “this is intense – dark and spirit-filled work – I don’t know how you’re doing it.”
I didn’t know if I was doing it.
MAIA ARRIVED FOR a long weekend.
My mother wept at the sight of her, pointed to the crow painting on her wall, “my crow,” she told Maia. “It makes me cry.”
Maia sat with her, read her passages from a book by the painting-artist about that crow until my mother fell asleep.
A FACEBOOK MESSAGE from my old friend Teagan: What does it mean for life to bear witness to death?
I didn’t answer her, didn’t want to answer her. Even Baba Yaga said that not all questions cry out to be answered. I just messaged back: You’re gonna start quoting Freud on me now?
What did it mean for life to bear witness to death? My oracle back in Portland had said I could ask questions after a year, but it occurred to me now that it didn’t promise any good answers.
IN THE YARD behind the former duplex, the living crows had started to gather. Five of them on the back fence. The snow fell. Ten of them now. It kept falling. There must have been thirty crows in the trees and on that back fence come first day of spring.
“Are there always so many crows in your backyard?” my Buddhist friend from Albuquerque asked when she stopped by to paint my fingernails purple.
“No. They’ve been gathering.”
And now here was my mother on the new caregiver Octavio’s arm. She hadn’t been out of bed in a month. She wrinkled her nose at the bottles of nail polish on the dining room table. “Are you trying to kill me? With those fumes?”
“I can’t believe you’re up, Mom. That’s great.”
She stood unsteady, leaned into Octavio, said, “Do you know what I want? I want a pumpkin chiffon pie. Just like Madre used to make.”
Madre. My Gammie. Her pumpkin chiffon pie.
I actually had the recipe. “You got it,” I said. “Pumpkin chiffon pie.”
THE NEXT DAY I stepped into my mother’s room, carrying my ugly little pumpkin chiffon pie. I couldn’t find the right ginger snaps at Healthy Wealthy for the crust, had been too impatient to let the pumpkin and egg white mixture cool properly. That pie smelled perfect, but it didn’t look like anything Gammie would have served.
“I hate you!” my mother shrieked.
I set the pie down on her desk, between the TV stand and the painting of the crow. “Okay, Mom. I give up, why do you hate me?”
“I’m not ready to die,” she screamed. “Who does that? Who doesn’t get ready to die? Do you want to know why I hate you, Tiniest?”
“Sure.” I was so tired.
“You’ve got everything and I’ve got nothing, all right? There you have it. You have a life and I don’t have a life.”
I shook my head, wanted to take a handful of that pie and cram it down her throat.
“You’ve always had a life, all right?” my mother seethed. “I’m a jealous bitch. That’s the truth about your mother. Your mother’s a jealous bitch. Are you happy now?”
“Yes, Mom,” I said. “I’m bubbling over with glee. This is exactly the kind of conversation I always dreamed of having with you on your deathbed.” I left her with her pie.
“Tiniest?” she called after me. I didn’t answer.
“Is that a pie?” she yelled.
I didn’t answer.
“Oh my God, Tiniest,” my mother cried. “You made me the pie.”
I GRABBED A pile of white dishes from my mother’s kitchen, texted the chef from the driveway: Can we get out of town for a couple of days?
Maxito would be with Sol anyway.
The chef texted back: Yes, definitely.
On the way home to my little adobe, I stopped at the dump, stood at the edge of the garbage pit and held each plate, one by one, smooth in my hands, before I raised it above my head and hurled it into the pit. The sound of the ceramic hitting concrete.
AT HOME I packed fast. The chef picked me up in her gold Jeep and we drove south down Highway 25, drove toward the lithium hot springs in Truth or Consequences.
We’d hole up in a room with a hot plate and a private mineral bath through
April Fools’ Day.
“My mother is never going to die,” I mumbled.
It had been two months since her release from the hospital.
My friends on Facebook threw virtual confetti. Death is beautiful! they insisted, and This is your time with her!
How could I explain the depth of my exhaustion? I knew I should be living in the present, in these ugly and sacred moments. I thought of the little girl clinging to her father as he held her over the fire, clinging because he was all she had. But I was glad my mother wasn’t all I had.
IN THE TIBETAN Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche recalls the death of a spiritual master. He was just seven years old when he witnessed it: The old man beckoned one of his students to his side. “A-mi,” he called her, my child. “Come here,” he said. “It’s happening now. I’ve no further advice for you. You are fine as you are: I am happy with you.”
WE KEPT DRIVING fast south in the chef’s Jeep. I never thought my mother would die with the grace of a master, but now I made quick peace with the possibility that my last conversation with her might have been the one about how much she hated me.
My phone buzzed with a call. I wanted to ignore it. My mother’s landline. “Hello?”
“Tiniest?” she whispered, anxious. “You have to come here now.”
“I can’t, Mom.” I watched out the Jeep window. Citizen Cope on the car stereo. I watched all that dry red earth, watched the dry river beds as we crossed over each bridge.
My mother’s voice, frantic: “Someone put a Post-it Note on the faux finished cabinets in the kitchen, Tiniest.”
This was her problem. A Post-it Note.
I’d seen it, actually. The note. A missive about which organic beans my mother liked better. (Pinto, not black).
“They’ve ruined the paint job, Tiniest. A person who would put a Post-it on my faux finishing would do anything,” my mother cried. “You have to find out who’s done this.” Her voice cracked. “You have to fire whoever’s done this. Don’t let them anywhere near me. Please. Don’t let anyone who would do anything like this anywhere near me.”