“You’re a… a… um, a sweetheart, dear. Hawaii sounds nice, but what I have won’t go away… by… by simply taking it somewhere for a good tan.”
“Maybe all you need is some pampering. Look at you. You need a manicure. A facial. A nice coconut-butter massage, and who better to do all that than a handsome native in a Speedo?”
“Allison! How could you say—?”
“Come on, Mom. Maybe you just need to have a good roll in the hay. When’s the last time you had some crazy, howling sex? Dad’s been gone how long now?”
“Ten years. Still… Allison Claire! You’re so rude.”
I make a juvenile face and stick out my tongue. We look at each other with wide eyes and then burst into high laughter. We roll on my bed like litter-mate pups. We are, at once, young girls again with coltish legs and slender arms, gasping with thoughts about boys and kisses and the forbidden delight of such entanglements.
The door to my mind (which had just moments earlier been so rudely slammed in my face) blessedly opens wide and I’m once again breezy with fresh air and words. I splash memory and language about the room as if there is no end to what I know and this bright and joyful moment will go on forever.
It occurs that this is how things will be from now on. Good days and bad. Good moments hunted and chased down by bad ones like Sherlock’s hounds. I’m learning not to expect my lips to stay bright for long.
Afternoon arrives and Allison, even with all her oven-mitted, spoon-churning fumbles, helps me in the kitchen.
Brian arrives late, sputtering apologies and excuses that seem to spill down the front of his shirt. He offers to flip the chicken breasts around the barbeque like he’s the man of the house. Nevertheless, he grumbles as he searches for just the right spot of heat.
“I thought we were going to have steaks,” he complains. “I really had my mouth ready for something large and beefy.”
“Steaks!” Allison wrinkles her nose at the thought. “That’s totally unhealthy. Cow meat is just wrong.”
“And chicken meat is right?”
“We need to think of Mom now. Maybe it’s not good for her to have beef. Don’t you know that cows stick their tongues clear up inside their noses, for God’s sake? How healthy is that?”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one disgusting thing about cows, but chickens don’t have a lick of sense. Christ, look at the way they flip around even after their heads are pulled away from their bodies.” Bryan winks in my direction. “If we want to help Mom, we should at least feed her something halfway intelligent.”
My children are off and running with what sounds like adolescent sibling banter; I’m off and running with a lovely glass of red wine and light-filled thoughts crackling through my mind. Yes! Allison and Bryan are mid-squabble and all is right with the world, in spite of my broken brain. I move indoors to poke at potatoes baking in the oven and put the broccoli on to steam. I’m able to figure out the workings on the oven and stove—always a good sign that I’m having a rare moment of excellence.
Bryan works at the barbeque while Allison sits at the table. As I watch from the window, an amused smile still making its path across my face, my eye wanders to the strawberry patch. Due to my singular neglect, they’ve overgrown themselves this year, encroaching into small cracks along the asphalt drive, widening their influence with flourishing enthusiasm. I make a mental note to whack them back into a proper and more manageable shape.
Sounds drift in and out the open window and I’m happy with that. For the moment, I’m a flat, smooth stone, good enough for skipping many times before sinking down into my mind’s brackish pond of forgetfulness.
YOU BLESS. You bless your ears and all they pull into their secret whorls and curls: the delightful banter of your children who could as easily be looped on drugs as they are on trying to best one another in passionate discussion; the tiny scrape of metal as your son slides his chair away from the patio table; the hiss of chicken turned on the grill; the clack of your daughter’s high heels across the patio’s concrete floor; the movement of fabric, sluicing across your thighs as you walk through your house; the now-and-again silence of calm in the sweet fragrance of forgetfulness that your husband is forever gone and you miss his hands so damned much you would give up your ears and all they know for just one more touch. Still, all is bright and lovely with your ears as they listen to sounds so normal you forget you are now often a reluctant outsider. You assume that soon you’ll constantly be paragraphs behind in conversation, not to mention what will happen to your understanding of nuance, your flagging imagination, or that silence will sit on your head like ash. One day you’ll have nothing but stillness in your mind. Today, though, you bless your lovely ears because you hear and discern the language of your children, and you tightly embrace the crackle of this bright and sparkling moment. Still smiling because you’ve discovered your ears, you walk outside and clearly announce that, Damn it, your strawberries can grow in the asphalt if they bloody well want and—furthermore—you’ve decided to buy a bikini for Hawaii and you’ll not hear another word about it.
After we’ve eaten dinner and the dishes are washed and put away, after Bryan and Allison blow goodbye kisses across the room, leaving me to another silent evening, I once again find myself at my writing desk, scrawling words onto paper. It’s becoming harder to select words, to find the order in which they should occur, to spell those words, to especially hold my thoughts long enough to make sense. It takes a good deal of time to formulate something into a cohesive conga line of words dancing after words, dancing after more words.
When I’m finished writing the day’s thoughts (I use the last of my rose-embossed stationery), I take the papers to my closet, fold them carefully and add them to my growing collection of letters. I consider moving the box to a more convenient location, but decide moving it would take away the ritual of reaching for answers in the dim of my closet and, as an adjunct, I might very well forget any new hiding place. I decide life is mysterious enough.
I add my latest letter and then select an older letter to read; it’s written on plain vanilla-colored stationery and folded in thirds. I open it and read.
My children,
This morning I sat on the patio with my coffee, watching as one puffy white cloud seemed to snag momentarily on the corner of the eave as it passed on its way to wherever clouds travel on Sunday mornings. It struck me right then—in that delicate and mysterious moment of a cloud’s passing—that you were raised by a particularly neglectful mother. That’s when a piece of that cloud broke away from itself and found its way into my throat, thickening it and making tears rain from my eyes.
After swallowing that piece of cloud, I considered things in a more rational light, realizing it wasn’t neglect I inflicted upon you, but rather my own prejudice of Sunday mornings and their practices. A mother’s influence is indeed great! I’m afraid I squandered mine with you and for that I’m sorry.
I could have offered you a different life. Instead of merely breathing in the sweet scent of your hair as I kissed your dear heads throughout the day, I could have filled those perfect heads with thoughts of all the churchy things that live in clouds and prayers and little squares of Jesus bread. I could have passed on stories of the Glad Tidings Holiness Church of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where I sat with your MeeMaw every Sunday morning. That was her church. Outside it was a simple square structure made of staid and conservative brick and mortar, but inside, that little building was filled with shouting, tongue-talking, arm-waving, Psalm-singing people who swayed as one to what always seemed a frantic, drumming rhythm. People ran up and down narrow aisles, shouting, crying. They danced and twitched and fell to the ground in gob smacked ecstasy. It was amazing.
It was frightening. It was glorious.
The Glad Tidings Holiness Church of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, sang all the way into your MeeMaw’s bones. It laid its hands on her. It gave her words that felt like rushing
water etching deep pathways into the stoniest of hearts.
She sat in its pews only long enough for the Holy Spirit to take hold and shake her by the neck. Then, she jumped and twitched and danced in its aisles, waving her arms and speaking in strange, nonsensical words. She was slain in the Spirit so often a spot was reserved just for her, where she could crumple to the floor, her arms flickering in little spikes of trembling mystery.
Your MeeMaw’s eyes might have been dying, but her wild prayers flung to heaven were as alive as anything ever sent heavenward from the lips and hands of a churchgoing Southern woman while caught up into a visionary cloud of witnesses all crying at once, Amen and Amen.
Once a month, the ladies of the Glad Tidings Holiness Church of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, passed around tiny cups of grape juice and plates filled with cut-up pieces of white Wonder Bread. Ma said Jesus lived in the bread; he swam in the grape juice. On those Communion Sundays, I would sit in the pew next to Ma and feed her a piece of bread, then hand her a little cup of juice. Afterward, she would sit, her eyes like blue taffeta, little Jesusy prayers falling from her lips, her face mesmeric like an angel’s.
She was simply enchanted.
I remember when you were small, I would wonder if Ma was looking down from Heaven to see me carefully washing your hands before we sat at the table and then neglectfully forgetting to show you how to lace your little washed fingers together to thank God for the peanut butter and jelly sandwich you were about to eat. At night, I wondered if she saw that we never kneeled next to your beds, our hands in prayerful little steeples, saying our Now I lay me down to sleeps and asking for our souls to be kept or taken, depending upon whether we woke or not the following morning. We did none of those things. We didn’t pray. We didn’t go to church. We didn’t boldly raise our eyes to the ceiling, or bow our heads in humility.
I taught you nothing but the purity of hopscotch. I told you that poets and writers and possibly even mathematicians would one day decipher heaven. I taught you that your heads were always meant for kissing rather than condemning.
I taught you nothing churchy.
Of course, we could have spent our Sundays like your PaaPaw, at the side of a stream with fishing poles sticking out from our bodies. I could have taught you how to thread worms and toss out your line so it didn’t snag in a knot or catch under a rock.
I was neglectful there, as well.
I didn’t thrill you with stories of how the North Carolina sky filled every morning with yellows and blues and its tree branches dripped down like heavenly green rain. I should have, at the very least, told you about the Blowing Rock. You would have loved it—that large rock hanging out over John’s River Gorge like it had risen from the ground, a wild swelling ocean wave, only to be frozen solid into one reckless and furious moment of foam and watery heft. It was said the wind caused the snow to blow upside down and your own words to blow right back into your mouth.
Can you imagine that an entire town was built around a rock and upside-down snow—and yet I told you nothing of it?
It was there that your PaaPaw and I stood one wind-blown Sunday morning, our hair standing straight up from our heads, our voices screaming out for the wind to bring your MeeMaw’s eyes back to her. Her eyes stayed blind, of course. But still I stood beside your PaaPaw, our hands clutched together, our voices raw in the wind, our bodies bent and thrust over the edge of the Appalachian Mountains until we took on the same curved and wild shape of the Blowing Rock. It was magnificent!
I should have told you about it all, about how I danced the aisles of the Glad Tidings Holiness Church and also how I fiercely screamed into a wind so brutish it could cause snow to fall upside down. Both places offered magical hope; both gave, in the end, only poignancy and heartless truth. How could I have explained my loss without making it yours as well? I felt that a worse cruelty, so I simply kissed your beautiful heads, washed your tiny fingers and let it go at that.
If you’ve felt deprived, I hope you’ll forgive a mother’s irresponsibility. The fierce protection of one’s children doesn’t come without its unintended consequences.
As I write this, we’re well past the time for me to have taught you the stories of heaven and hell. Nevertheless, I hope when your own Sunday cloud comes by to snag itself on the eaves of your houses, or fill your throats with cloudy tears, I hope you’ll remember this letter. I hope you’ll remember that I’m sorry I didn’t have the righteousness to place you in a church pew, or at the very least, show you how to properly hold a fishing pole or how to scream into an upside-down wind. But—when you need it most—I hope you’ll remember how it felt to have kisses on your little heads, all throughout the day.
Love,
Your Mother
Once more, oh God, once more, I stand in my closet with the knowledge that unseen disturbances are changing the entire structure of my mind. My brain is slowly being strangled. I’m being slowly deprived of my oxygen and I gasp with anxiety.
I return the letter to its proper fold and then to its place in the box, alongside its newest companion letter.
I leave the closet in time to hear the first raindrop of a rare Sacramento summer storm crash against the window. It makes me look up with agony in my heart. It isn’t so much that an unusual rain has started to fall, but rather that I’m so stricken by its thunderous presence. I simply don’t know what I should do next.
I place my face against the suddenly cold bedroom window. The rain makes me think that time is passing by and I am passing by—and now an odd rain is knocking, knocking at my window.
Chapter Eight
I’ve abandoned sticky notes that refuse to stay put on my thumbs and arms and, instead, now cleverly journal every idea and whim in small moleskin booklets that Bryan brings to me. I’ve also taken to wearing slacks with big hip pockets, which I fill with these little notebooks, along with pens of different colors. Ever the pragmatist, Bryan’s instructed me with the proper use of these blank books.
I write about every aspect of my days—who called, who did not, how the sky turned lavender at the end of the street, and how the garden now gasps and suffers under my neglectful hand.
Allison, on the other hand, fusses over my bulging pockets, clucking and loudly chortling disapproval of my little books. She’s come today to bring me fashion magazines: flipping through the pages, she points one delicately polished finger toward pictures of hollow-cheeked models, sleek and skinny in pants that threaten to fall from their tiny hips.
“This is the new style,” she says. None of the fashions appeal to me, nor do they have any practical application for my purposes. “Notice that not one of these pictures shows a woman with notebooks sticking out of her pockets. They don’t even have pockets.”
I bristle. “Without pockets, how can these pieces of cloth then be considered true pants? And furthermore, not one of these poor, underfed girls is over thirteen or suffering from Alzheimer’s.”
“Mother! It’s crazy that you and Bryan think you have some feeble old person’s disease.”
“Honey, it’s not what we think… it’s that rotten doctor who says these things. Blame it on her and her tiny little hipless body. I certainly do.” I offer a wan smile.
Allison peers over another magazine page. “I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with you that a little pampering won’t fix. See? Now, look at this.” Allison holds her fingernails out for my inspection. They feature a spotless French manicure; I coo over them, which makes her smile in triumph. “You should be doing this every two weeks,” she says, waving her fingers at me. “Twenty bucks and you’ll feel like a beautiful new woman.”
“Your MeeMaw,” I say, “now she was a beautiful woman, and never once did she have a manicure. Oh, I wish you could have known her.”
“Mom, please,” Allison says, her eyes screwing sideways. “You really need to get out of those awful fat woman pants. We only have two weeks before our trip… . Why do
n’t we run out and get you some really stunning items? I have a friend who works in designer clothes at Nordys. You’ll be gorgeous. Trust me.”
“Your MeeMaw, now, she was a beautiful woman. I wish you could have known her.”
“You just said that a minute ago. You’ve said that at least twice now… don’t you remember?”
“Ahh,” I say.
YOU TRIP. You trip over tangles of things that lie along the path of your memories. For all your vigilance over words that might repeat themselves without your permission, you find yourself once more wondering how you missed some sort of slippery string of thought that threads out from your mind. An obstacle over which to fall. “Ahh,” you say when your daughter reminds you that you’ve repeated a thought. Your ears tingle red with shame because duplicate thoughts keep falling onto your tongue, and “Ahh” is the only explanation you can manage. You picture words looping out again and again, like some crazy spirographic drawing and you can’t seem to stop yourself from adding more and more loops, until you have nothing but a jumble of black squiggles and a mouthful of “Ahhs” to mutter in apology. The horror is not that you repeat yourself; you don’t mind retelling your thoughts or your stories. Certainly, you understand your children saying, with a roll of their eyes, “Mom, you’ve already said that twice.” It’s clear you say things over and over, but still that’s not the terror of it all. No. Here’s the horror: your brain is breaking and no one can stop it. No one.
“Stay with me here,” Allison says, looping words around my neck and pulling me back to her. “Hawaii. We’re going to Hawaii. It’ll be good for you.”
Her words feel like her twenty-dollar fingernails have just scraped across the skin of my soul. “I understand,” I say, “but I need my pockets. For my notebooks.”
Allison groans.
“And,” I add, “of all the things I shall very soon forget, I hope this conversation is the first to go. You’re being rude and it doesn’t suit you.”
All the Dancing Birds Page 6