It’s said that sorrow doesn’t last forever. That’s wrong. The sorrow lasts and lasts and lasts. That, you should also know.
Love and gentleness,
Mom
P. S. I hope it helps that I’ve written this letter on my dearest and most favorite stationery. Don’t you love its creamy color?
I stand in the middle of my closet, as still and silent as any grim winter could be; my memories are a flash powder of starlight and magic, blazing white-hot one moment, cold as ice the next. There seems to be a system of hierarchy within my mind now. New, young star memories are born only to die an immediate sparkling death, while the eldest thoughts sit on fat cushions, twinkling like old wrinkled sages.
My thoughts are turning inside-out and what I should know is gone the moment I learn it, while what should have passed away long ago is all I can think of and cry over—again and again and again.
Chapter Thirteen
Now here I am, dry-eyed and trembling after months of splashing and crying over every little thing, I’m finally dry-eyed and upright. Of course, all that warm moisture I made created a favorable climate for bees—loud and bothersome bees—who are now busy hanging a nest in the rafters of my mind. I hear their industrious work as they spread their sticky honeycomb across the hardened wood of my brain. I feel them flying around, gathering all the memories they can find onto their legs, intending only to make jar after jar of some tragic nectar of forgetfulness.
It’s no wonder I’ve always been afraid of bees.
With a chronic buzzing that seems to have settled deep inside the wells of my ears, I begin what can only be called my mad phase. I let words fly through the air much like the stinging insects that inhabit my head. I bellow into the room and to the sky and the stars above.
“Who did this to me? I want to know and I won’t leave this world without an answer!”
I stand at my window and hurl obscenities at the moon. “You’d better goddamn tell me.” The moon is silent on the subject.
I hurl a dinner plate of half-eaten spaghetti at the kitchen wall; it leaves a large dent, red and angry like a bitter bruise. I can only imagine the wall is enraged by my assault, but it says nothing.
I stand in the middle of the living room and let my throat explore sounds and expletives only a madwoman would make.
I rip open the seams of my blouses, scratch at my face.
I’m unfolding, unraveling, and the twisting movement of this slow unwinding of my mind is incomprehensible torture. Still, I won’t let this thing happen to me without protest.
I am mad.
Loudly, wildly, soundly mad and the only soul who knows this is me because I hide my anger from my children. To everyone, I am a sweet little woman. To the walls and the moon, however, I am a different story.
YOU HIDE. You hide your broken dishes in the bottom of the garbage can, covering them with yesterday’s crumpled newspaper. You sneak shards of breakage out to the trash can during the dark of night when the neighbors are sleeping and only the yard dogs bark to each other about your secret tantrums. Still, in spite of vows to be nice—tomorrow—the moon shrinks from your outbursts and the sun wisely covers its ears. You give each day its bitter tonic of words, each night its dollop of pitiful spite. You make bargain after bargain with yourself to be kind to what’s left of your dishes and your sensibility. You call your children and make cooing mother noises, even though they are grown and can look over your shrinking stature without even having to stand on their tiptoes. You don’t fool them. Still, you hide. You hide. You hide. In the end—when you become tired of hiding what everyone knows about you anyway—you simply leave your broken dishes in plain sight and allow your lusty words to fly about like tattered kites in a terrible wind.
One day, in the middle of my horrid madness, I decide to be gracious. I invite Allison to come for lunch; I want to plan a lovely daytrip with her.
My effort toward civility wobbles the moment I open the door and see the stubborn posture of my daughter.
“Don’t even think about it, Mom,” she says brushing past me. “I’m still mad at you from the last time. In fact, I’m probably going to be mad for… forever… and don’t look at me with that blank look.”
I try civility again. “Good morning to you too, dear. Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Come, I made us tuna sandwiches. They’re delicious! Here, let’s eat in the kitchen and plan our trip.”
“There’s no way. You ruined my trip to Hawaii. Ruined it!” Allison flips her hair across her shoulder. I envy my daughter’s hair as much as I envy her snippy spunk. I want to place my fingers inside the dimples on each cheek so I can touch the same spots where angel’s fingers once touched. Allison makes it impossible for me to breathe. To regret. To fear.
“Are you saying I should find someone else?” I ask.
“Mom, you know you can’t do that. What if you get somewhere and you forget where you belong? Or you lose your passport?”
“I’m only talking about a day trip to the foothills. A little antiquing. Maybe a nice little glass or three of wine in… ah, what’s that town? You know, that stream named after that old man?”
“Sutter Creek?”
“That’s it! Sutter Creek. We don’t need passports to go there, do we?”
“We didn’t need passports for Hawaii either.”
“Hawaii? We went to Hawaii?”
“Come on, Mom. You made us miss our flight and we never even got there.”
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m sure there was a good explanation.”
“Explanation? Good God, Mother, you don’t even remember what I’m talking about.”
“Well, I don’t exactly remember the mistake, but I do remember the feeling.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, I remember the feeling… I was horrified with myself.”
“So?”
“So, do you want to go with me… or should I go with my new friend, Edith? She’s a hoot. I think you’d like her.”
Allison rolls her eyes; her entire head participates in the slow and exaggerated movement. “You don’t have a friend named Edith.”
“Of course I do. I met her just yesterday.”
“Yesterday? You don’t go anywhere unless Bryan takes you, and he’s in goddamn Hawaii for a conference. How ironic is that?”
“Bryan’s in Hawaii? How lovely, lovely, lovely.” I clap my hands. “Oh goody for him.”
“Mother! Come on… who is this Edith?”
“Oh, yes. Edith. I met her right here, in the house. There she was, right in the bedroom… I think that’s where we met.” I turn my head sideways, hoping a different position might help me remember more clearly. “Anyway, she’s my new friend and she’s better to her mother than you are to me.”
Allison looks at me with stiff eyes. “Now you’re just being stupid,” she says, flipping her hair across her shoulder. “Fine, then. Go with your new friend. Go with her.” She scoots herself to the farthest end of the couch, nearly crouching like a wounded animal.
“Allison, why are you being so mean?”
“Because you’re not like my mother anymore,” she says. Tears well in her eyes and her chin takes on the pointed look of a small child in full tantrum. Her words feel like the tips of gleaming needles, piercing and sewing large swatches of anguish onto my skin.
“We used to have fun and now we don’t anymore. I constantly repeat the same thing over and over again because you don’t remember anything! And now you’re making up people.” Allison becomes a watershed of tears and I reach out toward her. She flinches, pulling away from my trembling hand. “I miss my real mother,” she cries.
I find myself across that proverbial wide river, the one that separates a forgetful mother from her less-than-gracious daughter. She’s on the side of perfect words and unfailing memory; I’ve apparently drifted to the ice floe side of forgotten dreams and fallen-down bridges. There is, o
f course, something contemptible about being on the wrong side of a river without a way to be rescued. I look longingly toward my daughter.
She digs through her purse, pulling out her car keys.
“I’m leaving,” she says. “And, by the way, tell Bryan he can do everything for you from now on. That is, if you can remember one stupid, simple thing… although I doubt you can.”
With that parting shot, my daughter, my La La La friend, my sweet little pony with dimples made by angels, walks out the door.
At least I have a few more dishes to break, more wild words to fling at the sky.
I go to my closet and pull down my letter box. I open the box and scream into it. I close the lid, happy I’ve captured a small piece of anger and misery inside.
“Hah!” I say.
I put the box back on its shelf and leave the closet.
Minutes later, I return to repeat the opening, screaming, closing, Hah!-ing. This at least seems better than breaking the last dish I have left to my name.
Again and again I open and close the box, until finally my eye falls on one particular folded letter. I snatch it from the box and yell at the paper. “So, tell me something else I don’t know. Something else I’ll forget.” I shout into the creases of the paper, across whatever words it might contain. I unfold the letter furiously, nearly ripping it in two. I look at the words and force my eyes to focus. I read.
My sweet children,
I want to tell you about John Milton the Cat. It’s time you should know about cats and the magic that lives in their fur. John Milton was a graceful and practiced cat, as if he knew his every footprint before it was ever placed upon the ground. He preferred your MeeMaw’s lap to any other place in the house, but when she died, John Milton decided I was next best. It’s been said that one does not choose a cat, but rather, a cat chooses you. In the case of John Milton, I was simply the suggestion of a person he loved who was no longer there. He grudgingly chose my lap, but I don’t think he ever gave up longing for the fabric of your MeeMaw’s skirts to settle deeply into on days too cold for anything else.
It was one of those cold days of unflagging rain after Pa died when Ivan and I dragged poor old John Milton out from under the porch with the idea that we would sneak him into my dorm room. I was all that sad cat had left and I couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning him to the cold without someone to love him. John Milton, having other ideas, squalled as loudly as the sky as we drove from the old house in Lenoir to Boone. He refused my lap during the ride and preferred instead to scream up at us from underneath the passenger seat. Now and then, he would reach a paw from under the seat to plead with my legs.
Your father and I argued during the trip.
The strength and force of our words turned the day upside down. With John Milton screaming under my seat and the argument above, the car was a horrid cacophony of noise. Ivan wanted me to keep the cat quiet. I couldn’t. It seemed we each found our own misery.
Suddenly, your father and I stopped talking. I remember pulling in my breath and locking it tightly behind my lips. I believe your father did the same. We didn’t really want to fight, so the only expedient thing was simply to dam up any further words and let the day be what it was—one of wincing pain and regret and a cat squalling like a terrible storm.
In spite of John Milton’s pleading cries for his own discomfiting day, the car was filled with silence: of unspoken words; of Ivan’s hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel rather than cupped around my waist; the forever absence of my Ma and Pa; the mountains of my home receding behind me.
I looked over at Ivan with his jaw set angry and rigid beneath his skin. I wanted to end the relationship with him right then, but something caused me to look at the softness of his hair and the way the cuffs of his shirt touched his wrists. I looked at Ivan’s legs, his eyes. The curve of his neck. His lips. In that moment, I saw the whole of Ivan and my heart broke into a million pieces.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pieces of heart making their way to my mouth and causing liquid, teary words to spill over my lips. “I guess this isn’t easy on you either.”
“Oh, baby. Oh God, I’m the one who’s sorry.” Ivan looked at me with eyes filled with his own pool of tears. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
Ivan reached for my hand and pulled it to his chest so I could feel his own broken heart because of our first fight.
Ivan pulled the car to the side of the road. “Ah, Lillie Claire,” he said, holding my hand over his crashing heart. “Look at us in this car… only inches away from each other and yet we’ve never been so far apart. Marry me. Marry me so we’ll never be like this again.” There and then, with John Milton grumbling displeasure under the car seat, with the sky around us storming and flashing in fits of rain and blinding light, your father did what he always did.
He took up my hand and fixed our painful hearts.
There! That is what I know of cats and their magic. I’ll hold every hope that you will also know the wonder of words that hurt and words that heal.
I’ll hold every thought that you’ll always abandon hurtful words and concentrate only on gentle words. Healing words. You might also want to think of cats while you’re at it. The soft thrum that flutters from a cat’s throat is magical, you know.
Please don’t forget this, my dears. Please don’t forget.
All my love,
Your Mother
I refold the letter in my hand and let its intent fall on my shoulders like a cleansing rain. I gently return the paper to the box. Just as I close the lid, I softly whisper one more small utterance of Hah! across the folded paper of my letters.
I then take to my bed, dramatically pulling the quilt over my angry, bee-infested head.
Chapter Fourteen
After screaming my way through each day, I’ve at last taken on a quieter, more somber tone—a demeanor more befitting a Southern lady.
Most days the house hears only the sound of my voice; the television has nothing to say and music is far too joyful to be appropriate. The house listens to my words politely, intently. I speak more to the house than I do the garden because the house is a place of constancy and solidity, whereas the garden is wild with its flux and flow and movement of things in the wind. The house has integrity, gravitas. The garden, on the other hand, threatens to fling itself into the sky in leafy pieces of foolish disinterest. It frightens me with its flapping, flinging leaves. So I give my words over to the structure of the house, letting it hold them tightly against its upright walls until such time as I may need those words again.
I walk through the house, stepping from room to room as if each is on a string of rosary beads and each beaded room deserves its own prayerful thought. I let myself move from bead to bead to bead, allowing my words to become a nonsensical supplication. Now I walk me down to sleep, now here I am… now here I am. If I should die, then let it be… and now I walk and now I sleep.
I would be mortified if anyone should hear me. But it feels I have no choice but to walk in circles, whispering over every step, hoping my breathless words will be remembered by the walls. It’s a stupid hope as I continue to dissolve into the terrible oddness of these days.
I tell no one—not my children, nor the sky, and certainly not the garden tomatoes.
Today, when I’m finally weary of my circuitous murmuring and I’ve nothing more to say to the walls, I throw open the front door and stand very still, just inside the doorframe. The leaves sputter and rustle about in response to the day’s rain-filled November wind. I want to listen to the boisterous chatter of trees, if for no other reason than because I’m simply weary of hearing my own voice.
What I hear, though, is not the sound of talking trees, or even the muttering of clouds as they bump into one another. Beneath all the busy vocalizations of the day, I hear a tiny voice from under the bushes next to the porch—a mewing sound so mournful and frightened, it could have come from my own throat. I pull the leaves
aside and peer under the bush.
“John Milton!” I cry.
My arms scoop up a dusky gray cat, little more than a kitten, wet and shivering. “Oh, John Milton,” I coo into the squirming cat’s face. “Where have you been? You come into the house with me right this minute. And just look at you, all a soggy mess. Let’s dry you off and fix you a nice bowl of milk.”
Joyously, I take the cat into the house, but before I close the door, I look up beyond the trees with their swaying leaves, still clanking in the wind.
“Well,” I huff into the air. “You could at least have had the courtesy to also bring my Ivan back to me. You’re such a nasty, hateful sky!”
My anger is cured for the day and the magic of a cat in my arms seems a far better conclusion than either grumbling from room to room or throwing my coffee cup to the floor.
I’m still happily bouncing through the house when Bryan comes to visit the following day.
He brings me a stack of new books and offers them to me with hands that once held crayoned Mother’s Day cards with his name carefully scrawled inside. He now offers books and magazines filled with such simplistic writing I should be insulted. But his hands are so hopeful in the presentation, I can’t help but be moved by them. He gives me crossword puzzle books and large-print romance novels (a genre I’ve never liked). He loads my arms with The Big Book of Memory Boosters for Today’s Seniors, Cooking for Dummies and (most embarrassing) a book entitled, Sweet Submission with a barely-clad woman depicted on its cover.
My son has no idea how far I’ve slipped these recent months.
“Thank you, Dearheart,” I say, receiving his gifts. I poke at his pockets. “You don’t happen to have a nice bottle of something adult in there do you?”
“Of course not. It’s only ten in the morning.” Bryan laughs and the room sparkles with his voice. “I did think, though, that you might like to take a nice drive if you don’t have any other plans.”
“Oh, that would be wonderful,” I say. “What day is it? Where are we going?”
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