Mother Winter

by Sophia Shalmiyev

  XXII

  When I lived in Seattle in my early twenties, traveling back to Olympia on the Greyhound bus to finish up college, I worked at a peep show for about four years. It was the only time in my life I drank almost every day. That was the place where I thought, yes, I could die from these hangovers and find her not looking for me at last.

  The movie Frances came out in 1982, when I was four years old and spending my mornings watching my wet-with-hangover-dew mother and her two dearest accomplices chug vodka out of little juice glasses on a rickety four-legged table.

  Frances Farmer’s middle name is Elena—my mother’s name. My obsession with that movie and the woman it’s about managed to elbow and embroider itself into the fabric of my daughter-legacy for good.

  Born in Seattle, Frances Elena Farmer was a rebel from a young age. In the 1930s, she penned an essay called “God Dies” and then traveled to the Moscow Art Theater in the USSR on scholarship during a Red Scare. Frances Farmer became a stage and Hollywood actress who was infamous for her heavy drinking. Frances was hospitalized by her mother against her will and insisted that she was raped and abused while committed. Frances is more famous for the rumors she generated than for the art she made.

  A guy in my small Seattle music and art community, who is now in a real famous band, made stickers to mock me and put them up all over our neighborhood. He was teaching me a lesson about who gets to speak in public and what last words, last rites, look like. The stickers were of my heavily made-up face torn out from a copy of The Stranger. He typed out and pasted the words: Read my poetry! Understand my feelings! around the photo of my barely-past-adolescence-pudgy, fakely seductive visage. I was a hoary child in sexy young-woman drag. A few nights before this smear campaign I was drunk at our regular bar with friends and grafittied the bathroom wall, asking the question of whether the guys in the scene treated women like whores and groupies. It seemed like I was merely pointing out the obvious, and it also made my friends laugh. He felt that I was being hostile and implicating nice-enough guys like him in manipulating and using women, that I was harshing his mellow, that there was no reason to put in ink that Seattle barely had any girls playing music in our clubs.

  The picture he used came from an advertisement for the place where I worked. They never paid me for using my image in their ads. The first time it happened I was ashamed and indignant and the second time I felt I deserved no better or should just be grateful for the attention. I continued working there for a couple of years after the guy in the band left town, saying that everyone was real jealous of his success. I didn’t write any poetry for about a decade.

  × × × ×

  As my time at the peep show job that consistently ripped me off was coming to an end, I made friends with the girl no one liked. My other girlfriends wouldn’t even order takeout with her. Her father was a minister who broke down her bedroom door and fisted the devil right out of her. Once, on Halloween, she got us both in trouble at work yelling back at the manager after we had arrived late, again, and he charged us an extra stage fee. I planned on hanging out in the dressing room and reading I Love Dick instead of hustling shows to avoid the riffraff but found myself back inside her car cooking up ways to replace the money of the lost shift. She wanted to give hand jobs. I wanted to go back home to Olympia.

  She became lost driving around talking about our scheme and we ended up in Bellevue. The bridge still gives me the stomach sicks. I dug for sludge in my boots. When we stopped, this girl wanted me to take over and drive back. I didn’t have a license. I hadn’t yet met my husband, who would eventually teach me how to drive, and I was embarrassed to have skipped this step of proper adulthood. I tried to ward off intrusive thoughts, to believe we couldn’t die on the bridge back out to Seattle, but could only picture us flying off into the waves below if I got behind the wheel. We headed for Olympia defeated and stopped over at the sandwich shop where she had a straight job, to pick up her meager paycheck from the few shifts they gave her. She got into a fight with a junkie coworker who played in a local band everyone loved. She was so distracted when she started up the car again that we were hit from my side at the intersection just after going one block.

  The firefighters wanted to show me that I had cracked the windshield with my head on the passenger side. One of them even said, “See this birdie you put there in the glass?” I hadn’t worn a seat belt. I couldn’t go to the hospital because I had no insurance, and I was going to be Joan Crawford at a Halloween party at my house. I tried to stay awake doing speed with my favorite queens and faeries for two days to deal with my concussion.

  With photography we wish to manage decomposition, seeking out the beloved to force under glass. All of your pictures, too few, are the alien mother-body subjected to material corruption of postbirth ruins. You have been gone, but I didn’t know it. Patrick Dubost remarks, “Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic—portraits eroded by time and light—I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny.” But the body dances out the erosion of the mind.

  Girls at the peep show are moiré patterns dancing in a glass box. Pussy refracted refracted refracted to infinity. Indistinguishable intimacy. Shape-shifters. A cliché. Faking it as the balm on the burn.

  Clichés have a feeling like snakeskin. Slithery slopes of shedding stale old fat, rising to the surface. The more the snake sheds its skin, the more she hopes the wet and new skin underneath will be the truth; it’s the same truth as before, it dries out and fades, but maybe she absorbs the miracle cream of novelty better each time. I could take my clothes off, and the glass box at the peep show gave me new skin.

  I already knew the difference between staying and leaving the body, and being only of the mind, and packing that mind in a blue travel bag, and now, a shiny pleather hat box filled with ruffled things, and glittery things, and girly things to take off for money, so I only needed them for a minute but got ready for that minute for an hour.

  Jimi Hendrix is asking “Are You Experienced?” over the speakers at the strip place, and I’m nodding Yes. Yes. Yes.

  I wanted to be as far away from society as possible, for as long as possible, which meant being self-employed, and there were very few options for me as a teenager when I first began looking for work in college, no parental help or social standing to avoid the trap of long hours with low pay. I didn’t want to fake glamour, didn’t want to be touched, didn’t want to play the games of a typical strip club. The peep show, preferably the cut-and-dried transactional weekday shifts, placed me with women who were just my kind. Counterfeit strippers, caustic with mocking sarcasm, not having any of IT.

  In the same spot I used to hide your photo I then carried around a Polaroid of me, Marie, Chantelle, and Brooke, my friends in Seattle, 1998.

  My friend Marie is a missing-plane story, like my mom. She took this Polaroid and then we got Indian takeout after. The one out of the frame should get to stay in the picture, the memory of their half-blocked faces as they looked at you in a flash.

  What you can see in this family photo are three girls dressed up like strippers. I think we were all bad at real stripping, didn’t want to be those girls who were good at it with the pole tricks and tipping the DJ at the end of the night for playing that Guns N’ Roses tune and flashing you with warm pink light rather than the green or blue they might throw onto the odd and broke new girls. You can gain the courage to be desperate here.

  We used to go to Linda’s Tavern on the hill to play dominoes and drink the coldest and largest glass of making you funnier. The four of us girls still girls but angry like gray-dog women. I want you I want you so bad, come back to me baby, you were my everything, the song, any torch song, my song to block out the jizz-jazz, high-energy pole rockers, goes. Aren’t they all kind of the same in their earnestness? We were fearless before we knew the old mattresses we slept on were vile with pleasure. We didn’t care about gross thrift store–stained cloth touching our bare ba
cks with rakes of mystery, sandpaper-scratched itch. None of us had new dreams and that was the point. The right to remain ambiguous is to split off and perform a new woman, as if in a photo, maybe each time. I cannot perform any mother but the one I made to stand against you.

  Four centuries passed before Greek scholars began organizing Sappho’s verses into books. Our “largest figure with the smallest remains,” quoted and summarized by mouth after mouth, scraps to mirror those of us who are tiny, neglected, truncated trees.

  I lived with this picture of my friends, girls like us, Mom, because I didn’t have many childhood photos and fear losing any more family portraits. My uncle Chanukah sent us heaps of photos from Russia in the mail when I was a teenager. We received a clear plastic bag with ripped-open manila envelopes that had our address written on them in his neat handwriting. There were three or four water-damaged photos stuck in the corner of the package. The refugees on rafts.

  × × × ×

  My granny Chaya believed that if we brought our family album along on this journey that a wicked person—an Unclean Force—would lay filthy hands on the visages of our ancestors and living relatives and curse us all. The photos were argued over for hours on the day of our departure.

  Neither album, nor family. Photos displayed as taxidermy. The unexplained announced in attempts at gathering.

  When Chaya was dying of heart and kidney failure on the same pee-stained couch where I once slept, she asked for me to come and rest my hand on her face and close her eyes.

  Her last wish was to see her only granddaughter’s face one last time, and so she held on to a picture of me folded into her bosom as she passed.

  There are no pictures for these words.

  Seattle in 2000 was the place where my leg found a hole in an old, crumbling staircase no one was supposed to use in the back of my house. My bear trap held me captive in consideration of things to come as the flesh swelled against the old wood. I had hives on my neck, a bruise or two each week from diving off barstools, some contact lenses lost behind the eye, two whiskey doubles and ginger back at last call, Dick’s burger wrappers strewn about the bed as I got up to check licenses pulled out of wallets to read the names of the mystery guests using my shower. I was twenty-four and in need of a stern warning only my father could deliver. He admired my independence and loathed my aimlessness and secrecy. I was becoming my mother, and he could convince me that ruining myself would not bring her back if I allowed him. He never said this, never mentioned her. I was ready to forgive him, so I applied to the art therapy program at the School of Visual Arts—a compromise between his past career and my present state as an itinerant artist.

  I wanted to be cleaned out. I was baptized anew with a flight back to New York City to begin grad school and become an art therapist. The women I worked with at the domestic violence shelter as part of my training never knew that I hid a battered old bird inside a black-breasted sparrow.

  I was shy with my new clients, some older, some younger than me, all mothers, and used clay or watercolors or pipe cleaners to get them to talk about their abuse without flooding. The more we worked together the more I saw my Elena in them. I rocked their babies and I encouraged their kids to come to our sessions so that I could fawn over them, sort of hold them at a comfortable distance so that their mothers could see them anew. I watched their touch get softer.

  We giggled and hugged when they caught themselves losing their temper over silly accidents. They were lonely, horny, scared, annoyed, and their kids needed to know what lay ahead; they needed the past reinterpreted for them so that it fit, sequentially, contained, back into their heads, heads they banged on the walls, wailing, acting out, begging for a story with a beginning, middle, and end. For a mother who looked for them when they ran away.

  XXIII

  My father begged me to not go back to Russia. My stepmother threatened to stop speaking to me when she heard I was collecting addresses of friends and family to stay with while searching for Elena. She was curled up with the remote by her side, watching RTN in bed when I came over to get her unattainable blessing, eyes filled with if you must. My therapist discouraged me with a reminder that some things are unresolvable, that we fold in on ourselves and regress even when going home for the holidays, even when a frame of reference is stable, your old room and your family stationary, unlike the quicksand of an ill, roving mother in a country that spat me out, bitterly gave me up for a closed adoption to its cooler-than-thou rival.

  The idea to go find my mother coincided with finally receiving my American citizenship. My father had gone through the process when I left for college, but I shrugged off the responsibility even as he dutifully mailed me the naturalization applications. There would now be a death of my Alien ID, which had long rendered me unable to leave the country without enormous hassle, and a birth of a passport, removing a substantial obstacle to my journey back. After being sworn in with my future travel companion, whom I had been dating for mere months, as an enthusiastic witness clapping along with the other loved ones in the back rows, I was given all the tools to apply for a passport. I could now hand-grenade my body toward the place where my last passport was confiscated.

  I began packing even before I had the tickets—playing pretend. I didn’t want to fly back, either, but I wished to be brave, to be done with stillborn fantasies of our delicious reunion. I had a break from school a few months shy of my twenty-sixth birthday, some loan money, and a boyfriend who offered to come along. I didn’t choose as much as succumb to the road ahead of me. It was not a hero’s journey. I wanted to get it out of the way as fast as possible.

  A previous velleity as resignation syndrome.

  We all have a propensity for false pattern recognition, to look for meaning, a belief system when mystery is too anxious of a box to contain us—a story that can signify a completeness we have only felt in the darkness of our mother.

  “We are dead stars looking back up at the sky,” confirms the astronomer Dr. Michelle Thaller.

  But she’s also reminding me that we are 4 percent of what’s left after the last mass extinction, and that your children might face the threat of the next one, while living on the cusp of the golden middle before a blackout.

  We can only observe about four thousand stars in our night sky, but stardust collected in a jar will never make us a new planet. It is the loose bits of heat and gravity that create universes out there in the celestial wilderness, the feral, weightless darkness. But our survival depends on reading patterns, on following maps and having a guide, a compass, a cataloged history that we believe will help us predict disasters.

  I brought my mother what she may have stolen from me if given half the chance. To be her apparition of a daughter I must be the daughter of fortitude and remember those carefully plucked eyebrows, thin as satin thread. Or her vampy brown lipstick, heavily applied to the doughy, expressive mouth. Or the way she was able to expertly rim her eyes with kohl inside the bottom lash line, making the white of her eyeballs really pop. Or her short bob with silky, chestnut, swoopy bangs combed behind the ear. Or her favorite tight, dark-blue jeans—so hard to scam—that gave her backside a tight pear shape.

  Or my dad flirting with her as she walked by the breakfast table in the morning where he was grooming himself with an electric shaver and gave her a quick little buzz on the behind. How she laughed and sort of skipped on one heeled foot as she trotted out of the room. His and Hers Perestroika.

  Gabriel and Elena got married in a fever during a late January snowstorm. It was two days after her twentieth birthday. She wore a plain long-sleeved white dress to the courthouse. I was born nine months later. My hernia was protruding so far out that they announced me to my sweaty mother as a boy. “I thought it was your scrotum sack for a second.” She enjoyed telling me this story years later along with her other genitalia-related observations. Dad compares their romance to Romeo and Juliet even though they met in a seedy Leningrad bar and it was the bride who took the poiso
ned drink.

  When I packed to come look for her in the fourth year of the second millennium, I thought of that day, and carefully chose enough black lace underwear to last a week, along with some skirts and bras, guessing her size, ready to give her more of what she once wanted—adorning her as a woman needing to push this up and slim that down, of performing a useless restoration of an ill, or possibly dead, mother. As though I would know what condition she was actually in, what state I should be trying to sculpt her back into, using the shards of those brief memories we had together before I left Leningrad as a kid.

  After I get done packing I interview my uncle on the phone, who is hazy on dates and details, and get the feeling as though we are gossiping schoolgirls passing silly notes in invisible ink. I scribble down a few disjointed words in what glides out of me as an ancient dialect.

  This exchange with Chanukah reminds me of a ubiquitous revolutionary propaganda poster of a stern lady in a kerchief with a finger over her mouth: Neh Boltay. Don’t Gossip. Rumors can lead to gulags, families liquidated in a matter of days. Antigovernment thoughts or jokes told to a neighbor in confidence can land you in a labor camp. For writers, a poem that might criticize the Russian way of life could get you banned from the union, unable to appear in print again. Your books can be purged and outlawed, or simply phased out as no longer in vogue, like Akhmatova’s. There are reasons Russians memorized and recited poetry. Because we wished to express ourselves in a collective stanza as one people against tyranny, a shorthand, and because it could all disappear any minute, so you might as well etch it into your brain and whisper the lyric to your kids in case they never see the pages for themselves.

  As a last-ditch effort scouring for more scraps of information I go on an ancestry website and post a desperate message about my upcoming sleuthing trip. Almost immediately, a response from a Russian genealogist pops up: