Mother Winter

by Sophia Shalmiyev

  I made an enlarged color copy the size of my head of my mom’s photo before it was accidentally destroyed and taped it onto my dressing mirror. Right where my own head should be when I get in close to put on eyeliner like she used to, all the way inside, behind the eyelash—they don’t call it a waterline for nothing—there’s a missing persons poster instead. Inevitably tears come to the corners of my eyes and spit out tiny black balls of residue. I lack clarity and good vision. My chest holds a whale where only a goldfish could swim.

  My son collects rocks, horse chestnuts, and twigs in his drawer. He hoards pencils and pieces of scrap paper he steals from school. They turn to pulp when I wash his things and fail to empty his pockets. The horse chestnuts aren’t the edible kind and are poisonous if ingested raw. None of the things he collects can last or nourish, except for the rocks.

  “Why does the sky look beaten-up-red?” Jake asks me at 7:00 a.m. “How did the sun do that?”

  I still fall asleep with my contacts in even though the doctor instructed me not to. “The lack of oxygen will ruin your eyes if you keep it up,” the Slovakian optometrist with twin daughters and good sense says to me at the fitting. I woke up on the couch with my clothes still on. My wrists have red rings from the elastic of my dress sleeves.

  It’s Mother’s Day. I got really drunk with friends the night before. I feel like my teeth need to be swaddled and rocked out of my head. I can walk around and play with the kids by dinnertime and act right again “from now on,” as I mostly had every day before I got drunk at the Florida Room, bumped my head on the photo booth machine, ate nachos, wrote obscenities in chalk on the pool table, and told loud stories about a guy I slept with a long time ago—before my husband, before the photographer—whose penis was shaped like a tuna can. I meant to say it was thick and short. But once the initial field report was out there I couldn’t back away from my story and kept lying and laughing. It’s been almost a decade since I had sex with anyone other than my husband. I’m not supposed to think about this fact as much as I do.

  There was a guy in my writing community who came out for drinks after our MFA department’s annual writing awards ceremony. The conversation turned to sex, to issues of promiscuities and double standards. I explain that I still identify with slut culture, with hyperboles necessary to call attention to the lingering shame and imbalance, the safety concerns women continue to have. “You can’t be a slut, you’re married. The word for you is just horny,” he scoffs. When he said this staring at his beer, he looked like a mean, proud, lost baby bear that I wanted to hate-fuck, but never would. He reminds me that I have animal skin. He reminds me of the stickers in Seattle. He tells the table of writers he will be moving to Chile to avoid paying back his student loans.

  I tell him that I ain’t ever leaving. I love America. It’s broken, like me.

  What if the name of the town and country you were born in changed after you left? What if you lived in three different countries within a year right before you hit puberty? What if your native tongue had to twist to shout new sounds, trying to touch the top of your teeth to say the word teeth in front of a classroom of predictably cruel seventh-grade girls? What if the only word, the only name, the only place that remained constant was Ma? Mama, mama, mama, said so many times that it broke off and became half of itself, just Ma, no breath left to give to a whole word, so you speak the end or the beginning only.

  When putting my daughter down for a nap I try to leave the room and avoid the creaky floorboards like I’m navigating a minefield. Frances will scream by the time the door handle is turned anyway. I lie down with her, contorted into the best feeding position, and wonder what it was like for my great-granny during the massive shellings in Leningrad.

  If she thought about making little earplugs out of newspapers or the hem of her dress for her little daughter to keep out the noise of approaching doom. But maybe those scraps you would need for kindling. I want to sew earmuffs for my baby so I could leave her in peace for a few hours, but never get around to it, and so she suckles, and I dream about the war, about Hope’s stories, about the names we give eliminated things, eliminated people.

  Nostalgia. Shell shock. Battle fatigue. PTSD.

  My daughter screams out my name every morning, our house rooster: Maaaaaaaaaaaaaahmaaaaaaaaaah! I swing out of bed like I’m throwing a punch with my whole torso to greet her sweaty bangs and part them to the side to see all four of us—me, you, your mom, and hers—staring back against the stream of the light coming in behind me.

  Frances has almost Inuit eyes, extra puffy in the morning, igloo-melting browns, and I watch her stretch out on the writing desk I made into a changing table, the letter and envelope compartments holding diapers instead of passionate correspondence and magazine submissions. I wipe away the poop that smells as many different ways as you can say snow in that cold language.

  I think about how I want to be her so badly. I want to feel myself stretching with no memory of pain in my muscles, no reminders of where wood once met the small of my back on dad’s bed; no slap on the back of my neck that stings when I roll my head from side to side after he comes to my recital and realizes I have been only pretending to practice the violin in his bedroom and instead looking at his Japanese anime porn mags by laying them out on the floor and flipping the pages with my big toe as I fingered the amber-powdered strings in dissonance. Amber preserves all it traps when the resin’s still wet.

  A violin is shaped like the daughter, a higher-pitched cry than the cello, the bridge also notched with four strings, head rested to the side to play a song by heart with a horsehair bow.

  Toward the end of my extremely short and unproductive violin career I told any adult who listened that I had a big wish. I prayed that my father would become a very rich man so he could keep buying violins and I could keep breaking them over the backs of chairs. Violins against women no more.

  When our car is broken into again and again, Jake cries over his stolen backpack. Smash-and-grabs are so common in Portland. I teach him that someone must have been so unwell that stealing from us was all they had left that night and resorted to crime to survive. But his backpack had homework and favorite talismans, his sacred nothings. Why couldn’t they have left behind what mattered only to a child, he wants to know?

  We find a man asleep in our car. He’s covered himself with Frances’s nap-time blanket and has put all the stuff he wants in the front seat. I failed to unpack after a camping trip. He is dope sick. I try to open the door and a singed hand with browned fingernails slaps the lock shut. Franny cries out, “He’s touching my blanket.” When he finally leaves I’m holding the children in my arms and tell them that he needs help. The car is full of Gatorade bottles half-filled with his urine.

  Jake bit a kid at school after weeks of unrelenting questions about how our family would survive an earthquake put him on edge. I tell him that he cannot bite others. Or scream, or say bad words, or run away, or interrupt, or refuse to eat, or slam the door. We must follow directions. We must be patient. It seems that he knows from watching me that I used to love doing the things that have earned him a time-out. That I learned not to do them to others first by doing them to myself until nothing was left of the chewed-up spots and a new way had to be found. He will eventually ask me about the scars on my arms and why we don’t see my folks very much. For now, we look at each other and he knows about the other way. Say sorry and give a hug after you take a pause, after ma.

  Moments later he yells at his little sister, “Give it back, no fair.” Always wanting what he could have if he waited. But the desire is too enormous of a geyser. Because waiting doesn’t guarantee a reunification with the thing you gave up, even for a moment.

  New friends tend to ask why or how I chose to become a mother after I out myself as so elaborately motherless. I had to stop myself from looking for her, I explain. Not the looking I did on the page, counting every eyelash on her gloppy mascaraed eyes with a corresponding letter, but become too
busy raising children to go back to Russia again and be dissatisfied with the search and its outcomes. I didn’t want to travel for pain anymore.

  If place is a language, then without countries we would be a new kind of poetry. We would be a wall of lockboxes and a bowl of unnumbered keys.

  XXXIII

  I have been pregnant four times. Abortion. Miscarriage. Baby boy. Baby girl.

  I have given away. Been taken from. Mother. Mother.

  I learned that in the summer of 1940 Anaïs Nin had been selling pornographic stories to pay for an abortion and support herself in America after fleeing Paris. Against the backdrop of the Nazi takeover she remarked on her own survival: “Each pregnancy is an obscure conflict. The break is not simple. You are tearing away a fragment of flesh and blood. Added to this deeper conflict is the anguish, the quest for the doctor, the fight against exploitation, the atmosphere of underworld bootlegging, a racket.”

  Sappho is believed to have been writing a feminized version of The Iliad, while the men before and after her penned war torture porn.

  Each time a soldier leaves for active duty they number her tours. By the fourth deployment it is usually expected that the soldier won’t be sent to a war zone again in her career.

  Before I had Jake I miscarried suddenly, within forty-eight hours of telling everyone I knew. I sat at home bleeding with the dying, or dead, fetus still inside me when the balloons, flowers, and teddy bear delivered from my father showed up at the door. I knew I was done waiting, done rubbing progesterone cream on my thighs, done expecting it to pass like a red fog in the toilet bowl. But I couldn’t do anything but wait. In the middle of the night I felt like I had to bear down on a toilet. I saw two black dots on a puppy-like head in a pinkish sack maybe four inches long. I asked my husband if I should keep it. I wanted to bring it to the doctor. Get it analyzed. I wrapped it in clear plastic, a body bag that I put in the freezer.

  The next morning I went to the new doctor I had begun seeing only months before the miscarriage. She wanded me with the internal sonogram device and declared me empty. She then asked me about the ancient white scars on my arms. She was concerned I wasn’t stable enough to handle this miscarriage and was at risk for self-harm. I told her I did the cutting when my mother died, which was a lie. Didn’t she? Did she? It only happened a handful of times, but the forearm is the worst place besides your face to have that kind of flaw. The last time I cut my arm I was turning twenty and I never got the urge again. I remember the excuse I gave the gynecologist I never returned to every time I am forced to put on a cardigan in the dead heat of August, like the time my daughter got baptized.

  Franny’s dress didn’t fit at her baptism, so I left the back open with its buttons untended. It was a Victorian-era find that was better on a hanger than on a nine-month-old baby. The sleeves began to rip before the oil-slicked thumb traced a cross on her forehead. Her purity further heated up being held in my ugly, thatched arms.

  As soon as Franny could speak in sentences she asked, “Did you ever have a mother?”

  I let her stay up late one night and we look at my old photos. We sit on the edge of my bed by a dim lamp, Jake passed out beside us, another night I give in when they persist about sleeping with me. “Cuddle us all night,” they coo, and roll over, kick, and rub their faces into the cold part of the pillow away from me shortly after their fevered pleas.

  Franny holds my pictures carefully, asks questions about locations, about my outfits, and then suddenly begins to let down a tear. She wants to know why I’m alone, standing in the courtyard of the Vatican. Who’s with me? I explain to her that Grandpa Gabriel was my constant companion, but I was taken from my mom. That she wasn’t well, but that people live on inside of us, through stories, mostly, or so we tell ourselves. I don’t want her to take care of me, take my job, take my place, but she slides right in, right up to me, and says the impossible.

  “Is she living on through me?”

  While I’m on the phone with a friend the next day, Franny interrupts me to interrogate the scars on my arms, the ones I can no longer notice or pay attention to. I put her on my lap and tickle her tummy, but she calls me out for avoiding her question. I lie and say I got them in a car accident. “What kind of car accident were you in, Mom?” I hang up with my friend.

  × × × ×

  The reason Anaïs Nin needed a “Lie Box” in her mature years was so that she could organize and catalog all of her different selves into a neat and predictable order. A stoic and lush portrait could form out of a stack of impressionistic sketches she practiced on her friends. Each of these cards held the evidence of her mind’s intentions to become whole, to fill in the blanks where she was left empty. To have written herself out of the freezer, to turn gruesome tiny body bags into precious keepsakes, proof she survived a stolen childhood. My scarcity and mercy role model.

  Anaïs gave birth to her diaries instead of children. She proclaimed motherhood “a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon a woman.” I chose, and I didn’t. My mother’s leaving picked this for me the last two times I had gotten pregnant. I signed a contract to not re-create her and showed up for active duty armed with a toy gun.

  It is in me to leave my children. It is my destiny to make them unhappy. Those are the roaches scurrying around my mind when I turn on the lights in the kitchen of the proverbial house my mother built. When my mother drank instead of continuing to nurse me as a ten-month-old, she cut away at the stable and confident future-mother-me; I got annihilated as a natural, as the real deal, as her truest, most important poem, her Lie Box. But she stuffed some torn-up papyrus in a crocodile; she taught me how to look for shards of a vase with a few words on it and piece together a story. She gave me the words when she gave me up. She passed down an invisible language I am learning to read each day and transcribe to keep as naked proof that you can live without heat in your house. Maybe you can survive motherlessness.

  My dad often scolded me for losing my mittens as a child. Rubbing my blue fingers in between his palms, he looked into my face and repeated, “Cold hands, cold heart.” I stick my kids’ hands into my armpits and tell them this story while they try to tickle me, trapped for a moment.

  Soviets believed iced drinks caused viruses and flus. Drafts caused pneumonia. A chill on the back brought on spasms. A neck with no scarf made for a sore throat. Sitting on the frigid ground caused women to become infertile.

  Scientists say that there is no such thing as cold; there is only the absence of heat. It’s not that our houses get chilly, it’s that we open doors and let in a draft, allowing the warmth to escape. Do I make my children cold when I leave this apartment to write, to get a drink with friends, if I’m hungover after a fun night out, if I lose my temper, or spend the night lying awake and going over a perfect day of inhabiting a studio apartment with nothing but books and a television and no kids around? Do they feel the chill of all the wide-open doors my mother left ajar within me? Am I freezing them out when I write down what my life would be like if I never had them?

  What if I never made them dinner and cleaned it up and washed them up and begged them to get dressed to get undressed to go to sleep to please wake up to stop yelling to wait just one second to not be angry that I have to go now to ask their father that question instead to not rip the book out of my hand to play quietly to not wipe snot on your sister to not be afraid to be patient Mommy is on her way and I will cuddle you on the couch and yes we can watch a movie and forget the books the phone the friends the vodka soda on the rocks and sneaking a cigarette and cursing with my best friend walking around too drunk to button my coat in the winter and forgetting, forgetting, forgetting my body ever held them tight all to myself and my mother’s body did, too, and doing it all again at 6:00 a.m. the next morning all while something inside of me is snowing over the road back to holding hands while crossing the road together and missing her too much to go on.

  And so I only leave them for a few hour
s to write about her leaving for good. And I write about her ghost to find my wrung-out skin—to feel my lips kissing my children’s necks, bellies, hands, feet. Touch as worship. An altar of my goddess with her broken-off nose and no arms to take a drink of wine. Marble took me for its daughter. She needs fresh flowers and ripe fruit instead of roaches and lice. A divine blossom from her assimilated fruit.

  Restoration is the act of finding a baseline to maintain.

  I make jokes that I should have had my tubes tied. My friends who hear this wince a little. They know my kids are loved and well cared for. Each one planned out and fretted over. It sounds calloused. It also sounds beautiful when you say it out loud. Tied tube. A knot. A bow. Like pinching pasta. The twist on the dumpling. Closed off and sealed. Like an envelope. Unsent letters living and dying inside your canal.

  But it is also a noose, which is finite. And I am not—finite. I birthed two children. The wish for the noose under my skin has to do with me being a sieve. I’m not a funnel for my offspring. I try to protect them from the larger bits of truth. Chew them up myself before letting them swallow. I’m a round meshed device that is constantly trying to strain against the familial history of cheating, leaving, drinking, and fists swinging for faces. I know what I inherited. I know how hard I must work to protect my kids from the matter already in their marrow. What I fed them through my placenta and my milk and then sometimes the lost and sorry look in my eyes no matter the smile. The tiny jabs of beige on my arms pointing to them, don’t notice me, I’m too visible. I wished for the closing off of two holes inside of me to not infect them with my mother and father at their worst.