Mother Winter

by Sophia Shalmiyev

  × × × ×

  I don’t drop the kids off at school with Mike the next morning. In our hallway, by the elevator, I say, trying one last time, “Franny, can I tell you a secret?” She nods. I whisper that I love her so much, into her ear. She only says, “Bye.” She waves me away and I go pick through a drawer of nursing bras to find one that might fit even though I haven’t produced milk in a year. Get ready to start my day with our first goodbye.

  I braid Franny’s hair, but she screams at me to stop. I comb her hair, but she will only let me do one side. I am almost done tying the band around her pigtail, but she doesn’t want me to finish. I can’t groom her the way I want to. Can’t touch her wild locks. She keeps it for herself, just like her mama holds her mama in secret.

  After two years of barely touching her hair I finally realize that she has the same texture and color hair as my mother. Not my black too-full oil-spill locks, but the wispy waves of chestnut brown. This new rejection feels familiar. Familial.

  XXXXI

  Geophagy, or pica, is an affliction that makes you crave dirt when pregnant. It’s your body anticipating or dealing with a sickness and coating the stomach lining with clay to minimize the absorption of a foul substance.

  Before we moved to Portland from Cannon Beach I spent many crow and raven seafoam days wondering if I should have another child, or if I should write a book. I found out that I got into graduate school the day after we sheepishly celebrated my fourth pregnancy, which would bring us Franny. I set out to take photos of myself with a tripod in the freezing winter rain and hail in our winter garden beds among the slug-smeared brown vegetation.

  A crow cannot count past the number four. If five gunmen shot at the bird, she would take note of each one as she flew away, but she would get lost at five.

  The tourist town was usually empty during the week in the off-season and we lived on a dead-end street. When a cord of firewood was delivered to our driveway I waited for my husband to leave in search of surf with our friends and once our son was napping I took off my clothes and ran toward the pile as tall as my husband and as wide as our car. I walked back to the camera, rewound the film and set up the timer, and dove onto the chopped-up trees, inner blond, smelling sweet and tender, splinters shining in the gild of the sun.

  My breasts were properly drained, both big and flat, like wads of chewed-up gum spat out on the sidewalk, breasts so well used they have become public. They were rubbed to blue from bearing down on those edges and peaks of wood. I heard a faint laughter of teenage girls from above the big hotel next door as I slid off the pile an hour later. I laid down for the camera one last time and went back inside with my robe on to look at photos of earthquake rubble, shelling rubble, ancient ruins’ preserved rubble, and urban decay rubble. I would hug those cold bricks if I could.

  Most literature on psychology will say that broken people with attachment disorders and distorted self-images seek escape in sexual acting out. It’s intimate touch we should aim for. The more we get to know our lived-in and tousle-haired loved one, sweaty and ripe in our arms, the closer we are to meaningful sex, layered contact, losing oneself the right way. But what if the longer you stay merged and naked the less amorous you feel? What if only space gives arousal the room to rise and knead dough through your belly?

  My children are supposed to safely travel through stages of their own. Oral. Anal. Phallic. Latent. Then they get to a finish line of no longer being a child and not yet an adult in the Genital stage. These can’t be reverse engineered.

  There is a kind of sneaky arousal that happens from living inside Speedboat. You can move through Renata Adler without worrying about who is assigned seats in the audience and who has the stage. We are rescuing garbage together through our own version of a neurotic, jangled, and sometimes bone-weary cultural criticism that is half-awake but sober, the unrelenting and indefatigable woman who lives in her not-knowing, the hubris of her directionless days, of brief and scattered musings, her disinterest in being successful and inventing lovers in her solitude, a woman writing and not-writing while she moves in and out of attachments—she lusts and leers.

  Orgasms happen in four stages. Excitement, plateau, orgasm, and recovery.

  Recovery is what releases the most powerful of bonding drugs—the flood of oxytocin and other feel-good neurochemicals—the “post-orgasmic glow” chemicals are the same ones a mother feels when nursing, kissing, or holding her baby close.

  Space aches. But spaces can ache and then explode into new realms.

  What if familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, but a numbness of the body where it once felt like bears bathing you in a warm river? How can that numbness ever be squared against the dark and unknowable forest of claws within? The way post-traumatic stress has our brain fixate on the event of terror and won’t let up, the way the story remains incoherent, unbelievable, redundant, surreal, and constantly re-lived, but unwanted and discarded like a dirty orphan. The threading of the text, the Morse code messages rapidly firing out of a foxhole with plenty of white space to breathe, the first line or paragraph hanging on to the bottom of the page, fingers clinging to the edge of a windowsill with a dangling body writhing in the air, rescuing, pointing, moving, not comfortable yet in the company of more paragraphs, challenging transitional space—a page-turner.

  Deforestation is something I used to want to take photos of a couple years ago. On my drives to Portland from Cannon Beach I tried to motivate myself to pull over and get out of the car, take my clothes off, set up my tripod, and lie down squarely in the ruins of our local commerce. It was a gestating project about having been a stripper a long time ago and my love of weathered and ruined scenes that get re-staged, re-planted, and re-populated. I wish so badly to be the keeper of the lost and forgotten, of public wastelands.

  During most of these commutes it snowed or rained too hard or I was late, or my kids were in the car, or I was ashamed to be found out there, accidentally impaled on the sharp edges of hacked-up trunks. Now the urge is gone. I can only appreciate my old appetite as I speed by, cutting through the fickle weather. A postscript to the giving tree.

  Fragment 58 is the fourth almost-complete Sappho poem we have. In it, she complains of old age through allusions to Tithonos and the goddess Eos who rises from the edge of the ocean each dawn to make morning dew from her tears. Because she asked for her lover to be immortal but not to remain young, he grew older and older until he could not lift his arms to care for himself but still held hands with “his deathless wife.” Some myths say that he begged to be turned into a cicada tree in the end.

  The crooked tree holds no mystery. The storms and the soil are a matter of recorded history.

  More and more people have become interested in turning their remains into burial pods to be planted under trees. This way we can be a part of a memory forest instead of a graveyard. But what if the tree you are placed under is diseased or blows down in a storm? Who will collect the poisoned, crumbling wood that has absorbed the loved one’s DNA?

  In the fourth year of this millennium a new Sappho fragment was discovered around the same time as I missed a connecting flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg on my way to not find you. Scraps of papyrus were found decomposing at a site that was once a municipal dump in Egypt.

  When Frances turned two and Jake was six I flew them to the East Coast to visit with their grandparents. This was my daughter’s first, and so far only, encounter with my family. It wasn’t long before we got into our perennial topic: I was lucky to have an unusual kind of father. Most fathers would have abandoned me in the care of a grandparent with an unfit mother like mine. Men don’t usually raise children alone. I was lucky, because if I had stayed behind in Russia, my only fate with no parents to care for me and push me on would have been to become a prostitute. I was lucky to not become a piece of trash in Russia, and I should thank my father every day for that reason alone, instead of keeping score from the past, longed for to be forgotten. Luda is still a be
d-skirt mother, hiding Elena away like an impulse purchase from the discount mall.

  I asked my stepmother why she thinks my dad lost his temper and physically hurt me so much. Without even thinking about it she explained, “Because you constantly wet your pants, lied about being dirty, and wouldn’t change and clean up on your own, just sat in filth.”

  “Did you guys think that maybe I was just traumatized?”

  “Traumatized over some no-good whore? And you got a small bladder! There’s nothing that could be done about either of those things,” my stepmom muses as I look over at my daughter, her diapered bottom on the granite counter. She is not yet potty trained and I am careful to not push her. I learned by losing patience with myself rather than with my son during his road to dryness, to comfort, to control, to safety. I think of what it takes to hurt a child who is unable to use the toilet properly, of how Eva Hesse was beaten by the nuns at the orphanage each time she had an accident, regressed from fleeing war-torn Germany for Holland without her parents. They were able to come fetch her and bring her to America, where she remained dysregulated, hypervigilant, her body betraying her for some time. Screaming wet screams of separation.

  Luda, the woman who could have won a Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface look-alike contest in her heyday, is a starling. Not just because she is glamorous, loud, cruel, and shiny. Starlings are nest stealers. Their birdcall is more powerful than a mill saw.

  XXXXII

  My daughter never wants to wear a jacket, even in the dead of winter. She runs hot.

  The Leningrad Blockade reached the height of frigid destitution in January 1944, right before the Germans began their retreat, looting the summer palaces and setting up land mines on their way out. Record numbers of civilians were dying, most getting tired from hunger and falling asleep on the ice on their way to wait in line for paltry cuts of bread. Their petrified bodies were searched for ration cards and loaded onto sleds to be moved aside.

  Hope was taking care of her little girl alone that winter. She taught her how to lie very still to conserve energy under the blanket they made by stuffing old sheets sewn together with wood shavings. By the end of that winter siege Hope prayed the child would die already and be spared the suffering of hunger. She would have an unused ration card and an extra portion of bread. Amid her delirium she remembered hiding an egg in a blanket made of various odds and ends. Her own mother taught her that eggs could be made to last longer if stored in wood chips. At the moment she most wished for my granny to disappear, she knelt beside her, tore an opening in the seam, and fished out a lovely egg to save her daughter.

  Fourteen years later, Galina became a winter mother. Her daughter never seemed to warm up to motherhood herself. Men go to war needing someone to wait for them. Mothers stay home waiting to be left. All the right kind of mothers raise their kids to leave them.

  Whenever I slept over at Granny’s house, she cooked me a herring dish called seledka pad shubeh—“under fur coat”—and shared her big bed with me. I would curl up in front of her, molding my back against her belly, and wriggle my toes around, trying to worm my way into her flesh. She would collect my icy feet into a little sandwich between her thighs, and the feeling of melting into her lulled me to sleep under the soft blue silk, camel hair–stuffed blanket. The same blanket my mother soiled.

  My mother is a cut flower, a bloom crinkling brown on one end and a closed stalk with no water to drink. By what means does this orphan-maker survive? Her child was all daffodils between her thighs. Spilling out yellow. Slimy fungus water on stems in the jar kept too long on a shelf. Her daughter transplanted, transported. A twig re-grafted onto another species of tree.

  Too much heat makes a plant bolt. Yellow. Scared. Spent. Gone.

  Cut flowers need cold to live. Why do flowers have to dry upside down? Why do they curl up and reach for the ceiling, like a kid who waves their arms toward their mother and insists on being carried no matter what she might be weighed down with already?

  I need to know if she’s peeing in the snow, like salmon going back home based on their ability to smell out their origins. I need to know if she’s cold. But if she’s out there lying on top of or underneath the snow is the only question worth asking.

  × × × ×

  The morning after our trip the kids are still jet-lagged and sleep in while I walk around the apartment unable to get warm, face screaming like a new sunburn, lids too full to open or close properly, thumbs hiding inside the other four chewed-on fingers, and recite the familial details that my father has kept from me until I prodded him into naming the phantom limb. The one that still smolders like a juicy olive on a burning bush. Our kitchen talks ended in a bitter quarrel about my mother. They will not take on the burden of locating Elena, or Elena’s remains. My request that they hire a private investigator went unheard, so I called the airline and flew us out on New Year’s Eve, arriving at PDX a half hour before midnight thanks to the time change.

  Maybe I began to feel this phantom limb when Jake was vacuumed out of me at Woodhull Hospital and I was quartered like a chicken with unusual tears at the sides, as well as the vertical one, making four directions for the midwife to sew back, my left leg so numb from the pinched nerve for months that shaving it felt like prepping someone else for surgery. There was a razor and it touched the skin, but I didn’t recognize it as a part of me.

  I want to squeeze the life out of each and every one of these baby accordions of shaky letters to see which one survives the mauling. This didn’t happen. This did happen. This didn’t happen. This happened. A daisy chain. Forget-me-not notes.

  A broken circle as a new line. Pluck out the lies. Burn the liar. Trap the wanderer.

  The next day, the first day of the year, Portland is unusually sunny and warm, so I take the kids to Couch Park, kicking used hypodermic needles aside. The kids play hide-and-seek by the chestnut tree until it’s time to go back in for lunch.

  Franny’s favorite game when she’s carried home is to put sunglasses on my face. I can’t see you. She lifts them up. Again, and again. Where are you, baby?

  I found you. She laughs. Found you, Mama.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My book is in your hands because my feminist sister in the struggle, Leni Zumas, tirelessly nurtured and supported its existence until the visionary and truly gutsy Jamie Carr at WME took me under her wing and found us a dream editor, Zack Knoll—to whom I owe mountains of gratitude for providing the mirroring, the questions, the space to grow, and the fanfare to push on through. My dearest family, the ring of cool around my fire pit of writing: Mike Pfaff, who is a real mensch: generous, patient, and kind, as he shares in bringing up Jake and Frances, who have allowed their irreverent and rascally mother to exist as a person. I see you, babies. My passionate, bighearted parents, Gabriel and Luda, who raised me to be the kind of girl who will climb every tree and taste the sweet fruit others left on the highest branch. Spasibo to David, Michelle, Chanukah, Anna, and Angela. Dave and Cheryl Pfaff for countless hours of babysitting, stability, and lively shared meals. All of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and distant relatives from the Shalmiyev clan spanning the globe from Germany to Israel, as well as the Pfaffs and Wilsons for contributing to the robust history of my children’s family tree. All of my children’s providers of super-competent care and services made it so that I could work on this project, so thank you, kindly.

  Mega gratitude to Chris Kraus, who is the reason I dared to write for public viewing. Big thanks to Michelle Tea, Eileen Myles, and Melissa Febos for reading this beast early on and giving it your genius stamp of approval. Michele Glazer, for inspiration, laughter, and new angles for the manuscript. My whole gorgeous PSU MFA community, too large to list here, was and is, invaluable. Everyone at WME, including Matilda Forbes Watson and Caitlin Mahony—a brain hive I am blessed to work with. The Simon & Schuster dream team: Jonathan Karp, Richard Rhorer, Cary Goldstein, Marysue Rucci, Elizabeth Breeden, Alison Forner, Na Kim, Carly Loman, Kayley Hoffman, Shelly
Perron, Felice Javit, and Kirstin Berndt. Each and every one of you took my book seriously and worked your magic so the cream could rise to the top when I functioned with zero clues as to how to drive my bus through your many fab lanes.

  I am forever grateful to all the old friends, new friends, and my venerable support system. Sarah Roff for taking many leaps of faith, accepting both sides of the coin, and speaking our language. Kelly O’Keefe for knowing our worth and challenging the old to reign in the new. Matt Brose for being my perennial prom date even when he knows where the boys are. Sara Nelson for trusting me and being my oldest friend who writes. Alex Maslansky, who is my brother and book champion. To Jeremy Addam Wilcox for always being so supportive of this project. Ladies of Visitant, where bits and pieces of MW have appeared. Mary Brearden and Andrea Janda. Sarah Menkedick at Vela. Amy Zimmerman and Todd Gleason of Drunk In A Midnight Choir, and The Literary Review. My kisses also go to Cooper Lee Bombardier, Jerry Lee, Kari Boden, Will Gruen, Isaac Overcast, Ellie Piper, Megan Fresh, Cassia Gammill, Michelle Kline, Jeanne Tunberg, Sascha Fix, Jennifer Linnman, Megan Labrise, Craig James Florence, and Linda Majors. Thank you to Powell’s, Mother Foucault’s, Daedalus, and many other independent bookshops that make second homes for us writers. Thank you to anyone who has ever listened to me kvetch, or has allowed me to help you, make you laugh, and cook for you. My biggest wish would be to thank my mother in person and talk to her about my grannies, Chaya and Galina, who are the true heroines of my life.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © THOMAS TEAL

  SOPHIA SHALMIYEV emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. She is an MFA graduate of Portland State University with a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts. She lives in Portland with her two children. Mother Winter is her first book.