“Now, Mol, I wantcha to open that cupboard over your head.”
I opened the cupboard over my head.
“See those cans of soup?”
I saw those cans of soup.
“Now, bring those cans of tomato soup forward on the shelf, and put those cans of chicken noodle behind them.”
“Ma, for Christ’s sake these eggs are gonna burn,” I said.
“Come on, Polly, Molly’s making you a nice dinner,” Ann Louise coaxed. “Here, your dinner is ready.” I was putting the eggs on the plate and buttering and cutting up the toast.
“Oh, this tastes nice!” Polly exclaimed. “Just what I wanted.” Thank God. The stench of the eggs gagged me. I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth.
She’d made very good progress eating.
“I’m not much of an eater, except when you’re here!” she crowed. “Now let’s get back to those cans up there, Mols, those cans have got to get moved.”
Now I was supposed to climb up on the footstool and move the cans. I blew my nose. I set my lips.
“Polly, I’m too tired to move cans, tonight,” I said.
“Just a few.”
“OK, just a few,” I said, climbing on the footstool. I moved the tomato soup cans to the front of the cabinet. I moved the chicken noodle to the back.
“Make those labels show to the front,” she said.
“You ate all your toast, Polly!” Ann Louise said. “Look, Flo, she ate all her toast. She hasn’t done that since last week.”
I made all the labels show. I got down from the footstool. “I can’t do any more cans tonight, Pol. This is it in the can department. We can do more cans tomorrow.” Like a teenager I rolled my eyes at Flo.
“Come on, Ann Louise,” she said, “let’s let Molly get some sleep.” The two indefatigable sisters left, and my mother dozed off.
—
“I had a wonderful childhood,” Polly began when I got out the tape recorder the next day. This was how the story always began. “I hated the garage where my parents lived. So every Friday night after school I went to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s farm up the road. I rode Paint out through the fields to where Grandma Molly worked right there alongside Grandpa and the hired men. She hated the work in the house! She had muscles like a man and she liked to work with the men. She did the cooking, though, but a hired boy did the dishes and another hired man did the cleaning up! I had Paint all weekend. He was blind, but he knew where to go! He took me to the schoolhouse on Monday morning, and he turned right around and went home all by himself. He was a darn smart horse. After school I walked home to the garage to stay the week with my folks, but I couldn’t wait to get to the farm on Fridays. I loved the farm!”
What made the dark-haired, round-faced girl with the Buster Brown haircut and the sailor blouse prefer her grandparents to her parents? I, too, often preferred my grandparents to my own parents. They were calmer, and nicer, and they listened to me, and they didn’t try to push each other down the cellar stairs. The face of the little girl in the photos of Polly as a child is a storm cloud, then wicked with delight, then placid, then squinched up with the sun in her eyes. The photos of the ebullient little tank of a body tell nothing except that the child looks vigorous, not frightened or sad.
“I loved my father. Thought the world of him.” How I, her daughter who feared my dad, hated to hear her stories about her beloved father, my grandfather, who’d paid me no attention whatsoever. “But my mother, she and I weren’t on the same wavelength. Nope. She loved me. Yes, she did, but I’d rather be with Grandma. Grandma’s name was Molly, Mols, and that’s who I named you after, Molly McMann.”
Who was the little one who’d crouched inside Pauline until the months before her death and arose, fully her little girl self, with confidence and demands? I didn’t know. But I saw in her dying her final exercise of that child. In love of her, I was that child’s servant. The clarity of my mother’s childishness made me know for sure I had taken care of this little girl all my life. I was born as her grandmother. I had her name, Molly. And I, too, would have paid a hired man to do my woman’s work. I admired the Molly McMann in my mother’s stories, though I knew she was as made up as Paul Bunyan.
Polly had no legend about my adored Grandma Ruth, with whom I’d felt so companionable, learning from her the skills that Polly eschewed: embroidery and charity clubs. But what kind of a mother had Ruth been to my mother that Polly would go to her death revealed as the child she had remained? I didn’t know the answer. There were so many questions I didn’t know the answers to. But my care of my mother reinforced what I’d come to think of as my golden refusal to be a mother. Instead of having one, I was escorting the child I’d so reluctantly taken care of into the next world.
—
My husband, a cancer survivor, picked up the burden my mother’s cancer put on me as his own. I cried, and he held me; I screamed, and he held me; I yelled at an unsuspecting airline attendant who really had done nothing wrong and he smoothed it over; I put all the wrong checks in the wrong envelopes for my bills and he sorted it out; he backed up my computer; he did my laundry; he made love to me; and most of all, he helped me make plans. He knew how to do it. He knew how to maintain control when circumstances were out of control. We go ahead and make our plans, he said, you have to make your plans and then cancel them later if something happens, hut you make your plans anyway, he said, because otherwise you’re suspended in nothingness and afraid and unhappy and insecure and anxious and depressed.
I was surprised at what he already knew: We actually canceled very few of our plans. We figured out what we had to schedule and, always to my surprise, it usually happened. When I felt I could slip out of my handmade skin and merge with my mother again, inside her dying, there was my husband, a man who knew about dying, giving me a guide, and using a simple analogy that made sense to me: a syllabus. Something where you tried to keep to your deadlines, but if you couldn’t were guided in the changes. The pun of deadline was not lost on us. We had deadlines for Mike’s courses, deadlines for airline tickets, deadlines for my schedule of private students, deadlines for my mailings for the workshops I’d designed, deadlines for registration, and above all, deadlines for the process of my becoming a permanent resident of Canada. Now we lived in two countries with two currencies, two tax structures, border crossings, declarations, bag searches.
When I was not checking Polly on the phone, I was calling a doctor, and when I was not calling a doctor, I was calling Aviva, the kind nurse who liked my mother, and when I was not calling Aviva, I was calling the social worker. And then my mother again. Then the doctor, Howie, Flo, Ann Louise, the doctor, Gail, the nurse, Mike, Ruta, my mother, my uncle, the funeral home, the funeral director, the minister. Callcallcall-callcall.
“Are we living our lives,” Mike asked one day, “or administering them?”
We were putting one foot in front of the other. We were using the stepping-stones of our syllabus to cross the death flow. And when Polly’s death flow was the strongest, our deadlines were the most urgent. Together, almost as friends, we’d picked out her coffin clothes and perused the insurance policies she misled herself into thinking would pay for everything. They paid for about a quarter of everything. La Grange paid some. And I paid the rest, carrying out the mystique that my mother had really arranged it all. I hear about insurance you can get that covers the plane fare, the loss of work, the wear and tear on your car, the hotel bills. But I didn’t have that insurance. I had a lot of credit cards, and I used them.
In December Polly was hospitalized for the last time.
“She’s really fading,” said Aviva, in her confident competence, telling me long distance that the end was really here. I dialed USAir.
At the end of the week was my immigration appointment with the Canadian consul in New York. This appointment was harder won than tea with the Queen. It had required letters and forms and Xeroxes and X rays and medical certificates and divorce papers
and marriage certificates and tax documents and mortgage statements and all of it mailed by separate deadlines. No form had a phone number on it; there was never any way to communicate with a person one to one. It was small me dealing with Government, and this Goliath did not make me feel like David because I was too spoiled. Americans don’t usually experience themselves as outsiders in this way, and I was shocked that I couldn’t just find a number and call and explain my situation to someone. If the appointment was canceled, I would have to wait months and months for another, and the convoluted process not only would be delayed, but would have to start all over again, since the X rays and medical documents were good only for a short period.
But Polly wasn’t dying on the schedule of the Canadian government. All right, I would miss the immigration appointment. Not the worst thing in the world.
“For someone supposed to be at the very end,” Howie said as I approached her room, “she’s pretty energetic.” She was still talking to people, weak, but recognizing them, even greeting Howie’s wife, the one he had left the farm to marry. Now he lived and worked in Buffalo.
Polly had livened up the minute she’d heard I was on my way, Aviva told me. By my third day there, she was sitting up in bed demanding a chocolate milk shake. Mike had driven down from Canada. We went out to get the milk shake, and when we returned Polly was perched like a baby owl on its branch, mouth open in expectation. She grabbed the milk shake with a force I didn’t think she had left and slurped it down to the last gurgle in the straw. I didn’t have enough experience with dying people to recognize the tenacity of the life force that reemerges in waves.
“I have an appointment with the Canadian Consulate in New York, Pol,” I said, “and I’m going to go back to make the appointment, and then I’m coming back on Saturday morning.” My husband’s face brightened.
Polly had sunk back into bed, uncomprehending. “That’s nice,” she whispered. “Comb my hair.”
I began combing her sparse gray hair with a baby comb I’d brought. No daughter of mine would ever do this for me. Nor would I ever feel the mixture of love and loathing that Polly had to feel from me at that moment. Yet she herself had not combed her own mother’s hair. The attendants in the nursing home had given Little Ruthie her hairdo, as part of their jobs. Would a matter-of-factly neutral touch be better than the cloaked contradictory emotion my hand held in check?
“So I’ll be back in two days,” I said at the door an hour later. “Aviva and Howie and Flo and Ann Louise will be here. Do you want the light on?”
Silence. Then, weakly, “Off.”
“OK, good-bye, Mom.” I turned off the light, and said again by the door, “Good-bye, Mom.” It was just before 5, and already dark. Though Polly was facing the darkened window in her darkened room, her body positioned away from the door, she swiveled her head on its arthritic neck back toward me, and opened her eyes wide, wider, so that the whites glowed in the hall light. The pretense of her own nightgowns was long gone. Her glasses, her teeth, had been abandoned. Then she opened her mouth wide, wider. She seemed about to speak, but did not, and stayed with the look of an oracle, while I waited for her. Mike, in his parka, stood waiting in the hall. “What’s the matter?” he whispered.
“Good-bye, Mom,” I said again, and as she stared past me I realized she wasn’t going to speak, though her mouth and eyes gaped. And I closed the door. Then I flew to New York and had my interview, becoming a Permanent Resident of Canada, and Polly died a few hours before my plane was scheduled to return. The planning had gone awry at the end.
Night after night for weeks after the funeral I had the same vision of her: I woke at 4:30 A.M. exactly and felt smoke in the room, I looked up and saw a wing-backed chair with its back to me. Slowly the chair turned, as if on an oiled pedestal, and there was my mother with her newspaper under a dim lightbulb, saying, “Molly, don’t bother me, I’m reading now.” Don’t bother me. But bother with me. The image was our story. I had the stunned feeling I always had when I closed a big long book I had been reading over hours and hours. Where was I and who was I without that author’s voice? Slowly I’d feel my legs cramped beneath me, and the sunlight outside, and want to stretch, and go out, even though I was still in the cloud of the book, thinking about the ending and the main character and wanting to talk about it and deciding to look for someone else who’d read it. But the only other reader was my sister, and she had disappeared, refusing to come while Polly was dying and not showing up for Polly’s funeral, where I used all the muscles in my arms to close the book of our mother.
How do you grow up if you don’t have children? How do you remake the original love—mother love—into a mature love? Becoming a parent provokes this conversion, but the transformation into adulthood without the bearing of children means metamorphosis. The change is not instant and permanent like parenthood. It is a surfacing into adulthood and a diving down into childhood, and a poking into sharp air again, then a plunge into watery warmth, gradually converting your gills to lungs. After a time, you breathe in air exclusively, just as all adults do.
But birth is not the only event that propels us into adulthood. Death does, too. Any sharp change that brings us face-to-face with what we thought life was but now must revise instigates the entree into maturity. So the childfree grow up, either by evolution or by the swift witchcraft of event—or both. Gradually the childhood world vanishes into its own reflection and we look back from the other side of the mirror. To consciously refuse to be a parent and yet consciously to grow, to determine both to love and to understand love, is a project big as any in life. It is not necessary to originate a child to discover your origins—though it takes longer if you do it on your own.
As a little girl, just as soon as I could manage to fall in love with an idea, I did. The idea I picked was consciousness itself: awareness, the attendance on the minutiae of change. A person changing violently, like my father, requires vigilance. But a concept evolving requires awareness, calmly satisfying and deep. I valued this understanding because events drove me inward so far that I often lost touch with them, living instead through a book. While fantasies saved my mental life, they still made a wall between me and my own felt experience. A clinical word for this is denial. An aesthetic phrase is preparing for art. Yet for richly lived experience—and that includes pain—denial must give way to awareness. And for poetry awareness must operate keenly because it is the source of precise language. And so you must perceive sharply, whether that is the stab of a crimson dahlia against a wet wrought-iron fence, or the stab of realization as it spreads across your tearstained face.
But being with children, for me, always meant being in a blurred state. Focused on them, hyperaware of their safety and progress, my own inner life receded to a pinprick, and as a self I was lost. To attend my little sister—so frenzied and so needing of an anchor—meant a kind of giving over that even a fully formed adult can have difficulty doing, let alone a girl struggling to grow. My father, of course, required attention of a different kind: a parapet of watchfulness formed from fear. And Polly herself was often as lost to me as if she’d gone to live where she felt most at home—between pages.
Thus I clung to awareness, confident that it would guide and save me. I knew awareness worked: It had gotten me good grades, gotten me published, kept me alive. Being taken over by bodily forces—being pregnant, then focusing first on the helpless infant and then on the burgeoning child—seemed to shroud awareness in fog.
Yet love, too, is a kind of fog, and certainly requires surrender. One day I wrote a poem called “Waking Up,” and ended it with these lines:
How childish I feel when I remake
childhood’s dream: all things delivered in a stream
of consistency—no crack, no fissure, no mistake,
all done when planned. But swans arrive at their lake
each year, called home by the angle of sunbeams.
Surrender to nature’s perfection means
to know
one’s nature, no mistake. Sometimes it seems
a life’s asleep beneath my frenzy, and I wake
from a promise of youth I no longer make.
I had come to accept—and enjoy—my perceptions after the ceasing of my vigils. I no longer had to keep guard.
Then one day some months after my mother died I noticed how much I loved making a domestic fuss—over dinner, over the color of a wall, even over the shade of a lipstick as it vibrated against a blouse. It amused me that I had the mental time to make these commotions—and that the energy they required almost always involved mistakes: the purple potato for the recipe can’t be found; or the paint swatch, when enlarged, overwhelms the wall; or the lipstick, meant to go on flesh, will never match a woven fabric. Perfection of that sort never happens. Fuss is the play, not the applause.
The way a radiator hiss/ makes a perfect indoor snowy silence hush, I found myself writing, the flicker of a bother trues the world in which we kiss. When the rattle of a radiator made silence more silent, and when kissing my husband “trued” a world, I realized that my childhood romance had become an adult love, that there was no turning back, and no reason to, since the love now contained the love then. Wrapped in this consciousness, I sat down to title my next book of poems. I called it Original Love.
Good garden loam: the smell of possibility. Leo, my Ontario gardening friend who runs a local taxi company, is outraged by the responsibilities he feels unable to bear. On occasion we can share a shocking confessional intimacy, about one stage up from strangers on a plane. I come to the odd meeting of his Iris Society. I have an interest in irises, but Leo has a passion for them. He has a miniature woodland iris garden, which I go to look at in wonder and envy, and on occasion he comes to my little garden. On one of his visits Leo asked what I was working on, and, on an impulse, I told him I was writing about my choice not to be a parent. “It was all in my wife’s hands,” he said, shoving some iris roots into my basket.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 28