My mother’s story has everything I would want for her—a romance and work and games, a loving father, and a happy ending. Not only because she believed she’d had all those things. But also because she believed in them for everyone else as well. Even when her own marriage failed, she still believed in them for me.
I’ve always tried to believe in the same things she did. I can’t explain why it’s so much harder for me.
My mother believed in a good breakfast. She thought it was the most important meal of the day. This one is easy; I can believe this. But I was recently told that, in other towns than Magrit, in 1947 or thereabouts, Americans were being fed irradiated oatmeal in an experiment designed by their own government and kept a secret from them.
My mother believed in baseball. What made 1947 such a special year? I told you that the Dodgers had spring training in Cuba instead of the South, as was customary, but I didn’t remind you of why. This was the year that Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues. This was the year that baseball ceased to be merely a game and became a morality play. This was the year that many people who didn’t care about baseball at all followed the Brooklyn Dodgers as if their lives depended on it. There was a brief time when baseball really did matter as much as people are always saying it does, and that time was 1947.
No black woman ever played professionally. The All American Girls’ Baseball League has said it was because there was no black woman good enough.
My mother never believed that. When she told me the story of Cassiopeia, the queen so beautiful she made the goddesses jealous, my mother made sure I knew she was from Africa.
My mother knew that there were race riots in the forties, just like in the sixties. She knew about mobs. She knew about lynchings. She knew about the concentration camps and she still believed in the innate goodness of other people. This one is tricky. It’s easier when you don’t think about it.
My mother believed in the good war. I can’t dispute it; I wasn’t there. But I also know that wars are insensate, savage, and racist affairs. Every single one of them. Ask Gandhi.
I’ve given you my mother’s end to the story, and it’s her story, I kept telling you that, so really I should have stopped by now. Except that I can’t quite believe it.
It’s not only the 1940’s style romance that makes me stumble. There are also those final columns of Maggie’s. They just don’t read to me like the work of a seventeen-year-old girl.
I’m sitting here in the kitchen of the dead, and if my mother were here with me, she would tell me to go on as long as I wished. My mother would say to do whatever I wanted.
So here’s my own ending. Hers is nicer, but mine is more modern:
When Cindy wrote Maggie’s final columns, she did it in a single night. “They just poured out of me,” she said. “I didn’t even think about them. Usually it was so hard for me to type, but my hand just flew over the keys.” Years later she read the columns over and she couldn’t remember writing them at all.
This happened in 1947, in Magrit, where they had never heard of channeling. But now it’s the nineties; we’re a little more sophisticated. So, on the basis of the evidence of the columns themselves, and on Cindy’s own perceptions of inspiration, I can suggest the obvious. That the columns were written by Maggie herself.
In 1949 Magrit was troubled by a series of grisly incidents we would recognize now as quite ordinary cattle mutilations. Eventually the citizens of Magrit decided to blame Chi Chi, who had to be sent back to Little Persia, even though anyone who had spent ten minutes with her knew that Chi Chi was too refined for this.
Nor was the nocturnal surgeon an extraterrestrial. Nineteen forty-seven saw the first epidemic of UFO’s, starting with pilot Keith Arnold’s sightings above the Cascade Mountains that summer, but Magrit was behind the times and only saw the occasional old-fashioned ghost.
This leaves us with only one possible explanation. That this, too, was the fury of Maggie Collins, scorned and abandoned by the man who loved her, pissed off about those radioactive breakfast cereals, but silenced forever, secreted with the other drowned things in Upper Magrit. No wonder she surfaced from time to time, filleting everything in sight.
She was seen on many occasions and the people in Magrit knew who she was, all right, because of the apron, but now she had the eight arms of Kali as well. She scorched the earth like an overheated iron wherever she set her foot. Her hair crackled with the static of electrically dried clothes. She stirred the waters of Upper Magrit like a cauldron.
She was a cold wind, a hot flame. She ushered in the fifties as the fifty-foot woman, the unfortunate product of gamma rays and the bite of an irradiated ant. In the sixties she dressed as a guerrilla and carried a flamethrower. No one saw her at all in the eighties, but she struck with the precision and the training of a ninja.
We all get the goddesses we deserve. Sooner than you think, she’ll be enhanced with bionics and then just watch her beat and bake! She is coming on line and you have never seen a virus like her.
Time for you to get out of the kitchen.
She is the mother of us all, the mother of birth and death, queen of the circle, with the circle just coming round again. But she is a bit disappointed in us; we are not the people our parents were. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love us. She is preheating her ovens, sharpening her knives. She is waiting, waiting, waiting, and this woman is a professional, she knows exactly how to prepare you.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks are due to Mikki and Phil Adams, who gave me space, time, and love when I needed it. Also to Marlis Runnberg, for her helpful letters.
And the usual gang—Debbie Smith, Alan Elms, Sara Streich, Clint Lawrence, Darcy Campbell, Kevin Mims, Don Kochis, Nina Vasiliev, Stan Robinson, Ursula Le Guin. And always Marian Wood. And always Wendy Weil.
The Sweetheart Season Page 35