by Sarah McColl
She stood in the upstairs bathroom, fastening the clasp of her necklace. By this time, two years later, we had moved to a cheap, paper-thin house on Linden Street, but it had a staircase. Women Who Run with the Wolves lay on the linoleum floor between her low-heeled pumps and the toilet. The contents of other rooms were already packed inside brown moving boxes. After the wedding, we would drive south to Rick’s farm in New Jersey. I could count four new schools in the past three years. “You ready?” my mother called to me across the hallway.
My future stepfather drove us to the South Williamstown Second Congregational Church, the place where he had met my mother thirty years before. He put down the visor to block the sun, and she leaned toward me in the backseat holding a wide gold band between her fingers.
Would I hand this to her when it was time to exchange the rings, she asked.
I inherited my father’s sweaty hands, palms so wet they left damp spots on my notebook paper when I wrote. I was afraid the ring would slip from my fingers. I was also trying on preteen prickliness.
Why couldn’t she ask Katy to do it, I said.
“Because I want you to,” she said.
She didn’t ask for much. She didn’t ask me to stop skipping so many days of eighth grade or to wash the spaghetti pot or burn through less International Tasters Choice while I watched call-in romantic advice shows. She asked me to stop watching Melrose Place, to move with her again to another state, and to give her this ring so she could wed a man she loved, one who loved her almost as much as she loved us. A man eager to love all four of us to prove it.
I’m sure I sighed. But I slipped the band over my thumb and wrapped my slick fingers around it in a fist.
“Thank you,” she said in triumph, as she twisted forward in her seat again and readjusted her seat belt.
We went to the chapel, we got married.
I SPENT THE school day turning pages of The Bell Jar under my desk in algebra and feigning stomachaches so I could lie on the black vinyl bed in the nurse’s office during lunch. She asked questions with answers that seemed self-evident, like how was I adjusting to my new school. My English teacher handed back my poetry, “I’m here for you!” written in cheerful, rounded script.
After school, my mother drove me home on Ferry Road, past the blind fork. The overcast March sky hung heavy overhead. She was chattering on, wearing a cobalt blue turtleneck with moth holes at the ribbed trim of the waistband. Her face was inside a double frame: the dark line of her high-necked sweater beneath her jaw, and the black rubber edging of the driver’s side window outlining her profile like a Renaissance portrait. She had pink cheeks with large pores and teeth stained from nicotine and tea. Curls sprang loose around her face. At the time, I thought this was a moment in which I realized my mother was beautiful. I no longer think it is only that.
She had once told me my father said she was the kind of woman who tied her hair back with the rubber band from the morning newspaper. If that is true, I think it one of the keenest observations my father has ever made. In the car that day on the ride home from school, I looked at my mother, and she was in love again, like a teenager, like I would be in a few years with the boyfriend we would call Rattail at the dinner table. She was forty-six. She was planning her vegetable garden and ordering fruit trees for the area of the lawn she’d started calling her orchard and peony bulbs for the ditch by the septic tank. For the first time I saw: My mother was a girl, too.
spring
TELL ME WHAT you were like at my age, I asked in college. When I called home, I could hear the television in the background. Every night, my mother and stepfather watched hours of news. He was a Republican and she was a Democrat, and they flipped between Fox News and MSNBC until he began to snore with the remote in his hand. I wanted to know if she’d been in love with the first person she slept with.
She found this a dumb question. “Of course,” she said.
“What about the second person,” I asked.
“Sarah,” she said, weary of explaining the obvious. “Of course not.”
First: a stone mason I met on my twenty-first birthday. There were some red flags. He was tangled up in a vague lawsuit with a former girlfriend, and had lost his sense of smell after an accident—I hesitated to call it brain damage—leading him to call and ask whether I would come over to smell his milk. Not a euphemism. But when he stood behind me in line at the movies, he rested his chin on the crown of my head and wrapped his body around me, draped and protective like a layer of chain mail. I introduced him to my mother when she visited in the spring. He was late to the coffee shop, and I thought he might not arrive. Then he burst in from the sunshine, and she saw the bright smile and blue collar body, too. I had omitted the questionable details. “He’s very sexy,” she said, nodding at me.
Before him there had been an almost first: a cowboy who worked the door at the bar. One night he led me from the white wicker loveseat on his front porch inside across creaky floors. He turned on no lamps, flipped no switches, and so it must have been the light from the streetlights or the neighbors or the moon, because our bodies cast shadows around the windowed room. The light navy. Tall and sleepy, he put one hand on each of my shoulders and turned me toward the mirror hanging from the linen closet door. Look, he said. I saw his face over my shoulder. Is this what a man is? He wanted to give me something, show me something. Look, he said again, and I did. My hair fell in waves past my shoulders, my skin pale as the ocean in the moonlight, feet bare on the moaning dark wood floors. I reached toward the hem of my dress, pulled it over my head, dropped it at my feet as if planting a flag.
The man I married was so like my father, everyone said. But that night, as I pulled my face away from the cowboy, I was so struck by surprise that I couldn’t begin to entertain an insight. What does it mean if, in the dark, the shape of a man’s face reminds you of your mother?
WHEN I WAS NINETEEN, the man who would become my husband sent three dozen roses to my dorm room with a card. “One dozen for your beauty, two for your charm, and three because they’re late,” it said. My birthday had been the day before, and the arrangement occupied half the floor between my roommate’s bed and mine. I called my sister. “What does it mean?” I asked, and we both scratched our heads, if not genuinely confused, then disbelieving.
He was my stepfather’s nephew, a story I found romantic and he found humiliating. He begged me not to tell it at parties, preferring a cagey, We met through family friends. Maybe I loved the story too much. How my stepfather had attended college in the town where my mother was a girl, how he was her aching high school crush, and years later, her first boyfriend. Had my mother not left a note on the meet-up bulletin board during his reunion weekend, Rick: Call Allison, how would my husband and I have met? Inside her happy ending was my own.
“I’m in love with your daughter,” he told my mother when we began dating in earnest years after Rick’s arrival.
“Which one?” she asked.
He was eight years older but believed in another generation’s kind of manhood: to open doors and hold umbrellas, pick up checks, and order another round. In Paris we stood on a bridge, and he offered me a ring. What we had, he said, made him believe in God. I thought it was holy, too. For the first eight years, I took his arm and followed. It is little wonder he admitted at the end he preferred me at twenty-two.
I REMEMBER THE BEGINNING, driving to a movie theater across a state line on a flat stretch of highway. The day was overcast with hot July haze. He leaned back into his seat with one hand on the wheel and the other firm on the gear shift. I thought that was silly; it was an automatic transmission. I also thought, as our silent car passed the Chevron station on the left and overgrown farmland on the right, that this trip would unfold in quiet. Around this time, I began asking with semiregularity, What if we run out of things to talk about? He found this question kind of cute, I think. Didn’t it show how much I was trying? For me, the idea arrived in the car like a bill in the mailbox,
the sort you stuff in a drawer and decide to deal with later.
But I cannot omit another memory, likely from the same week, sweeter and as significant in my mind, the one that made more impact at the time, the one that allowed everything to follow. Independence Day. We walked in the early evening, and because we were new lovers, could not travel far beyond the first intersection before we stopped to embrace. There were no cars on the road and the hem of my skirt fluttered at my knees in the humid breeze. The sound of fireworks in the distance. Here, fireflies. I wanted to tie myself up in his arms and he wanted to be the rope.
We decided to walk on.
I ONCE HEARD an anthropologist on the radio explain our brains awash in the hormones of sexual attraction. “Love is madness,” she said. “You’re literally insane.”
So there’s that excuse.
ONCE, MY HUSBAND helped me carry sixteen volumes of the Time-Life Foods of the World series from a church jumble sale on the Upper East Side home to our apartment in Brooklyn. He was very romantic.
At my first job in New York, I stood at a photocopier for hours, staring blankly at the gray cubicle walls of a morgue-quiet academic press. I moved manuscripts from one pile to another, sent the same letter. Congratulations so-and-so, herewith find a contract, a very small check, your modest dreams coming true.
After bills each month, $160. If I called my mother crying from a bench in Madison Square Park, which was not uncommon, she told me I needed more vitamin D. “Go outside and stare directly into the sun,” she urged, advice I regretfully followed.
Things were better at home when a chicken roasted in the oven or eggs cooked in a hot buttered pan, even better when my job became food editor. Cooking was a meditation, I thought. It anchored me in my body—here was my hand, holding a knife, slicing through celery. Here I was, standing on the black and white kitchen tile of my first apartment in Brooklyn, listening to records, making dinner. Here I was, I thought, living.
It is a lot of meaning for a meal to bear, a habit I would not break.
WE WERE ALREADY falling out of love when my husband and I met downtown for a friend’s book party. She stood on stage in a tight black dress and read from her memoir, and my husband and I drank champagne at the bar with her fiancé, listening. He turned to us as the room began to clap. “She is the most amazing person I know,” he said, his face bright with admiration. I sipped my drink.
Later that evening, my husband and I stood on the dark Thompson Street sidewalk, waiting for a table at a sushi restaurant he’d wanted to take me to since we first started dating. We were finally getting around to some things, and still not getting around to others.
“Who is the most amazing person you know?” I asked. At the time, I did not realize it was a test. His face, which I never stopped finding so handsome, was illuminated in a streetlight.
“Your mother,” he answered. “Who is the most amazing person you know?”
“Same,” I said. That was not one of our irreconcilable differences.
I ASKED MY MOTHER if she believed in God.
“People are my church,” she said.
summer
BUDDHISTS SAY when someone close to us is dying, the veil that separates the living from the dead is lifted. We exist in full awareness of the end. Some experience this as pressure, like a deadline. Now is the time to start living! In later months, I would sense an urgency, but I felt it first as a space, like a window thrown open and then a breeze through the bedroom.
“It’s very clarifying,” my mother said.
My soon-husband was fond of the yearlong increment. On the other side of that period of limbo our real lives would start, next year, when everything would be different, most certainly better. By then he would be rich, he said, and we could begin our lives in earnest. We kept a cartoon he had drawn on a sheet of printer paper affixed to our refrigerator with a magnet. Drawn in black marker, there was a house with a kitchen island, a cock-eared dog in the yard, a nearby main street with a yoga studio, and at the foot of a staircase a basket, out of which peeped two tiny feet. Why such modest desires required millions of dollars wasn’t entirely clear. It did not occur to me the holdup on our hands was not a matter of money or of time but of willingness.
What I understand now is that I was very young, that time was still to me a resource that was abundant, heaped around me like playground sand piles to scale, slide down, and conquer again. That is why I could then still have more conviction in someone else’s dreams than my own.
When my mother was sick, I began to realize the future would never arrive. There was no golden door we stepped through into serene forever. Time swept by us, more sinkhole than ascension; meanwhile, we never arrived there. We were always only ever here.
This was our ongoing argument:
Happiness tomorrow requires suffering today, he said.
But all we ever have is today, I said.
Somewhere in the middle was someone who was right.
“Don’t take anything for granted,” my mother said, and I groaned. “That’s so hard.”
“Enjoy,” she said. “It’s the same thing.”
I WAS TWENTY the year my mother taught me how to roast a chicken. It was the deep dark of January, and we cut celery side by side on soapstone counters. She softened stale bread with warm chicken broth, gathered the torn cubes up by the handful and stuffed the cavity. I stood next to her taking notes, wrote Bell’s Seasoning. I was about to move into my first apartment twelve hundred miles away and four blocks from my Saint Paul college campus, and this was my home economics crash course.
We baked a loaf of whole wheat bread that night from a stained page of the spiral-bound More-with-Less Cookbook, written by Mennonite missionaries in the 1970s. It was filled with her backward checkmarks and a note to add buttermilk to the refrigerator bran muffins. She gave me its lessons in shorthand.
This is how to rub two pennies together and eat for a week. Serve some of the chicken hot from the oven with steamed broccoli and a spoonful of stuffing. Pull the meat from the bones and chop. Tomorrow, pile chicken on slices of homemade bread with mayonnaise, salt, and pepper. Cover the carcass with water, and boil the bones for soup. She took the bread from the oven, knocked the top crusts, and told me to listen for a hollow sound.
We sliced two slabs of bread from the loaf, buttered them, and ate the chicken and the soft, herby stuffing at the kitchen table beside the bay window blooming with tall amaryllis and paperwhite bulbs. She wrote a grocery list. Here’s what to keep in your pantry. She wrote Bell’s Seasoning, too. Here’s how to soften brown sugar. Here’s how to make a cheap chocolate cake in a sheet pan, and here’s how to cover it with walnuts so no one sees its uneven surface. She ripped the list from a pad, folded it, and sent me back to Minnesota for the spring semester feeling equipped as a pioneer.
Once there, in my sunny kitchen, I followed her instructions and hatched herb seedlings in empty eggshells on the sill of the kitchen window next to the table where I read Richard III. My roommates entered the kitchen, sniffing. Something rotting, they said.
WE TREATED HER first illness as a blip. It was fall, and my siblings and I took turns joining our mother at a New Jersey hospital every other Friday. Under a mobile of one thousand paper cranes, we sat in a ring of recliners we called the “chemo corral.” We had jokes for everything. The nurses handed her tea in paper cups while Tamoxifen entered her body through a port beneath her collarbone. She wore a short strand of gold beads, dented from teething babies and taken, she claimed, off the body of a dead relative. I sat beside her with a laptop scrolling through china patterns. My wedding would be the following October. We laughed too loudly about things I can’t remember, until the nurses returned, their hands tea-less this time. Some people here are really sick, they scolded.
But we were not them. Her children love chemotherapy, she joked to the staff. It was the only time we could claim her undivided attention. None of us realized how bad she looked until we saw the pho
tographs after Thanksgiving. In the kitchen, reaching toward a guest’s newborn, her expression is joyous but her skin colorless. Her body was vanishing as if in a film dissolve. I missed her eyebrows. She missed them, too.
After the holidays was radiation, and after radiation was remission. By the time her peonies bloomed in June, she and my stepdad were planning a trip to Scotland. It’s so nice to take you for granted again, I joked on the phone. In October, wearing a red silk shantung suit, she hooked her arm through my left elbow and walked me down the aisle.
NEARLY FIVE YEARS later, we were not granted the same luxury of disbelief. She had been dragging her right leg around for months, complaining of a yoga injury. By the time she entered the chemo corral just before the holiday season, she was one of the really sick ones. This cancer was not excisable; it was embedded in her bones, had burrowed its way into the marrow, nested in her soft organs. We didn’t have as many jokes, so we embraced understatement. She was sick, we said.
I don’t remember her losing her hair, only when it was suddenly gone. She wore scarves tied loosely around her bare scalp: botanical block prints on Indian cotton, batiks, and large silk squares she’d worn at her waist and neck in the 1980s. She wasn’t very good at tying them. They were always gathered loosely, slipping off, and she’d tug them lower on her forehead. “At least I haven’t lost my eyebrows this time,” she’d say at the downstairs mirror, putting on lipstick.
She lost other things instead. Twenty-two pounds, her toenails, taste buds, nerve endings. My childhood had been measured in the width of her back. When we hugged, I’d run my hands inside the deep channel of her spine, her bones flanked on either side by dense muscle. She had rowed crew and run after four kids, arms loaded with laundry and plastic bags from Tom Thumb. Now, her body was a stranger’s. Unable to stand upright, she curled over a walker. But I recognized her hands. Her fingers were long for the size of her palm, with freckles beneath the knots of her knuckles. They’re the same as mine. She gripped the steering wheel at ten and two.