As I pull into the lane to my mother’s house, I see the white fence around her yard is peeling and the boards sun-curl and seem tired. Dark shrubs that had not been there before underline the front of the house like a long green moustache. A white-muzzled lab I don’t remember hobbles out from the shade to bark in a bland obligatory way then turns back to the shade. Its sore hips make its body weave then right itself like a drunk shuffling from one chair to another.
When my mother comes to the door, she raises her arms to embrace me, and we hug a long time on the front step of the house as if entering will break this spell. Her hair is not yet completely white; it has a peppery undertone. She has that browned leanness of ranch wives who have spent their days attending one chore after another. In her apparent frailty there is still an admirable strength, an endurance. She leads me by the hand into the house, patting it with the other.
“You have been away so long, Diane dear,” she says looking at the carpet, then back at me.
“I know. I’m here to stay for a while, though.”
“It’s a big empty house, you’re welcome as long as you care to stay.”
I have not told her the nature of my disease, only that I’ve been sick. It is not fair of me to come here to die, to burden an old woman who has done nothing but carry burdens all her life. If there is an aged evensong, she should be listening to it, not attending to me. But there is something primordial about this return to our mothers, even if they have not been exemplary mothers, as mine was. It is as if the specter of the grave can only be assuaged by the cradle. I’m sure this circularity has a certain trite convenience to it, but like some lemming aiming for an ocean, I’ve come here, to the waiting, unasking arms of my mother.
She leads me to a back bedroom which is decorated much as I remember it. The walls have been painted, but there is the same old furniture and pictures. The room’s one window has a small collapsible screen to let the evening breeze in, and outside the creek slips by, a happy musical, rambling, reassuring sound. Two pictures above one side of the bed are stylized portraits of women in the nineteenth century. One woman is in a garden and has full skirts, a large hat and a parasol; the other is seated at a marble garden table with a tea set, a white cat asleep in another chair. Not like Renoir’s Les Parapluies which, with its baskets and bonnets, has a Sunday gaiety rather than this stiff upper class English privacy. These women posing under their parasols seem temporarily caught as if waiting for us to walk by. My mother must think of them as antiques rather than reflecting ideals. Everything else in the room has that dull luster of use and forgetfulness, of habit that makes things disappear into themselves. A picture of my father as a child is on the dresser. He is in knickers and long socks, a white shirt under a little coat, a bowtie. He sits in a chair and his polished shoes dangle, his arms on the arms of the chair, looking like he’s enjoying this pose. There’s a humor in it as if he’s deliberately imitating, in a miniature and satiric way, the Lincoln Memorial.
I sit on the edge of the bed. What does a life come to but a few charming pictures that in ten years no one will recognize? This photo might end up on some wall as an illustration of an antique time and place, my father’s face blending into his clothing—a fresh innocence that does not know it illustrates the late 1920s, a polished child of the pre-Depression in quaint hand-me-down picture clothes. I know what that face became, as few in this world do now.
My father died of cancer ten years ago, yet his presence is still in the house like an odor. It’s in the horseshoe coat-rack, the horse head emblazoned on the back of a vinyl chair, the cowboy-boot lamps. Some of his clothes are still in the closet of my room. He was a realtor but came from a farming and ranching family in this valley. For most of his life there was very little growth, few houses built, so he relied on death’s exchange of hands and lands. He ran a few cows on the side, a couple of horses to keep the grass in the pasture mown. Occasionally he and a few friends took their horses and went on camping trips into high mountain lakes. Once they lost a pack horse over a precipice. They shot a bear tearing apart a set of saddle bags. Another time, one of his buddies got plastered on Jim Beam and passed out on a granite boulder beside the lake. He got so sunburned he rode out the next day wearing only his underwear and a tee-shirt, with a hat and cowboy boots. The stories were told with a kind of shorthand to get to the laughter, even after those buddies had died. Most of our stories die with the tongue of the teller.
Poets for millennia have told us to “seize the day,” to gather metaphorical rosebuds while we may, but what does that mean, really? It is overlaid today with assumptions about emotional density and depth, about “passionate intensity.” Is it comforts in the sun, a sipping rather than gulping? I don’t know but feel our cultural wisdom is inadequate to what I am feeling. Not that everyone doesn’t go through some form of this, but I have eighteen months to three years to think about the erasure of my abilities while my mind sits like a canary inside its cage, whistling through the bars.
Already the questions and notions that flit through my brain seem to take on a gravity that my pre-diagnosis thinking never had. When I go back into the kitchen, my mother has set out things for tea and cookies. The cups are painted mugs. Tea bags boil in a saucepan. A plastic Tupperware box from the freezer is open on the table. She has set out four kinds of cookies: chocolate chip, peanut butter, thumbprints with a jam filling, and snickerdoodles. They are arranged into a little pyramid on a plate. She handles the pan with a tea-towel and carefully pours each cup.
In New York, my teas were an elegant ritual. My English Sadler teapot, my matching blue and white cups, butter cookies from Chantbou’s, cakes from Magnolia Bakery. On the teapot is some ancient Japanese garden scene with plumed birds and palms, flowers and bonsaied trees. It has teahouses, an unmanned gondola on the white water, three tiny workmen crossing an ornamental bridge carrying things. This teapot was a kind of benign foreignness for the English. But who kept the gardens, shaped the trees, built the ornate teahouses, the bridge? What ghost oared the gondola? My mother lives alone but the frozen Tupperware box of her own cookies has in it this assured promise of visitors, of talks at the table.
“You said you had been sick, dear. How are you now?” She says this as she puts the saucepan back on the stove and turns off the heat. Her concern has in it that belief in the arc of things coming into being, flaring, and passing.
“Just a little trouble with my hand,” I say, holding the mug with both.
“Probably arthritis,” she says, holding out her misshapen fingers. “I’ve had it for years. Rheumatoid, they say.” One finger juts sideways at the first knuckle on her right hand. Her joints are swollen and wrinkled. She flexes them and says they affect her most when she weeds the gardens.
“Probably,” I say. I want to tell her, but can’t. She has already lost her husband, her best friend, a son, and daughter-in-law. The husband to cancer, the son to suicide, the daughter-in-law to a car accident. She lost her parents, a brother and sister (him to cancer, her to a stroke). Her circle of friends has narrowed to a few gray-haired ladies who still golf on Thursdays and meet for lunch one Wednesday a month, mostly to see who is still alive. Something in me said she would welcome mothering again, embracing, and protecting the child, being so wholly needed; something also said at this age her own mortality needs care, and not to be frightened by my death.
“You said ‘sick’ in your letter, what does that mean?”
“They think it might be a sign of something else,” I reach for a peanut butter cookie, break it in half, and dip it into the tea, savoring its earthy, brown sweetness and warmth.
“Those were your father’s favorites, too,” she said. “He dipped them just like that.” She smiled at the memory, as if she were glad to have a piece of him home again.
“I don’t remember.”
“Something else, like what?” She was leaning slightly forward, over the tea steam, the question and posture seemed to exaggerate the wrinkles in her face.
“They’re not sure, I have to take more tests.” I held the cup with both hands to drink, to give my lies something to do. “Why don’t I take you out to dinner tonight? What is the best restaurant in town these days?”
“I have a stew made, in the refrigerator, not the best in this heat, I know. Save your money, we don’t need to go out.”
“I saw a Chinese place near the freeway exit, is that a nice place?”
“What’s wrong with your hand?”
I knew Chinese food was her favorite, but she was on the scent and wouldn’t be shaken loose so easily. I could see in her eyes that she was determined to look at the worst, to get to the bottom of my vagueness.
“They think it might be A.L.S., but there’s no test for it, only tests that say what it isn’t. And when those are all exhausted, when they’ve crossed off all the maybes, then it’s this.”
“I don’t know what ALS is, what is it, honey.”
“It’s like M.S., only worse. There’s no cure, nothing they can do, really, but treat some symptoms. You usually have up to three years.”
“But you can live with MS for years. Your dad’s cousin had it for thirty-two years before he died, and he died of something else.”
“Well, five percent of cases go into some remission, like Stephen Hawking.”
“Who’s he?”
“A physicist in England, famous for his research about black holes. He’s had A.L.S. for fifty years.”
“Well, there you go. There’s hope.” She got up as if that were the end of it and began to put the tea things away.
I felt like I threw Stephen Hawking out like a steak to the watchdog so that I could pilfer my mother’s hospitality. She doesn’t own a computer. She won’t look up the disease or Hawking. But her mind will tease that five percent, and Uncle Rob’s M.S., his limp, his left arm, his dragging leg, his canes. She will want to know more.
It pains me to think that I do not know that much about my mother’s childhood and adolescence which makes me realize that mine too will vanish in a mere matter of months. I know her father was a WWI vet who came back with mustard gas poisoning. He lasted seven years. The gas pocket in his spine was inoperable. In the few months of his illness, he had forgotten to change his insurance policy, so $2,500 went to his mother who then refused to give a dime to her son’s wife and children. That is $31,000 in today’s money. I looked it up. Her mother moved in with her parents, farmers with a small house and not enough acreage to support them all. They had to work from sunup to sundown. There was never enough of anything but work.
When her mother remarried, he didn’t want her children. My mother moved in with an aunt. That summer my mother went to camp and was gone for two weeks. When she got back, she couldn’t get her aunt on the phone. She finally decided to walk in the dark to an uncle’s house, someone on the wrong side of the emotional fence. When her aunt found out, she told my mother if she wanted to get away from her so damn bad she could just stay there.
I keep coming back to that image of my mother as a ten-year old who had already been bounced from her family’s home and her grandmother’s home, and was desperately calling her aunt, who was the kind of woman who never wanted her generosity to go unnoticed. She was opening her house and home, after all, to an orphan. I see that ten-year old walking with her bags as the streets darkened, not at all understanding the insurance money feud, though aware of the new tensions, making a choice out of fear and weariness and the on-coming darkness.
I had been home, or in my mother’s house, for two weeks when the first big episode occurred. My mother decided to make lasagna, and together we made a pan of it, thinking that this would last us several days or we could freeze it in meal-sized squares. My mother doesn’t eat much anymore. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy food but seems to have reached some beleaguered compromise with the ritual of its making; she will rise to an occasion, like her craft group luncheons, but her daily fare is sparse and healthy. She boiled the pasta, and we made the sauce together: cooked the hamburger, onions, garlic, mushrooms, added oregano and parsley, then her canned tomato sauce. We layered the pasta with sauce and her pesto, then cheeses: ricotta, parmesan, mozzarella. Later, my mother had gone out to the garden to change her sprinklers. The timer went off. The sauce was bubbling, and the top layer of cheese was nicely browned. With my right hand, I pulled out the pan, but as I lifted it to the stove top, the pan teetered toward my left arm which tried to right it, but it buckled, and the right couldn’t quite keep up with it. The pan’s bottom hit the floor and the steaming contents gushed out and sprayed tomato speckles and cheese all over the floor, the table and chair legs, and two feet up one wall.
When my mother came in, I was sitting on the floor, crying. She ran over, “oh, honey, are you all right,” thinking I had been shot or something. She knelt beside me and hugged my hair and stroked my cheek. We cleaned it up together, and then had a talk about what was happening to me. I explained that sometime in the future I would start falling and would eventually have to get a walker. She stared blankly into my future as into a dark theatre. She had gotten a vivid trailer but could not at all project what this movie was going to be like, as if I could, really.
The next morning, I woke up to the smell of my mother’s coffee. Sunlight was trying to get through the venetian blinds, and I could hear a robin singing in the lilac tree. Under a lamp, my mother was watching the news on TV and knitting a sweater. She likes to keep the shades shut so the house is cooler, but it gets dim and dreary.
I opened the window shades. A large bird stood in the yard, looking directly into the window. It had long thinly feathered, powerful legs so that from the neck down it looked like one of those 16th century courtiers in a puffy doublet, breeches, and hose. Its body plumage was a brownish gray. The feathers shortened as they rose up the neck, ending at a small evil-looking face: a black beak and eye mask, a little mohawk, and brown piercing eyes that looked at you as if deciding which part to eat first. There was something outlandish about it, too, like those Rainier beer commercials of the ‘80s where men’s legs stuck out of bottles and galloped across the plains of Montana or through the rainy Northwest mountains. It stood calmly in the yard, and my mother’s white-muzzled lab, Daisy, lay asleep in the pile of straw that leaked out the front of her doghouse.
“Mother,” I said, consciously calm, “what on earth is this thing in your yard?”
She put her knitting down, crossing the needles, and pushed her coffee mug squarely onto the coffee table. She stood up and limped over to the window, trying to convince her muscles to operate like they were supposed to. She obviously had not walked much this morning.
“That’s an emu,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“Does it come here often?”
“Oh, no, I’ve never seen it before, though I read in the paper someone is raising them in the valley.”
“For what?”
“Meat, eggs, and oil. They’re supposed to be less fat and better for you than beef, but it’s probably all marketing.”
“Shouldn’t we call someone?”
“I think we can run it into the dog pen and then figure out who it belongs to.” She turned around and padded down the hall in her slippers to change her clothes. The “dog pen” was a small, fenced yard in the back of the garage. She put Daisy in it when she was going to be gone for a day or two. It had a five-foot chainlink fence all the way around it.
“Don’t you think that might be dangerous? That bird must be six feet tall and weigh a hundred pounds. Those toenails look like they could rip open a can of tuna.”
But she didn’t answer, her hearing aids were moving away, and she was already wrangling emus. I got dressed too. Before we went out the door, she handed me a broom with a long wooden handle. She got another one out of the garage. The garage door slamming shut woke up Daisy who now saw and smelled the intruder. She began to bark but kept her distance as if unsure how to handle feathered giants with a beak like a pair of scissors. The bird walked regally toward the driveway, watching us. My mother opened the gate beside the woodshed which was like a miniature barn sheathed and roofed in corrugated metal. The passageway was narrow, but the yard fence, woodshed, and garage created a funneling effect toward the dog fence gate. We circled the enormous bird, brandishing our brooms as if they could be any defense against this creature. My mother proceeded slowly, waving her broom and clucking at the bird as if it were a large chicken. The bird looked vacantly confused but nonetheless defiant, glaring at our advance as if in the next second it would run over us to freedom. It made a low hissing noise, raised its nubby wings and turned toward the shed, and at this hint of retreat, Daisy rushed in toward the back of its legs, barking and crouching with a vigor she had probably not discovered in years. The bird ran dizzily forward and sideways, trying to look at the dog and the woodshed at the same time. It ran around the edge of the garage but did not make the turn well. Its neck hit the corner of the over-hanging tin roofing on the woodshed. Its head bounced back like it had been hit with one of our brooms. It stopped, as if trying to figure out just what happened, trembled, and then collapsed to the ground, blood spilling profusely from the gash in its neck, just below its head. Its feet writhed and seemed to be walking sideways in air. Its useless wings wavered, its mouth gulped as if trying to breathe. And then it lay still, one glassy eye staring up at the tin roof.
My mother and I looked at each other in utter disbelief and then at this giant dead thing. Like decrepit gladiators, we stood with our brooms, and Daisy crept up to the bird and began licking its blood, then looked at us, with a red soul patch on her chin. Twenty-five years in New York had not prepared me for this. I was trembling. On the asphalt, the pool slowly widened around the bird’s head as if it lay on a halo of blood.
“Go get a knife, Diane,” my mother said.
“For what?”
“In this heat, it will spoil if we don’t do something.”
“Can’t you call somebody? I’m not touching that thing.”
“I don’t know who to call. We can dress it out and put it in the cooler.”
She had a walk-in cooler that hadn’t been turned on in years. My father used to hang deer, elk, and beef in it long ago. It probably didn’t even work.
“Bring the stone and a bucket of water too.”
“I’m not touching that thing and neither are you,” I said flatly and headed for the house.
My mother didn’t say more. She leaned the broom against the garage and also went inside the house. I saw her using the phone and assumed she was trying to locate the emu’s owner. I went back to my bedroom and took a shower. Imagine, an eighty-four year old woman willing to butcher an emu so it doesn’t spoil in the heat. And for someone she doesn’t even know. I thought she was beginning to lose her marbles, and I had come home to die in the wrong hands.
In the shower I decided to take my mother out to see my father’s grave, and the host of relatives on his side who had found their way to the undiscovered country. After I blow-dried my hair, I put on white capris, my lightweight tennis shoes without socks, a loose long-sleeved lavender blouse to protect my arms against the sun. I had trouble buttoning my blouse. The fingers on my left hand were almost useless for small tasks, and my right just could not get the white buttons through the holes. Finally, my right thumb got it done. I found a straw hat in the closet that would protect my face. And the irony did not escape me—how wrinkled could I get in three years? The hat had a black ribbon around it with white thread sewn in a wavy pattern around the brim. I thought it looked jaunty.
When I came back out into the living room, I called for her. She didn’t answer, probably because of her hearing aids. I went from room to room, but she wasn’t there. I went outside, and I found her in black irrigation boots working on the dead emu. Blood had splattered up her arms and across her blouse. Two large pots were on the ground next to the bird. The skin had been peeled back and she had cut the breast meat out and was working on a thigh. The pots were nearly full of the cherry-red meat. She seemed to be having trouble boning the thigh and was chopping at the tendons that connected it to the knee joint.
“Mother, what in God’s name are you doing?”
“I don’t want it to spoil,” she said simply without looking up.
“Didn’t you call to see whose it is?”
“I found out, but he didn’t answer. I left a message. I couldn’t just leave it here in this heat.”
She had gone through the Depression and had seen hobos come to her grandparent’s door, asking for work in exchange for food. She described them as gaunt, silent men who walked from farm to farm doing odd jobs: chopping firewood, spading up gardens, picking fruit, repairing fences and stairs, whatever was needed. They stayed in the barn for a few nights and walked on. To this day, she washes out plastic bags and hangs them on a bathroom clothesline to dry; she buys only what she knows she’ll eat in the next week; she grows her own vegetables and claims she hasn’t bought an onion in years; her clothes still fill only half of the closet; she reuses tinfoil as many times as she can; she puts more money in the collection plate at church than she spends on herself in a week.
“It’s amazing,” she said, standing up for a breather.
“I should say, who in their right mind would do this?”
“I mean there’s no breastbone. And it’s so red. I didn’t know that.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I thought we would go to the cemetery today to see Daddy, but here you are up to your elbows in gore, trying to save some guy a couple pots full of meat. What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m going to put ice packs on it and turn on the cooler.”
She also saves ice-packs for some future use.
“That old thing probably doesn’t even work.”
She kept at it until all the meat she could scrape off the carcass was in the pots. She got a large metal tub out of the cooler and together we lifted the remains in, including the two hacked off legs and a looping pile of entrails. I thought the smell was going to make me vomit.
Daisy started to bark and trotted a few steps down the lane. A blue pickup sent up a rooster tail of dust along the driveway. A large bellied man wobbled out of the dented pickup, its dashboard littered with papers—from receipts to hamburger wrappers and boxes. When he opened the door, an empty Pepsi can fell out and rolled across the asphalt. He picked it up and threw it through the open window onto the seat. He wore oil-stained jeans with a heavy belt. His large black cowboy hat looked like it had gone through a washing machine. His graying beard needed a trim. He looked to be in his late fifties, my age.
“You Mrs. Harding?”
“No, that’s my mother over there. I’m just visiting.”
My mother set the bloody knife on a wooden bench. “Is this bird yours? Are you Max Grearson? I left a message on your phone.” She pointed at the carcass and pots of meat. “I was afraid it was going to spoil.”
“You’re right about that. Yes, I’m Max. What the hell happened here?”
“We were trying to pen it and it ran into the corner of the roof and sliced its neck open. It must have hit an artery. I’m sorry about that. We were just trying to be helpful.”
“My son didn’t latch the gate and Sylvester got out two days ago. You’d think a bird that big would be easy to spot. God-damn it.” I could tell he wanted to say more, to blame us, but the sight of a little old lady with a butcher knife took some of the wind out of his sails.
My mother apologized again for Sylvester’s demise, for Max’s loss, said she knew how expensive they were, that he could return the pots when he was done with them. After he picked up the bird’s remains and told her he appreciated the work, he offered to give her some of the meat, but she declined. He put everything into his pickup, touched his hat in farewell, then waved as he drove down the lane. She got a hose and washed the blood off the asphalt. She sprayed Daisy when she tried to drink from the red puddle.
To me, this interchange just seemed surreal. The number of assumptions was mind-boggling, as was the fact that I had left New York for this.
New York. How distant it seems after only two weeks. I live in the West Village and rode a bike to work before I quit my job. I was married for ten years, never wanted children because I was too busy with my career and had a hard time imagining raising a child in the West Village, much less with Michael. I spent the last eight years using my MBA as an overseas market analyst for Magnolia Bakery as they expanded franchises to Kuwait, Lebanon, Mexico City, Moscow, and Tokyo. Magnolia Bakery started in 1996, but its fame after being spotlighted in Sex in the City, Saturday Night Live, and in movies like The Devil Wears Prada was skyrocketing. We marketed cookies, muffins, Red Velvet and Devil Food cakes, frosting, pies, and puddings. I’ve been in boardrooms in ten different countries and worked with agents, movie producers, CEOs, and yet have come “home” to watch my mother dress out an emu. To Daisy’s blood Slurpee. To Max’s dashboard accounting and crumpled cowboy hat. To a group of Angus steers placidly grazing my mother’s fields indolently unaware of their own future only months away. To a valley that has changed little in the last thirty years.
After my mother showered and changed, I talked her into going to the cemetery. She wanted to go before it got too hot, for there was little shade among the shades. She always took her irises, peonies, and snowballs to the cemetery on Memorial Day, and they had been planted with this in mind, so her blooming flowers in July were more sparse: carnations, daisies, coneflowers, and columbines. I’m sure she saw no irony in rushing off to a cemetery after the poor emu was guillotined; in her world, human life and animal life were discrete entities, especially the meat-bearing variety. Perhaps Daisy existed on a plane endowed with enough emotional value that would cause an ironic jolt of sentimental electricity. But Sylvester the emu did not. She took her flowers out in a plastic five-gallon bucket with just enough water to keep from sloshing around the car.
It was not a long drive, about eight miles. We took her car because of the lasagna incident. She seemed small behind the wheel of her Dodge Caravan, a lot of car for a single old woman, but she liked to take her friends places and haul her golf clubs around. She often looked over at me as if she were deciding something. We crossed the river which was high during this irrigation season. When we stopped, she looked over at me and said, “Do you know whose hat that is?”
“No. I found it in the closet of my room. It fits perfectly and I thought I needed something for the sun.”
“It’s Sarah’s. I think it’s bad luck to wear it. You know she stayed with me the day before her accident. She left it in that room. I just couldn’t give it to Goodwill.”
Sarah was my brother’s wife who died six months after his suicide. I didn’t know she had visited my mother before her car accident.
“I’ve got all the bad luck you can get. I think she’d like something of hers going back out into the world and us remembering.”
“Maybe so,” my mother said, and picked up the bucket of flowers. I took one side of the handle, and we carried it toward the Harding’s area of the graveyard. Before noon, it was 86 degrees out, and the few birch, spruce, and yew trees ran parallel to both sides of the paved parabola that looped through the cemetery. The few other trees were on the outside edges of the cemetery rectangle. Because of the sweat and weakness, my left hand kept losing its grip on the handle, and we set the bucket down and started again twice. A blackbird had made a nest in one of the spruce trees and reprimanded us as we walked by, then the male swooped at my mother’s head so that she dropped the bucket handle, which made me drop my side. The bucket bounced and pitched forward, tossing the flowers to the ground. The bird was so black it had an iridescent sheen, and its yellow eyes were intense. It touched her head and then hovered acrobatically as if it were on a string. She took a wild swing at it but missed and then looked foolish.
“Damn bird,” she said.
“It’s probably just defending its nest,” I said as we picked up the flowers and put them back into the bucket. The bird continued swooping above us, making higher arcs while scolding, then flew back to the spruce tree. It seemed like some graveyard guardian whose yellow eye had had enough of the living human world, preferring us underground to upright.
My father’s stone is a white slab provided by the military. She poured the remaining water in the headstone’s cup holder and arranged some flowers. There was a faucet near the pump house at one end of the cemetery. I went to get enough for my brother’s grave and my grandparents’. A small pink carnation was left in the bucket. When I got back, she had little bouquets in each of the cupholders. I watered them all, and then put the carnation in Daddy’s.
“No, don’t do that. He doesn’t like them.” She took out the offending flower and put it in his mother’s, Grandma Laura Harding.
“I don’t remember that. Besides, I don’t think he’d care now. He’d probably just be happy we’re here.”
On the way back to my mother’s house, I couldn’t resist asking about the carnation. She just said it happened a long time ago, but I pressed her and she told me.
“It was when we were in high school and your father had asked me to the prom. We had never gone out before. We didn’t know each other well. He was handsome, on the football team, very shy, but he had taken this risk and I just said yes. He didn’t have any money, had to borrow a suit from a friend, his mother cooked the dinner, spaghetti of all things in a prom dress. He had made a corsage out of three carnations from his mother’s garden. I thought it was clever. He braided them neatly together with pink ribbon. Then tied a bow, and used a safety pin to attach it to the dress. When we got to the dance, the other girls had orchids in fancy arrangements from the floral shops. I was the only one with homemade flowers, but I didn’t care. Some of the popular girls, the rich ones, decided to make a game of going by our table and making comments about the corsage and then laughing as they walked away. I knew who started it all. Betty Williams had a crush on him and hated that he asked me instead of her. He got so mad we left early. And it was three months and a couple of phone calls from me before we went out again. I just never brought carnations into the house after that.”
“I doubt if he held a grudge against carnations all his life, I mean really. You grow them now.”
“I always liked them. And in the long run, I think they helped me get him. We never talked about it, though. I just didn’t want him to remember.”
In the car, I thought about Michael. Silly as the damn carnations were, I knew that I never, ever had that kind of respect for what he might be feeling. Would never have tried to protect him from recalling an embarrassment. In fact, I did just the opposite. I knew he thought he was short, but I went right after short jokes, both the vertical ones and the ones under the covers. He was afraid of heights, and I’d stand on the cliff edge and try to get him to admire the view. I made fun of his cooking. In truth, I don’t think I ever loved him, ever allowed myself to love him. My career, my pride, some vague idea that I somehow deserved better, for whatever lame reasons. He was a lovely man when I met him. I harvested what I sowed.
After dinner that night, my mother got in her slippers and nightgown. She went to the couch and began knitting. Soon, her head tilted to one side, mouth slightly open, her glasses crooked on her nose. The lamp spotlighted her forehead, and the shadowed side of her face had deep crevices. For the first time, she looked very old to me. Her makeup had been washed off for the night, her hair was combed straight back, and the peppered streaks were going to salt. Her hands were liver-spotted and bony, her rings loose on thin fingers. The wrinkles on her neck and chest looked like a bedsheet that had dried all balled up inside another sheet. In that yellow light, she seemed little more than a corpse with its mouth twisted open.
I knew then I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have her see me decline any further, that it would be too hard on her. Despite her emu-butchering grit and stamina, she seemed shrunken and wadded up. She wouldn’t survive the months and months of my needs. I couldn’t go to my death with that on my conscience. She deserved that evensong of her own making. I could see myself in a wheelchair, my hands useless and limp as baguette dough, my legs hard and stiff from disuse, unable to eat and fed through a stomach tube, unable to scratch an itch, unable to use the bathroom or shower, in diapers. Why had I come here?
As I lay in bed that night, I thought about what this diagnosis had done to me. It’s as if I look down on my life from a cloud or some neighboring planet. Everything is tinged with the amped colors of its passing. I would not say surreal, but more real. That everything before this knowledge existed in a kind of glazed artificiality like some French fish with cucumber scales in aspic. Now even reading is like watching some ancient sporting event with complicated rules but whose outcome is only a kind of self-admiration.
My mother has always been a sturdy woman who encouraged me to follow the bent of my nature. She did not really have a career herself, choosing to raise six children five miles out of her small town, which of course is a kind of career but not the kind most dreams are made of. Her summer days were spent gardening, cleaning house, picking berries, making jam, canning fruit and green beans, cooking meals, making butter, and washing endless baskets of clothes. When the last of her six children were in school, she got a job selling clothes at Ashley’s, a shop of women’s apparel, as if she knew or cared about fashion. She never complained about what her life had become, never seemed to curl into the resentment of broken dreams or lost opportunities like many city women I’ve known—dismayed actors, sour MBAs, bitter writers, lame dancers. If she had dreams of another life, I don’t recall her ever mentioning them.
In my New York life, though, I retold my past as if I had gone from an Abe Lincoln homestead to the White House. I told it with a subdued bravado and a flair for irony. In the city, irony is a staple like bread in poor countries. It is both our umbrella and weapon. It creates an inviolable space around us.
There is a glamour in crowds as if we had all chosen correctly, to be in this time and place, watching each other in our fine clothes and the swagger of our careerist ambitions. But there is also a sense that we are futilely carrying the dream of our own importance through this crowd—like trying to transport a mattress through Manhattan. Subconsciously, we think we are taking the pulse of the nation at the very moment it’s most fully alive, where deals and deeds and treaties are being cut.
When I think of my mother, there is no vacillation like this, no crippling doubts about her own value and abilities. She has always been like a plow horse who bore its traces with an assured ease. Perhaps “plow horse” is a Manhattan vestige, a protection against the facts of my origin.
During the next week, I sold my car, said my goodbyes to my mother who couldn’t understand why I was leaving. I thinned my baggage to the necessities. I would not be back. I booked a seat on the one shuttle to the airport over a hundred miles away. My mother drove me in her Caravan to the bus stop. We said our goodbyes. I knew I had to anticipate my decline. I have researched it online, read testimonials. It would take all my resources to buy a wheelchair, hire someone to come in and do household chores, buy an eyetext machine so that I could communicate after my speech goes, the P.E.G. operation after swallowing gets impossible, eventually Hospice. It’s too much to imagine, and how I thought my mother could have borne this is ridiculous, a selfish dream. Maybe I just wanted to see her one last time, to go home, to see and smell the valley of my birth, of my making. Maybe I needed to know if I wanted my ashes shipped to my mother and planted in the cemetery with my father and brother, my grandparents. I do.
As I wait for my flight, I feel I have something to say to the man berating his daughter for sitting on his computer bag, the woman arguing with the flight attendant because her name is not on the list, the girl elbowing her boyfriend for looking too long at the braless woman who jiggled by. But I know they wouldn’t listen, that they will have to draw their own black card before the man sees the beautiful wonder of his daughter, the woman is glad her body has many flights left, and the girl touches her boyfriend’s face because both hands still work, because both breasts do too, and there is still time. I watch a young girl sitting cross-legged on the seat drawing a picture, her mother beside her phone-scrolling. She is happy in the world she’s creating.
Aren’t we all waiting to fly somewhere, wingless as emus, hankering for home? And while, meanwhile, seldom-while, otherwise is where we live and breathe, the only home there is.
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Learn more about Joseph on the Contributors’ page.
Joseph’s latest poetry collection, Motion Against Our Moorings, will be published by MoonPath Press in June 2025.
(Photo: Scott Beale/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- Going Home by Joseph Powell - April 24, 2025