"The first time was from when I had you and like to have died. Now I've had two emergency surgeries," she glared over the words like I ought to apologize.
"You almost died from having me? I thought you were so happy that I was a girl and that you didn't even believe them until they put my butt in your face?" This is the story I liked to remember.
She brushed through her hair, straight back, and then scrunched it with her fingers. The brush was still in her hand as she spoke. "I sure enough did make them put your butt in my face. I was so happy to finally have a little girl I couldn't see straight. But afterwards, I had my tubes tied and they didn't hold my stomach."
"Why would they need to do that?"
"I was coughing and they were supposed to hold my stomach so that I didn't rupture any of the stitches. Well they didn't and I came untied and hemorrhaged. They liked to have let me die. I kept telling them that I didn't feel right, that something was wrong. But they didn't listen."
I interrupted. "Why didn't they listen? Couldn't they tell?"
"Well, you'd think so, I was swole up like a toad frog. But they just kept telling me that it was normal to feel that way after having a baby or some such nonsense. I told 'em that I knew just exactly what it was like to have a baby; this was my third. But they still wouldn't listen. Finally when the nurse came in to check my blood pressure I was damn near dead and they had to do emergency surgery."
I crossed my legs under me and sat up higher in the desk chair.
She repeated herself, "I was bleeding to death. Those nurses weren't watchin' me like they were supposed to."
I grabbed my side of the completely assembled arch and lifted while my mother lifted the other side. She was finally able to get out and work in the yard again, but now everything was just about done blooming and it was almost time to get the yard ready for winter. "I want to get that arch in before it gets cold, Becky. That way next year the wisteria will just run up it," she told me. We angled the arch beside the holes, then lifted it in. It slid in with a clunk and one of us had to hold it while the other packed the dirt around the poles. I volunteered for the dirt.
"Get the water hose over here and wet that old clay. It'll harden like concrete around the poles," Mother said, pointing toward the hose cart at the side of the house.
After reattaching the hose to the faucet I wheeled the cart to the flower bed where the arch now stood with my mother's support. The water was cool. When it hit the hard, cracked ground it didn't soak in right away but splashed against my legs.
I shoveled the mud into the holes and knelt down to pack it with drier dirt at the top.
"Now, that's just right," she said and let go of the arch.
The project had been a success. In a year or so the white plastic arch would be dripping with cones of purple petals. But I still hadn't told her.
She was already smoking when I got around to sitting down with her on the porch.
"Mama, I'm sorry if…" I started to say, trying to fight back the tears as they inched into my eyes, but she seemed to have softened a bit. Her body was relaxed against the back of the chair, and she was rocking. "I know I'm not exactly what you expected in a daughter."
She stopped rocking and looked right at me. "Oh honey, yes you are. You're independent, full of life, everything I ever wanted." She leaned back in her chair again and looked out over the yard. "Never mind that silly husband of yours, and doctors can do so much these days; you may have children
someday if you want, just look at what all has happened to me. All the problems I'm still alive to tell it."
"No, you don't understand," I protested.
"I know you two aren't getting along. He hasn't called all weekend, not even to see if you got here safe. You don't need him anyway, and you should be grateful for that. It wasn't like that when I got married."
"That's not what I meant. How did you know I lost the baby?" I tried to be pathetic, but it came out hard and cracked.
"It's been three months since you told me you were pregnant. You haven't said much about it since. At first I thought it was because I was sick but you have been completely avoiding the subject. Besides, you're shaped just like me. If you were three months along you'd already be swole up and big all over." She gave a half grin when she said this.
"Mama, I'm never gonna have a baby," I blurted and glared at her.
"Do you really want children? I mean, you have so much more. Just look at me and what all I've had to go through with my body. When I was your age I thought that children, and a husband, was all there was. But you have a choice." She took the last drag of her cigarette and put it out.
I couldn't believe this was the same woman who put me through ballet, piano, tap, and a myriad of other things to try and make me into a lady so I would grow up and marry well, have babies, and repeat.
She leaned back and propped her foot against the porch post. "You probably only did it to prove a point anyway." She laughed.
Instead of crying or screaming, I leaned back in my rock-ing chair and grabbed one of her cigarettes.
"I just thought a baby would…" I stopped to take a long first drag from the cigarette.
"Yeah, that's what we all think at one time or another. Now, I love you kids and I wouldn't have it any other way than having had you. But children won't solve your problems."
Even over the smoke, a floral smell still hung in the sticky air. The garden arch was a brilliant white against the rough black dirt at its base and the green of the wisteria all around it. I thought about the day I miscarried and the champs that woke me up at six in the morning. For about a week afterward all I could think about was sex, though I neither felt like having sex nor wanted to be anywhere near Terry.
"I think my hormones are out of whack," I said.
"Maybe you're about to go through menopause," she laughed and I laughed with her but it wasn't because it was funny. "I don't guess I will ever have to really go through that," she said with a tone that suggested a change of subject.
I held the cigarette awkwardly between my thumb and my forefinger. "The slugs are bad at my house this year. Slimy old things. I can't stand 'em," I complained.
"Pour salt on 'em. They'll just wither up and go away." When she said this I felt like the Morton Salt Shaker girl, without an umbrella of protection over my head, holding my life in my hands, which was still a reflection of her life. I thought about the store-bought wisteria shriveling in my front yard and decided to ask her for a cutting.
"Sure, they just grow up wild around here. I couldn't tell you how long it's been there." She got up to get the shears. After clipping a small branch with lots of leaves and an unopened bud, she brought it over to me. "Now, don't say thank you or it'll die."
"Why's that?" I took the cutting and twirled it in my hands.
She shrugged, "Old wives' tale."
ROB: What we need always to be in search of is the way in which a character's yearning is manifested. Stories are driven forward by causality. All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing for something. The complications ensue from the drive of those yearnings and the attempt to get around the impediments and difficulties that thwart desire.
In Brandy's story — talking now in this artificial, secondary way — planting things in a garden could operate as a metaphor for each of the character's barrenness. But barrenness itself is a problem; it does not constitute a yearning. You're on the verge of it here, Brandy, but the story does not yet move to the yearning in a clear and comprehensive way. One difficulty is that the building of the garden arch has not yet been made to work with metaphorical logic. Another is that some crucial things are told in flashback.