INTERSTATE 2
Driving home, thinking of his mother and him when he was little more than a baby, a photo. First only his mother for a moment. Doesn’t know where the thought came from or why the picture popped in. But suddenly — forgets what he was thinking of just before her, probably nothing much of anything — there was her face and neck and open-collar top of the summer dress she was wearing in the photo and then the whole photo, backdrop and concrete ground and crossed knees included, her shoes and his bare feet, even the white border or frame or outline with the notched or jagged edges or whatever one calls them when they’re by design kind of frayed, the style for years then, which he knows has a name because he recently read it in an article on photography but forgets or never recorded it in his head. Something he saw on the road set off the thought? He was thinking, he now remembers, of the car radio, what the call numbers were, if that’s what they’re called, of the public radio station of the little state he was driving through, 90.1 or 90.3 or 89.3 or 5, which he somehow thinks is one of them from the trip up a couple of days ago or should he try to find the public station of the much larger state bordering this one, which could also be one of those, when the photo first appeared to him. Bumper sticker “Save the whales, harpoon a fat chick” was the last one he noticed or remembers. Few minutes ago few miles back. But that’d have nothing to do with his mother since she was, till she started dying and became gaunt, slender all her life, even in her child photos, and though “chick” could relate to him in just his age in the photo, he doubts it was that. Said to himself when he saw the sticker “Stupid, how can a guy drive with it on his car? Stamps him as offensively dumb. Or if he’s driving someone else’s car, how can he without feeling embarrassed unless he also thinks it’s funny? But could be he never noticed it or realized, if it was someone else’s car or maybe even in all the time he owned the car, if he’d bought it used with the sticker on, what it means.” So not that one and no billboards he can recall or signs of any kind along the road and nothing on the radio, because up to about an hour before the thought he only had on solo piano and harpsichord tapes, and nothing about the music or instruments could relate, since his mother didn’t like that kind or play. Also no people in passing cars he can remember reminding him of his mother or her sort of pompadour hairstyle in the photo or her clothes or anything like that when she was that age, early thirties, or him as a toddler or just his mother, period, at any age, even when she was home and then in the hospital dying. He thinks “toddler” ‘s the right word for someone just under or around one. Or anything obvious or just somewhat concealed he saw or thought suggesting that particular photo, so maybe it was something from underneath. But to be a toddler don’t you have to be up and sort of walking with short tottering steps? And he wasn’t walking or even standing on his own when that picture was taken, his mother said, which was why she was holding him sitting up in her lap. He’d learned to walk and talk late. Maybe his kids playing or squabbling — but you don’t learn to talk, maybe not even to walk, and if you’re delayed it’s only because you started late. Or for a while the youngest angelically sleeping or something they said or did in back of the car or just being there with him acting as both mommy and daddy today and for the next few days had something to do with it in some way, but he doesn’t see how one of those would. Doesn’t know where the photo is now. Not among the ones he owns. Those he goes through about twice a year, either because he happens to come upon the two toiletry cases they’re in in his desk at home — three to four times a year’s more like it — when he’s searching for something else in the drawer or because he wants to look at his kids when they were younger or babies or just-borns in the hospital that day or next or his wife at their marriage party they gave or a couple of years before that or after, before the kids were born, and especially sometimes the two nude Polaroids of her he took when she was eight months pregnant with their first and had breasts twice the size they usually are and the only shots of her, at least one of them, other’s just shadow, with pubic hair. His mother’s photographs, if he doesn’t have them, are all gone, so it’s gone, though he doesn’t know how he let that happen. Particularly this one and a number of other old to ancient ones — his parents as children, his father as a lifeguard and in the army, their marriage photo and his mother’s first day at work in a bakery when she was fifteen, her parents here and in their original country, her grandparents only there, some with them young and one with her grandmother or grandfather with his or her parents and grandparents, but was photography even born then or that advanced where one could take family portraits? That article he read said something about it but he forgets what, though he thinks the reason he got it out of the library was to find out. But the missing photographs had something to do with a plastic bag they were in in her basement where most got damaged or ruined by the moisture down there along with being in the enclosed bag for so many years, making it even worse. So he threw most of these out, didn’t he? — not his infant one, which wasn’t among them, but those where there were no faces anymore and the photographs were mostly mold. He was in shorts in the photo, no shirt on, no doubt diapers underneath, the shorts of course. Whenever he had a shirt on, no matter how hot the day, then underneath it an under one, for that’s how his mother was right into his teens. Backs of her fingers clinging to him around the chest, short-sleeved summer print dress, she looked so beautiful, even with what to him seemed like too much lipstick and showing too many big teeth and the comical hair. She was a beauty all right, no question of it, dark, hair and skin, small features, high cheeks, gracefully slim, though big breasts in the photo because she was probably still suckling him, or he suckling, she nursing, since hers, unlike his wife’s, were any other time pretty small. Less chance of breast cancer he once overheard her say, so of course she dies of it, where even the little ones she had had to be lopped off. “If I hadn’t nursed you I bet I would’ve been spared,” she said, “not that I’m blaming anyone. I wanted the experience if I was only going to have this one child and it was also then the rage.” He said he thought that nursing gives one a better chance of avoiding breast cancer, but read that ten to twenty years before he said it and wonders if doctors still think it’s true. Or was he thinking of prostate cancer and masturbating, but anyway, maybe her breasts could be the “whales” and “fat” and he the “chick,” if that’s the way the mind works, or just his, but too far-fetched so seriously doubts it. Taken in the narrow backyard of their apartment at the time. First-floor floor-through. Tall green wooden fence behind them, though photo was black and white, painted that color to simulate grass and leaves, she said, couple of clay pots hooked on nails on the fence with some kind of ivy inside. All the vegetation they had back there except for a few plants from grapefruit seeds in coffee and big juice cans and an ailanthus tree from a neighbor’s yard covering part of theirs, none of that in the photo. Summer deck chair she’s sitting on, the attached foot and leg rest. Lots of curly hair, both, or hers more wavy than curly, his a bit lighter than hers. Who took it? Not his father. No matter how simple the camera, and he thinks the only kind they ever had, and they got a second when the first broke, was where you pressed a button and the front part, looking like a bellows, sprung open. His father didn’t make coffee, toast breads, boil eggs, change pillowcases, draw blinds, take pictures, work the TV, line the garbage pail with newspaper, didn’t even put in lightbulbs — he said he usually got the screwing-in part caught and was afraid if it shorted he’d have to disconnect and even change a fuse, besides not knowing how to open the stepladder to reach the socket. “I’m inept — how do you like that word? — at everything but my work and getting to and from it,” was how he liked to phrase it whenever she asked him to do a chore, and which she said was his alibi for doing nothing around the house as if he thinks his son and she are his slaves. But his light to lighter hair. She in fact used to say he was blond till he was five or six, “what they call a towhead in other religions,” but he never saw any evidence of it. No envelopes with hair, or photos, and none of his relatives remembered him that way. Also used to say his eyes were blue, at least a bluish green, till he was three, but his father said that was hooey and just another example of her wanting to think of him as some rich little patrician kid just as she’d like to see herself as a rolling-in-dough old