She showed us her work. We fled. She risked our misunderstanding and disapprobation, our attempts at praise, our confusion and neglect. In this risk and its result — her suffering — she found proof of herself as an original and subversive artist.
Was it so? Was my mother ahead of her time, destined for acceptance by some future civilization, as she proclaimed more than once in the years leading up to her death?
The robe is titled “The Heroine’s Journey,” and yet it is neutral in relation to the wearer’s sexuality. It does not shape itself around the body, and it does not impose shape on the body. From a distance, it looks like a vestment worn by an Episcopal priest; though, with its tassels and wings, it is clearly more pagan than Protestant. It is a peaceable kingdom crowded with personal spirit guides and pets — birds, lion, horse, giraffe, cat — a menagerie of wild and tame hieroglyphs guiding the kimono’s wearer, the heroine, safely down the green road bordered with flowers and paved with magical coins. The robe takes on the life of all the lives emblazoned on or suspended from it, and it imparts this life to the person wearing it. But what manner of life is it? Neither earthbound nor confined within the mortal body, it is a life that is at once sacred and secular, shapeless and formal, youthful and aged, innocent and experienced, ancient and modern, fleeting and everlasting.
The year before she died, I met my mother in Philadelphia. It was the spring of 1999. Her father had been dead for four years, and her mother was soon to follow. Not long after her father’s passing, my mother had abandoned Miami and her air-conditioned shop beneath the expressway overpasses. She’d packed up her sewing machines, her tailor’s dummies, her buttons, her worktable, her fabrics and scissors, her pincushions and measuring tapes, and Merlin, her new cat — the white one had finally given up the ghost — and, using money left by my grandfather, she’d purchased a little one-story house at the bottom of a road in Black Mountain. Now, three years later, she’d driven north to attend the art school graduation of F., a friend from the Florida years who had left Miami to study painting in Philadelphia. At the ceremony, F. and my mother met a gallery owner who worked in the Old City district. This person expressed interest in my mother’s clothes, and my mother formed the impression that the gallery would give her a show.
One Saturday morning in May, I got on a train to Philadelphia. F. lived in a red brick house on a quiet Center City street. I took my time walking from the station. I had a bad feeling about the day ahead. My mother’s health had been rapidly declining in recent years, and in the past months she’d sounded, when I’d spoken with her on the phone, sicker and sicker. I was afraid of what I was going to see.
I wasn’t wrong to worry. When I saw my mother, I wanted nothing more than to lower my head, turn away, and walk steadily and without stopping back to the station.
Instead, she and F. and I went out to a cafe. I did my best to suppress my embarrassment at my mother’s loud speaking voice. It seemed to me that she was trumpeting and boasting. Were people staring? I recall that F. was wearing a jacket my mother had made, a short coat decorated with contrasting fabric pieces stitched in geometric patterns. F. wore the garment comfortably. If the embellished kimono represented couture, the jacket might have come from the Peace Goods sportswear line. I wondered, as I sat with my coffee, whether F. would continue wearing it once my mother got in her car and headed south.
We paid the check, got up from the table, and began our pilgrimage to the gallery where my mother hoped to be welcomed as a new artist. It was a long journey over a short distance. I watched my mother struggling to breathe; and I noticed her preparing to reach for the nearest fixed object, a lamppost or a parking meter that could steady her, if she suddenly needed it. Had she gained weight? Lost weight? What about the cough? Had her hacking grown worse? Why did her hair look so dead? Was she having trouble carrying her portfolio? And where had she got to all of a sudden?
“Mom? Mom?”
There she was, half a block behind, standing in the heat, lighting a cigarette with a shaking hand, looking lost.
“Mom, are you all right? Do you want to rest a minute?”
“No. I’m fine. I don’t need to rest. Let’s get to the gallery. How far is it, Don?”
“It’s not far. It’s up here. Can you make it? Do you want me to carry your portfolio?”
“No.”
“Have you seen a doctor, Mom?”
“I have a doctor at home, Don. Let’s get to the gallery. They’re expecting me. I have an appointment.”
But what kind of appointment? When we finally got down the block and through the door, the woman behind the front desk recommended that my mother leave slides and a resume and wait to be contacted. This is normal-enough procedure, but my mother, who had garrulously promoted the narrative of her imminent ascension, took it as a blow. She stood before the receptionist’s desk. I was terrified that she would make a scene. I felt her anger and her humiliation, and my own humiliation. I paced around the gallery space, then sneaked out and paced some more, back and forth, on the sidewalk. It was a while before my mother and F. came outside. F. encouraged my mother not to get upset. But my mother had tipped into one of her bitter, bewildered moods.
The walk to F.’s house was only a few blocks. Nevertheless, it was too much to ask of my mother, so we hailed a taxi. When we got to F.’s, we decided to have an early supper. There was leftover fried chicken in the refrigerator, and we could eat outside. F.’s street was a dead end and got little traffic; the residents used the street and the sidewalk as a kind of communal square, and they occasionally set up chairs and tables beneath the old trees that formed a low canopy overhead.
It was evening, and the air was warm and still. The three of us sat in a circle, eating with our hands. For years, my mother had had the habit, in public and in private, of announcing, as an artist, her identification with me. She believed that we understood each other, and were fundamentally alike in our alienation from the noncreative world. “We don’t need to worry about what other people think, Don,” she might say. And she might add, “We don’t fit in.”
My mother may have made a few such claims that night when she, F., and I sat down to dinner. I don’t remember. All I could do was watch her eat.
She sat facing me. She took large bites, and bits of food spilled down her front as she chewed. She ate, it seemed to me, without awareness of herself; and the impression she gave was of something gone wrong, as if perhaps, at age sixty-four, she were making her first attempt to learn table skills. She wasn’t a toddler, though; she was sick, and denying her sickness. In four months, she would learn that she was dying.
I looked away. I was a man in his forties, afraid of his mother. Or maybe I was afraid for her. I looked again, and we made eye contact, and it crossed my mind that she was a crazy person wearing crazy clothes of her own crazy design, with a crazy person’s hairdo atop a head brimming with strange hallucinations in which she conversed with a crew of spirits that included the Virgin Mary and Jesus himself. These spirits related to her as a peer. The fact of their communications reinforced her belief in herself as spiritually and emotionally superevolved, and this belief, in turn, supported her image of herself as a heroine on a journey. In this romantic-journey scenario, her failures and losses in life were grand successes, insofar as they represented trials too arduous for anyone but a hero to overcome.