"Mom, come upstairs. Let me put you to bed," I said, setting down my books and helping her upstairs. She was leaning on me, still laughing helplessly. "My god," she said. "They lopped off my breasts, can you believe it? Lopped them right—" and she made a quick motion with her hand in the air.
I tucked her in and kissed her face and she cried into the neck of my blouse. "I'm cold. I'm thirsty. Don't leave me, honey. You're warm. If you leave I'll have to put on a sweater."
"Get some sleep," I said softly, pulling up the blue quilt, drawing the blinds, standing in the doorway, just a moment, to watch her fall asleep, the lake beating like a giant watery heart against the dock.
she takes long, silent showers, slumped against the ceramic wall, the steady jets of water bouncing off one of her shoulders, splashing against the plastic curtain, shampoo lather drizzling down into her mouth.
"Even his I love you's," she said, "were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but who is incapable of a passionate confession, of melting into a sob."
I tuck her in. I kiss her.
a series of pictures here of mothers and daughters switching places — women switching places to take care of one another. You, the daughter, becoming the mother, the Ceres, and she the daughter, kidnapped to hell, and you roam the earth to find her, to mourn her, leaving the trees and grain to wither, having no peace, you have no peace.
"what is beautiful is seized," my mother said a final time, speaking of my father, whom she said had been destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. "It came to me in bulky bandages, seeming much larger, much more than it really was."
my mother, thin and gray in a nightgown, staring off and away, not at the camera.
"you reach a point," she wrote me once, "where you cannot cry anymore, and you look around you at people you know, at people your own age, and they're not crying either. Something has been taken. And they are emptier. And they are grateful."
when my mother died, her groaning woke the elderly woman in the bed next to hers who was supposed to have her pancreas operated on the next day. "What is happening?" cried the old woman, sleepless and distraught. Something had seized my mother in the back, arched it, stiffened her limbs, her mouth a gash across her face, revealing only her teeth, yellowed fine as old piano keys. An awful astonishment pervaded her features, her bones, as if she never really believed death would be like this, a bludgeoning by tubes and contractions, and by the time — only a minute — the nurses responded to my shouts and came running, the sweat and urine soaking into the sheets already seemed cool and old and my mother's eyes were wide as eggs and she was dead. I clutched at things — her robe, a plastic pitcher, a cup — and looking around the room, the window, wondered where she had gone, she must still be, had to be near, somewhere, and the lady with the pancreas, beyond the screen next to the bed, had heard it all and now wept loudly, inconsolably, and they gave her a sleeping pill, although she pushed it away, saying, "Oh, please, god, no." Nothing moved. I bent over the bed. "Mom," I whispered, kissing her lips, surgical carts rackety in the hallway, a voice in the ceiling paging Dr. Davis Dr. Davis to the nurses' station, figures in white slowly gathering around me, hands on my shoulders, hard, false as angels. "Mom," I breathed.
Jacob Fish came to the funeral with a pretty brunette woman who looked like a high school French teacher. He seemed somehow like a nice man. At the end of the burial, he escorted the woman back to the car and then went off by himself, over to a tree, and ran his hands through his hair. I never really got a chance to talk with him, although I'm not certain what we would have talked about. When he was through at the tree and had thrust his hands back into his pockets, he rejoined the woman in the car and drove off.
My father did not bring anyone with him. He came up to me and hugged me tightly and for a moment the red rushed to both of our eyes. "Lynnie," he said, and I stepped to one side. I looked away from him. I looked at his shoes. I looked at the clouds. "I loved her more than you think," he said, and I listened for the needles, the safety pins. James, home from medical school and standing next to me, shook my dad's hand, then quickly embraced him. Everyone was dressed in black. "So much black, so much black," I kept repeating like some nervous mynah bird.
That night James and I left all the casseroles at my mother's apartment and went out and got drunk at a Howard Johnson's. James made me smile reminding me of the time when I was little and insisted that if you were in the woods and had to go to the bathroom really badly, all you had to do was eat a piece of bread; it would absorb everything, and you wouldn't have to go anymore.
"James," I asked him, carefully. "Do you ever think about your other mother?"
"No," he said quickly, like a doctor.
I looked at him, dismayed, confused.
"I don't know," he sighed and signaled the waiter. "I guess it's not basic to me. God, I can't get my feet all tied up in that. Why should I?"
"I'm not sure." I looked at my lap, at my shoes. I reached under the table for my purse. "Check's on me," I said.
"Dear Mom. Thanks for the cookies. I got them yesterday. Was sorry to hear about the hospital thing. Hope you're feeling better. I've got tests by the millions! Love, Lynnie."
driving back from dropping James off at the airport, I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror. It seems old, with too much makeup. I feel stuck, out of school, working odd jobs, like someone brooding, hat in hand in an anteroom, waiting for the future as if it were some hoop-skirted belle that must gather up its petticoats, float forward, and present itself to me. I wonder what else I could have written, those winters, looking out and seeing snow lining the elm grove like an arthritis and finding no words. I didn't lie: there were a lot of tests; I had a lot of tests.
The roads are empty and I am driving fast. I think of my father, imagine him long ago at night casually parting my mother's legs with the mechanical indifference of someone opening a cupboard. And I say to myself: I will leave every cold man, every man for whom music is some private physics and love some unsteppable dance. I will try to make them regret. To make them sad. I am driving back toward my tiny kitchen table and I will write this: forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.
"That's how much it costs, Miss," says the attendant at the gas station where I stop, looking rather numbly at the price on the pump.
"Oh," I say and fumble for my wallet. The oil cans stacked against an old truck tire are wordless, hard, collusive. But the triangular plastic flags strung at one end of the island flutter and ripple in the wind, flapping to get my attention, my compassion, like things that seem to want to sing but can't, things that almost tear themselves in trying to fly, like rainbow-colored birds, hung by string and their own feet.
The Kid's Guide to Divorce
put extra salt on the popcorn because your mom'll say that she needs it because the part where Inger Berman almost dies and the camera does tricks to elongate her torso sure gets her every time.
Think: Geeze, here she goes again with the Kleenexes.