My mother is so much of me, I can’t tell where she leaves
off and I begin. I am too much a baby
that way and old enough to know it, but nothing fastens me to the world like the
clasp of my mother’s cool fingers around my small clammy hand. I will not wail and stamp my feet in their
frilly nylon anklets and black, patent-leather Mary Janes. My mother’s tongue
clucks at little girls who throw fits. I
prefer to delight her if I can.
I get to spend one day with
her. Don’t ruin it, Aunt Irene has
warned me. Marie has enough worries, she
said.
Before my mother left me with
Aunt Irene, I had never spent a night away from her. I don’t know how many weeks she’s been with
my brother at Baptist Hospital in Nashville.
My brother is sixteen. I am
five. I’m the baby. Aunt Irene says he needs my mother more than
I do. I don’t believe it. It’s a hundred miles from Nashville to our
farm near Waynesboro, farther to Aunt Irene’s farm on Eagle Creek. My daddy has been at the hospital, too, but
this Sunday morning he scooped me from Aunt Irene’s front porch as pink streaks
broke through the sky. He brought me to
Nashville for the day, and I’m supposed to be happier after seeing my
mother.
Now I watch the sun slide
behind the tall buildings, knowing we’ll be going back soon. My mother’s skirt sways as we head to the
car. I ask her why she can’t come
home. I’m trying hard not to
whine.
“You know,” she says. “I have to stay with James Noah.” James Noah is named for our two
grandfathers. I’m not named for
anyone. Marie is the prettiest name I
know. Marie is my mother’s pillowy
bosom, the smell of her Pond’s talcum powder.
Our neighbor, Mr. Ralph, calls me Phyllis Marie for fun. Does he know that in my heart, I’m as much
Marie as Phyllis?
“How long do you have to
stay?” I ask.
“I don’t think it’ll be much
longer,” she says.
She opens the door of the
gray Plymouth and I scoot into the front seat.
She slides in beside me. The car
is parked on the street that makes a straight line into the huge glass doors of
Baptist Hospital. I wonder which high
window is James Noah’s room, and if he and my daddy are still playing
checkers.
“Just remember what a good
time we had today,” my mother says, and she helps me remember. Remember how the church bells were
ringing. Inside the hospital smelled
like getting shots. James Noah wasn’t
expecting me. Remember how he laughed
and laughed, the way he does.
Remember the nurse in a
starched cap who wouldn’t let us get off the elevator. She made us take the back stairs. “I shouldn’t do this,” she told my
daddy. “Keep her in the room.” But later, she told me, “You’ve made your
brother so happy.” James Noah is always happy, I thought.
Remember the little park
where I played until it was time to go to the car. Squirrels scampered and cannas stood like
gaily-decorated sentinels. My mother
remembers all of these things with me and says, “Tell your Aunt Irene what a
good time you’ve had.”
I can’t help myself. “I don’t want to go to Aunt Irene’s!” I whine, then I remember that Marie has
enough worries, and feel guilty.
“Well, that’s how you have to
help out. Everybody has to help
out.” She sounds annoyed. David has dropped out of college to run the
farm. He’s helping out, but he’s
nineteen. I’m the
baby.
Sweat gathers under my
bangs. My mother rolls down the
windows. She digs in her purse. “Here,” she says. “Buy some candy from the traveling
store.” She gives me a quarter, pressing
my hand into a ball. I bury my head in
the folds of her cotton dress. It smells
like starch. I try to keep my sadness in
my throat.
My mother blows out a long,
long breath.
Sometime later, I wake up in
the fuzzy dark. Daddy is taking a sharp
curve, coming up on Aunt Irene’s farm.
He’s thinking hard about something.
My fingers unfold, and there is the quarter. I swallow the sadness in my throat. I am such a baby, and yet I feel so
old.
My mother comes home, but James Noah
does not.
Why didn’t she tell me how
sick he was? Why didn’t she tell me that
rheumatic fever makes you die? I am so
angry with my mother.
My baby is five days
old. She has diaper rash, and I have
postpartum blues. Mother has arrived to
set things straight.
“Cloth diapers,” she says. She darts a disapproving glance at the box of
Pampers beside the ruffled crib. “No
wonder her bottom’s blistered!” Her next
disapproving glance is for my husband and me.
How could we not know?
She sends him out on this
Sunday morning to buy cloth diapers. He
doesn’t dare come home until the K-Mart opens at noon. No other store carries cloth diapers. Mother tears open the package and dumps the
whole lot into the washer, choosing the hottest temperature. “No Ivory Snow?” She shakes her head. Cheer has to suffice this time. She writes “Ivory Snow” on our grocery
list.
The baby’s diaper rash is gone by
the second day. Mother stays for a
week. Plump and gray-haired, she’s so
energetic it irritates me. My husband is
sorry to see her go. Mother believes a
woman should pamper the man of the house. “Put your feet up. Have a glass of iced tea,” she tells him. “The cornbread’s almost done.” Mother
believes in cornbread served hot from the oven. He has loosened his belt.
The baby is surely sorry to see her
go, too. Mother picks her up at first
peep, walks her, croons old tunes as they rock.
The baby melts in her cushiony arms.
Mother reminds us before she drives away, “Don’t run out of Ivory
Snow.” I think I’m glad to see her go,
and then the baby cries. I don’t know
what happens, but next thing, I’m cradling my new daughter, crying along with
her. I’m wondering, How will I ever
learn what I need to know to be a mother?
To celebrate her eighty-fourth
birthday, I take Mother to Florida. She
still lives in Waynesboro, two hours from Nashville on tedious country
roads. She has never seen the
ocean.
“It’s just beautiful,” she says,
watching the foamy waves from our balcony.
“Just beautiful.” The wind off
the ocean is chilly. Mother comes back
inside, afraid she’ll get pneumonia.
“I’m going for a walk on the beach,”
I tell her.
Her face contorts into alarm.
“By yourself?”
“You can go with me.” But I’m hoping she won’t take me up on
it.
“It’s not safe. You don’t know who might be out there,” she
says. She closes in on me as I dig in my
luggage for a sweatshirt. “I’m afraid
somebody will get you.”
The need for some distance
from her is suddenly overwhelming, but I can’t leave her. I slam my suitcase shut. Why does she have to be so
clingy?
The morning dawns clear and
bright. It’s still jacket weather, but
we head for the beach. This is why we
are here. My mother has never felt sand
between her toes or the spray of salt water.
I park the car as close to the beach as I can. We cross the wooden access bridge, above the
sand dunes. I kick off my sandals. Mother is wearing her sensible lace-up shoes
with socks.
“I’ll wait here,” she says. “I don’t want to get sand in my
shoes.”
“Why don’t you pull off your shoes?”
I say.
“Oh, I can’t do
that.”
“But you’ve come all this way
-” Do I hear a whine in my voice?
Reluctantly, Mother picks her
way toward the water, trying not to fill her shoes with sand. “Now, you have to stick your toe in the
ocean,” I tell her.
“Stick my toe in? Oh, no, I can’t do that. I’d have to take off my shoes and
socks.”
I think about that. How are we going to get her shoes and socks
off? How are we going to get them back
on? What if the cold water gives her
pneumonia?
“Why do you want me to stick
my toe in the ocean?” she says, screwing up her face as if I’d asked her to do a
handstand.
“I don’t know,” I say. Honestly, I’m not sure why this has been so
important to me.
Mother studies the lapping
waves, then takes a step closer. She
bends over, touching her arthritic knees, wincing. When the next wave washes up onto the sand,
she reaches out and slaps the water.
“There. I’ve had my fingers in
the Atlantic Ocean,” she says. She locks
her arm in mine, steadying herself. Her
eyes fix on the horizon, shades of blue, impossible to tell where the ocean
leaves off and the sky begins.
“It’s just beautiful,” she
says. “Can we come back for my
eighty-fifth?”
With any coaxing at all, Mother
would have been here for David’s surgery - he’s my other brother - but it’s too
hard for her to travel. “I’d be too much
trouble -” she kept saying, “- unless you think he needs me.” I think of her other son, whose bedside she
would not leave. Forty-five years ago.
The surgeon’s report confirms
my fears. Though I’m not shocked, I am
speechless. David and I have talked
about the insidious nature of cancer, but only now do I feel the knife-blade of
reality. I’m relieved that David’s
friend, Pat, has the presence of mind to ask questions. The surgeon directs his words to her,
dispassionate words that tumble from his mouth like invisible stones: lymph nodes, chemo.
Last night David spread out an assortment of documents and told me, “Here
are my affairs. I’m giving you Power of
Attorney.” I kept thinking, But you’re
the big brother; I’m the baby.
As soon as the surgeon breaks
away from us, I tell Pat, “I have to call Mother.”
It’s steamy hot outside the
hospital in Jackson, Tennessee, as I punch in numbers on my cell phone. The heat
rises in undulating patterns above the pavement.
Mother’s urgent hello comes on the
third ring. I know she’s stayed close to
the phone all day, but it takes her a minute to answer. “The surgery’s over and David’s fine,” I tell
her, repeating the surgeon’s words. Fine meant that he had done his job
well.
Mother murmurs relief, and
her voice trails off. She waits for me
to go on. I know how she bends toward
the phone, listening. I know how her
permed white hair poofs over her ear.
Stiff-kneed, she takes short, uncertain steps down the length of the hall
and back, fooling with the telephone’s curly cord. She won’t use her cordless phone because the
one in the hall has a device to amplify sound.
She’s wearing knit pants and a floral blouse. Lavender, or maybe pink. I
know how anxiety glitters in her eyes, how worry rounds her shoulders.
I would give anything not to
tell her, as I stand here with my cell phone clamped to my ear. Everywhere I look, I see concrete and
asphalt. No green space or bright
flowers. No squirrels scampering. I hear
my mother’s shallow breathing. I blow
out a long, long breath.
In my mind’s eye, she is
right here with me. Marie, with her
skirt swaying, is so close, I can smell her talcum powder. Squirrels play in a patch of cool grass. Red cannas stand tall, like sentinels, and my
mother’s firm grip is the thing that fastens me to the world.
copyright@pgallaher 2019
Published in Bellevue Literary Review
www.phyllisgobbell.com
Published in Bellevue Literary Review
www.phyllisgobbell.com
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