Chapter 11 #2
My mother produced the most artwork in winter, when she tended to become withdrawn and hermitic, sometimes even shutting me out of her bedroom.
But she always came alive again in summer, our favorite season.
Even if it was hot out, summer didn’t truly arrive until my mother wore her long hair in a ponytail.
With her hair up she looked even younger, and strangers often mistook her for my sister.
On those humid ponytail nights, crickets would gather beneath our windows and sing at such a volume that neither of us could sleep.
Lying on my mother’s bed, listening to the crickets sing, I wondered what they knew that we didn’t—if something awful was coming.
It was always a relief when, in late summer, thunderstorms vanished the cricket song.
I liked the way the rain rapped the window above my mother’s bed, rapped it hard like knuckles asking to be let in.
I longed to open the windows but was afraid of getting wet.
Sometimes I wished I could be more free. But my mother’s bed was warm, and we held hands when we slept, and that always seemed better than whatever freedom might be.
My mother worked weekends, but in the summer, she often skipped shifts to play with me.
In the garden, we set up two white plastic chairs that were always covered in tree pollen, which we smeared on our cheeks until we sneezed.
I liked the way my body jerked, liked the budding itch and seismic release.
Liked the way my lungs went hah, hah, hah, liked the way the sneeze shot through my nose and scattered the birds.
We would take turns sneezing, trying to outdo the other’s, eventually choking on our pollen-flavored laughter.
During one summer at the height of my childhood, the year my mother first stopped eating and I learned to swim, I gained a neighbor named Sam.
He was from California and had more freckles than seemed natural.
Sometimes his mother brought over fancy treats like biscotti and madeleines, and Sam crept behind his mother’s leg and waved at me.
I was suspicious of Sam because I was suspicious of everything, and he had eyes like holes that stood too close.
All the kids made fun of him because he acted like a baby. He was my first friend.
Sam replaced my mother in my garden afternoons.
He always blew the pollen off the chairs before I could rub it on my cheeks.
We made fairy dust by mixing the pollen with glitter and the crushed petals of dead roses.
My mother grew erratic and sometimes mean during this time.
If I left the fairy dust out overnight, I’d find it in the trash the next day.
My mother became reluctant friends with Sam’s mother, Eloise.
Eloise gifted me many things, among them a pink puffer jacket two sizes too big for Christmas.
My mother’s eyes narrowed to see it, so I knew it was expensive.
With it on, my feelings fluctuated between joy and embarrassment.
I stood before the mirror, removing then re-wearing it, no longer recognizing the girl I saw: a stranger in a stranger’s coat, older than I could ever be.
I didn’t understand then that it would be this way forever—I would always be losing my own face.
In winter, my mother and I wore our coats indoors because the heating made our skin dry. The puffer from Eloise was my warmest, but I kept it untouched in the back of my closet. The trees shed their leaves overnight. I admired this about them, that they cried in private.
A few months later, Sam and Eloise moved back to California. I asked my mother if she was sad. “I’m happy for them,” she said. “There’s nothing here for anybody.” In my room, I wept with the door shut and a pillow over my head.
Another summer went, reliable heat and familiar cricket song. There were fewer thunderstorms, and when they did arrive, I slept through the knocking of the rain. Once, when my mother was away, I tried at last to open the window above her bed, only to discover it was painted shut.
My mother and I were very close when I was a girl, and then, against our best wishes, I grew older.
It happened without my noticing, as if in some secret hour a crack in my brain widened and never again would I reach for her little finger.
I started high school, learned I was good at it, and painted less.
I made a few friends. Even so, I felt they knew something I didn’t, like the crickets that sang below my mother’s window.
When she was thirty-seven, my mother began to talk about her mother, who was the same age when she left. “I don’t blame her,” she said, “stuck in a place like this.” Or: “I used to think thirty-seven was so old, like there was nothing left to want. But I still want so many things.”
To be young? To be special? To be talented?
But my mother was still all those things.
If I were a girl, I would’ve wriggled into one of her too-big dresses and made her laugh.
Or I would’ve put lipstick over my face until she yelled, afterward hugging me anyway and transferring the color onto her cheeks, us two sad clowns.
But I was no longer a girl, and even my mother had outgrown her mother.
That following summer, the one before I applied for college, was different.
Quieter, no crickets. There were a series of small fires at the university, one of which damaged the lab and forced a monthslong closure.
My mother became more restless than ever.
She disappeared for longer stretches, spent whole days driving to neighboring towns and back.
I grew two inches and needed new jeans. But these weren’t the main things.
They were the things that happened after the real thing did, one Tuesday in early June on a warm and ordinary afternoon.
I was sick with period cramps. A kind classmate drove me home during lunch. The beat of the radio music made my stomach churn, and I rolled down the passenger window in case I threw up.
When I let myself in, the house was mostly quiet. Small noises came from upstairs: the creaking of irregular footsteps, the unmistakable sound of my mother.
My mother stood in my bedroom in front of my mirror.
Piles of clothes I hadn’t worn in years scattered the floor.
She did not notice me. On her hips draped a wrinkled navy skirt, part of my old middle school uniform.
Her small breasts hung loose in my old training bra.
The bra was once white, but years had turned it gray, and there was a tiny dark stain on the strap.
Then my mother caught my reflection, and through the mirror we looked at each other.
Finally, in a soft impassive voice, as if discussing the weather, my mother said, “My clothes don’t fit me anymore.
” I receded to the bathroom so she could get dressed.
I swallowed three painkillers for the cramps, though I usually took only one.
And then I returned and put the clothes away, focused on the task of it, horrified by the feeling that came over me, at once brand-new and wholly familiar, as if it had for years sat curled in my body, waiting to be noticed. Pity for my mother. It hurt to feel.
I looked on my hands and knees for the training bra but could not find it.
I wanted to wash it, get rid of that ugly little stain whose source I could not remember but whose color grew darker in my mind until I was certain it was black, permanent.
That night, I fell asleep with the dot burning in my mind like a laser.
When I opened my eyes the next morning, it appeared everywhere in my periphery, poking holes in the back of my eyelids.
In the days following, the dot surfaced on the back of my wrist, down the slant of my mother’s cheeks, between the cracks in the walls of our shower.
I searched and searched for the bra until eventually I made myself stop.
And then I stopped thinking about the incident altogether.
I would not think of it again until my last visit home.
My mother and I fought. I booked my return flight.
That evening, I stepped inside the garden.
The sky was dark blue. There were no more roses, no more birds.
So much pollen had gathered on the chairs that I could no longer see their original color.
I blew, the pollen drifted, and I felt something inside my body drop, like I’d swallowed a stone that was alive and wanted out, and I remembered our summers in the garden and the paintings in the dresser, my mother in the mirror and the dot on her shoulder, how the light hit our kitchen windows and made all the dust particles dance, which I’d always found beautiful until in adolescence I discovered it meant the house was unclean, and I understood finally that the reason I could not find the training bra was that she had it still, she never took it off.