Chapter Four #2
But this time instead of the future, I suck myself backward and sideways until I land in a weird in-between space where I wonder what Mom would say if she were here: about working on a Meadow project, about James, about the way I keep throwing myself against the glass of publishing like a bird confused about how house windows work.
I remember learning about liminal spaces in one of my lit classes right after Mom died, and I latched onto the definition like a leech.
Because I wondered if everything would be liminal forever, my entire life, and I hoped, wished, and begged whatever gods were listening that it was true.
Because if it felt like this to be in a world without Mom—so wrong and sharp and dull—maybe it meant that there was going to be another time and place when we would be together again, making this one liminal.
Between. Which meant everything that came after her on this side of the mortal coil was one step closer to seeing her again instead of what it felt like: a million steps away.
I think of before the liminal, try to summon a relevant memory from the scorched corners of my head. I do know what she would say, I’m nearly certain of it. And the memory floats up to me on a puff of errant smoke that doesn’t seem particularly malicious.
“Do you have to wear that?” I asked.
Mom had hand embroidered a Meadow Mama T-shirt that she insisted on wearing to the first movie’s midnight premiere at our local theater.
I wasn’t embarrassed, I told myself at the time. It was just embarrassing for her.
The entire Internet made fun of Meadow Mamas, gleefully declaring them emotionally stunted adults in love with teenage mythic creatures and, worse—because online communities suck —inappropriate.
If I was completely honest, though, I was a little embarrassed at the blatant way Mom embraced the cringe. I thought she was artsier than that, above that. Like it cheapened her to pretend to be in on the joke when she was the butt of it.
For whatever reason, it came out sideways that evening when I saw her clearly handmade fan shirt.
“You could just wear black and red,” I pointed out.
Mom had laughed. “That’s not very festive. Besides, I had to put that new embroidery hoop to good use.”
Still irritated, I asked, “Why do you like The Meadow anyway?”
But Mom wasn’t mad at the question or my tone. Instead she paused, actually thinking about her answer.
“Well, first of all, I like that you like it. That we can like it together.”
“Is that all?”
Mom again ignored my churlish tone.
“The problem with being young is that you can’t comprehend being old,” she said.
“But when you get old…You remember. You remember so much it hurts. Stories like Arabella and William’s?
When you’re young and haven’t experienced that kind of love yet, you think they’re a blueprint.
A dream. When you get older, they’re a memory.
A fond one that you will revisit again and again and again. ”
It was hard to stay angry at Mom, even with puberty hormones raging beneath my skin making me irrational and hungry— always hungry—and impatient.
“You had a vampire boyfriend I should know about?” I quipped apologetically.
But Mom just laughed.
“No, but nothing hits you square in the gills quite like first love, baby. You could live a thousand lifetimes and you’ll still remember what it felt like to first understand and be understood in return.
” She looked down and picked idly at a loose thread of the embroidery on the M in Mama, tucking it back into itself.
“If you’re lucky, you never come of age.
You’re always striving toward the next age and mining the last ones for ways to make the path smoother and truer.
There will be more loves, more firsts you can’t even imagine, and stories like The Meadow remind you of that.
It’s a crystal ball and a photo album, good art. It helps you look in both directions.”
We were going to be late. It was the age of arriving at the theater hours before the premiere to guarantee a good seat, but on the way out the door, Mom paused me with a hand to my shoulder and turned me toward the canvas painting she loved and kept hung just in the entryway.
She tapped the wall beside it with one peeling fire-engine-red nail.
“Good art,” she said, “can bring all sorts of people together.”
That damn painting.
The present comes back to me in the form of Dad coming up the stairs to my door, oblivious to my internal struggles and memories and smoke.
“Kid!” he decrees. “Excited for your first day tomorrow?”
“I guess,” I say.
Dad’s smile is already annoying me, but all the worse when he says, “Is that boy who came by the house going to be there?”
I roll my eyes where he can’t see before turning around.
“He was just dropping off a business thing, Dad. I told you that. Nothing exciting.”
Dad wiggles his eyebrows at me.
“He looked exciting,” he says.
“ Dad, ” I warn. “It’s not like that.”
My father ignores this.
“Awfully nice of him to drive all the way out here to deliver a piece of paper when he could have used the good-ol’-fashioned smartphones all you kids carry nowadays.”
I open my closet again for something to do.
“Dad, please. We’re colleagues. And you’re always first in line for the new iPhones, so don’t even start.”
“Your mom and I met at work, you know,” he says, like his anecdata is the only data.
“This isn’t like that,” I insist again.
Dad ruffles my hair.
“It never is… until it is. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be up to your neck before you realize your feet are wet.”
—
Later that night, I go to the plastic shed Dad kindly installed in the backyard to hold the stuff I kept from my old apartment.
I purged all the furniture and a lot otherwise, but I still have to root through an impressive number of boxes of books and bins of winter clothes to find the box I only labeled “ M. ”
There are three things in it: the Meadow Mama T-shirt, a large tin—full of buttons, scraps of paper, thread woven around bobbins, and crochet hooks—and a brown-paper-wrapped painting.
Unwrapping the painting feels momentous and too hard, so I make myself zoom out and see the scene for what it is: a thirty-something millennial digging out old keepsakes from a shed in the backyard of her father’s house where she currently lives because she can’t afford to live anywhere else.
Still depressing, but the more manageable kind.
The painting is just as I remember, of course: A woman sits with her back against a grand tree, the branches curling and twisting above her downturned head into a gray, stormy sky.
Mom got it during her very brief painting phase, a gift from a friend she met at a weekend painting intensive that she raved about long after her paintbrushes had been packed into a box to make room for her next craft fixation.
At first glance, it looks like a period painting circa Jane Eyre, and the viewer assumes that the woman must be peeling potatoes or shucking peas or some such pastoral chore.
Her clothing is neutral in tones of brown and black, her hair is ambiguously tucked into what looks like a hooded cloak that spills around her, but it’s a trick, a sleight of hand.
The cloak is a voluptuous, oversized sweatshirt, and—if you look very closely—her hands are actually fiddling with the power button of an e-reader whose exact outline is clear if you know where to look but is otherwise obstructed by the darkness of her outfit.
It was easily Mom’s most treasured physical object, and from the moment it arrived, she hung it in the ultimate place of honor on the wall between her bedroom and the garage door.
“So I can see it coming and going and before bed,” she said.
I used to tease her, to ask her if she loved the collection of kindergarten pasta necklaces kept in a jar on her bookcase more because I made them and isn’t that what mothers are supposed to say?
Mom would laugh and take a necklace from the jar to wear around the house with pride, but the necklace always went back onto the shelf and the painting never moved from the entryway where Mom could look at it every day.
I don’t overthink it. I take the shirt and painting inside, take down the Meadow movie-accurate corkboard from beside my bed, and replace it with the reading woman.
I’m glad of the décor change when my alarm goes off for my first day of recording. Mom’s painting is the first thing I see when my eyes peel open before my gaze jumps to the Meadow Mama shirt I have hanging from the closet with a cardigan atop it.
And even though it’s the first day of the project—a Meadow project, a paying Meadow project—I check my email before doing anything else.
I need to see if any of the publishers have reached out for an interview, if any of my applications have kicked up enough dirt to warrant a follow-up email, if the loop might be finally closing and I’ll be able to reroute myself to the Mom-approved GPS setting we had in place before she died.
I blame the sleeplessness, but after I shower and put on Mom’s shirt as a way to take her with me, I touch my finger to the painting of the reading woman and silently ask the magic—if it’s listening, if it’s even real —to maybe, possibly please get me through today.