Forsaken

“That Flo has found a way to make her presence known,” declared my mother, speaking about a woman who she sits with for meals at her assisted-living facility.  “She calls out to people as they leave the dining room, commenting on a nice blouse or some other article of clothing.  It’s always about clothes.”  I had never thought of my mother as an anthropologist before, but listening to her describe the behavior of residents at The Home of the Good Shepherd, I started to see her as a kind of participant-observer.  But I doubt that scientists feel envy, and it was envy that I heard in Mom’s comment about Flo as if she, herself, has yet to find her own mode of self-assertion.  She’s also told me that Flo has her eye on one of the men and flirts with him in very obvious ways.  This observation, too, is as much about my mother as it is about Flo.  She’s implicitly asking me why she can’t find it in her to talk to the eligible men whose doors are marked with blue football helmets, blazoned with “Bernie,” to distinguish them from the female doors, marked with pink flowers for “Cathy.”

On Easter I picked her up early for Mass and followed close behind as she inched her walker into the back pew, reserved for the lame.  No longer does she stand or kneel but sits through the Mass hunched over.  Ushers and others asked me wordless questions with their eyes:  does she want communion?  Why don’t they ask her?  She is a person in full possession of her faculties, who deserves the decency of her fellow humans’ regard along with the body of Christ.  Communion came but almost as an afterthought as we sang the final refrain to close the hymn and the brusque priest, who I’ve heard mocking the elderly in his parish, prepared to convey God’s blessing on us. 

Although I can bow and bend, stand up and sit down, I remained seated next to my mother much of the time to share her condition.  It is what I have done since my father died and what I feel I must do still.  Church was packed with young people—everyone seemed young compared to us old people consigned to the back—and we watched the Easter parade as if from eternity.  “I don’t see Jeannette,” says my mother, as the crowds flowed by us and we waited for an opening big enough to push the metal walker into traffic.  There is one white-haired lady who fits the bill.  “No, Mom, that is her,” I say as if I’ve sighted and identified some species of rare warbler.  She is chatting with another older woman.  Last time I was at church with Mom, I flagged Jeannette down, but on Easter Sunday it wasn’t in me to gesture like a highway semaphore.  “I’m sure she’ll see us,” I say.  But she doesn’t.  She walked right down the side aisle, and neither I nor my mother did anything to make our presence known.  I couldn’t read what my mother felt, so I went ahead and felt forsaken, almost as if I were already dead.  My mother has spent much of her life talking on the phone to friends, meeting them for breakfast, playing golf with them, and I’ve often been impatient with all the chit chat.  She has talked Jeannette through her own health problems, and I suddenly wonder—what for?  As quietly as is possible, my mother moves her walker inch by inch through the vestibule, and a patronizing usher tells her in a too loud voice to “have a good day” and to “keep smiling”:  “that smile [toothless] is golden.”

On a train somewhere in China, a daughter holds her mother's head,
 preventing it from hitting against the window.

Once tucked into the car out of the cold wind neither of us spoke of the shame, but Mom wanted to drive by my brother’s house on West Mountain Road.  I’m not sure why since he was supposedly in Massachusetts for Easter, but we do, and instead of going straight home, I turn right and head up the mountain, past the unassuming white church that I’ve almost forgotten even though it’s stood there through my childhood to this very moment.  Mom seemed to enjoy the ride.  I stopped the car near the top so she could smoke a cigarette and we talked quietly about nothing important.  I like the feeling now of talking just to talk, talking to draw out the other’s voice.  Our words don’t do anything.  They exist like the breeze or the streams of meltwater.  It’s a new and pleasurable feeling--this saying things together.

Back at home in the dark kitchen, the hours passed.  We opened cupboards full of school papers with my name on them, saved from 1972.  I was nine years old, practicing penmanship and completing worksheets on Saudi Arabia.  I find a short poem my mother must have written as an example of rhyme.  It’s obvious that she spent hours working with us, taking an interest in our schoolwork, and using her voice to coax out our own.  After a while, I get to work peeling potatoes and shredding cabbage.  The timing of our dinner is arranged around the arrival of my sister, who said yesterday that she’d come over later for pie and beer.  “Leave it alone, Mom,” I said, as my mother insisted on leaving her third phone message to invite Jennifer for Easter dinner.  “You cannot make people want to see each other.  You’ve been doing it for years, and it hasn’t worked.”  I was only partially aware of feeling that my presence and my effort—like the construction paper baskets we made in school and filled with green cellophane grass—had not been good enough.  Why?  The simple meal of ham and sweet potatoes was delicious.  Why couldn’t we savor it?  Why were others always more necessary?  The meal was over too soon for my taste, but my mother placed her knife and fork down and said “just in time” as Jenny strode in the front door out of the blazing sunshine, wearing a black fur coat with her strawberry blond hair irradiated.  She presented Mom with a spring green watering can to take back to the “Home.”  The talk turned to collectibles and vintage clothes.  Jenny pulled up on her smartphone pictures of art-deco chairs bought up in Plattsburgh for her new apartment and a purple ladies’ Schwinn bike found at some abandoned clockworks on the road to Saratoga.  Like Mom, she has definite things she likes and collects.  I listened, thinking of our predilection for other peoples’ clothes.  Vintage.  “It’s always comments about clothes.”  I saw a forest of siblings dressed alike, but some grew taller and larger, clawing their way through the dark understory and vying for light.  We’re grown up, when will the competition end?  Not a shopper by nature, I sat there, marveling at their evident ability to buy things that they want.  No, that’s not quite right:  I envied their ability to want.

Through the visit, I felt as indrawn as the old people that drop their heads on their own chests and pull the wings of garments over their heads.  I’ve got to get out of this house, out of myself.  And I did get out.  On the day after Easter before the sleepers in the house awoke, I walked along the edge of Potter woods and down West Mountain Road to the church Mom and I drove past yesterday.  Made of concrete, stolid and simple, I noted that it seems to lack anything interesting or graceful.  But when I looked closer at the stained-glass windows, I was so surprised:  in the window glass were spring flowers!  Flowers instead of the usual saints, apostles and bearded churchmen.  I thought of the way flowers come up in waves:  crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, roses (much later).  Each kind has its season.  Do the daffodils come up envying the grape hyacinths?  Do they come up to make their presence known?  I don’t think so.  They abide gracefully whether anyone sees them or not, and most people tromp on the violets hidden down deep in grass busy growing.  Only poets listen when flowers whisper, and, look!, the artist who made this window created a monarch butterfly, flitting above the irises.  As I thought about the secret language of flowers, it’s the Shakespearean heroines, Ophelia and Perdita, who come into my mind.  Today I know why they chose to speak with flowers and not words.  Maddened by neglect and abandoned to loss, they couldn’t trust the currency of language, and what they had to say was too fresh, too dirty, too rooted. 

Back home in Flint, I wander through Macy’s with my daughter Katya.  Passing the perfume counter, I spray some Chanel No. 5 on my pulse points  It is one of Mom's favorites, and Katya leans in to smell me as if I’m a flower.  “Did you see the old bottle in Grandmom’s bedroom?  I found it when I was climbing over the piles.  Probably it had expired."  I tell her how I wish I’d taken it, and she replies, “I want you to have a scent that I identify only with you.  I don’t want you to smell like Grandmom.”