ANTHONY D’ARIES
The Language of Men
CHRISTMAS MORNING, 1991. My father, my brother and I are on the couch watching Goodfellas. The smell of my mother’s pancakes drifts from the kitchen, down the hallway, over piles of crumpled wrapping paper and into the living room. I wear my stiff new baseball mitt, pounding oil into the palm, as Ray Liotta repeatedly bashes his gun into a young man’s face. My father laughs.
“Broad daylight, too. Jesus,” he says, sucking on a candy cane, the cellophane wrapper crinkling in his hand.
“Great scene,” Don says. He leans forward and adds another new CD to the stacks in front of him: Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Animals.
Ray Liotta walks back to his wife’s house, where she’s been standing in the doorway, watching him pistol-whip her disrespectful neighbor. He places the bloody gun in her hands and asks her if she’s okay, but she doesn’t answer and he doesn’t wait for a reply; his eyes are still locked on the man across the street. I mouth her interior monologue while tightening a leather knot on my glove.
“You guys want bacon?” my mother yells over the gunshots.
We look at each other as if silently electing a spokesman for the group.
“I don’t care,” my father says to me.
“I do,” Don says, not loud enough for my mother to hear.
“Well?” she yells.
“We all do, Mom!” I say.
I hear the bacon pop and sizzle in the frying pan. My father turns up the volume.
“I think this is De Niro’s best,” he says.
“No way,” Don says, “Taxi Driver.”
“You think?”
“Definitely.”
“Raging Bull,” I say.
“Pancakes are done!”
“You think so, bud?” my father asks me.
“Without a doubt.”
“Yeah, he’s a mean bastard in that one,” my father says.
“And he wasn’t in Taxi Driver?” Don says. “Come on.”
Big Italian men in white tank tops, suspenders with no shirts, stand around in tight groups. Loud body language punctuating hushed words. A secret code, a football team in a huddle.
“It’s getting cold, guys!”
One scene that always cracks us up is at Ray Liotta’s wedding. All of the wiseguys are dressed in fine suits, hair slicked back. The camera pans the reception hall showing dozens of conversations across the table: I took care of that thing. You talk to that guy? Forget about tonight, forget about it. Amidst these cryptic conversations, Joe Pesci’s mother is staring out at the dance floor, speaking to no one: Why don’t you get a nice girl like your friend. He’s married, he’s settling down now, and you’re still bouncing around from girl to girl. My father always laughs.
“Who’s she talking to?” he says. This white-haired woman reminds me of my paternal grandmother, who spent much of Christmas Eve fiddling with her hearing aid, gazing at her four loud sons laughing in the kitchen.
“That’s Scorsese’s mother in real life,” my father says.
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah, he gives her small parts in his movies sometimes.”
Finally, my mother comes into the living room, glances first at the tower of CDs in front of my brother, then at the television. “Come on, guys, it’s ready.” She waits in front of the large bay window, the sill lined with her ceramic Santa Claus collection. The tinsel she put on the tree sparkles like long drops of frozen rain, the red and green bubbler lights boil in their plastic tubes. Snow muffles the tires of passing cars. The wind swirls in tiny cold tornadoes on the front lawn and in the driveway. Some of the neighborhood kids are already outside, pulling shiny new sleds up the block, their mothers standing on porches sipping steaming cups of hot chocolate.
Joe Pesci’s head pops open like a party favor, misting the air with blood. The three of us let out a half groan, half cheer.
“Jesus,” my mother says, “why are they playing this on Christmas?”
“It’s a tape,” my father says.
She sighs. “Pancakes are ready.”
My father looks at me and grins. “So bring it over.”
“What?”
“Bring it ova’ here.”
“Don’t ova’ cook it,” I say, leaning back in my chair like De Niro, “you ova’ cook it it’s no good. Defeats its own purpose.”
“I never know what the hell you guys are talking about.”
My brother joins in. “It’s like a piece of charcoal, bring it ova’ here!”
We laugh as my father pauses the movie and heads into the kitchen.
“Raging Bull, Mom,” I say, picking a piece of crispy bacon from her plate.
If it wasn’t the TV, it was the radio. My father quizzed us on song lyrics, turning up the music in the middle of my mother’s sentences—wait, wait, hang on, Kathy—looking at me and my brother. An impromptu Name That Tune. He turned up the song with a grin on his face, as if he were the one who picked each song the DJ played. Most of the songs were written twenty, thirty years before I was born—Beatles, Rolling Stones, Otis Redding. My brother, seven years older than me, hijacked my father’s record collection when he was twelve; he had a slight advantage. But even at eight- or nine-years-old, I nailed “Love Me Do” after a few blasts of the harmonica, or listened to the melancholy trumpet give away “Try a Little Tenderness.” My father gently sang, oh, she may be weary . . . as my mother’s unfinished thought hung in the air like a struck piano key.
My father often quizzed me in the driveway while we washed his Monte Carlo. Soap suds clung to my forearm as I dug my hand into the bucket, then squeezed the big yellow sponge over the car, the water running down the hood in sheets. My mother knelt in her garden, silver shovel glinting in the sun. I watched the soapy water form black rivers on the driveway and flow out into the street.
“You paying attention, boy?” my father asked as I popped the soap bubbles in my hand. I looked up and nodded.
He walked into the garage and eased up the volume on the long silver radio. What sounded like a church choir poured out from the speakers.
“You got it?” he asked.
“I’ve never heard this song before in my life,” I said, wishing my brother was there to give me a hint. The choir sang on; my mind was blank.
“Donny, could you bring me that bag of topsoil?” my mother asked.
“Yes, you have,” my father said. “One second, Kath.” My father stood in the doorway of the garage, an unlit Winston clenched in his teeth.
My mother stood up and brushed the dirt from her knees, exhaling in a faint whistle like her tea kettle. Her sighs were her songs, the solos she sang softly in the kitchen, wrenching out the pots and pans jammed in the drawer beneath the stove, searching for that second sock in the wicker laundry basket, writing checks and stuffing them into envelopes on the kitchen table, carefully wrapping each Christmas present and signing each tag “Love, Santa.”
The song played on and I still had no clue. My father walked over to my mother’s garden and picked up a stone. He bent his knees, rolled the stone down the driveway, then looked at me with a big grin.
I laughed. “What?”
He did it again. “Come on, boy!”
My mother stretched her back and walked into the garage. She took off her flowered gardening gloves, gripped the twenty-pound bag of top soil, and started to drag it across the driveway. I heard her whisper, “Rolling Stones” and give the bag a sharp tug.
“Rolling Stones?” I asked.
“Yeah! Told ya you knew it.”
By the time Mick Jagger went into the chorus of You Can’t Always Get What You Want, my mother had dragged the bag of topsoil across the driveway and into her garden, a tiny stream of dirt belaying her path.
“Oh, Kath, I would have gotten that for you,” my father said.
“No, no,” she said, stretching, “it’s fine.”
In high school, I became obsessed with our home movies. Holidays, vacations, my old soccer or football games. I was fascinated with the past, often watching the footage my mother’s shaky hand had filmed that day the same night. Rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing.
I was especially curious about the events occurring just outside the scope of the camera’s lens, the elusive footage I could only hear. A conversation between two of my uncles. A neighbor’s lawn mower. Someone laughing. I wanted to see beyond the frame.
If there were footage of the Christmas morning we watched Goodfellas, I would want the camera to pan across our conversation in the living room, down the hallway, and into the kitchen, zoom in on my mother’s hands caked with pancake batter, cooking spray smoldering in the hot frying pan. As one batch of pancakes cooks, she mixes more batter, cracking an egg and carefully picking out slivers of brown shell that have dropped into the bowl. Gunshot after gunshot blasts from the living room. The camera’s microphone picks up her quiet sigh, and then her loud, unanswered questions about bacon. As if bored, the camera slowly pans back down the hallway, into the living room, past the bright tree and piles of presents, and across the mantel. Each of the stockings that my mother knit hangs full, bursting with candy and little toys, my father’s overflowing with shaving cream and razor blades and Old Spice. My mother’s stocking is empty.
From there, the camera lifts up through the roof of our house as if connected to a crane or a helicopter, lifting higher, higher. An aerial shot showing the other houses in our small Long Island suburb, each roof, each round pool almost identical—a panorama stretching all the way to the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Cold air fogs the lens, giant clouds engulf the shot. Beyond the boundaries of the frame, beyond what the camera can capture, the microphone picks up the sound of bubbling bacon and a woman’s unanswered song.
In January 2007, I visited my paternal grandmother at her apartment in Babylon, New York. I had written her a letter several months earlier, explaining that I was working on a book about my father’s experiences in the Vietnam War and asking if she’d be willing to answer some of my questions. “Sure,” she wrote back. No hesitation, no questions about why I wanted to know these things. She was eager to talk; I was eager to listen.
My mother and I walked down the concrete steps to the door of my grandmother’s basement apartment. She poked her head of white hair around the corner, cinched her robe at the neck, and shimmied down the hallway. She had that spry, frantic energy old women sometimes have, as if someone is always chasing them. She kissed me, pulled me inside, and locked the door.
Ushering us into the kitchen, she fiddled with her hearing aid, asking if we wanted something to eat, something to drink. She told us to sit, please sit, on the white vinyl chairs around the kitchen table. The cuckoo clock ticked above my head. I remembered that clock and those chairs from her kitchen at the farmhouse in Mattituck, where she cooked me pizza on an English muffin. I’d stand on a chair so I could reach the hands of the clock, wind them around and around until the bird popped out of his house. Or sometimes I’d just stop time and wait for her to notice. She never seemed to mind.
Once she settled at the table, she pulled a narrow piece of stationery out from the soft pocket of her robe. The stationery had a border of bright sunflowers which framed her neat script. Only three or four items on her shopping list of memories: Would I ever see him again? Come back safe and sound. Grandpa didn’t say much.
“All I remember . . .” she began. But very soon after telling me what she remembered about Vietnam—what she thought when they took my father to the airport, what she said to him, what my grandfather didn’t say—she somehow continued to talk for over an hour about the four bookkeeping jobs she had, how one of the jobs was above her beauty parlor and she’d run upstairs, her hair heavy with dye, to balance the books of an asphalt company. Then we were talking about her promiscuous old neighbor, the one who had affairs with the mailman, how my grandmother knocked on her door—What you do in there is your business, but I want my mail. After tearing open bills and flipping through circulars, she sat by the living room window, wondering when my grandfather would return from his nightshift as an airplane mechanic. Sometimes he didn’t come home.
I tried to steer the conversation back to Vietnam.
“Did you and Grandpa talk about the war after Dad left?”
“We never talked about anything,” she said. “He hardly said anything to me. Like your father.”
“Donny’s getting better,” my mother offered.
“Oh?”
It was quiet for a moment, and my grandmother let out a long sigh. I looked around her basement apartment, the worn-out recliner angled toward the television, the neat row of remote controls and magazines on the coffee table. In a skinny wooden box beside me was a clear folder containing a list of phone numbers. In case of death, call those checked.
She stared at her hands and then looked at me.
“You know, I was trying to remember if Grandpa ever said I love you.”
“He must have,” my mother said.
“I can’t remember then. That’s how few times he must have said it.”
It’s dark as we drive to my grandparents’ farm in Mattituck. I am ten years old, in the backseat, perfecting my ability to fake sleep. I’m getting good at it, determined to get better after I learn that it can help convince my mother I am too sick to go to school. I imagine my eyelids are a force field protecting my entire body, my groans and quiet murmurs letting them know just how deep asleep I am, lost in a dream even.
My father drives the Monte Carlo with one hand dangling over the steering wheel. His other hand scans the oldies stations, the real oldies stations, the ones below 95.9 on the dial. These stations are unknown territory for me, the real lovey songs—androgynous voices singing to the stars up above or begging the moon to cure their lovesick hearts. My father’s hand moves from the radio dial to the back of my mother’s neck. He hums, a minty toothpick in his mouth.
“You got this one?”
She hums, too. “Oh . . .” she says, “darn it.”
My father sings ahead a few lyrics.
My mother clicks her tongue on the back of her teeth. “Bobby Vinton.”
“Good one,” he says.
My eyes are open. I’ve forgotten about faking sleep but I’m still lying down in the back seat. Tractor trailers roar by on the opposite side of the freeway, their high beams draping us like a thin white sheet as I listen to my parents hum along to this unfamiliar song.
My father spoke his own language. A hillbilly twang of the Looney Tunes dialect—Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam—mixed with the African-American jive of the dirtiest comedians—Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy. He cut words in half, stressed whichever syllable he wanted, verbs became nouns and vice versa. He threw in song lyrics, movie quotes, even slogans from TV commercials. It all swirled together and all you could do was try to keep up.
“I don’t know where he got that pig language from,” my grandmother says.
“None of the other boys talk like that.”
He gave all of my mother’s sisters and my female cousins a flirty, construction-worker-on-a-coffee-break nickname: baby, suga’, sweets, momma, girl, honey. In his letters to my mother from Vietnam, written in his scratchy mish-mash of upper and lower case letters, he calls her “baby doll” and “baby,” and says “let’s not go spoiling this by telling Maddy,” Maddy being his fiancé at the time. He asks her if she can dig it; she’s gotta be jivin’ him; hold on, momma, I’m comin’ home soon.
He was perverted, but in a way in which no one in our family seemed to mind. He could pinch his sister-in-law’s ass or make a sly comment about the perkiness of her breasts and it didn’t seem to offend anyone. That was the reputation he established, the one we came to expect.
For Christmas one year he made a tee shirt for my cousin Shannon who was working as a stewardess at the time. She unwrapped his present with a suspicious look while my father threw up his hands proclaiming his innocence. She unfolded the tissue paper and read the front of the shirt while it was still in the box. Shaking her head, she held it up for all to see: Stewardesses Always Stay Face Down in the Cockpit.
“You know Dad,” my brother said, “total class all the way. When he sat me down for ‘the talk,’ he started telling me about how he got the clap from a Vietnamese prostitute and how bad it burned when he ran each morning, the sergeants yelling at him to move his ass.” My brother laughed. “He even told me how they’d do it for anything, a toaster, some food. I don’t know. I guess the talk worked, though. I never got the clap.”
When I interviewed my father about Vietnam, he twirled a silver dollar in his fingers and told me about how he met a girl—she was kind of like my girlfriend—and spent much of his time at her house, in her room, with her family in the next. Afterward, they served him phở, my father listening to their strange language as he gulped down large spoonfuls.
The girl—shit, I can’t think of her name—sat quietly beside him. Then, the girl’s father placed his hand on my father’s forearm, leaned over, and whispered: “Next time, you bring iron.”
Before his next visit, he used his GI discount to purchase an iron from the PX. Then he brought her a television. After that, a can of peaches. He walked to her village with his duffle bag slung over his shoulder like a camouflaged Santa Claus.
“It wasn’t love,” he said. “She took the shit I brought and gave it to her family.” The silver dollar froze in his fingertips, and, for the first time during the interview, he looked me square in the face. “After a while it was like: Who’s fucking who here?”
From my bedroom window, my eyes film a duet between my father and my mother. He is center stage, his blood-red ’67 Chevy pickup gleams in the driveway. She is in her garden across the front lawn. He kneels beside the front driver’s side tire. She kneels beside the thorny rose bush. He tightens a lug nut. She prunes a withered stem. He whispers to the shiny chrome wheel—breathy thoughts always ending with okay, okay. I see now. His words fog the chrome hubcap, seep into the truck, become fluid—course through the engine, change shape, color, drip out as antifreeze, run down the driveway, into the soil, into the roots of my mother’s flowers and bloom in her ear. She whispers into open petals like an old-fashioned telephone, her replies traveling back to my father, who hears them in the truck’s rumbling exhaust, feels them in the fender’s vibrations. This is how they communicate, I think. This is when they talk.
But I romanticize things. How many of their front-lawn conversations remain incomplete, their ambitious words burrowing through the soil but never making it to each other? How many whispers are still underground?
What would she say if she grabbed the microphone from us? She would sing an
a cappella song of nursing school, of wishes to care for the sick as she does her flowers, whispering healing words into the petal-thin skin of an old woman’s ear. She’d sing a song of desire, of need, a song devoid of sighs. She’d sing herself through the speech class that made her leave nursing school, the fear of speaking so powerful, so debilitating, that she can only now overcome it with song.
So telling are those red and green socks hanging from the mantel, the ones she knit, our names in white yarn stitched across the top. What did she feel stitching not Kathy but Mom on her stocking, her new name after the birth of my brother? Maybe it made it easier the first few years the stocking remained empty, those three letters still foreign enough to pretend they weren’t hers. But eventually it became her name. She had to claim that emptiness.
A few years ago, a thin white envelope appeared in my mother’s stocking. I didn’t put it there. Neither did my brother. Who did?
“Santa,” my father said.
My mother walked up to the crackling fireplace suspicious, saying my father shouldn’t have. She unhooked her stocking and the white envelope fell to the bottom. She reached in, past her elbow, and pulled out the envelope. Inside were a stack of scratch-off lottery tickets, each with holiday names: Jingle Cash, Ho-ho-hundreds, Green Christmas. My father flipped her his silver dollar.
“Make us rich, Kath.”
I watched my mother stare down at the lottery tickets. Her lips moved, but not with words. The coin scratched the paper like a phonograph needle. She inhaled deeply, blew off the layer of silver shavings and revealed her reward.
* * * from Refrigerator Mothers
Fall, 2010
JESSIE VAN EERDEN
A Good Day
love, how the hours accumulate. uncountable.
the trees grow tall, some people walk away
and diminish forever.
The damp pewter days slip around without warning
and we cross over one year and one year. —li-young lee
MORNING
My mother’s hands are older than she is, and as rough as the burrs she works loose from the dog’s fur. It is morning. A string of Christmas lights dangles from the doorframe in a lopsided U, her task interrupted by the dog’s collapse on the porch. Mom has made a straw bed in the barn and, over the past few days, has carried the dog to the bed, like an infant with legs and arms curled limp from a day’s play. Glossy black fur gone gray, rust-colored tufts around the teats. But the dog crawled back to the porch. Now Mom hurries to put a bucket of water beside the bed of straw in the barn and comes back to scoop up the dog, and it goes slack. Just dies right there in her arms, on the path midway between the house and barn door, liminal, on the path she’s worn into the ground carrying feed buckets and egg baskets and pails of cinders. She strokes the dead dog, snags a burr; she lays the furry body in the straw bed and tries to pet it back to life.
Nothing has ever died in her arms before. There was the calf stillborn in the pasture, but she watched from a window in the house. She recalls the Scripture, He breathed his last, and thinks, Now I know what that looks like. She’s not one to speak tenderly of animals, hollering often at the whitetail deer that munch her lettuce; she’s butchered hens with no remorse; she once shot a groundhog with a twelve-gauge. Even so. She has felt, freshly, death’s interruption, and now this dog has interrupted her hanging of the twinkle lights on a day with a dead wind. Her father-in-law C.S. has died, after she and Dad took him in for five months, after she became so sensitive to his movements that she would smooth the wrinkles from the rugs where he walked.
Death separates, Mom writes in her letter to my brothers and sisters and me that morning—it just seems like there’s been a good bit of it. And then, further down on the loose leaf: when the life breath goes out—absent from the body, present with the Lord.
It is morning where I am, too, several states west of her. I have hung my laundry and put on lotion, trying to trick my hands into not being like my mother’s. I’m thirty-one now, as old as she was when she birthed me. As yet, I am childless, birthing only manuscripts. I get going on my deskwork. This morning, I will write about her, about her days and the way they have shaped my own, these days that slip, however shaped, through our fingers.
She prefers the dawn. She wakes before five and tugs a ratty black sweater over her nightgown, reads the Bible, then dresses and pulls on her Tingley boots. She heads to the garden before the sun can burn off the fog, but she stops at the door, goes to the stove to start a letter on a paper scrap, just a paragraph before she remembers the hot sun rising and quits the letter mid-sentence for the door.
She takes walks down Wilson Hill and back, toting her prayer list of names: mostly those dying of cancer, but also my siblings and me and our crises; also the Albright foster sisters who were just split up; also the President and the War. But sometimes, in her rush of uphill movement, she just gives a bit of thanks with no room for anything else during the fifty-minute walk.
Some pray the hours; Mom prays the minutes—I am a little girl sticking my head out the back screen door; Aunt Kathy is on the phone and I holler for Mom, but she’s talking loudly to someone else, scraping the chicken manure off her Tingleys. Who are you talking to?—Just God—and how irritated she sounds, the conversation unfinished, or, perhaps, weighted on one side. She leaves off, mid-sentence, grabbing the receiver—Kathy?
Before his death, C.S. sleeps in the hospital bed in the living room. She still wakes early, reads Psalms at the table within earshot of his breathing. He is a small man-comma curved under the sheets, his oxygen machine a heavy whisper. With his presence in the house, she dresses in the bathroom and sees how very small her eyes are in the mirror, but they enlarge by and by; she picks up Dove soap for her face, cheap lipstick to rouge her cheeks.
C.S. dies, and that morning, she has a hair appointment—do I go? She doesn’t know.
And her hair—she touches it, apologizes always for its mess and its lack of shape, but then she threads her fingers through it with secret pleasure, for she’s never
wanted hair she could pick out of a catalogue. She thinks things are clearer when your hair that begs a dollop of styling gel, just as they’re clearer when you’ve got under twenty dollars in a checkbook and even less in a wallet but your jeans are nice and snug, line-dried, and the fall air chills your hands till they sting red with the work you have to do today. She throws herself full force into work, alongside Dad: burning brush, covering the chicken house windows with plastic for the winter, liming the garden, ousting the new potatoes. But doing the work is not for the purpose of arriving, finished, ready for a prize and a rose-pinning. It’s immersion. It’s work that’s meant to create a place inside the day for others to come into—come evening—to sit. And that evening light, radiating from the hues of the work itself, will slant onto the porch where the others will sit, and their faces will glow pink and gorgeous.
A day, a life, is not a means to an end. What do I think is urgent for her today? That we do not, will not, die alone.
I get up from my desk and fiddle with the coffee grinder till it cooperates. It is necessary for me, Thomas Merton says to me from the note card taped to my wall, to see the first point of light which begins to be dawn. It is necessary to be present alone at the resurrection of Day, in the blank silence when the sun appears. In this completely neutral instant I receive from the Eastern woods, the tall oaks, the one word ‘DAY,’ which is never the same. It is never spoken in any known language.
The morning light in here ignites the sill so that even the upturned Japanese beetle carcasses look radiant. As the days slip past, how are we to know if they are good days? How to know a path, my own path, like my mother’s between the back screen door and the barn, etched by her years of footfalls into the parted fescue?
NOON
Mom naps a noon hour of my girlhood—what a rarity—and I lie with her on the bed. I’m lucky to be beside her with no dad around, no older siblings. I see her with her glasses off: a pretty, naked face with lipstick on her lips, her cheeks and chin dabbed with the tip of the same tube of lipstick that she has rubbed in as rouge. She will not spend the money for the compact with a mirror, icing-pink blush with a soft cosmetic brush. Wet with sweat, her short brown curls sweep up from her forehead and don’t pester her. I realize, maybe for the first time, that she is separate from me, a woman much more powerful and more fragile than I can comprehend. Her eyes are not scrunched, as they sometimes are, with her suspicions so various: suspicion of “implants,” the back-to-the-earth hippies who move to rural West Virginia with, she thinks, some sort of agenda; suspicion of any agenda, of crisp computer-printed bulletins in churches with their Order of Worship; suspicion of the false note in a sermon when the preacher’s voice goes shrill then soft, like a fickle radio station, and of the common-law marriage, of versions of the Bible newer than the King James, of any woman preacher, of religious robes, symbolic icons, feminists, sad foreign films and their tedious subtitles, of self-help books, prayer manuals. Of any claims that have no clout for her once the morning fog burns off and what’s left is the day’s work.
On the bed, her eyes stay open wide somehow, though her lids are closed like pale, veiny curtains. She must see in her dreams a vision of fire, or of a workless day, or of the dress she lost in a basement flood, her wedding dress with a wide-brimmed hat to match.
Then it is autumn, after twenty autumns have passed; it’s a warm spell, so one afternoon she takes her ironing board out to the porch since C.S. likes to sit out there in an easy chair. She plugs the iron into a long extension cord and progresses from simple pillowcases to jeans to blouses with tricky pleats. Nasturtiums trail from her hanging baskets to the porch floor. The hen that escapes the coop each day, with little reprimand, perches on the arm of the porch swing while C.S. chatters like a magpie about his days as county sheriff and about what he’d like for supper. She forgets that the pink blouse she irons will one day dissolve to dust—or else she lives so completely in that knowledge that it makes her love the blouse all the more. What makes us love something? Its finitude? Our blithe, present forgetfulness?
Mom irons till dusk. It is one of those days when a person is in love with her life because she is still getting to know it—she later cleans up his diarrhea that gets all over the piano bench and bed sheets and living room floor—and she’s still getting to know it.
At my desk, it is almost three p.m. now, a terribly beautiful three p.m., and I wish it were raining. Then, suddenly, with a humid swell, it is. The rain starts, and, like a fool, I leave my laundry hanging; I keep writing. For the rain slows me. It gives permission for more deskwork.
My mother, too, though she propels herself always, forward flung and forceful (she shoots the moon in cards, always overbids her hand—bids three on the Ace of Spades alone—overapologizes, overbudgets a trip, overdoes the spread of pork chops and a batch of rolls on the table; underspends only on her underwear and shoes), she loves the rain. When it rains, there is pause, the catching of breath, the permission of the hard sure bullets on the tin roof. Permission for her letters. She pulls out the letter that she began in the morning, before the day’s work, and she resumes.
Since we, her kids, have left home, Mom handwrites us a letter sometimes twice a week, depending on the volume of news, a letter being borne out of the sensation that life is too voluminous to be embodied by anything more than flyaway stretches of news. She writes them longhand on loose leaf, then drives to town to make photocopies at ten cents per page at the library, then mails them off in envelopes covered in stickers: an oval sticker with lilies and Behold the beauty of the Lord, or a sticker of a squirrel hanging up each of the letters in HELLO THERE on a laundry line.
Her letters do feel like embodiment—both hers and ours. Her letters bear her body, an incarnation of her and her voice and the things her hands have touched today; and her letters bear our bodies, or at least our faces as they’re conjured in her mind as she writes. She writes the mundane and the revelation; she writes whether it’s beef roast or beans, whether it’s the cripple’s faith or the apostle’s that really brought healing in the Book of Acts; she reports on C.S.’s health and sketches the layout for this spring’s garden (where the sweet corn and pumpkins will go, the tomatoes and pole beans, and the perimeter of marigolds and zinnias). She writes of how the yellow colt’s feet are popping up along the ditch and how the world is glowing there and she wishes we were there to see it, too. She wishes we were there.
October 31, she writes in an update, did ten loads of clothes (electric had been off a week), hung eight out. November 2: Finished the ironing—a coon tried to get in the chicken house—tore one chicken’s leg off before your dad could get out there to shoot it—weighed every bit twenty pounds! Have separated the chicken out—using Vicks, Porters and Bag Balm—name: Henrietta Mae.
In the next line: I’m taking a lot of comfort in Acts 17:26-28. I’m thinking everyone is where they are for good reason and the main one being so that you all would seek God’s face even more. The truth is: He truly is not far from each one of us and it really is that ‘in Him we live and move and have our being.’
Sometimes she gets preachy, or plagued with self-doubt, or, most often, both at once. Sometimes she falls asleep as she writes and leaves a smudge of ink, a word half-dream.
In her weaker moments, she begs us to move back home, clinging to the image of each of our houses sprouting up from the ground all around her like barley. But when she’s stronger, the letters themselves seem to suffice. The letters say with confidence: your day, however spent, is now joined to mine, and it has been a good day.
On the loose leaf from Dollar General, her letters often begin with Well— as though we’d just spoken a moment ago, as though she’s starting the day alongside us and the present tense of the letter is fused with the present of the reading.
Dear All, she begins on November 20, Saturday, Well, I had this revelation from the Lord and even though I kind of choked on it, I feel like I have to let you fellas know about it.
Another begins: Well, yesterday was a very sad day.
Another: Well, we have around six inches of snow.
Well, it seems like I can’t get all my thoughts together and at the same time make the trek to town.
Well, Ashley is 17 years old today!
These letters are her closest thing to a diary. But, for her, a letter is not a record; it is a speaking. A voice without recorder. She tells us not to keep them; they’ll clutter; just put them in the recycling, she says, or use the backs of them for scrap paper, and sometimes I do. But usually I keep her letters. (I have them spread out, now, on my desk.) I keep them in order, I archive; I keep notes on how she makes her meaning, notes which I’ll be ever comparing with my own. For she lives the length of the day while I often feel that I flit, a moth in the world; Mom emanates light, a wick soaked long in kerosene. I cannot help but keep her letters in a folder that documents her winter, details how she cares for C.S., my granddad, her letter, in its saying, a tiny history of her grief and her joy—entrusted to me.
To her, the letters are simply a way to draw our faces into her circle of light. In truth, her photocopied print-cursive hybrid, can halt my hands from writing manuscripts. Implicit in her letter is the wonderful, dreadful news: I could burn this letter today—and this essay—and be ash with its ash.
When C.S. dies and the sympathy cards come in, she loves each of them and tears off their lovely sentimental covers, writes on their undersides and sends them as postcards.
Her letters do not simply blur her present with my present; they blur time with time, the temporal with the eternal. Beloved, she reminds me from a New Testament epistle, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
Mom is aging. I notice it the way you notice the sky getting darker earlier in September. I want to be able to let her age, which means I want to let myself age. She’s sixty-two, and I thirty-one. She does not long for her younger self; she is okay with aging, since she believes in resurrection, not as much in heaven’s gates as in an eternity that already grows green and firm like pith inside her aging body. When the time comes to go, she’ll simply slip into a new body, still carrying on the same conversation. She’ll keep going for fifty-minute walks, her litanies strewn all the way down Wilson Hill and back.
Well, she begins on October 26th, one more page and hopefully I’ll send this out tomorrow.
My laundry is soaked through now, bending the clothesline toward the ground with weight, that gravity and rain.
She’s dying, my mother, but so am I. Not soon, but soon. This day will bear fruit, and that fruit will be the death of us, a good death. What makes a day good? Perhaps a good day is a good full death. I hear her insist: You will not die alone. Is that possible—to not be alone in death? Is that what makes a death good? That it be attended? Is what makes for a good death the accumulation of good days? But, again, what makes for a good day? It is sometimes for me: I wrote something true. A good day looms larger than Time, yet a day is so small, perhaps too small a unit to measure and too meager a handful of coinage to squander.
I think of Socrates in his last hours, all the women shooed from his room, for they would surely make a fuss while he practiced his earnest dying, drinking his hemlock to die the best death. And often we say it is a good death if bloodless, hardly noticed, dying in your sleep with no faces hovering, no last rites or final words, no disturbance. But, for my mother—one day she is swimming all afternoon in the Atlantic; too self-conscious for a bathing suit, she learns from my sister how to get changed from her blouse into a tank top, on a public beach, wondering, amazed, in what context her daughter has learned this skill of changing in public—and it’s nothing but her and the water’s surface and then, deep beneath, long colorless tusks of life growing upward toward light—miles through water, her flippering legs. She loves, loves to disturb the waters, to slice through with her body, all the while her hospice-heart, her hospice-lips moving with the words of the sick and the dying—catheter, IV, Lacex, colostomy, dressing and undressing and dressing the wounds. In her house, death will not be shut away quietly in a closet. There she is, thrusting between the great shafts of light, among the reefs, troubling the ocean waters. Death is with us, rending us, binding us, and she is with the dying, midway on the path, liminal, a steward of their deaths, a midwife even—can that be possible? To midwife the dead? For C.S., she wipes the celery-seed dressing from his cracked lips; she hears his confessions; and even now her own father’s lungs filling with blood, her own mother falling back from the flowerbed to shatter her wrist, the diabetic neighbor losing toes and limbs pinched off by kidneys failing on dialysis—her face is there, the moon rising above the other’s face that is the moon’s reflection.
NIGHT
It’s true she makes the day last long, likes to lengthen and slow it and put off the night, but love of life and fear of death—they are not the same thing.
The Bible is all she reads—with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day—but I know of a few exceptions that she brings out at night, such as a few Christian romances; such as her novel she is sometimes writing, hidden in a garbage bag in the closet, the narrative taking place over one single week, the days elongated as though the project itself might slow time with its particulars; such as Harriet Arnow’s novel from the Fifties, The Dollmaker (though not Jane Fonda’s feminist film adaptation). Mom doesn’t own Arnow’s book, just keeps checking it out of the library in town, and their only copy is a large-print edition. That last chapter, she reads in bed:
Clovis, having moved his family from Kentucky to Detroit for factory work, is on strike, the children know better than to ask for more milk, and Gertie gets an order for fifty-dollars worth of wooden dolls for a church Christmas bazaar. She needs good wood and has a block of the best cherry that she’s been carving in their dank apartment, letting the shavings snow down to the floor late into the night. Out of the block she’s carved a man with an empty uplifted hand, a head but no face. She takes her boy Amos, pulls her statue in the boy’s wagon to the wood lot, asks the scrap-wood man to saw the statue into boards for the dolls she’s to whittle. The head of the statue must be split apart with an ax first, and the man can’t do it, knowing the soul she’s put into her carving, so she does it herself—and either she or the wood lets out a yelp as the ax splits the blank face right off the head of the carved figure. The scrap-wood man rubs his hand over the blank face and says to Gertie that she meant it to be Christ, didn’t she? But she could find no face? Gertie shakes her head, no, so many faces would have done fine, millions fine enough for him, the faces of neighbors in the alley, any would have done.
It’s the large-print edition, huge, a tent over her as she reads in bed till her forearms ache, or till it bends down to rest on her head and Dad gently takes it from her hands.
They sleep beside C.S.’s hospital bed in the living room, on the sofa bed. Mom often wakes while C.S. and Dad sleep, as she did when we kids all slept in the house and she rose to tend the beans in the pressure canner that rattled with jittery gunvan shots. Then, the coming of daybreak never occurred for her alone. Watching the day come was like letting a face come clear, closer and closer, always a face with a signature square jaw or hazel eyes or dry lips moving with breath.
It’s a beautiful October when C.S. dies. Mom wants to sleep on the sofa bed one more night, by his empty hospital bed. Dad doesn’t understand, but says okay and holds her. “It’s just for tonight,” she says. “Let the oxygen machine run, just for tonight.”
Writing into the night, I’ve drunk half a Killian’s Red, and so much has happened—time is that vast—much good and much bad. (I know she does not like me drinking.) My friend Kevin has emailed that he’s found the poverty harsher in his travels in Cambodia than he has anywhere—Pakistan, Burma. Young women in dirty camisoles proposition him and seem to sprout on the arms of men all over the city. This happened during my swallow: a woman has wrung her hands while a man whom she does not know and who doesn’t ask her name unbuckles his belt. And my mother has wiped celery-seed dressing from C.S.’s chin after supper and has heard the confessional flutters of his dreams. Someone has lit a lamp; someone has burned like a wick; I have put the bottle to my lips and heard a skunk and her babies rustle outside in the trash bins, and have kept writing.
We’re different, Mom and I. But not so different. The difference lies in the work we’ve chosen. She stows food in canning jars, bathes the ailing. I stow words in files and those files on a hard drive, and I go untouched by hands for many hours at a time.
But my laundry hangs black-wet on the line tonight, and I’m a girl with my sister on a summer night when the day has been long, the length of the burn of the small brushfire by the barn. The loose walnut leaves, which have batted smoke toward the wet cotton of the sheets, have stilled. And, as though reading their stillness like a sign, my mother says she is too tired to take in the sheets from the line, so we leave them to hang overnight. We sleep on our cool bare mattresses then, mine next to my sister’s, covered over top with some sheets from the closet, untucked. It is the gift of something temporary, a night without a made-up bed, a result of not having strength to finish a task. I wrap the closet-sheet around me, because, if I don’t, I might slip off the bed, into the dark. We’ve burnt some brush and trash, and we’ve shelled some of the walnuts, and we’ve half-done the laundry—what work has made of us today is finally allowed to be laid down, cooled and (as we imagined) beautiful. We smell only the old sheets that cover us—blue once, and, I remember now, dotted with tiny flowers—they smell of musty waiting. While our other sheets sleep pinned up outside and break the stillness only once to flap, as if to tell us something through the window screen. Downstairs, Mom finishes with her bath, the powdery scent of her Jean Naté coming close, the porch light switched off. I sleep with the brief world touching my cheek.
You see, they are ghosts, these bed sheets on the line, the ghosts of us, hailing our deaths, our brevity. We rest. We are the same.
I sometimes fear that I’ll make no mark or I’ll miss the vital thing, or my apartment will be torched and I’ll become ash with its ash. The thought of dying, not soon, but soon. Mom lives with no thought to permanence, but not because she thinks she’ll live forever—there’s no denying the lungs full of fluid and the neighbor’s toes then limbs lost one by one to diabetes. I know (and she knows) that she will cling as everyone clings, with a startled look or a But— on her lips, when she dies. Even so: to be, to love, to work, to set down a bucket and run. Well— and so on goes her conversation with the world.
And in the midst of her thick humid days, she is hot and malleable as iron in the fire—ever changing, running out of the bathroom with her hair half-combed, half-dried upside-down by the wall-heater, squinting without her glasses—Two things, she writes on her loose leaf, her face glowing from either the revelation or the heat from the heater. Number one: don’t let anything rob you of your joy, and, number two, I’m really sorry for pestering you kids to come home. I will try to do better.
And in the midst of her brittle autumn days, she breathes, exhales the name of God, YHWH, with voiceless breath—that name derived from the Hebrew verb to be. YHWH is her I AM, the One who is, the eternal present, pulsing and grinding forward. YHWH is the clutching of the dog gone slack in hands made old and rough by wash water. YHWH made strange with the familiar strangeness of a porch light, Tingley boots, and a nightgown draped with a black sweater. She slips inside the name of God, hushed by the pulse. And inside the name of God, it’s as if we live a thousand years in a day—the day itself an ancient thing. Perhaps we do it without knowing it, the way the weaver of a thousand rugs knows only the reds and blues of this rug she weaves, though her hands ache with the thousands. And the way, for Mom, there is the face right before her, etched with pain or with bruised sleep. There is no other.
It’s getting so late and I could burn this, and be ash with its ash. And I might do it, too, or I might send it to Mom who will read it standing by the stove with her lipstick-rouged face and tank top dirty with garden soil and, over top of it, my fifth-grade jean jacket she can still wear, sleeves rolled up, and she will call me and say that my work is good, except there’s too much of her in it. Except that she didn’t know someone was watching her.
This essay is the kind of thing you do when you’re old and eulogizing, and we’re both but neither of us old, Mom and I.
Very late at night, her rough hands are made smooth as she lotions C.S.’s arms, Lubriderm always, making both their ancient skins, finally, child-supple. She has smeared Porters Ointment on the sore of the isolated one-legged chicken, has put its food and water out in cottage cheese containers. She listens, unable to sleep as the moon rises then fades, to a sermon tape from the Bible Believer’s Commentary. It’s a tiny-voiced woman named Edith tracing the Lamb of God throughout the Scriptures. Mom is sleepless over the way the Lamb will come back, with the new worlds, the new heaven and the new earth—what the form, what the voice, what the day—the last day, the day of the Lord. And she’s ardent that the last day is this day, for they blur. What the face but this face?
I have stayed up all night writing. And now it is dawn, again.
—Jessie van Eerden teaches at the Oregon Extension in Ashland, R. Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, The Oxford American, and other publications.