“It’s good, all right. I don’t know how to explain some things anymore, but I think it’s best it goes with the house, like the chickens and all the white furniture.”
My dad looks confused and says, “Why don’t you go find those chickens, Melissa?”
Mr. Bonner grins at me with his gray teeth and says, “Go out around the barn. That’s where they do their hanging out.”
I’m out in the field in no time. It’s hot, dry, and sweet smelling. The yellow grass brushes up over my ankles and I wish I hadn’t worn my flip-flops. I could run faster across the field in my blue Keds.
The little barn in the center of the field leans to one side. It looks more like an old fort, but inside are bales of dusty hay, burlap sacks, empty nesting boxes, and cobwebs everywhere. I reach my hand into one of the sacks and pull out a handful of cracked corn. It’s gritty and leaves a fine white powder on my palms. I think it must be the chicken food for sure, so I take a handful with me and walk around the other side of the barn. I hear cheep-cheeping sounds.
It’s even better than I imagined. Not just chickens, but fuzzy baby chicks all in a row following their mother hen. Then I see a big red-and-black rooster coming my way. His tail feathers look black but shimmer green in the sunlight. I throw my handful of corn, scattering it in a fan all around me. The mother hen scratches at the ground, and all her little buff-colored chicks copy her. More chickens, white and black, come toward me, and soon I am surrounded by a giant horseshoe of chickens.
It is the best place in the whole world. Suddenly I feel like the little barn is also a new house, like this is a place that I am going to spend a lot of time. A strong, good feeling leaps into my chest.
I run across the field, back toward the big yellow house. I see Jamie and Eden climbing in a different tree, a tall oak with spiky leaves. I see my dad and old Mr. Bonner coming outside.
“Dad, Dad! I found baby chicks!”
Mr. Bonner looks down at the ground and shifts some dirt around with his shoe. “That’s Mudder-Mudder,” he says. “She’s been here forever. Always has a flock of chicks following behind her. She’ll take care of anything that comes along too. Once she took a wild duck under her wing. She’s the best chicken here, and an Araucana, you know.”
“What’s an Araucana?” asks my dad.
“Lays colored eggs.”
I think he’s joking at first. There are such things as colored eggs? But he talks too seriously and slowly to be joking. He looks at me. “You take good care of Mudder-Mudder,” he says.
We spend the whole day exploring our new house.
There’s just one thing I’m not sure about. It’s the whole cow in the white freezer. I’m trying to think how a cow could fit inside a freezer. The more I think about it, the more worried I feel about it. I stand in front of the freezer, which definitely seems too small for a cow. I tell Jamie about what Mr. Bonner said. How he froze his wife’s pet cow and says he shouldn’t have.
Jamie says, “That man was weird. I say we keep that freezer shut forever.” I think that’s a good idea.
Then Jamie jumps up from the floor and says, “Let’s go find Mudder-Mudder and her chicks again.”
I am right behind him, taking big steps like him. “Isn’t this the greatest place we ever lived, Jamie?”
“I think it is. I think it is,” he says.
And when Jamie says something twice in a row like that, I always believe him.
NOW
cherished
The speckled hen dashes out the back entrance of my mom’s room and I push the heavy door closed behind her. This room is a mess. Orange plastic pill bottles, lip balm, and crumpled candy wrappers decorate my mother’s bedside table. The dogs sleep on the bed, constantly shedding dander and black fur onto the blankets. Damp towels are strewn about, and socks hang over the backs of chairs like bats.
I want to clean it up but I don’t feel like it’s my place to do it. I don’t want to offend my mom’s husband, who seems to be doing all he can to keep her comfortable. Throughout the day, he enters and exits the room frequently with little to say. It feels like we are in a theater production and he and my aunt are the stagehands responsible for rearranging the set pieces. I am the understudy who showed up just in time for the final show.
As I look at the things this room holds, my head starts to hurt. I rub my left temple and eyebrow. I’ve been prone to severe headaches since I was a young girl. They hit me without warning and can linger for days. The pain has intensified over the years, sometimes so much that I want to detach my head from my body. I’m well acquainted with the sharp, stabbing symptoms of an “ice pick headache” and the nausea that accompanies it. The migraine triggers are so varied that I’ve never been able to understand why they happen.
This time, though, I feel a wave of overwhelming anger bringing on the pressure in my head. My mom’s room is a knickknack shop filled with collected curios and crap. Up high in the window are colored bottles in blue, ruby red, and green. Netted glass balls from the sea, old slag-glass insulators, and a few tinted cordial glasses with delicate stems. A lavender Mason jar holds a hundred or so marbles—many of which she “borrowed” from my marble jar back at home on her occasional visits. The rickety bamboo shelf across from the bed is cluttered with an assortment of boxes and carved animal figures, as well as handfuls of jewelry, hair clips, and scattered Guatemalan worry dolls.
I sit looking at all of her treasures, searching for patterns and similarities between us. I don’t have to look far—the hoarding gene runs deep. Even my father has lost control over the sheer amount of stuff he owns. He doesn’t own a home anymore, but he pays rent on four buildings to house the antiques he buys and sells. He’s become a hoarder of rare and exquisite things. I’ve talked to him about this affliction but he’s stubborn. He knows that the “right buyer” will eventually come along and pay his price. Yet some of his pieces for sale have sat in the shop for more than twenty years. Sometimes I imagine him bent over like a contorted man, dragging every object and treasure he owns behind him. The parade of his possessions stretches for miles.
Likewise, my mother covets these “treasures” in her house. Why do I have the urge to smash every one? I want to take my arm and clear the shelves in a single swipe—hurl all her things out into the field where the spring grass will grow tall and hide them. Not one of these objects will keep her alive. Not one of them will take away the gnarled tumors from her liver—nor stop the ammonia from building up in her brain and destroying her brilliant mind.
What if I just did it? Smashed her beautiful things so that she could focus on what’s important during her last days on this earth. If I were bold enough to take such an uncharacteristic action, perhaps she’d wake up and pay attention. I won’t, though. I am still the silent, small girl hoping that my mother will come back.
And if I am honest with myself, I am a hypocrite. I too suffer this affliction of hanging on to things. I give value and meaning to ephemera and small objects. There are boxes of childhood treasures gingerly packed in our garage that I refuse to let go. A ball of tinfoil that a handsome boy threw at me in the seventh grade, a piece of driftwood named Elmo that I’ve held onto for thirty years, a collection of broken glass animals and earless horses. A set of seven metal jacks I used to play with. These are the things that I protected when my dad got into a huge financial mess. I despise this part of me that clings to the remnants of the past, and yet I often find myself holding on to them tightly.
In our yellow house, the antique I treasured most was the Good Fairy who lived up in my father’s room. She was a small Victorian statue that he brought home from the flea market one year and placed on the windowsill above his bed. A foot tall and made of smooth white metal, she stood on her tiptoes with her slender arms open and outstretched toward the sky. She was young like me, caught in a moment of undeniable joy. Beneath her feet were the words �
�The Good Fairy.” When I’d lie on my dad’s bed and stare up at her, I felt just like her—like I could reach out beyond the borders of our yellow house. Like I could become anybody I wanted to be.
Sometimes when I looked up at her, she would tell me stories. Stories about the sparrow king, the black crows, and the storms and wars that were fought in the sky. The Good Fairy was a sure thing. And in our yellow house, things that were certain were the best—like the gravel rocks that led me down the driveway and back home from school each day, like the blackberry thicket, the pink tea roses, the marble collection in my room, and the five-hundred-year-old Chinese mud man sitting on his lacquer pedestal.
My mother, my father, and I hold onto things—we give them meaning in a world we cannot control. I wish I could sit next to my mom and just appreciate the beauty of each item in this room. Yet right now my mother’s cherished objects feel untouchable to me. And though part of me feels an urgency to gather up as many pieces of her as I can before she leaves this world, I don’t know what I’ll do with these objects when she dies. Will they only remind me of her absence?
I remember that every year around Christmas, I waited and wondered when—and if—a present from her might arrive. It never did on Christmas Day or New Year’s. By mid-January I always had given up hope. Then one February a giant package landed on our front porch.
THEN
merry to melissa
It arrives on a Saturday. A big box covered in brown paper with a dozen colorful stamps in one corner. Seconds later, I’m bolting up the stairs to my dad’s room, skipping steps as I go.
“Dad, there’s a giant box on the porch, and I think it’s for us!” I yell.
He walks down the steps with me and eyes the package. “Looks like it’s from your mother.”
“Are you sure? Does it say her name on it somewhere?”
“Well, it’s definitely her writing,” he replies. “Maybe it’s Christmas gifts.”
I hold my breath, afraid to get too excited. I can’t recall a box with my mom’s handwriting ever arriving on our doorstep. “Oh, Dad, please can we open it now?”
“No, we need to wait for your brothers to get back home from the Conklins’ house or wherever they took off to,” he says as he lifts the box, sets it in the middle of the living-room floor, and hikes back up the attic stairs.
I sit down next to the package with a box of cheese crackers. I’m six and a half now and can read a little, but not when it’s that fancy, curvy writing like my mom’s. But I like the way it looks, thick black ink and all the letters wearing curly tails. I pull my knees up under my T-shirt and stretch it down under my toes.
With each square cracker I pop into my mouth, I think of what could be inside the box. My mind is wild with ideas: model horses, paint by numbers on velvet, cowgirl boots, a shiny lime-green purse, a stuffed white kitten made from real fur, a set of farm animals—so many possibilities! I finish the whole box of salty orange crackers, wondering if it could be an Easy-Bake Oven.
I lay my hands on the brown paper. I imagine my mom’s hands pulling the paper tightly around the box. I can see her red garnet snake ring with the tiny diamond eyes coiled around her finger. I remember her hands full of rings, but it’s her face I can’t see clearly now.
I run out to the porch when I hear my brothers’ voices in the yard.
“Jamie! Eden! Guess what? There’s a huge box that came in the mail, and Dad says it’s Christmas presents from Mom!”
“Since when does Mom send Christmas presents?” asks Jamie.
“She better have sent me a T-2 model rocket,” says Eden.
“Dad, Dad!” I yell as I motion them in. “We can open the presents now!”
My dad makes a slice down the center of the box with his pocketknife. Inside the box is another box wrapped in bright, shiny pink paper. He hands that box to me and two smaller boxes to Eden and Jamie.
“How come Melissa gets the biggest one?” yells Eden.
“Biggest doesn’t always mean the best,” replies my dad.
I run my fingertips across the slick pink paper. There are old-fashioned angel stickers on one side and my mom’s fancy writing on the other.
“What does it say, Dad?”
“Merry to Melissa,” he reads.
I study the letters. Yes, I can see how it says that now. “Merry to Melissa.”
I carefully tear the paper, saving the part with the angel stickers and the writing on it. The first thing I see inside the box are masses of yellow yarn. Grabbing onto the yarn, I pull out a tall and skinny handmade cloth doll. She is almost as tall as me, and I laugh. She has long yarn hair, two big, leather button eyes, and a smile embroidered in pink. She is as floppy as the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz when he first meets Dorothy, and her long legs are thin like broomsticks. I hold her up and laugh again because even her head is floppy. I don’t care—she’s from my mom.
“I think your mom must have made this for you,” my dad says, sounding unsure. “You ought to think of a name for her.”
I stare at her sunny face.
“How about Jennifer?” my dad says.
“No, I need to think about it,” I say.
I look over to see what my brothers got. Some kind of building-set things.
“What did Melissa get?” asks Jamie.
“Oh, some dumb old doll,” says Eden.
I’m not much of a doll person, but I like how big and floppy she is. I will introduce her to Bun-Bun, Monkey, and Bumble-Bear, and all the other animals in my room. I could even dress her in some of my clothes.
At school on Monday, I tell the most talkative girl in my class, Kat, about the doll that I got for a Christmas present from my mom. She asks me why my mom sent it in the mail instead of just putting it under the tree. I explain that I live with my dad and my brothers. “That’s weird,” she says. “Besides, Christmas happened two months ago, you know?”
Kat is a girl I want to be like. She is the smartest girl in class and talks a lot if she likes you. I try to think of something more to say. I want to be her friend.
“Her name is Merry,” I say.
“Oh, I have a doll named Merry too,” Kat says back.
“No. My mom, that’s her name. Her name is Merry.”
Kat just looks at me. I can tell she doesn’t want to talk to me. Then she turns and runs toward the monkey bars.
I decide that Merry is a good name for my doll.
After dinner, I tell my dad about the name. I tell him that I am going to name her Merry, the same as Mom, since she made her. He looks at me almost the same way Kat did before she ran off to the monkey bars.
I push my spoon through the top layer of stretchy skin on the butterscotch pudding we’re having for dessert. It’s my favorite part. “Do you think Merry is a good name for her?”
My dad stares at me and doesn’t say anything. He probably still thinks it should be Jennifer. Then he says, “Your mother’s name is not Merry.”
I have to think carefully. What is he talking about?
“Her name is Mikel. Your mom is Mikel,” he says.
“But Dad, it said from Merry. Her name is Merry.”
“No, it didn’t,” he says firmly. “Her name is Mikel.”
I go into my room, close the door, and pull out the square of pink paper. I study it again: “Merry to Melissa.” If that’s not her name, then what does it mean? I feel like she tried to trick me. Why does she do that mysterious writing anyway? Does she even know how to sew a doll?
I lie down on my bed alongside the doll named Merry and try hugging her. But she is too thin and there is nothing to hang on to. I think how easy it would be to rip off her black button eyes. But that’s not what I want. I just want to remember what my mom looks like. I can’t recall how long it’s been since her last visit when we got in the car accident and I had to get sti
tches and everything was ruined. I want to see her whole body at once, not just imagine her in pieces. I want to see her blue car and her blue eyes. I can see her long hair, but I can’t remember how it feels. She is disappearing, fading away line by line like the invisible ink Eden got on his birthday.
I think of ways to make her come back. I could punch my fist through one of the windowpanes next to my bed. The noise would be satisfying and loud, and my hand might bleed. She might come if I had to get stitches again. She might come even quicker if I were in a hospital.
I lay my head against my doll’s yellow yarn hair and pretend that it is my mom’s hair alongside my face. I think I can smell her coffee and cigarette smoke. I shut my eyes. We talk about our favorite flowers. My mom tells me she likes red roses and orange tiger lilies. I tell her that I like buttercups, daisies, pink roses, and blue forget-me-nots. Maybe she would come if she knew how much I love flowers.
THEN
all kinds of flowers
When I turn seven, my dad lets me drop handfuls of tiny brown seeds into the earth outside the big yellow house. The soil in our garden is dark, strong smelling, and full of pale worms. I love the gritty feel of the dirt between my fingers. I drop my seeds carefully, one by one, even though my dad says to scatter them more quickly. He reminds me that some of them will sprout, but not all. I cover them cautiously so as not to upset the particular arrangement of my seeds.
For as long as I can remember, our garden has always been a vegetable garden. Every summer we have rows of corn, cucumbers, zucchini, red lettuce, and pole beans. This year, I have begged my dad to put in some flowers other than the same old yellow marigolds that are only planted to distract the bugs. He finally agreed and let me pick out five packets of flower seeds from the gardening store. I chose Shasta daisies, snapdragons, zinnias, impatiens, and blue forget-me-nots.
“Dad, where can we plant the flowers?”
Pieces of My Mother Page 4
