Pieces of My Mother

by Melissa Cistaro

  Regardless of what my father believed, Jamie had a gift. Once I asked him if he ever wanted to go to art school. He shrugged and said, “I don’t want to go to any kind of stupid school. I just like to draw.”

  As bizarre as some of his drawings were, something pulled me toward them and made me want to touch them. I kept a collection of Jamie’s drawings hidden in my room. I’d find them crumpled up in the wastebasket and would smooth them flat and save them. I’d study them sometimes when I was alone because I was convinced there was a secret about Jamie hidden in his drawings. Between the dark ink lines and the scales of fish, there were stories he was trying to tell.

  I’m worried about my brother. Beneath all his tattoos, I see the lost little boy he became so early in his life. I see the self-doubt he faces every day and the demons he wrestles endlessly.

  Jamie is like me. Our early memories are as vivid and detailed as the lines on our palms. We both know how to don a beaming smile and say everything is okay, when we really mean “Everything is shit.”

  I called him before I flew here to Olympia. He said there was no way he could leave his family or afford a plane ticket from Hawaii, where he lives now painting houses. But clearly he also couldn’t handle seeing her so sick. As a kid, Jamie used to say that when Mom got old and gray, he was going to be the one to take care of her. I think he really wanted that. But he’s having a hard time taking care of himself right now. Halfway through our phone conversation, I heard an odd raspy noise that sounded like the deep inhalation someone makes when smoking marijuana.

  “Are you smoking a joint or something?” I asked him.

  Then I realized he’s not smoking, he’s sobbing.

  I felt foolish for asking such an insensitive question. I know exactly what he’s feeling as he attempts to hold it all in. All the grief and guilt over what is happening, and our utter lack of control over it. “I’m so sorry, Jamie.”

  “Why does she have to die?” he asked. The simplicity and childlike quality of his question stunned me.

  “I don’t know, Jamie. But it’s all going to be okay,” I lied.

  Sitting here looking at my brother’s drawing for my mom, I begin to cry. Not for Mom, but for Jamie’s loss. He is the artist and the fisherman. He is my brother who could fall apart any day, my brother who always believed that he was the reason our mother left. There is no word, no bandage big enough for the size of his wound.

  • • •

  A photograph falls out of the second folder I’ve pulled from my mom’s filing cabinet. I’ve seen this picture before. It’s my mom in the West Indies. She’s all of twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Several more photographs show her smiling in a blue swimsuit. The light in these photographs has a dreamlike quality—washed out, blue green, and slightly overexposed, making them seem like they are from some other part of the world where the light reflects off the ocean differently. In one of the photographs, a chocolate-skinned woman is standing next to Mom, holding a tray topped with a drink that has a pink umbrella sticking out over the rim.

  I recognize this photo because my mother had it out during one of my visits a little over a year ago. I inquired about it because I couldn’t comprehend how she had ended up in the West Indies, of all places, when she had three small children at home. When she was on her second glass of wine, I felt bold enough to ask her. Even though her health was starting to fail, I didn’t try to stop her from drinking because I wanted the straight story, unblemished and from her mouth.

  “My parents sent me there,” she said.

  “For how long?”

  “A month.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they didn’t know what else to do, I guess. They were worried that I was going to have some kind of breakdown.”

  I didn’t say anything, sensing that I have caught her in a rare moment of revealing something about herself.

  “They sent me to this very upscale resort so that I could have some time to think and figure out what I was going to do with myself. I was not well. I was having a hard time being a decent wife and a mother, and I needed to get away.”

  She walked to the stove and clicked the burner until it lit up with a blue and orange flame. Then she held a cigarette against the fire ’til it caught and lifted it to her lips.

  “So my parents came up with this ludicrous plan. My father dragged me down to a New York lawyer—a real stuffed shirt—and told me what was going to happen. After a week of being at the resort, the lawyer said all I needed to do was write a letter to your dad, begging him to come get me off the island. If I wrote a letter and your dad refused to come get me—which the lawyer assured me that your dad would do, since he had his job and you three kids to take care of—that could stand as grounds for me to divorce him and get custody of you kids.”

  She stopped talking like she was suddenly caught back in that moment.

  “It was god-awful sitting in that office wedged between my father and that slick lawyer. He looked at me like I was white trash and told me I was lucky because he would sort it all out for me.”

  “But you ended up staying at the resort for a month, right? Dad never came to get you?”

  “That’s right.”

  I was trying to imagine my mom there, lonely in her blue swimsuit, weighing all her choices. “So what did you do there all that time?”

  “I partied.”

  “You what?”

  “I partied,” she confirmed.

  I don’t know why her answer startled me, but it did. I wanted a different explanation, even if it was a lie. I wanted her to say that she thought about us the whole time or that it was one of the most difficult periods of her life. I wanted her to sit down on that kitchen chair and tell me for once that she was sorry for what happened.

  “I’m tired, darlin’—I gotta head to bed,” she said, throwing back the last sip of wine.

  But I have one more question. “What about the letter? Did you ever send the letter to Dad?”

  “No, I just couldn’t do it. It was all so ridiculous.” She shrugged.

  I watched her sway out of the room.

  And that’s when I understood the layers beneath her words. She didn’t send the letter because it would have meant she was committed to coming back to us. And she wasn’t. She needed the vacation but she didn’t want custody of us.

  The photograph of my mom in the West Indies looks different now that I take a second look at it. The ocean light is dirty, and my mom’s smile and the drink with the pink umbrella are both empty. There is a quiet hum inside me, a familiar feeling of standing alone in a house and waiting for someone or something to walk back through the door.

  THEN

  terry, our ninth live-in

  We’ve gone through at least eight live-ins since our mom left. They come and go like stray cats that show up on the porch of our yellow house and then move on. Sometimes they say we are more like wild animals than children. Jamie and Eden are often sent home from school—when they aren’t ditching. There are broken bones, burned skin, fistfights, and fires to contend with while looking after us.

  Right now, we have Terry. She’s our ninth. She tells me ghost stories. Not the make-believe kind, but the true kind—stories of her real-life personal encounters with ghosts. She said that she felt the presence of a ghost in our house the first time she stepped into my dad’s attic bedroom, but she took the job as a live-in anyway because she sensed that it was a good spirit. I like the idea of good spirit living in our house.

  Terry is a grandma type who dyes her hair bright orange and layers her whole face with powder as thick and white as the Duncan Hines cake mix we used to eat beneath our old house. She’s got eyes that crinkle up when she smiles, and she smells like roses.

  One day, she sits me down at the dining-room table with a handful of pretzels and says, “Honey, you need to know the truth a
bout ghosts.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  She raises her red eyebrows to the top of her forehead, stares into my eyes, and tells me the true story about the time she came home to find a lit cigarette smoking itself over her bed.

  “There it was, puffing and smoking and waving up and down without a person attached to it. I knew right away that my mother was smoking that cigarette. It had a tiny stain of Coral Reef right on the tip, and that was her lipstick. She wore that coral even though it was too much orange for her pale skin. You see, she had been denied cigarettes during the last days of her life while lying on her deathbed. You’ve got to understand something about spirits, my dear Melissa. They show up to tell you things. And my mother was telling me that she would not be denied her smokes, even in the afterlife. So there she rested on my own bed that day, smoking the life right out of that cigarette.”

  I lick all the sandy salt off the last pretzel.

  “God bless her, she was stubborn,” Terry continues. “I never touched one of those deadly sticks, and I’ll tell you something else. I’m going straight to heaven because I have seen enough ghosts in my life and I don’t want to end up in their gang.”

  When Terry stops talking, I don’t ask her what happened next. I think for a long time about that cigarette floating in the air with its lipstick tip.

  A few days later, Terry takes me with her to do our grocery shopping. I count stop signs as we drive and wonder if she’s going to let me pick out a root beer at the market. I am still embarrassed about peeing in the back of our station wagon on the last trip to the Mayfair market. I kept saying I had to go, but Jamie and Eden were fighting and yelling so much that Terry couldn’t hear me.

  We pass stop sign number four, and Terry suddenly hits the brakes hard and pulls over to the side of the road. The wagon swerves back and forth, tossing me against the door.

  “My God, did you see that!” she exclaims. She makes a U-turn in the middle of Novato Boulevard and pulls into the dusty corner lot where the town nativity scene is set up every Christmas. Today, a dozen paintings in fancy frames are propped up against wood crates.

  “Would you look at that,” she says, transfixed. She stares out the window at a painting directly in front of us. The dust around the car clears, revealing a large oil painting of an ocean sunset with turquoise waves and an orange sky.

  “That is beauty on a canvas,” she says slowly. “It’s the most truthful thing I have seen in a long time.”

  “That?” I ask.

  “Yes, that,” she says.

  “It’s nice,” I say to be polite.

  She jumps out of the car, walks over to the painting, and stands there with her orange hair waving in the wind and blending into the painted sunset. A man in a wide-brimmed straw hat steps out of an old green pickup truck and approaches her. He seems to be trying to make eye contact with her, but her eyes do not leave the painting. I stay in the front seat, sticking my finger into the old yellow foam beneath the cracked leather, and I think, I don’t get it. It’s a picture of waves. I look for an answer in the other paintings. More waves and beaches. More orange sunsets.

  She hurries back to the car and wiggles into the seat behind the steering wheel.

  “I’ve got to have that painting. We’re skipping the grocery store, sweetie. I’ve got to see what I have left in my bank account.”

  “Does it cost a lot?” I ask.

  “The artist will give me a good price if I have cash.”

  Then I see the desperation in her face, her mind calculating and wondering how she can get the money. I’ve seen my dad with this look when he’s talking about the bills he can’t pay. I figure the painting must cost more than a hundred dollars. Maybe a thousand.

  “Have you ever seen such beauty, sweetie pie? Such godliness?”

  I turn my head to her. The powder on her cheeks has turned thick and pasty from the tears running down her face.

  “It’s very nice,” I say, afraid to admit I don’t understand what she’s talking about.

  “I think that’s what heaven must look like. I’m almost certain of it,” she says as if she is talking to herself.

  Terry emptied out her savings from the bank to buy that painting. She brought it back to our house wrapped in brown paper and placed it safely on the floor behind her bed board.

  Two weeks later she dropped the news just like all the others had. I wasn’t that surprised because she had been acting different ever since the day of the painting. She didn’t have time to tell any ghost stories, and she seemed to be in hurry about everything. She told my dad that she’d found an apartment across town to live in on her own. My dad offered to pay her more money but she said it wasn’t about the money.

  “Is it something to do with the painting?” I asked her before she left.

  She smiled at me with her crinkly eyes and said, “It’s sort of about that painting, sweetie.”

  I waited for her to say something more but she didn’t.

  The painting of the ocean put a spell on her, and I couldn’t understand why. How could a stupid painting change someone’s mind about living with us? I tried to tell my dad about this but he didn’t get it. He said that maybe Terry just needed her own space and that it was a lot of work for someone her age to take care of three kids all day.

  My dad is looking for a live-in that can stick around a little longer this time. He’s got a classified ad in the Novato Advance that comes out on Saturday. I ask him when Mom can come back to visit. My dad replies that he hasn’t been able to reach her and that maybe she has moved to a new house again.

  I keep trying to picture the places she lives. Sometimes I think I can see her sitting at a sunny kitchen table where she drinks coffee with cream and sugar. The curtains behind her are yellow with tiny white flowers, and her ashtray is a ruby-colored glass heart. My imagination is all I have. It’s okay, I tell myself. Maybe she will call soon. Maybe she will come and be our new live-in.

  NOW

  into the wild, blue yonder

  From afar, my mom was aware of the ever-changing hands in our house. But she never indicated if it bothered her. The idea of that is unfathomable to me; I can’t imagine someone else raising my children. When Dominic and Bella were younger we’d frequent the local parks. They loved digging in the sand, climbing the giant spider, and swinging from the monkey bars. But the park was one of the most lonely and isolating outings for me. I couldn’t help noticing the children that were there with nannies. Even if the nannies were attentive, I’d focus on the kids who were barefoot and sitting in the sandbox with vacant eyes—certain they were sad and wishing for their parent to be there with them.

  My father continued to find an eclectic assortment of live-ins to look after us: couples, hippies, grandmothers, drill sergeant types, cat ladies, and psychics.

  Gerta, the Olympic swimmer from Germany, was one of the first. I liked her because she saved me from drowning in the undertow at Stinson Beach. Dorothy from Bakersfield carried around a little dog named Toto. (Yes, really.)

  Sonny and Wes were teenage neighborhood boys who occasionally watched us in between live-ins. They entertained us by lighting matches and setting off firecrackers in the house. But after the living-room curtains caught fire, my dad didn’t ask them back.

  Then there was Lynn with the emerald-green eyes and Tia with the blue eye shadow. Jennifer, who said she could teach cats to talk like humans. And Claire and Arthur, who taught us the importance of the peace sign. And then Ken and Sharon, who left without saying as much as good-bye to any of us (and were creepy anyway).

  Our live-ins often seemed to pack their bags and leave on short notice. Taking care of three feral kids full-time couldn’t have been an easy job. Still, we imagined our mother might come back. Every day we fought to understand our place in the world and wondered who the next set of players in our yellow house might b
e.

  • • •

  I keep perusing my mother’s files, searching for any sort of clue to better understand her. My fingers graze a manila folder stuffed down in the back of the cabinet. I pull it out and see my mom’s handwriting penciled across the top:

  Letters Never Sent & Thought Dabbles

  The folder feels heavy in my hands. Letters never sent? I open it slightly, enough to catch a glimpse of folded-up letters and torn sheets of perforated paper and the scent of my mother’s hands, metallic from her fingers full of rings. Why would she keep a file of letters that went unsent? What has she kept hidden? I close the folder, questioning the integrity of snooping through her personal things. But I’m desperate for something to hold on to.

  I shut my eyes and sit with the folder on my lap, wanting to do the right thing although everything feels wrong. What if there is something in here that I am not supposed to know? A tremor creeps into my hands and then consumes my whole body.

  I open my eyes, reach into the folder, and draw out a letter written on hotel stationery to my great-grandmother. “The Fairmont Hotel and Tower—Atop Nob Hill in San Francisco” is embossed across the top in blue and gold letters.

  Dearest Gran,

  I can’t begin to express all that has happened to me since I last wrote. The European plans had to be scotched for a while—Daddy didn’t approve and I didn’t feel I had enough money. He still doesn’t approve, and I still don’t feel totally financed, but I’m going anyway. It may sound foolish, Gran, but I think this may be my Rubicon. I am absolutely terrified about the whole venture, but by dammy, I’m going to overcome the fear and GO. Karen and I will go to Paris where a friend has an apartment. Then down through France into Spain, up into Italy, across Greece, and down into the islands. From there things get a bit hazy—perhaps Switzerland and Germany. I would like to stay until December and then come home for Christmas. There is a possibility of J. taking the babies to NY then. Well, I refuse to spend Christmas without my tads. Gran, I can hardly wait to see the Parthenon by moonlight. And Knossos will rebloom with the Minoan culture while we are there. Be prepared for adventure!