The Seasons of My Mother

by Marcia Gay Harden

  Years later, in Texas, I sit at the gleaming dining room table, with mom in her wheelchair. I play the old song for her on my iPhone. They say music from the past can spark memories in Alzheimer’s patients, and so I amplify the sound through my small portable Bose speaker. She is astonished at the technology, even though I have shown her this speaker, and played music off of it several times before. Just the day before I had played Pachelbel’s Canon, and she was mesmerized with the repeating melody, and astonished at the Bose technology. She is always astonished anew. Now she smiles, and taps her stocking foot to the beat. My heart aches, in rhythm to the beat, and in sync with her small cold foot. Heartache, heartache, heartache Tap tap tap. Mom. Oh my dear mom. Tap Tap Tap Da da da da da da da dummm. She remembers, and whispers: “Tequila! ” perfectly in time with the song. Heartache Tap tap Heartache Tap. Tap. Where are all the details hiding in her brain?

  Da da da da da da da dummm. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Da da da da da da daaaa. Olly olly oxygen free. Olly olly income free. I never knew what it was—“oxygen” or “income.” “Oxen,” Google tells me. “Olly olly oxen free.” Come out, come out, wherever you are. Da da da da da da daaa dummm . . . Please, come out. Hide-and-seek memory of music and maypoles.

  My mother is a crescent moon

  MOM EXPLODED INTO THE WOMAN I will always remember during the late hippie years of the 1960s, when we were stationed in Yokohama, Japan, where my father had been sent to help command a ship during the middle of the Vietnam War. Everything was about to change. Five children had climbed onto a Pan Am plane in Long Beach, California, and when “fasten your seatbelt” directions were given in English and Japanese (causing me to crane my eight-year-old neck around to see just who could possibly understand this garbled sound, astonished to see that there were actually real live Japanese people on board our plane) and as we looked with rapt and fearful attention at the evacuation water slide that the bottle-blond stewardess pointed out in the plastic pamphlet, and as the airbags were displayed just in terrifying case we needed oxygen, we felt for our life preservers tucked faithfully under our seats, and it finally dawned on us that we were headed thousands of miles away, flying through the night sky across a big black ocean, and that we might end up in a raft surrounded by sharks, but if we were lucky we would make it safe and sound and land in Tokyo. Ah sō desu ka!

  Our stewardesses were dazzling in their white gloves, with their hair in full buns and sporting red, white, and blue dresses perfectly fitted to their curvaceous bodies. They smiled bright white smiles as they took our orders and quickly became our new best friends. Ahead of us, Mr. and Mrs. Lieutenant Commander Thad Harden were actually sitting in first class. Amazing! Mom and Dad in first class! It felt like we were in first class, too, being served a meal on little movable trays in our seats. At home we never went out to dinner. It was only on very special occasions that we were treated to Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion, on a sesame seed bun at the newly popular McDonald’s—and now, here we were having water and soda brought to us whenever we wanted! When our stewardess with the shiny black hair and a name tag that read “Tamaki” (but of course we called her “mam”) asked us if we wanted ice-cream sundaes for dessert, we looked across several seats with eyes raised hopefully, expecting Mom and Dad to say no. But when mom smiled and said, “Okay,” we actually squealed, causing the stewardesses to laugh and say how cute we were in our cotton dresses and black-and-white saddle shoes. Free card games were given out to keep us occupied on the long flight, and free pillows and blankets were placed under our tired heads and across our cold bodies as we climbed higher and higher into the stratosphere.

  We passed a crescent moon; her rays shot through the clouds and sparkled on some fish in the Pacific far below. Mom began to take shape on that flight; there, in the air, she began her transformation as we jetted toward brightly blinking Tokyo and exotic new landscapes. This hesitant young Dallas mother of five wasn’t asked so much to step aside or to sit this one out, but to grow and embrace herself as an elegant woman capable of navigating a naval wife life far, far from home. Far from the safety of her parents still living in Dallas, where Aunt So-and-So had played the piano at family gatherings while Mom’s mom Coco sang songs of the forties across from the china and cut glass vases, across from the sparkling ice white Waterford crystal and chalky blue Wedgewood. Farther still from our neighborhood in Long Beach and our gardenia plant in the front yard where we had lived so near to Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland and a Ralph’s grocery store.

  Here on this night flight, safely strapped into a giant steel bird winging across the ocean, the moon beckoned to Mom to follow her lead and change shape in the dark of night. And Mom did. She was in fact changing right in front of our eyes. She had, after all, smiled okay to the ice cream. She had managed to tuck her sleepy brood tightly into makeshift beds hundreds of miles high while she pointed to the stars outside the cold round windows, and smiled to her sister moon. She had packed up, rented, and left behind a home with only the help of her kids, each of us packing one box only and one suitcase only, following military family rules of only so much allotted weight to transfer to their new homes. She had even let me bring my dolls: I had proof of them in my little pink carry-on bag, my favorite paper dolls and my Barbie with the three wigs!

  Like a lunar hug, the crescent moon dipped her curved tip toward the Pacific on one side and the Atlantic on the other, and we flew in the center of her bosom, forward in time. Tamaki pushed her steel cart up the aisle and miraculously brought out hot eggs and sausage, which we ate at Pan Am midnight, preparing to land soon in Tokyo. We used the bathroom and screamed when it flushed loudly, but we didn’t have to brush our teeth because the water wasn’t “potable.” That was a new word, learned between Long Beach and Tokyo. Mom rested her forehead against the cool oval window, and stared below as we lowered toward the land and the lights began to glow, first small pinpoints of light, then larger and larger as we circled over our exotic destination. She squinted at the bright neon Tokyo signs flashing, as if the city were a Japanese Las Vegas, signs written in blinking Japanese characters, and traffic zigzagging red and yellow streaks, even at midnight. Mom mimicked the lunar arms of the moon, and hugged her brood deep to her chest, saying a silent prayer of thanks that we had made the flight safely, and we were not on a raft surrounded by sharks. She told us to fasten our seatbelts but our eyes were thick with sleep, so she leaned her Chanel scent over us and secured the straps. I smelled her drift away as she went back to her seat and pulled out her new coral lipstick, which was just a little bit darker than the coral she normally wore. She coated her lips, and she smiled as her children and her husband nodded off to a last hour of blanketed sleep.

  During our three-year stay in Japan, the early bloom of my mother that had begun with the night-flight crescent moon somewhere over the Pacific Ocean blossomed into a sexy, elegant, and determined woman. Even long after we returned to the States, my mother continued to grow due to her adventure in Japan. Inspired by her embrace of the city of Yokohama, she found a freedom of spirit, and she fiercely enforced open-minded transformation.

  We landed and jolted awake to the wheels screeching across the runway in nighttime Tokyo. Once in the city, we were assaulted with the smells of fish and feces in the open “benjo ditch” sewers, shocked and happy to recognize the Coca-Cola sign changing its accordion lights of red and white in the inky sky of the still-bustling Tokyo. Every scent and sight and sound was new, and we were soon admonished “Not to judge! People did things differently here! America wasn’t the only game in town!” Even the way we now had to go to the bathroom—oh my gosh!—was different. Their toilets were little holes in the ground with a small platform for each foot beside them. Mom took charge, forcing us to embrace these toilets, to embrace the hotter-than-hot baths, to embrace the seaweed breakfast, and we were not allowed to say “yuck.” Mom was changing. We were changing.

  When we slu
mped off the plane in now-wrinkled clothing, our skin shiny from unwashed sleep, Mom was thirty-one years old with five children ranging from two-year-old Stephanie to eleven-year-old Leslie. Five children, little money, no house help until she finally hired Otta-san the ancient maid, and she was soon to be left alone for long periods of time in a foreign land while her husband headed out to an unknown fate fighting on the high seas.

  Fueled with her love of travel and sharp curiosity, Mom was determined to plant her homesteading seeds in education and experience, and to relish as her garden of children grew. Yes, Mom changed: she soon wore her curly short brown hair in a longer Catherine Deneuve–type French twist. She bought beautiful linens and in her soft-spoken, slightly drawled voice hired Sumiko the seamstress to sew asymmetrical dresses in oranges and yellow gilded satin, in crimson silk and woven blue. She wore the crimson silk gown with long white gloves to the New Year’s Eve ball, her shawl lined with pink satin. Dad, home on leave for the holidays, wore his US Navy formal dress uniform with the medals proudly displayed on his chest and his gold cummerbund around his waist. When Mom and Dad returned home that night—in love again, tipsy, swaying—they came and peeked into our rooms to see their beloved children, flopped onto our single beds, to wake us up because it was the new year. But we kids had already banged the pots and pans outside on the porch at midnight, clanged pot tops and listened to the racket of all the other houses banging pots and pans, all the other kids from Area 1 and Area 2 whose parents were at the ball or at other parties, banging pots and pans echoing across the hills of the navy base in Yokohama, to celebrate.

  Mom and Dad flopped on the bed, and she pretended his suspenders were grandfather clocks, giggling “booiiingg, boiiiing” as she pulled at the straps and they snapped back against his chest. They swayed back to their room, still giggling, he now pulling at the straps of her gown and she at his suspenders.

  Years later, I wore that same gown to my first Tony nomination, for Angels in America. I had to widen the waist a bit because apparently Mom had a twenty-inch waist. Unbelievable.

  Soon Dad was back at sea and Mom was visiting Japanese gardens, museums, and temples, where she took off her shoes to keep the tatami mats clean. She now bought woodblock prints of fishermen wearing pointy triangular straw hats who carried poles across their shoulders from which hung barrels of fish. She bought a tansu chest made of thin teak wood in which she could store clothes; it had a secret hiding place for jewels. She studied Hiroshige, and watercolors, and began a love affair with nature in art that never went away. Even now, when she can’t quite remember where these beautiful things in her home came from, she traces the lines of the hand-embroidered peacocks she bought for Dad. He loved peacocks: he loved the fact that male birds were fancier than female birds, more exotic and bright; he loved to explain the mating habits of preening birds, the puffing defenses of a quail; and he especially loved the pomp of the peacock. She bought him watercolor peacocks, and cloisonné peacocks on black enamel.

  She visited Hiroshima, Osaka, Thailand, Mount Fuji. She brought home chopsticks. She made friends with a woman named Tookie; she took a cruise with Tookie to Cambodia. Standing on the deck of the cruise ship, feeling the spray of the choppy sea on her face, she wiped a salt tear of longing for her husband to come home, yet nervous for her husband to come home changed by the war. Another salt tear flew into the wind—that one was for missing her children. (She never said kids; kids was a name for goats, she once told me.) Then she raised her salty face to the sky, gloriously free and alive with a whole world of possibilities ahead of her.

  She had hired Otta-san, a seventy-year-old Japanese maid, to help us at home. There were navy wife meetings. There was garden club. There was dinner at the Officers Club with Kennedy half dollars given on your birthday. There was bingo, and there were movies at the exchange. There was the commissary for groceries, there was the New Year’s Eve ball. And soon, for Mom, there was ikebana.

  Ikebana is the ancient Japanese art of flower arranging. Mom took a class and fell in love with its discipline and its simplicity, with the colors and aromas and the waxy feel of the flowers and leaves. She understood that she could bring a gift home to her family, a gift of love and an expression of care and beauty and yearning. She would place the arrangements throughout the house. She would create an Ikenobo spot for the viewing of the arrangement and then wait for us to come home from a distant day of school in Negishi Heights. She met us as we hopped off the crowded yellow bus, called “Don’t run” while we ran across the patchy lawn and skipped across the porch, where later we would perform a play. And she smiled as we burst through the door and gasped in unison to be greeted by such a sight as those flowers.

  Pink gladiolus nestled between lime-green bamboo shoots, erupting from a long, low, olive green, square ceramic vase. The arrangements were supposed to mimic nature, to look as if the actual flowers and line materials of branches and leaves could be found in a similar scene if one wandered around a bamboo forest, or took a stroll through a park, or happened upon a pond where the snowy egret made his home. Sometimes the arrangements made me think of luxuriously clad dancers; the irises with their blue and yellow velvet gowns, the frothy tutus of the cherry blossoms, the brightly beaded red pyracantha—each was paired with its natural partner, and the arrangements swirled their way into tangos and ballets and Isadora Duncan stretches, one-two-arabesque and three-four-plié and now five-six-reach-to-the-sky, each standing tall on its stage of a ceramic vase. Then . . . slowly, seven-eight-, each shifting slightly as the days passed until they were now drooping, and nine-somewhat-tired, aaaaannnd ten—certainly faded as they took their final bow, old ladies making space for the ingénues, making space downstage center for the next flower arrangement.

  Creating an ikebana arrangement, like the Japanese tea ceremony, is supposed to be a type of meditation. The rooms are quiet when the teacher is presenting the lesson—a wild contrast, by the way, to the raucous scene we experienced years later, in 1998. Mom was teaching an ikebana class to my neighbors in Venice Beach as I was preparing to give birth to my first daughter, Eulala. My friends were mostly gay, some were neighborhood beach buddies, some were actors and actresses, some old college chums, and many already knew Mom. We were a grand, loud, jovial crowd, laughing at our inability to balance the lines of the branches we were using. Wine was poured and someone hollered “HELP ME, BEVERLY.” Flowers were strewn about the table at random as Mom showed how to cut the stems under water so the suction created a small vacuum. It was joyful chaos. Mom, soft-spoken, still, and delicate but not yet fragile from the losses of life and memory that were soon to come—that were at that very moment lurking like a cowardly thief just past our calendar’s sight—Mom gently walked around the room grinning at our mishaps, shaking her head at these friends who had gathered with tin can vases and Mason jar vases and, thank goodness, a few ceramic bowl vases, gathered to celebrate her, to celebrate me, but mostly to celebrate the new life churning unseen in our midst. It was a fun day. The crashing Venice Beach waves could be heard under the cackle of our joy as we oohed and aahed at each other’s creations. It was a time when Mom could still remember the months and the various flowers associated with each of them. She could remember that tulips bloom in the early spring. She taught us that wisteria loved vodka.

  “Whaaaattt?” we crowed.

  “Yes—a little vodka poured into the vase when wisteria is cut will help preserve it.”

  Years later, as her memory has slowly dissipated, I ask her how she knows that wisteria love vodka. I want to see if she remembers, I want her source of information, it is a sort of test. She replies, “Well, I know wisteria love vodka because . . . I have shared some with it!” Still witty, still smart, still canny buried under this hideous disease.

  But back in 1998, in Venice, Mom could remember the ikebana lessons exactly as she had been taught them in her blush of womanhood in Japan. She could remember that in Japan the students bowed low, the masters taug
ht in a black kimono, the rooms were quiet. She could remember that shin, soe, and hikae meant heaven, earth, and man. Did she remember this—that in this peaceful state of mind, the artist in her first began to bud?

  Dad was at sea for extended tours of duty—six months being the longest—fighting a war in Vietnam, stopping off in Cambodia, bringing home the chicken “gilly-gilly” or adobo pork recipes he learned from the Filipino chefs on board his ship, and murmuring with equal vehemence words like “Viet Cong” and “Mekong Valley” and “Hippies” and “Goddamn Rock and Roll.” He was visibly distressed at the unraveling of order and precision he loved so much in the navy. Long hair and beards and sideburns were now allowed, and this galled him, while on the other side of the teeter-totter mom was learning the art of precision and order through flowers.

  Leaving his beautiful bride and five children tucked into their beds in the house that sat alone in the middle of the hill, he took to the waves.

  We were left behind with our own system of order. We balked and grumbled at the assignments, but there was no choice in the matter. We each had chores. One person set the table, and one person made the salad, and the salad was always the same: iceberg lettuce torn up into bite-size pieces, small carrot discs, a little celery, tomatoes cut in wedges, and dressing on the table. We all cleared the table, secretly counting just how many glasses and plates each of us took from the dining room table to the kitchen, and, sure of an injustice in the making, we bickered at each other to “Heeelllpp or I’ll tell Mom!”