The Seasons of My Mother

by Marcia Gay Harden

  One person did the pots and pans, and it seemed like on rice night, it was always me. It was always me so much it became a family joke, and Mom and I still laugh today when I remind her of rice night, mimicking myself scrubbing with fingernails and grimacing at the rice pan.

  We drank powdered milk from the commissary. It was horrible and made me throw up, but we had to drink it anyway, and we ate chicken-fried steak because the milk and egg it was coated in made the meal seem more substantial. We bought new shoes for school, one pair only, and only once a year. We went to the library weekly and got to take out three books each. We put on plays. We did our homework and got good grades or else we would get in trouble, and we played flashlight tag on special nights. We took ten-minute showers only, and we were allowed five minutes on the hallway phone only (and my sisters and I never called boys). We ate breakfast and dinner together. We said our “Hallowed be thy name” prayers. We folded our clothes and helped wipe spots off the wall with Comet. We took ballet and charcoal drawing classes, we learned to sew, and there was no TV, so we read books and listened to Harry Belafonte. We waited for Dad to return from the sea, remembering how much fun we had had the last time he had come home and we were specially invited to his aircraft carrier to watch the movie Patton. As the executive officer, he had special privileges, and that meant we got to tag along for movie night! All the men saluted sharply when we trooped on board, and I saluted back, until Dad told me knock it off because I was a civilian and it was disrespectful to a man of service. So I just smiled and nodded awkwardly. The seven of us made our way down the steel passageways, me stepping with white lacy socks through cold gray doors and over oval hatches. We were ushered into the officers’ lounge and sat on the leather couch, our feet dangling off the edge, not touching the floor, eating popcorn and swaying gently with the sea. The words bastard and Goddamn peppered the movie, and all the men loved it when Patton said, “Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win.” They cheered loudly, when he said, “I will not have cowards in my army.” “Goddamn right!” agreed my dad. Patton and my father had a lot in common. We looked forward to Dad returning from sea again, and then we used more Comet on the walls, and even though the house smelled antiseptic, it was sparkling clean with no darkness hiding even in the hallway corners. No darkness for an officer returning from the seas.

  There was enough darkness in his head. Though he never spoke of it, in his deeply lined eyes we felt his sorrow for the men aboard the captured USS Pueblo, and his anger at the humiliation and torture they underwent. Pride and anger mingled in his manner as he walked through the door, but some of the darkness lifted from his smile as he presented “ciggi-booze” for his family. Ciggi-booze was the name given to gifts brought back from the States . . . cigarettes and booze being the most common request from officers and sailors. It felt fun, and slightly risqué, that an adult was bringing ciggi-booze home for the kids! There was scotch and cigars for Dad, Chanel No. 5 perfume for Mom, and for us the phrase meant chocolate-covered caramel, green-and-purple-striped candy sticks, blue barrettes for the hair, and pink bows, and hardcover books, and we especially loved the records. He would pull out the latest Beach Boys record and crank it up loud and we would all learn “If everybody had an oooocccceeeannnn . . .” Mom would enjoy Petula Clark singing “This Is My Song,” or Peter, Paul and Mary singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” or Herbie Mann piping the flute, but we never played rock and roll. Maybe, if we were lucky, the Beatles. Yellow Submarine. Certainly not the Rolling Stones or Jimi Hendrix. When Dad came home, the music got louder, and Mom watched for the darkness in his smile, the sorrow in his eyes, and in her he found light—as did we all.

  When we first began looking for a house in Japan, my mom wanted to live on the Japanese market, so the military realtor took us to a lovely Japanese home to discuss an arrangement with the owner. He bowed deeply to us in pants and a shirt and tie, then took a sidelong look at us five kids huddled in the middle of his rice paper home, and upon learning of our soon-to-be-adopted wiener dog, Amy, he said, “eey-yeh,” spelled iie, and meaning, No. Feeling somewhat embarrassed, too loud and too white, we went back to the navy base to look for housing, and we soon found the perfect spot. All the officers’ housing sat on the top of a big hill known as Area 1. It was protected by a stone fence. All the enlisted housing was at the bottom of the hill, known as Area 2; it was protected by a cliff and a chain-link fence; but our house magically sat in the middle of the hill . . . all alone. Just our house. I don’t know how we were so lucky to get this house. There it sat, with a rounded driveway and a koi pond in which we promptly deposited two fish and a turtle. We had sixteen lovebirds and two cats and Amy the wiener dog. We had a tetherball in the driveway, and Mom would come out and play jump rope with us on cool summer evenings. She was the only mom who did that, still jumped rope with her kids, and it made her seem cooler and younger and prettier than the other moms.

  I would look down over the cliff into the backyards of Area 2, where barbecues, beer, and the football were all thrown down with equal force, and then look up the hill into the quiet officers’ housing of Area 1, and I’d hope that other kids could see how cool we were in our rounded driveway jumping rope with our mom. I would sing “Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack” loudly, so that anyone driving up the hill might hear me, and might look over at us singing and playing and jumping rope by the pond with the koi fish. In our big, round backyard, there was a stone wall from which we hung a rope with a knot for a seat, and we pushed off from the wall and someone held the bottom of the rope and flung us up and dangerously down. Toward the very back of the yard there was a metal chain-link fence that blocked a bamboo forest from encroaching on the lawn, and we were warned not to go back into the thickness of it because there were caves hidden in the hills that still had the bones of warriors from World War II scattered about their dirt floors. We did go back there, of course. Wielding fake swords and stolen kitchen knives to use as machetes, we shallowly explored the caves, never daring to trespass to where it was really, really dark, but even in the dimly lit entrance we did see bones, and a spoon, and a canteen. We traipsed back through the bamboo leaves, careful not to get cut by their slicing edges, and arrived home to the safety of grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup from the can, and paper napkins folded in triangles.

  Mom planted the yard with roses. She made me help her weed. I always knew when she was in a fight with Dad because the weeding would get really vicious. She would clamp down on her jaw, with me at her side, and the blades of grass and weeds would start flying on either side of me. “Get the roots!” she would admonish. The metaphor was lost on me then, but now, I think about the roots—of pain and loneliness—and I think of those weeds in our garden in Japan.

  It would be nice to pluck pain out of the brain like a weed, to cleanse the garden of emotional toxins with the ease of weeding. It’s a big deal, asking a woman to be a navy wife, to raise her children alone, to discipline with confidence but then to surrender with “Wait till your father gets home.” To love and cuddle and then be separated for months, to work so hard and to be in charge and then to give up charge to the man of the house. To submit to his harsher discipline, to wonder how to mother, how to wife, and how to grow yourself with five kids to raise. To deal with the inevitable happy hours that weren’t so happy. To be filled with pride at your husband’s intelligence and accomplishments. To shift and change more deeply than you ever knew you would when first the crescent moon beckoned to you as you soared across the Pan Am sky. Mom shifted. The marriage shifted. Their love was still abundantly love, mostly pleasant, always present, but aged now with some cracks showing.

  I think now of roots of fights, me having fought too much in my own relationships, and I know that there is a moment when hurt has gone too far and the shift has caused the load to be at crank. At crank. It’s where the word “cranky” comes from, and it means off-kilter. It’s a shipping term, and when th
e storms are too rough, and the weight and load and burden of a ship have shifted on the waves and rolls of the high seas, the balance of the ship is off. It is at crank. It takes work to rebalance the ship, to distribute the weight, to repair the broken items, to batten down the cargo, knowing that there are more storms to come, and the end is never in sight. In these terms, I think of both of my parents so perfectly. “Get the roots,” a gardening metaphor, of course goes to Mom. And repairing the “crank” of the ship of course goes to my shipping father. I know now it’s what one has to do in a relationship. Get rid of the roots of weeds, nurture and water the roots of the blooms, and always, always maintain the balance and shift of the cargo. Maintenance is work, and it’s boring, and we are always wanting the calm and placid sea to enjoy, or we are drawn to the drama of the storm, but it is the balance of the load that keeps the ship afloat. Many couples aren’t able to repair the hurts of their relationships at crank. Words can create unstoppable leaks in the hull, shaky finances can keep the diet too strict, the travel too lean, and war surely asks both men and women to witness valor and horror—in the same breath—and then to bring this same breath home to inhale and exhale as love during a goodnight kiss to their children. My mother and father were in this for the long haul, however, and in my mother my father was discovering an expert captain and steward of all that he, and certainly she, found precious. She would repair the hull, and in long cursive letters passing over the seas, they would rebalance the load, and redefine the journey they were on together.

  She weeded and planted, and cut her lovely blooms, and her flower arrangements miraculously told stories to me of her day. The white tuberoses’ full-bodied scents, with jiggling layered petals, told me of her dreams, and I was right! She had dreamed of Hawaii and hula girls dancing in the tuberose fragrance. The bamboo spikes and chrysanthemum somehow told me of a painful week when she was hurting for money, and I was right! The mail was late with a check she needed. The Stargazers, so rare that she would pay for them with their heavenly scent, told me Dad was coming home from sea and star-studded evenings, and I was right! He joined us in his Navy Blues and carved the Thanksgiving turkey, setting the carving knife next to the creamy white gravy bowl that was touching the translucent ivory-tinged edges of the speckled pink six-petaled Stargazer, dancing in a midnight blue vase that looked like the ocean.

  Dad’s ships had names like the USS Henderson, the USS Osborne, the USS Kearsarge ; he commanded various destroyers and aircraft carriers, returning from Vietnam and Korea, where what he did was quite mysterious to his children. We gathered—my brother in blue shorts and a collared cotton shirt, we girls in matching dresses with white ruffled socks and patent leather Mary Janes—to welcome him home, spotting him on the top of the ship with the other officers, all lined up in uniform, their faces shadowed by their brimmed hats. On the bottom deck were the enlisted men, also lined up from one end of the ship to the other, hundreds of them, perfectly matching in navy blue bell-bottoms and navy blue sailor shirts, all of them standing at ease with hands behind their backs and legs slightly spread. Men coming to port to rejoin their families, exotic scents still lingering on their uniforms. We spotted Dad with the gruff face and half cigar, puffing a little cloud above his head, we told him we knew it was him because of the cigar! I could still smell it on the ride home, thick and overpowering and masculine.

  His world and our world merged and collided when he came home. We were sometimes little soldiers with our “Sir, yes, sirs!,” sometimes just kids showing off our latest artwork or dances, following our mother’s lead in how to run a tight ship . . . at home.

  One July night, when Dad was home on leave, we went to a dance that changed my sense of self forever. The Bon Odori is a traditional Japanese summertime festival honoring one’s ancestors. Its songs and dances pay tribute to long dead spirits, although I didn’t know that when we first went at the invitation of friends of my mom’s. I thought it was a harvest festival, and pretended to hoe rice as I danced the rituals’ movements with the crowd. Mom had been teaching English at a Japanese high school; she didn’t speak a word of Japanese and they didn’t speak a word of English, plus she had never been a teacher before, so I don’t really know how she knew how to lead this class. But she did. She would travel in our little gray Volvo on the “wrong” side of the road, squeezing through the twisting, curvy streets of Yokohama, up a windy hill past open fish markets and jute stalls that sold osembe and nori maki crackers, colorful erasers, bright pink plastic purses, paper umbrellas, and children’s toys, all displayed artfully on the sidewalk. She had memorized the roads because she couldn’t read the signs in Japanese, and she would hold her breath as she twisted and turned through the narrow streets, finally letting it out in a long sigh of relief when she arrived at the high school. There she relaxed for a minute, enjoying bland green tea with the teachers in the rice paper lounge while she prepared her lesson, and over time she became friends with a science teacher. He introduced Mom to his family, and for the great Bon Odori festival his wife made all seven of us a yukata, the traditional cotton summer Japanese kimono. Mom and Dad’s were blue and white with a bamboo design, while the rest of ours were brightly colored flowers; chrysanthemums and gerbera daisies, cherry blossoms and birds-of-paradise on a bright white background. Our obis were red, and we each had toe socks with wooden Japanese clog sandals. My dark brown hair was pulled into two pigtails, and I tied red ribbons on each one, my pigtails bouncing with the excitement of a night outing.

  As the sun sets, and dusk settles the waiting crowd, the Bon Odori festival begins. I was only nine when I first sang and danced the joyful Bon Odori song under the inky black sky glittering with golden stars, yet I have never forgotten it. To this day, it is my standby song: I sing it when prodded to participate in talent shows, I sing and dance it around campfires, I embarrass my children with my yodeling Japanese voice and the studied dance movements of a rice farmer. It is in my bones, this ancient song; it fills me with the same sense of freedom I felt that hot July night when I first learned it. The night I got lost, got separated from my mom and dad, my brother and sisters, and found myself in a sea of kimonos and obis, under the floating red-, pink-, salmon-, and yellow-colored paper lanterns of the Bon Odori festival, dancing round and round the center temple stand that had been erected that day in the parking lot at the foot of the naval base, dancing crushed in among hundreds of people I didn’t know, Japanese men and women and children in their brightly starched cotton yukatas, American soldiers in their starched summer whites, dancing to drums and singing this song: “Omme omme fudee fudee kaaaasaaannngaaa.” Again and again, “Omme omme fudee fudee . . .” repeating each verse and motion, dancing round and round in a kind of trance, sweating in the heat that was still rising from the warm pavement, and realizing suddenly that I was alone with strangers under the speckled night sky of Japan, and I was okay. My mom and dad, my sisters, and our Japanese friends, were nowhere to be seen, and I was dancing and singing with hundreds of gracious, jet-black-haired people, celebrating their culture, and I was okay, and I belonged with them.

  I knew I would probably get in trouble for getting lost and making my parents worry, I knew that I would certainly get a spanking, but I couldn’t stop. Like a magnet, I was a child caught in the centrifugal force of the music and swaying crowd, going round and round and round and round, Omme omme fudee fudee kaaaasaaannngaaa, safe only in my exact movement and synchronized clapping and clog shoe step step step . . . making a hoeing-rice gesture, hoe hoe hoe, Omme omme fudee fudee, throwing the rice over my shoulder and clap! Freedom! It was my first taste of freedom! A heady feeling for a little girl. Again! Omme omme Fudee fudee. Freedom. Kaaaasaaa-nnngaaa . . . under the lanterns, inhaling the smell of grilled teriyaki chicken and rice and lost in the drums and shamisen guitars, Yano men eh, Omu kaye, Huda shin ahh . . . floating wavering flute and twanging instruments filling my ears, bouncing off my pigtails and fluttering with my red ribbons, Peache peache kapu kap
u naaa naaa naaa . . . in perfect step to the music. Step step step. Hoe hoe hoe. Throw the bag over my shoulder and CLAP! Step step step, hoe hoe hoe, throw the bag over my shoulder, and CLAP!

  Eventually, as round and round I went, over the yodeling crowd I heard a thin scared voice calling, “Marcia . . . ? Maaarrrccciiiaaa?” I looked up past the colored lanterns and I saw a familiar crescent moon bobbing through the crowd. It was Mom, pale and glowing in her yukata, approaching with her teacher friend, her brown eyes barely hiding her tears of relief, and then something strange and magical happened without words, because her teacher friend nodded his approval at my dancing with the crowd, and suddenly I wasn’t in trouble and Dad would never know I had been lost and I wouldn’t get a spanking. They both claimed me, Mom and the teacher, in that moment, as if I had been with them the whole time. We circled yet one more time, all step step stepping together. Then Omme omme fudee fudee ended and they both smiled at the child they had watched dance free. And clap!

  My mother holds me like Mary holds Jesus

  JANUARY IS A TIME TO get rid of the excesses of December, and celebrate clean lines and purity,” Mom always said. New beginnings. Her arrangements for January were often white, inviting the viewer to imagine snow, or the reflective glass of a frozen lake. She hadn’t really grown up with snow in her childhood home of Dallas, Texas, but in her travels around the world as a navy wife, she had seen it drift off of red Japanese temple tops, skim the backs of golden koi fish, and settle in the hushed depths of a dark Virginia wood. Snow piled high on the roof of our Volvo as it was parked in the driveway in Maryland. Dad scraped it off the windshields in the mornings, his black and gold uniform dusted with ice as he puffed and cursed, preparing to go solve problems at the Pentagon. Mom watched from the steamy frosted window, and had his coffee ready when he came inside, the fried eggs and bacon already on a mat on the table. I liked that he always thanked her for his breakfast.