She now stopped to inhale the jasmine draping over our fence, or picked an orange from the fruiting tree before she peered under the car to check for bombs, making sure it was safe to trundle her kids off to school.
She now made time to visit the islands, sitting still with me on the white stones of a Santorini hillside, drinking a shot of ouzo as the sun set on the Aegean Sea. When the outdoor lounge speakers floated “The Girl from Ipanema,” Mom smiled and said, “Kala,” meaning “good.” Athena was also the goddess of justice, and Mom made time to climb the steps of Delphi, and wonder at the oracles, wonder at the deaths of the young virgin girls, wonder at the balance, or rather imbalance, of power. Athena was also the goddess of inspiration, and when Shawn came to visit me from DC, Mom gathered my brother and sister and joined us at the beach in Marathon for a nighttime swim so we could all experience the miracles of the phosphorescent sea. We watched the waves glow as they rolled into the shore, illuminating golden starfish floating in the clear water. It was amazing. We waded in the water and stood in awe. “Look, Marcia,” she said, standing still with her feet in the cool water, her head craning back to witness the vast sky. “Look, the sky is mimicked in the phosphorescent sea: sparkles and starfish and glittery blue at our feet, and midnight blue and stars above, all sparkling and glittering together. Poli oreo!” Meaning “very beautiful.”
I knew she was imagining an arrangement evocative of the glowing waves on the bioluminescent beaches of Marathon. And because Athena was also the goddess of the arts, and of skill and of craft, I wasn’t surprised when Mom found a dark blue iris whose petals rolled like the waves, its golden center glowing with light. She sprinkled sand in the bottom of a flat, square sea-blue vase. She placed several deep blue irises in a spiky kenzan, their wavy petals splashing forth, the yellow glow just peeping from the interior of the flower. She placed one pale starfish flower beneath the iris, at the lowest point of the arrangement. Above the waves of iris, she laced angel’s breath, its tiny white clusters of flowers becoming a star-studded sky.
“Lampros,” I said. Meaning “brilliant,” “radiant,” “shining.” It’s where we get our word for “lamp.”
“Ne,” said Athena. “Poli lampros. Oreo louloudi. Efharisto.” Meaning, “Yes, very beautiful. Pretty flower. Thank you.”
When Mom returned from Greece, she brought Athena with her. She settled with my father and my younger brother and sister in Vernon View, Virginia, just a mile up the Potomac from George Washington’s old home. My father was working at the Pentagon again, now on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he was frustrated with the usual red tape. I had returned home that summer from the University of Texas in Austin where I was attending college, and was enjoying hanging with the family. One day, out of the blue, Mom said, “I want to change my birthday.” Her birthday is January 11, but she never liked to celebrate it then. It was too cold. And too lonely, she said. And there wasn’t any excitement; people were still sated from Christmas excesses, and no one cared about her birthday, she said. “I want to celebrate it in the summer, when people are here!” she demanded. Demanded? This was impressive! I liked this self-advocating mom! And she wasn’t wrong, exactly—it was true that as we all had gotten older and gone off to college or started our own families, it was eventually just Mom and Dad at home. But in the summer, people were always visiting, or Mom was always visiting one of us kids, and it felt more like a celebration.
So . . . we changed it. We decided to celebrate her birthday in July. On July 4, to be exact. It made perfect sense: it was a built-in party! The fireworks would be for her! The gatherings and red beans, sparklers and the grill would be lit up for her! It was a celebration, and we adopted the many planned events, and put her at the center. It worked! And what better place to give birth to this idea than Washington, DC? Every Fourth of July on the great mall, between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, thousands of people would gather to watch fireworks and listen to music and honor American Independence. This particular summer 500,000 people were gathering, but to celebrate what? To celebrate my mother’s birthday, of course! And the Beach Boys were going to play at her party!
One of my favorite cousins was visiting that summer—Alicat, I called her—and we all packed picnic baskets and colorful picnic quilts. Fried chicken, cheeses, grapes and apples, sodas and water, crackers and chocolates and napkins—we packed these into backpacks and woven wicker baskets, and Mom shoved in bug spray and flashlights. We kissed Dad goodnight, asking one last time was he sure he didn’t want to go? Of course we got the answer “There is no Goddamned way in hell I want to go to a picnic with that many people on that Goddamned muddy mall.” So we laughed and hugged him and drove the car to the Alexandria Metro station to catch the train.
It had been raining nonstop for several days, and to tell you the truth I wasn’t looking forward to the muddy slog very much, either, but slog we had to: we had a birthday to celebrate, and our mall guests were already 200,000 strong. We lugged the baskets and blankets and crammed into the sleek silver Metro cars with the thousands of other revelers who had the same idea. Everyone was laughing and cheering and singing Beach Boys songs and waving flags. Mom had a small flag clutched in one hand and her purse smashed securely under her arm. She was smiling and waving the flag, holding the pole on the Metro train, laughing as it lurched forward and all the people said, “Whoooa.” She was happy in this community of revelers. She was happy to be on an adventure. Happy to have a birthday that was an event, for goodness’ sakes. At some point I shouted, “It’s my mom’s birthday!” and the car spontaneously erupted into what would become our theme song of the night: “Happy Biiirrrthhhdaaay dear Mommmmm/Beverlyyyyy . . .”
Hours later, under the stars, the Beach Boys played from their catalogue of songs and we all sang along. These songs were like old friends, first learned in Japan so far away across the seas, long, long ago. We felt connected to the Beach Boys, as if they were singing just for us because they knew that their records had been part of the very few we had been allowed to listen to in Yokohama. “Goood, goood, goooood, good vibrations!” rolled over the heads and off the tongues of our many guests. We ate and laughed and lolled around, muddy and somewhat cold. We patted mosquito spray on our arms, and Mom sat shining in the center of the blanket, not wanting to miss a thing. Soon after the band finished the concert, there was a pause before the fireworks would begin. In this quiet, we dug deep into a woven basket and pulled out the cake, and Alicat lit one candle. We started to sing. Other voices from nearby picnic blankets slowly joined in, and soon there were several hundred people singing those familiar strains of “Happy Birthday to You.” Then we made Mom stand up and look around, and she began to cry. Spontaneous joy, welcoming community, “Happyyyy Biirrrthdaaaayyyy deeearrr Mooooommmm, Haaappy Birthday to You!” Then BOOM! A yellow chrysanthemum firework burst into the darkened sky. First one, then another starlike cluster lit up the night. Then another and another, and soon the sky was full of fireworks and colors and smoke and music. Golden chrysanthemum fireworks exploding in the night sky. Pyracantha tracers arcing over the chrysanthemums. The top of the Washington Monument became obscured by the smoke. Yet we sat with necks craned skyward, oohing and aahing at each burst, so glad that Mom had been born on the Fourth of July.
Later that year, I was back in Texas finishing college, and the continuum of daily conversation got interrupted, replaced with expensive long-distance phone calls and hurried letters, so I can’t exactly trace Mom’s reimmersion into the lively ikebana scene of Washington, DC.
I lose track of her thread and her growth, I lose track of her shoulders squared back and her new voice, and though they grew in plain sight of anyone looking, like the bamboo in the forests of Japan, you had to be standing still long enough to really witness it.
I wish I had been paying closer attention when she rose through the ranks of ikebana, and was finally named president of Ikebana International in 1983. She performed flawlessly during her two yea
rs of service. This prestigious Washington, DC, chapter was called Chapter 1, and it represented all of the various schools of ikebana.
There was Ikenobō school, founded by the Buddhist monk Senno in the fifteenth century, which dictated arranging flowers with reverence. There was Chiko school, which used fruits and dolls, vegetables and flowers to create an arrangement. There was Ohara school, emphasizing the seasons. There was the Saga Go-ryū school, which focused on the spiritual. The Saga Go-ryū school could trace its origins back almost twelve hundred years, to an arrangement using three chrysanthemums the Emperor Saga had created at his summer palace.
My mother’s particular school was Sogetsu and she loved it because it was so inclusive. It was an “every person” art, the basic principle of Sogetsu being that ikebana “reflected the person who arranged it.” Anyone, anywhere, anytime, and with any kind of material can create a Sogetsu arrangement. Mom explained that it was different from natural, raw, found beauty. Instead, it was created, crafted, sculpted by an artist, paying homage to nature. Sogetsu says one has to use natural materials, the flowers and buds and branches of trees, the driftwood and even items found in the kitchen, to create beauty with the arranger’s feelings, and to express one’s feelings through flowers. And so the artist is seen, the artist is known, each arrangement unique.
Athena was, finally, the goddess of the city, and of civilization. Ikebana’s stated mission is to culturally bond the countries of Japan and America through the arts. Mom shone during those two years of her ikebana presidency in Washington, DC. She organized international events, she hosted Japanese dignitaries, she produced enormous demonstrations with the various schools of ikebana that were taught by Japanese masters. She hosted luncheons using her fine china and silver dishes, she placed cherry blossoms in crystal cut vases at the museum. She taught ikebana and inspired so many women and men to express themselves through flowers. She watched chrysanthemum fireworks explode over the Potomac, on the birthday she chose, the Fourth of July. She arranged flowers with a hum and a hum and a hum in her head, visibly growing like the bamboo. It happened quickly. It happened slowly. And it happened when I wasn’t looking.
Fall
My mother is a driftwood ballerina
A BROWN HAND BROKE THE surface of the Potomac River, then slowly disappeared beneath the debris floating in the gently swirling current. Again, fingers surfaced, chestnut brown and curved. An arm floated to the surface.
A wrist rolled over, followed by a pointed elbow, and soon a shape emerged. It appeared to be a young woman. I saw a spiny back, a flank, and the sun was glinting off a curved hip, causing the grainy brown skin to glow blood red as the shape bobbed, and seemed to float for a second, wallowing as it drifted closer to the shore. Now we could see the body emerge, a swirling dress frothing about the torso as the figure performed an arabesque through the water. Her leg was suspended straight back, and she seemed to stand on a pointed toe shoe. What was she?
Mom spotted her first. She had seen the hand and startled when the arm arose, she turned with quivering lips, staring at the emerging body, and pointed it out to Dad, who responded with his usual booming: “Good eye, Beverly! Good eye!” Good eye was a birding phrase; it was a sort of shorthand validation they used on their many birding walks, and when Mom would spot, say, a small tufted titmouse perched atop a branch, almost hidden behind the verdant leaves, she would murmur, “Ssshhhh, Thad, look up! Two thirty deep in the branches, you’ll see a tufted titmouse.” Dad would boom, “Good eye, Beverly! Good eye!,” and his voice would inadvertently scare the little bird away. This, in turn, induced a string of “Goddamn sons of bitches,” and Mom would sigh, binoculars still raised to her eyes, her head tilted back. “Shh, Thad. It just flew a little deeper, one o’clock now.” Dad would fumble with his Canon camera, huge lens pointing toward the wee bird so he could snap off a few shots. Satisfied with the discovery of the tufted titmouse, they would walk farther down the path, until Mom spotted another bird, perhaps a red-winged blackbird heading toward the marsh, and the Good Eye ritual would start all over again.
We stared at the wet lady, her arm curved over her brown head, her Isadora Duncan–like scarf blowing in the wind. Her skin was dark and shiny, a lacy grain decorating her leg. She was a swirling, curving, graceful piece of driftwood. Driftwood like I have never seen before. She had sashayed her way to this particular inlet on the Potomac River, where we had seen her from the jogging path, and we wanted her. She was the dancer.
We stumbled down the incline to the inlet, our golden retrievers pulling hard at the leash, and Dad volunteered me to wade into the water and try to pull her out. I tugged at her arm, rolled her over, and pulled at her sodden toe shoe, inching her up the muddy shore. She was soaked through and heavy, impossible to move much farther, so we strategized her rescue. Fellow joggers stopped along the way, free with their advice; everyone was suddenly a paramedic, it seemed, and tow ropes and chains and pickup trucks were offered to help us bring this dancer home.
Mom stood guard over our partially submerged ballerina. She was already pulling dead leaves and slime off her tutu, and gently stroking her hair. She was in love, so soon, so quickly, with her life-size wooden doll. Dad and I left, pulled by those bad-mannered golden retrievers, and retraced our steps, heading home to formulate our rescue plan. We puffed back up the hill, enjoying the hot sun on our backs, waving at various neighbors on their riding tractors, iced tea in their little cup holders. This neighborhood was full of lovely houses—not mansions, really, but nicely built four- and five-bedroom homes, definitely not cookie-cutter, each with little structural distinctions, like shutters or gabled eaves or colonial pillars. The front lawns and gardens were beautiful, manicured, and mowed to exactly three inches. They were the kind of houses with gardens that won neighborhood pride garden contests. They had single-rope swings hanging from the oak trees where happy mothers pushed their happy children high, singing “wheeeee” as the swing touched the dangling leaves on the lower boughs. Coral and pink rose bushes and soft purple wisteria draped over the white garden gate.
It seemed like there were no arguments in these houses: windows sparkled; doorbells chimed; chimneys spouted storybook lines of smoke in the winter. Lives were on track, and children were grown or growing. No matter the age, fun could be had. Just the kind of neighborhood my mother would love. Just the kind of home she had always tried to create, and though thwarted at times by the trials and tribulations of life—by the military demands that frustrated my dad at the Pentagon, or the inevitable pot-smoking-kid discovery, or the sullen college kid returned home—she still tried to create a house where sunlight glinted off the silver kitchen faucet and little basil plantings in the kitchen window were always leaning toward the sun. For the most part in this lovely home surrounded by other lovely homes, in the soft southern breezes of Virginia, Mom’s wings were spread and she was flying with her women brood: the garden club in our neighborhood, and Ikebana International, which had headquarters in Washington, DC, and a local chapter in Mount Vernon that Mom attended. She taught weekly ikebana classes at home in the garage, gathering materials from our backyard, from neighbors’ gardens and roadside bushes, and of course, from the trees and plants along the Potomac. The dancer—if we could ever get her home—was soon to be part of several major ikebana installations.
Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, was a mile down the Potomac. It was our designated end point on our weekend jog—making an easy three-mile round-trip along the dewy biking path. When guests would come visit Mom and Dad, perhaps Japanese dignitaries from Ikebana International traveling to the States to do a demonstration, or old navy buddies of my father’s, or Texan relatives up to see the monuments, we would send them off to visit the stately mansion of our first president—sometimes going with them, and always marveling at the beauty of the grounds. You could walk back behind the colonial mansion, through the gardens, and down a grassy hill, and there was a dock where a boat from Georgetown delivere
d another bunch of tourists on their historical ventures. From our house to the bottom of the hill, if you turned right, you would get to Mount Vernon. If you turned left, you would get to Old Town Alexandria, famous for its cobblestone streets and brick-building warehouses made into artist studio spaces and living lofts, clam chowder in big bowls with chunks of bread for dipping, and several fine restaurants overlooking the water. Not to mention the Little Theatre of Alexandria, where I was soon to get my start.
The mideighties were a time of flourishing for Mom, and the cherry-blossomed outskirts of Washington, DC, provided a perfect blend of international culture from which she could launch her artistic spirit.
Somehow, rescuing the dancer was like preserving a statue of that same artistic spirit of Mom; the floating arabesque en pointe was a wooden embodiment of the reach and soar and stretch of my mother’s vision. Dad sensed this, and was determined to bring the ballerina home. Perhaps because he hadn’t always been the most cooperative, or the most complimentary . . . and perhaps because he regretted it; when he would walk the birding paths and gaze in remorseful recognition at the blustering quail trying to hide its eggs, or when the partridge blew up twice its size and Mom would laugh and say, “Just like you, Thad!” Perhaps in these moments he saw her anew, and realized just how lovely she was. Perhaps he had seen that again when “Good eye, Beverly” had discovered the dancer, and with oval fingernails scraped a bit of moss from the grooved eye, so gently scraped the ridged brow—perhaps he fell in love with her again in the mud of the Potomac. Though he loved Mom dearly, his gruff manner had been overpowering during much of their marriage, and often thwarted her spirit. On this day, perhaps he saw her spirit rise, and the rescue of the dancer (Was her name Giselle?) was an opportunity for his redemption. He would be the danseur in the pas de deux, and lift the sodden driftwood from the muck, pirouetting with her through the grass. Now on a mission, he packed his tools and a shovel in the Cadillac, put a big drop cloth in the backseat, sent me off to find the ropes and an old red wagon, and we loaded them in the trunk and drove back to the nearest lookout parking lot on the Potomac. Mom was sitting now on a grassy spot gazing at Giselle, her knees pulled up tight to her chest, her cheek resting sideways in the sun. She looked up with a smile as we rattled our way down the paved path, uneven black wheels bouncing behind me as I pulled the little red wagon piled high with our excavation tools.
The Seasons of My Mother Page 11
