by Kris Radish
“July 12—P. arrives. The world circles in. Every second—tomorrow does not exist.”
“August 5—Bedroom done. Quiet storm last night. I will never leave.”
“August 10—Trip to the clinic. Desperate for miracles. Five young girls all pregnant. Exhausted. I want to lie down. Lie down.”
Tons of notes like this, and I find the wine from Tomas's lunch basket and go to the beach, fanning through the pages, absorbing every word and then making believe that I know everything there is to know about the cottage and my aunt and the years she spent pacing this spot where the sea meets land. There are pages of notes that need translation—“Damn it. Birds in the kitchen. Juan did it again.” And I imagine somewhere that there is someone who could tell me a story, that story, any story about what it all means. But I cannot wait. I drink the wine, every drop of it myself, and I make up stories as I fry in the sun and turn occasionally to see if the cottage is still standing and I am really sitting in such a paradise. When I lie still and close my eyes, my aunt and her friends, her lover, they all come to life and I see them running through the pages I have just read and they are as real as my own skin lying on sand that has been touched by their very feet.
I walk the beach a good mile one way and see not one person, not one house, then I turn around and walk the same distance. Light is fading by then and half a mile from the cottage I see a break in the stand of trees. Piles of stones, placed in a long oval circle with dried flowers scattered about its center, protected from the wind, huddled in piles several inches thick. I bend down and smell them—a rich scent of orange sweetness that makes my limbs weak with delight. I barely fit inside the circle, but when I get inside of it, the smell, the heat from the sun-warmed rocks and an occasional breeze from the jungle all combine to make me feel as if I am being cradled by the very arms of Earth herself. Then I laugh.
I laugh long and hard and I push my face against the flowers and drop them on my head and across my legs, and I know that this is exactly what my aunt did in this spot and this is why she built it. She built it so she could just be here and do this. Feel the rivers of jungle air washing over her. Feel the scent of the flowers moving into her hair, under her skin, in and out of her fingers. Feel the rhythms of the waves circling in to land at her feet. Be silent and touch her self, her soul, her own rushing waves. Feel. Just feel.
There is no secret note hidden under a rock or buried under the flowers and there doesn't need to be. Being in the circle made me happy—the wine helped too—and that was the message. “Staying in the circle,” I remember saying to myself, “that's going to be the hard part.” and centering myself on that occasional breeze from the jungle I need to wrap around me and hold me and keep me centered. It is the feeling of being inside my aunt's beach cocoon that I seal into my heart and take with me when I finally get up, brush the flowers from my skin and step back outside the circle.
I spent that night wrapped up in a blanket, sitting on the beach. I could not bring myself to sleep in my aunt and her lover's bed and as I dozed with my face dusted in sand, I wondered how long it would take me to make the house my own, wondered also if I could possibly keep it, spend months there, in my own circle of laughter, just as my aunt did and keep the light tilted just the way she had seen it on her life.
I wondered if I would have the courage to actually file for divorce, to move out or ask him to move out, to . . . what else? That entire night, all those hours, my life paraded in front of me and I was the lone spectator and the theme of the parade—“Margaret's Missed Life” was much longer than I had expected. In spite of the circle of laughter, I was totally missing the point.
I know this now, sitting in my office with two of the rocks stolen from that beach resting on my desk. I know it and pray to God that it isn't too late to do something about it.
If I had a sister I wonder if we would be as opposite as my mother and her sister were. My mother's new condo kitchen, where I am standing and where Dr. C has strongly suggested that I visit, is totally humorless. There are no dishes in the sink, no tipped-over wineglasses on the counter, the garbage is empty, there are fresh flowers on the table and not one aging note is tacked up on the refrigerator. My mother has just made us tea and we are moving onto the porch to have what she calls “a little chat.”
I watch her pour the tea and wipe up what she spills on the white Corian counter with the edge of an exquisite cotton cloth, and my heart fans out just to see that. I always knew that my mother loved me and that she struggled with many things. I knew that she had piled her dreams into a paper bag and thrown them out the back door—well, actually she'd placed them gently into the bottom of the stainless-steel can under the sink, but throw them away she did. We talked, my mother and I, but we rarely shared. If I were younger, I might rage and ask her why. If I did not know that she loved me and that she had tried to move her corner of the world for me at least once, I might be angry, but somewhere along the road leading up to this moment I decided to embrace her, just embrace her, even if that meant holding her at a slight distance while I did it.
“So,” she says as a way to kick-start whatever it is she thinks I need to say, and as she says it and turns her head, I notice that the lines along her eyes match mine and that she has developed a nervous twitch above the left line of her lip. I wonder in those few seconds as she sets down her cup and looks out across the courtyard if she misses my father. Could she miss my father?
“Mom,” I say suddenly, changing the direction of a conversation I had totally planned. “Do you miss Daddy?”
She pauses, closes her eyes and says without looking at me, “No one has ever asked me that question.”
Oh, Mom. Oh, Mom.
When she turns, I see little emotion in her eyes. No tears.
“I'll tell you, Margaret, because I know you have come to tell me some things that are hard. I may be old but I am not stupid. You have been unhappy most of your life.”
Oh, Mom. I am the one who starts to cry.
“A part of me was glad when your father died, which is a horrid thing to say. But it is true. A part of me will also grieve and ache for the familiarness that grew between us, for knowing what time he would come home, for being able to fix his dinner just the way he liked it . . . for many, many things.”
“But—”
“Let me finish and then you can talk.”
My mother turns to face me and it is all I can do to sit still and not sweep her off her feet and hold her like a baby.
“We should have had this conversation twenty years ago. I'm sorry for that, Margaret.”
“But—”
“No,” she says louder. “Let me say this.
“I made mistakes. I could never stand up to him, never step out of the role someone else had designed for me, and because I couldn't, I did not have the courage to let you create your own role and place in life. Me not going to college and putting up with his temper and allowing him to dictate . . . well, I will hate myself until I die for that.”
She has stunned me into silence. The tea will never do it. I'll need Irish whiskey. I cannot move.
“But the terrible irony is that I loved him, honey,” she says. “I thought of leaving, but I couldn't imagine myself without him. Do you know that he used to sing to me?”
“What?” I manage to squeak out.
“Your father sang to me. Not a lot, just once in a while, but it was enough.”
“Mom . . .”
“But I wonder, I will always wonder, what my life could have been. He was a jackass. He was a goddamn jackass.”
She still does not cry and I know she must have had this conversation with herself a hundred times, maybe a thousand times.
“That's it,” she says, moving her hands off my knees. “I don't need you to say anything now, except what you came to say. We'll see how that goes.”
Before I share my glad tidings, I tell her I must go to the bathroom first and I ask if there is whiskey for the tea. My moth
er laughs and says that part of me has always reminded her of my father and her sister. “God, how you two loved each other,” she says with pure pleasure of my relationship with Aunt Marcia.
While she gets the whiskey I stand in the bathroom without turning on the light, without actually using the toilet, and I feel like a fool. I feel as if everyone in the entire world has known some huge secret about life and I am, once again, the last to know. It is hard not to hate myself. Not to waltz over the edge of that place where you want to slap your own face in disgust and embarrassment. I am so goddamned stupid, I never even imagined having the conversation I have just had with my mother.
When I go back out to the porch, she is sitting with her back to me and I move in behind and place my hands on her shoulders. It has been a long time since we have touched on purpose beyond those random acts of passing in the hall and hugging good-bye. My mother brings both of her hands to mine and I sense in that moment the patience that kept her with my father, that helped her raise three children, that got her through what I can only now imagine as days and nights darker, much, much darker than my own.
“Sit,” she finally tells me.
When I begin to talk, nothing seems to make sense at first, and then she touches me again and I feel something smooth and lovely move between us and I embrace the importance of touch and holding as the one solid thing that I have ever known as true. My mother's hand on my back as I walk into the hospital to give birth to my first child. Her fingers in my hair when I am a teenager and sobbing in her lap because of some now long-forgotten adolescent crisis. Her gracious shove the day of my wedding when I was panicked about making it up the aisle. All those nights she slipped into my bed after I'd heard the yelling, and her legs warm and firm against mine and her hands moving to rub my back and arms when she knew I was worried about her and him and us, as she cried quietly. The one day, many years ago, when I fell out of the car, my arm pushing down the lever in the new red Ford, and me rolling and rolling and rolling and my leg bent sideways and the gravel that dropped from under my skin and my mother's hands there again in my hair and touching the top of my chest and moving in circles on the side of my face that was not bleeding. The touch. Always the touch and the fine flow of energy from her skin to mine and the firm feeling of strength that I could feel rising from her—through her—to me. Her touch now gives me the courage to begin again.
“Mom, you are right, I am so unhappy. I can't remember being happy, really happy, for a very long time.”
“Tell me, baby, just tell me.”
And the circles of her fingers keep moving and I tell her everything. I tell her about the wanting to watch and leaving and then coming back. I tell her about Mexico and about following the trail that had been laid together piece by piece by her sister until I ended up on the edge of a sea wider than anything I had ever seen or felt and the circle of solid stones that sifted in an occasional breeze from the jungle, and I tell her that I know about my aunt's foundation, and then I pause and wait for her hand to stop moving on my arm, for her to walk away or to simply be quiet, and she does none of those things.
“Meg, you should have been my sister's daughter. Something got screwed up along the way and I ended up with you, such a great prize, one that I never felt I quite deserved.”
Mom. Oh, Mom.
She doesn't stop. I lean into her even more but she doesn't stop. She may explode, I think, if she doesn't get this out.
“You always seemed perfect to me, Meg. You did, really. I've wanted to tell you your entire life how sorry I am for all the times when you needed me to push through the door first and I couldn't do it. I just could not do it, and I apologize now, but I just could not do it.”
Mom. Oh, Mom.
She goes on for what I am sure to her seems like an eternity, when I realize that she must be doing this for a reason that is about to make itself known in a big way because we have had portions, in very small doses, of this conversation several times during the past three years. A weepy session at the hospital the night my father died. The funeral. Selling the house. A month alone in Arizona and dozens of late-night phone calls. One afternoon of wine and remembering things that would have been better not remembered. A lost card from Marcia arriving in a tattered envelope from the post office.
So this, some of this, most of this, is old, maneuvered back into place by my rotting life. Or is it something else?
I start talking again when she finishes, reassuring her that I understand the place and time, and then forgetting my premonition to ask her what the hell I should do next. It must be the whiskey and tea.
“What do you want to do, Margaret?”
“Start over.”
“Well, then, why do you ask me what to do?”
“I feel bad.”
“Oh, screw feeling bad.”
“Mom.”
“You would say ‘fuck it,' but I can only say ‘screw it.' That's all you are getting.”
We laugh, which seems to be the thread of who we are, have been, will probably always be—and without realizing it, I am holding her hand and kneading my fingers in between hers so that she can relax and let go of whatever it is she has left to say.
“So?” she asks me.
“I'm still exhausted, even after that trip.”
“You've got years of unburdening to do. I'm surprised you can walk, for heaven's sake.”
We pause again, take a sip of the whiskey tea and watch as three sets of golfers jockey for a place on the third tee that she can see from her porch. A breeze kicks up that ripples through the trees just below us, and it is as if something or someone is whispering in a quiet concert designed for us.
“Did you hear it?” I ask her.
“You think it's a voice from the dead?”
“Maybe just the cranky neighbors who heard us talking about sex.”
She laughs and then turns toward me quickly. A sharp turn. Fast. My head aches from the whiplash.
“Tell me what you want, Meg.”
My heart pounds. I cannot breathe, but I know. I suddenly know what I want.
“Something simple. An apartment,” I say, and then it is as if a dam has burst open, as if someone has plowed through an ice field that is a thousand years old, as if a dried-up spring has begun to flow, as if the blind can see and women are ruling the world.
“I want to live how I want to live and quit my job and spend lots of time in Mexico and make certain that Katie does not end up in prison and . . .” There's so much. I'm afraid that if I keep going I will never stop.
“What?”
“Well . . .”
“Baby, say it. If you say it, you make it real.”
“I want to be alone. I think I just want to be alone for a while, maybe for a long time. But I'm scared. I'm so scared.”
She laughs again and I know that she's not laughing at me but for some other old and ridiculous reason that I don't need to hear about.
“That's it?” she asks.
“Well, part of it.”
“That's enough. It's huge and perfect and you'll do it. Soon.”
“Really?”
“Oh, come on. Look what you've done in the past few months. I was beginning to think you were going to start selling Tupperware or those baskets at home parties, for crying out loud.”
Who is this woman? Where the hell did my mother go?
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Why didn't you say something?”
“You had to come into it on your own. It wasn't right. Timing, you know. It's important that it be your choice and your life and not mine. Never mine or anyone else's.”
Mom. Oh, Mom.
I think we are done then. I think that when I get up and drive home that there will be a little book of instructions on the kitchen counter to tell me what to do next. Everything will be outlined and the important stuff will be boldfaced and there will be a choir of naked male angels singing in the backyard to help me when I get low
and lonely as I cross out one task after another.
This is when I realize the whiskey has taken its toll on my afternoon heart. I'm tipsy. Not drunk, but woozy enough to want to lie down on the porch and pull my shirt off over my head. Bad enough to know I should not leave my mother's wonderfully decorated condo.
“There's no way in hell I can drive home, Mom.”
She laughs again.
“This is like college or that last week of high school,” she tells me, moving already to get the pillows fluffed and pull back the covers. It's what? Jesus, not even eight P.M., and I'm sauced.
In bed, she tucks me in like she must have hundreds of times when I was a little girl, and her fingers, just like then, linger on my face. When I open my eyes, I see that she is crying. My hand goes to hers and I rise up from the pillow. I cannot seem to speak.
“Meggie, this is something, isn't it?”
“Yes, yes it is,” I say through tears as thick as the wall we have just tumbled through.
“Meggie, just saying this has made us stronger, but . . .”
She pauses, and my heart, already flat and exhausted, stops.
“There is one more thing. It's a tough one, honey. Pretty damn tough.”
My mother never swears. She's done it several times in the last few hours.
“What?” I ask as I leap outside of my body and watch us, hands together, hearts beating from the same origin. “What?”
She takes a breath and even in my boozy state I can see that she has the words in her mouth but she is having trouble getting them to the next step.
“Honey, I have a lump. They found a lump. This is the worst possible time for you. But I need you. Auntie Marcia is gone. I need you.”
My mind is frozen and then dips suddenly to the warm beach and to the scented circle of laughter. I will myself to feel the breeze that shifts through the long green leaves, past the rows of grass at the edge of the beach and through the tiny cracks of the rock wall, and then I take my mother in my arms and say the only word that I can remember. The only word that seems finally perfect.
