Living Doll

by Jane Bradley

  They called my mother the one who wouldn’t die. They were amazed that she kept floating up from comas, settling down again, and speaking clearly after seizures so strong she shook the wires and tubes loose from the bed. But she died finally, far beyond the family curse that she would die before the age of thirty-five. She lived on almost twenty years more, lived somehow, demanding to be washed and cared for like those dolls she once kept burying and digging up. Her secret of success: “I just live to love my babies,” she’d say with a sweet wise smile as if that were all she’d ever done, as if this were some kind of deep and ultimate truth.

  Really? I wondered, never daring to ask: When did you start living to love? I didn’t want to make her cry and try to defend herself. I would do anything not to see my parents cry. “I’ll be good, I’ll be good,” I had always whispered to myself the way any normal child simply draws a breath. “I’ll do my best to please.”

  I watched my mother, fetal, curled in a coma, eyes protruding, hands drawn like bird claws, lips pursed thin, tight and pale. I saw de-evolution in that hospital bed, saw a primate fetus take shape in my mother, a bird, reptile, fish. Her body parts were going piece by piece, the second kidney taken, along with the cancer-eaten remains of ovaries, uterus, cervix, the womb where she carried me once, my pink warm fertile blood-and-water home. Gone the bladder tissue, muscle, blood. Then finally, her bones went, not one by one but in a slow fade. Calcium leeched into dialysis, a gland failed that could stop the flow. The suck and pull of the machine was wasting her away as it cleansed the toxins from her blood.

  Her brain kept firing, liver filtered, heart pumped, lungs pulled oxygen from the air. Modern maintenance techniques kept her taped together. A blue plastic bag sealed to her skin around the intestine that protruded pink and alive, like a wide-mouthed worm. Another bag hung, sealed, a flap there like a blue fin, her disposable bladder. Her bags could be emptied, cleaned and rinsed until the seals wore out and they started leaking. Then they were wrapped in tissue, pushed deep in the trashcan, and thrown quickly away.

  My mother had a fascination for the engineering and mechanics of her medical maintenance things. Three times a week she drove herself to the clinic until she was so weak that we had to take turns driving her, helping her into the easy chair in front of the TV in that fluorescent-lit, falsely cheerful, whirring dialysis room. She said, “Staying alive is the job I do.” She called it going to work, said it could be worse: at least she was alive. “I want to live to love my babies,” she said.

  Why now? I wondered, remembering the mother who’d cut her wrists, taken overdoses of pills, who put a gun to her head and threatened to kill herself and us more times than I could count. Why struggle for life now? You were healthy then, your body was fine, not in constant pain.

  I couldn’t see the inner wiring of her brain, her thoughts and heart any more than I could see the spark and flaming danger of those wires my daddy twisted together and hid in the attic. She had a plan as he did. She was rigged somehow for a profit of destruction. She thought she could get something in dying, just the way they thought they could gain when they burned their own house down.

  Watching her I wanted to rip my own head off to stop knowing her pain. I wondered what I’d find inside. I knew how to do it, how to push the back of the head, hitch fingertips firmly under the bone base of the skull, then pull, snap, pop, roll the head free. It would all be over then. Maybe like a doll I would feel nothing at all.

  Mothers kill their children. It happens all the time. A mother cuts a daughter’s throat to spare her certain pain. It happens: pans of boiling water fly; a locked house burns in the night; the barrel of a gun presses gently into some boy’s temple, then explodes. A woman trapped, desperate, and beaten, doing the best she can with that wild ripping urge to have an effect on someone’s, anyone’s life. It’s easy to kill a child, just takes a second to slip a knife, squeeze a trigger, hold a head under water, silence it pushing down.

  Break a bone and you don’t hear only the dry dull snap, but a scream. Hold the bone to your ear and hear the blood-black tidal wave roar up, an ocean of screaming loss, grief, shrieking simple pain. Bones hold the stories of our lives like the faint circles in the sawed trunks of trees. Put your ear to the wood. Listen to the distant gnawing sound of feeding insects, the sap ebbing and trapped in the dead wood, trying without a chance to course its way back to the roots still reaching and sucking life from the deep damp earth.

  They say a lobster screams when you plunge it tail-first into boiling water. They say you can hear the thin high shriek, its hard jaws opening, its tiny black bead eyes rolling in its head. They tell us to do the humane thing; plunge it in head-first to kill it in an instant. But I know, I’ve heard the silent scream under water. I know we do the humane thing simply not to hear the sound.

  My mother knew when she was going. She lay flat on her back in her hospital bed, looked at the ceiling and seemed to see the words. “I’m leaving you this time, babies,” she said, and I knew there was no holding on, no pulling her up and out this time from that black space. The fever carried her and dragged her out as we watched like sentries, standing at the corners of her bed, and saw her disappear. At the end she seemed like a shrunken leather doll, something they could have buried once as a charm in a Native American grave. She was a tiny withered thing that last day, clutching and babbling as she clawed at the sheets, tried to pull herself up from sinking into an invisible pit at the center of her bed.

  “Agitation,” the doctor called it, the usual wild clinging to life before sinking into death. I watched her claw at the sheets, and saw myself going under, hands clutching at the water as my possessed mother held me down. I saw her above me pushing, then suddenly below me, small and sinking into the white sheets of her bed. Her head flailed as she babbled, only now and then a meaningful phrase. “I wish ya’ll would do my nails, I’m tired of looking like an old hag,” she said, stretching her fingers out, straining to see the chipped polish on her nails.

  Finally she stopped and let herself sink into that secret space in the room, fall through that tear in the fabric I had thought was life. I watched the heart monitor’s digital numbers slow, stop, start, slow. Her death was no sudden thing, but rather a gradual ebbing, like water poured into dirt, a pool of water that sinks and disappears without really going away. I didn’t want to be the one to divide my mother’s ashes into those little dime-store imitation Oriental urns. It was Sally’s idea to save her. Momma had said she wanted to be thrown into the lake, but Sally couldn’t do it. Sally had to hold on. All of them wanted to save back a scoop of her to keep except for my daddy and me. “Let her go,” I said. She was the one who said she wanted to be burned and thrown into the lake.

  Sally planned a birthday dinner in honor of Momma’s ashes; she decided that Mom’s birthday would be the best day to save what we wanted, then throw the rest away. But I was the one who sifted through those ashes, divided her up into little urns with a spoon. I didn’t want to do it, but like so many other things in my life, I did it.

  I had to. Sally saw to that. It was time to leave for the lake to meet the others for the ceremony, to stand together and take turns grabbing handfuls of my mother and toss her away. Sally planned it. She went to take a shower and left me alone in the kitchen with a new row of brightly painted tiny vases and cork stoppers. I held the little urns in my hand, ran my finger over the intricate vines, the green leaves, and red blossoms. There were twelve of them with twelve tiny corks. My mother would be like a genie broken up into little bottles and sealed until someone opened them and made a wish.

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said as if dividing ashes were an unwanted chore as simple as carrying out the trash. I took a breath, walked to the living room and grabbed the big smooth ceramic urn provided by the funeral home. Holding it in both hands, I carried it to the kitchen table. I saw Daddy lean back in his chair and pale. He looked at Sally’s husband, bot
h of them repulsed by me carrying my dead mother’s ashes across the living room in front of the football game they insisted on watching on TV.

  Sally was in the shower, her kids playing Nintendo in the back room. I smelled the ham cooking and looked over at the buffet spread with covered dishes of green beans, sweet potatoes, coconut cake, all Momma’s favorite foods. We would celebrate her birthday, the first birthday after the day she died. We would light candles and have a party after we threw her ashes into the lake.

  I sat at the kitchen table, placed the urn in front of me and spread my hands over the smooth lid. I felt them staring at me, their mouths twisted with disgust as they rumbled for cigarettes. I saw my daddy slam my mother’s head again and again into a wall. I saw him beat her unconscious with the broken leg of a chair. Now I hoped he was afraid.

  I opened the urn and reached for a spoonful of the ashes. I looked at him, smoking his cigarette as he watched me lift the lid of the urn as if I were opening a jar of pickles. “Don’t worry,” I said, “Momma can’t hurt you now.” I wished for a moment that life could be like those movies where demons let loose could slam a man against a wall.

  But, of course, nothing happened, and they went back to watching an instant replay on the TV screen. I stared into the urn and saw nothing but ashes, crumbled dusty bits of white, so light, yet so heavy and dense.

  I opened the urn as if it were a tomb, a vault no mortal had opened for thousands of years, and there was nothing. No sudden vengeful blast of rage. This was the truth. All that existed of her was in my mind. I sat and scooped out a bit of her, felt the dense light weight of grit in the palm of my hand. Then suddenly, as if I’d rung a dinner bell, the kids came running. “We’re hungry,” they called as they saw me, then paused as they tried to figure what I was doing with something that looked like a cookie jar.

  “This isn’t cookies,” I said. They found the Oreos and Chips Ahoy in the cabinet and stood eating, crumbs flying across the floor as they watched me spill ashes on the table.

  “Y’all get away from there,” Daddy said. But they weren’t budging. They stood, watched me roll a piece of wax paper into a funnel, then smoothly slide the ashes a bit at a time into a tiny vase.

  A large chunk of something clogged the opening; I took it, put it aside. The kids moved closer, cookie crumbs falling on the table. They were so close, I could hear the chewing, could hear them breathe. “What’s tha-ut?” one hollered. They pointed, moved in for a better look.

  “Grandmother,” I said, as if they could understand the process of a woman reduced to ashes. They looked curious as I explained the business of sickness, death, ashes, and the story of life beyond death. “Well it’s not really Grandmother,” I said. “It’s just her body. Grandmother’s soul lives forever, you know.” They nodded, but they were more interested in the clumps of things, the bits of clips, and screws and staples that worked to hold my mother’s body together when she was alive.

  They ate more cookies, crumbs mingling with the scattered ashes. I tried to keep moving, wanted to get it over, but I couldn’t help grinning at their pink fingers reaching, their complete acceptance of a dead woman’s ashes on the table while they ate cookies and watched. One grabbed a tiny screw, and said, “Well, what’s tha-ut?,” his arm knocking over an urn.

  “Careful. That was a screw they put inside Grandmother for an operation once.”

  “A screw?” they chimed together, their faces almost laughing, surprised, maybe a little shocked at the things grownups could do. More pieces scattered, more tiny nuts, bolts, staples, rolling up though the gravel and grit. They stood until they’d had their fill of cookies, and I told them to go on back in the bedroom and play. I watched them race from the room and on to the next video game. I could hear my mother laughing just behind me, that old wild laugh she had when she danced with us in the kitchen, when she forgot her life and played. I knew she would like to see her grandchildren fingering her ashes, making no distinction between ashes and crumbs.

  The men sat pale and nervous, ready to bolt, it seemed, at the sign of something supernatural. Only guilt could make them fear such a curse.

  I carried the urn on my lap in the back seat of Sally’s station wagon as we drove up to Chickamauga Lake where motor boats pulled water skiers gripping wooden handles with rope that held them firmly to the boats. The engine pulled them wildly round and round over the frothing surface of the water as if there were nothing in the world but speed and wind and water, as if it all could be forever alive.

  We found the place on the north shore of the lake where she had liked to fish. There we stood in the winter mud by the lake, and I dipped my hand in the urn, grabbed a fistful of ashes, and tossed them on the blue-gray water. We heard the shiooshing sound of the tiny stones hit water and sink. Filmy thin sprays of dust hung on the surface, then washed out in the waves and finally disappeared into the glare of sunlight on dark water. We each dug our hands in the urn and tossed her out, again and again until nothing was left but what I had saved back home in those tiny vessels, neatly arranged on the counter and corked. We stood there squinting in the light, listening to the sucking sound of water as the current pulled her out.

  My daddy is in jail now. They know him. He’s been there more times than anyone cares to count. He says he likes jail. The Silverdale Workhouse. “Sil-verdale” he calls it smoothly, as if it’s a resort. “Yep, I’m going back out to Sil-verdale,” he says, as he sits back, almost proud. “Gonna rest up and save my money for a while.” He says he likes the card games, the sitting around with the boys and “shooting the bull.” He says he likes not having to do nothing but eat and sleep and go to your room.

  But the warden there knows my daddy can cook, so they always give him kitchen duty. I can see him in his white cap and long white apron, throwing pot holders, ladling out beans, fried potatoes, cutting huge flat sheets of cornbread — his own recipe, cornbread doctored up with chopped pepper, onion, kernels of canned corn. They like it when he comes back to the workhouse. The eating is always better because he cheats on the recipes, slips good things in like spices and extra oil.

  But now he is in private lockup. Sally told me he got too generous and started giving double dessert to the inmates. “What the hell,” he must have said. “If a man wants two pieces of peach cobbler, why the hell not?” He knew that leftovers just got thrown out or carried home with the guards. So what the hell. He gave second rounds of desserts to his buddies, until someone who wanted points with the warden — someone who didn’t like sweets maybe — told on him. So he’s in private lockup. No cards, no “shootin’ the bull with the boys,” no TV. This is how he pays.

  He laughs about doing time in Silverdale, swears he doesn’t mind it, says that in Silverdale, if you play your cards right, you can get whatever you want. He’s not just talking either. He’s talking poker, Black Jack, five-card stud. He winks when he tells me, “You can get anything you want.” And I know this means whiskey, drugs, dirty magazines, blow jobs, women, anything you want. “Play your cards right,” he always says, “and you can get anything.” Then he sits back and shrugs. He shakes his head, bites his lip and says, “And if you lose, what the hell.” He laughs in that snickering way of his. “I don’t give a damn. If you lose, what the hell.”

  I wonder if he says that in lockup, the dim little concrete room. Does he sit there laughing? Or does he close his eyes and cry? Does it matter? He is in that dark room, muttering, “What the hell. Yeah. What the hell.”

  Five

  I took the bus to college one day. I had to think about it a long time to get up the nerve. But I couldn’t make BLTs and milkshakes forever. And when I was a kid my teachers always said I was smart.

  So I did it. Hazel, my boss, pushed me. She’s old and has copperred hair that she dyes, but she’s still got good legs for a woman her age. She kept saying, “Shirley, you’re too smart to waste your life here.”

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p; I am smart, I guess. I didn’t know it until I went back to the schools and got my records. One teacher had written that I was an “exceptional child.” So I took the bus and asked the driver to tell me where to get off. He was a nice man. He had those gentle, wide-open eyes. When he stopped, the bus hissed, and he smiled at me. He pointed out the open door and told me which sidewalk to take to the main campus. I stood on the last step and looked out half expecting the walkway to be shining like that road to Oz, smooth, winding, and gold. I got out and started walking the way he said. It was a regular sidewalk, tan and dirty looking, cracked and edged with grass.

  I looked for the biggest, oldest building, thinking that would have to be the center of things; that would be the place to start. I watched my Dingo boots go down the sidewalk. I had saved for them a long time, used all Daddy’s ten-dollar tips. I bought them because boots make me walk a little tougher and taller. They make me feel bigger, a little more solid and strong.

  Then I saw it there in front of me, where all the sidewalks come together like the spokes of a wheel. I looked up at the old dark brick building, saw the turrets and little stained glass windows. It was college, just like in the movies, old and solid. Grand. That’s what I kept thinking. It was a movie word: Grand. I saw the ivy growing, thick green ivy winding up and all over the wall. Just the way it was supposed to be.

  I hurried up the steps, pushed open the glass door, and stood breathing in the smell of floor cleaner and cigarettes. I saw a Coke machine in the corner and a black metal trash can with an ashtray on top, dirty with mashed butts and a pink-chewed wad of gum.

  I turned and watched two guys go down the street with backpacks. The guy in the denim jacket was eating an apple, and the other sipped something hot from a Styrofoam cup, the steam curling up around his face. It soothed me just watching. This was the world. It was soothing and happy and warm. Sparrows were picking at a McDonald’s bag that had fallen from a trashcan across the street. I remembered the story in the paper about a cat that lived outside the dormitory. The students took care of it. They even collected money to get it fixed and all its shots. They took care of things in college. That’s what Hazel told me. “You’re smart,” she said. “You’ll be all right.”