by Grace Sammon
I don’t dispute her argument. Maybe I just don’t get the whole shoe thing.
“I was going to give up the idea because you thought it was shallow. It pissed me off. I mean ticked me off. You’re as bad as the oldies sometimes. Do you ever listen to yourself? You are always saying things related to feet, like, getting your footing, wrong footed, mis-stepped, walking on eggshells, two left feet, sure footed, not a leg to stand on. Then, when I thought of you and THE footprints I was really pissed. Sorry, ticked, that you thought it was shallow. This is for you. I need you to tell me if it’s shallow.”
From out of the envelope I slip a beautifully bound, high gloss covered book. The cover picture is the Latoral footprints, my African connection. Title of the book: FEET by Erica Cortez. Dedication: ‘to jb who ticked me off enough to do this project.’
Looking up at her, amazed, I ask, “How did you do this?”
“Anyone can get anything published Aunt Jessica, you know that. I just sent it away to one of those photo-book companies. I’m submitting this for my photojournalism final. We had to create a book.”
The photos are really good. She’s chosen black and white, again. The ones of Tobias’ and CC’s feet are included. There are baby feet. Feet standing at a gravestone—probably Tia’s, bare feet, shod feet, dog feet on a lap, calloused feet, boots with frog eyes, sneakers with the shoelaces being tied, foot in a leg brace—mine, feet on a ladder. There’s one page with three photos—sheep feet, four llama feet—two stomping, and Oliver’s hooves deep in mud. There’s a striking one of a pair of stilettos one already on, the other with a foot poised to go in, or just sliding out. You are left with the feeling of what role will the wearer, obviously Sonia, take on today. There doesn’t seem to be a theme to the book, but you get a feel from it, a focus. It leaves you wondering.
I think Erica is worried I don’t like it because she interrupts my flipping through the pages. “If you think it sucks, I could maybe get these together before the end of the term.” She hands me a second envelope.
Before I open it, I say, “Wait, slow down, Erica. I should piss you off more often,” a nod to her using “ticked” for me “These are really good. What exactly was the assignment that led you to create FEET?”
As I open the second envelope, she explains that it was “to create or inform a feeling using just one body part.”
I want to push her thinking. “I think it does that, but what feeling do you want to convey with this work? What feeling do you get?”
I don’t give her a chance to answer because I am already looking at the contents of the second envelope. Color photographs of arms and hands. I don’t know about her having a foot fetish, but she clearly has a body part thing. She’s included the picture of Joan’s empty chair, hands holding Oliver’s reins, a hand reaching for one of the wooden spoons, hands spinning and weaving, Roy and my hands intertwined, Sonia’s hands mid-expression. I love these, dozens, and dozens of pictures.
“These really inspire me, Erica. I really do like the other, but these are so much stronger. These have, OK, for lack of a better word, ‘reach.’ I get the feeling that all these hands are telling a story, I love the sense of touch that I get from them. The hands are working, making an impact, touching, even if it’s only touching air. The way you’ve shot these, in my opinion, makes the viewer want to reach into these photos.”
“You really think so? Can you help me sort through them? I’m only allowed to have thirty for the project.”
As we pour over her photos, it seems the breakfast banter has reached its natural end as Pavarotti and Elizabeth walk past us. Elizabeth puts her hand on my shoulder as she passes and, to mine and Erica’s head shaking, utters, “Whatda ya hafta do” as she goes into the game room and closes the doors. Through the glass doors I can see the two of them, Elizabeth staring out the windows tugging on Pavarotti’s ear.
“I’m sorry Erica, do you mind? She’s been really cranky the last few days. I need to see if I can fix that, get a run in, and finish packing before Roy gets here. We should still have some time to go through your photos.” I kiss the top of her head, deliberately tussling her hair, and begin to head to Elizabeth. “Hey, Erica?” I stop to ask her. “When I’m gone for these few weeks, can you be extra nice to Elizabeth? I worry about her feeling so alone.”
She gives me a nod and I head to Elizabeth. With the game room doors closed the room is already overly warm, heat turned up to ward off the fall chill just beginning to envelop the house and fields. Elizabeth is staring out at the fields, freshly plowed under, waiting for winter to come to Southern Maryland. Although I’ve come in specifically to check on Elizabeth, I set to busying myself with trip preparations, packing books and my knitting needles in my duffle. I’m hoping to avoid a prolonged discussion.
“Whatda ya hafta do,” she sighs as I enter. I ignore her. I know now that this is never really a question, but her catchall statement, similar to “alas.”
She leaves her non-question hanging in the air, waiting for me to give her my full attention. She lets her pause go on for too long. She wins.
“Okay, Elizabeth, I’ll bite, ‘what do you have to do’ about what?”
“I didn’t think it would be-a like this,” she states, matter-of-factly, as she does most things.
“Be like what?” I ask, sitting on the window seat indicating she now has my attention.
“This sense-a of-a waiting to go on a vacation.”
I’m exasperated. Why is she bringing this up hours before I leave for the airport? She’s waiting? Ridiculous! It has been such a busy year getting ready for my doctoral orals, finishing up the interviews for “our” book, planning the trip, all of the oldies moving into this house—none of this felt like waiting around.
Elizabeth knows, better than the others, how important this trip is to me. She’s the one who urged me to go. ‘Go find your family, make decisions, you can no sit-a in two chairs,’ she counseled me. Now she resents that I’m going? She is, in so many ways, the subtle power behind everything that has transpired here. Why doesn’t she see that?
I’ll be back in four weeks, defend my dissertation, and then I’ll have the winter holidays here.
I try to practice patience, but for the moment I am indignant that she is questioning my leaving for a vacation. I know she resents the sense that she is being left behind with the others when she so wishes so was able to make this trip with me. I get that, but I resent her resenting it. Somehow, we are in a struggle. I don’t need right now.
As she always does, she reads me in a heartbeat.
“Not your-a vacation, silly girl, mine. The one with no-a suitcases. The one that lasts forever.” She pauses, “When the leaves fall, old people think of-a going on vacation.”
With emphasis she levels her eyes at me and says, “I didn’t think it would be-a like this. As if one place would be different from another, any less lonely, any less-a desolate. It feels like a very long wait.”
This “vacation” metaphor line had been a long-standing joke between us. She says she is ready to “go on vacation.” I simply refuse to acknowledge that she really wants “to go.” I may be heading to Europe for a month, but I am not ready for her to go anywhere! She has become too important to me in the last year. The mother and friend I didn’t know I needed. Still need, even at almost sixty years old.
I have even grown to enjoy her calling me a “girl.” I am no longer so insecure that I need “woman” status, and I am just old and vain enough to like that I look young next to the women living here.
How could this past year feel like waiting for her? We had done so much since this whole project began. Every day seems full. And she has been waiting? Had I listened so poorly, missed so much, been so selfish? I look at her more squarely. With one of the other women I might have taken one of their hands, but not Elizabeth. She is of a strong Northern Italian, closer, stereotypically, to the stoic German type. She laughs easily but at t
he core she is solid rock.
“Remember when we started?” I ask. “I was such a mess and you were the one who first listened and pulled me along. You thought the book concept was solid and did a lot to convince the others. You created most of the interview questions for the book. I owe you so much. So much has changed. You are really the one who helped make all this happen, don’t you see that? Our projects are making a difference to others.”
I can hear myself pleading like a little girl. “Elizabeth, after all this, I am not ready for you to ‘go on vacation.’
“We have a real story to tell. Besides, when I get back, I still have the last interview to do—yours. You can’t put it off any longer. I don’t have that piece in place, and you are going to be part of the story, like it or not. Please, drop this feeling like you are just waiting around. You’ve never been good at waiting anyway. It’s a journey, remember? So, “no-a vacation for a you!” I kid her, mimicking the insertion of the ‘a.’
She’s returns to looking out the window. It doesn’t appear that I’ve captured her interest at all.
“Elizabeth, I know I haven’t shared the book draft yet. I’ve been saving it for right now. Here. Here’s the prologue to our book,” I say the ‘our’ with great emphasis. Read it while I go for my run. We’ll discuss it before I go.”
She takes the papers, complete with my margin notes. I watch and wait as she begins the prologue, hoping for a hint that I got the beginning of the story right.
“And, so, our-a book begins,” she says aloud, “Our Mothers’ Stories.”
She looks at me and settles into the story.
This story begins many years ago at exactly 12:01 a.m. on December 7th, the moment my mother died.
With my mother’s last breath, she inhaled Death and all that may come after it. In that last sigh of an exhale, the story of my mother was forever lost to me.
In the release of that single breath she let go of an eighty-year journey and of the roles of wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, godmother, friend, mentor, artist, fundraiser, and event planner, as well as a host of other roles that left in their path only love, respect, longing, and an appreciation for the gifts she shared. She was, again, simply, Magnolia D’Alessandro Barnet, a child of God.
I was there at her side. My father had just risen from their shared bed to check on her. For the last few days, as her fever raged, she lay silent in the arms of coma. He leaned over, kissed her, and then, in a moment, the long eleven months of battling cancer ended. She slipped, ever so peacefully, into eternity.
If you’ve walked this part of a life with someone, you know that it is a privilege. You also know that you don’t know how you will react.
With my father now downstairs, the men from the funeral parlor came to wrap my mother in the heavy black plastic sack to take her away for preparation. As I watched them get ready to take her, I was only thinking that I still needed her risotto recipe. The men stood by respectfully as I looked at them waiting for them to direct me as to what comes next. To them this was a routine call, made too late at night, causing them to exchange the warmth of their winter beds for black suits and ties needed only for the short ten-minute ride to the funeral parlor.
I didn’t want to give her to them. I knew they wouldn’t care for her as our family had cared for her these last months and weeks. I knew they would have no idea of the grace, dignity, and kindness she shared until consciousness left her just days ago. They wouldn’t have a sense of the amazing wife she had been. They wouldn’t see past the cancer-havocked body of an eighty-year-old woman to the woman who, just months ago, was still brilliantly beautiful, with eyes of the most lustrous blue. They didn’t know the stories she had told of her girlhood with long curls and an oversized bow in her hair and a gold locket around her neck. The image of that little girl now stares back at me each morning from my dresser, a life of promise ahead of her. One that ends here in this bedroom.
The men from the funeral home don’t, and couldn’t, know who she was.
Was? Oh, God, how quickly the word “was” slipped into my thoughts? I sensed the men were eager to take her and get back to their beds! I hurried and lay down along-side her, understanding at my core that this is the last moment I have to be her daughter.
I assured her aloud that it would be ok, that the men would care for her. This was so unnecessary. She was already safe. There was no one more prepared to leave those she loved so well, no one more trusting that she would lie in the arms of a God she loved and served.
I told her, not yet wanting her ears to be deafened, that we’d see her tomorrow, and reassured her that she would be alright.
In truth, it is I who needed the reassuring. I realized that so much was lost in her passing. There is so much I wish I had asked, gotten answered, written down.
In the months and years since her death I have found real gifts in the kindnesses and wisdom of older women. Often, I vowed that I would start the book I envisioned in the moments after my Mother’s death cataloging the life lessons that she and other older women wanted to share with those they leave behind. Aunts Marthy and Mary died without me taking the time to even ask their thoughts. My Aunt Lilly and I spoke of a writing project often. We agreed to begin it together, but she had the good sense not to wait around for me to come by and sit with her. After two years of waiting, at ninety-six, she too left this Earth.
Now it is, finally, time to write.
I know that the younger generation is not interested in taking the time to listen, let alone be ready to care about the stories that go before them. I reassure myself that someday they, like me, will care. I can no longer trust that there is time for the conversations. Now is the time to talk, to listen, and to write so our stories will be waiting for them when they are ready.
What unfolds over these pages is all true, reflecting the ever so common confluence of chance meetings that become the fabric of our lives. Every aspect of what is here is part and parcel of women searching, seeking, and satisfied. These are the stories of women determined to control their own destiny, even in the final chapters of their lives. These are our mothers’ stories. The ones they needed to tell, and the ones we were not ready to hear. These are our stories, from both sides of the mirror. Sooner or later, if we live long enough, we will look in the mirror and wonder who that old person is staring back at us, or be surprised as we watch our mother’s hand come out of our own sleeve as we get dressed. It won’t be long before we find ourselves sitting in their chairs as we run out of time to tell those behind us what is important, real, or imagined.
I hope I capture their stories fairly, or, as my ex-husband would say, “warts and all.” If I get it right, you will recognize me and you, and your children and mine, and your friends, relatives, and the women in your community. You will, I hope, argue, agree, aspire, and analyze. You will, I hope, hold conversations. The conversations help write the next story, and the ones that come after.
Once upon a time, all of our stories began with “once upon a time.” We were young girls who dressed up in crinoline skirts even when we played in the mud. We dreamed of being princesses and mermaids. Then we were girls. It never occurred to us until we read psychology books in college that the only older women we saw in story books were evil and old—the archetypical Freudian foils for a child’s battle against their parent.
Somehow, we still became women, with little in the way of role models. We took on the roles of mother, caretaker, community worker, nun, nurse, teacher, lover, partner, and breadwinner. In the early ‘70’s we girded ourselves in manly suits and took on “a man’s world.” We over-proudly thought we were the first generation of women to balance career and family, have affairs, divorce, have women lovers, or to have crises of faith.
The reality was, of course, that there were countless role models at our fingertips. As babies we crawled to them and used their legs to gain our own footing. We only needed to reach for the hems of their skirt
s and our role models were there. Through twists of history no one had written the personal stories of how our mothers made their journeys, largely because we didn’t take the time to listen. Even today, in our accomplished selves, we don’t have a road map.
Now, we are women, and while our children may not be ready to hear our individual stories, perhaps they will value the story of the whole. There are still so many voices that need to speak, and there are ears that will want to listen. These are our stories. They begin like the old stories…
…Once upon a time, we were girls… and, we still believe we are.
Jessica Barnet
The Grange, Calvert County, MD
I hear the deep intake of her breath as she mouths the last line and raises tear-filled eyes to mine. Before she can comment, I raise my hand, interrupting what she is about to say, “Elizabeth, I am going to be sitting a very long time on the flight from Dulles to Oslo. I really need to fit in this run before Roy picks me up. We will have time to talk when I get back, I promise. Please, sit with it for a bit. I so want to hear what you think and if I got this right.”
With that I turn from her and make a quick check for final trip preparations. I jot a quick note and slide some things into an envelope for Elizabeth.
Checking my papers for my “note for the run” I strap my iPod to my arm, support sock on my left ankle, ‘tricked-out,’ elite cross trainer running shoes at the door.
I am ready for my run.
elizabeth
I
wait until Jessica leaves and I hear the door close behind her to tell Pavarotti, “Up.” From the front windows I watch as she runs down the drive and makes the right turn, north on Route 4. I watch as she stops for a minute, reties the laces on her left running shoe, pulls up the support sock, and adjusts her headphones.
