by Saeed Jones
A few months before she died, I had agonized over whether I could afford to give my mother the $800 she had asked for to help fix her car. I finally did after a coworker reminded me, “You only have one mother.” My mother was gone now and, in her stead, I had a check worth more money than either of us had seen in our lives. A cruel joke. The overdrawn checking accounts for the sake of groceries and heart medication. The doctors’ and dentists’ visits put off for too long.
Though for years at that point I’d thought of her failing health as inevitable, staring at the number on the paper in my hand I saw that a different story had once been possible. It wasn’t always necessarily going to end this way. If she hadn’t been living paycheck to paycheck, maybe she would not have needed to smoke so heavily to deal with her stress. Maybe there had been earlier avenues of treatment that would’ve spared her congestive heart failure in the first place. Maybe she could have been able to go back to school, gotten her college degree. What if, what if, what if…
I couldn’t tell which hurt more: the onslaught of ideas about what could have been, or all the memories I had of what actually happened. My mother crying in front of her altar because she couldn’t afford to send me to NYU. My mother sitting across from a banker who had denied her for yet another loan. My mother pacing in line at the grocery store, hoping her debit card wouldn’t be declined.
And now this check was in my hand, bought and paid for with her life.
I climbed the steps to my apartment and slid back down to my knees once I was in the kitchen. We could’ve had more flowers at her funeral. We could’ve decided on the casket with the rose-gold handles. We could’ve buried her in a designer gown with diamond rings on every finger and black pearls around her neck. Instead, my mother would wear the suit her sister picked out for her until the fabric disintegrated and succumbed to the dirt and worms. My ears rang with everything we could’ve done, everything we could no longer do. I would never get to bury her again.
21SEPTEMBER 2011
BARCELONA, SPAIN
I cleaned out my mother’s apartment that summer. Next to her altar, I found a note card she’d been keeping with a list of what she called determinations. At the bottom was this: “I will travel and see the world with my son.”
We never got the chance. But I went without her as summer faded, feeling untethered, like a wheel without an axle. I floated through one town to the next, winding my way through western Europe. Each morning I woke up wondering where I was, grasping at the last ray of a dream about my mother, even as the details turned to ash.
One morning, I leaned over the edge of my bed and nearly tumbled out, realizing only then that I was on the top of a bunk bed. I craned my neck to look at the bed under me and saw a blonde girl snoring softly. The night before we’d gone on a pub crawl together along Las Ramblas. This was Barcelona. I was in a hostel in Barcelona. Not Jersey City, not Memphis, not Lewisville.
I was pouring myself some cereal for breakfast when I noticed an older lady in the hostel’s common area. Most of the guests in the hostel were in their early twenties. Australians, forever on vacation, it seemed. Americans doing a gap year, backpacking across Europe. Young couples on their honeymoon. Quiet young women getting over breakups. This woman looked to be in her sixties, small but spry. Tourists like her usually seemed to travel in packs, but she stuck out. I ate my cereal, trying not to stare at her from across the room, wondering what this woman was doing alone in Spain.
After breakfast, I’d only made it a few blocks before I had to go back to the hostel to get the wallet I had forgotten in my room. When I came back downstairs, the older woman was standing by the front door, about to head out into the day herself. She happened to be holding a brochure for the Picasso Museum, exactly where I was going. I’d been keeping to myself, avoiding talking to other hostel guests as much as possible, but I felt like I should say something.
“Oh, I’m going to that museum too,” I said.
“Really?” Her voice sounded like a parody of an old lady’s voice, a young person’s idea of what a silver-haired white lady would sound like, except it had such force. Her words shot out. “Well, we should go together. I’m Esther.” She took my hand and shook it. Again, such force. I tried not to wince.
Though I hadn’t really planned on us spending our time at the museum together, once we were there, instead of going our separate ways, Esther and I made small talk. We walked from room to room, looking at paintings and sketches, trying to make sense of the descriptions written in Spanish and Catalan, talking about the hostels we’d seen throughout Europe.
“I tried one of those bus trips with other retirees,” she said at one point, “but old people are so… old.” Esther giggled at her own cleverness and I laughed too. She told me she was a retired nurse from Ontario who’d found she loved traveling overseas by herself. When she asked me what I was doing in Spain, I just said that I was writing, looking for material. Part of the relief of traveling alone was that I didn’t have to talk about my mother. As I strolled through Barcelona, though, she was all I thought about.
At the gift shop, Esther bought several postcards—not for grandchildren, as I had expected, but for the policeman she had recently started dating. Every time she turned away from me, it seemed, I caught myself staring at the curious marvel of this fierce little woman. She didn’t ask if I wanted to go to lunch with her; we just went to lunch. While we waited for our food, I asked about the other trips she had taken alone.
“Well, last summer I visited all the Holocaust museums and memorials.”
“Wait. All?”
“Every single one in Europe. Took me all summer,” she explained, smiling broadly. In the glint of her eyes, I could tell that I was giving her that baffled stare again.
“Are you Jewish?”
“No. I just… oh, I don’t know.” She paused. “I was just curious about how one man could get so many people to do something so awful.”
As the day went on, we stuck together, drifting from cathedral to cathedral, monument to monument. Esther refused to take taxis, even as I dragged behind her, whining and sweating. At one point, as we walked down an interminably long city block that may have been uphill, or simply seemed that way because of the late-summer heat, I watched Esther plowing ahead as I walked behind her. I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t been so tired. Why was I following this little old white lady all over Barcelona? Why was I in Barcelona in the first place? The questions shimmered in the air like the heat.
A month after the funeral, I had woken up in my apartment in Jersey City and looked around the room. I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. I needed to wake up somewhere new; I needed everything I saw as soon as I opened my eyes to say clearly and definitely that my life had changed. Too much had happened for me to keep waking up surrounded by the lie of continuity. I had already decided that when the school year ended, I wouldn’t return to teach again. Trying to take care of those kids when I was barely taking care of myself just didn’t seem right. And, when I was seized by the fog of grief, writing brought me the kind of clarity that I desperately needed.
I moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Harlem that cost twice as much as my previous studio. I can afford this now because my mother is dead. I’m a poet living in Harlem now because my mother is dead. My full-time job is writing now because my mother is dead. I couldn’t separate the monstrous from the miraculous. Friends would try to convince me otherwise, framing her sacrifice as a gift my mother had given me, but I wasn’t so sure. It felt cruel to mine personal meaning out of her death. I didn’t want to redefine her life and death as a journey toward sacrifice. It’s still difficult, at times, to talk about my mother without inadvertently rendering her as a beautiful stone idol. Sometimes I hear a voice in my head asking, “Who died and made you king?”
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, Esther and I went to the beach with some of the other people from the hostel. We stopped at a bodega along the way and got several bottles of sa
ngria.
“Did you know all this sand was imported from Egypt?” said Esther as we spread out our towels on the white sandy beach. I smiled and shrugged. “The country had all the sand shipped in to make the beaches look prettier when they hosted the Olympics. I think palm trees too.” We looked at a nearby tree, as if we were natives eyeing an interloper in our midst. Esther and I toasted our bottles of sangria.
As Esther played with the sand next to her, combing it with her wrinkled fingers, I thought about my grandmother, who must’ve been just a few years older than Esther. She had never been to Europe. I couldn’t remember the last time I had chatted with her as easily as I did with Esther. My grandmother and I didn’t chat; that was never our relationship. But we had, in the months after Mom died, started calling each other again. The calls were short, and we rarely if ever talked about Mom. Yet her presence was always there somehow. Early in the summer, I was calling from my new apartment in Harlem, and just as we reached the lull in the conversation that usually precipitated us ending the call, my grandmother let out a heavy sigh.
“I sure do miss that woman,” she said.
It’s difficult to describe the warmth I felt in her voice right then. I could hear my grandmother smiling on the other end of the line, as an image of her daughter formed in her mind: Carol Jean smiling in the sunlight, sunglasses on, hair shimmering. That woman. I heard my grandmother’s joy build, and I heard grief come back to snatch her smile away. Good memories had become self-inflicted cruelties for us.
It knocked the wind out of me. I hunched my shoulders and nodded, unable to answer her back. I’d heard so many people speak lovingly of my mother since she died, but no sentence had as much love tucked into it as my grandmother’s “I sure do miss that woman.” For the first time in years I wished I could hug—really hug—my grandmother. I wished Mom could have heard the love in her mother’s voice just then.
* * *
AS ESTHER LOUNGED, I decided to go for a swim. The ocean was a bright shade of blue, with swirls of emerald springing forth when the light hit the waves just right.
When I first stepped into the water, I almost laughed. At its warmth, like an embrace. The tease of waves licking my ankles. The shock of coming into contact with a body of water that vast, then vanishing into it.
I drifted out into waves the color of peacock feathers. They pulled me away from shore, and into a dream I’d had about my mother earlier that summer. We had been driving across one of the old bridges in Bowling Green, me at the wheel and Mom in the passenger seat. It was a bright, cloudless afternoon. Music played on the radio and we had our windows rolled down, so my mother kept waving her hair out of her face. We laughed, or at least I heard laughter. We had been driving across the bridge all day, but my mother didn’t seem to notice. She kept waving strands of hair out of her eyes and switching radio stations. The bridge just kept going, mile after mile. It irritated me that Mom hadn’t realized. With one hand still on the wheel, I reached over and touched her hand.
I put my hand back on the wheel, but the skin where I had touched her turned an iridescent blue, tinged with green. A peacock stain soon marked her hand and we stared at each other. Somehow, this was how we knew she was dying. She tried to apologize, but I only looked back at the road ahead and pressed down on the gas. The bridge stretched out and out.
A blink and we were in a white-tiled bathroom, both of us standing in the empty bathtub. The peacock stain had spread from her hand to the rest of her arm. “I’m sorry,” she said again. But something unsettled in me. I don’t know why, but I grabbed her by the collar of her shirt. I shoved her against the wall. I held her there as she cried, and I cursed at her.
This had been my first dream about my mother since her funeral. Gasping, I woke in my apartment in Harlem. A bright, cloudless morning, just like on the bridge. My sobs were so violent, my ribs hurt. For months, I had been waiting, hoping, for her to appear in my dreams. I thought she would answer some questions, or just sit beside me, but instead, when she finally showed up, I hurt her. Every time I squeezed my eyes shut, I could still see her pressed against the tile wall, struggling to keep her balance in the tub, her shirt collar still in my grip, her eyes locked on mine as she cried.
I knew where this part of the dream came from. One morning during my junior year of high school, an unspoken argument between us finally broke open. I can’t even remember why we were arguing, but I remember growling: “I love you so much. You’re the best mother anyone could want.” I injected my voice with as much venom as I could muster, and I said it over and over. With each repetition, she slapped me. I love you so much. Slap. You’re the best mother anyone could want. Slap. I kept going until my eyes shined, until I was screaming.
My mother, several inches shorter than me, grabbed the collar of my shirt and pinned me against the sliding glass door of the patio. I remember feeling myself lifted onto the tips of my toes. My voice was hoarse and my mother was so livid she sounded otherworldly. We shouted back and forth, neither hearing a single word, until we were both exhausted. When she let go, I ran out of the apartment.
Like the actual impetus for the fight, whatever happened next is a blank. All that remains is the single ugliest moment between the two of us. My mother and I at our worst.
That is the memory that came hurtling toward me when I woke up from the dream in Harlem. I was shaken, terrified that this is what all dreams about my mother would be like. Brutal memories, distorted and looped.
I love you so much. You’re the best mother anyone could want. I’m almost certain I said those exact sentences while holding my mother’s hand in the ICU.
I was shocked by how vivid it seemed. The memory of her death came surging forth again, as if I’d been in the hospital with her just the day before.
Would it always be this way? Time cascading and crashing in on itself, each memory pushing me back toward the beginning of my grief. I didn’t know if I could take it.
I realized, as I swam out farther than I’d expected, that I was sobbing. The tears ripped through me as I treaded water. I tried to stay above the waves, but they kept breaking against my neck and face. I was exhausted. My body, my mind. My life itself felt exhausted. I started swimming back to shore but the waves resisted me. Drunk on sangria, tired from the sunshine and the crying, I started slipping under the surf. Water went up my nose, into my mouth. I coughed, sputtered, started swimming again, struggling to keep my head above water. Wave after wave kept coming in.
My arms and legs were so heavy. Maybe I had fought long enough. Maybe I could just let go, stop fighting, and ease down into the sea. I thought it over, paddling and paddling. I decided, “Yes, I will let go.”
I stopped kicking my legs. I stopped stroking my arms against the sea. I started to sink and let the water crest over my head. I let a last breath escape my lungs. And just then, the tips of my toes brushed against sand.
The waves had pushed me back toward the beach; I hadn’t even noticed. The peacock blue had saved me from myself.
I let out a small laugh. I felt the sand under my feet. I felt the waves tugging me back toward shore. The ocean shimmered around me. She would have loved this place, I knew. I wish she could see it, I thought. Then, I guess I’m seeing it for us.
I made my way out of the water and back to Esther and the rest of our new friends. I sat down and she handed me a bottle of sangria.
“It’s a little warm,” she said.
* * *
OUR LAST NIGHT together in Barcelona, Esther and I went out for dinner. We ordered tapas and giggled every time she said “sangrita,” even though she already knew it was called “sangria.” The café we chose was in an outdoor plaza overlooking the city. In an easy silence, we watched the sunset together.
“My mother died in May. That’s why I’m here,” I said, finally, still looking ahead.
“My mother died this year too.”
I wonder if we had, in some way, always known that we had this in common.
Holding hands across the table, we took turns letting the words pour out of us. It was overwhelming, describing the women we missed so much. Words coming home like waves. It was freeing to just say it.
Our mothers are why we are here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My literary agent, Charlotte Sheedy, has had faith in me from the beginning. Her support ensured that I was able to write this book under the best possible circumstances. Equally important, Jonathan Cox—my patient, lovely editor at Simon & Schuster—is simply one of the most brilliant people I have ever gotten to work alongside. He has been my champion and lodestar throughout this process. Thank you to the many, many people at Simon & Schuster who have contributed to this book’s journey. Thank you to the wonderful folks at The Tuesday Agency. Thank you, Sam Hall and Karisma Price.
Thank you to my grandmother and the rest of my family for trusting me to tell my truth as best I could. Thank you, Aunt Janet; I love you more than the air I breathe. Thank you to my chosen family for reminding me again and again that, though the work was daunting, I was never alone. Isaac Fitzgerald. Ellen Claycomb. Lukas Thoms. Christopher Jerrolds. Teddy Goff. Marc Dones. Marlon James. David Speer. Adam Ellis. Benj Pasek. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. Angel Nafis. Morgan Parker. Danez Smith. Kiese Laymon. Syreeta McFadden. Adam Falkner. Alexander Chee.
Thank you to my therapist, David Witten.
Thank you, Sarah Schulman, for being the earliest reader of what would become chapters of this book.
