This is the seventh installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).
There are lots of reasons why it’s hard to be a writer, but most significant among them is that it seems to be a career path specifically designed to hurt your mother’s feelings. For some writers, that's the entire point -- if the old bitch isn’t keening into her handbag over everything they publish, they don’t feel they’re doing it quite right. As much as I’d love to be one of these bitter, dysfunctional individuals, it turns out that I'm still too fundamentally sensitive to my mother’s mental and emotional well-being to make that leap.
Not that I’m a perfect angel. I dropped out of college to write, and she's never let that one go. And meanwhile I've posted comments about my personal life on various Internet forums that would flatten her if she read them. My professional writing projects have included things like horror movie interviews, bar reviews, and one stage musical about lesbian erotica -- I doubt I could have chosen more alienating subjects. Mom, I tell people, is a gentle soul. Mom is a clean, honest, trusting, light-hearted individual who is made to cry easily. Mom won’t watch a movie if she suspects it has an unhappy ending. She finds catharsis to be overrated. Her own life, she claims, is hard enough already.
My sisters and I saw little evidence of this vulnerability as children. I guess that at least compared to kids ten-and-under, Mom was a pretty tough lady. No matter how far we were from home, misbehaving on a shopping trip got us frog-marched out of the store and driven straight home in blistering silence, and God help you when your father gets home. She was perpetually sending back her food at restaurants if it didn’t arrive exactly as ordered, or driving all the way back to the grocery store to get a refund on a bad melon. We worshiped and envied these magical adult superpowers. The general consensus among adults was that she was utterly delightful company, girlishly generous with her laughter and her attention, but we who were her responsibilities knew that she lived for responsibility itself. Her principles provided the script and direction for the play we were all putting on together. Contributions from Dad came in colorful, temperamental bursts -- art direction, I suppose, heavy on the pyrotechnics -- but Mom moved us all forward as steadily as a glacier.
But these, I have learned, are merely the masks adults wear in front of their children to reassure them that someone is in charge -- they ought not be mistaken for actual personality traits. This is why a child’s view of a parent, no matter how informed by decades of observation, is dangerously incomplete. It pains me to have to accept that nearly all of the personally significant experiences of my mother’s life happened either before I born or when I was safely out of earshot. But those are the facts -- the woman has always been a master of obfuscation. Only now that she’s in what she (frustratingly) refers to as her “crone years” is she slowly learning how to reveal herself to us. We're now privy to her unfiltered opinions, her concerns for herself and for the world, of which we still make up a significant part. Her tears, once a rare and terrifying sight to us, have finally lost their mystique. They’re regrettable in the way that all mom-tears are, but they’re also queerly similar to our own adult tears -- just one more bucket of suds at the car wash.
My mother has no script to consult as she learns how to fret over grown children -- she lost her own mom at twenty-three. My grandmother, Mina, suffered a brain event while babysitting my cousin and I, a slovenly pair of three-year-olds. My memory of that day is faint but it exists: Mina's phone call to my aunt when she felt something strange coming on, we kids being sent to play in the spare room so that Grandma could lie down and “get some rest,” When we were finally allowed out, she'd already been whisked to the hospital. My aunt prepared a pensive Spaghetti-O lunch while I sat at the dining room table with my coloring book. From a child’s perspective, it was an abrupt but mercifully quiet exit.
What a testament to Mom’s masking abilities that this was the extent of my loss! Somewhere in the background of my awareness, a young mother of two (with a third on the way -- meaning she’d already spent the better part of two years pregnant, or caring for a infant, or both) was struggling to survive a major crisis, while I scooped gravel in the yard. Meals were still served. Books were read aloud at sunset. They say kids are scarily observant, but that vision is terribly myopic. Wbe mom explained to me that Grandma had died, I’m sure I understood the sadness and finality of it, but there are Pink Panther cartoons that left a deeper impressions on me.
Mom still doesn’t like to talk about these things. Her life, remember, is hard enough already. But as we continue to age together, every now and then another hunk breaks off of the glacier, revealing important anthropological artifacts. In the middle of otherwise uneventful conversations we trip over partially-exposed fossils of memory, old loves and hurts that were flash-frozen and preserved intact, perfectly incorruptible. What am I supposed to do in these moments -- leave the remains where they lay and walk a wide berth around them? Can I dig them out and take them with me, or do they belong to the place where I found them? Neither of us seem to know.
One night on the phone, Mom described all the ways in which raising kids has changed since she was a young mother. She surprised me by off-handedly mentioning how hard it had been to raise her small children without Mina there to help. “Wow, I never thought of that before,” I said, delicately. I was afraid to push for details that might upset her.
She surprised me by continuing the thought on her own: “Plus I had to help make all of these decisions and funeral arrangements, and I was six months pregnant with Kelly at the time, so it wasn’t easy!” she said, laughing uneasily. “I even had to do her makeup for the funeral?”
And before either of us quite knew what was happening, Mom began telling the story, tying odds and ends of details together like rag-bundles. She told me about being at the hospital with her father and brother during Mina's final hours , translating the doctor's medical terminology into plain speech they could understand. She told me about the shock that came days later, when the three of them arrived at the funeral home to view the body: her mother’s corpse on display, exactly as it had been discharged from the hospital -- no “naturalistic” makeup, no makeup of any kind actually. No hairstyling, no pursed smile of eternal rest. Just this unkempt thing stuffed into her mother’s clothes. Something no one was ever meant to behold. A beautiful woman, Mina had been quite vain about her looks, and she had died in her prime, her early forties. To my mother, the thought of displaying such an unrecognizable ruin before an audience of loved ones was utterly offensive. It was an assault against a person who was not there to defend herself.
She told me how the funeral director apologized, informing her that they simply had no cosmeticians on staff. And how, with the actual funeral now mere hours away, she made an urgent case to her father and brother for a closed casket so that this wouldn’t be the rest of the family's final glimpse. And how my grandfather rejected the idea on principle: a closed casket would give people the idea that something unseemly had happened to Mina, that something was wrong. And how she kept trying to convince him that something was wrong, that there was something terribly wrong with presenting the bereaved -- whom were even now streaming into town to pay their final respects -- with a virtually unprepared cadaver. And how ultimately, despite her laments, the family could not be compelled to cover up the sight. The lid would remain open.
So, she told me, she drove home. Which is to say, she drove through a haze of tears to her parents’ house, where she gathered up armloads of the dead woman’s cosmetics. She plundered rooms and drawers where the smell of hairspray still lingered, rounding up the powders and cremes and devices of Mina’s daily beauty regimen. She told me how she drove back to the funeral parlor in a frenzy, hellbent on recreating from scratch a woman whom, until quite recently, would never be seen in public without lipstick. And about how upsetting it was to learn, firsthand, while painting her own mother, that cosmetics designed for living flesh don't actually do much for the dead, how the dry and unyielding skin laughed at her efforts. And how defeated she felt, washing everything off and starting over, smearing and washing and crying, pawing through the magic puzzle pieces that were supposed to fit together and form her mother’s face, coming up short again and again. Three generations of women inhabited the silence: one resting in death, one (my unborn sister) standing by patiently, and one frantically working to beat the clock. The end result, she told me, was the best you could hope for under the circumstances. The canvas that greeted guests that afternoon may not have been a masterpiece, but as a final gift from daughter to mother, it was better than nothing at all.
My mom’s voice was strangely neutral as she recalled all of this, as if she’d forgotten she was still speaking. On my end of the phone I’d been holding my breath, afraid of breaking the spell. When she finished, I wanted to ask lots of questions, including: “Are you taking any new prescriptions?” But instead I stammered, “Jesus, Mom. Why didn’t you ever tell me this story before?”
“Oh, you know," she sighed. "I guess I mostly just try not to think about it too much...” She laughed again hesitantly, in a way that hinted that the suds were catching up with her. “It was a long time ago.”
“But Mom. We’re your kids. Don’t you think we need to know these things? I mean, how long have you been holding that in? Twenty-five years? Don’t you need to talk about it? Don’t you think it would help?”
“I don’t know,” she laughed, sniffling. “Isn't bad enough that it happened at all? Why would I want to ruin anyone else’s day?”
That is the glacier talking, its inhuman patience and fortitude, its faultless geologic memory. And at the time, I'm sorry to say, it was the despicable writer in me that spoke back, warning her that I might want to write something about what she'd told me, probing for permission knowing full well that these artifacts are not my property, that she'll always keep the choicest bits under lock and key, details that she’ll take to her grave rather than risk ruining my day. But she said yes, I was welcome to write about it if I liked, though she couldn’t imagine anyone finding it very interesting.
Hi Mom, it’s just me talking straight to you now, even though you'd probably never read this far down the page in a story about yourself. For the record, it is interesting, and worth sharing, even if I have to fight myself and my concerns for you in order to write it down. You have your unknowable version of the truth, and I have mine. For the time being, I'm content with simply telling the story of you and I and the long distance phone call we shared, in which your tears became profound and terrible to me once again and I realized the near limitlessness of your endurance. As long as you continue to have a writer for a son, you're going to need it.
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