The intuitive was wearing oven mitts when she opened her front door and waved me in for a consult with my spirit guides. “I’ve been baking. We’ll have cookies later.” After Wendy and I settled on her couch, she spread Tarot cards on the coffee table. She turned them over one by one, her manicured fingernail tapping each card for emphasis.
Tarot cards? Really? Why isn’t she channeling my guides?
“What?” Wendy asked.
A whiff of oatmeal cookies overpowered the candle she’d lit.
“Well. Umm. I prefer the guides.”
She put the cards away and walked over to her bookcase, stood for a moment without speaking. She was emptying herself of Wendy.
When she turned to face me, the guides scolded like impatient parents. “She thinks wisdom only comes through in this fashion.” “It will be hard to live up to her potential.” “If she’s going to be creative, she’ll be destructive too.”
Even though the guides were scolding me, I was finally receiving the attention I was starving for.
Wendy scrunched her face as if trying to make out an object in the distance. “They’re gone now. Someone else is here.” Wendy paused. “A woman who hasn’t been here before. Standing in a shadow. Stoop-shouldered.” Wendy was still as a corpse. “She’s looking right at you, but she doesn’t say anything.”
I leaned forward. “Mama?”
Most days during my childhood, Mama didn’t look at me. She wandered from room to room like a zombie. Rooms with roaches in the cupboards and grime on the floors. Rooms where laundry drifted in the corners. I spent a lot of time in the corner, too, wary of the zombie, wishing I had a mother. She and Dad often argued behind their closed bedroom door, while we kids eavesdropped from the top step, long past our bedtimes. One night two men escorted Mama––listless and compliant––down those stairs. I didn’t know who they were, but Dad didn’t try to stop them. He led them through the living room and grim-faced, held the front door open. I watched them take my mother away.
In the 1960s, no one spoke of mental illness.
Dad said Mama “got better real fast” after the doctor threatened shock treatments.
My grandmother called her lazy.
In Wendy’s living room, I felt the gaze I’d craved for fifty years. “Mama’s here.”
Fragmented images of her that I’d long forgotten floated together in my imagination. The woman she’d surely been, in between bouts of depression, eased into the foreground. A tremor went up my arm.
“She’s gone,” Wendy said.
Her visit was over, but Mama had walked into my life and made it clear she’d never leave me.
The Mama I’d forgotten loved to dress up.
In my favorite picture, she posed with hands on hips, a wide grin on her face. She wore a forties skirt suit: broad shoulders, nipped waistline, and her feet clad in ankle strap peep-toes. The outfit was topped with an admiral’s hat that framed her shoulder-length waves. The epitome of chic. It took a beat to realize the headgear was a joke. It belonged to Dad’s kid brother Al, who was standing next to her, hatless, in his high school band uniform.
She and Dad celebrated a New Year’s Eve at the Elks Club. Her outfit: a champagne-colored chiffon dress. Short puffy sleeves. Sweetheart neckline. Full skirt billowing over petticoats. They swished when she walked.
She took my brother Michael, in high school then, to a production of “The World of Suzie Wong,” at Des Moines’ KRNT Theatre. Her outfit: a black knit dress that hugged her hourglass figure. A narrow belt of the same fabric. Stockings with seams up the back. Black suede pumps.
Michael remembered she’d struck up a conversation with a young Asian couple sitting next to her. “What nationality are you?” (They were Japanese and had emigrated to Hawaii.) Perhaps she followed up with Where are your parents? How did you end up in Des Moines? Do you miss Japan? These are questions I would have asked. I inherited her curiosity, along with her depression.
My sister Michelle is a minister; part of her ministry is helping the living communicate with loved ones who have passed on. “Do you think Mama has a message for me?” I asked.
“Let’s go walking in my favorite place, and I’ll find out,” she said.
At Santa Barbara’s Botanical Garden, we found a winding path that led uphill and down, in and out of the shade. We stopped on a stone bridge to listen to a creek that gurgled underneath. As we continued, the hot sun on my bare arms turned into cool, still air. We’d entered a redwood grove.
“This is the spot,” Michelle said.
We sat side by side on a bench in the shade of the giants, and then she wandered off alone. I leaned way back to see the treetops. I was a supplicant in a holy place, as I’d been at monasteries I’d visited on retreat. The redwoods silenced the chatter in my mind.
Michelle returned and sat beside me. “Mama said she’s proud of you. She said keep writing. It’s important.”
It was a Christmas present in July.
When I was eight, she noticed I’d developed a chronic stomachache and insisted on taking me to the doctor, against Dad’s objection. She noticed my dislike of chili. Whenever she made the dish for supper, she fried me a burger instead.
She noticed a world brought into our living room every night by Huntley and Brinkley. When her sisters visited from out of town, her conversation was peppered with words meaningless to me: Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt, The War.
Summers, Mama used to pore over the Burpee Seed Catalog. I sat across from her with my elbows on the kitchen table and the backs of my thighs sticking to the plastic chair seat. Mama didn’t look up. Her house was dirty, her children stinky, but marigolds bloomed by the front porch.
The year I turned fourteen, Dad––divorced and remarried––moved the family to California. I don’t remember saying goodbye to Mama. She wrote to me all through my high school years. I don’t remember answering. She remarried. I didn’t congratulate her. We exchanged neither phone calls nor visits. She died shortly after I graduated from college. I didn’t go back to Des Moines for her funeral. I’d inherited her looks, but also Dad’s attitude toward money. The idea of buying something as expensive as a plane ticket was alien to me. I was poor, and Mama was a stranger.
She died of heart failure.
After she visited me at Wendy’s house, I suspected her heart had been broken.
My father punished us with a razor strop. Or his bare hand. A smack on the backside sent the victim airborne. It only took a glare to shrink me into submission. Surely Mama bore witness. Did he hit her, too?
Dad woke up one morning with Mama holding a gun to his head.
He told the story when we were all grown, as proof of her madness.
After she visited me at Wendy’s house, I revisited that old story. I suspected she stood over him, sighting him down the barrel of that pistol, waiting. After his beady eyes opened, I imagined she said, “Don’t you touch my kids again, mother fucker.”
By the time we were adults, Mama’s children resided in three different states, but one summer Michael, Michelle, our brother Bill, and—along with our younger brother Wayne—visited her grave together. Or rather, Bill took the rest of us. He and Mama had remained close, and after she died, he made a pilgrimage to her gravesite every year. But it was the only time the four of us had come together to honor her. Bill bent down and brushed dirt from her headstone, set flat in the ground.
I felt awkward.
Bill said, “She was happy after she remarried.”
Michelle said, “She’s here now.”
“You mean you feel her spirit?” Michael asked.
“I see her. Right over there.” She pointed to a spot behind Bill’s shoulder. “Wearing a white dress. She’s at peace. Happy we’re here. Together.”
It was then it occurred to me. How devastating to have her children wrenched away, clear across the country.
We stood in a circle around her grave, our heads bowed. We said nothing. My shoulders slumped under the weight of confusing emotions.
As we crossed the cemetery to return to the car, our steps were slow and labored in the Iowa humidity.
Michael, Michelle, and Wayne spent the weekend at my house in Kansas City. Michelle took to sitting alone on the patio, surrounded by pots of roses, petunias, and marigolds. I’d inherited Mama’s taste for marigolds.
At dinner, amid our chatter, her gaze turned toward the dining room window. She had a way of saying big things in a small way that made the thing even bigger. “Mama was on your patio today. Now she’s standing just outside the window.”
I smiled to think of Mama striking a pose on my patio, all dressed up in a skirt suit and peep-toe pumps.
Tarot cards? Really? Why isn’t she channeling my guides?
“What?” Wendy asked.
A whiff of oatmeal cookies overpowered the candle she’d lit.
“Well. Umm. I prefer the guides.”
She put the cards away and walked over to her bookcase, stood for a moment without speaking. She was emptying herself of Wendy.
When she turned to face me, the guides scolded like impatient parents. “She thinks wisdom only comes through in this fashion.” “It will be hard to live up to her potential.” “If she’s going to be creative, she’ll be destructive too.”
Even though the guides were scolding me, I was finally receiving the attention I was starving for.
Wendy scrunched her face as if trying to make out an object in the distance. “They’re gone now. Someone else is here.” Wendy paused. “A woman who hasn’t been here before. Standing in a shadow. Stoop-shouldered.” Wendy was still as a corpse. “She’s looking right at you, but she doesn’t say anything.”
I leaned forward. “Mama?”
Most days during my childhood, Mama didn’t look at me. She wandered from room to room like a zombie. Rooms with roaches in the cupboards and grime on the floors. Rooms where laundry drifted in the corners. I spent a lot of time in the corner, too, wary of the zombie, wishing I had a mother. She and Dad often argued behind their closed bedroom door, while we kids eavesdropped from the top step, long past our bedtimes. One night two men escorted Mama––listless and compliant––down those stairs. I didn’t know who they were, but Dad didn’t try to stop them. He led them through the living room and grim-faced, held the front door open. I watched them take my mother away.
In the 1960s, no one spoke of mental illness.
Dad said Mama “got better real fast” after the doctor threatened shock treatments.
My grandmother called her lazy.
In Wendy’s living room, I felt the gaze I’d craved for fifty years. “Mama’s here.”
Fragmented images of her that I’d long forgotten floated together in my imagination. The woman she’d surely been, in between bouts of depression, eased into the foreground. A tremor went up my arm.
“She’s gone,” Wendy said.
Her visit was over, but Mama had walked into my life and made it clear she’d never leave me.
The Mama I’d forgotten loved to dress up.
In my favorite picture, she posed with hands on hips, a wide grin on her face. She wore a forties skirt suit: broad shoulders, nipped waistline, and her feet clad in ankle strap peep-toes. The outfit was topped with an admiral’s hat that framed her shoulder-length waves. The epitome of chic. It took a beat to realize the headgear was a joke. It belonged to Dad’s kid brother Al, who was standing next to her, hatless, in his high school band uniform.
She and Dad celebrated a New Year’s Eve at the Elks Club. Her outfit: a champagne-colored chiffon dress. Short puffy sleeves. Sweetheart neckline. Full skirt billowing over petticoats. They swished when she walked.
She took my brother Michael, in high school then, to a production of “The World of Suzie Wong,” at Des Moines’ KRNT Theatre. Her outfit: a black knit dress that hugged her hourglass figure. A narrow belt of the same fabric. Stockings with seams up the back. Black suede pumps.
Michael remembered she’d struck up a conversation with a young Asian couple sitting next to her. “What nationality are you?” (They were Japanese and had emigrated to Hawaii.) Perhaps she followed up with Where are your parents? How did you end up in Des Moines? Do you miss Japan? These are questions I would have asked. I inherited her curiosity, along with her depression.
My sister Michelle is a minister; part of her ministry is helping the living communicate with loved ones who have passed on. “Do you think Mama has a message for me?” I asked.
“Let’s go walking in my favorite place, and I’ll find out,” she said.
At Santa Barbara’s Botanical Garden, we found a winding path that led uphill and down, in and out of the shade. We stopped on a stone bridge to listen to a creek that gurgled underneath. As we continued, the hot sun on my bare arms turned into cool, still air. We’d entered a redwood grove.
“This is the spot,” Michelle said.
We sat side by side on a bench in the shade of the giants, and then she wandered off alone. I leaned way back to see the treetops. I was a supplicant in a holy place, as I’d been at monasteries I’d visited on retreat. The redwoods silenced the chatter in my mind.
Michelle returned and sat beside me. “Mama said she’s proud of you. She said keep writing. It’s important.”
It was a Christmas present in July.
When I was eight, she noticed I’d developed a chronic stomachache and insisted on taking me to the doctor, against Dad’s objection. She noticed my dislike of chili. Whenever she made the dish for supper, she fried me a burger instead.
She noticed a world brought into our living room every night by Huntley and Brinkley. When her sisters visited from out of town, her conversation was peppered with words meaningless to me: Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt, The War.
Summers, Mama used to pore over the Burpee Seed Catalog. I sat across from her with my elbows on the kitchen table and the backs of my thighs sticking to the plastic chair seat. Mama didn’t look up. Her house was dirty, her children stinky, but marigolds bloomed by the front porch.
The year I turned fourteen, Dad––divorced and remarried––moved the family to California. I don’t remember saying goodbye to Mama. She wrote to me all through my high school years. I don’t remember answering. She remarried. I didn’t congratulate her. We exchanged neither phone calls nor visits. She died shortly after I graduated from college. I didn’t go back to Des Moines for her funeral. I’d inherited her looks, but also Dad’s attitude toward money. The idea of buying something as expensive as a plane ticket was alien to me. I was poor, and Mama was a stranger.
She died of heart failure.
After she visited me at Wendy’s house, I suspected her heart had been broken.
My father punished us with a razor strop. Or his bare hand. A smack on the backside sent the victim airborne. It only took a glare to shrink me into submission. Surely Mama bore witness. Did he hit her, too?
Dad woke up one morning with Mama holding a gun to his head.
He told the story when we were all grown, as proof of her madness.
After she visited me at Wendy’s house, I revisited that old story. I suspected she stood over him, sighting him down the barrel of that pistol, waiting. After his beady eyes opened, I imagined she said, “Don’t you touch my kids again, mother fucker.”
By the time we were adults, Mama’s children resided in three different states, but one summer Michael, Michelle, our brother Bill, and—along with our younger brother Wayne—visited her grave together. Or rather, Bill took the rest of us. He and Mama had remained close, and after she died, he made a pilgrimage to her gravesite every year. But it was the only time the four of us had come together to honor her. Bill bent down and brushed dirt from her headstone, set flat in the ground.
I felt awkward.
Bill said, “She was happy after she remarried.”
Michelle said, “She’s here now.”
“You mean you feel her spirit?” Michael asked.
“I see her. Right over there.” She pointed to a spot behind Bill’s shoulder. “Wearing a white dress. She’s at peace. Happy we’re here. Together.”
It was then it occurred to me. How devastating to have her children wrenched away, clear across the country.
We stood in a circle around her grave, our heads bowed. We said nothing. My shoulders slumped under the weight of confusing emotions.
As we crossed the cemetery to return to the car, our steps were slow and labored in the Iowa humidity.
Michael, Michelle, and Wayne spent the weekend at my house in Kansas City. Michelle took to sitting alone on the patio, surrounded by pots of roses, petunias, and marigolds. I’d inherited Mama’s taste for marigolds.
At dinner, amid our chatter, her gaze turned toward the dining room window. She had a way of saying big things in a small way that made the thing even bigger. “Mama was on your patio today. Now she’s standing just outside the window.”
I smiled to think of Mama striking a pose on my patio, all dressed up in a skirt suit and peep-toe pumps.
RSS Feed