I Like This Woman: Also, Antics of My Mother

My mom was on the way to her book club, when she noticed that instead of reading “In the Garden of Beasts,” which is a story about a family in pre-war Berlin, she actually read “Beast in the Garden,” which is a true story about a pack of cougars that invade a small town in Colorado.

When playing “Guesstures” last night, instead of guessing “kneel” my mom guessed “genuflect.” When it’s her turn, one should keep in mind that she uses the same motion for “embrace,” “cold,” “warm,” and “zombie,” which is to hug her arms around her body.

White Bread

Mom remembers the day Thomas was asked to draw her portrait. He was in the first grade at Emmanuel Presbyterian, and the teacher told the children to sketch a picture of their mother for Mother’s Day.

“I looked mulatto in that picture,” Mom says.

We’re eating dinner at the dining room table. Mom has made rice, collard greens, and lemon chicken. The collard greens have too much bacon in them, and every time someone asks what we were having for dinner she yells, “CALL-ard greens!” with a southern accent.

“All the other pictures of all the other moms were just white bread, white bread, white bread,” Mom says, pointing at invisible women with her spatula, “but I was brown.” She laughs. “I thought it was great.”

Thomas is poking at the parmesean rice on his plate. Dad is at the head of the table, “What kind of rice is this?” he asks.

“It has cheese in it,” I say.

“Well I don’t like it.”

Thomas swallows. “I just remember thinking that nobody’s white. Like nobody’s totally white like paper. That’s all.”

“Well I thought it was so great,” Mom says, still laughing. “I looked different.”

“What kind of cheese did you say?” Thomas asks.

“Parmesean,” I respond.

“I don’t like it,” he says. “Sorry, Mom. I just don’t.”

“It’s okay, Thomas. Neither do I,” Dad says. “I don’t like the rice either.”

Mom shrugs.

She goes on to tell us about the day Thomas came home with the drawing. How he was sitting in the back seat of the car when she drove up to Nellie’s house, and Nellie’s daughter Robin, who was then in her twenties, came running out to say hello. “Show Robin the picture,” Mom had said. “Thomas drew a picture of me in school,” Mom explained out the window.

Thomas stuck the paper through to Robin, and she looked at it and tried to stifle a laugh.

"You’re black, Sigrid! Did you know? You’re black in this picture!”

Dad stops putting food in his mouth and looks up. “What, you thought Nellie was your mom or something?”

Thomas rolls his eyes.

“Well that’s what Robin said,” Mom interjects. “She was laughing because it looked like me, but also like Nellie.” She pauses. “I wish I still had that picture.”

Thomas puts his fork down and shakes his head. “I know, I know, I feel bad about that every time I think about it.”

“Feel bad about what?” Dad asks.

“I tore up that picture, and I feel horrible about it.”

“Oh you were little, Thomas,” Mom says. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

“No, I was a bad person.” Thomas is still shaking his head.

“You tore up the picture?” Dad asks. His fork is poised in the air, inches in front of his face. “You really tore it up? Why would you do something like that?”

“Because he was little and mad and didn’t know,” I say. “Stop asking stupid questions.”



(Painting "White Bread" by Wayne Thiebaud.)

Birdwatching

We are through working for the day when I go to the backyard to watch my mom finish her drink. Before I sit down I take the cigarette from her hand and take a long drag, then place it back between her fingers. In front of her is a tall glass of ice and limes and the remains of a Vodka tonic. I sit down on the seat next to her and lean against the back cushion, my face bent dramatically towards the sky.

"Oh, I can't go on," I say. "It's too much."

"I know what you mean," Mom says, taking a drag of her cigarette. She looks down at the stub between her fingers. "I've gone out," she laughs, reaching forward to take the pack of matches from the table. "I guess I smoke too slow."

Mom lights the end, sucks in, and holds out the cigarette for me. I take it again, surprised that I'm not enjoying the taste as much as I used to.

"You know I came out here with the binoculars to look for that bird nest," she says.

I don't know what she's talking about. I give her a look.

"There are a family of birds," she explains, "at least I think. We can hear them chirping pleasently right by our window every morning." She smiles to herself, staring off into the distance, most likely listening to the sound of birds.

"I think I found the nest actually, over by the neighbor's house. It looks like a swallow nest or something."

"What does a swallow nest look like?"

"Oh, you know, kind of like made out of mud or something. Instead of sticks. It's really quite impressive. Do you want to see?"

She stubs out her cigarette, and I follow her over to the side of the house. She's taking slow steps along the rocks, the binoculars held up to her face, staring up at the neighbors' house. "There," she says, "I think it's right there. Here," she hands me the binoculars, which are large and heavy and used to belong to her father. "You take a look."

I peer through the lens, adjust the focus, and slowly inspect the eves of the house. "You know it would look really weird if they came home and saw us doing this."

Mom laughs. "Do you see it?"

"I don't know. I see something. But it doesn't really look like a nest."

"Right, it looks like it's made out of clay or something," she says excitedly.

"Mom, there's nothing up there but a pipe from the bathroom."

"A pipe?" Mom takes the binoculars from my hand. "Let me see that." She stares up at the house again, her neck craned.

"Ha!" she laughs and looks at me. "So it is a pipe. And I thought they were just clever little birds who make nests out of clay."

Long-Distance Runner

The fact is, I don’t want to have this surgery. And I certainly don’t want to imagine what it will be like if it goes wrong. I don’t want to be the unfortunate disable people barely remember. I bitterly wish I could be back to the way I was before the accident, and not really so athletically different, necessarily. I was trim and fit and strong, not any good at team sports but mostly unhindered when it came to running. That was one way I took after my college roommates, the track stars. I was never talented like them, but I was very eager, very dedicated. Even now, if I could trust my body a little more, I know there’s a lot I could do.

I don’t have to fault myself for feeling this way. The Lord wept in the Garden on the night He was betrayed, as pastors have said to me many times. “Who will free me from the body of this death?” Well, I know the answer to that one. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” I imagine of kind of ecstatic pirouette, a little bit like going for a long run on the beach when you’re so new and fit that your body almost doesn’t know about effort. The apostle Paul couldn’t have meant something entirely different from that. So there’s that to look forward to.

I say this because I really feel as though I’m failing, and not primarily in the medical sense. It’s more about the weeping emotion, the worry. And I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people won’t remember to stay back for me. I often think about what I can’t do, comparing myself to them. I’ll be on my bicycle, happily riding around the inner loop in Prospect Park, and the sun will be shining, and my legs will be pumping, but all the while I am staring at the runners. I had a dream like that the other night. In the dream, my legs wouldn’t move.

Blank

I remember that old Baptist church that my parents took us to, the hard wooden pews, the large cross bathed in light behind the pulpit, looking ten times as remarkable as it would have if a light had not been shining on it. That was always a major part of my idea of a church, the cross. When I was a child I stared up at it until I got tears in my eyes. I had watched the older women do this, stare into the light, shake their heads down, stoke their arms. It seemed the highest compliment one could give to God—deep distress over his mangled son.

Because we were Baptist the cross was blank to signify the resurrection. I had to imagine Christ hanging there, a crown of thorns wound round his head, his chest heaving.

Pastor Hasper stood before us, a lanky six foot four. I thought it fitting his name rhymed. That indeed he had been called to the ministry, the same way some friends of our, the Doctors, were called to the medical field, each child growing up to become Dr. Doctor. My name didn’t rhyme with anything.

Electric Ice

What a day, you said.

We were in Coney Island. It was my first time.

It was also seventy degrees for the first time since I’d been in California.
Who knew winter would last this long?
I guess it’s easier when things are new.

We walked along the boardwalk—the rides were closed.
Based on the signs we were six days too early.

Shopkeepers stood on metal ladders with paintbrushes in their hands, preparing for the harvest.
You stood next to me at the walrus exhibit, preparing for the launch—a moment when the bulbous creature would brush his whiskers against the glass by your face, push off with his fins, and fly backwards, upside-down, like a fat, white torpedo.

The blue rectangle of water before us—the creepy shine of the light against your profile—made you look like an ipod advertisement.
I snapped a picture, which you later threatened to delete.

You thought you’d get sick from the clams. It was lent—I had given up meat, you had given up bread—Nathan’s hot dogs “Since 1912” were out of the question.
We’re not even riding a roller coaster, I assured you.
Instead we walked backwards.
Pushed off the wall of piss by the bathroom sinks,
And floated to the man with the stained cover-alls.
I have 3.98, you said. It’s all you, baby.
The soft serve was called “electric ice.”

The Church on Munjoy Hill

For Randy Henry, who died on March 20, 2011

One evening in early fall while I headed towards town, I stopped to look inside the old stone building near the lighthouse on Munjoy Hill. A few men were standing at the door, and one of them was dragging out a sign that read, “Evening Episcopal Service, Six o’clock, All Welcome.” I looked down at my watch. It was 5:55. “Hello there,” the tallest man with white hair said. I would come to know him as Pastor Jim, an Episcopalian minister who traveled from a town twenty miles outside of Portland to lead the candlelit, Sunday evening service. I didn’t come up with an excuse or stop to think about my other plans. I simply slipped inside.

The church had been converted into a theatre company, so the stage where Jim stood to preach rotated with props for whatever show was being performed. At that time of year it was “On Golden Pond,” and while Jim spoke the liturgy and told us of our location on the church calendar, fishing rods and galoshes stood behind him in the shadows.

Every Sunday night I would walk to that church and join the other twelve members in the arena seating. We sang from Episcopalian hymnals, while Tom, a shy man with uneasy musical talents, led on the piano. I met Portlanders, people who I would run into regularly while living in Maine. There was an empty-nested couple who were rooming their daughter’s friend for free while she went to nursing school; a young mother who brought her baby every week, cradling him in her arms; a soft-spoken girl named Sarah who I would regularly see walking by the water in the mornings. For communion, we would arise and join Jim on the stage. Standing in a circle, he would come to us one by one, placing the bread on our tongues, holding the cup of wine to our lips. “Do this in remembrance of me.” Sometimes a woman preached but mostly it was Jim who wove deep, stirring narratives about the world we inhabited, and the people we were supposed to become. When I asked him where he got his stories, he responded simply that he too was a writer.

Later, I attended Jim’s book club and walked in the room to find big bottles of wine set out on folding tables. Along with crumb cake and sugar cookies, they were part of the refreshments, and women with fat fingers stuck corkscrews into their tops and pulled them out with a loud pop. I sat next to two ninety-year-old sisters—who would later become subjects of my first published article—and they informed me that Jim had graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. A few months later, I would attend this same club, this time in Jim’s living room, where he would give us a screening of the movie “Lars and the Real Girl,” about a man who falls in love with a blow-up doll. The same old woman would lean in close to me, holding my arm, “I always like what Jim has to say, but I’m not sure about this one.”