a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee. I can see the panther pace back and forth behind the bars on the surface of her sunglasses, as if he were inside her peering out at us. Sometimes seeing her that way in memory, I want to offer her a glass of water, or suggest that she lie down in the shade of the willow behind her. Other times, I want to pull the glasses from her face, put my large capable hands on her square shoulders, and shake her till she begins to weep or scream or do whatever would break her loose from that island of quiet.
To get out of the heat, we went into a cavelike building, very cool and damp. At that time, I was fascinated with Dracula’s silky evil and headed straight for the vampire bats, which were disappointingly tiny through the thick glass. They were hardly bigger than field mice and hanging upside-down from a stick. Their teeth were tiny, not at all like Bela Lugosi’s on TV. One finally dropped down and wobbled near a petri dish of blood in the center of the display. He seemed so awkward trying to arrange his frail-looking wings that I kept thinking of a broken umbrella. Lecia moved from window to window, looking at owls and opossums and the other nocturnals—she wanted to be a vet back then, or a nurse. Mother sat on a stone bench under the red EXIT sign, smoking.I got hypnotized waiting for the clumsy bat to drink the blood. I tapped the glass pointing it out, but he never did.
By dusk we were on the spaghetti freeways looking for Highway 73 home, and I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother’s eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road’s white dashed lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and into the darkest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives.
After the amputation and that trip to Houston, we didn’t see Mother much. She either came home from the hospital briefly in the mornings to change clothes before heading back, or she returned after we were in bed. I would wake to her weight tilting our mattress, her Shalimar settling over me when she leaned in to kiss me and pull up the chenille bedspread, which had a nubble like braille under my hands. A few times, she would sit on my side of the bed all night smoking, till the yellow light started in the windows. She had a way of waving away the smoke from my face and making a pleasant little wind in the process. I kept my eyes closed, knowing that if I roused she’d leave, and I wanted nothing more from her on those nights than to let me lie in the mist of that perfume I still wear and to imagine the shapes her Salem smoke made. Inside the great deep pit that I had already begun digging in my skull, I had buried the scariness of Grandma’s hacked-off leg and Mother’s psychic paralysis at the zoo. So I did not long to talk of those things or to hear her reassurances about them. (Children can be a lot like cats or dogs, sometimes, in how physical comfort soothes them.) I could feel through the bedspread the faint heat of her body as she sat a few inches from where I lay, and that heat was all I needed.
Except for these apparitions of Mother, we were left the rest of the summer in Daddy’s steady if distracted care. At some point, the men of the Liars’ Club arrived with their pickups and toolboxes to turn our garage into an extra bedroom for my parents, who had been sleeping on a pull-out sofa in the living room during Grandma’s visit. I guess they wanted to make her a nicerplace in which to die. That didn’t register in me at the time. I had neatly blocked all glimmer of her very existence—alive or dead, sick or well—from my waking thoughts. Each morning, about the time that Lecia and I reached the
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee. I can see the panther pace back and forth behind the bars on the surface of her sunglasses, as if he were inside her peering out at us. Sometimes seeing her that way in memory, I want to offer her a glass of water, or suggest that she lie down in the shade of the willow behind her. Other times, I want to pull the glasses from her face, put my large capable hands on her square shoulders, and shake her till she begins to weep or scream or do whatever would break her loose from that island of quiet.
To get out of the heat, we went into a cavelike building, very cool and damp. At that time, I was fascinated with Dracula’s silky evil and headed straight for the vampire bats, which were disappointingly tiny through the thick glass. They were hardly bigger than field mice and hanging upside-down from a stick. Their teeth were tiny, not at all like Bela Lugosi’s on TV. One finally dropped down and wobbled near a petri dish of blood in the center of the display. He seemed so awkward trying to arrange his frail-looking wings that I kept thinking of a broken umbrella. Lecia moved from window to window, looking at owls and opossums and the other nocturnals—she wanted to be a vet back then, or a nurse. Mother sat on a stone bench under the red EXIT sign, smoking.I got hypnotized waiting for the clumsy bat to drink the blood. I tapped the glass pointing it out, but he never did.
By dusk we were on the spaghetti freeways looking for Highway 73 home, and I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother’s eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road’s white dashed lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and into the darkest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives.
After the amputation and that trip to Houston, we didn’t see Mother much. She either came home from the hospital briefly in the mornings to change clothes before heading back, or she returned after we were in bed. I would wake to her weight tilting our mattress, her Shalimar settling over me when she leaned in to kiss me and pull up the chenille bedspread, which had a nubble like braille under my hands. A few times, she would sit on my side of the bed all night smoking, till the yellow light started in the windows. She had a way of waving away the smoke from my face and making a pleasant little wind in the process. I kept my eyes closed, knowing that if I roused she’d leave, and I wanted nothing more from her on those nights than to let me lie in the mist of that perfume I still wear and to imagine the shapes her Salem smoke made. Inside the great deep pit that I had already begun digging in my skull, I had buried the scariness of Grandma’s hacked-off leg and Mother’s psychic paralysis at the zoo. So I did not long to talk of those things or to hear her reassurances about them. (Children can be a lot like cats or dogs, sometimes, in how physical comfort soothes them.) I could feel through the bedspread the faint heat of her body as she sat a few inches from where I lay, and that heat was all I needed.
Except for these apparitions of Mother, we were left the rest of the summer in Daddy’s steady if distracted care. At some point, the men of the Liars’ Club arrived with their pickups and toolboxes to turn our garage into an extra bedroom for my parents, who had been sleeping on a pull-out sofa in the living room during Grandma’s visit. I guess they wanted to make her a nicerplace in which to die. That didn’t register in me at the time. I had neatly blocked all glimmer of her very existence—alive or dead, sick or well—from my waking thoughts. Each morning, about the time that Lecia and I reached the
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