My mother, the child:
MY MOTHER GREW UP in Kingston, New York. She grew up poor, she said. She grew up jumping pennies on her bedspread. Two lines of Lincolns she made. With her thumbnail, she’d flip each penny on the bottom line to try and kiss its brother on top. If she made them all, she won. While my mother jumped pennies on her bedspread; hid the dark hair on her arms; was bullied for not wearing blue jeans, for wearing a mother-made prom dress; got drunk taking sips of rum from her father’s cupboard instead of going to school; vomited each Sunday from a combination of two Nathan’s hot dogs and carsickness; saved her best friend’s life by squeezing her wrist to stop the blood after she put it through a window; fetched towels and made halos out of them to help mop up her mother’s miscarriage—she fell in love with a boy named Loren. Kingston is bordered by Rondout Creek, which empties into the western mouth of the Hudson River. Loren was my mother’s first kiss; he died canoeing on that river. Because my mother’s mother did not let her go to his funeral, and because he liked to talk about running away from home, my mother pretended he had. With the taste of copper on her tongue, she believes there’s a boy with Loren’s face floating on that river still to this day.
Whenever too long a stretch has gone by without me calling her, I receive messages: Do you still love me? You don’t ever communicate with me. I have no idea what you’re doing, and I miss you terribly! And, by the way, I have packed up all your clothes into bags.
During one of my tennis matches, my mother showed up drunk and blowing kisses. Alighting from her BMW, she looked like a girl in her full-skirted gingham dress and headband. I think of my mother as a descendent of Rumi, the thirteenth-century mystic and poet who was known as a “drunken Sufi” for spinning while reciting his verses. Rumi, who asks, “What will our children do in the morning if they do not see us fly?” After his death, the Mevlevi order, the order of whirling dervishes, was created, and thus a portal opened between earth and heaven. In Turkey, whirling dervishes perform the sema by donning long white robes that symbolize ego and cone-shaped camel-hair hats representing ego’s tombstone. Through a series of hypnotic turns, dervishes are said to reach the ecstatic state of Nirvana. As I watched from the court, my mother twirled in kind, aswoon, heaven-bound, to receive God’s beneficence. And with God clutched in her fist, the girlish dervish hiccupped but once before plunging back to earth and landing in a heap on the ground.
My mother, the architect:
When my mother’s father died, she built a dollhouse. She painted every shingle, wallpapered every tiny room, and even put in crown molding.
When my mother’s mother died, she ate cannoli cream for breakfast but continued to pinch blood into her cheeks, keep the mole sitting pretty in the corner of her mouth, and never put her hair up because it drew too much attention to her nose. One by one, she’d line up white and dark chocolate soldiers, unwrap each, and bite off their heads. To hell with life. I’m going to enjoy myself, she said. She enjoyed herself until she developed high blood pressure and gained fifty pounds. She was, of course, carrying the weight of her mother inside her—wanting to feel full but never quite managing it. The rub is this: Now, instead of hot dogs in cars, the combination of bupropion and naltrexone causes ultraviolent illness at even the sight of food. Kadoon, kadoon, goes her stomach, missing that old mothery feel, that old weight, the house she built for her mother now shrunk. And the mother who used to live in her stomach—all gorgeous laugh, doing the Lindy Hop with a rose pinned to her breast? She is alive in resentment, as my mother, sick with norovirus, could not attend her own mother’s funeral. She is alive in the hops, kicks, and swingouts from the rosary with pink wooden beads dancing wildly from my mother’s rearview mirror.
In the corner of her bedroom, collecting dust, is a short-necked lute with eight strings muzzling a pear-shaped wooden belly—my mother’s grandfather’s Neapolitan mandolin. Cave paintings from 13,000 BCE in Trois-Frères depict a man plucking his hunting bow, theorized to be the first single-stringed musical instrument. My mother’s eyes go big and dark as emu eggs when she tells me how, with his sun-spotted fingers, her grandfather plucked at her breasts when she was a girl. Until then, she’d never breathed a word, never even told her mother about him.
My mother is often concerned about her daughters’ purity. When my twin sister and I first shaved our legs, she turned upright and furious. For three days, the three of us mourned for the silk of our old leg hair, now stubbly like poppy seeds. In lieu of sex education at school my mother brought us up in her bedroom. She told stories about her miscarriages. The blastotomy, which wasn’t a real baby, but to her it was. The one she bought the wooden stork for, to stick in the yard. My mother told my sister and me about dead girls with corkscrewed bodies. Naked girls, stolen girls, caged in glass and turned upside down.
In 2006, a local family were found in their basement, bound with electrical cord, beaten with a claw hammer, their throats slit. Kathryn and Bryan were the parents of Stella, who was nine, and Ruby, only four. One of the murderers was the second-to-last person to be executed by lethal injection in Virginia. The other received a life sentence without parole. Whenever she finds the front door unlocked, my mother yelps like someone not long for this world and declares us destined to end up like the Harveys.
My mother, the medical enigma:
After my mother gave birth to my brother, she had a postpartum hemorrhage and lost half her blood. She lost more than half with her last child, my sister, who she was not supposed to have. Only 1 to 5 percent of women experience postpartum hemorrhage. It is caused by overdistension of the uterine muscle or by placenta that remains attached. As the nurses flocked to her side with sterile gauze and forceps, ready to knot her blood vessels into gingham bows, my mother called my twin sister and me to tell us goodbye. Sounding as if her throat were already packed with cotton, she told us to be good girls. She told us she loved us in the way you tell someone you will never see again.
My mother excels at growing canker sores on the pink shore of her gumline and the insides of her cheeks. A holy procession of them paddles from her soft palate down the oxbow of her throat. Major aphthous stomatitis is the rarer type. One-centimeter-long sores emerge before the old ones heal, leaving scars. My mother sits daintily propped up by pillows. Guttural sounds emerge, and applesauce drips from her suspended tongue. Vicks VapoRub should never be used in the nose, mouth, or eyes, warn Procter & Gamble. Yet my mother takes heed of old wives’ tales instead, slathering the inside of her mouth with the eucalyptus oil and camphor jelly. And wouldn’t you know, those sores bit back once and then died.
The asparagus is not only a malodorous delicacy but a decidedly ironic vegetable. My mother is the sole member of the family with asparagus anosmia, meaning that due to a mutation of her OR2M7 gene on chromosome 1, she is oblivious to the skunky yet harmless metabolites expelled in her urine after eating asperges à la hollandaise. Though scientists have discovered that the antioxidants lutein and zeaxanthin and vitamins A, C, and E protect our eyes from illnesses like macular degeneration, they have yet to understand how we metabolize asparagus or what compounds are involved in its after-smell. Just as my mother is genetically nose-blind to this simple sulfurous truth, she remains unaware of her alcohol-induced halitosis. Because awareness is so pesky, so inadequate, so fine with feathery foliage, we ignore the vinegar of her blind-drunk breath when she comes home late after working long hours. I will never ask what the evolutionary advantage is to smell or not to smell. I am afraid of what I am doomed to repeat.
Upon discovering a lump in her breast, my mother decided to get a mammogram, an anomaly for her. Because she gave birth to four children, whose vernix caseosa or “cheesy varnish” was supposed to excrete all those carcinogens, she did not believe in mammograms. This time, it was different. My mother speaks to her mother by rubbing the beads of her rosary to misshapen nubs. Her mother told her, Go on, get the mammogram. Because of her mother, my mother found a phyllodes tumor in the connective tissue underneath her armpit. Phyllodes are extremely rare, she said proudly over the phone. Less than 1 percent of all tumors. She explained how, under a microscope, they are quite beautiful. The leaf-like pattern gives them their Greek name, phyllon. Though the tumor was benign, my mother insisted she had breast cancer. Further, she said, May as well lop off the breast. All wet-toothed and eager to suffer, my mother saw her lumpectomy upstaged by her sister’s prognosis of five years to live. An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; a life for a life. Ignoring her surgeon’s instructions and her family’s wishes, my mother refused to get a mammogram ever again. Months later, post wrist surgery, she cradled her hand, which she called her “broken wing.” It’s so much worse than having cancer, she repeated, like the prayers of the common hill mynah, her lip curled into a snarl.
My mother, the huntress:
My mother is a horse collector, which is to say, she collects the stoppers of Blanton’s bourbon bottles. There are eight stoppers, one for each letter of the name, depicting a horse and jockey in a different stage of race. Same as she loved stuffing her mother in the car and dragging her off to find Beanie Babies, my mother gets a thrill out of the chase. I accompany her on liquor runs so she can buy two of whatever allocated bourbon drops that day. There is a subculture of liquor enthusiasts called the tater crowd who compete for the rarest bottles. To keep our hands in the game, my mother and I join these bottle-chasers long before the store opens. Fixed in her stirrup irons, she nudges me behind the master of the hunt. We gauge the field, eyes peeled. As soon as the hounds are cast in the covert, they pick up a scent. The quarry bolts into view, and my mother doubles the horn, yelling, Tallyho away! We head it off and, in our pursuit, bring the panting quarry to bay. At the end of the line, I’ll spit the bit. Mercilessly we’ll claim our prize.
Once in a blue moon, my mother will take a Scotch-Brite lint roller to the stairs, but she refuses to hire someone to clean the house because they will steal her jewelry. There are alternating bouquets of black mold and pink mildew in each bathroom. Instead of pennies, the dog’s muddy pawprints line the bedspread, while an entire room is dedicated to shoe racks cradling 304 pairs of Jimmy Choos. Like a mythical treasure-keeper, she hoards jewelry, bourbon, chocolate, and pills. She grazes her teeth against garlands of South Sea pearls. She forages through troves of gold, flinging away anything magnetic, causing verdigris, altered by vinegar, or that which floats. All fiery breath, with one eye open, she sleeps beside a drawer brimming with orange bottles wrapped in ancient labels. At most, my mother grants me permission to bury all those lizards curled dead around their babies. Did you know, viviparous reptiles feed their embryos from a placenta and give live birth? Five-lined skinklets have bright blue tails, the same kind of blue my mother likes to wear around her neck.
Vincent van Gogh painted with eight brushes, one between each of his fingers. He stabbed the canvas with such fervor, you can see brush hairs sticking out of the paint like petrified insect legs. Or missing eyelashes. True or false, my mother loves these stories about van Gogh, loves the old mad myth that he ate yellow paint to make himself more cheerful. She is especially in love with van Gogh’s sunflowers. At peak season, she takes my twin sister and me to a sunflower farm where, carrying shears, we are made to disappear ourselves in fields of flowers six feet tall, their heads wide as four hands. While my mother sits in a golf cart, feet propped on the dash, we cut and carry as many flowers as we can, curtsying as we present her with our offerings. Flowers skirl under our armpits, in our hair, between our teeth and each of our fingers. Back home, we place the cuttings in hot water to condition them. We dribble in bleach to kill bacteria. We fill vase after vase and place the sunflowers in every room to make our mother more cheerful. Perhaps only van Gogh could revive the dying sunflower’s beauty. In the end, its head droops and dark eye flutters closed. All those disc petals shrivel out of Fibonacci sequence. The seeds drop like flies, their stench feral, like rot. And then, the spider mites come.
According to my mother, there’s nothing better than the kind of quail you can cut through all the way down—no bones. She likes roast duck, really anything with a long neck. Like the anhinga, she snakes her head toward her food, spears and flips it in the air, swallowing it headfirst and whole. On tough days, my mother will vroom into the drive-through at McDonald’s. Each time she orders the same thing: a double quarter pounder with cheese, large fries, and a Coke. How simple the playdate between ketchup and mustard, the puckish brine of pickle coins nestled between sesame seed pillow-buns. There is the salted milkfat of American cheese, the juicy burst of not one but two hot meat patties. As soon as that last bite of burger is gone, she goes after those poor french fries by the fistful. Cramming them, messily spilling them into her mouth. The fries! The goldenrod fries with their own meaty taste, the faint glimmerings of onion and tallow. Between pulls of Coke, my mother eats in her car as fast as she can stand it.
My mother, the martyr:
For years, my mother was a cantor at Saint Paul’s Catholic Church, something women were allowed to do only after the Holy See clarified the law in 1994. Her specialty was Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” That is, until the choir director asked her to stand behind a pillar. My mother did not want to stand behind a pillar, she wanted to be the star, and after that, she never went back to Saint Paul’s. She tried to sing at my father’s church but hated the preacher for handing out recipes for caramel and parading lions and tigers across the altar—the production of it leaving her spiritually malnourished. Now, she performs Jesus Christ Superstar in the car and only attends church on Christmas Eve and Easter. Just as Jesus rolled out of his tomb to exit stage left, just as God giveth and taketh, when it comes time to sing, my mother will belt out a few words to prove she can do it, then flat-out refuse to continue.
When I made the decision to put the dog down, my mother called me a murderer. Though the dog couldn’t control her bowels and drooled catatonically, my mother was convinced we had more time. The veterinarian agreed it was the right decision, but my mother told me she was lying to make me feel better. Months later, my mother brought home three cats, knowing she was severely allergic to their dander. She developed adult asthma and gobbled nine Benadryl each night, the dog’s ashes forever snuggled under her chocolate-stained pillow.
When we turned eighteen, my mother took my sister and me to Paris. One night, we went to a restaurant so expensive that my mother kept leaving the table to flirt with the chef. The chef fed her shavings of jambon de Bayonne, straight from Basque country. He taught her all about the terroir of the region, the age-old process of exclusively using pigs with protected geographical indication and curing the meat with salt from Salies-de-Béarn. Deep red with snow white fat, the jambon de Bayonne tasted hazelnutty and sweet. This chef took a liking to my mother and, after hearing it was our birthday, gifted us an enormous omelette norvégienne. My mother urged us to eat the entire mound of blazing egg white and sugar, as much as we could stomach. But when the bill came, she looked like a pig being boiled alive. The chef had charged her for everything, up to and including the omelette. Adding salt to freshly cut muscle makes it spasm: On our way back to the hotel, my mother became suspicious that the taxi driver was taking the long way round. While the car was still moving, she tried to jump out, butchering her hand in the door in the process. With a high-pitched squeal, my mother fled to the street. On all fours, she began grunting over her broken fingers.
What did I do wrong for you and your sister to be involved in such horrible relationships? my mother once asked me over dirty martinis. I told her the thing that had taken me years to understand. There is nothing logical about abuse. Some men hide in plain sight, licking their chops, hunting for an exposed throat. But what did I do? she asked again, making her mouth a liquid red O until I repented. With my garnish spear, I marked her a hangman in the air where she could not see, drawing her first before the quartering.
My mother, the handkerchief:
On occasion, my mother purchases specialty pear brandy—Poire Williams to be exact. She likes it for the conversation piece. How in the world did they get a pear to sit in the bottom of that bottle? Apparently, the distillers imprison pear buds when they are still small enough to snuggle down the throats of bottles. The pears mature this way, upside down and caged in glass, until they are harvested and drowned in brandy. The fun is trying to get the pear out of the bottle. I recommend a filet or boning knife through the neck to shepherd sliver after sliver of white pear meat to float inside your mother’s snifter. Pretty as miniature pocket hankies and patriotic as flags, my mother and I place our right hands over our hearts. Standing at attention, we’ll render the military salute and then strike up the band.
The handkerchief has an ancient history. Illustrations from the Zhou dynasty of 1000 BCE depict figures with cloth draped over their heads to shield them from the sun. During the Roman Empire, spectators waved sudaria at exotic animal hunts and gladiator battles. Throughout the Middle Ages, ladies gifted handkerchiefs to knights, who tied them to their helmets. Desdemona’s handkerchief in the posses-sion of another drove Othello into a murderous rage. My mother, one for ignoring Kleenex’s slogan, “Don’t carry a cold in your pocket,” keeps the handkerchief alive to this day. She purchases the embroidered kind at high-end antique stores, producing and disappearing them from her sleeve like a magician.
You ask too many hard questions, my mother tells me, her daughter, who is desperate to know her. For so long I wondered, what are daughters if not made to turn to bleached bone pillars under the moons of their mothers? I wondered for the fear of it—of what I might become. My mother is a child, an architect, a medical enigma, a huntress, a martyr. Most of all, she is a handkerchief. All embellishment; all signaling for attention; all cipher; all Molotov cocktail wick; all Shroud of Turin; all cleaning her hands of me. And me? I’m all obsession but no longer surrender. I slug back then spit the mother tincture of Asparagus officinalis. I untie her from the horns of my bleating heart for good.
Lindsay Forbes Brown received her MFA from American University and currently serves as managing editor of Grace & Gravity. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. www.lindsayforbesbrown.com
