Don't Call Me Mother (35 page)

My equanimity isn’t seamless, however. As I listen to her stories about Gram’s life and death, her own life and mine, I want to shout, “Tell the truth for once, dammit!” Of course, I know it would do no good. I’ve given up trying to tame the whirlwind that is my mother.

I wonder, not for the first time, what is wrong with her. She is so very odd, so different from other human beings. Suddenly an unbidden wish forms in my mind, that she instead of Gram had died. Guilt immediately grips me and I gaze thoughtfully at this wild woman, her high-pitched chatter rising above the deep voices of my Iowa family. I wonder if she can ever change, if she’ll treat me better now that her mother is gone, or if things will get even worse.

The next time I see Mother is at Gram’s house on Park Street, where she arrived a couple of days before me. Already she’s torn up the place—the Oriental rug is rolled up, the books and the huge mounds of papers are gone. As I look around, the house is familiar and strange all at once. The wallpaper is still French green and maroon, the ceiling still seems to hover just above my head. But without Gram’s brooding energy and cigarette smoke filling the place, it seems smaller and infinitely empty. My room has been stripped so I can’t find my keepsakes—Storybook dolls and favorite childhood books in which I took refuge from Gram’s rage and insanity. I find sealed black garbage bags full of my things heaped in the garage. Mother insists that I not open them, just take them away. I open the bags anyway to find a jumble of photos, clothes, and books, but so much is not there. I beg her to let me look for the Teddy bear Grandpa gave me, my school yearbooks, and other things I wanted to always keep, but she screams at me that everything is gone and tries to slap me to shut me up.

I’m raw to the core by the time Dennis and I drive away with the furniture that Gram has left me. I always hated it, but mother insisted I had to take it because she’s closing up the house. We drive down the old highway that borders Enid, where the wheat sang to Keith and me as the moon rose. I’m so ragged with grief and stress, longing for a loving parent to soothe me. I send a prayer to my father: Please don’t die, Daddy. Don’t leave me yet. I’m not ready.

We drive through the empty, lonely plains under a moonless sky. No answer comes from the heavens. Only silence.

The next morning Andrew balances on my knees while I practice yoga in the living room. He giggles, his big blue eyes full of happiness to have me back with him. I touch his fine blonde hair, keenly aware of the preciousness of this simple moment with my son. He falls into my arms and we roll, laughing, over the floor.

The phone rings and I answer in a happy, playful mood.

The hiss on the other end tells me it’s long distance, and suddenly my heart clenches. Hazel’s voice: “I’m sorry, Linda, but your father died last night.”

A chill comes over me and I start shaking. “No, he couldn’t have died. My grandmother just died.”

On the other end, a breath, then, “Honey, I’m so sorry, but he did die last night.”

“No. No. He didn’t die last night. He couldn’t have died. Gram is the one who died.”

More silence, a beat. A breath. “Honey…”

The room spins. Andrew grabs my legs and I collapse to the floor. Tears wash down my face as I hold Andrew, sobbing into his hair. His little hand pats me.

On the airplane, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. Five plays on my headset, but its uplifting strains can’t save me today. Tears stream silently within while I struggle to keep my composure.

Once I get there, we stop briefly at the house, where I feel the emptiness of a world without my father. Hazel tells what happened with Daddy—they’d had to rush out of Mexico so he could die in the United States. On the last day of his life, she read him the letter I sent about Gram asking for forgiveness. She said he understood and everything was okay. I try to imagine what he thought, how he felt. What he looked like at that moment.

Soon, it is time to go to the viewing. Hazel and I march like wind-up dolls toward the limousine that takes us to the funeral home. Both of us are drained of tears, speaking matter-of-factly about what will happen in the next few days. Some part of me works desperately to suppress my true feelings, which are too painful to bear. A pill gives me distance from the pain, as if it’s in a room separate from my real life. Everything becomes dreamlike—riding in the limousine, the funeral home, viewing my father in his casket. Hazel greets their friends one by one, introducing me as his daughter, the estranged child.

Being surrounded now by all these strangers reinforces my sense of not knowing my father. I stand a few feet away from his casket, unable to bear looking directly at his face, but close enough to see that the man in the casket doesn’t resemble the father I knew. This man is emaciated, skin tight to bone, reduced to nothing. Then I recognize my father’s hands. I rush to the bathroom, where it seems the tears won’t stop. I’m losing control. I don’t know how I can go back and face the strangers, how I will navigate the airport tomorrow.

The next day we walk like zombies through the corridors of the Arizona airport where we see Daddy’s casket being loaded into the plane. We stand and watch the surreal scene while life bustles all around us. In Louisville dozens of relatives from my father’s family come to the funeral home. One sister throws herself onto the casket in a fit of hysteria. I don’t know these people, either, though I’m related to them by blood. The enormous sense of loss, a lifetime of brokenness with no way to repair it, overwhelms me utterly.

Daddy is placed in a marble crypt labeled with gold letters. I have seen him in his casket, there has been a funeral, but I still can’t accept that he’s gone. Someday, surely, we’ll make up for all those lost years.

A month after all this, I leave Dennis, sharing custody of Andrew with him, and move back to Illinois to be close to old friends. I have no idea how lost I am. For a long time in my dreams, Daddy is not dead. He comes to me, at first once a month, then more often. He appears to me alive, shiny, energetic. It seems quite normal that he’s walking toward me, arms ready to embrace me. I say, “Daddy, I’m so glad to see you! I thought you were dead. I knew we’d be together again. I knew you’d come back.” He smiles and hugs me tight. Then I suddenly remember he’s dead, that this has to be a dream. He begins to dissolve and I cry, “Don’t leave me!” I crumple into grief, sobbing uncontrollably, clutching at the mist that he’s turned into. I wake up, unable to stop crying. These dreams tear at my waking life.

A few months after coming to Illinois, Andrew and I move again to join Steve, a man I’d been friends with several years earlier. I love his belly laugh, his joy of life. Most importantly, he is known to me, a familiar old friend who likes me, admires me, and wants me. He buys me a long winter coat and a muff like one that Mother once gave me. He exudes charm like my father. He’s my rescuer. Andrew and I weave our lives into his. For a while, the bad dreams stop.

Beside the Road

The day is gray-brown, an icy wind sweeping down the plains from the north. My son is huddled in his car seat, eyes closed, innocent of how his life will change today. His cheeks are still pudgy from babyhood, though he’s taller now. He expresses himself more each day. I love it when he calls a bridge a “jib-es,” a train a “nigh.”

The windshield wipers fly back and forth, blurring my vision—or is it tears. Too much has happened recently for me to sort it all out—Gram’s death and then Daddy’s, leaving Dennis, trading Andrew with him every three months or so, adjusting to being in a new relationship. My every nerve is raw, and there is little peace in my heart. I hope Dennis won’t be late to the Howard Johnson’s rest stop next to the freeway. It’s terrible to think of handing off our son as if he were a bag of groceries, but we try to be rational about it. We’re thoughtful people, clear about how we must do things as modern, separated parents, sharing everything, even Andrew, equally, with no guilt. It’s the guilt part that I’m not able to handle very well.

My inner voice bugs me, telling me that because Andrew is so young he still needs to be with me more than with his father, but maybe I’m just being old-fashioned. I reassure myself that he loves his father and his father loves him. I’m determined not to repeat what happened to me. A father and child need to be together, too. Besides, as a boy, he needs his father even more than I needed mine—that’s how he’ll learn to become a man someday. He won’t miss me very much.

The green freeway sign says “Rest Stop—4 miles.” My palms begin to sweat, slick on the steering wheel despite the cold. Today I got up early, driving down from Champaign, where I work in the university library. My stomach hurts from the war going on inside me. I keep telling myself I’m not deserting Andrew, I’m just giving him to his father. Out of the corner of my eye I see the sign for the rest stop.

“Andrew,” I call out. “Wake up. Daddy, we’re going to see Daddy.”

He begins to stir. “Daddy? See Daddy?” he says in his sing-song voice.

“Yes, we’re seeing Daddy. You’re going to be with him again; won’t that be fun?” I say cheerily. Nothing to get upset about. As I park the car, I see Dennis’s green Ford pickup across the parking lot. We bought it when I was pregnant, expecting to take wonderful family camping trips when Andrew got older, things we’ll never do now. Dennis watches me drive up, the wind tearing through his curly blonde hair. I have to look away from the pain on his face. Andrew is the best part of our marriage, the best part of who we were together.

Andrew bounces in his seat and waves his arms. “Daddy, Daddy!”

“Hey, buster, how are you?” Dennis opens my car door and buries his face in Andrew’s neck, inhaling the smell of animal crackers and apple juice.

The ache spreading from my stomach to my ribs tells me that I am in dangerous terrain. The need to be fair to Dennis, to give Andrew to him for a while, wars with the part of me that knows Andrew and I are bonded close—it tears him up when I leave him. The other times we exchanged Andrew, he was younger, but I can tell that this time it will be harder for him. It certainly is for me. But what about Dennis? He looks torn apart too, but he’s trying to act cheery, holding Andrew’s hand as they go into the store to get milk. I watch the wind blow against the car, feeling the heaviness of rain in the gray world that surrounds us, as if there will never be another spring.

As they leave the store, Andrew trustingly holds his father’s hand. When he sees me, he lets go and rushes to me, a look of wild happiness on his face. He buries himself in my legs, giggling with pleasure. I brush his fine blonde hair with my fingers. His blue eyes are wide and big, the blue of the plains sky in summer. “Andrew, you’re going to be with Daddy. Be a good boy and mind him. I’ll see you later. I’ll call you on the phone, okay?”

Andrew stares up, his smile dimming, his eyes registering his growing awareness of the purpose of this gathering beside the road. Dennis picks him up, sensing his brewing upset.

“Don’t talk to him now, just get in the car and go,” he tells me. Dennis is practical, a scientist. His philosophy is simple: Take care of the goal and the rest will follow. He rushes a blubbering Andrew toward the pickup. Perhaps he’s right, but I run alongside, trying to hug Andrew one more time. The last time we did this, Dennis told me, “Don’t worry, he always stops crying right away.” Maybe he usually does, but the turmoil this time is worse—he understands more about what we are doing, and it’s tearing his heart in two. He’s kicking and fighting and screaming for me. Oh God, I’m hurting him, I’m ruining his life, he’ll feel lost as I did, as I still do.