I can’t see anything except a small patch of moonlight illuminating, among other things, a photo of my mother. Although I lived with her for a total of twenty four years, when I imagine her face I see only this photo: Mother’s body is turned away, but not so much that the silhouette of her right breast and swelling belly can’t be seen. Her head is turned toward the photographer, her face tilted upward and her simple features showing no real emotion except maybe surprise. She is biting her lower lip in thought and her arms are raised, fingers spread to hold her hair off her face and neck. She isn’t wearing any jewelry, just a man’s Oxford shirt unbuttoned at the wrists and navel. The image always makes me want to hold her, to hold my fetal self as I nestled under her skin.

I didn’t really leave my mother’s home until I was twenty. Upon my graduation from the community college’s secretarial program, I moved my four boxes of practical possessions into my own one bedroom apartment. Mother put down the deposit and paid my first month’s rent; after that I relied on my starting salary from a local insurance agency to sustain me. I think Mother was proud of me, and Sunday nights I always let her buy my dinner. She would giggle nervously when she suggested new restaurants, apparently intimidated by the sophisticated adult world into which she thought I’d been inducted.

By the time I moved out, Mother was certainly not the same woman that she had been when the photograph was taken. She was overweight, with sagging breasts, and she wore baggy sweaters with matching leggings whenever she went out. Her hair was cut short and had lost its shine. She still wore the engagement ring that Paul had given her, insisting that she only wore it because it was, after all, a pretty ring, and therefore it would be a shame to put it away. Mother never wore makeup when she was young, and perhaps it was in compensation that she applied the same lipstick every day of her later life—a tawny shade that she selected herself and that was a little too orange for her heavily freckled skin.

After adolescent years of angst projected at-- and, I thought at the time, caused by—my mother, I didn’t anticipate ever moving back in with her. When I did it was out of necessity. I was thirty four and the lease was running out on the apartment that I shared with my boyfriend of three years. When my aunts decided by conference call that my mother could no longer live alone, they asked me if, since they couldn’t sense any significant long term plans in my life, I would accept the responsibility of her care. I took the opportunity to break up with Jacob and went to the supermarket for cardboard boxes.

I spent four years playing mother to the woman who raised me. I think that my never-married mother understood that I was the one person who could not abandon her after four broken engagements had left her wounded and lonely. My implicit loyalty allowed her to be openly miserable in my presence; she spent her mornings on the plaid sofa, hugging her own large body under a woolen blanket and watching talk shows featuring men who spat and women who shrieked. In the afternoons she napped and read tabloids or yelled out the answers to questions on tv game shows. Twice a week I came home early to drive her to the health clinic. Once a month we stopped at the pharmacy and picked up refilled prescriptions. Mother’s best time was just after dinner, which she usually helped me prepare by slicing onions or arranging frozen french fries on cookie sheets. I remember, before rising to wash our plates, sitting and enjoying the effect of our red wine. Mother told me about her pregnancy and my childhood. I don’t know how much was true; when I searched my right shin for the long scar she described as the proof of a 1970 accident, I found nothing.

Mother’s heart stopped when she was sixty one. My aunts flew in from Key Largo, Dallas, and Indianapolis, and I didn’t cry until my mother was underground and the door had shut behind her sisters. I spent the next week pulling dusty shoes out of closets and almost-empty bottles of hand cream out of drawers. In a bureau in the back bedroom I found, carefully folded, the red Oxford shirt from the photograph. I assume that it was my father’s. Mother never told me his name and I never asked. I smelled it, but after thirty eight years it smelled like her, not him.

With each item of Mother’s that I brought to the dump, I brightened. I pawned her television and bought azaleas to plant on her gravesite. I almost never went back after that. I prefer this: sitting in the stairwell of my own home, in the dark, studying her photograph as it hangs in peace on the wall in front of me.



EGK