A south wind has scattered the morning clouds and a feathery cube of mid-day sun settles into the courtyard like an elevator down its well, a heel into a boot. My mother’s boot. The crocuses just out, yesterday the first time, a spill of jewels along the path, a necklace of garnet, sapphire, amber, its string broken, all unstrung and scattered, unnoticed in the giddiness, tripping home after the ball. Miniature irises and snowdrops, too, their tiny leaves muddied by the night rain splashing in freshly turned soil. My mother’s soil that I have turned. I have taken her place as gardener.
What am I feeling just now, at this instant? Calm. That’s not it. Contentment? No, more fundamental. Delight? Closer…
She is older than the other boys’ mothers, and already stoops under a burden of gray and wrinkle. Calling me in from play while the games continue, before I am ready, but I come. No one really notices because I’m only watching anyway, no invitation to play, not able should I be invited.
Born fat, something with my thyroid, and always taken for slow in the head. Now I’m told it is my mother’s fault, having me too late. Forty-four she is. Too old for a first child, so they say. But all the trouble I cause her, and she loves me anyway. I don’t take it for granted. No one else could love me, so I keep her close and do as she says.
One day they take me away to the institution. My mother is unhappy but she goes along with it because it is for my own good. I’m too coddled. I’m a man now and they will teach me a trade, make me useful. With a little luck and hard work I will be able to support myself, not be a burden on my family. Watch your diet my mother tells me. Watch his diet she tells the matron in white. Nobody watches my diet. I work in the kitchen and I wash the floors. That’s what you do when you first go to the institution. Then you graduate to mowing the lawn and trimming trees. They teach you things like reading and arithmetic, too, but not very much. They say that the reason I can’t read is because my mother always reads to me, and so now I’m lazy. Every day she reads, not just for me but for herself. I think she likes to read aloud. She reads well, with expression. She reads the newspaper and Time magazine and The Nation and Huckleberry Fin and Camus and Virginia Woolf. Now they tell me I’m dyslexic, and it’s not really my fault, but I don’t like washing all these dishes and I’m never going to graduate to become a gardener, so I run away. It takes me almost a week to get home.
I have a father, of course, or so I think, and he’s not happy that I’m home again, but my mother chooses me over him, and he goes away. That’s love for you, black and white. My mother tells me he’s got a mistress so we don’t need to worry about him, which is convenient.
The sky is that windy blue, deep as a hawk, made blue by the rolling whiteness of the clouds and the spangle of kites. Two of them far over the wall, red and pink, fighting for dominion. I like kites like I like falling stars. We don’t see them much in America. We have television instead. I’ll bet there are still lots of falling stars and kites in the skies over Bangladesh where they haven’t the money for electronics. We don’t have a television because my mother says it’s better to read and talk and play cards, and now that she’s gone we still don’t have one. I think I’d like a television but I get by with the movies I play in my head.
We go shopping every day after breakfast. We each carry an empty string bag to the store and a full one back, a couple miles walk in all. It’s the same every day except what we carry back in the bags may be different, depending on what it says on the list, and on Sundays when the store is closed. Sunday is the day I weigh myself on the bathroom scales. It’s important to only do it once a week otherwise you get depressed. Sometimes I weigh over four hundred pounds and sometimes, like last Sunday, I weigh two hundred and fifty-two. My mother has me on a strict diet so I don’t usually weigh four hundred pounds. Vegetables, soybeans, insulin, and coffee. Sometimes I weigh less than two hundred pounds.
I like going shopping. Our house lives in a pasture at the top of a twisted dirt lane that finds its way through a small forest of elm, willow and cottonwood. Every day it takes a new route past the punched-down barn and broken orchard, across the abandoned irrigation ditch, and between the neighbor’s gateposts. A dust devil of dogs peels out of the trees. They whirl around, catching us up in their aimless excitement, lurching my heart and spinning my head. They know us, but if one of them forgets himself and yelps, the whole pack is off in a tizzy that sometimes follows us all the way to the pavement. They have no names, but I have named them, sitting in the dust scratching their ears. Pascal, Dewey, Einstein, Linus, Bernard.
Mrs. McCormick is almost as old as my mother and she runs the store. Sometimes her grandchildren are there to help. Petey she calls me, my chin barely high enough to rest on the counter. She offers me a spiraled stick of candy, but my mother tells her No. No, Peter can’t eat sugar, she says, and Mrs. McCormick returns it to its jar. I don’t really care. I think I’ve forgotten the taste of sweets.
My mother doesn’t speak like other people. She swallows the end of words like a robin its worm. It’s because she’s a foreigner from across the bounding main. She tells me this, her feet curling beneath her on the couch as she sips her tea, white with milk. Thirty, practically an old maid, she is when she snags her husband, a fly-boy she calls him, an American doing his country’s bidding and patriotic duty, fighting in the war. She is working as a schoolteacher north of London in Hertfordshire, Herts, she calls it, and they meet in the dancehall near his base. She has been going every Saturday night for a year waiting for him and they marry in the blink of an eye and he brings her home, to his home, across the sea. But they can’t have children. She tells me this and then leaves it, as if I might understand.
Petey, says Mrs. McCormick, you’re getting to be such a big boy! Petey sounds like a parakeet, I tell her. My name is Peter. My, oh my, my mother and Mrs. McCormick agree.
If you can’t have children, then who am I? My mother laughs and hugs me to her breast. My fly-boy is sterile, she says, but not I. So she runs around, has a gay old time. So she says. Now or never, she tells herself, how quickly the years have flown! So, who is my father? She laughs some more. Who knows? Who cares? Not her.
It is my birthday, the first day of spring, and I am forty-four. I have a kitten. Her name is Mouse, and we sleep together in my mother’s bed. We sleep late because there is no reason not to. I love the morning but I love the nighttime too. The sun settles into the trees like Mouse into my pocket, her eyes heavy for sleep, closing with deliberate slowness, pulling, pulling a universe of light through an amber haze of branches and lashes to rest. The crescendo of birdsong suddenly hushes, an invisible maestro drops his arms and his bowed back turns on another masterpiece. Who can rest now with the world so newly asleep? Diamonds loom and soar, whistling their constancy above the hills. My mother’s voice, another’s words, sing fancy in my ears, and melancholy finds me happy.
At this moment, what do I feel? Before I can know the moment is gone and analysis begins, annihilating the tenuous flicker of longing that prompts the impulse to question. Better not to think.
There is conceit in words, but pleasure too. I feel the former slowly leavening in my skull and, if I pay it any mind, a trickle of nausea follows. It is better to be the receiver than the purveyor of wisdom. It is easier to disbelieve what you hear than what you say. It must be dangerous to be a writer, risking nausea in others.
Sparrows house in the eave of a dilapidated neighbor, seesawing in and out of crannies impossibly small, all spring hauling in straw and twigs and mud, all summer grubs and worms. Pathetic fledglings collide with our garden wall, shit abundantly, and gawk in amazement at their accomplishments. My mother kneels in her garden, her kneepad is a spongy material wrapped in burlap then covered in denim. I see her, stitch over stitch on winter evenings, create softness for her boniness. The young sparrows are as big as their parents but I know them still by their silliness. They fall out of the willow tree but catch themselves with an awkward tip of a wing. I laugh and turn to my mother, but she is lying in the delphiniums, her face sideways in the dirt. Call a doctor, she tells me. Say I’ve had a stroke. I dial 9-1-1 and return to her glazed eyes and her mouth full of mud.
The ambulance comes and I say, you missed her, then show them the way, two white uniforms and a trolley. They take her away as if she isn’t already gone.
The only sound in the house is the clock, chopping wood all day long, chopping time into kindling, making a regular mess of things. I go over and put my hand on its pendulum. I may not stop time, but I stop its regimen. A seamless calm settles over me.
I see camels in movies, Ishtar and Lawrence of Arabia, and I like the way they move, a colored curl lining a dune, with purpose but no hurry, swaying this way and that, left and right, their tails and burdens hanging that way and this, right and left, in unconscious counterpoint. My mother reads like that, a camel high-nosing the desert air, with more plod than lilt, but rhythmic just the same. The words sway out of her with certainty and logic, persistence and foresight, and I sway with them, a rider on his camel bound for Marrakech. So I don’t always hear all of the words, or grasp the sense of them, the beautiful words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Michael Ondaatje lost in a dozy reverie of sandalwood and cigarettes.
It is just a tiny alteration in one’s way of looking at things by which this life could seem completely different. My mother reads those words and they make themselves true.
What am I feeling now, at this instant? Melancholy. Too abstract. Alone? Ditto.
My mother’s death is a shutter closed, the lid of the Cyclops eye unfurled, and a shroud wraps me in dreamless sleep. Consciousness, the foundation of reality, disperses as a morning fog to reveal the azure terror of freefall from grace. Or perhaps it is to grace that I fall. I know little of grace in my sheltered world. The circle intersects the square. I sail in an oblivion of loss until, a famished husk, I surface, then fall again.
Is it sadness I feel or merely emptiness? I believe there is a bitter quality to sadness that I lack. What stills her voice drops me into a well of oblivion. And what is it that stills her voice, glazes her eye, and feeds her dirt? Theory bursts into manifestation and drives the wind from my lungs.
I lurk in the tortured rooms, vent remembered gluttony on the refrigerator, unshackled from the safety of another’s discipline. Uncomprehending officials require my X and threaten me with unspecific grief until I mount my defenses and ward them off. I invent a career of gardener, for their sakes, for my sake, then undertake it for no reason other than the words.
And now? What do I feel, just now? My thumb against the table, the grain weather-raised. A tickle of sweat under my collar. A breath of air where there is no breath, cooling my brow. Closer.
Today is my birthday. Forty-four. Same age as my mother is when I am born. The serpent makes a meal of his tail. Complete… I understand the largess of death as well as anyone. There resides my mother. Here and gone. A canopy of indifference. Blessedly mutual. My mother is a stone into a well and I mourn her as such. Utterly black, impossibly deep, abysmal waters have her as completely as her garden embodies spring. She is both, split upon the cross of reality. Or is it memory? Split upon the cross… There is no cross of indifference. This is the function of memory.
So, it is my birthday today. Forty-four. The first day of spring. The distance between winter and spring. Just another year, but hard to measure. Consider the melting snow. I put little store in seasons. My mother dies in high summer, eating delphinium dirt. This season they will rise again, oblivious.
I think that idiots understand death better than most. We miss the difficulty.
So, today is my birthday. My mother keeps me in a strict dietary regimen. For my heart. Weight kills. I take my health less seriously than she. Today is a day for ice cream!
The wind kites the trees a mile high. The tumble of leaves and houses spins the lane into dizziness. Einstein and Bernard nip at my heels until I find their flying ears. Linus sulks in the ditch licking his balls. A file of swallows turns and disappears, a shimmering cascade into the lane, then reappears, greasepaint on glass, as flat as eternity, each feather a dynamo of invention.
And now? What am I feeling at this instant? The shimmer of the new-green leaves.
Mrs. McCormick isn’t in her store, which is good news. Mrs. McCormick refuses me ice cream because my mother tells her to. Her grandchildren find themselves free of indoctrination, one ice cream as good as any other. Rocky Road, Venetian Strawberry, or French Vanilla? That is the question. My mother reads me Hamlet, I can quote the Gods. The slings and arrows of outrageous chocolate. I go for Rocky Road. It is my birthday, a day of culmination. I shamble down the street toward the bus stop, the whole world in the tip of my tongue.
And now? Cold. Cold on my lips, a sweet slide melting. And now? A pain growing under my left arm and suddenly a searing arc across my chest and into the shoulder. Oh Mother! Mother! I let go of the cone and am helpless to slow its fall into the dirt. My chest is a cavity of ache and breath comes in gasps. The green slats of the bench are a featherbed of invitation. A great groan fills the distance between my ears, swelling, swelling through my gritted teeth to envelop the world. My back fits perfectly the bench and the new-green leaves my eyesight. Two birds of some sort… They are of a variety, but I cannot think what it would be. What a blessing not to know! The thought blossoms out of me, dispersing all else. Not to know! The sun beckons, bobbing through a tapestry of green. A bird rolls with the wind and lifts its tail directly over me. Ah shit! A sulfurous splatter hits my forehead and fills my nostrils. I jerk my arm but it doesn’t move. The tapestry deepens, darkens, blackens, black. And now? Here I am. Now? Nothing.
Venice April, 2001