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By Root 974 0

She did everything quickly and never lingered affectionately over these operations, though she could be gently teasing or humorous, joking with even the youngest and most oblivious infant. She bottle-fed Caroline and I’m sure she bottle-fed us, in spite of the fact that farmwives never willingly take on extra work, and her demeanor during the feedings was rather impersonal as I later recalled it. There was no melding with the child into symbiotic fleshy warmth. Her dresses, even her housedresses, were structured and public-seeming, with tucks and darts, decorative buttons and appliqué work. The span of her motherhood was a short one, just over a decade, only a moment, really, no time for evolution. I have noticed that a mother left eternally young through death comes to seem as remote as your own young self. It’s as easy to judge her misapprehensions and mistakes as it is to judge your own, and to fall into a habit of disrespect, as if all her feelings must have been as shallow and jejeune as you think yours used to be.

That that young woman foresaw my life so clearly unnerved me, as if something intensely private had suddenly been exposed and discussed by people I barely knew. Simultaneously, I recognized and pitied her frustration and fear. That is another bequest from an early-dying parent, her image ever more childlike and powerless compared to your own advancing age.

I hadn’t actually made the parallel between Rose’s situation and my mother’s, no doubt because my main thoughts during Rose’s treatment had been selfish ones—my life’s companion, little Rose, always four to my six, the way she was when I first became really conscious of her (when I first became really conscious). But of course, when you thought about it, Rose was quite like my mother in many ways—her manner, her looks, even, in part, the name (Ann Rose Amundson—while I swam I formed my mother’s maiden name with my lips). Virginia—that was a pretentious name for our family, taken from a book, as was Caroline.

But even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries. For a moment I toyed with a magic solution—that Rose, in herself, in her reincarnation of our mother, would speak, or act out, the answers. All I had to do was be mindful of the relationship between them (mindful in secret, in a way no one else could be mindful), and gather up the answers, glean the apparently harvested field for overlooked bits. But no. There could be a quest—I might go around to people we knew, or who had known her, and ask them about her. I could, maybe, call her brother in Arizona or New Mexico, if he was still alive, if someone dimly remembered the town he used to live in. I could ask my father about her. I could become her biographer, be drawn into her life, and into excuses for her or blame of her, but that seemed like an impractical, laborious, and failing substitute for what I had missed in the last twenty-two years. I was, after all, my father’s daughter, and I automatically did believe in the unbroken surface of the unsaid. After seven laps, I hauled myself out of the water and sat in the hot wind. I noticed that Pammy had peeled away from Doreen Patrick’s group and rejoined Linda. Her polka-dotted sunglasses were firmly in place.

There was no reason to go home. The weather was relentless, and I didn’t look forward to the hot night to come. Our house had a few shade trees close to it, but my father’s house was stationed proudly up a little rise, four or five feet, but the only rise in the area, adjacent to an equally proud stand of ornamental evergreens that looked nice but did nothing for the heat. You could see his roof, radiant tin, from a good ways off, but if it warded off the heat, I wasn’t aware of it.

Even so, sitting around the pool felt like a kind of penance. Pammy said nothing about Doreen Patrick, nor about anyone else, but she raked the area ceaselessly with her gaze, stopping and staring