The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [95]
I said thank you mamma. I love you so.
And then she died.
It was 2001, the year my son was born. Her urn was a faux gold box about the size of a coffee pot. My father wouldn’t part with it - brainbird that he was by then - and so I didn’t try to take it until after he died. Then I put it in our garage on a shelf for two years. I didn’t look at it, I didn’t talk to it, I barely thought about it. It just sat up there with nails and cans of paint and summer storage items and garden tools.
But one day I was in the garage hunting for corner braces to build a frame for a painting and I saw it on the shelf looking all …well. So I called my sister and asked, uh, do you want to do something with mother’s ashes? My sister who had been estranged from my mother from the time she was 16.
Oddly, she said, I guess. So I drove my mother in a box up to Seattle. She sat in the passenger’s seat.
Sitting in my sister’s living room on her brown leather couch that smelled vaguely of cat piss, we stared at the motherbox between us.
She said, “You wanna open it?”
“Sure,” I said. Then I examined the edges more closely, and I jammed my fingernails into the joints, and saw that there wasn’t a clear way to do it. So I said, “Do you have a knife?”
My sister left the room, went into the kitchen, and came back with a butter knife. I stared at it in her hand. Then I took it and tried to pry my box of mother open.
No luck.
“You have a flathead screwdriver?” I said.
“I think so,” she said, and went off in the direction of her garage.
“And a hammer,” I yelled after her.
I put the box on the living room floor. My sister knelt next to me. “Hold the bottom of it,” I said.
“Don’t hit me with the hammer,” she said.
“Move your head,” I said.
I placed the flathead screwdriver at the line where the box edges joined, and then I whacked it with the hammer. The box shot across their hardwood floor. “Look at it go!” Came out of my mouth before I could stop it. Then we both nearly died laughing, rolling on the floor like kids.
I swear to god we tried everything to get that goddamn motherbox open. At one point I even dropped it from the roof of her deck hoping it would sort of break open, but no. I briefly considered running over it with the car. There was no way into the motherbox of ash.
After I left, my sister told me she buried it in her backyard, but I visited her a month later and saw it in the back of her mini-coop with all her life shit and dog hair and car crap. I never confronted her about the lie. But I never saw the box again after that, either. It could be in the ground in her backyard.
Or it could be someplace else.
I can still see my mother sitting in her car as I’d come out of swim practice as a kid. The heater running. Whatever else she was, she was there.
Morning. I’m sitting in my car waiting for them to unlock the doors of the swimming pool. They open, and I enter. I shed my clothes. The water is the color of my eyes. The chlorine smell is more familiar than anything I have ever known. When I dive in, all sound, all weight, all thought leaves. I am a body in water. Again.
Mother, rest. I am home.
Wisdom is a Motherfucker
YOU DIDN1T ACTUALLY THINK I WAS GOING TO LEAVE you inside marriage and family in the regular way, did you?
Listen, I love my family. Like gonzo. And it’s true enough Andy and Miles have pretty much rebirthed me. And yeah. I’m married. With family.
And I love women. Sue me.
But there are other wisdoms.
Unfortunately, I am not wise. I don’t have a special look back on your own life wise voice. More often than not, all I have is a wise-ass voice, and people get tired of that, I can tell you. Although I am fairly skilled at creating lyrical passages when needed.
Up until the place in my life where I crashed into a pregnant woman head-on and met the Mingo, I thought the whole story was about me. A me drama. All these things that have happened to the Lidia.
But what happens to you when you swim back through your own past is that you find an endwall. The endwall