Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [4]
After, I kept thinking that it must have been that moment when Mama reached to grab Anne’s hand for the last time, when her mouth—no longer speaking what her mind was seeing—began that soft wordless howl. Twenty minutes of howling and then silence, and death happening then like the closing of a book.
“You mean and stubborn and completely Ruth’s daughter,” Aunt Dot had told me when I visited her years ago and would not give her the gossip about Mama that she wanted. I had made a mantra of her words. “Mean and stubborn and Ruth’s daughter. I don’t hold grudges. I kick butt and keep moving. Mean and stubborn and Ruth Gibson’s daughter.” But what did that mean in a world without her? Who were Ruth Gibson’s daughters without her?
After the good-byes and the weeping, walking away from the hospital together, my sisters and I became other people. All through the funeral rituals, we acted as if we had become careful strangers. I imagined myself crisp and efficient, doing what seemed necessary, barely pausing to wipe the tears I could not stop. Anne walked silently through the motions, white-faced and wounded, though the air around her hummed and burned. It was Wanda, my big sister, who startled me, putting me down in her own bed, serving food I didn’t know she knew how to cook, teasing the relatives out of their animosity. She even got my uncle Brice to talk to my aunt Maudy and kept me carefully out of my stepfather’s reach.
At first I wasn’t sure what my sister was doing, but at the funeral home I began to understand. We had gone through Mama’s things together, talked about buying something special, but finally chosen clothes for Mama that she had worn and loved—her lucky shirt, loose-fitting cotton trousers, and her most comfortable shoes. “Only woman ever buried in her bingo outfit,” I would tell friends later. But choosing those clothes, we had not laughed; we had felt guided by what Mama would have wanted. It was when I watched Wanda fasten Mama’s lucky necklace—the little silver racehorse positioned in the hollow of Mama’s throat—chat I saw.
Wanda was being Mama, doing what Mama would have done, comforting us the way only Mama had known to do. I looked around and saw Anne holding my stepfather’s shoulder as he sobbed, looked down and saw my own hands locked on the little bag of Mama’s jewelry we had found in her dresser. For a moment I wanted to cry, and then I didn’t. Of all the things I had imagined, this was the one I had not foreseen. We had become Mama.
I reached past my sister to put my hand on Mama’s face, to touch her again and push away my sudden fear. But the cheek was hard and cold, something marble and inhuman. I did not know then what was more terrifying—what my mama had become or what we had.
We divided Mama’s things among us.
My sisters have daughters. I insisted they take all the jewelry to pass on, but it was no great gesture. My mama had nothing worth any money, only one good bracelet and one good ring that I pressed on Anne and Wanda. They insisted I take the engagement band. It was cold in my hand. I tucked it in a little satin bag in which Mama had kept three spools of thread, tiny plated scissors, needles, and a thimble. A month later, in Los Angeles to do a reading, I would lose the bag, the ring, all my clothes, and the manuscript I was completing. But when I told my sisters about it, all I thought was that the sewing bag was the only thing Mama had owned that I really wanted.
Then I remembered the pictures.
For two decades, every time I visited, I shuffled through those pictures—scores of ancient snapshots stuffed in a box in the end table in Mama’s living room. Each time I pulled them out and asked Mama to go through them with me. The faces in Mama’s box were full of stories—ongoing tragedies, great novels, secrets and mysteries and longings no one would ever know.
“Who’s this?” I would ask about another cracked and fading sepia image of a child.
“That was your cousin that drowned.”
“And this?”
“She was the one ran off at thirteen. Now,