What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [83]
“Not lost,” I say. “Only changed.”
“Well.” She smiles.
“I know,” I say. “I told someone on the plane I hadn’t seen my mother in thirty-five years and she was absolutely incredulous. And so was I, when I heard myself.”
“Oh, it … happened,” my mother says.
For a moment, the only sound is from the wind in the trees outside.
“I would have been a good grandmother, though, I think,” my mother says. “I was always good with babies.”
Some wall inside me breaks. “Jesus,” I say, my hand to my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t do it,” my mother says. “It just happened. I’m the one who didn’t stay around to fight for you. I gave up. At that time in my life, it seemed like the right decision.”
“Maybe it was,” Sharla said. “We’re all right, we turned out all right. We’re happy.”
“Are you?” my mother asks, and her voice is as wistful and plaintive as a young child’s.
I nod my head. “Yeah.”
“Ah,” my mother says. “Then.” She sighs deeply, closes her eyes, opens them. “I have wanted to know that for such a long time.”
She goes to the window, looks outside. “Want to take a walk? It’s beautiful here; I have a certain way that I go. Would you like to see it?”
And because we are finally, finally ready, we tell her yes.
It’s the same captain on this plane going home that I had coming out; I recognize his voice. And once again, he is pointing out things we should look at: in this case, Lake Michigan. But I don’t bother to open the shade.
I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and her reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent-teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up a forty-seven-year-old, looking in the mirror to count age spots.
Before we left our mother’s house, Sharla and I presented an abbreviated version of as many life events as we could recall: our graduations and weddings, our children’s milestones; and smaller things, too: my bout with mononucleosis at age sixteen, for example. “Did you wrap a warm washcloth around your neck?” my mother asked.
“No.”
“Oh well, that can feel so good when your throat hurts. I would have done that for you. And made some soup.”
A long silence. And then, “What kind?” I asked.
“Well,” she said. “We would have had a conference. On paper. Because I wouldn’t have wanted to make you talk.”
“I suppose I might have written ‘split pea,’” I said.
“All right,” my mother said. “So first I would have gotten a good ham bone.”
This is what we did, Sharla and I, on our walks with our mother. We gave her our life events to reconstruct so that she could put herself there. The three of us stood at the edge of the Pacific and our mother told us how she would have told Sharla’s boyfriends that she wasn’t home on the days she wanted to avoid them. In the woods, we lay on soft beds of pine needles and my mother told me that children walking after age one doesn’t mean a thing.
Did this help? Did it matter? Yes, and yes. In the way that it could.
For now, we are full of promises to stay in touch, to have our mother visit soon, to meet her grandchildren (“My grandchildren!” she’d said, with her hand to her throat). We’d talked about the wisdom of introducing our children, old as they are, to someone who may very well die soon, and concluded that so might any of us.
I am thinking again about Wayne, too, remembering how easily I let him into my life, then out of it. I am thinking of how right he was when he said that people want to be deceived. I have learned the truth of that notion over and over; but I never admitted to its obvious presence in my own life. After all, I claimed I