by Alison Hammer Winans
Although job prospects in northeastern Oklahoma were lousy, I insisted we stay at Sparrow Hawk Village, instead of moving on in our search for a home. During my treatment, I wanted to be sustained by the stillness of nature and a community of loving, spiritual people. This unexpected change in plans forced our decision to fly to California and retrieve our stuff from storage. As we packed our suitcases, Tom said, “I’ll get a job and support us financially, so that you can put your energy into healing, instead of worrying about our debts.”
“I’m depending on you now,” I replied. He had not worked for eleven months, but I believed that he would keep his promise this time.
On our way to the airport, we stopped off at Dr. Smith’s office in Tulsa to discuss the result of the biopsy and how to proceed. Without speaking Tom and I sat hand-in-hand on the pink loveseat in her waiting room. It was January 14, 2002, twelve days after our first visit to the young surgeon. The initial shock had worn off, but I was still coming to terms with having a life-threatening illness and getting involved in western medicine. The diagnosis was “moderately differentiated infiltrating ductal carcinoma,” with positive estrogen and progesterone receptors.
Dr. Smith called us in and took the time to translate this saying, “The cancer cells started in the milk duct and then invaded the surrounding tissue. Your female hormones, estrogen and progesterone, helped them grow. They are different from normal cells but not as different as they could be – which would be a worse scenario.”
I liked the way she looked me in the eye and sat close to me. She welcomed and answered all our questions, but even more firmly outlined her ideas for a course of action. “Before we do anything else, I want you to have a chest X-ray, CT scan and bone scan to rule out the possibility of metastases. When breast cancer metastasizes, it goes to the bones, lungs, liver or brain, so all these areas have to be checked.” She continued, “If the cancer has already spread, I will not do surgery on the breast unless it has started to break through the skin.” Tom was looking at the floor, not saying anything, just like he did when we first came here. Unbelieving I stared at her, and tried to imagine it breaking through the skin. How could she say something so horrific? Seeing my look of panic, she quickly said, “Breast cancer is very treatable.”
I was starting to feel the train of events running away with me. I tried to assert myself saying, “I really don’t want to have those tests, but I guess I don’t have a choice if I want you to remove the lump.” Well I did have a choice—there were alternative treatments, but would they work? “Do you know how much the tests cost?” I said reluctantly.
“No I don’t but they are expensive,” she said. “Unfortunately Project Woman does not pay for these diagnostic tests.” The non-profit, Tulsa Project Woman, would pay all the expenses for my surgery as I did not have any insurance. Dr. Smith, in agreeing to work with them to help medically underserved women, would receive less than her usual fee.
I looked randomly around the room, at the photos of her young blonde daughter, at her daughter’s artwork, at self-breast exam pamphlets, seeing and yet not seeing. I said, “Okay, you can make my appointments.”
She concluded, “I’ll try to find an oncologist who will work with Project Woman. Remember that breast cancer is very treatable.” In spite of her optimism, I felt afraid and dismayed as we left her office.
Tom held me as I cried, “What will I do if it has spread? Am I going to die soon?” The medical machine was moving and carrying me with it into a totally strange world. Yet I was asserting some control and not just blindly going with what the doctor said. Having been immersed in the holistic health paradigm for over twenty years, I planned to do everything that I thought was important to maintain my health. Dr. Smith had said to me, “I’ll still work with you even if you use iscador and other holistic treatments.” Thinking that this meant she understood my position, I was disappointed to find out, many months later, that her notes for the first visit read, “She has been, she states, neglecting getting medical care.” That wasn’t how I saw it. She didn’t mention the doctor who couldn’t find the lump. And I had a mammogram that was a false negative, Then we lost our health insurance. So I tried Jin Shin Jyutsu, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, eating raw foods, cleansing my liver, homeopathy, my guru’s sacred ash, Chi Gong and healing in the Daime church. All these modalities were part of my medical care. Mind you, they hadn’t got rid of the lump and that was why I was here, putting my trust in Dr. Smith.
In the airport taxi I said to Tom, “It makes me so angry that medical procedures are about the only service that you have to commit to buying without knowing how much they cost.”
“The AMA, the insurance companies and the pharmaceuticals have got it all arranged. Do you know how they do it?” Fortunately we arrived at the airport then, so I didn’t have to listen to one of Tom’s long expositions. Why couldn’t he get a job as a teacher? He was always so excited to explain things to me. He would be such a great teacher.
We talked more on the plane to San Jose. “Alicat, remember the hymn by Mestre Irineu that says ‘The stars told me, everything in the world can be healed.’ You are going to be healed.”
“Yes, that’s one of my favorite hymns.” We sang together in Portuguese, “Eu subi serra de espinhos, pisando em pontas agudas. As estrelas me disseram no mundo se cura tudo.”
“We can find some alternative treatments to heal you so that you won’t have to have chemo and surgery. After we get my computer from California, I’ll search on the internet.”
“But Tom, a lot of those things are unproven and expensive and I’d have to travel to Mexico or somewhere. Besides, remember that the best way you can help me is to get a job.” I lapsed into silence. I couldn’t believe that I was arguing in favor of western medicine instead of against it. Maybe I was more of a scientist than I liked to think. Anyway I was going to try straddling both worlds, integrating western and complementary medicine.
Tom continued, “Jesus is the great healer. If you do have to lose your breast, Jesus’ healing would bring it back.”
“I wish I had your faith in Jesus. But seeing as I don’t, you pray to him, okay?” I didn’t want more of a rift to develop between us, although it seemed to me that Tom didn’t get the urgency of my situation. “My faith is telling me that I am doing the right thing because all the pieces are coming together—I’ve found a wonderful surgeon, my surgery is paid for and Sparrow Hawk Village is full of holistic healers. After one month here I already have friends, and I love the forest and river and wildlife.”
We arrived at San Jose, picked up my car and a UHaul van, and a week later were back at our storage locker in Tahlequah with all our belongings in one place. The morning after we got back, I drank my contrast—chalky, pasty stuff that was nasty and gave me diarrhea—before driving back to Tulsa for the diagnostic tests. I arrived at the hospital just in time to rush to the restroom, and then they made me drink more. The young lady at registration told me, “I don’t know how much the tests cost, maybe about $1200.” I was probably worrying more about the money than about whether the cancer had spread. I spent several hours there in surreal rooms with large cold steel machines, whirring noises, flashing lights and technicians in white coats. It was weird being at the hospital going through extremely high-tech tests when I didn’t feel ill, I certainly didn’t look ill, and it was hard for me to believe that I was “ill.”
That night, I dreamt a male doctor was saying that I wasn’t going to live long, because the cancer had metastasized and spread. I stood up, saying vehemently, “I’m not going to die!” I affirm that I am alive, I am totally whole and I am healthy.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
THE GARDEN OF BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS
By Alison Hammer Winans
Dedicated with love to Jeanne Ayesha Lauenborg who passed away Monday, June 18, 2007
There is a sanctuary where I go during guided meditations when the leader says, “Go to a place where you feel safe.” And sometimes I go there alone to seek replenishment and an escape our cramped lodgings. My inner landscape used to be an empty windswept plain, a clearing in the woods or an open sunny meadow. But ever since my recovery from cancer it is a lush garden, humming and pulsing, a magical garden redolent of northern California, Hawaii and England. I say this garden is paradise, not because lions are lying down with lambs, but because there are no mosquitoes, and the mugwort, orchids and primroses flourish in unison. It is everything I want it to be, all in one and one in all.
Today I want answers to eternal mysteries. This morning as I held Ayesha’s bony hand she said, “Ali, I need to…” She drifted off, then re-opened her eyes and tried again. “I want to establish reality. Am I here?”
“Yes, you’re here, my friend.”
“Am I in my body?”
“Yes, you’re in your body.” It is her body although skin stretches over her skull like the head of a drum and loose flesh on her limbs flaps like prayer flags.
“Am I dying from cancer?”
I faltered and then said simply, “Not yet.” But when does she stop living and start dying? Where is that line?
Now I lie on my bed, close my eyes and invite the image of my garden. So grateful to be lying down, I relax my muscles and pass into another reality between the two guardians, grandmother banyan trees, broad-leaved and entwined with medusa-like vines since a time unknown. Bird-of-paradise flowers and glossy red anthuriums stand strong. Under the canopy there is a flash of color, a parrot’s squawk, the constant whirring of cicadas, the moist earthy smell of frilly orange fungi. Every springy step releases the fragrances of pineapple weed and pennyroyal, fruity and medicinal. A tropical heady scent draws me deeper into my favorite arbor. Jacaranda trees are dripping with tubular blue flowers and tiger orchids growing from the bark, while trellises of white plumeria, jasmine and trumpet vine buzz with bees and provide a resting place for monarch butterflies lazily opening and closing their wings, intoxicated by the perfumes.
A ruby-throated humming bird chatters in a tree, then in a flash of iridescence flies a circle around me, and comes back to his branch. “Hummingbird, when do we stop living and start dying?” It seems like the right kind of question to ask the only bird that can fly backwards as well as forwards. He kisses a vermilion trumpet vine, comes back to hover close enough that I feel the fanning of tiny wings and then zooms through the gate between my eyebrows into my head. I am spinning out into the relative universe where life and death are the same, and my avian guide says, “It all depends from where you are looking and how fast you are moving.” I feel that something important just happened but am not sure what it is.
So I continue along the path, footsteps releasing the woodsy aroma of variegated and lemon thyme. Sunlight streams between the oak trees, squirrels are chasing, bush tits are twittering, and a choir of warblers and vireos sing anthems. I look carefully amongst the scattered acorn cups for signs of a fairy tea party. When I was little, I wanted to be a fairy, and here I recognize their presence as time seems to shimmer and a numinous stillness develops. I sit on a moist moss-covered rock beside a constant flowing spring that creates a magical pool filled with leaping frogs, water lilies, giant pink-yellow lotus blossoms and koi, white with orange spots and orange splashed with white. The spring burbles and the wind whispers through the leaves, “Ayesha.”
In front of my eyes a robust caterpillar appears, lime green with horns and eye-spots, hitching a ride on a spider web. Catching it on a leaf, I say, “Caterpillar, what is it like to die?”
“To me death is transformation. You have to let the structure disintegrate and the elements come together in another form.” My, this is a scholarly caterpillar. “Thank you,” I say putting it down carefully. But I still don’t know what death really feels like.
Going deeper, there is a tall privet hedge that walls off a secret garden. A squeaky wrought iron gate covered in cobwebs opens into an English rose garden with honeysuckle trellises. Around a central fountain are beds with a joyful profusion of forget-me-nots, snapdragons, marigolds, sweet peas, larkspur and delphinium, not in soldier-like rows but in nature’s ordered chaos. Every flower holds a memory for me. I carefully remove a few honeysuckle flowers and suck out the ambrosia. My tongue is alive with sweetness. A monarch butterfly alights on my arm. “I’m sorry if I’ve taken some of your food,” I say.
The butterfly dances around my head, then delicately sips from a flower and lands in the palm of my hand. I must be forgiven. “Butterfly, how do you fly so many miles without dying?”
My royal friend unfurls and curls its proboscis, like a woman fluttering her eyelashes, and says, “None of us could do it on our own. We stay together to uplift each other. Together we arrive at our destination, separate we would fail to reach the goal.”
“Thank you.” The butterfly joins its friends, while I continue walking between clumps of pale yellow primroses, breathing in deep the pungent aroma of grey-green mugwort leaves. A skinny brown rabbit with alert ears hops in front of me nibbling on parsley and sage. Her shiny brown eyes watch me as I say, “Rabbit, why do we suffer so much?” She comes close, her nose catching my tears as they fall and says, “I will show you.” She hops along the path slowly enough that I can follow her outside the privet hedge.
And then we are in a hot dry golden meadow where the lazuli buntings glean grain kernels and the crickets chirp and the violet-green swallows swoop down catching flies. There is a spinning wheel with a maiden singing, and this must be Ayesha in her youth, with a voluptuous figure, long red hair, clear grey eyes and a captivating smile. She appears not to notice me as she spins piles and piles of straw into gold. Understanding begins to dawn within me. She works harder and harder, until I see yards of a golden gossamer cloth emerging, sparkling with ethereal colors, finer than the morning mist. Ayesha stands, wrapping the cloth round and round her body, and she twirls and circles like a dervish, faster and faster until she dissolves into a column of golden light reaching to the sky and beyond. I still hear her sweet voice singing, “Shemaya, the light of the universe, shemaya,” and I feel the ecstasy of her smile in my heart.
Now I am ready to leave my sanctuary carrying the magical gifts of wisdom and beauty inside me. I feel renewed and, for now, at peace, knowing that next time I hold Ayesha’s hand I will imagine her clothed in gold, singing, twirling, smiling.
Dedicated with love to Jeanne Ayesha Lauenborg who passed away Monday, June 18, 2007
There is a sanctuary where I go during guided meditations when the leader says, “Go to a place where you feel safe.” And sometimes I go there alone to seek replenishment and an escape our cramped lodgings. My inner landscape used to be an empty windswept plain, a clearing in the woods or an open sunny meadow. But ever since my recovery from cancer it is a lush garden, humming and pulsing, a magical garden redolent of northern California, Hawaii and England. I say this garden is paradise, not because lions are lying down with lambs, but because there are no mosquitoes, and the mugwort, orchids and primroses flourish in unison. It is everything I want it to be, all in one and one in all.
Today I want answers to eternal mysteries. This morning as I held Ayesha’s bony hand she said, “Ali, I need to…” She drifted off, then re-opened her eyes and tried again. “I want to establish reality. Am I here?”
“Yes, you’re here, my friend.”
“Am I in my body?”
“Yes, you’re in your body.” It is her body although skin stretches over her skull like the head of a drum and loose flesh on her limbs flaps like prayer flags.
“Am I dying from cancer?”
I faltered and then said simply, “Not yet.” But when does she stop living and start dying? Where is that line?
Now I lie on my bed, close my eyes and invite the image of my garden. So grateful to be lying down, I relax my muscles and pass into another reality between the two guardians, grandmother banyan trees, broad-leaved and entwined with medusa-like vines since a time unknown. Bird-of-paradise flowers and glossy red anthuriums stand strong. Under the canopy there is a flash of color, a parrot’s squawk, the constant whirring of cicadas, the moist earthy smell of frilly orange fungi. Every springy step releases the fragrances of pineapple weed and pennyroyal, fruity and medicinal. A tropical heady scent draws me deeper into my favorite arbor. Jacaranda trees are dripping with tubular blue flowers and tiger orchids growing from the bark, while trellises of white plumeria, jasmine and trumpet vine buzz with bees and provide a resting place for monarch butterflies lazily opening and closing their wings, intoxicated by the perfumes.
A ruby-throated humming bird chatters in a tree, then in a flash of iridescence flies a circle around me, and comes back to his branch. “Hummingbird, when do we stop living and start dying?” It seems like the right kind of question to ask the only bird that can fly backwards as well as forwards. He kisses a vermilion trumpet vine, comes back to hover close enough that I feel the fanning of tiny wings and then zooms through the gate between my eyebrows into my head. I am spinning out into the relative universe where life and death are the same, and my avian guide says, “It all depends from where you are looking and how fast you are moving.” I feel that something important just happened but am not sure what it is.
So I continue along the path, footsteps releasing the woodsy aroma of variegated and lemon thyme. Sunlight streams between the oak trees, squirrels are chasing, bush tits are twittering, and a choir of warblers and vireos sing anthems. I look carefully amongst the scattered acorn cups for signs of a fairy tea party. When I was little, I wanted to be a fairy, and here I recognize their presence as time seems to shimmer and a numinous stillness develops. I sit on a moist moss-covered rock beside a constant flowing spring that creates a magical pool filled with leaping frogs, water lilies, giant pink-yellow lotus blossoms and koi, white with orange spots and orange splashed with white. The spring burbles and the wind whispers through the leaves, “Ayesha.”
In front of my eyes a robust caterpillar appears, lime green with horns and eye-spots, hitching a ride on a spider web. Catching it on a leaf, I say, “Caterpillar, what is it like to die?”
“To me death is transformation. You have to let the structure disintegrate and the elements come together in another form.” My, this is a scholarly caterpillar. “Thank you,” I say putting it down carefully. But I still don’t know what death really feels like.
Going deeper, there is a tall privet hedge that walls off a secret garden. A squeaky wrought iron gate covered in cobwebs opens into an English rose garden with honeysuckle trellises. Around a central fountain are beds with a joyful profusion of forget-me-nots, snapdragons, marigolds, sweet peas, larkspur and delphinium, not in soldier-like rows but in nature’s ordered chaos. Every flower holds a memory for me. I carefully remove a few honeysuckle flowers and suck out the ambrosia. My tongue is alive with sweetness. A monarch butterfly alights on my arm. “I’m sorry if I’ve taken some of your food,” I say.
The butterfly dances around my head, then delicately sips from a flower and lands in the palm of my hand. I must be forgiven. “Butterfly, how do you fly so many miles without dying?”
My royal friend unfurls and curls its proboscis, like a woman fluttering her eyelashes, and says, “None of us could do it on our own. We stay together to uplift each other. Together we arrive at our destination, separate we would fail to reach the goal.”
“Thank you.” The butterfly joins its friends, while I continue walking between clumps of pale yellow primroses, breathing in deep the pungent aroma of grey-green mugwort leaves. A skinny brown rabbit with alert ears hops in front of me nibbling on parsley and sage. Her shiny brown eyes watch me as I say, “Rabbit, why do we suffer so much?” She comes close, her nose catching my tears as they fall and says, “I will show you.” She hops along the path slowly enough that I can follow her outside the privet hedge.
And then we are in a hot dry golden meadow where the lazuli buntings glean grain kernels and the crickets chirp and the violet-green swallows swoop down catching flies. There is a spinning wheel with a maiden singing, and this must be Ayesha in her youth, with a voluptuous figure, long red hair, clear grey eyes and a captivating smile. She appears not to notice me as she spins piles and piles of straw into gold. Understanding begins to dawn within me. She works harder and harder, until I see yards of a golden gossamer cloth emerging, sparkling with ethereal colors, finer than the morning mist. Ayesha stands, wrapping the cloth round and round her body, and she twirls and circles like a dervish, faster and faster until she dissolves into a column of golden light reaching to the sky and beyond. I still hear her sweet voice singing, “Shemaya, the light of the universe, shemaya,” and I feel the ecstasy of her smile in my heart.
Now I am ready to leave my sanctuary carrying the magical gifts of wisdom and beauty inside me. I feel renewed and, for now, at peace, knowing that next time I hold Ayesha’s hand I will imagine her clothed in gold, singing, twirling, smiling.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
A BEECH BRANCH
by Anne Kaier
The realtor caught me stealing a branch of our beech tree the day after the family house sold. In her camel coat, she came up the long driveway as I stood on tiptoe to cut about six feet covered with winter-tight buds. As I dragged the bough away, it made crow’s feet across the snow. “Just a little memento,” I told her, wrangling it with my small hands. She looked smug: “A lot of people do that, actually.” I didn’t want to feel like a lot of people. By taking that branch I was trying to preserve the physical memory of my childhood, the brush of soft beech leaves on my arms when I hid under the low boughs among the fire-flies.
“I’m gonna take it home to the city, prop it up against my piano.” I rolled down both windows in my black Ford Escort, and somehow got it in sideways, only scratching my plump arm twice.
The house, made of Pennsylvania field stone in the 1920’s, stood behind the tree. My brother and I grew up in that house. My charming father died in it. For 22 years after his death, my mother stayed there in her adopted home in the Philadelphia suburbs. She entertained her friends, whacked golf balls in the backyard, dragged the long hose out to water her flower border. She made no changes except to refurbish the living room with yellow damask curtains when she gave a party to commemorate 50 years of living there.
Meanwhile, my life went on in Center City, although as a single woman, I was under pressure to show up for Sunday night suppers. She’d cook steak and salad with a Scotch in her hand, moving quickly on muscular legs. Then she’d put two red rag placemats on the long dining room table. I could never convince her to eat in the kitchen when we were alone. One February night the year before she moved, I jerked Sheraton chairs up to the table and sat in the dark candlelight listening again to her tales of Indiana where she grew up in a Catholic family in the 1920’s. She told these tales practically every time I saw her.
“You know my father died when I was only six months old.” I scored the edges of the placemat with my nail. I had heard this story a thousand times.
“My mother was left. Think of it. A widow with no money. All she had was $250 in life insurance. What could that do?”
“Not much.”
“My mother was everything. The things she did for us. They made her a partner in that Ford car agency.”
“Yep. Right.”
“In high school, Betty O’Hara and I used to ditch the Catholic kids at the gym door; we were the only ones who ran with the Protestant kids, prominent families in town.”
I truly think she has hardwired those stories. I don’t think she has any idea that she’s told them again and again. She has no sense of her audience, only that she has one.
She held forth at that table on all ceremonial occasions. When she was about 80, she finally gave up her hold on Thanksgiving dinner and my brother and sister-in-law took it over. But from the time they were born, my brother’s children celebrated every Christmas in that house. On Easter afternoons, they hunted for eggs where we had hunted thirty years before them, scratching around the same sappy pine bark, poking through the same daffodils down by the creek.
Nothing ever changed. For 30 years, orange towels with green daisies, bought new in 1974, hung above a claw foot tub in an upstairs bath. My brother, a soft-spoken Philadelphia lawyer, loved seeing his children run up the back stairs to that bathroom, which had been his. He played with his sons in the basketball net that still hung above the garage doors. He first made love to his fiancée in the Victorian guest room bed. I, however, felt that the layers of lives lived there obscured my memories of my own childhood in the same place. So I waited, trusting that a flood of recollections would finally rush in on me when the long senility of the house in my mother’s last years there had passed.
It had happened before. My father died upstairs in the blue bedroom on May 31, 1981 after three years of increasing dementia. On that sunny afternoon, as I turned away from a face already stiffened by rigor mortis, I felt the breeze blow hawthorn scent through crinoline curtains. Downstairs, I swung around the back porch lamp post.
Suddenly I saw my father came smiling through the kitchen in his panama hat, settle my pudgy seven year old’s legs on his shoulders, and sweep me outside to steady me on a low branch of the apple tree, scratchy beneath my cowgirl outfit. Surely, I thought, when mother leaves the house, the same kind of thing will happen again.
When I’m not here all the time, visiting her alone in an in tractable present, when I don’t have to hear her tell the same tales about this house, it will open again in my imagination. My earliest memories will stream into my mind: the flick of her foot on the Singer sewing machine pedal when she made dresses for me, the sound of the ball in Dad’s mitt when he played ball with us on summer nights, the smell of dust in the attic. But first, she needs to leave and I need to close the door.
On our last Easter in the house, thirteen of us, including our cousins, sat down to roast lamb, asparagus, and strawberries in the dining room, lit by fragile April light. My mother, upright in her purple dress, presided over Waterford glasses full of Cotes du Rhone. Her new calico kitten, Coco, was allowed into the dining room for this occasion and sat in her lap. After the demitasse, Mom and most of the cousins went into the living room while I did the dishes, helped, erratically, by my blond nephew Tommy, just 18. “What are we gonna do next year, Annie? I mean, like, it’ll be weird not being here.” He picked up the kitten and rubbed her belly. I handed him a salad bowl, pushing up the sleeves of my flowing summer dress.
“I dunno. Your Dad’s place maybe. Maybe mine. Maybe we’ll just bag the whole thing and go to Grandmother’s club.”
“Yuck.”
“Yeah, I know. How ’bout you clear off the rest of the table?”
When the dining room chairs were back in place against the walls, the candles blown out, and the pink table cloth smoothed of wrinkles, I saw the birds on the Chinese wallpaper rustle in their greenery. Then I turned off the light.
On moving day in May 2004, I came to take Mom to her club for lunch while the movers loaded her things into the van. That night she’d sleep in her own bed in a nearby retirement village. The old rooms were empty or filled with boxes. I felt no regret, no wrench. I wanted to get her out of there, to the club where she could have a drink and not watch the home of 55 years die in front of her eyes. I wanted to get her established in the new place, where new wallpaper hung in the kitchen and a pot of geraniums sat on the small balcony. By mid-morning, she was ready to leave. She got into my car clutching a bouquet made up of every single rose that was blooming in her garden. “I might as well take my roses.”
After she had left 803 N. Pennstone Rd., my brother drove by fairly often. A sweet and sentimental man, he hates change and was sad to report that the new people had cut down several of the pine trees near the house. He saw bulldozers in the back yard.
My solo dinners with my mother continue. Now we eat at the little card table in her
apartment. She still tells the same stories about Indiana. She still tells the same stories about 803 N. Pennstone Rd.
“We moved there in 1948, the summer my daughter was three. Mother died that year. You don’t remember her.”
“I remember she brushed my hair in the old yellow bedroom.”
“Mr. Kaier,” her name for my father’s father, “died later. I was young. I had two babies and all those old people. My house comforted me.”
As she ages deeper into her 90s, she has become an unreliable narrator. I’m not sure what
I’m dealing with - a dementia or just a quirk in the brain that’s occasionally irrational, strange. It’s confusing. I feel like I’m beginning to lose her. One day I asked how things were going and she talked about not really liking the new place and how she misses her house. I felt like she was real again. When I left her in that fluorescent-lit hallway in her pale blue suit, I flashed on leaving her at the back door at Pennstone Rd. I also feel guilty about seeing this as the beginning of the end of her life and in some ways really expecting, even hoping, that she will fade away quickly.
Back in my city house, the beech branch scratched up the paint on the wall next to my piano. It leaned over the sheet music. I couldn’t turn the pages. Finally, I cut it up, pasted a few inches of the utmost tip into my scrapbook and threw the rest out. Perhaps those physical memories of my childhood that I so long for are buried deep in my body. But as long as my mother lives, my mind seems blind to them. I have only glimpses of the child who hid beneath the beech tree. I’ll have to wait.
The realtor caught me stealing a branch of our beech tree the day after the family house sold. In her camel coat, she came up the long driveway as I stood on tiptoe to cut about six feet covered with winter-tight buds. As I dragged the bough away, it made crow’s feet across the snow. “Just a little memento,” I told her, wrangling it with my small hands. She looked smug: “A lot of people do that, actually.” I didn’t want to feel like a lot of people. By taking that branch I was trying to preserve the physical memory of my childhood, the brush of soft beech leaves on my arms when I hid under the low boughs among the fire-flies.
“I’m gonna take it home to the city, prop it up against my piano.” I rolled down both windows in my black Ford Escort, and somehow got it in sideways, only scratching my plump arm twice.
The house, made of Pennsylvania field stone in the 1920’s, stood behind the tree. My brother and I grew up in that house. My charming father died in it. For 22 years after his death, my mother stayed there in her adopted home in the Philadelphia suburbs. She entertained her friends, whacked golf balls in the backyard, dragged the long hose out to water her flower border. She made no changes except to refurbish the living room with yellow damask curtains when she gave a party to commemorate 50 years of living there.
Meanwhile, my life went on in Center City, although as a single woman, I was under pressure to show up for Sunday night suppers. She’d cook steak and salad with a Scotch in her hand, moving quickly on muscular legs. Then she’d put two red rag placemats on the long dining room table. I could never convince her to eat in the kitchen when we were alone. One February night the year before she moved, I jerked Sheraton chairs up to the table and sat in the dark candlelight listening again to her tales of Indiana where she grew up in a Catholic family in the 1920’s. She told these tales practically every time I saw her.
“You know my father died when I was only six months old.” I scored the edges of the placemat with my nail. I had heard this story a thousand times.
“My mother was left. Think of it. A widow with no money. All she had was $250 in life insurance. What could that do?”
“Not much.”
“My mother was everything. The things she did for us. They made her a partner in that Ford car agency.”
“Yep. Right.”
“In high school, Betty O’Hara and I used to ditch the Catholic kids at the gym door; we were the only ones who ran with the Protestant kids, prominent families in town.”
I truly think she has hardwired those stories. I don’t think she has any idea that she’s told them again and again. She has no sense of her audience, only that she has one.
She held forth at that table on all ceremonial occasions. When she was about 80, she finally gave up her hold on Thanksgiving dinner and my brother and sister-in-law took it over. But from the time they were born, my brother’s children celebrated every Christmas in that house. On Easter afternoons, they hunted for eggs where we had hunted thirty years before them, scratching around the same sappy pine bark, poking through the same daffodils down by the creek.
Nothing ever changed. For 30 years, orange towels with green daisies, bought new in 1974, hung above a claw foot tub in an upstairs bath. My brother, a soft-spoken Philadelphia lawyer, loved seeing his children run up the back stairs to that bathroom, which had been his. He played with his sons in the basketball net that still hung above the garage doors. He first made love to his fiancée in the Victorian guest room bed. I, however, felt that the layers of lives lived there obscured my memories of my own childhood in the same place. So I waited, trusting that a flood of recollections would finally rush in on me when the long senility of the house in my mother’s last years there had passed.
It had happened before. My father died upstairs in the blue bedroom on May 31, 1981 after three years of increasing dementia. On that sunny afternoon, as I turned away from a face already stiffened by rigor mortis, I felt the breeze blow hawthorn scent through crinoline curtains. Downstairs, I swung around the back porch lamp post.
Suddenly I saw my father came smiling through the kitchen in his panama hat, settle my pudgy seven year old’s legs on his shoulders, and sweep me outside to steady me on a low branch of the apple tree, scratchy beneath my cowgirl outfit. Surely, I thought, when mother leaves the house, the same kind of thing will happen again.
When I’m not here all the time, visiting her alone in an in tractable present, when I don’t have to hear her tell the same tales about this house, it will open again in my imagination. My earliest memories will stream into my mind: the flick of her foot on the Singer sewing machine pedal when she made dresses for me, the sound of the ball in Dad’s mitt when he played ball with us on summer nights, the smell of dust in the attic. But first, she needs to leave and I need to close the door.
On our last Easter in the house, thirteen of us, including our cousins, sat down to roast lamb, asparagus, and strawberries in the dining room, lit by fragile April light. My mother, upright in her purple dress, presided over Waterford glasses full of Cotes du Rhone. Her new calico kitten, Coco, was allowed into the dining room for this occasion and sat in her lap. After the demitasse, Mom and most of the cousins went into the living room while I did the dishes, helped, erratically, by my blond nephew Tommy, just 18. “What are we gonna do next year, Annie? I mean, like, it’ll be weird not being here.” He picked up the kitten and rubbed her belly. I handed him a salad bowl, pushing up the sleeves of my flowing summer dress.
“I dunno. Your Dad’s place maybe. Maybe mine. Maybe we’ll just bag the whole thing and go to Grandmother’s club.”
“Yuck.”
“Yeah, I know. How ’bout you clear off the rest of the table?”
When the dining room chairs were back in place against the walls, the candles blown out, and the pink table cloth smoothed of wrinkles, I saw the birds on the Chinese wallpaper rustle in their greenery. Then I turned off the light.
On moving day in May 2004, I came to take Mom to her club for lunch while the movers loaded her things into the van. That night she’d sleep in her own bed in a nearby retirement village. The old rooms were empty or filled with boxes. I felt no regret, no wrench. I wanted to get her out of there, to the club where she could have a drink and not watch the home of 55 years die in front of her eyes. I wanted to get her established in the new place, where new wallpaper hung in the kitchen and a pot of geraniums sat on the small balcony. By mid-morning, she was ready to leave. She got into my car clutching a bouquet made up of every single rose that was blooming in her garden. “I might as well take my roses.”
After she had left 803 N. Pennstone Rd., my brother drove by fairly often. A sweet and sentimental man, he hates change and was sad to report that the new people had cut down several of the pine trees near the house. He saw bulldozers in the back yard.
My solo dinners with my mother continue. Now we eat at the little card table in her
apartment. She still tells the same stories about Indiana. She still tells the same stories about 803 N. Pennstone Rd.
“We moved there in 1948, the summer my daughter was three. Mother died that year. You don’t remember her.”
“I remember she brushed my hair in the old yellow bedroom.”
“Mr. Kaier,” her name for my father’s father, “died later. I was young. I had two babies and all those old people. My house comforted me.”
As she ages deeper into her 90s, she has become an unreliable narrator. I’m not sure what
I’m dealing with - a dementia or just a quirk in the brain that’s occasionally irrational, strange. It’s confusing. I feel like I’m beginning to lose her. One day I asked how things were going and she talked about not really liking the new place and how she misses her house. I felt like she was real again. When I left her in that fluorescent-lit hallway in her pale blue suit, I flashed on leaving her at the back door at Pennstone Rd. I also feel guilty about seeing this as the beginning of the end of her life and in some ways really expecting, even hoping, that she will fade away quickly.
Back in my city house, the beech branch scratched up the paint on the wall next to my piano. It leaned over the sheet music. I couldn’t turn the pages. Finally, I cut it up, pasted a few inches of the utmost tip into my scrapbook and threw the rest out. Perhaps those physical memories of my childhood that I so long for are buried deep in my body. But as long as my mother lives, my mind seems blind to them. I have only glimpses of the child who hid beneath the beech tree. I’ll have to wait.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Calling Home
by M. Ingrid Wiese
Is it possible, just slightly possible that I have achieved something worthy for a call home? I think for a moment about the last few calls home. There was the phone call from the mountains of the Former Soviet Republic of Georgia informing my parents that I had been evacuated due to a revolution and by the way, Dirk and I broke up. There was the call from a hospital bed in Bosnia to ask my father if he knew the Croatian word for Appendicitis. There was the call from a windowless office building in DC to tell my parents I had passed the Foreign Service Exam so please make yourselves available to any strangers asking questions for my security clearance. And there is now.
“Wait a second,” Moms voice is slow and drawn out. I look at my watch. It’s 9:30 in Washington DC, making it 6:30 PM in Washington State, and all together possible that my mother is already drunk.
“Let me get your father on the phone.” She says.
“Really Mom, It’s not that big of a deal. It's kinda supposed to be a secret. But okay, if you want to get Dad.”
She tries to cover the receiver with her hand, but I still hear her scream.
“Miiiicccchhhhaaaaeeellll.”
I hear a click and the bass hum of my Fathers monotone voice.
“This is your father.”
“Oh Michael, is that you?” She asks.
“Who else would it be Susie? We live alone. Did you think the neighbors would be picking up our phone?”
“It’s Maiken and she wants to tell us that she is moving to LA." She tells him.
“Mom, it’s not Maiken, it’s Ingrid. And I’m not moving to LA. Dad, it's not that big of a deal, I just wanted to tell you and Mom that I’ve been invited to LA for a casting call. One of these reality TV show things."
Dad speaks. “That’s nice. Why are you telling us this?”
“Oh Michael, She is going to be on MTV!”
“Well, not exactly Mom. Well, not yet. It’s just a casting call. I probably won’t get it, but I feel kinda special they invited me. It's exciting, don't you think?"
“I didn’t know you were an actress. I thought our other daughter was the actress in the family. Who is this again?” Dad doesn’t have Alzheimers. He and Mom are only in their late 50’s. This is the latest routine. The ‘I just can’t keep up, there are so many of you’ routine.
“Dad, I’m not an actress. It’s a reality TV show. Like 'The Bachelor'. It's all a secret, I don't really know the details yet, but I just am, myself and they record it, and-"
“Don’t tell them I’m a drunk.”
Silence.
Dad breaks it. “That all sounds very nice Jane."
“They are flying me to LA this weekend for a casting call. I just wanted someone to know. You know, in case I get sold into white slavery or something. I just wanted you guys to know.”
More silence.
“Well, sounds very exciting. Good luck. I’ll be sure to tell your mother in the morning.”
“Oh stop it Michael, I think you got me early enough that I’ll remember.”
Dad responds to his cue, “Is it before 8:00?”
She giggles.
“I just wanted you both to know.”
“Great, let us know how it goes.” And with that, Dad hangs up.
I can still hear Mother breathing into the receiver. I hear footsteps, and my Father taking the phone out of my Mother’s hand.
"C'mon Susie, let's go to bed."
I hear the click of Dad's shiny loafers crossing the kitchen floor.
I hear the click of the receiver, returning to its cradle.
Is it possible, just slightly possible that I have achieved something worthy for a call home? I think for a moment about the last few calls home. There was the phone call from the mountains of the Former Soviet Republic of Georgia informing my parents that I had been evacuated due to a revolution and by the way, Dirk and I broke up. There was the call from a hospital bed in Bosnia to ask my father if he knew the Croatian word for Appendicitis. There was the call from a windowless office building in DC to tell my parents I had passed the Foreign Service Exam so please make yourselves available to any strangers asking questions for my security clearance. And there is now.
“Wait a second,” Moms voice is slow and drawn out. I look at my watch. It’s 9:30 in Washington DC, making it 6:30 PM in Washington State, and all together possible that my mother is already drunk.
“Let me get your father on the phone.” She says.
“Really Mom, It’s not that big of a deal. It's kinda supposed to be a secret. But okay, if you want to get Dad.”
She tries to cover the receiver with her hand, but I still hear her scream.
“Miiiicccchhhhaaaaeeellll.”
I hear a click and the bass hum of my Fathers monotone voice.
“This is your father.”
“Oh Michael, is that you?” She asks.
“Who else would it be Susie? We live alone. Did you think the neighbors would be picking up our phone?”
“It’s Maiken and she wants to tell us that she is moving to LA." She tells him.
“Mom, it’s not Maiken, it’s Ingrid. And I’m not moving to LA. Dad, it's not that big of a deal, I just wanted to tell you and Mom that I’ve been invited to LA for a casting call. One of these reality TV show things."
Dad speaks. “That’s nice. Why are you telling us this?”
“Oh Michael, She is going to be on MTV!”
“Well, not exactly Mom. Well, not yet. It’s just a casting call. I probably won’t get it, but I feel kinda special they invited me. It's exciting, don't you think?"
“I didn’t know you were an actress. I thought our other daughter was the actress in the family. Who is this again?” Dad doesn’t have Alzheimers. He and Mom are only in their late 50’s. This is the latest routine. The ‘I just can’t keep up, there are so many of you’ routine.
“Dad, I’m not an actress. It’s a reality TV show. Like 'The Bachelor'. It's all a secret, I don't really know the details yet, but I just am, myself and they record it, and-"
“Don’t tell them I’m a drunk.”
Silence.
Dad breaks it. “That all sounds very nice Jane."
“They are flying me to LA this weekend for a casting call. I just wanted someone to know. You know, in case I get sold into white slavery or something. I just wanted you guys to know.”
More silence.
“Well, sounds very exciting. Good luck. I’ll be sure to tell your mother in the morning.”
“Oh stop it Michael, I think you got me early enough that I’ll remember.”
Dad responds to his cue, “Is it before 8:00?”
She giggles.
“I just wanted you both to know.”
“Great, let us know how it goes.” And with that, Dad hangs up.
I can still hear Mother breathing into the receiver. I hear footsteps, and my Father taking the phone out of my Mother’s hand.
"C'mon Susie, let's go to bed."
I hear the click of Dad's shiny loafers crossing the kitchen floor.
I hear the click of the receiver, returning to its cradle.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
AFTER ZION
by Elliot Ratzman
Fall, 1997, Jerusalem.
Enter Mikael Mikaelsvili, taking up the center space in his—now our—bedroom. Bulky, swarthy, Army green too tight, curious coins for eyes, lips ready to comment, throws his duffle bag on his bed, yelps at me in Hebrew, coins turn to slits, shakes his head at my clueless response, can’t believe how bad my Hebrew is, typical of Americans which I seem to be, resolves and then declares that he’s going to teach me himself. Somebody nicknames him ‘Moose’ by the end of the year and it sticks.
“Vat’s vith all tese bvooks?”
“My library…” it would take up five shelves by the end of the year.
“No bvooks in Hebrew? Tell me, Ellioot, vhen are you going to learn Hebrew?”
“I’m in rama aleph [level one], so slowly…”
“Look, Ellioot, when I eh, moved from Georgia, I vas on Kibbutz, you know vat that ees? Goot. Ok, so, all the oder eemigrants, these azzholes from Vussia… no, no, I am from Georgia, Gruzia, eez different… anyway, so do you like Led Zepplin?
The ‘masters of the “white blues”’ he declared matter-of-factly as if noting the capital city of Belgium “so, tese azzholes eemigrants, they don’t want to learn Hebrew, no, they stay up all night and dreenk, and faak and speak Vussian to themselves, and I do noot speak Vussian or Georgian for a few months, just Hebrew.
"That’s vhy I’m so good and dees other azzholes vant to go back,” in a whiny voice, “‘oh, eez too divicult en Israel!’ Look, ok, so eef you work hard enough you too can have Hebrew like me. My English es good, no?”
The next year Mikael was a night concierge at the Hyatt across the street from our dorm. Coming home laughing one night, he tells us this story: “So, tees Haredi [ultra-orthodox Jew] comes in” he mimes with his hand ‘beard’ ‘earlocks’ ‘hat’ ‘jacket’ “comes up to us, ‘Velcome to Hyatt, how can I elp you?’ Nothing. So, no Hebrew. No Vussian. No English – Ellioot, how can someone leeve in a country vith no language? only Yiddish! So, none of us speak Yiddish, but ve vigure out vat is vat. So, he goes to his room. A few minutes later, he phones down to us ‘Need. Girl. for. Love.’ and we are like ‘ohhh, faaking orthodox!’ so ve call the, eh, how do you say it, ‘escort service’ and this gorgeous bloonde Vussian peach, comes, goes to his room. Three hours later, she comes down. A few minutes later, he comes down. Ellioot he must have given a thousand dollars, all in cash… and leaves! Faaking orthodox!”
Mendel, Crazy Tony and I, incredulous, are all rolling on the floor. Mikael rolls with us with his jolly high-pitched laugh. Then his face goes serious, lips slightly hanging, menacing, “Mendel vants to get the number of dees ‘escort service’ I think!” Another round of laughter. “But dey Vussian weemen, tey are all postitudes—coming here from Vussia, go to school, and ten on to the West Europe, America. They eat ov the country.”
Mikael had a girlfriend named Andi, from Hungary. She was fair-skinned, and relative to most girls in the area, blonde–one can be a light brown in Israel and be blonde. Mikael called her Andika, ‘my Andi’ in Hungarian. We all called her Andika after awhile. She was quiet, and passive, and deferred to Mikael’s presence and authority. Andi had a friend named Ginga who Mikael hated. She was on her way to our apartment where I was going to look over her graduate school application. “She is stooped,” he’d say. “Another postitude here to study in Israel.” But he kept his opinions to himself, and later that year he helped her move apartments.
Fall, 1997, Jerusalem.
Enter Mikael Mikaelsvili, taking up the center space in his—now our—bedroom. Bulky, swarthy, Army green too tight, curious coins for eyes, lips ready to comment, throws his duffle bag on his bed, yelps at me in Hebrew, coins turn to slits, shakes his head at my clueless response, can’t believe how bad my Hebrew is, typical of Americans which I seem to be, resolves and then declares that he’s going to teach me himself. Somebody nicknames him ‘Moose’ by the end of the year and it sticks.
“Vat’s vith all tese bvooks?”
“My library…” it would take up five shelves by the end of the year.
“No bvooks in Hebrew? Tell me, Ellioot, vhen are you going to learn Hebrew?”
“I’m in rama aleph [level one], so slowly…”
“Look, Ellioot, when I eh, moved from Georgia, I vas on Kibbutz, you know vat that ees? Goot. Ok, so, all the oder eemigrants, these azzholes from Vussia… no, no, I am from Georgia, Gruzia, eez different… anyway, so do you like Led Zepplin?
The ‘masters of the “white blues”’ he declared matter-of-factly as if noting the capital city of Belgium “so, tese azzholes eemigrants, they don’t want to learn Hebrew, no, they stay up all night and dreenk, and faak and speak Vussian to themselves, and I do noot speak Vussian or Georgian for a few months, just Hebrew.
"That’s vhy I’m so good and dees other azzholes vant to go back,” in a whiny voice, “‘oh, eez too divicult en Israel!’ Look, ok, so eef you work hard enough you too can have Hebrew like me. My English es good, no?”
The next year Mikael was a night concierge at the Hyatt across the street from our dorm. Coming home laughing one night, he tells us this story: “So, tees Haredi [ultra-orthodox Jew] comes in” he mimes with his hand ‘beard’ ‘earlocks’ ‘hat’ ‘jacket’ “comes up to us, ‘Velcome to Hyatt, how can I elp you?’ Nothing. So, no Hebrew. No Vussian. No English – Ellioot, how can someone leeve in a country vith no language? only Yiddish! So, none of us speak Yiddish, but ve vigure out vat is vat. So, he goes to his room. A few minutes later, he phones down to us ‘Need. Girl. for. Love.’ and we are like ‘ohhh, faaking orthodox!’ so ve call the, eh, how do you say it, ‘escort service’ and this gorgeous bloonde Vussian peach, comes, goes to his room. Three hours later, she comes down. A few minutes later, he comes down. Ellioot he must have given a thousand dollars, all in cash… and leaves! Faaking orthodox!”
Mendel, Crazy Tony and I, incredulous, are all rolling on the floor. Mikael rolls with us with his jolly high-pitched laugh. Then his face goes serious, lips slightly hanging, menacing, “Mendel vants to get the number of dees ‘escort service’ I think!” Another round of laughter. “But dey Vussian weemen, tey are all postitudes—coming here from Vussia, go to school, and ten on to the West Europe, America. They eat ov the country.”
Mikael had a girlfriend named Andi, from Hungary. She was fair-skinned, and relative to most girls in the area, blonde–one can be a light brown in Israel and be blonde. Mikael called her Andika, ‘my Andi’ in Hungarian. We all called her Andika after awhile. She was quiet, and passive, and deferred to Mikael’s presence and authority. Andi had a friend named Ginga who Mikael hated. She was on her way to our apartment where I was going to look over her graduate school application. “She is stooped,” he’d say. “Another postitude here to study in Israel.” But he kept his opinions to himself, and later that year he helped her move apartments.
FORGIVENESS
by Alison Hammer Winans
“Alison, come and eat your breakfast now. And don’t bring your book with you,” called my mother in her whiny voice. She always sounded like she’d been crying even when she hadn’t.
I buttoned my green cardigan so that the embroidered collar of my white blouse showed, put down What Katy Did, and came reluctantly to the table. Oh no it’s boiled egg again. Ever since starting at the new school I felt sick every morning. I hated always being different from other children. My parents, sister and I had recently come back from Japan to England for a year’s furlough in Cambridge, where we lived in a third floor furnished flat above our landlord and another family.
“Where’s Daddy gone?” I asked, sliding onto the wooden dining chair.
“He’s in Oxford for a two-day conference. I’ll be taking you to school until he comes back.” She was wearing a beige cardigan she knitted herself and a brown tweedy skirt. She frowned as she took the knife and sliced the top off my egg. I scrunched up my face trying to pull my eyebrows together, wondering how she made such deep furrows and what it felt like to frown all the time. Besides that and her bulbous nose, she was quite pretty with her dark brown curly hair and motherly figure.
“Don’t make such a face. I did my best to cook it how you like it, with a soft yolk and firm white.”
“I wasn’t making a face at the egg.” It’s useless trying to explain. I nibbled at my wholemeal toast and picked up my small egg spoon, sprinkling salt and then scooping a mouthful of yolk and white together. My mouth was dry, and the food went down into my stomach like an animal swallowed whole traveling through a boa constrictor.
“My tummy’s all squiggley, like tadpoles swimming around.”
“Alison, you’re six, you’re a big girl. Can’t you eat without making a fuss, like Liz?” Liz opened her mouth displaying her half-chewed food, trying to make me feel even worse.
My mother continued, “Now, don’t you start. Keep your mouth closed when you’re eating.” I glared at my younger sister, looking so innocent with her wide green eyes and halo of light brown curls, and tried to kick her under the table. Unfortunately, my parents knew better than to seat us within reach of each other.
“I don’t like going to school.” She’s not even interested in finding out why. Sighing, I decided to explore my egg further, taking a rich, orange-yellow mouthful. Then I dug my spoon deeper, knowing that runny white was often hiding down below the yolk.
Liz said, “When a chicken lays an egg, does it come out the same place as the pooh?"
“You beast, you’re only saying that to make me feel sick.”
“Girls, just stop bickering and eat. We have to leave soon.” I scraped out some of the white from the bottom of the egg and left it on the side of my plate, hiding it under some pieces of brown eggshell. Runny white reminded me of the strings of snot that end up on your hand after an especially strong sneeze. I took another mouthful, forcing myself to swallow the rapidly cooling egg and chased it down with some toast.
“Alison, your teacher told me you’re still not talking. And you don’t do as you’re told.”
“I do all my work. I just don’t know what to say.” Doesn’t she know I’m scared?
“Daddy and I decided to tell Granny not to make you any dresses for next summer, unless you start talking at school. Now, hurry up with that egg.”
When I heard that, my stomach moved like a nest of worms writhing. My breakfast was cold, and just thinking about boiled egg made me gag. “I can’t eat any more. I’m not going to.”
She came and hovered over me saying, “Liz, clean your teeth and put your shoes on.” Liz quickly got out of the way. Picking up the spoon, my mother scraped the inside of the eggshell, bringing the mountainous pile of congealed egg towards me.
“Open your mouth.”
Clenching my lips together and trapped in my seat, I dodged, pushing away her hand holding the spoon, the hand I usually admired with soft, smooth skin and perfectly oval fingernails. Then she pounced. Her other hand held my nostrils closed tight and as I opened my mouth, she filled it with the detested food. Somehow I made the muscles of my throat choke it down. I didn’t dare say anything else. Holding back tears, I ran to the bathroom, eager for once to clean my teeth.
As we hurried to the bus stop, rode the bus for a mile or so and then walked down a tree-lined street to the school, Liz chattered while I was quiet. I wasn’t going to talk to my mean mother. Besides I had to think about what to say to the other children at school. Shall I just start by saying hello? What would I say next? But even my worries did not stop me from crunching and swishing through piles of autumn leaves and searching for conkers fallen from horse chestnut trees. Somehow nature clothed me in courage, and when my mother dropped me off, I was ready to face the classroom.
When she came to pick me up at the end of the day, a crowd of excited children ran up to her saying, “Alison can talk. She spoke to us today.” After so many weeks they must have thought I was mute. I said proudly, “Now I can have my dresses, can’t I? Can they all be pink?”
Decades later my mother and I had a phone conversation. “I was always bothered that you bribed me to start talking instead of finding out why school was so difficult for me.”
“When you went to the Japanese kindergarten, you didn’t say anything until you learned some Japanese. In Cambridge, we thought you were doing something similar. I always knew you could fit in, and felt that all you needed was a bit of a push. On your first day, I wanted to tell the teacher that it was all new to you, that you were accustomed to a Japanese kindergarten. But the teacher looked like she was going to cry, so I didn’t want to bother her. But I wish I had.” She sounded so sincere that I had to believe her motivation was kind and caring.
As for the egg, “You know back then I didn’t like boiled eggs. Do you recall the time you held my nose to make me eat it?”
“I remember making you eat your scrambled egg when you came home, if you didn’t finish it at breakfast. But I don’t remember holding your nose. Oh dear, I’m sorry about that.”
“You are forgiven.” I felt peace like a clear light filling my chest, as I said these words. I realized that I also forgave myself for the time when, as a teenage nanny for a six-year-old girl, I replayed that horrible scene. And for all the times when I ate more than my stomach wanted.
“Alison, come and eat your breakfast now. And don’t bring your book with you,” called my mother in her whiny voice. She always sounded like she’d been crying even when she hadn’t.
I buttoned my green cardigan so that the embroidered collar of my white blouse showed, put down What Katy Did, and came reluctantly to the table. Oh no it’s boiled egg again. Ever since starting at the new school I felt sick every morning. I hated always being different from other children. My parents, sister and I had recently come back from Japan to England for a year’s furlough in Cambridge, where we lived in a third floor furnished flat above our landlord and another family.
“Where’s Daddy gone?” I asked, sliding onto the wooden dining chair.
“He’s in Oxford for a two-day conference. I’ll be taking you to school until he comes back.” She was wearing a beige cardigan she knitted herself and a brown tweedy skirt. She frowned as she took the knife and sliced the top off my egg. I scrunched up my face trying to pull my eyebrows together, wondering how she made such deep furrows and what it felt like to frown all the time. Besides that and her bulbous nose, she was quite pretty with her dark brown curly hair and motherly figure.
“Don’t make such a face. I did my best to cook it how you like it, with a soft yolk and firm white.”
“I wasn’t making a face at the egg.” It’s useless trying to explain. I nibbled at my wholemeal toast and picked up my small egg spoon, sprinkling salt and then scooping a mouthful of yolk and white together. My mouth was dry, and the food went down into my stomach like an animal swallowed whole traveling through a boa constrictor.
“My tummy’s all squiggley, like tadpoles swimming around.”
“Alison, you’re six, you’re a big girl. Can’t you eat without making a fuss, like Liz?” Liz opened her mouth displaying her half-chewed food, trying to make me feel even worse.
My mother continued, “Now, don’t you start. Keep your mouth closed when you’re eating.” I glared at my younger sister, looking so innocent with her wide green eyes and halo of light brown curls, and tried to kick her under the table. Unfortunately, my parents knew better than to seat us within reach of each other.
“I don’t like going to school.” She’s not even interested in finding out why. Sighing, I decided to explore my egg further, taking a rich, orange-yellow mouthful. Then I dug my spoon deeper, knowing that runny white was often hiding down below the yolk.
Liz said, “When a chicken lays an egg, does it come out the same place as the pooh?"
“You beast, you’re only saying that to make me feel sick.”
“Girls, just stop bickering and eat. We have to leave soon.” I scraped out some of the white from the bottom of the egg and left it on the side of my plate, hiding it under some pieces of brown eggshell. Runny white reminded me of the strings of snot that end up on your hand after an especially strong sneeze. I took another mouthful, forcing myself to swallow the rapidly cooling egg and chased it down with some toast.
“Alison, your teacher told me you’re still not talking. And you don’t do as you’re told.”
“I do all my work. I just don’t know what to say.” Doesn’t she know I’m scared?
“Daddy and I decided to tell Granny not to make you any dresses for next summer, unless you start talking at school. Now, hurry up with that egg.”
When I heard that, my stomach moved like a nest of worms writhing. My breakfast was cold, and just thinking about boiled egg made me gag. “I can’t eat any more. I’m not going to.”
She came and hovered over me saying, “Liz, clean your teeth and put your shoes on.” Liz quickly got out of the way. Picking up the spoon, my mother scraped the inside of the eggshell, bringing the mountainous pile of congealed egg towards me.
“Open your mouth.”
Clenching my lips together and trapped in my seat, I dodged, pushing away her hand holding the spoon, the hand I usually admired with soft, smooth skin and perfectly oval fingernails. Then she pounced. Her other hand held my nostrils closed tight and as I opened my mouth, she filled it with the detested food. Somehow I made the muscles of my throat choke it down. I didn’t dare say anything else. Holding back tears, I ran to the bathroom, eager for once to clean my teeth.
As we hurried to the bus stop, rode the bus for a mile or so and then walked down a tree-lined street to the school, Liz chattered while I was quiet. I wasn’t going to talk to my mean mother. Besides I had to think about what to say to the other children at school. Shall I just start by saying hello? What would I say next? But even my worries did not stop me from crunching and swishing through piles of autumn leaves and searching for conkers fallen from horse chestnut trees. Somehow nature clothed me in courage, and when my mother dropped me off, I was ready to face the classroom.
When she came to pick me up at the end of the day, a crowd of excited children ran up to her saying, “Alison can talk. She spoke to us today.” After so many weeks they must have thought I was mute. I said proudly, “Now I can have my dresses, can’t I? Can they all be pink?”
Decades later my mother and I had a phone conversation. “I was always bothered that you bribed me to start talking instead of finding out why school was so difficult for me.”
“When you went to the Japanese kindergarten, you didn’t say anything until you learned some Japanese. In Cambridge, we thought you were doing something similar. I always knew you could fit in, and felt that all you needed was a bit of a push. On your first day, I wanted to tell the teacher that it was all new to you, that you were accustomed to a Japanese kindergarten. But the teacher looked like she was going to cry, so I didn’t want to bother her. But I wish I had.” She sounded so sincere that I had to believe her motivation was kind and caring.
As for the egg, “You know back then I didn’t like boiled eggs. Do you recall the time you held my nose to make me eat it?”
“I remember making you eat your scrambled egg when you came home, if you didn’t finish it at breakfast. But I don’t remember holding your nose. Oh dear, I’m sorry about that.”
“You are forgiven.” I felt peace like a clear light filling my chest, as I said these words. I realized that I also forgave myself for the time when, as a teenage nanny for a six-year-old girl, I replayed that horrible scene. And for all the times when I ate more than my stomach wanted.
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