One Secret Thing (6 page)

I believe

in the creation of

the criminal,

the evil people,

my mother says on her eighty-third birthday,

everyone born is a miracle.

How did I know I would have YOU,
she

cries out. “I don’t know what I would have done

without you, Mom,” I say, “I’d still

be out there, calling MA-ma, MA-ma!”

She laughs with delight. But she’s worried about cloning—

“When they clone
you,
Mom,” I tell her,

“I want one.”
I’ll put you on the list,
she says.

“I want the little kind, that I can

put in a high chair and feed Cream of Wheat to,”

I add, and she says,
I’ll move your name

up high on the list.
Over and over,

these days, she tells me they never will be able

to assemble real flesh, in a dish, not flesh

with spirit—the men cannot make happen

what happened in her body. When she dies, she wants to see

her father again, and put her arms

around her second husband.
Not a living

cell with a soul. Oh—but Science,

she sighs,
you know
—20,000

Leagues Under the Sea
!
“Let’s come back

and check on them,” I propose. “On your birthday,

in the year 3000, I’ll pick you up,

and we’ll visit this planet.”
What will you be driving?

she asks. “A goose,” I tell my mother.

“I’ll honk.”
Shave and a haircut,
she says.

They will never make flesh.

Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale’s bulk …

it seems mine,

Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and

sluggish, my tap is death.

—“The Sleepers,” Walt Whitman

When she talks about caring for her beloved husband

after his stroke, I hold the phone

in the crook of my shoulder, where the heads of sleeping

infants have rested. She goes over the heartaches

again, the setbacks, the bad nurse—

the one who was not professional,

who did not understand he was not

responsible for the things he said about her

race and about her neighborhood.

Suddenly, my mother bursts out,

And my therapist says it COULDN’T have been my

kicking him, the night before,

that caused the stroke.
“Of course not,”

I say, “of course not. You, uh,

kicked him?”
He was sitting on the couch,

we were fighting about which cruise to take next, I could

TELL how small the staterooms were

by the plan of the windows, but HE wanted to go

to RUSSIA, I kicked him in the shin with my soft

sneaker. And my doctor says that it had NOTHING

to do with the stroke or the cancer.
I agree,

but a week later I stop short

on the street: my mother is still hitting and kicking people?

I know that soft sneaker. But when

she married again, I thought she’d stop hitting.

Or do people hit and kick each other

a lot, does everyone do it? Does each

family have its lineage

of pugilists? No one hit her back

until today—by-blow of this page,

coldcock to her little forehead.

When I told my mother the joke—the new kid

at college who asked where the library’s at,

and the sophomore who said, “At Yale, we do not

end our sentences with prep-

ositions,” whereupon the frosh said, “Oh,

I beg your pardon, where’s the library

at, asshole”—she shrieked with delight.

Asshole,
she murmured fondly. She’s become

so fresh, rinsed with sweetness, as if she is

music, the strings especially high and bright.

She says it and sighs with contentment, as if she has

finally talked back to her own mother.

Or maybe it is the closest she has come,

for a while, to the rich, animal life

she lived with her second husband—now

I can see that of course she touched him everywhere,

as lovers do. She touched me there,

you know, courteously, with oil

like myrrh; soon after she had given me life

she gave me pleasure, which gave her pleasure,

maybe it felt to her fingertip like the

complex, clean knot of her Fire Girls

tie-clasp. She seems, these days, like a very

human goddess. I do not want her

to die. This feels like a new not-want,

a shalt-not-want not-want. As soon as I

dared, around fifty, I called her, to myself,

the A-word. And yet, now, if she goes,

when she goes, to me it is like the departure of a

whole small species of singing bird from the earth.

When it approaches, no one knows what it is—it is her

brain tumor, flaring up again.

My mother explains it to me—
Something

is happening, and it is physical,

and medical, and emotional,

and spiritual.
She’s so sheerly lonely

she is like the one member of a tribe.

When she hears the doorbell—when it has not rung—

and she runs to it, she is like an explorer

of unseen deserts, unscanned rivers of

asteroids. Her naked body is almost

pretty, with its thousand puckers, maybe there’s a

planet somewhere which holds this beaten-to-

soft-peaks egg-white stomach the most

desirable. It was painful to know her,

such a feral one, untrained, unmothered,

but now she is playing at the edge of some field,

absorbed. There is something big coming,

bigger than love, bigger than aloneness.

She’s staying up all night for it.

Something not an angel, not male or female,

is leaning on her brain. Up from within

the crease of the tumor, like the first appearance

of matter, something is arriving—not

her father, and not just death, but the truth,

her self, soon to be completed.

Just before dawn, the fixed stars

stand over my mother’s house,

and the queen’s throne seems to set

as the earth turns away from it.

But my mother is at her zenith—every

hour or so, these days, she stops talking,

and lets me have a turn, she squinches her

face like a child concentrating, she

knows this custom is important. Then

she is off again, on her long carouse

across the sky. There are two new

people who worship her. Well I worship you

myself, I say, for your good work

with the young musicians, and she says in her new

voice, Well I worship you right back.

Then she tells me the tumor may be growing again,

she has me finger the side of her radiant

visionary childhood face, to feel,

in the dent of her temple, the earth rising,

coming for her. She tells me her dream in which her

late husband, pissing in the goldfish

pool, turns toward her, laughing. She laughs,

her head thrown back, her hard palate

an arc, her curls gleaming like the moonlit

lake bush of an ancient Venus.

She was not meant to be a mother,

she never got to be a child until now—

I feel I am back in an early time,

when people were being tried out, combinations

of flowers, and animals, and hinges of iron,

and wheeling desire, and longing. I feel

like an old shepherd on a hill. My lamb,

who sickened so long, my first lamb, is gamboling.

At moments almost thinking of her, I was

moving through the still life museum when my mother had her

stroke. I was with the furled leeks, I was

in the domain of the damp which lines

the chestnut hide, of dew on snails,

of the sweated egg, and the newts quick

and the newts gone over on their backs, and the withered

books—she was teaching someone, three

time zones away, to peel and slice

a banana, in the one correct way,

and I was wandering ruins of breakfasts,

broken crusts of a blackberry pie,

the leg of the paper wasp on it done

with a one-thread brush, in oil which had

ground gold in it. She had alerted me,

from the start, to objects, she had cried out

in pain, from their beauty, the way a thing

stood for the value of a spirit, an orange

trailing from its shoulders the stole of its rind,

the further from the tree, the more thinged and dried—

my mother was a place, a crossroads, she held the

banana and lectured like a child professor on its

longitudes and divisible threes,

she raised her hands to her temples, and held them,

and screamed, and fell to her bedroom floor, and I

wandered, calm, among oysters, and walnuts,

mice, apricots, coins, a golden

smiling skull, even a wild flayed

hare strung up by one foot like a dancer

leaping. There are things I will never know

about love. I strolled, ignorant

of my mother, among the tulips, beetle in its

holy stripes, she lay there and I walked

blind through music.

One secret thing happened

at the end of my mother’s life, when I was

alone with her. I knew it should happen—

I knew someone was there, in there,

something less unlike my mother than

anything else on earth. And the jar

was there on the table, the space around it

pulled back from it, like the awestruck handmade

air around the crèche, and her open

mouth was parched. It was late. The lid

eased off. I watched my finger draw through

the jelly, its egg-sex essence, the four

corners of the room were not creatures, were not

the four winds of the earth, if I did not

do this, what was I—I rubbed the cowlick of

petrolatum on the skin around where the

final measures of what was almost not

breath swayed, and her throat made a guttural

creek bed sound, like pebbly relief. But each

lip was stuck by chap to its row

of teeth, stuck fast. And then I worked

for my motherhood, my humanhood, I

slid my forefinger slowly back and

forth, along the scab-line and underlying

canines and incisors, upper lip and then

lower lip, until, like a basted

seam, softly ripped, what had been

joined was asunder, I ran the salve in-

side the folds, along the gums,

common mercy. The secret was

how deeply I did not want to touch

inside her, and how much the act

was an act of escape, my last chance

to free myself.

Then we raised the top portion of the bed,

and her head was like a trillium, growing

up, out of the ground, in the woods,

eyes closed, mouth open,

and we put the Battle arias on, and when I

heard the first note, that was it, for me,

I excused myself from the death-room guests,

and went to my mother, and cleared a place

on the mattress, beside her arm, lifting

the tubes, oxygen, dextrose, morphine,

dipping in under them, and letting them

rest on my hair, as if burying myself

under a topsoil of roots, I pulled

the sheet up, over my head,

and touched my forehead and nose and mouth

to her arm, and then, against the warm

solace of her skin, I sobbed full out,

unguarded, as I have not done near her;

and I could feel some barrier between us dissolving,

I could feel myself dissolving it,

moving ever-closer to her through it, till I was

all there. And in her coma nothing

drew her away from giving me the basal

kindness of her presence. When the doctor came in,

he looked at her and said, “I’d say

hours, not days.” When he left, I ate

a pear with her, talking us through it,

and walnuts—and a crow, a whole bouquet

of crows came apart, outside the window.

I looked for the moon and said, I’ll be right

back, and ran down the hospital hall,

and there, outside the eastern window,

was the waxing gibbous, like a swimmer’s head

turned to the side half out of the water, mouth

pulled to the side and back, to take breath,

I could see my young mother, slim

and strong in her navy one-piece, and see,

in memory’s dark-blue corridor,

the beauty of her crawl, the hard, graceful

overhand motion, as someone who says,

This way, to the others behind. And I went back,

and sat with her, alone, an hour,

in the quiet, and I felt, almost, not

afraid of losing her, I was so

content to have her beside me, unspeaking,

unseeing, alive.

In the middle of the night, I made myself a bed

on the floor, aligning it true to my mother,

head to the hills, foot to the Bay where the

wading birds forage for mollusks—I lay

down, and the first death-rattle sounded

its desert authority She had her

look of a choirboy in a high wind,

but her face had become matteryer,

as if her tissues, stored with her life,

were being replaced from some general supply

of gels and rosins. Her body would breathe her,

crackle and hearth-snap of mucus, and then

she would not breathe. Sometimes it seemed

it was not my mother, as if she’d been changelinged

with a being more suited to the labor than she,

a creature plainer and calmer, and yet

saturated with the yearning of my mother.

Palm around the infant crown of her

scalp where her heart fierce beat, palm to her

tiny shoulder, I held even with her,

and then she began to go more quickly,

to draw ahead, then she was still and her

tongue, spotted with manna spots,

lifted, and a gasp was made in her mouth,

as if forced in, then quiet. Then another

sigh, as if of relief, and then

peace. This went on for a while, as if she were

having out, in no hurry,

her feelings about this place, her tender

sorrowing completion, and then, against my

palm to her head, the resolving gift of no

suffering, no heartbeat;

for moments, her lips seemed to curve up—

and then I felt she was not there,

I felt as if she had always wanted

to escape and now she had escaped. Then she turned,

slowly, to a thing of bone,

marking where she had been.