Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (42 page)

The day to day of my life was not unpleasant. Jean and I had become so close, so candid with one another, and so much like genuine girlfriends that the twelve-year age difference separating us seemed almost to have vanished. She, my father, and I had finally reached a kind of peace, living together in the house that had belonged to my mother more than anyone else. When Dad was there with us and not at his girlfriend’s, the three of us ate meals together on the dishes that were my mother’s, set the table with linens that were hers, and moved in and out of rooms where objects that had been more hers than ours leaned out from every crevice. We were happy. As happy as we could or ought to have been, anyway, eating our meals, drinking our wine, and watching our movies together, or else going out, each alone, into his or her own private version of the night. Sometimes, Jean and I spent evenings with our father and his girlfriend, evenings where the four of us were content, laughing at the stories that emerged from the new life our father was living. Together we accepted the terrible, immovable fact that our mother would not, could not ever, come back. It wasn’t a grim peace. It was simply our lives picking up
again after the standstill of shock. The way a train that has sat stalled on the tracks, its lights dimmed and its engine dawdling and a restless impatience or an angry helplessness gripping the passengers waiting in their seats, suddenly lights up and moves forward again toward its destination.

One afternoon, Pastor Gainey came by to check on us and found me home alone reading a Jane Austen novel. I had baked a lemon-cornmeal cake, and the kitchen sent that smell all through the house. It was long enough after the funeral that we both felt free to be smiling and cheerful. I had just taken a job as a substitute teacher, and the fact of having someplace to be most days gave me confidence. Though the visit didn’t warrant such a show of formality, I set out my mother’s silver coffee service.

“Someone’s going to snap you up one of these days and marry you,” Pastor Gainey said, chuckling.

I could tell he meant it as a kindness. It made me feel all of the sudden like one of Austen’s heroines, like I might be inching my way toward my own plotline, and I felt a shiver of anticipation. I still didn’t have any clear plans. I hadn’t felt capable, in my final months at college, of making any. While my classmates had been applying to graduate schools and internships or setting up jobs in journalism or finance, all I’d been able to do was tell myself I was going home to be with my mother. It was a decision no one had asked me to make; it had made itself. I was going home to my mother. I was going home. That was as much of the future as I could bear to see. But that was already months ago. Now, my mother was gone and I was still at home, still uncertain whether I had the wherewithal to pick up and move forward. In that state of mind, Pastor Gainey’s comment teased me into imagining, for just a split instant, that the vague, faceless force of the future might
all along have held something in store for me. Yet as the thought spooled forward, I started to feel afraid of what it would mean to stay there in my hometown for too long and to get snapped up and married just the way that I was: dreaming of doing things (of writing books, to be specific) but having done (and written) next to nothing. It also made me mindful that living in my childhood home was saddling me to the different selves I’d been in that house through the years: the obedient schoolgirl, the surly adolescent, the adult in whom something critical had been stamped out by grief. The longer I thought on it, the more Pastor Gainey’s remark struck me as a warning.

In the weeks just before Mom had died, I’d sent off a slapdash application to the creative writing program at Brown. It was the only writing program I was even remotely familiar with, from my visits to Providence before my boyfriend and I had broken up. I’d done a hasty job, as if sending the thing off quickly might diminish the guilt that had come from plotting out my own future in the midst of such an all-consuming present, a present during which nothing but my mother’s dwindling life should have mattered. How odd that fewer than three months sat between where I had just been and where I now found myself. It was January. A new year. There was still time to do things properly, to choose another program and put together a solid application that might serve as the bridge to carry me forward and away.

One of the last bits of advice my mother had offered me was to go to grad school. “Further your education. Nobody can ever take that away from you.” She said it one afternoon while we sat together on her bed, though we seldom spoke, in those days, about what I should do with my life. For my part, I was afraid to make reference to the time when she would be gone. It was too painful
a reality to try to peer into, let alone speak of. But she was being practical. She wanted me to understand that I’d have to look after myself at some point, to climb back onto the day-to-day world I’d been yanked from by her illness.

“Mom wants you to think about applying to law school,” Conrad mentioned, a day or two later, when he and I were alone. The prospect of studying law chilled me, but I decided that taking half of her advice and going back to school would be one way of honoring her wishes.

My mother. There were things that had worked their way out of hiding after she died. A notebook dug up from a drawer, in which she had written,
Maybe I can publish my cookbook!
A paperback, covered in a sheet of Sunday comics and barricaded behind wigs and handbags in the top of her closet, that turned out to be a modest sex manual entitled
Nice Girls Do
; it struck me as so innocent that I’d felt a wave of almost maternal compassion for her. But these things were finite. They only pointed me to the woman I had known, when what I wanted and needed were things that might give me a sense of my mother as someone I might still come to know.

Sometimes, when my aunts called from New York to check in on us, I’d ask them to tell me stories about my mother, about what she was like before my siblings and I were born, before she fell in love with my father, when she was still just a girl.

“When we were little, Kathy loved to play ‘hospital.’ She’d lie down and make us cover her with a quilt and tell us to go get her a handful of raisins. She’d pretend that was her medicine.” “Before Kathy met your father, there was a boy she used to talk to named Napoleon, and another boy named Willie James.” Tidbits, anecdotes that felt like stolen glances of my mother. The phone calls
with my aunts—conversations that were friendly, jovial, not quite motherly but nurturing in a different way—also helped flesh out my idea of who my mother’s sisters were, not just in relation to my mother but as people, women, characters in the stories of their own lives: Ursula, who taught kindergarten in Harlem; Evelyn, whom my mother, I suspected, had been closest to; Lucille and June, who lived together in a house just north of the city and who were sisters in the way twins are sisters—two halves of an apparent whole—though they weren’t twins and probably didn’t think of themselves that way; Carla, right around Jean’s age and still marveling herself at the spectacles and the plenitude the city had to offer, who’d driven me on a tour of Harlem at night; and Gladys, who had flown to California to shepherd Mother back to New York and who once looked at a pair of pointy-toed boots I was wearing and said, “You could put your foot dead up someone’s ass in those shoes.” My aunts held facets of my mother in their voices and their stories and in their very bearing. They were women in whom I might catch glimpses of my mother—and to whom I might reveal myself with the courage and honesty I lacked when my mother, their sister, was alive.

I decided to apply to Columbia. Every chance I got, I tinkered with my essay. It wasn’t a personal statement in which I was asked to tell about myself and my relationship to poetry. The application asked for a brief commentary upon a book of contemporary poetry. I chose
Dock Leaves
, a slim volume by a British poet named Hugo Williams. It was dedicated to his mother, who’d died the year before mine, a fact that had disposed me toward a feeling of kinship with the poet—or gratitude that I might get to tag along as his poems did the work of grief and commemoration. I turned to the essay eagerly during quiet moments—and, to be sure, I had
nothing but time. By the time it was done, and I sealed everything into the big white envelope, the gesture felt not so much like a wish or a shot in the dark as a prayer.

Months later, not long after a terse form letter of regret from Brown reached me, I received word that I had been admitted to Columbia. Holding the envelope in my hand, I convinced myself to trust that the angels my mother saw that night in her room had been right. I convinced myself to trust that they had been speaking to me through her. At the time, the thought of them there in the room with us, in their perfection so thorough it could only sit outside of this human plane, had cowed me. Now, needing them to be right, not knowing what I’d do if they were wrong, I submitted to them, took them at their word. I claimed them as my angels, imploring them to give a piece of my mother back, to show me that she was still available to me—not locked in the past tense, but rather eternal and ongoing.
A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for
.

EPILOGUE: DEAR GOD

W
hen I first brought my newborn daughter home, it felt as if I were setting foot into a house where someone had died. There was that same unsettling sense of connection to an unknowable elsewhere, to the vast and mysterious place that threatens us at least as much as it makes us feel eager and whole. There was that same awe, exactly that: wonder and terror. That same sense of being helplessly small in the face of something infinitely powerful and unsettlingly near. It was that way again when my sons were born. Wonderful and terrible. Is that what my mother met each time another of us arrived, tugging her world in a new and as-yet-unnamed direction?

Those first hazy newborn weeks, in the half-light of feedings, and in the sleepless whirl of everything else, I discovered another version of my own urge toward the divine: the desire to pray.
Dear God, protect her
. At first, that was all. And then,
Dear God, please allow me to give her everything she deserves
. And then,
Dear God, let me live long enough to help her along whatever path she chooses
. I prayed this way for my daughter and again for my sons. I spoke these prayers aloud. They came out of me with urgency, a fervency that did not strike me as quite me. It was all I could do, all that the deep and abiding need would permit—the need to believe that not even death would put an end to the bond I feel with my children. I still do not really know what led my mother to God with the kind of
vigor she seemed to possess for the idea of that particular hereafter, but I wonder, now that I have become a mother myself, if her faith was born of something fundamentally very simple. I wonder if gazing into each newborn face—at each little being who seemed at once ancient and utterly new, fragile and yet, by turns, possessed of an almost discomfiting poise—had put my mother (as it did me) in search of anything that would permit her, quite simply, to last.
Dear God, please let me keep her in my life even after I no longer have a life. Please let me always, always be her mother
.

Is God each of the many different things we seek in the course of a life? Family for a short time, and then unfettered independence, and then love? Is God what animates the body, drawing us into a deeper, more primal sense of our physical selves? And then, when that appetite is calmed, does God move out of the body and into wherever it is that tenderness or compassion reside? Does God become an armament we leverage for the ones we love, the ones we have committed to nurture and protect? I don’t know what I think. I know that the God I was taught to see as a child, the one who watched over me like an omnipotent father, is still one piece of the God I call upon now. But I feel myself most alive, most electric with faith, breath, and courage, when I think of God as a current that runs through all that is. Not by will or by choice. Not as a benediction but because there are laws that even God must obey.

When I think of the shape God made in my mother’s mind, even as she faced illness and death, I now believe that what I am seeing is the shape, from my own incomplete vantage point, of my mother’s mind.

My mother. In the now I belong to, she has been gone so long it’s almost as though she must only have been a dream that felt real but wasn’t. She has been gone so many years, the moment is
approaching when she will have been gone longer than she was with me, and perhaps then it will turn out that I can only struggle to remember her the way one does a dream. So many years during which, at times, I have felt relieved not to have had to see her take in my mistakes. Years that have granted me permission—at least I’ve taken it as permission—to remember her in any way I choose. Though today, when I try to put her back together in my mind, it is because I am searching for the real her, the woman she would have shown herself to be; the woman who could sit me down and tell me exactly what to do, how to mother my children so that they will feel safe being children, how to be playful and patient and forgiving, the way she somehow always managed to be; the woman who would cast every one of my memories and fantasies of her as uniquely wrong.