Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (21 page)

Because there is nothing in the newspapers about my mother’s murder, I decide to call the Los Angeles Police Department and request a copy of her files. It has taken me days to work up the courage to make this call, and I shake as I dial, but the lady in the Cold Case Department who answers the phone is kind.

“All I can do is give you the case summary,” she says when I’ve explained my situation, “because your mom’s case is still open. We can’t release any other details. Can you hold for a second? I have to go pull a book from the shelf.” I imagine leather-bound folios gathering dust on a shelf, or, more likely, huge three-ring binders stamped with lapd.

“Okay,” she says when she gets back. I hear the thump of the book on her desk. “What I have here is a case summary of your mother’s file. It’s not…it’s pretty ugly, okay? I really wish you were here in person so that I could be with you to tell you this, but I’ll try to read it over the phone.”

She pauses a second as if she is trying to control her emotions. “I really wish you were here in front of me.”

I had steeled myself to talk to a burned-out detective or a calloused bureaucrat. I wasn’t prepared to talk to someone kind. It is her care, and not what follows, that makes me cry.

“In the upper-left-hand corner it says: ‘Beating — blunt instrument — unknown. Strangulation — ligature.’ That means she was strangled with a ligature, like a rope or a cord or something. Then it says her name: ‘Michele Ann Grey.’ Your mom was murdered between November 28th and 29th, between 10:00 p.m. and 8:10 a.m., when she was found. It lists the suspects as ‘unknown.’ Okay, then it says —

“You’re gonna hate me,” I hear her mutter under her breath, then she continues.

“Victim is a Hollywood prostitute who was living with three companions at the Hollywood Center Motel. At 10:00 p.m. she told her companions she was going next door to turn a trick to help pay the rent because they did not have enough money. Her friends thought she meant a hotel up the street. They did not see the victim alive again.”

She clears her throat.

“The victim was discovered by a gardener in the vacant lot at 610 North Hill Place. An autopsy revealed the victim had been beaten and strangled with an unknown ligature. She was fully clothed except for her right shoe. There were no witnesses to the body being dumped or the homicide occurring.

“Status: Investigation Continued.”

She takes a breath.

“That means your mom’s case is still open. And it always will be until…until it’s solved. And I’m actually the investigator for homicides in 1976, so I’m the detective on your mother’s case. My name is Amelia Chavez.”

I don’t trust my voice, so all I can say is “Thank you.”

Amelia takes down my contact information and tells me she’ll read through my mother’s file to see if there’s anything else we can do. A week later she calls me to tell me that she has sent the available physical evidence to be tested for usable DNA. She is also locating and interviewing all the principal witnesses in the case, including, she says when I ask, my birth father. She also says that the detectives ruled out the Hillside Stranglers long ago.

“This isn’t like CSI, okay?” she warns me before we hang up. “It’ll take four to five months for the test to come back. And we’re probably not going to find anything.”

But at least you’re trying, I think, at least you care. And suddenly it is like that night when I was eight years old. Everything is different now. In a few months I might know who killed my mother. In a few months I might meet my father.

I try to imagine the physical evidence in my mother’s file: her clothes, I imagine, maybe jeans and a sweatshirt, underwear; perhaps her wallet or a watch or earrings; her left shoe, her socks. I keep thinking about her right shoe, the one that was missing. I wonder what happened to it, where it is now. I imagine they store all the items in a big cardboard box, the kind you see on TV mysteries. I think of how more of her belongings are in that box than I will ever possess. The only thing I’ve ever owned that was hers was the Bible she had when she was a child. It had color illustrations of Moses in the rushes and Mary Magdalene weeping. On the inside cover my mother had written her name, Michele Ann Grey, in big cursive loops. I used to touch that Bible, rub my finger along its spine when I was lonely or sad. I think of the evidence in that big cardboard box, and I want to touch it too, run my finger along the jeans my mom once wore, the hem of the sweatshirt that once kept her warm. I lost that Bible somewhere along the way to adulthood. I wish I had it back.

Hardly anyone cared about my mother while she was alive, and when she died few people took note. All she left behind was a birth certificate, a death certificate, a few pictures, that Bible, and a box of ashes — the only evidence that she ever existed. It is so little with which to reconstruct a life.

This is what I know about my mother: when she was a little girl she had a cat, when she turned eight she had a birthday party. She spelled her name, Michele, with one
l
. On my birth certificate she spelled my middle name, Michelle, with two. She had brown hair that, like mine, shone red in the sun. She named me after a steak house by the 405 Freeway called Kelly’s. She was a prostitute; she was addicted to drugs. Against all reason she carried me to term. She took care of me as best she could. She died at night, with only her murderer for company. This is what I know about my mother: I am her daughter, and her memory rests with me.

Anne Carson

 

ANNE CARSON
, twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the 1996 Lannan Award, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. In 2001 she received the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

 

I

I can hear little clicks inside my dream.

Night drips its silver tap

down the back.

At 4
A.M
. I wake. Thinking

of the man who

left in September.

His name was Law.

My face in the bathroom mirror

has white streaks down it.

I rinse the face and return to bed.

Tomorrow I am going to visit my mother

She

She lives on a moor in the north.

She lives alone.

Spring opens like a blade there.

I travel all day on trains and bring a lot of books —

some for my mother, some for me

including
The Collected Works of Emily Brontë
.

This is my favourite author.

Also my main fear, which I mean to confront.

Whenever I visit my mother

I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,

my lonely life around me like a moor,

my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation

that dies when I come in the kitchen door.

What meat is it, Emily, we need?

Three

Three silent women at the kitchen table.

My mother’s kitchen is dark and small but out the window

there is the moor, paralyzed with ice.

It extends as far as the eye can see

over flat miles to a solid unlit white sky.

Mother and I are chewing lettuce carefully.

The kitchen wall clock emits a ragged low buzz that jumps

once a minute over the twelve.

I have Emily propped open on the sugarbowl

but am covertly watching my mother.

A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside.

My mother is studying her lettuce.

“In my flight through the kitchen I knocked over Hareton

who was hanging a litter of puppies

from a chairback in the doorway….”

It is as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass.

Now and then a remark trails through the glass.

Taxes on the back lot. Not a good melon,

too early for melons.

Hairdresser in town found God, closes shop every Tuesday.

Mice in the teatowel drawer again.

Little pellets. Chew off

the corners of the napkins, if they knew

what paper napkins cost nowadays.

Rain tonight.

Rain tomorrow.

That volcano in the Philippines at it again. What’s her name

Anderson died no not Shirley

the opera singer. Negress.

Cancer.

Not eating your garnish, you don’t like pimento?

Out the window I can see dead leaves ticking over the flatland

and dregs of snow scarred by pine filth.

At the middle of the moor

where the ground goes down into a depression,

the ice has begun to unclench.

Black open water comes

curdling up like anger. My mother speaks suddenly.

That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it?

You aren’t getting over him.

My mother has a way of summing things up.

She never liked Law much

but she liked the idea of me having a man and getting on with life.

Well he’s a taker and you’re a giver I hope it works out,

was all she said after she met him.

Give and take were just words to me

at the time. I had not been in love before.

It was like a wheel rolling downhill.

But early this morning while mother slept

and I was downstairs reading the part in
Wuthering Heights

where Heathcliff clings at the lattice in the storm sobbing

Come in! Come in! to the ghost of his heart’s darling,

I fell on my knees on the rug and sobbed too.

She knows how to hang puppies,

that Emily.

It isn’t like taking an aspirin you know, I answer feebly.

Dr. Haw says grief is a long process.

She frowns. What does it accomplish

all that raking up the past?

Oh — I spread my hands —

I prevail! I look her in the eye.

She grins. Yes you do.

Whacher

Whacher

Emily’s habitual spelling of this word,

has caused confusion.

For example

in the first line of the poem printed
Tell me, whether, is it winter?

in the Shakespeare Head edition.

But whacher is what she wrote.

Whacher is what she was.

She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.

She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke.

She whached the poor core of the world,

wide open.

To be a whacher is not a choice.

There is nowhere to get away from it,

no ledge to climb up to — like a swimmer

who walks out of the water at sunset

shaking the drops off, it just flies open.

To be a whacher is not in itself sad or happy,

although she uses these words in her verse

as she uses the emotions of sexual union in her novel,

grazing with euphemism the work of whaching.

But it has no name.

It is transparent.

Sometimes she calls it Thou.

“Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,”

records Charlotte in 1828.

Unsociable even at home

and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,

Emily made her awkward way

across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

This sad stunted life, says one.

Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment

and despair, says another.

She could have been a great navigator if she’d been male,

suggests a third. Meanwhile

Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question,

Why cast the world away.

For someone hooked up to Thou,

the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.

But in between the neighbour who recalls her

coming in from a walk on the moors

with her face “lit up by a divine light”

and the sister who tells us

Emily never made a friend in her life,

is a space where the little raw soul

slips through.

It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel,

out of sight.

The little raw soul was caught by no one.

She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary

or a fear of death. She worked

in total six months of her life (at a school in Halifax)