So little of the story adds up, but she walks the mile from Earl Street to the beach, where a teenage lifeguard digs a hole in the sand for her belly—me—to fit, and she lies face-down. This is where I learn to just be, held within her body, in this pocket of shoreline where bay and ocean merge, and so many streams and inlets not far away, this is where I first learned: in her body in this earth’s sand, watersound all around, unable yet to speak, so I just listened. When I am simple-minded, it explains everything.
The day before my mom turned 30, her mom died, after months of battling pancreatic cancer. It was 1978, just a few days after the grandmother I called Nanny was buried at Newington Baptist Church in Gloucester, Virginia. I was four. My dad worked two jobs at that time, had crazy hours, and I remember sitting with my mom one night, just the two of us. She was very calmly crying.
“Ma? What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
“Because Nanny’s gone.”
Then an image filled my head: my grandmother walking around our backyard, admiring the azaleas, impatiens, and tomato plants. She would touch a leaf or a bloom, and just nod. I guess I figured it was a vision, because I told my mom, “Don’t worry. She’ll be back. She’ll be back.”
And my mom said, “No she won’t, honey. No she won’t.”
My mom believed in spirits and she wasn’t afraid to show it, but she didn’t believe at that moment, and she let me see that doubt and that despair. She did not comfort her son or herself. Such nakedness: to let your child see you low, to let it show, to be vulnerable, to be open to the pain that comes with accepting certain things. At her best, she was like that.
When the congregation rose to sing, I stood on the pew next to my mother.
When they turned to the appropriate page in their hymnbooks, I was lost by the lines and twirls.
When they sang, it was a song they had steeped in, one I am still somewhat outside of.
Back then, at Newington Baptist Church, my great aunts and uncles sang words they knew by heart in a melody that may as well have been their veins.
I want to join in, but I know nothing, so do all I can think of: whistle along, an improvised tune.
She taps my hand and shushes me, my grieving mother, standing next to her widowed father.
I sat at the kitchen table, playing with my Matchbox cars, while she made supper. My mind drifted to a Tom & Jerry episode, called “Satan’s Waitin’,” in which Tom, while chasing Jerry, keeps dying and going to hell. He rides a winding escalator down into a massive, fiery cavern, where a bulldog devil tallies how many of his nine lives Tom has used, then sends Tom back to chase again. He rides that winding escalator back to the above-ground world, and the cycle continues.
The number of deaths in that episode pushes double digits, but it was the idea of an escalator that scared me. If hell was real, and if there was indeed a simple people-mover that ferried people back and forth, couldn’t the Devil ride it back and forth too? Couldn’t he just come on up to this world, pop in for a visit?
“Ma?”
“Yes?”
“What if…the devil comes up here someday? And walks around and stuff.”
She must have briefly closed her eyes, raised her eyebrows, or shook her head at this strange little boy with the heavy imagination, but she didn’t pause much.
“Oh, honey. The devil’s just the part of people that makes them do bad things.”
My mother was raised Southern Baptist, went to church every Sunday, played the organ in a small town where she had at least 12 aunts and uncles and just as many cousins in rural Gloucester County, Virginia. Their devoutness, as I remember it, was low-key, a sort of mild-mannered Evangelism. They didn’t carry on or holler or condemn, but they were there every Sunday, singing hymns. And they were serious: God was real and, I assumed, the Devil was real too—there, far below the earth’s surface in that seething cave.
And here was my mom telling me the Devil was just a metaphor, defying what I saw as her regional literalism and giving me just plain old good news. Such relief: no guy in a red suit with horns, no angular mustache, no pitchfork, no cave, no fire! Nobody to imagine and fear underground, no winding escalator, no burning. All’s well, little boy.
The Devil’s just a part of us—people in general, my mother herself, and even first grade me. In a single sentence, my mom had demonstrated a certain sophistication, forced her child to think figuratively, comforted him, and scared the living hell out of him.
I remember poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s story like this: As a young poet, he once asked the great elder poet Gwendolyn Brooks, “Ms. Brooks, what is art?” and she replied, “That which endures.”
It is a word I have long associated with my mom.
For almost all of my life, I have known my mother’s body to be a source of shame or trouble for her.
How many times did it happen? She’s driving us somewhere, and we pass a large woman on the sidewalk, at a bus stop, in a parking lot.
“Lord, I hope my butt’s not that big.”
“Is that how big I am?”
“Am I that fat?”
My answer was always no, even when it was a lie, because I felt I had to reassure her with comparison, that she wasn’t that bad off, she wasn’t so overweight, she wasn’t as fat as some other woman. Didn’t this put her in competition with other women? Didn’t it make it so that some other woman always had to be made to seem more shameful than her? Didn’t it also imply that even though she’s not as fat as that woman on the sidewalk, she’s still fat, just to a lesser degree? No one wins. If you’re falling down, sometimes you want to drag another with you. What did this do to her? To me? Is this why she kept female friends a little bit at arm’s length? After all, her life had been wrecked by her ex-husband, my father, fucking another woman for two years.
When I was a kid, I watched that “dust motes in a shaft of sunlight” thing and was happy as could be. Lay on my bed and tracked the swirls and pocks on ceiling plaster. On the back patio, I held a caterpillar and sensed each leg touch and untouch my palm, in sequence, its fine hairs wavering like a cornfield.
I made her feel some of this shame at least once. It was the one outright argument I remember witnessing between her and my dad. I was 7 or 8—at least two years before he began an affair—and I remember him lying on the sofa, her standing over him, the two of them yelling at each other.
She turns and picks up an old football I’d left on a chair—it once belonged to my dad, and was darker, slicker, and more rounded than standard footballs at the time—and throws it down at him before she storms out of the living room.
I’m sitting somewhere nearby and am impressed that he catches it while lying prone, with both hands, right around his waist.
But soon I am crying, my dad has his arm around me, and my mom is back, standing in the same spot as before, teary herself. I say I’m afraid they’re going to get a divorce, and my dad softly reassures me they won’t.
“No, no, no,” he coos. “People just have disagreements sometimes.”
Then he lifts the football from his lap and says, “Now, how about I shove this football up your momma’s butt?”
He’s making a joke, maybe channeling Buford T. Justice from the Smokey and the Bandit movies, and I am in the routine of going along with my dad’s jokes, trying to complement their ugliness, and I say something I’m still ashamed of.
“It’s big enough to.”
Meaning, her ass is large enough for that old-school football. Meaning, you’re right, Dad, go ahead and do it and favor me with your laughter. Meaning, take this crude joke, Ma. Take it. We guys are ganging up on you, even in my tears.
I think she grinned faintly, but I also heard her sniff out through her nose, and nod like, “Oh, there you are.”
We are in Disney World, maybe 1983. My dad and I go on most of the rides together, with my mom waiting for us. He and I go on the teacups, giant round high-backed booths with a tiny stand-up steering wheel-like device in the middle. As the cups take their laps around the platform, we can turn the wheel to spin our cup faster. It’s a maze of inter-whirling parts that I don’t understand or bother to control, just letting my dad do the steering.
My mom stands outside the fence, watching us, eating popcorn. After we get off, and for years after, he jokes about how fast she was eating it, just shoveling it in, mimicking her movements.
Friends over, I walk to the bathroom across the hall, look down towards the kitchen, the bar-top table, where she is at a crucial part of a story.
“…and I was like [up yours gesture] ‘Fuck you!’” and they all laugh.
I hear my dad telling their friends about me. “He goes to bed, turns out the light, and reads under the covers with a flashlight. Sometimes I can see, the way the bedrooms are situated, catty-cornered, a little teeny pinprick of light on the wall from where that flashlight beam is juuust slipping out a little bit from under the covers.” I can hear him smile as he tells it.
It’s a summer morning in 1985. I’m in the kitchen, looking down the four steps into the garage, where the washing machine is to the right, a massive freezer to the left of the stairs, and the dryer is on the opposite side of the door leading to our back patio. Whitney Houston’s “You Give Good Love” plays on the radio, and my mother is trying to slow-dance with my father:
You give good love to me, baby
So good, take this heart of mine into your hands
You give good love to me
It’s never too much (never too much, will never be)
Baby, you give good love
He is resistant. Self-conscious of dancing? Self-conscious that the boy is there? Embarrassed by the suggestion they’d had sex the night before, perhaps a rarity at this point in their marriage? A guilty conscience, as he’d already started seeing someone else by this time? Depressed because he didn’t really love her anymore, and here she was all over him, acting like things were sweet and wondrous, man and woman, sleepily slow-dancing in the garage, in front of their son, after a night of attentive pleasure?
It’s the summer of 1986 and I hear them talking in bed one night. He is reassuring her about the car she’s just bought: “No, I’m not about to mess with that. That car’s yours.”
Weeks later, I’m spending the night at Braywood Manor, a “highrise for the elderly” where my great grandmother lives and my grandmother’s boyfriend, a man named Frank, who was like a third grandfather to me. He was from South Norfolk, had been in the Navy, had fascinating tattoos, supposedly had a terrible drinking problem when he was younger, had tentatively reconciled with a formerly-estranged daughter, and was one of the kindest people I ever knew. I spent many weekends there, listening to old folks, playing cards, dominoes, Monopoly, eating pizza, and watching Johnny Carson.
My grandmother spent a lot of time at Braywood, taking care of her mother, who was in her eighties, and Frank, who had emphysema.
I remember the call there one night. I was setting up Frank’s old Army cot to sleep in the living room. I remember Frank answering and giving the phone to my grandmother, who spoke for a few moments to my mother, hung up, and then said, “Andy-honey, I have to get you home. Your momma wants you home.”
I didn’t really question this, but Frank must have, quietly. I heard my grandmother whisper to him, “Sonny’s leaving Connie.”
I was already at the door with my stuff, waiting for her. As she hurried to me, keys jingling, Frank called from his armchair, “Lorene!”
“What.”
“Tell that boy to call me.”
And for a moment, I think it will be alright. Frank will call my father, talk sense into him, explain things about his own wayward youth and middle age, explain things about loss and fucking up and not fucking up and he will stop this fucked up thing about fucking from fucking us all. Frank will make this all ok again.
It’s a week after he’s left, and he’s staying five minutes away with his mom, my grandmother, until he can move in with a work friend named Tim. I’m supposed to go over to eat with him soon, and my mother tells me things about him, things that complicate my image of him. The worst thing is he once told her, anticipating the aftermath of their separation, “No one else will ever want you.”
She asks me something like, “What do you think of your father now?”
I call Gramma’s house. 499-1010. He picks up and I tell him I’m not coming over, and he asks why.
“Because of what you really are.”
“What? What am I? What am I really?”
He somehow convinces me to come over. We sit on the back porch, while my grandmother fixes our plates. She brings them out, hands me mine, hands my dad his, then comes back to me. She’s on her way to Braywood to see Mamaw and Frank, but comes over and kisses my head, and whispers, “It’s going to be alright, honey.”
I stare at my fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and string beans, untouched, and cry, cry away.
We start having visitation. Every week it is the same thing: go see a movie, go to Burger King. Go see a movie, go to Burger King. Sometimes we vary it, going to Burger King first and then a movie. Either way, starting in September of 1986 and going for at least another year, we see virtually every movie that comes out in the United States, and not all of those are good movies. Some are fun, at least for the time, Crocodile Dundee, Back to School, and others are creepy, bizarre. Flowers in the Attic. The Last Emperor. The Abyss.
We just didn’t know what to do with each other. Before the divorce, our relationship was good, but limited. He worked tough hours at the airport, wasn’t home much, and when he was, he was often napping on the floor by the fireplace. Or taking care of the yard, working in the garage, or helping out his mom, my grandmother, who lived half-mile away.
We threw the football around in the backyard, each of us pretending to be our heroes–Sonny Jurgensen and Art Monk–him narrating our dramatic game-winning drive against the Cowboys to clinch the NFC championship and head to the Super Bowl.
He, my mother and I camp for a week every summer and fish, and my dad takes me fishing around Tidewater a few other times each year. He’s a master, but an impatient teacher; I am bumbling, and a tentative, self-conscious learner. But he’s also fun: loves to laugh, joke, cheer things on, celebrate.
I’m doing some kind of exercise training for Cub Scouts, part of which is 50 sit-ups per night, and when I get to 50, as he’s holding my feet, he tells me, “One for good measure!”
I groan, but do it.
“Another for good measure!”
Again, 52.
“Two more for good measure!”
And I stop and we laugh. Still, in a couple more nights, we go to 50, but good measure gets us to 55.
His encouragement is like resting your hand on a sun-warmed bench on a cool day.
But that was when I was little and the world was whole. Now, I am 12, 13, 14. For the better part of three years–from August 1986 when he leaves until October 1989 when hockey comes to town and we have a new thing to learn, enjoy, follow, cheer for, and celebrate together–we just don’t know how to be around each other.
But somewhere in there, when he drops me off after a movie and Burger King, he starts telling me he loves me. It’s one of the things that saved us.
In the months immediately after the divorce, my mom was out a lot of weekend nights, as well as the occasional weeknight. Dancing at the Purple Moose. Seeing Skip Holland, the Mad Hatter, performing stand up comedy in little nightclubs.
Coming home, shaking her smoky hair in my face to smell, to be repulsed with delight.
“So disgusting!” she’ll say, but it is evidence she’s been out. A smell to be somehow proud of, though it was also the smell of my father, who smoked for decades.
In that first year or two, there were at least three boyfriends: Ray, Marv, David. Marv was the lamest, David the nicest, Ray the most interesting, living single in a fancy condo on an inlet, a former Navy Commander who drank hard, had a filthy mouth, but was–as far as I know–a gentleman to her and friendly to me. There is Monty, from her own hometown of Gloucester. I never think any of them will be my stepfather.
But there is also Joe Maniscalco. When they first meet, he is in his last months in a popular Tidewater covers band called Night Flight. She took me to see them once and they were total hams, but Joe, Warren, and Robbie absolutely had the bar rocking. They become close friends for decades before he dies of lung cancer.
He also becomes my first and only guitar teacher. After Night Flight breaks up, Joe starts playing solo 6 nights a week at various restaurants and bars across Tidewater. My mom goes to watch him a few times a month. She often brings me, especially to Freemason Abbey, a circa-1873 church-turned restaurant at the intersection of Freemason and Bousch streets in downtown Norfolk, where Joe’s wife Tammy is a manager. I’ll watch him play Van Morrison, Roger Miller, and way too many Jimmy Buffet covers, predicting where his hands go for the chords, soaking up every move he makes, so that I can imitate him when I get home, trying to figure out R.E.M. songs and writing my own.
He also comes over after playing. My mom will fix him a plate of whatever we had for supper, he’ll drink a beer or two, we’ll watch George Carlin. And he shows me just enough basic music theory for me to figure out how a lot of popular songs are structured.
By 1989, I’m a batboy for the minor league baseball team in town, the Tidewater Tides, AAA affiliate of the New York Mets. Four years later, the summer after I graduate from high school, I am now a “clubbie”–helping another guy manage the visitors side clubhouse, doing laundry, loading and unloading buses, running errands. But my dad has given me his little pickup truck as a graduation present–his uncle Edward had died and my dad got his Oldsmobile–and I can finally drive myself to and from the park.
One night, coming home from ballpark, I see Joe’s van in the driveway. That’s not unusual–I’ll be happy to have a beer with him–but I open the front door, and I swear I hear them in the shower.
I remember making no big deal of this, asking no questions, not feeling thrown, but I think now I must’ve been numb. I so often held what both my parents did at arm’s length, with this attitude of benevolent—or was it indifferent? Self-protective?—“Well, that’s them, and that’s ok, everyone’s free to do whatever they want to do…”
I remember the sound of feet moving, sliding, squeaking against the tub’s floor. I remember a little laughter and joking. I remember them both coming down the hall a few minutes later, their hair wet, in robes or towels. They were caught, but trying to play things off, act like it wasn’t a big deal.
I think when I got in the front door and heard the shower—this would also be at least 11 o’clock at night—and noise, I must have knocked on the bathroom door, or yelled in there, “Ma?” I think they both yelled something normal.
“Hey, hon!”
“Hey, buddy!”
“Be out in a minute!”
Or did she come down the hallway with pride, like a bride down the aisle, Joe still married, Ma carrying herself as if “See? I can do this too. Someone does want me. I have my own life.”
Sometimes when we’d talk on the phone—me in grad school in northern Virginia, her back home in Virginia Beach—she’ll confess to buying a bag of chips and eating it all. She’ll say it with the tone of one marveling at a storm’s power: awe, disbelief, fear.
I ate the whole thing.
She moved to upstate New York for the last few years of her life to be near her grandkids. One night I was with her at urgent care, getting her arrhythmia checked out, and a nurse checking her in asked her marital status.
“Happily divorced.”
While I was in high school, she once told me, “I will always love your father. I just don’t like him.”
It is 1996 and I am living with my dad in Chesapeake. In these days, we spend a lot of time together. Part of it is monthly bonfires when he invites his work friends from the airport over to play horseshoes. There are treasure chests of beer, buckets of fried chicken. He lives at the last spot on a dead-end quarter-mile lane with a [cornfield?] on one side, a deep ditch along the lane, a house with chickens behind him, and the nearest neighbor on his street is several hundred feet down.
We stay up well past all the other guys leaving, until 3 or 4 in the morning, drinking, laughing, talking, crying, sometimes yelling. I’m not proud that it took beer to talk directly about the divorce, but we did, and it helped us.
I once asked him, “Why did you cheat on Ma?”
His answer could not be more direct: “Because I didn’t love her anymore.”
I think of that moment as on the same level of respect as when my mom told me about the devil that only exists inside us, or the mother who would not return.
One of the relationships she started soon after the divorce was with a couple, Betty and Eddie. Over the years, she sometimes referred to them as Mom and Dad, which started when she lived with them for a few months between selling our house in Kempsville and moving into a condo in Great Neck, after I’d started college. But she met them as “her dance instructors.” They must’ve met one night dancing, and they taught her and other friends how to dance. I remember shag being a big one, and how they loved the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman,” a song I’ve despised my entire life.
Our friendship with them helped in this new life. They had an in-ground pool, always had lots of people over, endless food, talking and laughter. For 25 years, they treated us like family. Even when my wife and I moved to where Betty and Eddie were from–upstate New York’s Capital Region–and my mom would visit, sometimes it was with them. She could see us, they could see their relatives, and we all could see each other. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, Betty’s mother Rebecca was the first person outside of immediate family that I told.
But there was eventually a falling out. Around 2010, Betty—who was always loud and opinionated and occasionally rude—seemed to get just plain mean, and often. While playing cards with a group of friends, even Eddie sometimes questioned and even chastised her in front of guests for the way she was treating people. My mom moved up to Halfmoon, New York to be near us and her grandkids, and Betty and Eddie started spending a few months of the year in Florida, so it was easy to start distancing herself, and eventually just cut off contact.
My wife and I were talking with my mom about this once—she seemed sad, irritated, glad to be done with her ex-friend, all at once. They hadn’t spoken in months. My wife said something about just them talking for a few minutes, being in touch, being upfront with each other, even if they could only stand it for a minute.
My mom said, “Nah. Forget it.”
“But there’s also forgive.”
My mom looked like she smelled something. “Forget it.”
Then she heard Betty died. A massive brain tumor that had been growing for a long while. She briefly theorized that maybe that was the cause of—or at least a contributor to—the changes in Betty’s behavior, and never spoke of her again.
In one of the worlds in my mind, it is always August. It’s when they split up, and because I teach high school, it is also the saddest and poorest month: we’re headed back to school soon and the summer money is trickling away as my town is filled with vacationers spending loads of money on restaurants, hotels, and horserace betting.
This time it’s at my dad’s for my family’s annual trip South to see him. She calls on our first of three nights. I’ve gone down to the basement, where my son sleeps in a bed in the corner, and I sleep in another bed, set perpendicular to his, on the opposite wall. I’ve started meditating and just a few minutes in, she calls. It’s late. I’ve had some beers on the porch with my dad. She has taken herself to urgent care. Long story short, a doctor there tells her he thinks she has pancreatic cancer. She is sobbing. This is what killed her mother, and she’s always worried it would be her killer too.
A few nights later, we’re in the DC area for one night before heading home. Again I’m on the floor, this time of a hotel room in Arlington, while my family sleeps from walking the city all afternoon. She doesn’t call, but I can replay it all, watching my mind play these new scenes in an old movie.
The oncologist tells my mother, “This will take you from us.” He goes through the options, none of which are pleasant. But the last option is to just wait and see how things go.
I know this is the one she will prefer, and secretly, I do too. Nothing. Just keep plodding forward, waiting for whatever. The simplest and most passive response. Or maybe the bravest? The one of acceptance? But secretly, my instinct is what it has always been: be still and silent. There’s fight or flight, and there’s also freeze, and I just don’t want to decide anything. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to analyze, evaluate, persuade.
I can’t tell my mother to do nothing, because that’s as good as telling her, “You’re going to die, and soon, so just die, and soon.” I can’t tell her to fight with everything she has, because I know it will be a path of more suffering, more spending, things she has done enough of, and it will likely make zero difference. It might buy her a few more agonizing weeks. What can I tell her?
She either knows all this, or we’re just the same person, because she turns to me. She is sitting to my left, the chair right up against mine, the body that carried me nine months, the person that carried me for a good two decades, and now I want to carry her, but I also don’t want to take away her dignity.
Using my childhood nickname, she says, “Well, Moose? Wanna ride the waves?”
At first I’m not sure what she means, but she wants to wait and see. Or she has already relinquished everything.
We leave. We stop for lunch at an out-of-the-way Greek diner she and a friend like. I have soup: chicken, lemon, orzo. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it is delicious.
Sometime before finding out it was stage four, she told me, “I just hope it’s enough to fight.”
Someone somewhere told me, “Be there. But don’t get your hopes up.”
Soft, soft, the sky behind the clouds.
Months after her death, in the liminal state, I had a dream-vision of her in my closet. One of the two sliding doors is slid to the left, open, and there her naked corpse is, standing upright, as if attached to the wall. She’s hiding there, but it’s also like she’s been relegated to some purgatory, a limbo, victim of my indecision and freezing. She moves around like she’s trying to step through my shirts, the hangers, the boxes, but also like she doesn’t want to emerge. She too just wants to stay where she is, pretending not to be there while I pretend to be asleep.
My late friend Reuben was fond of repeating the saying about having a child being like watching your heart walk around in public.
There were a couple of years during grad school in the late 90s when I’d take the train home from DC for holidays, from Union Station to Williamsburg, where she would pick me up and drop me off for the return trip. Once, standing on the platform, the train arrives and we hug and kiss, say “I love you.” I climb aboard, find a seat, and settle into a book, or writing. I disappear back north.
But when I check email many hours later–this is at least a decade before widespread smartphone use–I find one from her, which begins, “Well, you just got on that big old train and never even looked out that window seat to wave at your old Ma.”
And she was right. I just wanted to be done, move on, not belabor a goodbye, not drum up a cinematic, emotionally demonstrative goodbye. I didn’t want to dance with her. I wanted to get back to my chosen home. I remember being picked up at Union Station by Jeff, my friend and roommate, along with another friend of ours. The plan was simple: hang out at Jeff’s and my apartment, get drunk, maybe get high, play cards, listen to music. I wanted to get back to that, to get started on that, while my mom was still in her mind standing on the platform at Williamsburg, waiting for me to appear at the window and wave at her one more time.
Fast forward to August 2024. My son is working at a pizza restaurant on Fish Kill. He’s driving these days, but I need my car today, so I let him drive, while I’ll take the car back home with me. We swing into the little gravel lot next to the employees’ entrance, where a couple of his work friends are already hanging out before the shift. Normally, as I hop out from the passenger seat and walk around the back to the drivers’ side, we hug and say we love each other, but this time, he’s already gone, dapping with his friends, the drivers’ side door gaping open.
I back out of the spot, and my window is now in line with them. I’m looking at them, presuming he’ll notice me, hear the gravel crunching just ten feet away. He doesn’t, but one of his friends does.
“Hey, Watson–your dad, man.”
“Oh, see you later, Dad!”
We wave, and I drive on. Isn’t this the way? Our innocent sins revisited upon us by the innocent?
But this too is true. During my mom’s last year, I took her grocery shopping. We’d walk the aisles like we did when I was a child, always just the two of us in this world of bananas, eggs, laundry detergent, and greeting cards.
Then her lists would get shorter, but it took the same amount of time to make our way around.
Then she would sit in the car while I ran in for ten or twelve things.
Then she stayed in her apartment while I went out for her.
In her last months, before we were positive she was sick, her energy plummeted, and she usually didn’t even have the strength to cook. Most of what I was buying was suddenly Stouffer’s frozen dinners.
Something about certain foods always made me sad anyway, even when I was little: fish sticks, canned barbecue, frozen Salisbury steak, boxed mac and cheese. I don’t know if it was the implied lack of money or the massive mechanization of convenience that ran it all, but certain foods just make me want to cry.
Stouffer’s is now one of them. I try to avoid looking at them when I pass by. If I do see them, I can feel myself start to scowl.
Six months after her death, my son and I are at the grocery store, we pass by the Stouffer’s, and we stop so I can tell him all of this, how that became all she would eat, and then when she wouldn’t eat that was all that was in her freezer, stacked up and waiting, and I can’t stand the sight of them.
“Can I have a hug, Watt?”
And my twelve-year-old son does just that, right there in the frozen food aisle: hugs his heartbroken father crying about his dead mother.
The story goes that my mother was twelve and the instructor just pushed her into the lake, saying, Swim. Her growing body tangled in brush, weeds, her future, branches, bitterness, betrayal, race, roots, and fantasy, and someone dove in to save her.
She never learned to swim, readily admitted her fear of water, and blamed that instructor as long as she lived. She’d go into the ocean or a lake up to her knees, a pool up to her shoulders, feet always touching the submerged ground, head above water. Her face and hair were to remain dry.
As she died, she didn’t know where she wanted to rest. It was so hard to just be—wouldn’t just-being eternally with non-being be harder? She didn’t want to rest beside her parents and stepmother, didn’t want to be buried at all, said she’d never really wanted the fire, but now felt it her best option.
I listed places to be scattered, and she shook her head at every one. She was just done.
I told her she could stay with me, and she does, but today I imagined finding a lake, how I could strip down and then scatter her ashes—with its bits of bone and teeth—and then jump in as it swirled, hopefully glittering in the sunlight, the unwanted fire cooled at last, and lie on my back, look at the sky, reach behind my head to pull the water past my hip, finally swimming with my mother.
Andy Fogle is the author of Mother Countries (forthcoming, Main Street Rag), Across from Now, and seven chapbooks of poetry, including Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. He’s from Virginia Beach, spent 12 years in the DC area, and now lives with his family in upstate New York, teaching high school. He is poetry editor at Salvation South. www.foglejunk.squarespace.com
Engravings from Pauline Knip’s Les Pigeons (1811.) One of the birds depicted is “considered fictitious.” See more at https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/les-pigeons/
