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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
I meant what I said, but I wish I hadn't said it.
May 10, 2002 | My mother threatened to kill herself so many times -- rifling through the kitchen drawers to find a knife, getting drunk and swallowing pills -- that when my brother called to tell me that she and my stepfather had been killed, I assumed it was a double suicide. Or that she killed him, and then killed herself.
My last words to her were "Fuck you." The day before she died was the first time my family had gotten together since my father died the year before. We met at my brother's house in Orlando, and although things started out OK, by the end of the evening Mama started up her usual shit, and I, tired of it all, said the magic words. My stepfather tried to get me to apologize, but I wouldn't. Mama called later and talked to my sister, and I remember holding the receiver to my ear, listening to her cry, saying she was sorry. I didn't say I was, though. After 21 years of dealing with her, I meant what I said.
She was 48 when she died. It was 1981. She and my stepfather were driving home from Clearwater Beach, drunk, still wearing their swimsuits at midnight, their bare feet grainy with sugary white sand. They ran their light-blue Plymouth under a tractor-trailer, shearing off the top. Both of them were thrown into the weeds on the side of the road. The next day the sheriff handed my brother a brown paper bag with a stiff bloody bikini in it. Instant death, he said, but I knew better. My mother had been aiming for that moment for a long time. She couldn't have chosen a better ending to her story.
Her trajectory began inside the white scalloped edges of a photograph. She flirts with the camera, poses like a beauty queen standing in a small wooden boat on the shore of Lake Seminole, barefoot, hands on hips, head thrown back, a wide and bright smile. Open. She's wearing short shorts and she's conscious: "This is how I want to be remembered; I am as marvelous as Miss America." She gives herself to the camera, maybe to the eyes behind the camera.
I imagine my father before he was my father, smiling at my mother before she was my mother. He has a head full of glossy black hair. Squinting his eyes, bringing her into focus, he snaps this photo of her, thinks of butterflies resting on leaves, camouflaged, right before they are netted, pinned into boxes.
In the next photo, she and my father are leaning against an enormous pine tree near the banks of the Apalachicola River, right on the Georgia-Florida line. He's wearing shoes, thick brown brogans. She isn't. Her long slender feet are posed calendar-girl style. Daddy surrounds her with a bearlike grasp, his arm draped over her shoulder, his big hand pulling her to him. He smooches her ear with his mouth, whispering, "Baby, I love you, I love you so much." I can't remember my father's voice saying those words to my mother, but I know he did. Love her, that is, even if he did forget her birthday later.
Once, he did remember, and he hurt her feelings by buying her one pair of flimsy ladies underwear from the Dollar Store uptown and she wailed that nobody loved her, then threw the underwear in the garbage can beneath our pecan tree. But you can tell he loved her by looking at this photograph, the way his arm circles her, the way he holds her hand. She lets herself be contained, lets him whisper in her ear. This time the camera is peeping; Mama seems almost embarrassed at being watched; her eyes glance toward the ground.
Then there was a photograph taken after Mama had children. May 1962. That's three years after my sister was born. Four children in five years and all of a sudden she's wearing shoes, like she's afraid we're going to tramp on her feet. No more smiling, barefoot Miss America. The photograph is blurry, hazy. Mama's sitting in one of those old-fashioned shell-shaped lawn chairs, scrunched to one side as if she's going to share her seat with someone much smaller than herself. Her hands are clasped on top of her head, her legs crossed. She's smiling but it's a smile tinged with sorrow, the one I become most familiar with.
She sits beneath a tung oil tree, in front of a metal swing set. To her left is a clothesline, diapers fluttering in the breeze. In the corner of the photograph, there are bleary shapes, tiny feet, what seem to be hands. If you squint at this photograph you can almost see one baby helping another baby stand.
