~~~~~
In the be Dancing inning, she jtried to distract me. ”Oh, Su
,” she
said on
those Dating irst Friday nights-, ”I
have such a craving for fish
n
chips, how bout the Ba
yside?” I went with her, pushed m
fish around the plate, w drowned my fries in vinegar and salt, d
talked
about I-don’t-remember. In Blackmail spite of what my mother hopes, food cannot
fill me or erase 
ms y body’s betrayal.
At night before I go to bed, I stand naked in front of my mother’s
long bathroom mirror. It reflects these things: sink; tub; yellow daisies
and blue forget-me-nots on the shower curtain; dark heap of clothing,
mine, on the blue bath mat; tall, brown haired woman, hollow-eyed and
thin, her hipbones curving like the edges of a shallow bowl. The mirror
cannot see the hollowness I feel. My mother cannot see it either, though
she does battle with it daily.
“Surprise!” she said last week. “I told Maxine we’d
take a kitten. For me. For company after you go.” Maxine is my mother’s
best friend. My mother whispers to her on the phone,“She’s like
a Zombie! What am I supposed to do?” Now, because Maxine has promised
that a kitten will be good for me, a bit of sharp-clawed marmalade fluff
sleeps in my mother’s bed at night and thunders through the house
with sideways prancing, feints, and leaps. If I sit in the big green armchair
to read, the kitten curls into my lap. I find my fingers caressing her
bright, soft stripes and thank Maxine.
~~~~~
Every Sunday, my husband calls from Kansas. “It’s been so
hot,” he tells me,”terribly sticky and hot, the worst I’ve
ever seen, you’re lucky to be in New England.” Steven is careful,
he is gentle; he is losing patience. “It doesn’t mean we can’t
try again,” he says. “It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong
with you.”
“Yes,” I tell him, “Yes, of course. Soon,” I promise.
While Steven talks of weather, his and mine, I plan what I will take
with me to the cemetery. Some nights I will go empty handed. Some nights
I will bring a blanket or bug spray or just the wine, white and cold.
R. will walk in from the other side, the side nearest to his house. He
will come with poetry in his head and his dog named Andrew Marvell on
a leash beside him and always, always too much food: cookies, crackers,
rich cheeses, smoked salmon, pickled herring, cashews, nectarines. R.
believes in food and drink and, like my mother, in love and time and poetry.
My mother believes also in doctors. At her urging, I go once a month
to her kindly, gray-haired gynecologist. He examines me and says I am
“as good as gold.” On my second visit, he gave me a printout,“Issues
and Procedures in Women’s Health:Partial Molar Pregnancy” by
Francis D. Ashley, MD. The first paragraph contained words that hurt my
eyes: uncommon, very frightening, complication, ‘hydatidiform
mole.’
“I don’t know much about this,” my mother’s doctor
admitted. “It’s just a freak of nature, something goes wrong.
Two sperm, one egg, but instead of twins, you get an abnormal placenta
and a fetus with too many chromosomes. Your baby never had a chance.”
I could not read the pages he gave me. I folded them neatly, carried
them away with me, and hid them far down in the back pocket of my empty
suitcase. Perhaps Steven will want them when I go back.
~~~~~
“Help me with my garden,” my mother said at the end of May.
She handed me a trowel and a pair of garden gloves. I went with her to
the back yard and knelt in the dirt while she broke up clods of soil and
weeded the lettuce and tried to charm me with poetry:
“She digs in her garden
With a shovel and a spoon,”
Out of habit, I finished the stanza for her, and while I spoke she smiled
as if a miracle were taking place.
“She weeds her lazy lettuce
By the light of the moon.”
Then we heard the music. My mother rose eagerly, brushing dirt from
her knees. “Suze, remember how you used to love parades?” and
again I trailed behind her, this time to the front yard.
It is Memorial Day, and nothing has changed since I was a child: the
high school band; the firemen riding invincible on the new fire truck;
the veterans with guns on their shoulders and triangles of extra cloth
stitched into the backs of their pants, a record of how time has thickened
them. “Go ahead,” my mother says. “A walk will do you good,”
so I follow the music, thinking I will walk just a little way.