More Crap from Mummy

Messages now come to Sarah, not in dramatic psychosexual upheavals, or through the medium and the fruits and nuts, but from simple intuitions. “Little voices”, as she calls them, tell her everything; she knows what she has to do. With Harry gone and Gloria well on her way to adulthood, the split pea can resume her search for free thought. She takes to the atlas to map out the next phase of her destiny. By October she has done more than seriously think about taking a trip to Pingp’yangpoong. She has already made arrangements to go. On the first of the year she’s scheduled to leave for the Mahabharatan subcontinent, around Cape Boaz, the southern tip of deepest darkest Jujuba, on an international medical supply ship flying a flag of mercy. From there, she’ll go north as far as the train will take her, pick up some guides, leg it on the long trek up the mighty Pu Mountains and start looking for Lord Bharavi in the flesh.

The circumstances surrounding the death of Corn Dog opened doors that shed some light on the dark side of her soul. Now, with Harry’s passing, the marble goddess feels the block of this material world could fall away from her entirely, that her spirit could be on its own, following in the streamlines of the buck, the same lanes that Z cruises, where the nature of the body is voidness, were it not for a pair of sticky particulars. One is the mother-daughter talk. Unless she tells Gloria now, levels with her sister-to-sister about who she is and what she’s done, she imagines she will go to her grave holding the secret of her denial of the child’s real father’s identity and the part she played in his death. But she has had this ache in her head for over a decade and, as is so often the case with chronic pain, as the years go by the sufferer becomes one with the suffering and doesn’t mind it as much. It’s the second item that’s more upsetting: over ten months have passed since Harry’s death and Laudette is still being contentious and threatening to quit, all because of Sarah’s open admission that she thought her husband’s end was a stroke of good luck.

If she quits, thinks Sarah, I’ll have to kiss my travelling plans goodbye. I’ll never find anyone whose hands I’d trust more to leave Gloria in than Miss Lord’s.

Yet every morning the big woman clomps through the house eating donuts and praying out loud heedless that Gloria, getting ready for school, is within earshot. She begs the Almighty’s pardon for Sarah. “Emanual, forgive that girl for she knows not what she did when she wished Sir Harry into Your care. Please send Your Brand, Your Holy X-Rays and make her see the light and hear Your angels’ horns and heavenly choir, anything that will deafen her to those goldarn little voices.”

Sarah notes the irony. She berates herself when she keeps things inside, yet the few times she has tried to open up, as when she told her father about her love, the ladies who lunch about her past, and lately when she tried to explain to Laudette the metaphysical particulars of Harry’s passing, she has drawn censure. She must wait until Gloria is off to school to defend herself.

“Why I didn’t go for the buck when I had the chance is something I’ll never be able to explain, but you, Miss Lord, forgave me for it instantly. I guess you only forgave me because you knew how much I was suffering about it. I thought I could be truthful with you about Harry. Now after all these months you still damn me for what happened to him. Harry died of natural causes. All I did was accept them and work with them.”

“That’s not what someone said on that day that will live in infantry. Someone said she witched it on him.”

“I’m sorry I don’t live up to your moral standards. But I have my own,” Sarah offers, her voice weakening.

The sitter folds her arms, turns her back, and walks away.

When the hep kitten Gloria comes home from school, she finds her mother in the back parlor, at the piano, waiting for her. Sarah bids Gloria have a seat on the bench next to her. Gloria takes the high end. Sarah stares at the keys as she speaks, Gloria likewise, as close to sister-to-sister as they’re going to get. “As you probably know I never was a good mother,” starts the peach gloomily, stumbling over the words. “At first, I thought that because I was young I didn’t know what I was doing, but as I got older I didn’t grow any wiser, only more tolerant of my ignorance.…” She rambles, full of explanations, hints, and apologies. The heart-to-heart talk goes astray, “It was tough for me to get along and I never had much time to spend with you. From the beginning I was afraid of everything and I masked my fears in makeup and fancy clothes. You were a special child. At first I thought you were retarded, then I saw how bright you were. You could see clear through me. You seemed to sense how uneasy I was with you and you did me a favor by being standoffish.” She sighs. “You’re brave like your father, not frightened like me.”

“My father?”

“Just forget him,” begs the split pea. It’s the best she can do.

Just more crap from Mummy then, Gloria thinks, nothing new here. But actually Sarah does have a surprise for her. She clears her throat and gets the talk back on track. She intends to reveal her wanderlust. “My tour of duty is up, both as a wife and as a psychic warrior. In a few months Mummy is going to see her Teacher, who lives on a magic mountain in the faraway East.”

The child is mother to the woman. Gloria looks down on Sarah and shakes her head, poor silly Mummy.

Sarah chokes, continuing. “You see, I love Lord Z, and I want to marry him. I think that he’s already married and has more than one wife, but I don’t care. It’s ironic because—did I ever tell you?—I was brought up in a sect of religious fanatics who practiced polygamy. I think part of the reason I love Z so is that he reminds me of the Old Goat I was forced to pray to when I was a girl your age.”

As it was in the beginning, to Glory Bee, God is omnipresent. She feels her inner space as full of God, and the world around her as God’s country, and thus sees no reason to travel, either mentally or physically, to find more. Her mother is like a hungry ghost transposed, a flesh and blood being trying desperately, impossibly, to ingest soul stuff. However, knowing nothing else but God, Gloria cannot see that her mother lacks clarity of inner vision. She cannot understand why her mother goes to such extremes in search of spirituality. Instead of being patient with her, Gloria is aggravated by her stupidity.

Bad enough Mummy talks about these fruity fantasies as if there were real, but to act on them and actually go on a wild goose chase, looking for magic mountains and swamis on the wind—what a sad case! With the double whammy of money and beauty, why doesn’t she use her powers to make home life easy and men manageable? If a beautiful woman, just past thirty and filthy rich, can’t make the mountain come to her, who can? And of all the times to travel, Nastis in the Titanic, Kimrakazis in the Deep Blue Sea!

“I leave on the first of the year, if Laudette agrees to sit here with you.”

The cat girl thinks she might be able to get rid of two birds with one swipe. “Lawdy? Mummy, I think you should know: she keeps telling me about a death wish you put on Daddy-o. I tell her she’s full of soup, and she shouldn’t be talking about you behind your back. But you know her, she won’t listen. I think I’d be a lot better off staying here on my own, so I don’t have to hear what a rotten egg you are all the time. Don’t you?”

But Laudette’s audacity only goes to further reassure Sarah that without the sitter’s cooperation she will not be going anywhere. However loud Miss Lord is about the uncanny factors that went into Harry Swan’s demise, that’s how meticulously true to her word she is when it comes to staying perfectly “mum” about the Corn Dog tragedy.

And regardless of Sarah’s own reluctance to overemphasize moral principles to Gloria, never before has she counted more on the sitter’s good sense. Although all along Sarah maintained that she preferred Gloria raised as a freethinker, now that the girl has developed into a young woman, the split personality, remembering all the trouble coming of age caused her, is not so sure she wants her daughter on the loose looking for the free love she sought. While Gloria has a mature face and figure, looking almost old enough to be mistaken for Sarah’s sister (were you to look beyond the superficial feature that one sister would be white as snow and the other tan as toast), she is still only a thirteen-year-old girl, not a baby who needs sitting, but a minor, not yet of age legally or otherwise to go without adult supervision.

What frightens Sarah most is that the sitter, so out of line of late, might actually go over the hill and leave just when she needs her most. The last thing Sarah wants is the responsibility of overseeing the adolescence of a girl, not only taller, but who is in many ways mentally and emotionally more mature than she.

“Unlike me,” Sarah says, “Miss Lord is consistent, true to her word. All things considered, even though she condemns me, she’s the best influence I could have on you, Gloria. You see, a mother and daughter should be further apart in age—”

“Thanks for your confidence in me, Mummy,” Gloria says sarcastically. “I happen to be a very strong person, not some formless pap waiting to be molded by old stick-in-the-mud Lawdy.”

“Of course you’re a strong person, dear. I didn’t mean it like that. Only that one needs others to lean on.”

“Well, not me, Mummy.”

Sarah murmurs some encouragement to herself, then says to Gloria, “I can send you to boarding school or you can stay here with Miss Lord. Which will it be?”

Gloria will take the sitter.

“I haven’t discussed my plan with her yet. I would appreciate it if you would let me bring it up when I think the time is right.”

“Are you making Lawdy my legal guardian?”

“No, she’ll still be your baby-sitter, but you do what she says anyway, no arguments.”

Gloria, wise enough to know there’s no point in arguing with a fruit, agrees to keep her mouth shut. She goes to her tent and sets to thinking how she can make the most out it.

Good riddance, Mummy. After all, what girl’s dreams of paradise include her mother? Now to get rid of old die-hard Lawdy. She doesn’t have what it takes to run the whole show either. Maybe I can get her to crack. Or—she thinks about her uncles Early and Bones—maybe I can get her to come unglued and have some fun for a change.