Ravine

Dad would have turned seventy-five that day Mom drank so much she fell. The fall shook her brain against her skull and bruised it. She lay unconscious on the condo floor for two days. The Red Cross, where she’d volunteered and now was paid to answer phones, sent someone up. They called the ambulance and us.

Four of us flew in, prepared for death, given Mom’s small chance of surviving the delicate surgery. We arrived to find her hooked to life support, unconscious, but alive. We went to her apartment to spend the night.

As I walked through that door, my legs nearly gave out, Mom, looking into your life this way, the piles of dirty clothes, the unwashed tub, the dust, the dishes, and the yellow cigarette-smoke film gumming the velvet upholstery, tabletops, walls, like a sepia photograph. I thought you never cleaned our house because there were so many of us. You just didn’t care about yourself enough to clean. Mopping up the pool of shit you’d lain in for two days, I thought of the sweet scalloped soaps, snow-white damask, translucent bone china of the Hotel Fontenelle.

My heart roared with pity.

You recovered, lived alone again. Stopped drinking, thanks to your medicine.

We insisted on a cleaning woman, you allowed her. Back to your TV, your smokes, and your puzzles, dancing with dukes in romantic novels. “Go out and play!” I wanted to say, but it was some ideal life for you.

This ravine between your near-death and your death gave me time to think.

I remembered years back a Sunday after Mass, pulling sweet rolls apart. The phone rings, you answer, you sink on the flying steps, crying and crying. Your brother Johnny died.

I was young enough to be confused—why were you so sad? You’d only mentioned him once or twice, he never came to visit, you never went. You hardly knew each other.

I now know that was why you mourned. No parents, no siblings. Can I forgive you for the damage you have suffered?

•••

The movement of glaciers plucks away stones. Some that are lodged in my heart you remove, leaving soft lakes in your wake that echo your voice:

There’s nothing so beautiful in Woman as a low and gentle voice.

If you have but two loaves, sell one, and buy hyacinths for the soul.

I will bet a silk pajama there isn’t any three-l lama.

Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!

Poetry was natural to you, part of conversation. Something Donna Reed had overlooked.

You left us manners like a lovely coat, a gift even strangers admire.

And for that school night in the middle of my tortured adolescence when you said: “You’ll like this movie. Stay up and watch it with me.” An Affair to Remember. To watch it, just the two of us, was like some tremendous dessert, salted with sniffles for star-crossed love. I was as grateful as if you had made it yourself. The love the love the love the love. The almost unbearable love.

•••

I want it to be one way or another: a wonderful dad and a horrible mother, a heart-seeking mom and a cruel dad. This won’t explain the time we had.

I want it to be one way or the other. How could you approve of his ambition?

How could he approve of your neglect? How close I am to you and how you distance me.

Life is weathers passing over, coloring rock and lake and clover. Day or night, which is right? Man or woman, which is human?

•••

I find a picture of a you I never knew: sitting on one leg on a hand-hewn porch in Jackson Hole in flannel shirt and jeans, as if you belong in cowboy life. A look I’ve never seen before or since radiates from your young face: pure and serious confidence. You show a natural faith in the natural world and a natural self. A woman I could have befriended. I might have traveled to Montana with her.