MOTHER

“Mother is going to come stay with us for a little while.”

The smells and the heat and the idle restlessness from that ancient visit to Leroy came racing instantly back when my mom broke the news about my grandmother’s imminent visit. For a moment, I was back in Mother’s house, trapped and restless, and separated from my mom by an invisible gulf.

“Mother has started forgetting things,” Mom explained to my sisters and me. “I’d like for her to come out here and let us take care of her for a little while.” The phrase out here carried with it a silent nod to our father’s belief in California as the antidote to life in the hot and gritty South or in fast-paced, dangerous New York. In opening our home to Mother, we were hoping to help ease her mind, to give her the chance to regroup and come back into her real self, to realize that she was only tired—exhausted and nothing more.

The way I saw it, Mother in California might have meant a bit of sunshine and fresh air for her, but it meant the opposite for us; our lives would feel more like her life, and our home would feel more like that house with the strange smells and the long, flat hours stretching on and on into the distance. It might also mean that my mother would disappear again into the self she had become in Alabama, the one I couldn’t hold to tightly enough.

Compounding my dread was the fact that I was now a senior in high school and had begun to feel intense pressure from a part of my mind wholly dedicated to the task of tabulating the Embarrassment Quotient of every situation. The idea of Mother as an indefinite houseguest sent that embarrassment meter shooting into the red.

As Mom related it, Mother had started behaving strangely about four months ago. My aunts, who had her with them in New York, said she would insist upon going out to run errands and then wander off, mistaking the streets of Pelham and Mount Vernon for those of Leroy. At any given moment and with minimal instigation, she would become dead set on giving anyone, everyone, a good old-fashioned whipping. Someone might offer her a cup of coffee, and she’d reply, “Go on out in the back and git me a switch, ’cause I’m fixin’ to whup ya,” forearms tensed like snakes homing in on their prey. Aunt Gladys claimed to have narrowly missed a good beating by perching herself on one leg and raising her arms like a kung fu master, making B-movie martial arts noises until Mother called her a fool and stalked away.

“I don’t know how long she’ll need to stay with us,” Mom continued, “but it should do her good to get away. I know my sisters need a break.”

I’d seen Mother only a smattering of times in the span of ten or eleven years since I was last in Leroy. She’d visited us now and again, and there had been a Christmas sometime not too terribly long before when the extended family had congregated in California. Those visits were brief and blurry to me, though her presence, and the conundrum it posed, loomed large to me always.

When she finally arrived that spring, she was so much slighter than I remembered. Of course, I was bigger myself, but there was something different about the scale of her. She was wiry, and her breasts and stomach had shrunk away to almost nothing. She’d also given up her thick glasses. Her eyes, once cloudy with cataracts, were open and clear, and I tried to take her in as if through them rather than my own, thinking that if I could see her afresh, perhaps I’d be able to hear and understand and love her the way I should have the first time around.

Mother stood on the landing just inside our door, inching forward as we each hugged her, welcoming her into our home. What if we should succeed? What if being sweet with her, just as we had been asked, could lead her back into our lives and back into the world the way it was supposed to be? When it was my turn to hug her, she felt strong beneath her coat. And underneath the perfume one of my aunts must have dabbed her with in preparation for her departure, she smelled just like the tobacco and the woodsmoke and the cane syrup of Alabama.

She was quiet, wary. Evenings, she’d sit with Jean, my parents, and me, and Wanda sometimes, too, in silence. Sometimes, under her breath, I thought I heard her muttering curses. In the afternoons while I was at school, she tried to elude my mother’s watchful eye and venture out into the streets she thought would lead her back to her own house, her own life. At first, I thought she must just be eager to return to her own familiar belongings, the places she knew and liked, but at Christmas, when everyone was home, she touched Conrad’s thigh and called him by my grandfather’s name: Herbert. “No, Mother,” he told her, gently returning her hand to her own lap. How far into a past only she could recognize would any of our voices have to travel before reaching her? Perhaps all the way back to the place my mother used to reminisce so much about, the one I thought would still be waiting for us in 1978—where Christmas morning meant ripe, sweet oranges and wrist-thick peppermint sticks; where the cotton, melons, and chickens, the whole cured hogs and the catfish swimming in the pond belonged to them; where the brick house on its vast acres made a world all its own, set back, perhaps sometimes only moments at a time, from the world beyond, with its rigid facts and despicable truths.

Truths like the story about one of my distant relations, a great- or a great-great-uncle—someone Mother would have known when she was a young woman in Leroy—who stopped into a bar one night after having sold hundreds of acres of his own timber, his pockets bulging with the cash, or just having the poor sense to boast of it. He’d peeled a few dollars from a fat roll in sight of the wrong pair of eyes. Or else he’d forgotten how quickly news traveled in that town, and his need to slap a few backs and stand a few drinks had given word of his good fortune time to overtake him on the road. It’s possible I have the story wrong. He could have gone straight home. It could have happened on his front porch or in his own house. It doesn’t matter. One way or another, the bullet would still have found him—that bullet or some other—affording one or another white man the ease with which to walk away with all that money, confident he had nothing to fear, accurate in his hunch that, though he’d just killed another man, the law was on his side.

Occasionally, Mother managed to escape her daughter’s gaze, wandering the streets of our neighborhood like a vagabond or a prophet, but we were always able to find her. In a neighbor’s yard. Walking slowly up or down North Texas Street. Arguing with the cashier at the doughnut shop. Once or twice, when the police were enlisted to help, Mother was convinced we had called in some corrupt sheriff from way back when, and she glared at us with incredulous contempt.

No matter who found her, Mother always came back angry—for being kept prisoner, barred from conducting her affairs. Our response was to humor her. “Sorry, Mother,” we’d submit. Only my mom dared correct her. “No, Mother,” she’d say. “You’re in California now.” But no one told her when she was—that her husband was gone, and Mama Lela, too—that even if she were to “come to” here or anyplace else, she’d still likely find herself unmoored, an alien adrift.

Despite the discouraging fact that having Mother with us was improving nothing, my mom continued to try, giving her things to do with her hands, asking her to cook or explain or reminisce, anything to slow her descent into the disease we’d all by then started to call by its proper name.

I remember the sorrow in my mom’s eyes when she told me Daddy Herbert had died. I was only four or five years old, but I recognized a heartbreak so undisguised it collapsed me in tears. My mother’s father has died, I told myself. My mother’s world has been touched by death. But really, what I was crying for was myself and the fact that my mother, having come from a man who was susceptible to death, might one day die herself. I wept and wept, my body buckling under a weight I was too small to have ever considered before, a weight that pushed in from all sides. My mother had been touched by death; it was no stranger to her. There was no way to undo that, no way to make death forget her name.

But this time, it was something else she stood facing. What did she see in Mother’s face, the brow knotted in doubt, the mouth crimped shut in anger or fear? What did she hear in the silence Mother mostly gave back? I never asked. Caught up in my own adolescent crushes and fantasies, worries and preoccupations, I barely stopped to think what kind of trauma this must have amounted to for my mom. I could see that she was more than tired, that she was mentally exhausted from the stress of wanting to stop time and fix whatever was broken inside Mother—but I said nothing.

I began finding reasons to linger after school, not wanting to rush back to the disquiet I’d come to feel with Mother at home. Sometimes, I stopped into a favorite teacher’s classroom as he was erasing the boards, and we’d talk for a few minutes about poems or novels. Other kids were racing home or changing into gym clothes for sports practice. The band, which I’d quit after eighth grade, was off in the distance; the brass notes and percussion traveled through the air and reached us almost languidly. I was motivated by something I couldn’t articulate. I was sniffing out what else the things I was reading might offer me, some way of seeing or being in the world that might help lead me…where, exactly? I only knew the very real wish, like an itch under the skin, to get there. When my teacher and I talked about a poem or a story, I felt its words rolling toward me in great waves that crashed, receded, then gathered force and returned. The language and how it hit me assured me I was withstanding something, that language was marking me. But sitting there day after day talking with that man as if what we said to one another had never before been said—as if the sound our voices made together really did matter—that was marking me, too.

My teacher was young, just a few years older than Wanda, who by then was already thirty-one. Perhaps I’d fallen so easily into our unfolding conversations because I was used to confiding in people his age. Because of his age, and the fact that he was relatively new to the school—unlike other of his colleagues, he had never taught my siblings or met my parents—he represented a different kind of authority. He wasn’t handsome. He was exaggeratedly tall and angular. But he was earnest; he talked about works of literature and art as if they were the keys to a deeper, more genuine way of living. I don’t know that he lived that way outside of the classroom, but from the way he talked, I knew he wanted to. Sometimes, the two of us would walk across the quad to the school library, and he’d pick a book off the shelf for me to take home. It was on one of those afternoons, while my teacher was disappeared in the meager stacks, that I noticed a portrait of Conrad hanging midway through a lineup of former Students of the Year. “That’s my brother,” I told him when he reemerged, as if Conrad up there on the wall might help to assure him that he was justified in devoting so much time to a girl half his age.

Soon I began stopping by his classroom every day after school. My teacher would turn one desk around to face mine, and without feeling it happen, we’d talk for an hour, sometimes more. Then I’d collect my things and walk home, with an optimism that helped brace me against whatever unease Mother might have been stirring up at home.

One afternoon while I was at school, Mother cornered my mom in our front yard, brandishing an actual “switch,” a young branch she’d yanked from the shrubs and stripped of its leaves so that, were it to strike someone, it would cut quickly through the air and hurt like the devil. There was an attempt to reason, then a standoff, and then a struggle. My mom, racked with her own grief, was no match for Mother’s desire to be done with the bewildering time and place in which she found herself, and to be done with all of us. How could my mother strike back against an old woman whose anger was not anger but fear swirling in every direction? How could she lash back at her own mother, even if doing so was the only way to save her?

Seeing her mother like that must have tipped Mom into a state I didn’t associate with her, a state of panic, and that thought activated my concern. Did she run for cover? If she had, Mother might have taken advantage of the opportunity to get away. Did she lurch for the arms that whirled the switch in the air like a knife? Surely the promise of one of Mother’s beatings (a promise Mother, incidentally, made good on) would have been secondary to the threat Mother’s escape would have posed. Mom must have called out for help, because eventually a neighbor, glimpsing the tussle through his front window, emerged to help corral Mother back indoors.

By the time I got home, everyone in the house was slumped under a mix of enervation and fright. Jean had taken me aside and told me all the details in a voice barely above a whisper, not wanting Mom to have to relive the day’s events by hearing the story narrated again. I remember that I felt guilty, but also, I am ashamed to admit, lucky, to have been away when the struggle took place. My mom made some calls. By evening, she’d found a way back into herself as we knew her, into her voice and her mind-set as our mother. She had even mustered a thin, brittle laugh at the skill with which Mother still knew how to hand out a whipping.

When Aunt Gladys arrived to take Mother back to New York, she dispelled a small part of our anxiety. She was younger than my mom but older in a kind of visceral experience—strong, tough even, but still feminine. Aunt Gladys had the family eyes—large, expressive, and deep—and my mother’s strong, wide nose that married an unexpected vigor to her beauty. She had a physicality that Mother submitted to more easily. Aunt Gladys was a switchboard operator at a hospital in the Bronx. “Op-er-a-tor!” she sang into the receiver, when she was on the job, like a lady in a movie. She laughed easily, and her laughter was either big and explosive or silent but perceptible, seeping out practically from her pores. It didn’t seem that a woman like Aunt Gladys could ever be tired or that she might secretly be dreading the family work that lay ahead in New York. “Okay, Mother, here we go,” Aunt Gladys said when the day finally came for their departure. When she and Mom said their goodbyes, the physical mirroring I always recognized in the two of them inverted. Aunt Gladys was, for a moment, the original, and it was my mother who resembled her—not the other way around. My mother’s eyes, her nose, even the dimples in her cheeks, were, for a moment, not working together to conjure an image of herself but rather one of her sister. Something under the surface united them, too. A knowing and a sorrow I had not seen in my mother for a very long time.