Walking Distance

Sometime in her forties, my mother stopped moving forward. Somehow when we weren’t looking, she must have curtsied, performed a little shuffle sidestep, and exited stage right. In retrospect, she’d been rehearsing for some time. She went up to bed often without saying good night, or stayed home from family outings with ambiguous symptoms.

“You’ll be fine without me,” she always said.

She grew up in New York City and told stories about a magical New York childhood: Rockefeller Center and the big tree at Christmas, skating and picnicking in Central Park. After college she rented a tiny studio and walked to her job at a magazine every morning. She was beautiful, with large dark eyes, a quick smile, and quiet manners. She met my father one afternoon on a park bench where she was eating her lunch and he was reading. She left New York to follow him to graduate school.

She was away from the city for a long time, and when she finally went back she took me. I was sixteen, she was forty. I held her hand and we walked everywhere. When I got tired, I asked if we could take a bus or the subway, but she said New York was a walking city. Everything was walking distance, she said, so I squeezed her hand and tried to keep up.

My mother always said she knew my name before I was born, before she was pregnant, before she was even married. She’d always known, she said, that one day she would have a daughter named May.

“What if I’d been a boy?” I would ask.

“I knew you weren’t,” she said.

“You didn’t have any boys’ names picked out?”

“I knew you were a girl,” she said simply. “I knew you were my May.”

May. May may help. May, help? I was the plan all along, but it wasn’t enough. I was born into a role I couldn’t play.

The first Christmas she was in her room, I gave my mother a pot of reindeer moss (Cladonia rangiferina) wrapped in some silver foil. It’s a remarkable little gray-green lichen that can survive just about anything. Keep it in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp; it just goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Eventually my mother had a line of them on her windowsill. After she died I threw them all out, but for all I know they’re thriving in a landfill somewhere. I don’t care for it as a Christmas decoration anymore.

Sometimes I think my mother slowly removed herself from the story until the story simply no longer had a role for her to play. But now I’m forty and what do I know? We had happy times, though our happiness was always a little desperate because it was never an adequate fix for whatever was making her sad. That is how grief infects families and turns some of us into detectives. The first grief was my mother’s; I inherited it.

My first winter break home from college, I called my mom from a phone booth in the town square (this was when there still was a phone booth in the town square). She had been in bed all day and I thought it would make her happy to know I was looking at the city tree all lit up for Christmas. She’d always loved it.

A fabulously beautiful woman was waiting to use the phone. Her long winter coat looked like rabbit fur and her hands were tucked into a muff. She looked like a princess, as if she’d just dismounted from a sleigh. I turned toward the phone box and hunched over the receiver.

I asked my mom if she’d thought about volunteering, perhaps with children or animals? There was a long pause, during which I could hear her sniffling.

I peeked out at the waiting lady. A handsome man was talking to her, offering her the use of his cell phone.

My mother asked if the tree was pretty.

Yes, I said. It’s beautiful. Do you want me to come get you?

Maybe, she said.

But I knew she didn’t. We’d been here before. She wanted to come, until she didn’t.