Gift of God

I want to talk about my mother. No, no. Not the anguished confessions of therapy, more of a wake. I want to boil twigs and leaves to make a steaming mug of dirt brown tea, wrap up in a blanket, sit out on the chilly deck, under the dark blue night salted with white stars, and open up the faucet on my stream of consciousness. I want to reach deep into my chest and pull my mother forth—her cigarette in one hand, the gray smoke curling away, a flaming hot cup of coffee in the other; her beat-up Keds gripping the fleck-patterned linoleum in the kitchen. I want her in her forties when she thought she was no longer young and was no longer thin; wearing navy or tan Bermuda shorts topped by a plain, sleeveless, cotton shirt primitively laundered in our old tub washer and gruelingly ironed throughout the endless, flaming-hot summer that was my childhood; purple, blue, and green varicose veins tracing her stark white skin and making her legs look like road maps—the kind we kept in the glove box of our mammoth mint-green Buick.
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Although she was born in Indiana, Dot’s vocabulary and mannerisms suggested the south. Her father built Highway 51 running from the Gulf of Mexico up to the top of Wisconsin. Construction started in New Orleans the year Dorothy was born and ran north as fast as forty men could go working mule teams, digging road bed, and laying asphalt. My grandfather died when the crew reached southern Wisconsin and my grandmother put down roots in what became my hometown.
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Our town straddled the Wisconsin-Illinois border and, toponymistically, if not geographically, offered a demarcation of sorts between north and south. Illinois town names are southern: Centralia, Decatur, Vandalia—names that spoke of long, hot, dusty dry summers, a by-gone era and women named Blanche, as was my grandmother. Wisconsin, the complete opposite, was a land where Indians in loin cloths, stepping silently from the woods, met at the confluence of broad, green rivers to trade for skins with French trappers wearing coonskin caps and moccasins. Wisconsin towns follow the beds of its many rivers at evenly spaced intervals—as far as an ox cart could travel in a day—and bear French or Native names: Eau Claire, Prairie du Chien, Fond du Lac, or Menominee, Winnebago, Potawatami.
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Dot grew up going from town-to-town as her father pushed 51 north. My father claimed that when they first met, he couldn’t understand a word she said but they married. You may argue that the southern appellation is a stretch and I’ll listen but it does account for some of my mother’s foreignness; for example, calling pound cake Johnny cake, cantaloupe was muskmelon, and corn bread corn ‘pone.’ She loved Hoppin' John though she made it only rarely. I make it every New Year's Day, for luck as southern tradition dictates. I never heard Dot use “y’all” except in jest, but the remainder of the Southern lexicon was standard in our house, especially when Dot spoke to her mother but even my father adopted many of the phrases he once ridiculed. Dot preferred biscuits for Sunday breakfast and made them from scratch, pushing the rim of an empty juice can into the sticky dough and then hitting her wrist on the edge of the counter to free the paste-white disc from the barrel of the can.
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I was their second child. Between my alcoholic, army sergeant father and my mother who simply had to have been bipolar, I learned a rich and arresting vocabulary that not only shocked my teachers but to this day causes me grief. “Shit a meat ax.” I actually said that in kindergarten; it may even have been the first day. My father used it constantly. It was his way of expressing that he was unhappy. At four and having little experience with the outside world, I thought nothing of working these expletives into my vocabulary. It was in this same way that I first called my brother an asshole. He had brought the epithet home from the schoolyard and taught it to me. I’d already become a handful, largely because no one was paying any attention to my random acquisition of language and behavior.
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“Shut up or I’ll cram your teeth right down your throat,” was how my mother would settle our increasingly frequent arguments. I heard her bark into the phone, “You can stick that right up your ass and nail a board over it” so many times when she was working something out with my father that I thought it was a standard form of discourse; something of a non-endearment. It was only when I arrived in elementary school and began to meet other children and their families, that I realized how peculiar was mine. My mother had a narrow bandwidth for normal. She couldn’t stay “in the paint" too long, as they say in round ball. She was frightening when depressed; we held our breath thinking the least disturbance would finish her off. When she became manic, she was utterly terrifying.
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Her depressions had a southern gothic shading to them. Dot confided in me, when I was eight years old and she was about to leave us to go on one of her long, internal quests to find Eurydice and bring her back to the living world, that she never wanted children; had even wished, after each of us was born, that we would die so she wouldn’t have to take care of us. My most enduring memories of her, however, are both from her manic phases.
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I was still small—yellow seersucker pajamas, damp and sweat-tangled from a nap, clung about my legs; my baby fine hair was matted to the back of my neck—when she came bursting out the back door waving a frying pan in one hand and an egg and me in the other arm, shouting that it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. “I’m gonna show you,” exclaimed my mother’s bright red mouth with an enthusiasm that stretched her smile too thin, startling and worrying me because it felt so wrong. “You stand right here and watch me.”
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I stood as instructed; staring down at the sidewalk where a glob of white grease was melting in the center of a pan struck full force by the sun. My mother crouched low to the ground and pushed her hair out of her eyes, then cracked the egg against the sidewalk. “Never crack an egg on the edge of the pan or the bowl, Claudette; you get a cleaner separation when you strike a flat surface.” She pulled the white oval open to let the clear snot and yellow ball drop slowly from the perfectly broken shell. On landing in the pan, the yolk slid forward as though it had been hit from behind and fell, skidding on its chin. Gradually, under the fierce sun, the clear part of the egg clouded to white and thickened. My mother grabbed me by the arms, swinging me into the sky above her head. Spinning me around faster and faster, she shouted, “See!” jubilant and red faced. “You didn’t believe me, did you? But I was right, god dammit. I was right!” And she laughed loud and wildly, swinging me in wider and higher circles, letting my arms slip through her hands until she was barely holding my small wrists and I grew sick.
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That manic gaiety was what stuck with me. As Dot cycled through her ups and downs, her mouth was the most important visual signal as to who I was dealing with—bright red lips pulled tight across lupine teeth meant trouble. But, and here is where it was so confusing, before getting there—and I mean the rise up the slope of the sine wave to manic—as she rose from depression and became more voluble, my mother was fascinating and I thrilled to be in her company. The best times were when we would start some large project that consumed our attention and bonded us where love could not, as when we tore up the backyard on a whim one day to plant a stand of birch, my mother delivering a discourse in canoe building as she swung a pickax into the dark earth of early spring.
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Even after accounting for the tendency of mourners to say only good things at a funeral, my cousins’ eulogies at Dot’s service stunned me. Who were they talking about? Who would fold her arms around them and pull them up onto her lap? Who always had time to listen and an encouraging word to offer? Who taught them to knit? Who, for the love of god, made sock monkeys for every other child in the universe?
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Just after World War II, when new siblings and cousins were arriving annually, my maternal grandmother marked our births by making for each of us a red, felt Christmas stocking. Each stocking bore a heraldry of sorts. All stockings ended with a Christmas tree at the toe, blazing with beadwork candles and garlands. The boys’ stockings featured a yellow star and white drum over a rocking horse, while the girls’ symbols were uniformly an angel accompanied by a blue bell. One stocking, however, was so completely different, so anomalous from the others it always invited mocking commentary—mine.
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Mine was the only stocking to bear the completely secular image of a blue bird whose spread wings, at their apex, were about to push down hard; almost as though they knew from the start that I was destined to fly away. Shortly after my mother’s funeral, I dreamed of a birch stand where a blue bird sang sweetly to me. I walked toward it and extended my hand but it remained on its branch, singing a dream tune of almost unbearable sweetness. I was awakened by the phone; friends calling to invite me to golf.
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Waiting on the first tee, a western blue bird swooped down from the high sky to land in a nearby tree. The western blue bird is almost extinct. People have lived their entire lives in California and never seen one. Even more amazing, of all the variety of trees lining the tee box—fir, aspen, liquid amber, Japanese maple—the blue bird landed on a birch bough and began to sing. I walked slowly up to it and came within five feet of the branch. We looked directly into each other’s eyes for several seconds before it darted away. It followed me the entire round; from branch to branch, from one hole to the next. And for the next twelve months or more, whenever I played golf, a blue bird would arrive at some tee box and stay with me for a while.
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You may call it what you like. I know that bird was my mother.