Why I Write #2

I come from a family so challenged that, were we a Ronco Popeil slicer ad in which the amazing contraption faithfully shreds and tears as “Quick!," “Effortless!," and “Guaranteed!” urge the buyer on, the words flashing across our screen would be “Suicide!” “Alcoholism!” “Homosexuality!” I mean only to say that I did not have a good rapport with my mother. It is like running headlong into a minefield to write about our mother/daughter relationship, so suffice it to say we didn’t laugh much. “Suffice it to say.” That is my mother’s voice pulling me into her slipstream where I ride along behind her into the orange western sunset. Safe as a bug in a rug. There. See what I mean?
.
“I’m going to rip your arm out of its socket and beat you with the bloody end of it!” “How'd you like a sharp stick in the eye?” “Judas Priest!" Pronounced: JUDE assed preeeeeeest. These were some of my mother’s favorite expressions. She could turn a phrase better than anyone else. Even when I was being beaten and she was screaming abuse at me, I would reflect with pride on how the things I heard my mother say, I never heard anybody else say. I believed she could talk the blue down from the sky and I was intensely in awe of that. Is that when I first wanted to be a writer?
.
My mother's name was Dorothy, the inverse of Theodore. Both names mean 'gift of god;' one forward, the other in reverse. I loved listening to my mother. Those mornings before I started school and her friend Clara would come for coffee, I would pretend to play quietly nearby but secretly, I was listening. I wanted to hear the stories, hear her voice change as she confided a secret or again when she told of a betrayal. I learned that she believed the most outrageous things. Pranks too idiotic to be believed by any but the most gullible had become certified urban legends by the time she got hold of them and still she fell for them.
.
I once overheard her talking with a woman from her PTA. They were discussing Betty Bonette whose husband was a salesman and traveled quite a bit. Casting a sideways look at me, which I knew to mean she was speaking in code, the PTA woman began telling my mother about Betty's 'lady problem.' My mother said she'd talked to Betty. She swore the source of Betty's problem was yellow toilet paper; dyes used to make toilet paper match your bathroom walls rather than plain white. The way her friend looked at her made me realize my mother was insane. Yellow toilet paper was all Betty had to explain herself to the world. It was good enough to sucker the woman who raised me.
.
There was another story about a friend of a friend of someone’s cousin who bought a coat made in India. It was the end of the season and the woman put the coat away, placing it in a box and sliding it to the back of her closet. When the chilly season arrived again, the women pulled the box from the dark, warm back of her closet and slipped it on. Immediately, she felt it squirm as though alive. She died when the poisonous vipers just hatched from the eggs that had incubated for months in the lining of the coat devoured the first food they could find. I love that story. My mother actually believed it. She would just swallow anything hook, line, and sinker.
.
One of the last times I saw Dot, I had just returned from Italy. I was showing her pictures of Roman catacombs. Even though she tried to be appreciative, I could see that she was growing more upset with each new view of stacked skulls and crossed arm bones. I asked whether it was too macabre. She looked at me without comprehension, as though I were speaking Urdu. What then? "It's just. . . well, how will these people find their bodies on Judgement Day if their bones are all mixed up?" I looked at her as though she were speaking in tongues. "What will they take up into heaven with them?"
.
My mother’s voice is always with me, absorbed into the very fabric of my psyche where she broadcasts a show 24/7 on the internal station of the superego that Annie Lamont calls radio K-FUCKED. She died in April, my mother, the month Demeter trades places with her daughter Persephone in hell to renew the world. On the day of mom's funeral, in Wisconsin, the sun shone fiercely against the crystal clear late winter ice. Then it snowed, the wind came up, it rained, washing the snow and ice away, lighting split the sky, and lilac bushes exploded in ecstasy behind garages and along fences everywhere filling the air with an aching desire for another chance at life. The service had nothing of my mother in it; only her ashes, the charred remains. She had already been sucked to the underworld.
.
When I write, Dorothy returns from Hades and gets to work subverting the narrator. I have the story arc, but mom has the voice. It’s not like hearing her voice inside my head. What happens is that I begin to see the world the way she saw it and the only way I can capture the images that unwind when I write is to use her language. I sometimes suspect the only reason I write is her voice. To hear it again.
.
Aside from the engineering satisfactions of the craft, the major reason I write is that the time I spend working through a story is the time my mother and I have the most civil conversation of our lives despite the fact she has been dead for years. In an imaginary space where I can reinvent her as I need her, we get lost in each other. Lulled by our temparary truce, I operate comfortably in my own skin, feeling safe enough to be like her, to adopt her expressions and manner of speaking while she, like the good witch in a fairy tale, sees and speaks what is in my heart.