Mother: A Memoir

This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever been asked to write. I’m accustomed to writing fiction, which means you can make things up as you go along.   If you don’t like something or someone, you can simply change it.   But here I have to tell the truth.  Not only that, but I have to tell the truth without being sentimental, maudlin, or irreverent.   You see, I’m talking about my mother here, the woman who gave me life, who nurtured and protected me until I was old enough to protect myself.  The nurturing part never stops, or at least we wish that it wouldn’t, although we often don’t realize this until it does.  More on this later. 

I’ll start with some recollections.  I’m seven, eight maybe, returning from my first day back at school.  It’s September in the San Fernando Valley, suffocatingly hot and smoggy,  and I’m quick-stepping up the last long hill.  I’m mad about something but I’m not sure what--the start of school, the end of a too short summer,  some petty rivalry brewing.  I  hustle up the bank of ivy, under the canopy of oaks,  and  burst through the front door, angrily announcing my arrival:  “MOM!” 

No answer.  Nothing but a quiet emptiness in the house, as if its resident spirit had gone AWOL.   The silence is spooky:  usually I’m greeted by a circus maximus of younger brothers and sisters hooting, howling, and clawing at my feet.   I try again, meekly.  “Mom?”    Then once more, fearful:  “Mo-om?”   I creep down the dark hallway of our L-shaped house, switching lights on as I go.  My imagination runs wild with visions of kidnappers and axe murderers.  What have they done to my mother?  I begin praying:  Heavenly Father, please oh please oh please make my mother safe and okay and I’ll never ever do anything again oh please. . . 

I find her, finally, in the laundry room casually sorting clothes.   My fears and anxieties vanish.  So do my vain promises to my Maker.   “MOM!” I roar.   My mother turns and flashes me a  starlet’s smile.  “How was you day?” she asks.   I feel like crying.  Instead, I rear back and really let her have it:  “Where were you!” 

She looks puzzled.  “Why, in here,” she replies innocently.  “Folding clothes.”   

She obviously isn’t getting it.  I’m hot, sweaty, angry,  and I want her to know it.  “I called and you didn’t answer!” 

She points to the washing machine, pounding earnestly away.  “It must have been the washer,” she says.  “There’s Jell-O in the fridge!”   At this point I throw up my hands.  I’m thinking, She must be dense.  Or an angel.  Who else could return my rattlesnake venom with such sweet goodwill?   I spin around and pretend to stomp off.   In fact I’m hiding in the hall, watching to see if  her feet magically leave  the floor.

Back then I had a reputation as a rowdy trouble-maker, the proverbial bishop’s kid.  “Hell on wheels,” the neighbors used to call me.   So this time I’m in fourth grade, and my mother is entering the office at Lanai Road Elementary School.   She notices me sitting outside the principal’s office.   At first her eyes light up like the Fourth of July.   Then her joy turns to worry.  She settles down beside me and begins smoothing my forehead with her hand, as if checking for a fever.  “Are you all right?” she asks. “Why are you here?  Are you waiting to see the nurse?”

She begins checking my pulse, my ears, my mouth.

Meanwhile, I’m dying.  Hughie Greenup, Tom Doria, and the rest of my buddies are sauntering by, witnessing first-hand her Florence Nightingale act.  I’m supposed to be tough, immune, un-Mothered.  I’ve got an image to uphold and she’s single-handedly destroying it!

“No, Mom, not the nurse.”

“Then who?  What?” She’s genuinely worried about me, ready to call the paramedics.

Staring straight ahead, I  mutter cooly,  “The principal.”  

I will never forget the look of disappointment on her face.   “The principal?  Again?  But you were going to do better you said.  You were going to--you promised--”

I’m embarrassed, humiliated, ashamed of what I’ve done.  I have no defense except being more offensive.  I snarl crossly:   “I know!  I know!  I know!”  And I brush her hand away.

My mother is hurt but refuses to show it.  She smiles and hands me a brown sack--the lunch I  left on our kitchen counter that morning. Later, when she’s gone, I peek inside and find a Hostess Snowball Twin,  my favorite dessert. It wasn’t in my lunch earlier, so she must have gone to the store and bought it especially for me.  I carefully remove the plastic wrapper and bite into the soft coconut-flavored shell.  I chew slowly, but  the sweetness eludes me.   

More memories.  My mother’s shaking me awake at an obscenely early hour.  “Are you ready?” she whispers.

I groan in edge-of-death fashion. “Ready for what?”          I’m eleven,  still groggy from a swimming party the night before.  

“Don’t you remember?”

Unfortunately, I do.   The day before she had asked me to join her on a drive into the city.  She frequently  requests my company, especially when my father is out of town.  I think she wants me along for protection, although I don’t know why.  I have no training in self-defense or the martial arts.   If we are attacked, I’ll  be a perfectly useless 100 pounds of cowering pre-adolescence. 

I have no idea where we are going, and I sleep most of the way.  We’re on the freeway, I know that.  I also remember my mother’s bribe--a Baskin Robbins ice cream cone,   “if I behave.” 

When I wake up, it’s still dark and we’re parked near the entrance to a big ugly warehouse buried deep in the high-rise of downtown L.A.   It’s dark and creepy,  with shadows brooding on the walls.  Gigantic trucks are rolling in,  and dark-skinned men are unloading wooden crates.  They speak quickly, in a strange staccato tongue I can’t understand.

My mother pulls up in our old Saratoga, an ugly two-tone I call “The Tank.”  She climbs out and waits for me to do likewise.  She’s wearing her long camel-colored coat, with a shiny black purse tucked under her arm.    I follow behind her as if she’s a human shield.  Sheets of water, rainbow-ringed,  stain the alley streets.  A nauseating blend of smells stinks up the early morning air:   fresh and rotten fruit, tar, oil, blacktop, cigarettes, hot coffee.  

I try to appear confident, unfazed, John Wayne-ish, but my false courage makes a quick exit when a tough-looking man saunters towards us.  He’s wearing a Pancho Villa mustache, a sleeveless t-shirt, and the word “Angelica” tabooed on his left bicep.  He doesn’t look happy. Any second he’s going to pull a six-shooter out of his hip pocket and gun us down like dogs.  I’m sure of it.  I position myself more strategically behind my mother, then close my eyes, waiting for the worst.  Then the impossible happens:   My unassuming mother gently commands the man with her hands to load a dozen crates into the trunk of our Saratoga.  The man nods smartly, as if the Virgin Mary had spoken..  As he barks at his men in their secret tongue,  my mother backs our car into the warehouse.  Instantly the men form a firemen’s line and begin passing the crates, one by one, towards our Saratoga.  My mother waits patiently, with folded arms, for the men to complete their work.   When they finish, she nods at Pancho Villa.   He barks at his men who instantly scatter.   I stare at my mother, dumbfounded.  Is this the same woman who at home can’t get me to rinse a plate or make my bed?   My mother turns to me and smiles.  “Ready?”

Sunday nights, my mother drives across the City of Fallen Angels to visit her father in his brick apartment on Coronado Street.  I’m usually with her.  While she and Grandpa Mortensen chat in the tiny front room, I  watch Bonanza on the color TV.  It’s a special treat because we still have a black-and-white set at home.  I have unlimited access to the candy jar on the coffee table, which is routinely replenished by a local policeman.   I flip through Grandpa Mortensen’s Buffalo Bill book, hoping that if I show enough interest someday he’ll give it to me.  (Twenty-five years later it is in my possession.)   Sometimes he interrupts to tell me a story about the olden days, when he was a fearless bear hunter in the mountains of central Utah.  He’s old now, a small, frail, bird-like man with a few wisps of white hair on his patchy pink scalp.  It’s hard to imagine him going hand-to-hand with the vacuum cleaner let alone a black bear, but his stories take me magically back in time.  So does his Brach’s candy.

My mother and I return late that night.  I feign sleep in the front seat, my head resting against her shoulder as she hums a sad song from a time I can’t recall..

There’s more.  I’m sitting on the green sofa in front of the Clap-Trap (my father’s phrase) with a book open in my lap, doing homework.  There is a table to my left with a big gold lamp, a stack of books, and a peanut butter sandwich or some other evening snack. My mother is sitting beside me, searching a catalog for the perfect Christmas card to represent our family this year.   Intermittently she  asks me how I’m doing, if I need help, what am I working on?  Because I earn good grades, I enjoy  certain privileges.   My siblings earn good grades as well, but for some reason my mother likes to showcase mine, probably because I have nothing else to showcase:  I’m not an athlete like my older brother or a piano prodigy like my younger sister, and I lack the shameless adorability of my baby brothers and sisters.  But I have no curfew or bedtime.  My mother assumes that I’m studying, and I am.   My relationship with her is quite different from the bond between my older brother and my father.  They play chess together late into the night, sharing hot cups of Ovaltine.  My older brother shadows my father around the yard, the garage, the tennis courts.  I don’t remember following my father anywhere, although I probably did.  I do remember trying to avoid him, especially when yard work was on the agenda. 

Tonight I’m staying up extra late.  Johnny Carson has stepped trippingly across the stage of the Tonight Show and is starting his midnight monologue.  It’s a school night, and I ought to be in bed.  I am, after all, in fifth grade.     

 My mother has assumed a lying position on the sofa, legs bent, head propped sideways on a small sofa cushion.   Once she assumes this posture,  it won’t be long before her eyelids close and her mouth opens, comically at first.  This is understandable: the sleeping state is surely our most vulnerable.  We make odds sounds and our faces try out weird disguises.   But I’ve seen pictures of my mother in her youth.  She looked like a movie star, a young Betty Davis less the sinister edges.  Her face radiated the poetic ideal: Truth, Beauty, Goodness.

Tonight her sleep is the sleep of sheer exhaustion.  I  look down at her hair which is dark and stiff from the gradual accumulation of hair spray.  There are lines in her forehead, and her mouth curls downward sadly.  I wonder about this sadness.  Am I the source?  Is it my father?  My brothers and sisters?  I wonder about her history, her  life B.C.--Before Children.  They say she loved the piano and was studying to become a concert pianist, although I rarely hear her play at home.  Hidden somewhere between the lines is the tale of a young pre-med student with a red sports who worshiped the wrong god, or no god at all.   I wonder how and where she met my father?  What attracted her to this Taras Bulba-looking man?  I’m too young to comprehend the workings of a woman’s heart.  Every father is a war hero, right?  Every father graduates from Harvard and USC.  Every father can dash off a 440 in under fifty seconds.   

I close my book and set it on the table.  Johnny Carson is swinging an invisible golf club, ushering in the first commercial sponsor of the night.  I check to make sure no one is watching, then place my hand gently on my mother’s forehead, brushing back her bangs. Her forehead is moist, and the simple beauty of her face appears tired, fatigued.  I float my palm softly across her crisp hair, back to her forehead.  The tense lines around her mouth seem to relax.  Her mouth closes and I think she’s about to smile.  Instead she jerks awake, and my hand flies from her face as if it were on fire.  She looks at me groggily.  “What time is it?”  “Late,” is my reply.         

They say my mother was a perfectionist.  She gave up her personal dreams in order to marry and bring spirit children into the world, one of those spirit kids being me.  When she found she couldn’t be the perfect wife-mother-friend-pianist-Primary President all at once all the time, she began dying by degrees.  Mediocrity tortured her.  Her children became her dreams.  If we succeeded, she succeeded; if we failed, she failed.  

Unfortunately, when I think about my mother, too many of my recollections are associated with disappointment.  My mother had great expectations for me--for all of her children, really, but I think for me in particular.   I was going to do something extraordinary:  find a cure for cancer or male pattern baldness.  But time and again I’ve  disappointed her.  I quit piano at age twelve; I prematurely aborted my mission to Spain; at forty-six I am a victim rather than the vanquisher of male pattern baldness.  Perhaps worst of all, at age sixteen I deserted her.   Not overtly or intentionally, but by default.

My mother spent most of my sixteenth summer in the hospital--“for a rest,” we were told.   We believed this simple explanation because it was the easiest thing to do, and because  we wanted to.   About mid-July I took the bus north and spent the remainder of the summer with my Aunt Ruelene and Uncle Lee in northern California.  I instantly fell in love with their little pine tree paradise.  When the school year started, my mother wanted me to come home.  I wanted to stay.  I begged and pleaded and she finally relented.  Her first concern was always my happiness.

When I returned home for the Christmas holidays, I was happy to see my mother and father and brothers and sisters, but I also realized how much I disliked L.A. That night, as I lay in bed, I looked outside and instead of ponderosa pines and starry skies, I saw the blurry moon peering through a concrete window like a sick eye.   My mother slipped into my room and sat on the side of my bed.   In a familiar gesture, she brushed back my bangs.  “Are you happy?” she asked.  “Are you happy to be home?” 

“Yes,” I said, but it was a lie.  She smiled. I could feel her smile in the dark.  But I knew that she knew, and I think I broke her heart that night.

I hate rain.  I think because it was a rainy February night that I received the phone call.   I can still remember the loud percussion on the sky lights of my aunt and uncle’s home, and my father’s voice, soft, froggy, anguished:  “Your mother’s gone.”

I flew down for the funeral but didn’t stay long after.  I made up some feeble excuse about returning ASAP for track practice.  In truth I wanted to escape.

In my family, we each have a story about the day our mother died, and each story involves guilt.  However, my mother has appeared to my other brothers and sisters in visions, dreams, or other manifestations.  She brings them good tidings, comfort, reassurance, forgiveness.  I think I have to wait longer than the others.  Or maybe I’m not waiting at all.  Maybe I’m trying to delay that inevitable reunion for as long as possible.   Maybe I’m trying to put myself together a little better first.  I really don’t know.

Earlier I said I disappointed my mother countless times.  In reality I only disappointed myself.  My mother quite frankly doesn’t give a damn, Scarlet, if I’m a rocket scientist or a jazz musician (although she’d probably cast her vote for the latter, given the chance).   She had that remarkable gift of all great mothers, seeing me not as the lazy beach-comber I was, but as what I could become.   

I’ve kept my mother’s memory at a distance all of these years, I think,  because inviting her back into my life would have been much too painful. But saying this,  I’m guilty of delusion, if not outright fraud.  How do you keep at bay the very thing you are?  How do you distance yourself from yourself?  And if she is, literally, my better self, why  would I want to? 

I see my mother daily in my oldest daughter Jessie, her artistic protégé, who can mesmerize a packed house with Rachmaninoff, and in my second-born, Carrie, who can break the frown on a bronze statue with celebrity impersonations in two languages.   And there is my daughter Samantha who carries my  mother’s features in her face and her heart, disguising both with her ferocity on  the soccer field.  Finally there is my son Benjamin Michael, who is the clearest window to my own relationship with my mother. 

The chemistry between my wife and our daughters is powerful but predictable.  Between her and my son it is more alchemy than science, full of mystery and wonder.  I see it when his gangly six-foot-four frame curls up beside her on the sofa, hooking a leg playfully over hers.  I see it in their banter in the kitchen, when he sneaks up behind her, drapes his long arms over her shoulders, and groans like Big Foot,  “Food!  I want foooood!”  And I see it when he pretends to dodge her good-night hugs and kisses, and when he tries to lift her in his arms, as if she were his bride waiting to be carried across the threshold.  Then I begin to understand, or re-understand, how at sixteen, seventeen, whenever, you can’t simply turn away from all of that and trot off to track practice. Not without paying a terrible price.