Greetings from Lovelock
In my heart lies the belief that the good adult daughter should be as taciturn and obedient as the perfect Chinese child. “Be filial to your own parents and respectful of all elders. When your mother or father is calling, do not be slow to respond,” says the ancient Buddhist text. Two of my Asian college students have written that you should honor your mother because of the pain she experienced bringing you into the world.
I tell my grown-up self, “Be kind. Forget your precious ego.” Usually it is easy, but sometimes she is hard to love. Sometimes she reminds me of that Thurber cartoon of the woman, arms spread, looming over an unsuspecting house. Furthermore, my grown-up self does not always have the upper hand. Today, for example. Picture her standing at the kitchen sink. My kitchen sink. She wears a pink and white plaid housedress, one size fits all, golf socks, and those Swedish exercise shoes, white with wedged heels. On one side of her face, the wrinkles have been swept and tucked by Bell’s palsy. From the kitchen window she watches her pre-teen granddaughters playing at the edge of the swimming pool, pretending to teeter and lose their balance. She says, “What would happen if I pushed them into the pool?”
Sullenly drying the morning dishes, I say to myself, “What would happen if I pushed you into the ocean?” It’s a mean thought. I know it. I know she doesn’t deserve it. But today, for some reason, even her many good qualities seem hard to take. Her generosity, for example. I can walk into any room in this house and find something she has given me, each thing stamped with her personality. Today, none of it seems mine. Like the Chinese baseball cap, with charming appliquéd figures, hanging in the small niche in the living room by the front door, a bright red tribute to her trip to China three months after the violent Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing. When I glance at it, I can hear her saying, “I said to myself, ‘If the President says it’s safe to go, and the travel agency says it’s safe to go, well, at my age what have I got to lose?’” Is this courage or ingenuousness? I’m not sure.
The black reading lamp on the table next to the fireplace. She picked that up in Berkeley last year when she was staying with my sister. Mom bought it for herself, but when I barely whispered that I needed a lamp like that, she gave it to me. Well, she said I could use it, but I know she meant I could keep it. As a matter of fact, I’m surprised that she didn’t say, “I found this lamp that could go on the pine table in your living room—if you want it.” I would demur, saying that she shouldn’t have, but that it’s perfect. Often it is.
She likes to see things used, passed around. The oak dining room table and chairs that I have used for twenty-four married years came with the sound of her voice: “I got those things out of the house after Grandpa Harris died. Nobody else wanted them. Nobody would have taken them. Marion and Alice didn’t want any of those things.”
A few years ago she was bringing or mailing or loading into my car useful items that she no longer wanted; things that have stories attached to them. Sometimes I love that: the stories and things, like the linen tablecloth and eight napkins, simply embroidered with clusters of yellow and green daisies in the corners. “Aunt Irene embroidered this set and gave it to us not too long after your dad and I were married. I want you to have it.”
When she says that, I can see her little Welsh aunt, warm-hearted, industrious, only a few years older than she. I can remember how much those sisters, my great aunts Irene and Thelma, loved to play cards, especially gin rummy and double solitaire. I remember the many stories about my mother’s early married life in Reno at the end of the Depression: the simplicity of their household because they were so broke; the fact that there was only a two-lane gravel road around Lake Tahoe; the wonderful time they had at the World’s Fair in San Francisco, even though their suitcase was stolen and they only had a dollar to get back home.
Some days, like today, the stories and the stuff seem overwhelming, the detritus of her life, not mine. Even though she is disbanding her household with a vengeance, finding possessions a nuisance now that she is a widow, she came with two large suitcases filled with letters, old photos, and newspaper clippings—a travelling family archive.
I know what she wants. She wants me to come into the guest bedroom, to sit on the bed, and, as I carefully touch the photos and the clippings, to ask her again about when she and her sister Adele worked so hard at the drugstore in Milford after their father deserted the family and took off for Bakersfield. She wants to talk about Dad and his accomplishments, to look at photographs of places where we lived in Kansas, Colorado, and Nevada, to tear up when I see that precious 2x3 black and white print with white rick-rack borders, framing me and my kid sister sitting on porch steps smiling into the sun.
Should we come to that adorable photo of her and Adele standing in front of the drugstore, hair in ringlets, Sunday dresses, patent leather shoes, obviously proud that they have learned second position open, I know her face would cloud with sorrow and anger. We would talk about the automobile accident on the dark road in Iowa and the unbearable fact that Adele is still in a coma two years later, and how, at the convalescent hospital, they sometimes dress her in a jogging suit, as if that seventy-four year old broken body is going to rise up and run laps.
We have talked about this tragedy many times in the past two years, mostly on the phone. I remember the indignation and disbelief in Mother’s voice when she told me that they had put Adele’s comatose legs in braces: “When I asked them why in the world they were doing that, the nurse told me that they had to. It was some kind of law.” She pauses, and then says, “ She wants to curl up, you know, back to the fetal position. Why can’t they let her die?” she shouts through the phone. Then her voice fell, tired as she told me about Uncle Dale saying, “I guess I’m just selfish. I can’t seem to let her go.”
If we are both sitting on the bed, she will suddenly tidy something, straighten the rumpled bedspread, and put the carefully labeled photos back in a manila envelope. “You girls will never go through that with me. You both have copies of the living will.”
Then she will give me a look that reduces me to a teenager with a messy room, “Do you remember where you put it?” We will get into a tiff about the way I keep track of things, but I know what she really wants. Mother wants me to hold her and to cry together.
Back to the stuff. In my kitchen there is a colander that she—you know what? At seventy-seven, she is not particularly interested in my versions of family stories or the range of my experiences. She may have risked China after an uprising, but she wants no civil unrest now. She wants simplicity. “Your dad and I did the best we could and we never stopped loving you.”
Anyway, about the copper colander hanging above the kitchen sink. I bought it at an antique shop twenty years ago and gave it to them. They would use it for picking vegetables when they lived at the Thorpe Creek ranch. I remember watching Dad turn the water from the creek into the garden, and then pick big muddy onions and beets to steam for dinner, bringing them to the house in that colander. During those years she had a dehydrator and she bought one of the first of those Seal-A-Meal things. She would send us boxes filled with tidy sealed packages of her own dehydrated vegetable soup mix, dried apple slices, and fabulous beef jerky. If she weren’t so Republican, she would have made a great hippie.
She likes gadgets and machines. In my kitchen here are some of the things she has given me: an ice cream machine, a milk shake maker, a Belgian waffle iron, a Kitchen Aide, and the Champion juicer that she bought when Dad was diagnosed with cancer. They were wintering in Arizona then. My sister had been reading about laetrile and mega-doses of Vitamin A, so Mom bought a juicer and a fifty-pound bag of organic carrots.
The three cherry pitters in that drawer came from her; all the canning equipment she passed on to me, and she gave us the silverware we have been using for the past twenty-five years.
I don’t know how to end this. I’m not finished listing things from two rooms. This is a big house. And there is all that she has given to others in this family. I can’t speak for them about what is treasured or a burden or forgotten.
I said that it is hard being her adult daughter: being loyal, subservient, and respectful at the same time I am running my own life, claiming my own life. We are at different stages but on the same stage. Why gets the starring role? Who is best supporting actress—not her. Never. And she, dammit, is the one with naturally curly hair.
I guess we will work this out—me being fifty and her turning seventy-seven and not knowing what to do with the rest of her life. Just the other day she said, “You know, near the end, you dad…I was sitting by his bed and I starting crying, ‘what about me? What is going to happen to me?’” He said, ‘I don’t know.” She continues, “Another time he said—well, I guess he must have been thinking of all those mopey widows around town, anyway, he told me, ’Don’t be a sentimental slob. You don’t have that much time left yourself.’”
We are sitting on the screened porch. There is a slight breeze. Now, in the softer evening light, she is beautiful. I tell her, “You are a sentimental slob, and, furthermore, Ronal Reagan was still running the country when he was your age. Don’t think you can get old and feeble on me. You’re my mother. I can’t remember if we laughed or if that prompted another fight about where she should go and what she should do. We talk about her moving here. The conversations are touchy.
Sometimes I have this image of her furiously packing her bag, well, all her bags, heaving them into the trunk, and driving off in her white Mercury. I am not the responsible, happy, fifty-year old me, but a panicked little girl running after the car, calling, “Don’t be angry. Come back. Come back.” The street is empty.
Sometimes when this dream scene occurs, I imagine her sending me a postcard from Lovelock, Nevada that says in her perfectly legible script: “You had your chance.”
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