|
FICTION "Make Believe," The Belmont Story Review, Vol. 8 / Fall 2023, Belmont University. Print only. "Because of Jane Austen," Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy, Vol. 10 / Fall 2022, Hamilton College. "Real Colors," untethered magazine, Vol. 5.2 / Fall 2020. Print only. SEE FULL TEXT BELOW. "Chalk," Antietam Review, Vol. 24 / 2004. Print only. NONFICTION "Dear Protester," Touchstone Literary Magazine, January 3, 2021, Kansas State University. "My Son," The Watershed Review, Spring / Fall 2020, California State University, Chico. "Dumpster Dying," The Sandy River Review, Vol. 40 / 2020, University of Maine, Farmington & Alice James Books. Print only. SEE FULL TEXT BELOW. "Fear and Waiting," Tigertail: A South Florida Annual, Florida Flash / Vol. 11 / 2011. Print only. "A Foreign Exchange," Transitions Abroad, Vol. 25 / Dec. 2001. Print only. |
REAL COLORS
(a short story originally published in untethered magazine)
The first note appeared in the second week of kindergarten. Miss Smith’s red-penned letters glowered next to Timi’s self-portrait that we’d completed, quite nicely I thought, the previous week: Please use real colors. You are brown.
I’d lured Timi to the kitchen table with an Oreo cookie, set him before the open Crayola box, and told him that he was to draw a picture of himself using the crayons – as per the instructions at the top of the paper. Without hesitation, or much thought, he grabbed the blue crayon.
“No!” cried Abi, his twin sister and fellow classmate, who’d followed us into the kitchen when she smelled the Oreos. “Miss Smith says you have to use real colors!”
“Real colors?” I said. “Nonsense! You can use whatever colors you like. Good grief, it’s 2011! Surely, everyone could use some color, real or otherwise. Take Van Gogh –”
Timi rubbed an ear, apparently remembering the Impressionist artbook we’d perused at the library.
“– wouldn’t the whole world, including Van Gogh, have been so much happier if they’d embraced his bold palette?”
Abi glared at me, rolled her eyes and then went back to the living room to finish watching Martha Speaks, a television program about a talking dog that Abi presumably found more relatable than her own mother. She, of course, had already finished her self-portrait two hours before and with the painstaking detail of a seventeenth-century Dutch still life. As for Timi, he’d scrawled a stick figure of himself in blue crayon. From an egg-shaped head with big ogling circles for eyes and a crooked line for a mouth, his legs dangled like the stems of a hanging plant and his arms sprouted where his ears should be; jagged circles made for hands and feet and short lines, like spider legs, made for fingers. With the purple crayon he scribbled on some hair, approximating his own curly mop. “Beautiful!” I told him and gave him a kiss on the forehead. I was thrilled that he’d agreed to sit long enough to render the self-portrait and that it was, without any belabored deciphering, recognizable as the depiction of a human being. What progress! Miss Smith was a miracle worker!
But no, I now decided, as the scolding red letters indicated, Miss Smith was no miracle worker. She was an uptight schoolmarm. Real colors? Were there such things as fake colors? I imagined hues like artificial sweeteners, manufactured in a laboratory by scientists plotting to pollute the color wheel and poison the artwork of children just as aspartame would their livers. When we met Miss Smith at kindergarten roundup last spring, I’d been so hopeful. Her classroom was meticulously organized with various stations for all sorts of creative play and enrichment. She was young and fairly pretty. I was a bit concerned with her struggle to make eye contact with the parents; but nevertheless, I was on Team Miss Smith.
I pondered the enigma that was my children’s teacher until it occurred to me that perhaps Miss Smith was actually engaging her pupils’ parents in some sort of Kantian riddle – this was an expensive private school, after all. Perhaps she longed to be a philosopher but given the horrible job prospects in higher education had opted for the job security of the elementary level. Now, bored with addition and sight words, she wanted to draw parents into a discourse about something more compelling than the school’s nut-free policy, bathroom procedures, and color-coded discipline charts which, rather eerily, mimicked the post-9/11 terrorist threat advisory scale. You are brown, the note said. But was Timi really brown? Or was brown merely a social construct? Could Timi, in fact, be blue because Timi said he was blue? Barack Obama, biracial like Timi, insisted he was black. What would Lacan or Derrida say? Was Miss Smith testing my knowledge of Postmodern ontological theory? Was there even such a thing as Postmodern ontological theory? Suddenly, I wished I’d paid more attention in my undergraduate semiotics class.
Timi pointed at the shocking red letters and asked, “What’s that say, Mommy?” Because I could not reply with “Great job!” or “Beautiful picture!” I decided that I didn’t care about Kant or Lacan or semiotics; instead, after Timi had wandered off to his Legos, I wrote a note on the back of his self-portrait and stuck it in his folder that Miss Smith would open the next day when she searched for his lunch money:
Dear Miss Smith,
I have read your note regarding Timi’s self-portrait. In reply, I merely ask you to consider this question: what if someone had told Picasso to use “real colors” when he was painting prostitutes and beggars in Paris from 1901-1904 (his BLUE period)?
Respectfully,
Natalie Muir-Adebanjo (Timi’s mother)
I did not receive a reply. Timi’s homework, in which he was to practice writing the letter A on wide-lined paper, had been returned with a note in the same obstreperous red ink: Crayons are NOT for writing. All written work must be done in PENCIL. To this I replied:
Dear Miss Smith,
You state, and I quote, “Crayons are NOT for writing.” But as this note written in the very real color of orange attests, crayons CAN be used for writing. In fact, as I stare at these bright waxy letters, I feel my spirits rising like songbirds. I highly recommend you trade that red ballpoint pen for a red crayon and see how it goes.
Sincerely,
Natalie Muir-Adebanjo
A couple of weeks passed and Timi’s homework remained silent of Miss Smith’s red pen. As for Timi, he’d settled into the nightly routine of loading his dinner plate into the dishwasher and then returning to his chair where I would place his crayons and pencil before him. If I handed him a crayon and told him to write his name on the worksheet, he’d reply like Miss Smith’s parrot: “crayons are not for writing.” Yeah, yeah, I’d mutter and hand him the number two pencil (heaven forbid he’d use a one or a three). His name was fairly easy for him to write; however, when it came to Adebanjo, he’d leave out the E or make the J backwards. But he was writing his name on his own! He’d struggle with identifying the initial consonant sound of each picture, or with counting the number of flowers or cookies. With some help, though, he’d get it. He would even color all the worksheet pictures, which Miss Smith insisted be done. Before kindergarten I couldn’t get him to color for more than ten seconds, no matter how many Batman and Toy Story coloring books I bought him; and yet, here he was coloring apples, toasters, and baseball mitts!
“Does Miss Smith ever smile?” I asked Timi one evening over his homework.
“Sure,” he said. “Sometimes.” From the crayons scattered on the kitchen table, he grabbed the one closest to him. He colored the zebra, even the black stripes, until the animal looked like a blob of cotton candy.
Timi’s eyes searched the tabletop for several seconds until he found the next crayon he wanted.
“Why are you using yellow?” I asked as he filled in the face of a woman wearing a crown.
“White doesn’t show up, so I use yellow.”
“How do you know the queen is white?”
“I dunno. She just is.”
A woman of authority and power was automatically deemed white. Just like Miss Smith. Should I be worried? Should I be more worried? When we were deciding on a school, I’d wanted one with students and teachers who looked like the twins, which meant public school. But no, my Nigerian husband (and his parents who said they’d pay for it) insisted that the children get the best education – diversity, that American obsession, be damned. It was the same thinking that had landed us in one of the whitest neighborhoods in Boston. That July I’d been too pregnant and too relieved to be moving out of a tiny apartment and into a two-story house with central air to argue. Now, more than ever, I worried I’d failed my children. I’d allowed them to go to a school that not only had no role models of color but that also employed a teacher who ruled over the students’ self-expression like a Soviet apparat.
Two days later the worksheet returned home with a big red C, which we’d since learned meant correct. And yet, there was a note next to the pink zebra: Please use real colors. Again, with the real colors! Why no note next to the jaundiced queen? Was yellow the new white? I was having a difficult time keeping up with the rules of kindergarten. I knew I’d have to reply, despite that my replies didn’t get replies and my subtler forms of communication were ignored as well. Since writing the first note, I’d purchased Eric Carle’s The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse. Every night for a whole week I read to the twins from that book (despite Abi’s stomping and pouting), and it was recorded on their reading logs. On Timi’s log, I’d even added a little comment: The twins LOVE this book. I highly recommend you get it for your class. I’d be happy to donate a copy. I hoped that Miss Smith would recognize my olive branch and reply accordingly. But, no. Only a big red C returned on the reading log. So, I composed another note:
Dear Miss Smith,
I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, but I think you’ll be interested to learn that the Nazi regime would not allow the work of the artist Franz Marc to be shown. Hitler only believed in realist work and deemed the abstract expressionists “degenerate artists.” I’m sure you would not deem my sweet Timi (or his pink zebra) as degenerate. As for Hitler and the Nazis, well, we all know how that turned out.
Humbly yours,
Natalie Muir-Adebanjo
This time, when I sent the note off with Timi in his folder, I felt a bit nervous. I didn’t tell my husband about it. Actually, I hadn’t told him about any of my correspondence with Miss Smith. Oly comes from a typical Nigerian family in which you do as you’re told and no one gives a fig about your feelings or self-esteem – those mushy American conceits. You work hard. You aim to be the best. Absolutely no trophies for everyone. Notes about color choice were nothing compared to the canings Oly had received in school. When I showed him Miss Smith’s first note, he’d shaken his head and said, “Time for Olatimi to get used to the real world.” He’d chuckled at his pun and then, Oly, the only non-white employee at McArthur, Levin & Lowe, turned to his laptop and resumed the firm’s mandated online cultural diversity sensitivity training. Yes, he most definitely would’ve been on Miss Smith’s side. This is not to say that he isn’t a doting and affectionate father, but he insists that Timi should not be coddled. He even says that since I can’t have any more children (complicated delivery, ruptured uterus, emergency hysterectomy) that I subconsciously try to keep Timi as my baby.
“Baloney,” I said to him one morning when we dropped the kids off at school after he, once again, made this assertion.
“Really?” he replied. “Then why did you burst into tears when he refused to kiss you goodbye and ran into the building without looking back?”
“I’m a mother! That’s what we do!”
“You never cry when Abisola refuses to kiss you.”
“That’s different. With Abi I expect it. But with Timi, he’s my –”
“Baby?”
I refused to give him the satisfaction of a response.
No, my husband wasn’t into babying Timi. As for referencing the Nazis and Hitler, he certainly wouldn’t have been into that either. By mentioning the notorious fascists and their leader, I was in no way implying that Miss Smith was one of their ilk. I was merely drawing her attention to some facts about art history. Something I thought might serve to improve her own knowledge and pedagogy. Still, despite my most benevolent and benign intentions, I couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy. A feeling that did not abate when I did not receive a reply from Miss Smith.
As for the comments on Timi’s work, they only consisted of big red Cs at the top of the page, or a red S written over the ones he’d written backwards, or an oops! where he’d circled the wrong picture or miscounted the number of cars or teddy bears. Despite what seemed to be a fairly decent performance on his work, I had no idea how school was going. When I asked if he liked kindergarten, he’d say, “Yeah.” And when he asked, “Where are we going tomorrow?” and I told him school, he never complained. But he never cheered either. Maybe he really hated it and was secretly miserable. Maybe my notes had miffed Miss Smith and she was taking her umbrage at me out on Timi. Maybe this was why he’d never been Star of the Week or flag holder or line leader!
I really panicked the day Miss Smith changed his behaviour card from green to yellow. What if Timi hadn’t been involved in the eraser throwing at his table, but Miss Smith, looking for a way to punish me, had sabotaged his perfect record right before the behaviour prizes were awarded? Abi had come home with a pack of scratch-n-sniff stickers for keeping her card green all month. But not poor Timi.
I decided to write Miss Smith a note requesting a conference. I’d ask her, politely, how Timi is doing. Is he keeping up with the class? Does he have friends? Is he going to pass kindergarten? Is he happy? I might even apologize for my seemingly insolent correspondence. But before I could write my request, I opened Timi’s folder to find a white business envelope with For Timi’s Parents written in black ink on the front.
My heart thudded to a stop. Parents. Plural. Oly was supposed to read this. He, a stickler for rules and obedience and respect for authority, surely wouldn’t be pleased with whatever was inside, not to mention he still didn’t know about my notes to Miss Smith. And what about Timi? Maybe Miss Smith was recommending expulsion. How could she ever mold a child when she wasn’t getting full cooperation from his mother? She would have no choice but to conclude that Timi was not the right fit for this learning community.
My heart managed to get thumping again. I ripped open the envelope and unfolded the paper that had been neatly creased into thirds. Across the top was written Progress Report. My eyes raced down the page. Timi has made great improvement in letter recognition, though he still struggles at times with identifying lower-case letters … adequate competence in identifying and replicating patterns … has difficulties at times working independently … shows self-control – and then I saw what every mother hopes to see: Timi is a sweet, kind boy who plays and shares well with others. He has a lively imagination and is a pleasure to have in class. I look forward to working more with him this year.
Miss Smith did not hate my child! Under the line for the parent’s signature, I considered writing a thank-you note, but it seemed rather silly to thank her for acknowledging what was so obvious: Timi was a wonderful little boy. No, I would just sign my name.
I picked up the green crayon that was on the kitchen counter. As I was about to sign, I set it down and pulled open the junk drawer. After rooting through rubber bands, bread ties, expired coupons, take-out menus, screws and paper clips, I finally found what I was looking for: a black ballpoint pen. I pulled off the cap, but before I could put tip to paper, my eyes caught the photograph that was stuck to the refrigerator.
We’re posing together in a pumpkin patch after a day of picking apples. It’s a familial tableau worthy of Velásquez. My arm is around Oly’s waist, he holds Abi in his arms, and Timi stands before us holding a pumpkin that must weigh as much as he does. Abi, Oly, and I are smiling at each other. Timi stares directly at the camera, mouth drawn into a proud and confident grin. We don’t look like most families, and we are certainly far from perfect, but we are real.
I put down the black pen and picked up the green crayon. I pressed it to the paper and slowly signed my name. When I finished, I studied my work. The color appeared as glossy as holly leaves and the letters rose and fell like hills in a Romantic landscape. I underlined it. Twice.
DUMPSTER DYING
(an essay originally published in The Sandy River Review)
“Hey! You can’t do that!”
My sister and I, bulging Hefty bags in hand, look to our right. A twenty-something in khakis and blue polo, “Rent-A-Center” stitched over his heart, stares sternly at us.
“The dumpster’s only for the businesses,” he says. By “businesses” he means those of the strip mall we’re all standing behind—not the business of two middle-aged women and a ’96 Chrysler LeBaron convertible, top down, jam-packed and piled high with black trash bags.
Just seconds before, Ann Marie and I were arguing over the religious paraphilia that had spilled out of one of bags stuffed into the trunk of our parents’ car. Over my older sister’s objections, I insisted the holy cards, medals, third-class relics, and plastic rosaries all had to go in the dumpster. I assured her that as I put every holy item in the trash bag, I’d whispered, “Sorry, Jesus. Forgive me, Jesus.” Certainly, the Christ-Made-Man understands the mess we’re dealing with, how our parents’ house was overwhelmed by the free gifts from every monastery, convent, and mission fundraising in the United States, as well as all the other “stuff” Mom and Dad have been hoarding the past five years. Their refrigerator alone was wallpapered with years-old funeral prayer cards and graduation announcements as well as magazine clippings of puppies and babies—as if the photos of their six children and twenty-three grandchildren hadn’t been sufficient.
And surely the same man who’d cured cripples and the possessed knows the stress we’re under, knows that Alzheimer’s doesn’t make just the patient crazy but her family too. Sometimes literally. Take our father: shortly after Mom was diagnosed, he had a series of strokes brought on by stress, resulting in vascular dementia. Two months ago, he busted Mom out of the nursing home because he was going to take better care of her than those “shit-for-brains” at the “institution.” One month ago, after his refusing to let anyone into the house and my sister’s threatening to have him declared legally incompetent, Mom was back in the nursing home, emaciated and barely holding onto life.
But even before the strokes there was the denial. Like someone standing before his tornado-leveled home declaring, “Just needs a little paint.” My first visit home after Mom’s diagnosis, I, in my need “to do,” a need heightened by the fact that “doing” was nearly impossible since I lived 1500 miles away in Boston, made an appointment for Dad and me to meet with the director of the local Alzheimer’s Association to learn what should be done for Mom now and in the future. Dad, charming, even cracking the occasional joke, listened attentively to the woman, graciously accepted the brochures about adult daycare, homecare, and nursing homes, and then followed not one bit of her advice, the shiny pamphlets eventually left to drown in the heap of junk mail on his desk. Some months later, from my own home office, I searched online for therapists. Despite the failure of the Alzheimer’s Association visit, I, suffering from my own case of denial, or magical thinking, thought Dad would now be open to expert advice on his feelings, of all things. Feelings which were finding full expression in high blood pressure and gastrointestinal distress. Just as with the Alzheimer’s Association, Dad readily agreed to go and, after I’d extolled the wonders of therapy, even said, “makes a lot of sense.” But when I called the therapist’s office on the day of the appointment, the receptionist politely explained he’d cancelled that morning saying, “I don’t need to see a therapist because I’m not crazy!”
Finally, I was sane enough to realize I could do nothing from so far away—except worry and feel guilty, which I did with great aplomb. I worried about my parents and felt guilty I wasn’t there when Mom most needed me and felt even guiltier that Ann Marie, who lived only four blocks from our parents, was carrying a load that could crush Atlas. I did go home during my children’s summer vacations and whenever Mom took bad turns, which inevitably would happen when my husband was on a work trip in Germany or some other convenient location. Upon receiving the dire call or text from my sister, my stomach, which I’d inherited from my father, would shrink to the size of a pea, my breath a lump of dough in my chest. I’d try to slow the tilt-a-whirl spinning of my thoughts--What to do with the kids? Do I take them with me? Do we have enough frequent flier miles? Why the hell does it cost more to fly to Iowa than Europe?
Three days ago, I flew home because hospice had given Mom a week or two at most. I went directly from the airport to the nursing home, expecting to find her asleep, her skin draped over her bones, her white hair, falling past her shoulders. I was going to hold her hand and not leave her side. I might’ve come home occasionally and done some cooking and cleaning, but, unlike Ann Marie, I’d missed the day-to-day slog of Mom’s illness. I hadn’t been there for the doctor appointments and endless paperwork; for the daily fights over everything from showering to eating, from pill-taking to using adult diapers; for the late-night calls because surely the neighbor boy had stolen the TV remote; for the crying fits because the house was haunted. I’d missed too much. I was not going to miss my mother’s death.
I walked into the nursing home room to find Mom sitting up, her pale green eyes open, and my dad holding a spoonful of mashed potatoes to her mouth as she laughed and laughed. For what reason, no one knew. Ann Marie calls her Lazarus.
Over the next couple of days, I did hold her hand. I told her how with awe and admiration I looked upon her life—the way she raised a family while also helping women and couples through her work as a pioneering natural family planning instructor. I helped her drink water from a straw. I did my best to keep Dad from force-feeding her. He arrived at the nursing home early in the morning and left only after she’d fallen asleep for the night. At one point he dozed off in his chair, and Mom, staring and pointing into the distance, started mumbling about Matthew, my brother who’d died over thirty years ago, her parents, and Mother Mary. I asked if she wanted to join them. She nodded. Smiled. A light shone from her eyes. I could see the face of my mother, the woman who’d loved to wear hats to Mass, to swing dance with her husband, to laugh late into the night with her children, to snuggle with her grandchildren. The woman who everyone from the plumber to the neighborhood kids to her clients had found easy to talk to and willing to listen for as long as they needed. The woman who’d returned to school at forty and with half a dozen children at home and finished top of her class. The woman I wanted to call every day because she had cared about me and what I said in a way no one else did, whose advice had meant more to me than anyone else’s. The woman--the mom—I desperately missed.
I texted Ann Marie and Chris, our brother who lives just outside of town, telling them to come right away. This was going to be the deathbed scene I’d envisioned—Mom, surrounded by family, peacefully letting go.
But then she looked at me, the light extinguished, eyes filling with tears. “I’m afraid,” she whispered. “We’ll be fine,” I promised. “You deserve peace.” She wasn’t buying it. I asked if she wanted to pray the rosary, and this 80-pound woman with brittle bones, bed sores, and drop foot and who was mostly incapable of uttering a coherent sentence held my hand with inexplicable strength and said every word with me.
I don’t think she fears what is to come—she clearly saw something beautiful beckoning. More likely, just as I worry when leaving my three children, she’s apprehensive about leaving her family, her maternal instinct residing not in her Alzheimer’s-ravaged brain but in her heart and soul. At times she has begged my sister to look after “the babies.” I especially wonder if she knows how lost Dad will be without her. He might be the former high-powered corporate attorney, but she’s always been his (and our entire family’s) emotional center, like the sun in the midst of the planets, exuding a force that keeps everyone moving securely in their orbits.
After three days of sitting next to Mom while she mumbled, dozed, and steadfastly refused to go to “the light,” I, once again, needed “to do”—something—anything—that would produce a tangible, certain result. So this morning, after Dad left the house for the nursing home, I found a box of Hefty bags and set to work feverishly, imagining him walking in at any moment and demanding to know why I was throwing away perfectly good empty sour cream and peanut butter containers, five-year-old magazines, or bath towels worn to transparency. I knew if he walked in after I was done, he’d never notice they were gone. He is incapable of remembering they were there.
Room to room I went, each as familiar as my own hands. This was the only home I’d lived in growing up, and at that moment I hated it. Even without the hoarded items that had accompanied Mom’s illness, the house felt too big, too overstuffed, too neglected. The two hutches, standing like dusty, hulking coffins, sparked no fond remembrance—no thoughts of the holiday meals that’d been eaten off the china, of the Carlo Rossi my parents had drunk nightly from the wine glasses, of the tea that’d been poured from the dainty pots as everyone laughed over Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit. No, I looked at my parents’ collections as well as the knickknack-covered coffee tables and mantlepieces, each superfluous item sucking air from the room, with nothing but contempt.
After her day at work, Ann Marie came to help me get rid of the dozen-plus bags of junk before Dad got home. Thus, here we stand behind the Rent-A-Center.
“I’m really sorry,” Ann Marie says to the young man who, considering his dismay at the misuse of his employer’s dumpster, is surely an employee-of-the-month. My sister has always been quick on her feet. She is also fearless. While I stand dumbfounded, shrinking from any inkling of confrontation, she charges straight-on like a bull going for the red cape. How many times growing up did she lock horns with our father? Since our parents’ deterioration, it’s become a daily ritual for her. “We wouldn’t do this normally,” she continues. “It’s just that our mom died, and our dad can’t stand to get rid of her stuff, so we’re trying to do it without him finding out.”
The Rent-A-Center guy and I stare at her, dumbfounded.
Mom died.
The words have struck like an unexpected whack to the back. A whack that has dislodged something inside me. I can imagine breathing. Freely. For the first time in years. If Mom lets go, my stomach can quit clenching every time my phone rings. I can quit panicking about plane tickets and childcare as I rush home for the next emergency. No more guilt about not doing enough. No more anguish at the thought of Mom’s suffering. I might actually feel like eating again. My sister, the exhausted caretaker, knows this imagined freedom more than all her siblings and her father too confused to see the truth. Having missed so many opportunities to help, I rushed home wanting not to miss another crucial thing. I wanted to be present for a particular moment, but, as naïve as it sounds, I hadn’t considered the moment’s effect—its finality. Perhaps I hadn’t allowed myself to. Now, standing trash bag in hand, I know I don’t want just to be present at my mother’s death; I want my mother dead.
The Rent-A-Center associate no longer looks so sure of himself. “Um, okay,” he says. “Just this once.”
Ann Marie thanks him profusely as he backs away. We quickly hurl the bags into the dumpster, my body feeling lighter with each toss.
Despite the predictions of hospice, eight months will pass before my sister says those words again, and means them. She will call me just as I’m preparing to celebrate my birthday and will tell me to prepare for Mom’s passing—there is no doubt this time. I will feel the panic clawing at my stomach, squeezing my lungs. Should I rush home? “No,” my sister will tell me with absolute assuredness. “Wait till it’s over. You’ve said enough goodbyes. Try to enjoy your birthday.” We will laugh at that. I will laugh at myself. It will be the third year in a row Mom will have taken a terrible turn come November. Making plans with friends, weeks in advance, will have been my way of warding off another turn. Even though I want my mother dead, I will not want her death anywhere near November 6th. On November 5th I’ll climb into bed, thinking, My mom is not dying on my birthday. I’ll wake in the middle of the night--No--and quickly return to sleep. At 6 am the phone will rouse me. “Happy birthday, Lizzie,” Ann Marie will softly say. “Mom died at 4 o’clock.”
Bags deposited in the dumpster, we climb into the LeBaron and drive toward our parents’ home, our voices rising above the spring wind. We laugh at the absurdity of being scolded by someone young enough to be our son, at my dumbfounded stammering, at my sister’s snap, irreverent duplicity. I should laugh at my own absurdity, for thinking that something as profound and mysterious as death will ever conform to my will. For thinking my mother’s death belongs to anyone but her.