That night when I get into bed, I am nervous and jumpy. I need to clear my brain so I can relax enough to sleep, but behind my closed eyes all I can see is that underwear. I see the little flowers and the yellow stain and the wrinkles under the thick plastic. The moment keeps playing on a loop in my short-circuited brain. “Do you want evidence??” I think I do.
I’m just not sure of what.
Part One
Split
1
* * *
before
I want to tell you about my mother.
I am trying to detail her precisely. Primary fact: she did all the motherly things. She was mostly gentle and affectionate, and I always knew I was loved. Her friends and family tell me that I was the most important thing in her life, that she said it often and showed it clearly.
She tucked me in almost every night of our life together, those twelve years. She sang to me while sitting on the edge of my covers, smoothing my hair with a gentle hand.
When I was sick or crying, she came to me with a cool washcloth for my head. She called me Cutie Pie longer than I would have wanted my friends to know. She made me pancakes and bacon most Saturday mornings, and let me drown them in lakes of syrup while I watched Garfield, my favorite cartoon, and she watched with me. She made sure my homework was done, my lunch was packed, and my sweater matched my shoes.
But this is all familiar stuff, and adds up to so many other women who love their children.
Let me try again.
My mother was full of energy and passion. She believed in the souls of housecats and in the melancholy of rainy days. She believed in hard work, and the energy she poured into her job—hand-sewing shoes at a factory—seemed boundless. She believed in spontaneity, and once urged me to sing into her boyfriend’s CB radio on a common frequency, the two of us calling out that we were “b-b-b-b-bad to the bone!” until he emerged from the House of Pizza, hands full, shaking his head while we giggled.
She was graced with bright red hair, a golden tone of red I’ve seen only a handful of times. As a child, I never tugged on the wrong coat sleeve in the grocery store, I never wandered away and got lost; I just kept that bright hair in sight. Now, on those rare occasions when I see a woman with that hair, my mouth goes dry. I stare and keep on staring, and my hands feel empty, and I hope she doesn’t notice.
In the short Maine summer, she sunbathed for hours, lounging on a narrow strip of lakeside sand, reading a novel behind oversize white plastic sunglasses. She was very thin, with finely turned collarbones and a constellation of freckles all over her body, which would deepen and multiply as the day passed. I baked along with her, my blond hair glowing blonder as the summer rushed toward bittersweet fall, when the trees turned red and yellow and orange, like a fire burning up all those languid weekend afternoons.
A couple times a year we would drive to the ocean just south of Portland. Her favorite thing to collect from the beach was sand dollars, and I loved walking up and down the yellow sand and finding them for her. They were plentiful when I was little, but something changed as the years went on. The water got colder, or warmer, or there were more predators than before.
She felt decidedly, unabashedly superior to women who dyed their hair red. She pointed them out to me—how the color was too even, their eyebrows too dark, their skin not pink enough. Now I’m one of these women, but her genes help me fake it. My driver’s license even has a little “R” next to “Hair.”
Real redheads, on the other hand, were part of a secret sisterhood. She loved the royal Fergie, Wynonna Judd, Bonnie Raitt, even Pippi Longstocking.
When I was about eight, we went to the salon and got our first spiral perms together. I loved the attention, the hours of sitting in the chair and being fussed over, but I hated the choking chemical smell, the tight pull on my scalp. This was when I first learned that pain could yield beauty.
She was terrified of birds, at close range, and moths, at any distance, their blurred wings beating the air, their flight paths unpredictable. She had seen Hitchcock’s The Birds when she was four. Still, she continued to watch horror movies and let me see plenty I shouldn’t have, including Single White Female when I was eleven. The People Under the Stairs that same year. And The Stepfather.
She wore denim-blue eyeliner nearly every day I ever saw her, focusing her soft blue gaze. From small-town stores and crumbling rural malls she assembled a strange and glorious wardrobe. When she went out—once a month or so—she dressed up as though headed somewhere much more glamorous than a dark bar or a town hall dance. She favored white, gauzy shirts with big collars and French cuffs, fitted sundresses with big, cheerful floral patterns, black satin skirts with tiers rustling down to her knees. Her jewelry box was filled with costume pieces—faux gold earrings in the shape of cats, faceted glass hearts on silver hooks, tiny shells strung together on fishing line, which we bought together at the beach. She had a small collection of thin gold rings with semiprecious stones—amethyst was her favorite—bought from Kmart and Ames. On her dresser stood a city skyline of perfumes—Exclamation, Baby Soft, Xia Xlang, Tabu. Gentle, crisp scents she found at the pharmacy, next to the holiday cards.
The clicking of her high heels on our kitchen floor meant happiness to me, vicarious excitement; she put them on only at the last minute, at the very end of getting ready. We’d drive to her best friend Linda’s house, just a couple of miles toward town, and climb the wooden porch to her screen door. Mom would call out, “Hey!” and Linda would tell us to let ourselves in, her voice rising above the radio as she bustled from bathroom to bedroom to kitchen, sipping coffee in between wardrobe changes and applications of lipstick and mascara, her bangle bracelets ringing like bells. I loved Linda, with her year-round tan and big smile. She was a small woman, but she gave good, solid hugs, her blond-highlighted curls brushing my face, stiff with gel and smelling of perfume. She was always running just a little late, and I was always glad; this was the part of the evening I got to share, before the three of us got back into the car and drove across town to drop me off at my grandmother’s, where I’d spend the night while they went out dancing.