She was a mediocre swimmer.
Sometimes after I took a shower in the evening, we would sit on the floor in front of the TV while she wound all my long, long hair into tiny braids, dozens of them, about the width of a pinkie, secured with elastics meant for Marie’s braces. The next morning, we’d unravel them, and my hair would be soft and crinkled, thousands of tiny waves floating down my back.
Vodka was her drink when she went out. She hated whining. She became furious the one time she thought she heard me swear, and would not be convinced that I’d said “Kitty gas!” instead of “Kitty’s ass!” Dennis laughed at this but would not back me up. She sent me straight to my room.
She would not go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink.
She liked solid plans and good surprises equally.
Walking across summer-hot parking lots, she would sometimes stoop to pick up tiny bits of trash—gum wrappers, receipts—that weren’t hers. Then put them in the nearest garbage can without comment.
One rainy day when I was in third grade, for no particular reason, she let me stay home from school. The morning was cozy and gray, and she had a rare midweek day off work. We watched some TV, lounged in our pajamas. We drove to Renys and got a box of popsicle sticks and some Elmer’s glue, and when we got home she taught me how to make a box by alternating the sticks over and under one another at right angles. She kept my box for years.
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These are all small pieces, like shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope; I spin and combine them to make a glowing, shifting picture. But they are finite in number. I cannot know my mother as others know their parents—I will never have an adult conversation with her. But in addition to memory, I do have something else, something that most children would never see: notes from the therapist she started seeing nine months before she died, the records subpoenaed by police two days after her death. The dead cannot give permission; I shouldn’t have this access. But it helps me see that time, and my mother, more clearly. This profile of her internal state, her thoughts and feelings, matters more to me than all the official evidence ever could. So the most valuable document from my trip to Gray was created before the investigation even started.
These notes show me that the truly terrible fights with Dennis started happening much earlier than I’d remembered, right at the beginning, really, when I still believed in them, still wanted to brush aside the bad things about their relationship. I can see that she was making a monumental effort to hide most of her pain from me, that we were conspiring in a sort of white-knuckled optimism.
Mom’s therapist, Anna Parker, was young, just finishing up her training. Mom may have been one of her very first patients. It is perhaps Anna’s common name that keeps her hidden from me; I have been unable to find her and speak to her, have only these notes. Mom’s final appointment, before Anna was to leave the state for another internship, was scheduled for May 13, the day after she died.
On her first visit with Anna, Mom said, “If it were not for my daughter, I would probably kill myself.” I wonder if this was one of the appointments that I went along to, when I brought homework with me, filling in spelling worksheets in the stuffy, wood-paneled waiting room, bored and impatient. I wonder if I was right there on the other side of the door while she talked so frankly about wanting to end her life. If she would have felt differently had she known that it would soon be ended for her.
And so opens a steady vein of disappointment and self-doubt, anxiety and ambivalence: feelings I knew she was having at the time, but that were far more abundant than I realized. She spent the final nine months of her life trying to understand her feelings for Dennis and for Tim, trying to find a path to happiness through the chaos of anger and sex and love.
Mom seemed, at first, ready to take action: by her second week of therapy, she’d broken up with Dennis. They’d been dating for about six months. She realized—partially because of his many failed, premature proposals—that he was too immature, too impulsive. But she dreaded the unfilled weekend hours. Anna suggested different activities that could help keep her busy, to stave off loneliness and keep her from breaking down and calling Dennis. She offered one idea after another: going to the movies or a new restaurant or driving to the coast and taking a walk on the beach. But Mom was afraid to go to a new place by herself, and she couldn’t drive very far because she worried she’d be stranded by a migraine. Nothing sounded fun to her, and she left the appointment merely resolved to suffer through the empty days. When I first read these notes, I was exactly the age Mom was at that appointment—one month past my thirtieth birthday—but I was overwhelmed with sympathy for this young woman. I have never had a physical ailment that restricted my freedom, and I have never been afraid to go to a movie or restaurant on my own. Suddenly she seemed so fragile, so girlish and young, so different from the vivacious woman I knew, cloaked in the willed bravery of motherhood.
There is no way to neatly plot Mom’s feelings for Dennis over those last nine months of her life. She accepted Dennis back, broke up with him again, asked him to take her back, and stayed with him—all while sharing with Anna her feelings of ambivalence and dread. Her resolve to leave him waxed and waned, as did her fear of being alone. At some point, Tim came around again and “pressured” Mom into sex, which left her feeling confused and angry. I can’t tell who called whom. I also can’t determine, from Anna’s clinical notes, what “pressure” meant. Soon after, Dennis staged his paper-bag marriage proposal, and Mom accepted.
Two weeks after the engagement, Mom told Anna that she was trying to set some limits with Dennis: “He can’t swear at me or break things,” she said. This was meant to be a starting point. He needed to understand that this was abusive behavior, even if he didn’t touch her. She was scared, but determined. Through shaky tears, she told Anna that she did not want to have “any kind of violence in her life.”
The next day was my twelfth birthday—the last we would spend together. Mom gave me an emerald ring I had seen at Kmart, and I was ecstatic to have my own gold band and jewel. I remember opening the gray velour box at our kitchen table, then leaping up to hug her, bumping the table and tipping a glass of soda over onto the cake while she and Denny laughed. She must have worked so hard to make it a happy day for me. About a month later I lost the ring, and I remember her disappointment when I told her, her sadness about the loss mirroring and amplifying my own. She had been so happy to give me this thing I desperately wanted. I found it at school, three weeks after she died. It was a joyous moment marred by the fact that I could not share it with her. One of the first of thousands.
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