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Remembrance

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Athena



Joined: 26 Aug 2004
Posts: 314
Location: Berlin
Remembrance

Remembrance

My mother puts down her teacup and tells me that I remembered wrong.
“I had no such relationship with Ella. What would make you ask such a question?”
She pours more black tea into her cup, although she had only taken two sips and adds more milk to the sweet, cloudy tea. She picks up her dainty piece of buttered banana bread and shakes her head.
“Because I remember you two were lovers.”
Her face looks panicked and she stops chewing for a moment. I hear her swallow and she laughs nervously.
“And what should give you the impression that we were lovers? I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.”
Her tan cheeks redden and she holds the delicate cup to her mouth without sipping. I cannot help laughing at her embarrassment
“Oh, come on mom. There is nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s been ages. It’s not like I disapprove. If I did, you’d have heard about it long ago.”
She puts the cup in the saucer and gives me an annoyed look.
“I can’t believe you are accusing me of having an affair with the hired help.”
“I’m not accusing you,” I say incredulously. I am annoyed that she is making this to be about race and not misunderstood love. “I’m just trying to let you know that I understand. I think it’s great you did it. You needed the affection. God knows you didn’t get it from Dad.”
“Cecile, you stop this nonsense at once.” Her French accent reveals itself; something that occurs when she is furious. I smile and sip my tea. I decide to ease up on her so I cut myself another piece of bread and bite into it. She smears butter on another cut of bread.
****

It was spring on the cusp of summer and I was four years old, sitting opposite my mother in a cushioned bay window. Her legs stretched out before her, I was sitting on one side of them, my near naked body pressed against the cool glass. She was carrying my brother in a tight pouch beneath her shift dress and I was not allowed anywhere nearer to her.
Sweat poured off us both and the pathetic ceiling fan was making more noise than breeze. She wiped at her glistening neck with a white, sweat stained cloth and I looked at the people below. They were coming into and out of the building, siting beneath maple trees in the front courtyard, or bombarding the Good Humor ice-cream man.
Mom’s legs were as sweaty as mine were. I decided to assume her position, but our legs stuck together and she moved them like agitated scissors. She did not speak English, at least not well enough to feel comfortable, but I still understood her French. I saw Dad approaching the steps to the building with a brown bag tucked under his arm and I hurled myself over mom’s legs. She did not move.
We moved from Martinique when I was three nearing four. Dad was a half Swiss, half American, from Lausanne, traveling through the Caribbean when he met my mother, a shy country girl living with her grandmother. He played guitar in a band, sketched women’s clothes in his free time, sold his pattern to dress makers, making just enough money to move throughout the Caribbean and South America. He had curiously found himself at a country restaurant, being served by a butter skinned girl with golden waves of hair flowing down her back. She was only fifteen.
He decided to stay, taking the odd job to pay his rent in a boarding house and treat my mother to the luxuries of ice cream and gold bangles. After they were married, he rejoined his band, but came home several times for the month. When I was three and he tired of island life, he decided it was time to return to the states, and my mother had to leave all she ever knew.
****


She drains her cup of tea and wraps the remaining bread in tin foil. I circle the rim of the cup with my finger. I am trying to come up with a new tactic to make her talk.
“How are your classes?” She says over the running faucet.
“They’re good. I’m taking this literature course that’s really interesting. It’s hard but I like it.”
“That’s good,” she says absently. I know I’ve made a sizable dent. Mom chuckles softly and a secret, remembered thought. She hums a Beatles tune, but I can’t figure out which one it is.
“I Saw Ella’s granddaughter the other day. She’s a sweet child. I should tell Lisa to bring her by so you can see.”
Mom looks at me sharply, then back to the dishes in the sink.
“And how is Lisa? It’s been years since I saw her last. I probably wouldn’t recognize her.”
“She’s good. I’m shocked that she doesn’t come to see you.”
“Why should she?”
“Because you and her mother are such close friends. You’d think that she would stop by once in a while.” She comes over and takes the cup and saucer from under my circling fingers and shuffles back to the kitchen.
“Ella and I don’t speak very much. We exchange cards and a letter every now and then. Besides, Lisa doesn’t owe me anything. I knew her as a child. I’ve probably passed her on the street; I wouldn’t ever recognize her.”
****

As the summer days became sufferable and my unborn brother grew, Mom became more unbearable to be around. She sat in the bay window; sometimes with her stained cloth full of chipped ice and sometimes with a small bowl of water she used to cool her neck. At one point I was not allowed anywhere near her, and the sight of my chubby hands reaching for her only made her cringe and shiver in the stifling heat. In her sleep she cried audibly, and mumbled that she wanted to go back to her grandmother’s house.
One night, as Dad was bathing me I asked him why mom no longer wanted my unborn brother or me. He did not look shocked at all. He only replied that “maybe she was too young to have children.” I think back on it and she was only nineteen that summer.
Worried about mom’s deteriorating health and the health of his unborn child, Dad asked a woman in our building to help. She was to do housework, and look after us. The day she rang our bell, I was disappointed to find a young, dark woman, not munch older than mom, with a six-year-old daughter clinging to her mother’s dress. I was expecting a grandmother, for mom’s sake.
Ella was a trim, but sturdy woman, who cleaned our apartment, cooked our food, cleaned our clothes and looked after us as if we were family. She and her daughter lived with her parents, just two floors above us. She came early in the morning, and left at night. Sometimes she and her daughter Lisa didn’t leave for days. They stayed in my room with me until Ella felt it was ok for her to leave for the night.
****

“She named the child Sara.”
“Who?”
“Lisa, mother.” I am feeling impatient with her. She is watering her jungle of green plants living on the kitchen sill. She rubs a healthy looking leaf between her fingers and smiles. I am still sitting at the table, one leg crossed under me.
“Didn’t you say you had an appointment this afternoon?”
“Yeah, but I’m not going to go. There is supposed to be heavy rain and lightning today.”
“Oh, but the sky is so clear. You should go anyway.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me mom?”
“No, no.” She gives me a playful smile. “You shouldn’t live your life according to predictions, that’s all.”
****

Lisa and I were supposed to be asleep in my bed. We lay back to back in our underwear; me awake twiddling the end of my pillow and she asleep sucking her wrinkled thumb. I couldn’t sleep because I heard my mother crying and Ella trying to soothe her.
“You be ok Vivvy. You be all right. I remember when I carried Lisa. I wanted to dump her out my belly. But she my baby and I glad I had her.”
Mom cried and I decided to see her. At four, I was not stricken with grief to see my mother crying, as most children would be. I crept to the door and tiptoed to spy them through the keyhole. The murky bath water was draining and my mother sat on the edge of the tub, wrapped in a skimpy towel. Ella was combing through her wavy auburn hair then plaited the waist length tresses into to floppy plaits. She poured cool skin cream in her hands and rubbed moms legs and thighs. Mom quieted. Ella rubbed cool lotion down her back, across her breasts and massaged her belly. Mom sniffed and stared at Ella who was determined to moisturize every part of mom’s freshly scrubbed skin. Ella hadn’t noticed her and turned to get mom’s nightgown.
I wasn’t shocked by what I was but it was something I remembered for the rest of my life. Mom stood up, startled Ella and put her arms around the dark woman’s wiry frame. She rested her damp head on her shoulder and started crying again. Ella embraced her and mom began kissing her neck, then her cheek then her mouth. Ella did not resist. They looked at each other then kissed again and hugged.
“Come on Vivvy, get into your gown,” Ella broke the silence. She slipped the gown over mom’s head and I went back to my room.
****

Thunder clapped in the background and mom looked up from her book.
“Quel était cela?”
“Thunder. I told you it was going to storm.” The sky is turning ominous and a shadow spills through the bay windows. I look out and notice people in the courtyard, running towards the building, watching the sky for the imminent fury. A strong gale blows and a child’s drawings are scattered across the trimmed lawn. Then the hail falls. A soft plink at first then a crashing like pebbles on larger stones. A bolt dances in the distance then the thunder booms. I return to the couch where I was napping. I rummage my purse for my cell phone.
“Rester ici jusqu'à ce que l'orage est par-dessus.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.” She looks back at her book. I feel a tightening in my chest. She only reverts back to French when she is upset. I feel sorry and guilty for causing her such unease. I stare at her in her faded pink housedress and black felt sandals. Her hair is still a bright golden color, and pinned into a bun that looks like the inside of a conch shell. Her skin has lost a bit of its lustrous glow and looks more like a tree stripped of its bark. Her deep brown eyes are still youthful and can still pick up on unharmonious movements. She notices me shivering.
“Que 'le tort des.”
“Nothing. I was just thinking.” She looks back at her reading.
****

That summer my father grew more and more annoyed with my mother’s depression. Some nights when Ella and Lisa stayed over I woke to the sound of him screaming at her, though the thin plaster walls, and her helpless whimpers.
“Genevieve, this must stop!”
“Oh, leave me!”
“Look at me!”
“Leave me!”
“You are my wife. I said look at me. Me regarde!”
“Prendre me soutient à ma grand-mère!”
I would roll over and see the whites of Ella’s eyes and only then feel the urge to cry. She patted my head, keeping time to a lullaby she sang for Lisa.

In late August when I was nearly five, my father went back to Europe. His designs had been a success in America but that summer people grew disinterested in what he had to offer. Perhaps his sketches needed to be updated, or perhaps he could not be creative with a wife who grew younger and younger during the course of her pregnancy. Whatever the reason, he left and did not come back for three years. Our only contacts were the monthly Francs or Pounds he sent in brown envelopes.
Lisa and I were often left alone. We played with our dolls and shreds of Dad’s fabrics. She was a quiet girl who always said “please” and “thank you” even to me. She never dirtied her clothes, washed her hands several times a day and when Ella bathed us together she was never pinched for trying to look at what was below our soapy hips. Before bed, she drank her milk and rested obediently, sucking her pruned thumb furiously. Me, I never went to sleep directly the way Lisa was able to. I wondered why Ella slept with mom and, I wondered if Lisa had a father and if she did, where did he go? I wondered if Dad was gone for good, or if he went back to his old apartment in Lausanne. Every conceivable thing to a four year old going on five raced thorough my head those nights.
Sometimes I paced the halls and looked in on Ella and my mother sleeping together. I saw their bodies naked except for cotton panties and their breasts resting flat and squashed on their chests. I saw mom’s stomach, like a tortoise shell, stretch marked and taut. I saw the way they easily breathed as they embraced one another, complementing each other like bark does to the wood beneath.
When I was eight years old and my brother Michele was three going on four, our father came home and Ella left. I don’t remember a fight or a party. She and Lisa just left. They came back to visit; on birthdays and holidays, but they were no longer a fixture in the family. My mother, who was carefree and affectionate those three years, became sullen and withdrawn form us all for twelve years until my father left again, and for good this time. It was those twelve years that Michele and I learned to hate her and the years since then that’s we’ve been trying to love her again.
****

I pick at the cold chunks of chicken resting on a bed of lettuce and onion. Mom eats her supper easily bringing the summer food to her lips, chewing carefully and swallowing. The storm has eased and my toying thought of staying the night, blown afar. I can see her disappointment as the last boom of thunder moves farther from us, but she retains a cheerful exterior. For many years I thought my mother’s emotions an act. Michele and I knew that her smiles and laughs, long after dad had left her, were perfunctory gestures to keep us at bay. Gentle as she was, she reeked of dishonesty, at least with us. But now, I am almost certain it’s not just an act for my sake. There seems to be a sincerity I had never seen before, or chose not to see.
“You are not hungry?”
“Not really”
“Are you feeling ill?” She puts down her cutlery and leans over the table to feel my head. I playfully brush her hands away and smile.
“I’m fine. I am. I’m just….”
“Yes?” She looks at her plate and searches under a leaf for more chicken.
“I’m just….” She looks up at me. Her brow furrows and I feel the tears welling in my eyes. How could I have been so cruel?
“Cecile, ma chéi, tell me what it is.”
I cannot tell her what I am feeling. I cannot. It’s that realization, thirty years late, that our parents are not just our parents, but beings like us who feel and need. What right did I have to humiliate her all these years later, just because that lifestyle, sexual preference, or whatever you want to call it is ok to talk about now? How could I hate her for so long when all she needed was the opposite? Maybe she was right. Maybe I did remember wrong. I remembered the facts right, no matter how she might deny it, but the memory? I dismembered it; the memory was all wrong.
_________________
"We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental."

Post Tue Jun 28, 2005 4:27 am 
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goldenwillow



Joined: 12 May 2006
Posts: 87
Location: nashville,tn


that was a wonderful story, thank you for sharing.

Post Tue Oct 17, 2006 6:12 pm 
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