A work in process

So, I have been working on a story. Its been ages! Its got so much in it.....and it needs help. So, here it is....it's just a number of beginnings and doesn't have real form yet...pull it apart??? Thanks! ;)


My mother was a barbed woman with brilliant hazel eyes. “I was 116 pounds when I got married,” she told me one July morning as I huddled with her in her dark, acrimonious closet. She had been following me all day—my own emotionally scavenged pet—and somehow we had come to our familiar spot among her misshapen handbags and leather flip-flops.
“Really?” I asked her, at once disbelieving she was ever any smaller than the swollen and slumped flesh she was kneeling now at my feet.
“Yes! 116 pounds!” she exhaled in pride.
She bounced to her feet then, and grabbed protectively a small square of fabric folded in a dry-cleaning bag.
“I can prove it” she furthered, inviting me to peel away the plastic. Inside was a cotton and polyester skirt with begrimed rainbow stripes and an elastic waist.
“Try it on, Danielle,” She further goaded, “I wore that on my honeymoon”. I slipped the skirt easily over my bathing-suit, and let it droop around my waist. Her face flushed at once with color, watching me carefully as I pirouetted for her, then twirled slowly around and around.
“Do you like it on me?” I asked her, breathlessly spinning, wavering under the weight of the moment we were having—a mother and child locked away in a bedroom closet in the middle of the day, a week and month into her self-imposed confinement. She nodded ever more slowly, her eyes flashing their brilliant color and I too felt flushed with pride. Warmth blushed over my body in flustered nourishment. I had forgotten again until that moment my desire to be pleasing.

I wore the skirt all that day, so happy I could fit in anything that belonged to my mother—no matter how mottled or slightly sour the fabric wafted. I was surprised by the joy that that skirt brought to me…surprised that I could feel not only happiness, but relief in my mother’s unimposing sense of nostalgia. She told me then,
“Danielle, remember forever that people should never ever feel they need to be any way today because of anything they were yesterday. The sky can’t have the same clouds today as it did last week and would never ask the sun why it can’t. Those clouds already fell away as rain and are gone and it’s just accepted. We can’t be on any day, what is already fallen and gone away. We have to be like the sky, and accept a new color and a new temperature and a new shade of sun all the time. That is true, Danielle. As true as I was thin enough to wear that skirt, it’s true and if you remember that, living won’t hurt as much.”

A vision of my thin mother with her tired-red-hair and elastic wrapped waist appeared before my eyes suddenly—threateningly—and at once I was startled by her beauty. I remembered sitting cross-legged in a field of dandelions somewhere between school and home watching the sun’s golden yellow reflection dance like fire on the back of my mother’s head and shoulders.
“You’re so pretty,” I had said, staring at her while arranging a pile of the decapitated weeds into a neat circle.
“Shhh!” she had said sharply, ”I keep telling you to stop making so much noise and you keep ignoring me. How can I hear when it is okay to go home if you keep talking and talking? I can hear those flowers and you louder than I can hear my own voice.”

Beauty and fear competed ceaselessly in defining the love for my mother. In dreams, I imagined a conspicuous woman with the thin hips and big eyes was the mother of my today. Her lightly freckled cheeks bent into a near comical and sleepy smile as I sang for her or peeled potatoes for her, and her eyes, without a hint of hollowness looked directly into the deep pools of my own. I had seen a photograph of that woman when I was eight and was shocked to be told it was my own mother.
“There I am,“ she had said as she scattered thick papered pictures around us like flower petals.
“Can you tell that that is me?”

I couldn’t. She was beautiful. She lay in a short dress I imagined was green or yellow with her legs lazily draped over an armchair and an amber colored bottle in her hands, laughing widely. Other photos with it showed similar woman, and men—all laughing and smiling, one even playing a guitar. I imagined she was coming home from work, or maybe an afternoon at the downtown library. That she had taken the bus, but had to wait for it for 15 minutes because she was running a bit early and had gotten hot and thirty in the half-shade of the bus-stop bench. She had been a little breathless, because she had just gotten the kind of good news that changes your heartbeat, and she was thrilled to be able to share it with someone. Of course, she would have to wait. She had a 20 minute bus ride uptown, and with nobody to ride with she would have had to make herself content to look at the people and the buildings slowly passing by. The sky was so blue earlier that day, she had noticed. Even in the city the blue of the sky could not be washed out by sandstone and concrete when it was so cloudless. She smiled to herself, remembering that Dave and Laurie would be meeting her to walk the rest of the way to Jack’s apartment and that Dave would kiss her on the cheek to make Laurie hit him, but that it was all in good fun and by the end of the night he would ask her to marry him and she would again hit him and tell him to “Get a job, you bum!”. They all arrived within minutes of each other and she had time enough only to finger comb her thick red-brown hair behind her ears. She thoughtfully thumbed the bridge of her nose—something she had been doing since she was a small child and had given-up sucking her thumb. Right before Karen had begun snapping photographs, Richard had tossed her a beer and she had smiled gratefully. Neither of them were shy, but she couldn’t remember why they hadn’t talked very much at these things. “He has a nice smile,” she had thought. She had taken a long drink from the bottle, letting the cold bitter beer burn her throat and send bubbles back up to her nose. Karen asked her to smile, and she had begun to turn toward her when she noticed something on the wall next to her that took her attention instead. Only Gloria would stop to stare at such little things as water-stains, and her friends often goaded her about it. “I think it’s adorable,” Richard had said. It had made her smile in relief. This stain was such a new one…days old and probably from the rain that had been there over the weekend. It reminded her of a clownish cloud, of God even, and she found it easy to keep smiling and staring at it at the same time. Then she heard a secret. The clownish God whispered that things were changing for her. “Who me?" she asked, "I am going to be just fine! See that man over there? I’m going to marry him and we will have a great life and a great house and I will remember you always God and be a mother just like my own and raise my children to remember you and will love them to pieces. No, it’s not me you mean. I am just fine.” She smiled again, this time right into the camera. “This one is for my baby!” she shouted, which made two of the men hoot, and Richard to look up at her, and for the first time really see her. He was amazed how he had never before noticed how beautiful she was.

When she made her last winded push of delivery, no one knew I would soon gazing into a puzzled and voiding face. Mother was unfastening her being like a tumbling spindle and only she felt the urgency of its fall. No one yet knew that I had been born to keep company with her as she labored through flushes of panic and confusion. I am sure of the relief she had felt with me finally in her arms-- her baby daughter no longer squirming against her bowels or kicking her in the ribs as she paced the hallways recalculating the look of the man who had asked if she needed assistance. How had he dared to suggest he might need to call someone for her? She was just fine. The car had felt stuffy with all that baby belly and the highway seemed somehow spongy under the turning tires. It just didn’t feel safe, and she had a baby to protect. Stopping the car and walking home made sense to her. She was being a good mother, yet his face had seemed to reflect a challenge of that fact.
I am sure of the love my father had watching his perspiring bride handle his baby girl with careful and almost fearful tenderness. First a son, and then a daughter had she given him. How his face must have looked reflecting the happiness of his wonderful family! And how well she must have kept things from him in those early years for him not to have seen the signs! How hard it must have been for her to smile through the fear, and how easy for him not to look for any evidence it was there.

All this I thought of as I wore my mother’s honeymoon skirt. I wore it riding bikes with Roni and Beck and picking fruit in the misshapen plum trees that bordered the fences. I let it drag in mossy dirt to scoop Mrs. Neal’s kittens from under the deck and I wore it for my mother when she asked me to perform for her.
“Put the skirt on, Danielle. It makes you look just like me, doesn’t it? Have you written any new poetry? Can you give me a show? I need to smile today.”
I let myself again and again be filled by her neediness—consciously accepting it as maternal warmth. I taught myself to choose my words carefully by watching her face smile or crinkle depending on each suggested message or each song’s topic. I held her unyielding, comforted by her thick silences in a way most children are with praise. I read to her, sang to her, tickled and flattered her. Sometimes I felt the eyes on me wax away untainted and I would quickly open my own to see them—for a moment, each of us would catch ourselves smiling at each other like we were unsullied clouds in the sky. Even still, it wasn’t for the annulled eyes of the woman watching that I did this, I knew. It was for my photo-mother. The joyful woman I had seen in her twenties when her eyes still remembered God’s face. The woman who was still holding hope she could love her baby to peace. For the woman in the photograph my cheeks ached from smiling. For her, I sang and laughed and toe-to-heel, toe-to-heel twirled and dipped. For her approval, I made memories that could settle me from the faintness of years of spinning. For her, I never stopped to steady my feet.

My mother wouldn't hit me often, but often enough. Then one day i picked up a large rock. I was in 4th grade or maybe 5th and i put it in my hand and brought it to her face when she was yelling at me and i shouted (i remember this clearly), "This rock? This is YOUR mother. This rock is going to crack your head in two for yelling at me. Believe me, your head is going to fall apart."

The undeveloped defiance stung my lips. I felt hot, spitting. It was comical, of course. The truth of it, not nearly as compelling as the humor it stirred on the face of my mother.
She had handed me so many rocks to hold, so many stones to carry after all. She was so distracted by her amusement, I could have certainly scarred her if i had smashed it into her face. But i didn't. I threw it to the ground letting out a short sob which made her whoop with laughter. She leaned toward me, adjusting her laugh, and said "Oh really? Oooooooh really? You are really so much of nothing Danielle. It's almost cute."

But I was right after all. She was cracking--her head falling apart. For years she had been handing me a stones, and then tell me to hold them. She would say, "Hold this. Don't share it. Hold it and listen to me. Do you know what would happen to you without a mother?" I was no older than five. I couldn't imagine my father making dinner or remembering to help me feed my goldfish. I could not imagine my brother without my mother to drive him to his soccer game. Or me, without arms to push against in the middle of the night, when i needed a bed to sleep in. "You can't tell anyone anymore than this rock can. I trust you Danielle. You just can't tell anyone anything. Everyone has their thoughts about the way thoughts should be thought, but not you. You understand what would happen to me. I trust you Danielle."

So I would hold the stone while she'd say things that scared me, so many confusing things. I'd breathe-in the field we sat in, or the car seat fabric. I'd take long deep counting breaths and try to hear anything happy in the stories she told me, but found that all i could think of was how pretty the stone was, or how smooth, or how sharp and how the sentences she said felt scratchy together and nothing like the other stories I knew. They never seemed to start at any beginning, and never had time enough to end.

"I killed a man today," she said.
This one has a green line in it. It looks like the green dotted line like on my writing workbook, I thought.
"I don't know when someone will find out it was me," she continued.
Is that pink? There is pink next to the green. If I break it open, would it be hollow inside?
"They don't know what I know."
That tree looks perfect to swing from, if my arms were stronger. I could just hook my armpit over that branch and....
"So I have to quit, but I can't tell anyone why. Don't tell anyone why. Danielle? Danielle?!"
"Okay Mommy. It's okay. I'll go put this rock by that tree, okay?"
"No, Danielle. Just bury it."

It's an ugly rock anyway.