Early Loss

My mother was slim, but a short drink of water, with breasts like sun-speckled eggs. Her halter-top and hot-pants were jumping colors and they seethed like a firecracker. She had the tiniest hands, golden brown and glistening with sun-tan lotion. I loved her hair, a mass of dark waves, full and weighted like the cherry tree branches in our backyard.

This was the summer I turned four. My mother was dainty and dating a man named Bobby. She was shooting-the-shit with her gal-pals. There were whirling hangovers and sleep-ins past noon. One minute, she'd pinch my cheeks... The next, she was standing on the street, her bags packed.

It was the summer she emptied the contents of our cabinets and drawers onto the floor. Food wrappers, used sanitary napkins and tampons blended into the chaos of broken furniture and dirty clothes. Our apartment was littered with empty cans.

It was the summer she drank frozen Daiquiris and Pina Coladas. The summer she sang Jim Croce songs and danced barefoot in the grass. The summer she rushed me to the emergency room with a can-lid stuck to the end of my finger.

The doctor laughed... My mother was certain I would die.

Night-after-night, she sat at the dining room table hunched over a tiny flickering flame. Her long hair hung dangerously close to the fire.

At times, she became so enraged, her whispers became shrieks as she transformed into an incredible hulk. Her shirt ripped with bulging-tense-muscle. Her face became a stiff mask. Under the cover of night, she wielded heavy objects above her head and sent them crashing to the floor.

She covered walls, scrawling obscenities with my Crayola crayons. She hung vinyl records on the pull chains to light fixtures. They hung suspended above our heads like UFO’s.

During this time, she spent her public assistance checks on silk jumpsuits and fake fur coats. She shoplifted socks and threw them into my stroller. She became the kleptomaniac of candy bars.

Eventually, she stopped bathing. She stopped brushing her hair and her teeth. She stopped sleeping. She stopped paying the bills. The electricity went out.

I watched her from my bed as she prowled through the rooms late at night. Everything became a complicated maze— as if a hand plucked her from one life and dropped her bloated and toothless into another.

Buildings unexpectedly lit up, noxious odors emanated from words on a page. She was assaulted by a barrage of voices that seemed to speak at once. —Her eyes bulged and words flew like flecks of paint. Phrases dripped from her mind with a fluidity that resembled the shattered droppings of a Jackson Pollock. It was like her mind loosened until it resembled a heap of tangled, agitated string. She argued with these selves, and wrote their fragmented speeches into notebooks. Overwhelmed by despair, she struggled to hold back the primal rage she felt about her stolen life.

Even as her mind attempted to swallow the last vestiges of her personhood, she railed against the shapeless senselessness that would rob her of youth.

These were days that resembled one long night. And in that night there was a clock on the wall, but its arms were stopped… I could not fathom why she peeled the wallpaper from the walls, or why she scratched into the crumbling horsehair plaster with a butcher’s knife. I only knew the pain and uncertainty of the heart.

I observed; learning the savage beauty of nature. I learned even cherry tree blossms turn to bloody pits... that branches, once thick, become barren in Winter... that a wind would blow.

And as it turned out, even when she was no longer my beautiful, erratic and sun-kissed mother, the blossoms continued to arrive without fail, always burgeoning into full-blown pollination around the time of her birthday.

Years later, when my mother was on medication to quiet her thinking, as she faltered between halfway-houses and hospitalization, after her passions were cooled and every ounce of her personality was drained, she didn't sing. She wore dark clothes, and moved like a fat cloud.

Every year, when the blossoms were ripe and failing, I sat still in the backyard. I watched grasshoppers push aside the green blades, as they made their way, springing from peak-to-peak.

I wished for a radio playing, for my miniature swimming pool, and for flowers clinging to the fence. I wished for my mother, ecstatic and unassuming, swimming her fingers through air as she pretended to be someone else.

Sometimes, when the yard became blanketed with tiny white petals, I'd tumble into them. I'd bury my face. Sometimes, when I needed, I opened my mouth. I'd try to catch them on my tongue as they descended from our tree.

I imagined I was a priest. I imagined they were communion wafers... that somehow this act redeemed me and made me a part of a fully human, inexhaustible body.

I believed I was in control of the savoring—each drop of life, each sacrifice, complete and safe in my priest-like hands.

I dreamed I was the keeper of the oldest flame, the oldest story, ever to be spoken and ever to be written, that I could bring our tree to fruit again.

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