My Mother

Story ID:	3210
Written by:	Zofia Danute Barisas
Story type:	Family Memories
Writers Conference:	$500 2007 Family Memories Writing Project
Location:	Ajijic Jalisco Mexico
Year:	2007
Person:	My mother

My Mother

By

Zofia Barisas

I pick her up at Wavel Villa where she now lives. I'm taking her out to lunch. She's wearing one chartreuse green sock, one pink one, yellow sandals, a green skirt and a magenta blouse. There's something happy about what she does with colors. I see she still dresses herself and that is a blessing.

Wavel Villa is a Polish nursing home located across the street from High Park. The park covers acres of hilly terrain and has a lake, boats for rent, cycling paths, a small zoo, picnic areas and a restaurant. Small European grocery stores nearby display stands of fruit on the sidewalk. Further along are small outdoor cafes and Hungarian pastry shops. It is a pleasant and cozy neighborhood. She has taken to stealing ripe mangoes. The store owner yells at us as we amble by:

"She can't come in here, she's a thief."

My mother the thief. I can't help smiling. She's finally breaking some rules.

In the parking lot around the corner from the home stands a Goodwill box, overflowing with clothing. Bags that people haven't managed to squeeze in are piled along the sides.

"Look at this," she says to me, "they give you clothes here, you can take as much as you want. You don't need money."

She's like a child playing grown up, pulling out all sorts of items.

"Look, this would be nice for you."

She collects a small bundle.

"I'll take these with me."

"Mama, this is a collection box, clothes for poor people."

"No, little daughter, it's for everybody. Men stand in the back of a truck and hand them out with open hands."

In her room she shows me the wedding dress, a long affair all in lace and satin lining. She looks at me and her eyes are lit with such delight that I feel it in my bones. The room is filled with black plastic bags filled with clothes from 'the store' in the parking lot where they don't charge. The man who manages the home says to me:

"We can't have all these bags in here. What do you want us to do about it?"

"Mama, would you like me to take some of this stuff with me, make more room for you here?"

"Oh no, no, there's plenty of room. All this will come in useful."

The door to the balcony is blocked by stacks of bags, the walls, the floor are lined with them. It's a black bag igloo with a white lace dress as a decoration. She's a young girl dreaming of the wedding she's going to have with the cavalry officer she never married.

* * *

Many, many years ago when we were both much younger, we sit at the kitchen table of a farmhouse in a tiny parish in Quebec. We're the one family of foreigners in that part of the world. She tells me about Paul, Povilas in her language. I'm sixteen. The reason for this unhoped-for intimate time is my love affair with Peter. She is sharing with me a piece of her romantic past.

"We used to sit on a small hill," she says. "I was as slim as you are now. I weighed less than a hundred pounds."

I think back to the times when I was five, seven, ten years old. My mother with the size 38D breasts, trying on bras with extra wide straps and me sitting in the fitting room, bored in a litter of bras, all that soft flesh, so much boneless flesh, now you see it, now you don't, now hanging, now the things gathered up, her hand inside the bra cup accommodating the mass, bending forward to let it all gather in there, fill it up, then the straps pulled up. Here it is, what rested softly now is all up, pointing, on some warpath, coming at you way ahead of the bearer, make way.

Less than a hundred pounds. I try to visualize it. I have this bizarre fleeting thought that her breasts alone weigh half of that. Outside the open window are dahlias nine feet tall with huge heads in all mixes of colors, and raspberry bushes loaded with red and yellow berries. My mother who has never had time for me is all absorbed in my drama today, in my romance with Peter, a 26 year old Swiss German engineer, ten years older than me. She has found what she thinks to be common ground between us, the love of a man, and she has become a friend, but so suddenly that I'm still feeling my footing around it.

She's telling me about her love story and I look at her face that I never tire of seeing. Looking at her has become enough. It's hard to take in this whole lot of more. I listen and I see her fade back till she's back on that hill outside some small European village. There are white birches around. Povilas is waiting for her. He's in the cavalry. His horse grazes nearby. There she is in his arms again. She's wearing a thin cotton dress.

"He used to bring me novels to read. Then we sat under the trees and he held me and kissed the top of my head. A breeze rustled the leaves and cooled our faces. All my girlfriends were jealous of me. He was so handsome in his uniform. Then one day he was arrested and made prisoner of war. 'He'll be out in a year,' his father said. And he was. But I didn't believe him. I was 25 years old and every one knew he was my boyfriend. I thought no other man would want me."

I hear the words and look at her beauty and am left in wonder.

"Many women went to Canada," she says, "to marry men they didn't know. This was before the end of the war. And my best friend's family knew your father and said he was a good man. I could have gone home, the return passage was paid, but I couldn't face the shame of going back."

She was married to my father by the archbishop of Quebec City where the ship had docked. My father always seemed to be angry and at some point she started calling him 'kvetkiuk', which means little flower, to soften his anger.

She tells me this story and I, so much more my father's daughter than hers, wait for the part where I'm hoping that the little pipe and the little chicken, which is what my little brother and I have been taught to call those parts between our legs if we ever have need to talk about 'that', I'm hoping she'll come to the part where those areas engage, but no, it's all pure love, or so she chooses to remember or wants me to believe. Povilas is a man who loves and respects her. Listening to her I find my own earthiness uncomfortable.

This romance of mine that she wraps in smiles and dewey eyes, when she sees me again, when she reenters the present, back from that other reality she goes to for heart comfort, is a sordid affair. We spend hours in the tourist rooms ripe with bug spray, where he lives, and struggle on the old chenille bedspread, with him trying to find a way into the tight Catholic girdle that I wear and I fight for my purity while wanting to lose it, too afraid of the state of mortal sin and equally afraid of the state of pregnancy.

"We can have the reception at the Church Hall," my mother says. "You'll look so beautiful in white. Three bridesmaids, maybe 150 guests. We can make a list."

I've met Peter in a smoky coffeehouse, down some thirteen steps from the street. He still hasn't worked out the snap mechanism in the crotch of my girdle (any hope of progress hindered by my tightly closed legs) and my mother is planning a wedding.

"Oh mama, what planet…"

Nothing has changed. She still doesn't see me. She's talking about the wedding that she didn't have.

* * *

Many years have passed. All these romances seemed so important at the time, so deeply desired, and in her case so longed for still, even after new life began in a foreign country. Old romances dreamed of for comfort in the unwanted new male arms. All this has rolled by the window of life and has been left behind as if lived by so many ghostly selves. And she, at the end of her life, is reclaiming them to give better endings to their stories.

* * *

Today, I put her in my car. We drive across town to the trendy Beaches district where I live half a block from the lake. We go to an elegant restaurant, a renovated old bank. Muted colors, original artwork, soft upholstery, old architecture, marble floors and great open windows. In this politically correct city we are welcomed with but a trace of resistance. I ask for a table in the window as the maitre d' is aiming us for a darker corner. We drink coffee while we wait. The crème de saumon comes.

"What is this?"

"Cream of salmon soup."

"I used to catch fish in the river with my father," she says. "He once beat me with a birch branch, whipped me across the thighs till they turned blue. I was playing, sliding down the thatch roof. He was so worried that I would get hurt. That was the only time that he ever hit me."

She pours her leftover coffee into the soup and puts her curled butter ball into the mix also. She spreads the mixture on her bread with a spoon. I watch this novel way of eating and it strikes me as a viable alternative, though one I would not have thought of. The people at the next table motion to the waiter and ask to be relocated. It's a perfect meal. I watch, spellbound, ways of combining foods and use of utensils and marvel at the wonder of her being so young again. The mother/daughter tension that used to blanket our meals when we were both adult is no longer present.

Afterwards I take her to my apartment. The stairs wrap around two sides of the house to the third floor. I have her climb ahead. We're almost at the top. She stops. She's staring at the two inch gap below the low wall that encloses the staircase. She starts backing down on all fours. I'm right behind her.

"Mama, there is no danger, no way you can fall. I'm right here with you."

She presses back against me and tries to push past.

"Mama, it's only five more stairs, only five stairs and we're there. Just a little ways more. I'm right behind you."

She is in a panic, she is agitated and moans and tries to back down. I press my thigh against her buttocks to block her backward progress and look around for someone who could help me, someone who could take her by one arm while I take the other. But no one is about. I feel the diarrhea seep through my trouser leg before I smell it. I bend forward, wrap my arm around her stomach and half push, half carry her talking to her all the time. It's painstakingly slow going. Her energy fed by panic is all into retreating, mine into advancing. We crawl in this strange huddle, gaining inches despite resistance, like two awkward bugs laboring a steep incline.

"Just a bit more, mama, just a couple of steps, we'll be inside, we'll be safe. We're there, we're on the deck. You can open your eyes, the gate is shut."

In the bathroom I pull down her soaked skirt, her soiled underpants, my stained slacks. She removes the rest of her clothing. I run a bath while I wash her at the sink. She eagerly tries to help by washing her front while I wash her back. I rinse the clothing in the toilet bowl and put it in the washing machine. She is now in the tub, she the child and I the mother. I kneel next to the tub and gently wash her face, shampoo her short white hair and comb it away from her face to show the widow's peak, a beauty mark which she calls horns and hides by combing her hair forward. Grey rolls of dirt come off her arms as I soap and scrub. She hates baths.

"But I just had one," she says when the people at the home want to bathe her.

The breasts men so desired have shrunken empty and hang low. I lift then one by one and wash underneath. She looks down at them and says:

"An old body."

I look into her pale blue eyes where no age shows. Her present is my future though I have no daughter. She is my guiding light, has been all along, not by what she said but by who she was and is. I pull the rows of wrinkles on her stomach and wash in between then soap between the lips of her vulva. This is the body I came from, the vagina, the breasts, the vulva. The whole process of procreation, the unwanted couplings with the unloved man, the act of giving birth, the life giving milk flowing from her breasts, the body that I wash and rinse tenderly has lived it fully. The strength of life, its tenaciousness, its fragility is written here in gatherings and folds.

She rubs rolls of accumulated dirt down her legs wanting to do her share of this cleaning process and I sit back on my heels and watch her.

"See how much there is of it," she says.

I smile at her and she smiles back.

"You wash me like a baby," she says.

"Yes."

I lift her up. She is again less than a hundred pounds. I dry her and wrap her in a thick bathrobe and then hold this frail, bent body in my arms. My mother.