May 12, 2003

• Dammit, Toto, it looks like we’re still in Kansas.

  
  

  To set the record straight, I love my mama.  It isn’t the respectful and/or dependent filial love of a daughter looking up to the superior maturity and wisdom of a parent.  My mama turned me into her caretaker when my father died.  Any remaining shreds of filial awe were dispelled when I was 25, homeless, just out of jail and soon to be on my way to prison, and she was 58 (my current age) and confided in me about her man troubles and asked for my romantic advice.

  
  

  My love is not a euphemism for guilt or obligation or gratitude.  I don’t think I owe her a thing.  I consider our mutual karma balanced, null and void.  She wanted a baby, to fulfill her need to be a mother.  She stated that in so many words.  She tried before and bore another girl who lived a few hours.  I was her last chance at motherhood.  She could have adopted one or two of my cousins, but wasn’t interested in that, neither before nor after I was born, though my cousin Buddy and I were closer than many brothers and sisters.  Buddy and I both wanted him to stay with us, but just as she did with a long succession of dogs, cats and various love objects of mine, Mama wouldn’t have it.  It had to be her own baby, and only her own, and the baby was not allowed to have other love interests.

  
  

  Mama and I didn’t bond properly when I was a neonate.  Both of us had separate surgeons working on us as soon as the obstetrician got my foot pushed back up so my butt could come out, and I managed to back into this life.  I don’t know how soon it happened, but Mama became the odd one out, unable to fit in the tight, companionable rapport between me and Daddy.  It didn’t help that she lacked the native intelligence of his family.  She was a little bit slow.  We both thought, talked and ran rings around her, laughing at her the whole time.  I think that after he died she decided to make me pay for some of that.

  
  

  My love for mama is composed of empathy and compassion.  I know how hard she suffered for her errors and I know intimately the cultural and family history that led her into error.  I love her as I love all the rest of the people I know intimately.  It’s really just the same love I have for the entire Universe, only intensified by the intimate contact and knowledge.  The better I know someone, the better I love them.  And I know my mama very well.  I was her confidant, the one whose shoulder she cried on, whom she blamed when the latest man moved on, and who was sternly admonished when the next one started coming around that, “children are to be seen and not heard.”

  
  

  I have made my peace with mama, though she never made peace with me.  I was a gross disappointment to her ’til the day she died, though she always spoke of how proud she was of me.  As paradoxical as that sounds, she did have both pride and shame in me, simply because she tried to own me, control my life and live through me.  To the extent to which she got her way with me, she was proud.  I was smart and pretty, brave and capable.  To the extent that I did not conform to her ideal, she was ashamed.  I was independent, irreverant, headstrong, and promiscuous, as precocious at sex as at the intellectual stuff.  She was mortified.

  
  

  It drove me nuts and drove me out of her reach.  I don’t have to pretend that she was anything she wasn’t in order to love her because I love her unconditionally.  She was just exactly the mother I needed.  She showed me the error of hypocrisy, dishonesty and denial, gave me something worthy of rebelling against and made me who I am today.   

  
  

  But that hadn’t happened yet when we ended up at my cousin Red Conners’s house in Halstead, waiting for Jim Henry to come back in his green woody, a wood-paneled station wagon, with all his worldly goods.  Mama was uneasy within the first day or so without a phone call from him.  In San Jose, after that first phone call they were talking frequently, amost every day for a while.  Mama always missed her men, and her sisters and brothers and friends and me, when we weren’t around.  She was always missing someone.  She missed Daddy right up until she died, she said.  She was obviously missing Jim there at Red’s house.

  
  

  She kept looking at the phone, probably willing it to ring.  I saw her walk over to it a few times as if to pick it up, then tensely force down her hand and walk away.  There was no number to call.  He was supposedly on the road.  But after enough days had passed that she was sure he should have been there by then, she called his sons in Pine Bluff.  He was gone, they said, had sold off, doled out or packed up everything, headed for Kansas.  Then the police were called in.  I wasn’t privy to any of that.  The grownups dealt with it.

  
  

  I knew only that Jim had “disappeared”.  Somewhere between Arkansas and Kansas, he and his woody and all his worldly goods had gone missing.  Mama was frantic.  She twisted hankies to shreds.  She did her little approach/avoidance dance with the phone all the time.  Time passed and I guess she grew numb.  She and Aunt Alice and Red and his wife Blondie discussed the possibilities.  Mama was going for the fanciful ones that had him just somehow delayed, while the other two women were horrified at the thought that some hitchhiker might have offed him for his woody and the worldly goods.  Red thought he had probably gotten cold feet and took a powder.  I remember his mother and his wife shushing him when he expressed that thought.  They’d rather have Jim dead in a ditch, I guess, than absconded.

  
  

  Red made it clear that Mama had to get on with her life and out of his house.  They worked out a deal for her to buy his business, Halstead Sundries, the place the town called the drugstore, though the pharmacy was in the next block south on Main Street.  Main Street was paved with red brick.  The floor inside the store was small hexagonal tiles set in geometric black and white patterns.  The high ceiling in there was dusty-looking once-white painted stamped tin, with wreaths of fruit and flowers embossed in the metal.

  
  

  On the right was a soda fountain with seven red vinyl-covered swiveling stools, and between that and the door were a cigar case and a heated display of roasted nuts.  The opposite wall of the store was lined with shelves and a long row of shallow divided bins for everything from sewing notions to Carter’s Little Liver Pills.  The sundries stock extended the full depth of the store, more than twice the length of the soda fountain.  At the back of the store, tucked under a “balcony” floor the full width of the store and about 12 feet across, were a jukebox, three red leatherette booths, a magazine stand and two wire racks of paperback books.  In other words, heaven for any kid growing up in the fifties.

  
  

  Too bad then, that I was living in my own little self-created hell.  Mama put a good face on it and joshed with the customers all day, and cried at night.  Now that Jim wasn’t there, she was back to crying for Daddy, too, along with crying for Jim.  She looked like hell:  pasty face, red eyes, a rictus of a grimace for a smile.  She had admonished me enough about being a good girl around Jim, and scolded me enough for being bad, that I was pretty sure he had gone away because of me.  First I widowed her, and then I repelled her long-lost childhood sweetheart.

  
  

  I don’t look so good in my old pictures from the time, either.  I see the eye-pouches of kidney disease, the puffy features, and I remember how sick I was.  It was fairly soon, that first summer in Halstead, that I had my first serious sugar overdose.  Part of it was grape, artificially-flavored grape.  Between the Coke machine and the ice cream freezer behind the counter, were two drink syrup dispensers.  Each held an upended gallon jug of flavored syrup.  One was always orange, and the other would be lime sometimes, sometimes grape.

  
  

  We had just opened the new jug of grape.  I had taken the doo-hickey that held the jug down and washed it, and then clamped it back onto the counter and Mama stuck the open jug in it.  She let me try a glass of it, a portion of the syrup over ice, and then fill the glass with water, either carbonated or plain.  She wanted me to have plain, so of course my preference was fizzy. 

  
  

  It was hot outside and I got thirsty and came back for more… a lot more, and a few dishes of ice cream, because it was so hot.  Mama realized that I hadn’t had lunch and started looking in the fridge to see what was on hand.  I ate a sandwich:  a “salad” of minced ham, mayonnaise and pickle relish on white bread, and since by then I didn’t want to drink grape any more, I had a glass of Coke.  I was soooo sick!  Puking and sweating and cramping and headache, arrrgh!  Grape soda was never tempting to me again after that.

  • 9:41 pm
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