Tunes

by Jessica Stone

....In Wisconsin, summers are like one drawn-in breath that stops the world, and may never be exhaled. Everything falls unbreakable and still. The sky and ground and air look flat, and every blade of grass and every tree leaf, dropped or hung, has a quality of waiting, of suspense. This afternoon is especially humid, and I feel like I’m inside a stopped clock. Today, my mother wants to sit outdoors.

I get a mattress out of the garage. We sit together in the back yard. The lawn—I water it—is doing fairly well for this heat and stretches yellow-green as cornstalks, and quite far. On the mattress, which smells of rain and dry manure, it seems we’re on an island, shored up from time. Over our high wire fence I can see the nearest neighbor’s yard, tear-shaped pears on several trees, and what, from this distance, look like sunflowers, heads up, flagging the sun; they always looked to me so angrily determined, as though any day they might rise up and march off. I don’t know this neighbor well, or any others. My mother doesn’t talk to them; their friendliness toward her—after my more jovial father’s death— wore off, with her help.

Her skin looks as if it has grains of mica in it, a dry sparkle that is partly perspiration. Cross-legged, she is wearing a Chicago Bears T-shirt that used to be my brother’s. I’d gasped when I first saw her in it. As if reading my mind, she’d chirped, “Well, I’m not dead yet, you know.” It was# the first time in days I’d seen her smile.

When my mother talks of life these days, she is talking about death. This is why: Her greatest concern is not death itself, but the idea of life continuing without her. She says, “After I’m dead, the grass will keep on growing.”

“It might,” I said, “if someone waters it.”

There are no flowers around us. She stopped gardening last year, telling me this visit what a relief it had been to stop—who had she done it for, who saw it? Just one other needless habit. Now she knew.

My mother used to grow orchids, irises, lilies, big snapdragons that looked like firecrackers. She had truly liked tall# flowers, the ones, she said, that you could stand and look at almost face to face.

She says, “Your brother is cold-hearted.”

“What do you mean?” I am thinking it is too hot for her to be out here, and that my legs, in denim shorts, look aimless and unused. I think of how, if the phone rings, it could well be her doctor and she won’t talk to him. I would, though.

“Cold-hearted,” she repeats. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s why he’s a doctor. He gets it from me, too.”

She does that: puts herself at the roots of our fates, as in, “My daughter married early to escape me. Twice.” And variations. My brother, Paul, lives in Milwaukee. He has two children and a wife. By his appearance, though, you wouldn’t guess he had a family. His face is guardedly blank. He always greets me with a handshake that is meant to ward me off. Yet I’m relieved that tomorrow he will be here. He’ll take over.

My mother asks me what I’m thinking.

“The earth, about how long it’s been here,” I say easily. (I had been thinking of my mother’s wedding ring—how she took it off at my father’s funeral, as if to say, “Well, that’s that.” I’m wondering, once more, who she had done it for, or to, exactly.)

In her long T-shirt, even barely bathed, with her singular, dense smell, she appears dry and cool as cork. We could be sitting in two separate climates. “About the good earth, like Tara, huh. Your roots?” She laughs.

I had been thinking, too, about her burial. At first, I’d thought she might want to be buried beside my father, but she’d told me rebukingly that she didn’t like the idea of a coffin. It was too conclusive, she had said. She wants to be cremated, and, being unsqueamish as she is, the thought of having the flesh burned off her bones does not disturb her. But I look at her and cannot imagine her not whole.

My mother’s room, as always, has been pared down to its essentials: eye-drops, Kleenex, Jergen's Lotion, talc, a bar of soap, and a basin, which I keep filled with water (she sponge-bathes herself, occasionally, now, allowing me to help), and her drinking glass, which always seems too full—she barely drinks. On two pink floral chairs are several folded T-shirts and her nightgown, which I handwash every other day. The photographs of my brother and myself are the only sentimental objects she allows herself to keep. They face her bed, although, sometimes,purposefully, she turns them so that they face the window.

It’s dusk and cooler now, and I go outside to the porch, another ritual. Night comes fully# here. In nearly pure dark, you see the vivid, ice-sharp stars, the moon in all its forms, the blurred and at last invisible line between horizons. The yellow ranch house is set 30 yards off from the two-lane road that’s nearest. When my mother visited me ten years ago in San Diego, she complained about how impersonal the night seemed in the city, distracted and diluted by all the sleepless lights and cars, unnatural. It’s true that in the country the dark feels tailor-made, both personal and ancient, soothingly repeated. It falls upon you warm and tidal as deep sleep. There is something intimate about it....

Jessica Stone lives in Los Angeles.