how i used to write about my mom

One Way


We are not made of sugar. That’s how my mother would say do not make fusses about walking in the rain. I was seven. I told her that the raindrops made me need to pee. Settle down, she’d say, as we drove down the hill to buy some groceries.

Belted safely in her chiclets-yellow Oldsmobile Omega, we drove past Angelinos jogging by the coral trees.... The rain was keeping them cool, mom said. Her radio played Good-day-Sunshine songs.

When we got there, I felt shy. I held a corner of her handbag, not her hand. I was watching people’s sneakers when she told me, pick a soup. The market floor was sticky from the rain tread in. Its green Palmolive tile felt like dirty glass.

Let’s not make a career out of shopping at the country mart, she said. That’s how my mother told me my decisions took too long.

With her long swan neck and ballerina legs, she seemed taller than the other mothers. Her denim jeans fit like she’d been dipped into them. Her high healed zipper boots made a tap, tap, click, click, and click. She also wore a smoking jacket, black cherry colored, with a sash made out of faux bunny fur. It came from New York City with a label that said “!!!!”

She was hard to understand. Her presence at the market was noticeably non-suburban. She had kitten eyes, lined with blue-black pencil. Her eye color was pale, pale blue. Her hair was silky black; as shiny as Chinese teacups. She usually pulled it into a bun. She wore it down that day. More people would look at her when my mother’s hair was down.

We liked the men who did their work in aprons. The Grocers shared our sense of time and tempo. From aisle to aisle, they seemed to glide. We’d smile or say hello as we walked by them. Spraying fruits and veggies they would say, the mangoes are good today. The apricots are almost ripe. But the grocers didn't wave or whistle to the other women pushing shopping carts. These were our neighbors, who were never in a hurry. We bumped into them sometimes. It would slow my mother down.....

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We could share a great big secret, just by smiling. My mother taught me how to smile in a way that said “!!!! At the cashier, Handsome Dr. Blue stopped by to say hello.
“I recognized you from behind,” he told my mother. He didn’t notice me. Or else I pretended I wasn’t there.

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My mother made heirlooms that afternoon, after we drank soup. She said she was sorry that we didn’t have any. We sat at the kitchen table. She was quilting throw cushions, patterned with scenes from our back garden. The daisies and the mandarin trees. I made my own homage. Muddy watercolors of what I saw through rain smeared windowpanes.

“Stupid, stupid, bad,” I said about those watercolors. And I told her that Art hurt my feelings.
Nothing garish grew in that garden. The Eucalyptus was a dusty, mild, faded green. The lemon trees made dull off yellow fruit, never ripe for juice. And then there were two birds of paradise, which stood out extreme. Their colors seemed to be screaming mad. Red vermilion, and orange. My mother liked it that way.

I envied the symmetry in the patterned shapes my mother made. Perfect flowers not even traced or measured. My flowers were lousy. My paintings had design flaws.
“There’s no such thing as a perfect circle,” my mother told me. In Marvy Markers I drew my mother gardening wild flowers. Flowers the color of stained glass.
“Come here” she said. She let me sit on her lap, despite my design flaws.

“I will always be your mommy. You can always talk to
me. But, don’t have hurt feelings if the conversation is only one way.”

Most of that year was quiet. She was sick. Then bed ridden in her white room. Cold and hot. “That’s nice,” she said, when I held a wet cloth on her forehead. She didn’t have the strength to quilt our heirlooms.

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I think about those perfect circles she made. I rarely see them anymore. Still, sometimes I do talk to my mother. To one of her handbags or to a fresh bouquet of flowers in her vase. I try to balance sad and funny.

After a rough day I’ll complain to her handbag about the subway. I gave my seat to a teenage mother who looked knocked up again. She yanked her daughter up the stairs too fast when they got off. Her daughter smiled at me. She had daisy barrettes with; I love Jesus in the petals.

I tell my mother’s flower vase about the homeless lady who lives down my block. “You’re ugly!” she says, each time I walk past. I go out of my way to avoid going by her.

I miss mom a lot today. I'm all grown up in that jacket, of ill repute. On me it hangs mid thigh. I’m at the modern art museum with a pink satin notebook tucked under my arm. This notebook was a gift from Sam. “Don’t write in between the lines,” he wrote inside.

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There is a small gallery in the museum, where I like to get dreamy. I go here a lot. Loud non-art lovers sometimes block my view. “Looks like New York street pee,” some one says. I know to never look these people in the eye. My mother would have stretched her legs and smile slightly without opening her mouth. The look is perfect.
I see her face in a painting from the 1920’s. French haircut. Fair skin. Red lips, long neck. Kitten eyes the color of pale blue water.

When I close my eyes I shut out distraction. And then I see her in a Degas pose. She’s lounging on a white Eames chair with her legs out on the ottoman.

That coat looks great on you, she says. Then why make troubles with your man?
See what you’ve done? There’s nobody left who is unflawed like you..............