Dodie and I are taking shifts sitting by mama’s bedside in the ICU. Dodie being the “up at the crack of dawn” kind of person, takes the morning shift and I the afternoon. We meet for dinner in town and both of us visit her in the evening, carrying on conversations to the cadance of the breathing machine, and the rhythmic chimes of life support as if it were the most normal thing in the world. We hold her hand and talk about the future. I read aloud from some of her favorite books in the afternoons as if we were sitting on the veranda, enjoying a mint julep. But the steady hiss….thump of oxygen being pumped into her lungs has no place in that other world, the one I’m beginning to long for, the world I ran away from.
I wish that this was all just a bad dream, and that when I wake up, mama will be sitting at the kitchen table, cigarette in one hand and chihuahua in the other, musing over the morning paper. But it’s been five days now since the surgery and the odds that she will suddenly wake up and breathe on her own are getting pretty slim. Every once in awhile I look up from my book or my conversation with the wall and search for a flutter of consiousness. Just a flicker of an eyelash or the squeeze of a hand would do. At this point I’d take anything as a sign that this isn’t all going to end where I think it will. And I haven’t even begun to have that conversation with Dodie. You know, the one about the plug.
“Where’d you go, mama?” I whisper so the nurse won’t hear. “Are you dancing? Can you hear me?”
But I may as well be talking to a stump for the response I get. My petite and slender mother who has kept her dancer body in spite of the bad habits that landed her in heart surgery, once had jet-black and straight hair, like mine. She favors her mother and the Mexican side of the family, most of whom live South of the Border. You can see the ever-so-slight reference to Grampy Bates and his Irish Texan clan in the bridge of freckles spanning her nose beetween the high cheekbones, and skin that is slightly fairer than mine (except when she gets some sun). Now her hair is streaked with gray and cropped short. She’d look a lot like Joan Biez were her hair not sticking out in spikes all over the place. I reach for a hairbrush in the little metal cabinet next to the hospital bed and try to tame the remnants of her battle with surgery and her present combat with death.
I can’t quite recall when mama cut her hair short. Maybe back in the seventies after my brother Timmy died. Everything seemed to change then. The spark seemed to fizzle right out of her. She used to wear her hair in a long braid down her back as my Mexican grandmother still does. Funny how you spend most of your life trying to avoid being anything like your mother, and then one day you look in the mirror and there she is. You wear your hair the same, hold your mouth in the same pucker of vanity in front of the mirror, and find yourself picking up the familiar gait of her footsteps. Not so long ago I would have found this appalling, but lately I’ve been feeling the faint stirrings of my Texan roots calling me back home. I’d been even toying with the idea of giving up my law practice in Boston and moving back to the McCullah Ranch to help mama manage the place, maybe set up a practice in El Paso. Of course I never would admit any of this to Dodie, and I sure as heck didn’t let it slip in front of mama. My living so far away has always been a bone of contention between me and the rest of the family. Maybe if I make a vow to come back, mama won’t up and die on us.
I put the brush down and take her hand in mine and raise it up to my cheek and I’m surprized that there are tears in her palm when I bring her hand back down to the bed. Although she is merely a remnant of what she used to be, her hands are as I remember them. Just like mine, mocha latte softness and long, slender fingers. I notice that she still wears her wedding band and a sapphire engagement ring even though Daddy’s been gone at least five years. My own hands are unadorned except for a small turquoise band on my right hand. I have no use for the institution of marriage. I don’t know why Mama stuck with it, but she must have had her reasons.
Jesus Christ! What the hell’s the matter with me? I can’t quite wrap my head around the emotions I’m experiencing. When did I start getting all sentimental? After all, I’m the cool-headed one in the family. The one who could win a debate with a pole cat in a dark ally. Not like Dodie, all fire and red like the McCullah side of the family. She and daddy, whom we affectionately called “Colonel Joe”, would boil over like a steam engine at every little mishap on the ranch. But me, and mama – well we just watch and wait. Like I’m doing now – watching and waiting to the hiss – thump drum beat of life support wondering if my mother, Magdalena, is holding the hands of all those other Magdalenas that go way back in our family history.
I finger the tiny key she gave me the night before her surgery. It is tied to a thin, red ribbon, long enough to wear around my neck.
“This is yours, Queirida,” she’d whispered so the others wouldn’t hear as they left the room, “if anything should happen, take this key to the bank. Everything in the vault is yours…..”
I had laughed it off as Hall Mark Sintimentality. After all, heart surgery was nothing these days. She would be up and about, back home in less than a week. Hadn’t the doctor said that? Hadn’t they promised?
I realize that I am not prepared for this. I am not prepared for the death of my mother or the flotsom of her life which she has left in a bank vault for me to retrieve. I am not prepared to look at her through a microscopic lens so that I might construct a eulogy as if I ever knew who she was. The fact is, I don’t know her. She is my mother. A quirky artist, former ballroom dancer and journalist once married to a prominent rancher. A military wife, mother of two living daughters and one dead son…
“Who are you?” I whisper.
Hiss – thump. Hiss – thump.
“Why didn’t you stop me?” I wonder almost out loud, “Why didn’t you try to convince me to stay close to you and Texas and our crazy mixed-up family? Why did you disappear from us so long ago? Why didn’t you share all those secrets? The ones that are locked away in that bank vault you want me to open like Pandora’s Box.”
I am drifting into sleep, lulled by the emptiness of her response and the lullabye of the machines that tether her to this life. I am searching for a dream or a memory to hold onto. There is that familiar flashback which has haunted me ever since I can remember. The one where I am waving goodbye to Mama as she drives away in that turquoise convertable – and Abuelita Lena holds my hand – and out of the red dust trailing behind her like a jetstream I notice that man, a tall, dark stranger standing nearby. His hands are buried deep in his pockets. His smile is sharp and white against burnt sienna skin. He throws back his head and laughs and the laughter frightens me because I know that it is real and closer to her heart than I have ever been, and I close my eyes with the fists of my adult woman self because I do not want to know who that stranger is and also because I know somehow that a heart that strong can singe and I will never let that happen to me. I will not be like her. I am awakened by the silence of death.
And so began a journey I did not sign up for.
Two months later
Jesus H. Christ, Mama, I thought as I lay stretched out across the bed reading the random entry from the plain, black, hard-cover sketch book she must have used as a journal. “Who the hell are (were) you!” I said out loud.
I had rummaged through her drawer and found a pack of Virginia Slims, and finally broke down and lit one up as I sat surrounded by the contents of “the vault”. It had been two months since mama passed away during her heart surgery, and it had taken me this long to drag my sorry ass back down here from Boston so that I could tidy up the loose ends of her estate I had been appointed the family lawyer several years back when I first set up my practice up north and daddy started feeding me ranch and real estate business to take care of in order to entice me to move back home. Thank God for the internet. I could just as easily close a deal online and with a short plane trip, as I could by setting up shop in the walnut paneled library on the ranch. But being the executor of mama’s estate, there were things I just couldn’t accomplish from my office in Boston or my home in Newton Heights. Namely, this mess.
I was not prepared for what I found in mama’s bank vault. She didn’t even hint to me what I might expect to find there before she went into surgery. Although I think she knew she was not coming home, I had every faith in the doctors and the technology that she would come out of it just fine. I had placed her vault key in the bottom of my purse, figuring we would go there together some day when she was feeling sentimental or spunky enough to tell me whatever the hell she had been keeping from me all these years.
That key had slipped into the annals of one purse and then another until it was forgotten. It wasn’t until I was fully packed for a six-month leave, having left my office in the hands of my two partners (who will probably rob me blind, being the good lawyers that they are), that I remembered the damned thing. Already late for the Homeland Security routine at the airport, I searched frantically through every purse in my closet, trying to remember which ones I was using two months ago. When I found the tiny envelope tucked in the credit card section of a red canvas purse with leather handles, I grabbed it and bolted down the stairs to the cab. My bags were already in the trunk, and my briefcase on the seat. I had e-mailed other important documents down to Texas, already. My laptop was in my briefcase.
We had just entered the Big Dig Tunnel on the way to Logan Airport, when I finally unclenched my hand and poured the tiny key onto my palm. I was suddenly overcome with sobbing grief, just looking at that key and remembering that the last time mama really spoke to me was when she handed me the envelope and told me to go to the bank. I cried like a fool all the way to the airport with the cabby, some young, jazzy punk from Berkley School of Music, looked warily in his rearview mirror.
There were all sorts of things I ought to be tending to as executor of the estate. Namely, getting Dodie off my back regarding inheritance taxes. For someone who is rolling in so much dough, she has turned into the biggest cheap-scape there ever was. She’s not going to fork over one single penny to the government if she doesn’t have to.
There are decisions to be made regarding the ranch, the business, and other assets, and whether to sell out or keep it for the grandkids. I really don’t have the time to be doing this. I mean, rummaging through mama’s past which was ever-so carefully packed away in two old steamer trunks she must have stolen from granny McCullah’s attic.
I went to the bank vault about a week after I arrived back home on the ranch. I don’t know what I expected to find. Most people leave their loved ones a little tin box with a couple of jewels or maybe great, great granddaddy’s Confederate sword. But not two frigging trunk loads of apparently worthless stuff! The bank manager was ever-so-kind to help me cart the big old trunks to the truck, and we lifted them into the pick-up bed and bungee tied them to the sides so they wouldn’t be slamming around in the back. I’ve lately taken to driving daddy’s big old extended cab Dodge with the ranch logo on the side. I feel at home, now. Much more so than were I driving mama’s Mercedes.
I had the trunks lugged into mama’s old room, where I’ve set up camp for the duration of my stay. It’s roomy and airy, and affords me the capability of watch-dogging over Dodie who would just love to get in there and rummage through mama’s stuff with her kids in tow. Although there’s not much I want or need that has sentimental value to me, I don’t want Dodie coming across some other dark secret mama may have forgot to hide in her vault. I have felt a little protective of her secrets, being the last thing she said to me and all.
When I first opened up the trunks, I felt like I had just unearthed Captain Kidd’s treasure. Imagine my surprise to find a bunch of fancy old clothes, and a whole trunk full of letters, journals, photographs, and news clippings. I just don’t know what to make of this mess. I haven’t even had time to examine any of the documents or even pull out the old clothes for examination. What the hell was she thinking I would do with all this stuff!
But then there’s this. This writing in a voice I don’t even recognize as my mother. The voice flows onto the page like syrup, sticky with sentimentality and something I can’t quite put my finger on. Is it passion? Is it poetry? I guess I knew my mother had had aspirations to become a writer before she married my father. She had even gotten a scholarship to study journalism and went to school for a year before she picked up a job writing for the local newspaper. But all that got put on the back burner when she married daddy. He was a man who valued hard, physical work, not the ephemera of words on a page. His letters from overseas were terse and pragmatic, and they had their own little place in the scrap book where family photos were kept. But these letters, these journals and Lord knows what else, have been kept sacrosanct in their own little crypt. I had no clue what the content of the letters may be, nor the parties involved. I had only just begun to crack open a journal which happened to be lying near the top. I don’t even know at this point if this is a work of fiction or my mother’s own thoughts. The handwriting is definitely hers, perfectly tidy and legible. All I can say is, “Holy Shit!” Did she really expect me to make sense of this much paper in the limited time I have to spend down here?
Magdalena’s Diary: 9, May, 1961 COME PASSION
Come passion, the breath we long for in this life. But we taste that wine and then we go to sleep. We walk bleary eyed and stunned about our daily lives, collecting clues in our fragile little baskets which we sort through in our dreams at night. If we are fortunate to have been blessed with certain sensibilities on this earth then we find our bliss buried deep in that basket, and we wear it like a shroud to protect ourselves from the very thing that will set us free. But come passion in our lives and we teeter totter on the edge of that precipice overcome by the vertigo of our own undoing. Do I leap? Do I fly? Do I breathe? Do I laugh? Do I cry? Do I dare to let go of the shrouding veil that protects my heart? Do I live to die in the arms of another?
Come passion into my life
On the wings of a tiny bird
And I can fly the deepest canyon
Or scale the sharpest edges
On your wings I can rest my soul
And I am not alone.
The most dangerous intersection in a marriage is when there is no road to compassion. Once the incidental wounds and resentments have collected their toll and drained the purse of passion, we are lost without a roadmap, and who will be the one to dare to ask for directions in that maze of dead-end streets? Who can be trusted to send you on your way back to that place that drew you together so long ago? It is the devil’s fork in the road – when the choices are far too many yet few. You can each set out on your separate paths – exploratory missions – trying to find your way back to each other. But what if your work is done? What if the life you have lived is only one layer of your life, and now you are ready to live another, and then another, and then another? When given the choice, we all prefer the road of familiarity. This is what I know. This is who I am. But that smooth coated road doesn’t rock the soul. Complacency is a slow and steady as you go kind of road. It doesn’t pump the heart; it cushions the mind like a soft pillow in a warm bed. It is green and soft and nostalgic, but it does not pull you forward. You stand frozen at this crossroads because one false step could send you reeling backwards into the fires of old patterns which desire nothing more than to continue burning for us.
But what about the summit? Which road leads to the crest of our eternal sense of being? Physical passion can be short-lived. A road to nowhere that fizzles out the way a deer path disappears in a thicket and you wonder if those deer have wings to fly above the trees, or do they melt inside the density of wood. Passion without heart can leave you groping in the dark for solid footing on a steep climb with a short peak. And then we all end up alone in the end. Alone in our marriages, our lovers arms, our coffins.
And here we stand, together reeling and teetering, wings unfurled yet milky and heavy of heart because we do not dare leap and leave those we love behind. But this I know: I have been awakened as if from a deep, walking sleep. I have seen myself in the reflection of your love in your eyes, and I have fallen deeply into those black pools, believing in beauty and myself and faith once again. In your eyes I can do anything. I can overcome the other side of lonely. I can climb the tallest mountain on my knees and sail the deepest ocean with no breeze. I can fly away to heaven with no wings because I have been reminded by a big, strong heart that I do exist on this earth to experience the joy of such things as your love.
This is when I vacillate. I go back and forth with no rhyme nor reason between incredible joy to know that my heart is full of love for at least two people on this earth, and why would God not want me to experience both? You can see that I am not a practical kind of person, and I do not always understand the ways of this world. But then I find a thread of guilt which I worry between my fingers until it is snarled into a knot, and this is the unraveling of the soul when we start worrying our tattered threads and forget to breathe. I am panicked if I dare to stand on that bridge. I am scared because if my feet dare to touch those weathered boards and cross that murky water, I am buying a construct from which there is no return, because I have raised the question in my heart: What if? What if this is our only chance? What if this is it – the love of our life? Do we squander it? Do we put it through the fires of hell at the expense of others – only to fizzle and dry into hardened lava? And what kind of bedrock is that for a foundation of love?
But then – do we turn our heads away and pretend it does not exist? Do we ignore the visceral pull between us that makes us want and want and want to be closer than the breath we have not even tasted?
There is no reason or logic in this murky world of love. Who knows what forces lifted the veils that clouded our heart and mind for too long? But there it is, a raw and fragile thing waiting to be nurtured, and it seems that the soil in which this seed has been planted is the fertile ground of our art – the creative realm where we can draw from the passion of the dance and transform this power between us into music that touches the soul.
I was mesmerized by the words I was reading in my mother’s tidy handwriting. If this were a novel she was working on, the plot was not yet clear. There were no characters, only her meandering voice, a seemingly random monologue emerging from some deeply recessed cavern somewhere in her brain with thoughts I wouldn’t have known she was capable of. Perhaps had I not been so busy most of my life running away from my family and rebelling against my Texas and Mexican roots, I would have noticed my mother had a deeply rich inner life. But while I was spraying round-up on every external leaf that shot up from those roots, exterminating the past, my mother passed quietly through the walls of this house with that cat-like smile upon her face. I know now, it must have been a smile of secrets. She was somehow able to transgress the brick and mortar of the boundaries which were built around my father and the ranch, the McCullah clan and the Bates family, and live her inner life as she pleased. I wondered how she kept the journals from “The Colonel”. My dad was as covert as they come, at least in the military realm. If he noticed that his wife was having second thoughts about the meaning of marriage, he had the good grace not to interfere. That’s probably why the marriage, in-spite-of all the water which passed under that broken bridge had lasted so long – until daddy’s death did do them part five years ago.
I thumbed through the pages of the first book, the book of Magdalena. Every entry was dated 1961, which meant that there was probably a full book for each year. The pages were neatly written – almost like calligraphy, and there were occasional sketches which surprised me. I never once saw my mother pick up a pencil to draw. But right there on the third entry dated: 12th May, Monterrey, Mexico, was the beautiful sketch of an evening dress with matching shoes. On the first page of this entry was the dress, which appeared to be built for my mother’s long and lean body. It was a simple design, slender with one bare shoulder. The shoulder strap on the right side was delicate and feminine, attached by a silk magnolia flower. The magnolia flower pattern was repeated on the lower skirt of the dress, which was tiered at the bottom, and split up the left side, dangerously high. The dress fit perfectly over the headless form of its model in several sketched positions to show various features, including the hint of shoe beneath the hem.
On the second page of this entry were the shoes. Oh and what shoes they were. No woman in her right mind would imprison her feet in such a jailhouse of form over function. A close-up of the shoe was carefully constructed, showing off a ridiculously high arched and feminine foot encapsulated by the design which followed the lines of the foot perfectly. Spiked heels that could aerate a lawn in the dust bowl, ended in a thin cup for the back of the heel and a strap around the ankle. The arch was left bare to show off the shape of the foot, and the toe of the shoe was wrapped in a soft leather just so that a glimpse of painted (I’ll assume red) toes beckoned in a seductive come-hither sort of way. And, of course, topping the shoe was a silk magnolia matching the dress. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a pair of shoes like that, but they wouldn’t get any further than the bedroom – for recreational use only. A shoe like that oughtn’t to be worn out in public.
I thought of my mother’s high-arched foot and how perfectly deformed it was. Those shoes were made for her dancer feet. I recalled how in later years the top of her flexible arch foot became deformed with calcium deposits from constant inflammation. After arthritis set in, she could no longer wear a pair of sneakers or any shoe that had a tight fitting top. We used to joke about her having a secret life in Japan as a foot-bound Geisha Girl. Mama would only smile that cat-grin knowing smile. Perhaps she really did have a secret life.
It occurred to me that the dress and the shoes may be connected to the other trunk. The one which stunk so strong of moth balls, I had it put in the storage room off the garage where mama kept her Mercedes. In the trunk which was there in the room with me, I counted out twenty-five black hard-covered sketch books which were placed carefully in order, top to bottom and interspersed with letters from each year, which I hadn’t even started to read. It was a biographer’s dream – an organized time-line of thought and historical record.
Were my mother someone famous or historically significant, I would be dancing on cloud nine by now, given all the material culture for the makings of that dissertation I never did finish in my attempt at becoming a historian. If only I had unearthed this much material on Emily Howland, a nineteenth-century abolitionist and philanthropist who had started up schools for blacks in the South after the emancipation of slaves, and provided an endowment for George Washington University. I had been trained as a historian both in my undergraduate and graduate education, and though my ultimate goal had always been to become a lawyer, I toyed with a doctorate program in American Studies at Clark University when I was in my mid-twenties. I found the research and the collecting of information easy to organize, being well-versed in mathematical thinking and a natural sleuth. But when it came to the writing, I just couldn’t pull it all together. Somewhere in the attic of my home in Newton Heights, is a trunk full of documentation for the life of Emily Howland, and an unfinished dissertation. In the end, there were too many gaps for me to fill in, unlike the treasure trove of letters, diaries, and who knew what else, which my mother graciously organized in her own little time capsule for me to unearth. I began then to toy with the idea of writing my mother’s biography.
Who said that history had to be filled up with stories of famous and significant people? It’s really the extraordinary lives of the ordinary that provide the foundation for history. By studying the material culture of the ordinary 18th century farm wife, we get both a narrow and a broad view of the American Revolution and pre-industrial America. It is the dance of everyday lives that makes the music of the American experience. My mother, in her ordinary life as a military wife, half Mexican, half Texan ranch family, lived through some extraordinary times. Through the lens of her experiences I could reexamine the early days of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the coming and going of The Beatles. It did not occur to me that I would also have the opportunity to examine my own roots.