Mother Dearest

There are these…quiet spaces...behind my eyes, where errant thoughts go to die. Where I am a child again…nursing a child’s memories. Remembering a fairy tale you never read.

The scariest moment in a child’s life should be checking out a copy of the Brothers Grimm at the library, when all they have ever known is Walt Disney. It should be stumbling across a dog-eared copy of Felix Salten’s Bambi, or Richard Adams’ Watership Down, at a used book store just outside of town. Because nothing is as terrifying as the realization that the stories of your childhood are not always meant to be warm and musical. They are not always guaranteed to end with “happily ever after.”

I spend a little bit of time, each and every night, thinking of my own personal fairy tale. Remembering that dilapidated white house, at the end of a red dirt road. The poets call this feeling “nostalgia.” I know it only as the gritty sensation of barefoot soles in the gravel. The dusky haze of that white sage you would burn, in a dish on the coffee table. The bitter aroma of Dollar Tree coffee grounds in the kitchen, passing through. In retrospect, it seems soft. Like nothing hurt. Even the earthen heat of my knees, dressed in grass-burn. Even the sharp flare of fairy-stone bruises on my calves.

And then...just when a girl thought nothing hurt...then, Mother dearest, there was you.

My favorite childhood game was spinning circles in the yard, alone, until I finally hit the ground. I can still recall the heady sway of my senses. Like being drunk and high at the same time. Talk about a foreshadow. Talk about an apple, braiding roots with its own tree. Every dandelion sneeze was a housecat’s yawn on the windowsill. Every skipped stone was a coin-tossed lifeline. Every daisy chain a missed connection. Thinking idly to myself, if wishes were daydreams…

Oh, but they were.

At twenty-three, I am twice removed. I am thrice replaced. Adulthood is crude, like a hand-whittled souvenir. But childhood...ah...childhood was soft. And malleable. Like art class clay. I fall prey to these tiny little memories, how they exist in the form of unspoken notifications, like silent flutes and bells.

Beneath the looking-glass, I see myself as I was: I was green as a grasshopper. I was new to many things and blind to many more. Still yet, I was bright. Like a Gala Apple, plucked from a tree in Swanson’s Orchard. Old man Swanson would set the hounds loose, if he caught you, crawling beneath the barbed-wire fence of his property. I had seen what those dogs could do to a fox. But I had also seen his prize hound, limping towards death by the end of the week, on a swollen foot courtesy of a copperhead’s bite. I knew better than to play like a fox. So I wound my way instead, up trunks like a deceptive snake. And when old man Swanson caught wind of my method, I can still hear exactly what he would say, to this very day.

“On your belly you will go. And dust you will eat, all the days of your life.”

He was right.

Oh but then, only then, I was nothing save eight. A pixie-nosed leper, on a warpath with the world. Old man Swanson called me a tempest in a teapot, and it wasn’t a lie. I had sticky fingers, with chipped nail polish, in the shade “Cherry Wine.” It was seventy-nine cents at Revco. It fit perfectly—like the second thought I never had, in the empty pocket of my thrift-store overalls—while you, Mother dearest, double-counted behind the pharmacist. 90 white Xanax bars. When you were finished, you would shake that little orange prescription bottle to get my attention. Bells and whistles.

The cashier behind the counter alone knew the truth. But she would never so much as whisper. And if she had, what could she do? Children have eyes that roam like spotlights. It is hardly an admission of guilt. Even if I cried when you glanced my direction, what of it? Children cry. They sport bloodshot pupils from hay fever and not looking before they move, or not thinking before they act. Children are guiltless. Like clergymen, politicians, and police. Children are free.

I miss being free.

Mother dearest, you were a queen on a throne. A bottle of liquor. A bottle of pills. A perspective, riveted by a power drill. An enviable cog in the antique infrastructure of that gilt-frame Beaudry. Looking back at this part, perhaps my memories are not even my own. At fourteen I can recall standing in front of that mirror, thinking to myself, a child, “I only want to be the second fairest of them all.”

Or the third. Perhaps the fourth. Or just...fair...at all.

At fifteen, I would give up, still just a child. I would put my fist through the dusky backwash and shatter that damning image staring back at me. As an adult, it is true, I am scornful—of men who do such things with their fists out of anger. But at the time, it was the only outlet that I knew...still earth-drunk on four-leaf clovers and page-pressed forget-me-nots. And think-of-me-pleases. And-pay-attention-if-you-cans. Tiny Hells...these flutes-and-bells.

At sixteen, I was desperate for shards of anything sharp. Hell-bent on puncturing the inflated egomania of my dark twin, depression. I was convinced I could shimmy something jagged beneath her skin, where it was laced in place by sinew and veins. Then I could drag it out for miles like a magician’s silk tie. It was a (rather abstract) manner of self-deflection you never even noticed. Any third party looking in could have foreseen that for me, seventeen would fast become less than green.

In retrospect, I have to confess: to this day, I still keep my favorite splinters of that broken mirror. In a sick sort of way, perhaps I admire the artistic expression of that stained-glass mosaic. It is a sentient souvenir of my own bloody childhood trauma. You remember it well. Sainte Chapelle, mon chaton! How easy it would later become, to face that reflection, beneath an erratic roadmap of pastel, powdered lines. Every one of them cut tirelessly with an overdrawn credit card that was not mine. Bells and whistles, Mother dearest. I played Alice in a Chemical Wonderland. You played tragic ivory cameo, brought to life by a witch’s curse and fated to fade, imprisoned, in a picture-frame only you could change.

You didn’t.

All too often, I feel rooted, to an off-kilter wheel of life. Which brings me to yet another splinter. An ode to one of my personal favorites. Summer days, longer than a runway model’s legs. Great-aunt Lottie, the witch, known moreso for her devilry than her hand-sewn patchwork quilts. So it was ours, for nothing but thanks. An esoteric map of the world, spread flat in the grass of our tiny front yard. Atop it like game pieces, you and I, Mother dearest—flutes and bells—two mismatched peas in a pod. You would hand the Tarot deck my way, and I would fan the cards out and sift through, picking favorites. And you...would read my future like a storybook. To impress you I memorized every symbolic meaning, painted onto every card in Aleister Crowley’s Thoth deck. Less than symbolic is the memory of how you would remind me, “The cards never lie.” Whether it was meant to be taken as a hint or a warning or an errant grain of salt, I never knew. I’ll never know.

Perhaps that particular splinter belongs alongside those cards, in the bottom drawer, wrapped up tightly in a black silk scarf.

Ah, but that was then. Here we are, and this is now. My childhood was years and miles and timelines away. Perhaps those days, and all the days that came before it, were muffled by the sound of that music. I am twenty-three now. I have had time to think. And drink. And drink. And drown. And wonder...fleetingly...just how many shards of regret and splinters of reproach that I dug out of my own knuckles and palms. It felt useless. Like putting my fist through a casket, when the cadaver has long since been cremated.

At twenty-three I am guilty of many such brief and troubling thoughts. Such as just how many years of bad luck I traded off to myself, in the shape of that mirror. But then again, perhaps not. Perhaps even that old Beaudry knew the truth, while I bled needlessly over splinters and fragments. Same as the myosotis petals, pressed between the pages of my childhood journal, a person ought-not-forget. Mother dearest, the reflection I scandalized in flashbulb, like a bloody slapdash Polaroid, was never. Even. Mine.

I keep my childhood memories locked up tight. Like the empty cosmos of a toy box. Like my fist closed around that glass bottle of Revco Cherry Wine. I would drop that nail polish on the carpet in the den, remember? Vermilion on cream. Just flies. Flies on cake. I couldn’t have known that, at the time. The old woman behind the register watched me do it. She peered sternly at me, down the rickety bridge of her nose, and I recall thinking absently to myself, “I wouldn’t try to walk across that in seven-league boots.” So there I was, other-side-of-the-counter imposed. A guiltless girl-child in faded denim overalls from that thrift store on Elm Avenue, blowing rude bubbles of Big League, flavor grape. The cashier at Revco knew nothing about me, save that I was a pixie-nosed thief. I wanted to say, “I’ll bet you have no idea, that my mother is an ivory cameo.”

But I did not. I was nothing more than something distasteful, on the bottom of her shoe. Same as you. I reeked of gas station chewing gum and the wrong side of the tracks. So I slipped away to freedom, with an unperturbed whistle, leaving the pleasant jingle of the bell on the door in my aftermath.

As for the music, I remember it well. You probably don’t, lost as you were in yourself. As a girl I was obsessed with fairy tales. My favorite pastime was to sit, cross-legged beneath the old crab-apple tree, immersed in grass so tall that it swallowed me whole. I would hold my breath and I would wait, straining my ears for the sound of Faery rades. You see, I read in a book once that the Gentry marched through tall grass, at “in-between” times, in “in-between” places. I almost felt like I could relate. So I could be found, each day, in the hour where the light lingered tandem with the night. I would watch, until one party’s knees finally buckled and gave way. Still as a stone, I would listen, for the passing whisper of their flutes and bells. So still that the mosquitoes would drift to sleep, with their IV’s planted in my skin. So still that ticks would gorge themselves on my blood and burst open like overripe berries. So still that once upon a time, a white-tail deer fawn folded its beanstalk legs like a lawn chair and laid right in my lap. And of all the reasons to be surprised, I was surprised to learn that a fawn was not a soft thing to touch, but rather something coarse, like a stiff-bristle grooming brush. But in retrospect, you know, it seems perfectly right. Soft things were just not built to survive.

It’s a funny thing to think, that human nature is twisted just so, that so many memories are shaped by regret. I am no exception. But here, only here, my retrospect is two murky lenses, coke-bottle thick and tinted rose-pink, like the strawberry wine of that one country singer’s innocence. On the contrary...mine was not nearly so sweet.

When it comes to youth, you see, and the tragedy thereof, there is this: it is gone. I am grown now. I am just another queen of hearts, with porcelain skin and back-alley eyes, and this tongue like a viper’s. But under the flesh, just like the nursery rhyme, I am made up of tarts. A grimace, a glower, and a grin...sunny-side breached and Jack-o-lantern flipped. A reversed Tarot card, plucked from the deck, on Great Aunt Lottie’s patchwork quilt of the world.

As for me, Mother dearest, I do not regret the small things that most women regret. Not loving bad men, or turning men bad. Not saying bad things, or wishing ill of the dead. Not the drinks or the drugs or the hate or the crimes. Not even flunking out of college (three times). No. Of all the thorn-prick truths that linger in the quiet, inherited spaces behind my serpent-green eyes, this one reigns supreme.

Let it be known, I have eaten of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, and I am not sorry. I have pocketed apples from the the midst of the orchard and I felt no shame. I have dreamt a dream that was meant for me. It is just as they say: “The woman saw that the tree was good for food.” And so it was.

But you see…where I was hungry for food, you were hungry for your own pretty face, framed in gilded-gold ornate. Sated, as you were, every day...by the rattle of an orange pill bottle.

And so it was. Flutes and bells. Just like in the fairy tales.

Submitted September 06, 2018 at 11:18PM by binchwhut https://ift.tt/2MToXhV