Page 36 of Slanting Towards the Sea

THIRTY-THREE

BACK HOME, I’M brIMMING with a nervous energy that nothing seems to pacify.

I’m split in two again: the Apologizer, angry with myself for ruining the night—hell, not just the night, but the beginning of something that could be beautiful—by sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong; and the Observer, shaking her head, asking when has it ever worked for me to pretend to be someone I’m not?

Familiar pain gnaws at me. It never goes away, and on nights like this, I’m afraid it never will.

Unable to calm down enough to go to sleep, I check on Dad.

I press my ear against the door of his room to hear his loud snores before I get back into my car and drive off to the cemetery where my mother is laid to rest. It’s three a.m. when I get there, and though the premises are well lit, an eeriness hovers over them.

A scops owl hoots in the tall cypresses on the other side of the graveyard, tar-black against the city lights.

It pains me to admit this even to myself, but visiting my mother’s grave has mostly been a mechanical thing.

A rote sequence of actions that allows me to go through the motions without thinking too much about it.

First, removing the bouquet of wilted flowers from the vase on the side of the tombstone, and dumping it in the garbage.

Then trimming the stems of the fresh flowers and refilling the vase with water from a nearby spigot.

Then, arranging the flowers. Mom liked symmetry; she would want the flowers to be arranged neatly.

Then I stand at the foot of the grave and stare at her picture in the small frame etched onto the marble surface of her tombstone. But instead of talking to her, or praying for her, my mind always goes blank, as if it were a grave of an unknown person, someone I’ve never met.

On a couple of occasions, I tried talking to her, the way I’d heard other people talk to their deceased at nearby graves, but I felt ridiculous speaking to a dead person, and, what stung even worse, I realized I had little to tell her.

In front of her grave, I turned into a clenched fist again.

I’d been shut off to her for so long before she died that I didn’t know how to undo it.

When the whole charade became too uncomfortable, I mumbled a cursory prayer and walked away, feeling like I’d let both her and myself down. It takes a petty person to withhold herself from a dead mother.

But as I’d shuffle my feet along the gravel path, the words would come to me.

All the things I wanted to tell her. Dad drives me nuts.

He still salts his tomatoes until they turn white.

I found him frying bacon the other day and making pan-roasted potatoes as a side dish.

Or, I saw Vlaho the other day. It would’ve been our wedding anniversary, but if he remembered, he didn’t say anything.

Instead, Tena scraped the heels of her palms when she fell, and Vlaho lifted her and pressed her onto his chest, saying, “Daddy loves you more than anything,” and I wanted to dig a hole and bury myself in it.

I’d think those things walking away and realize.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to tell her.

It was that I was afraid that if I did speak, she still wouldn’t listen.

But thinking about Asier’s son makes me consider all this again. It makes me think back to what I suppose was the first time I went to therapy, though I don’t know if it could be considered therapy. I was only five when Mom took me there, and we only ever went that one time.

I had been wetting my bed almost every night, and Mom was flustered. She couldn’t figure out why it was happening or how to stop it.

I remember only bits and pieces of the visit itself.

The therapist—I don’t know if she was a psychologist or a psychiatrist, though I suppose the latter must have been true, because we were in the hospital—and the massive desk she sat behind.

It was afternoon and the hospital halls were empty and dark.

I remember her asking what my mother did for a living, and me saying Mom was a cleaning lady, not because I didn’t know that she was a store manager, but because I was pissed off at her for bringing me there in the first place.

The therapist asked me what color eyes my father had, and I said, Brown .

What color were my mother’s eyes? Brown. Brother’s? Brown. Mine? Purple.

She asked me the same question four times, and I always said, Purple .

I was angry. I knew my eyes were brown. The therapist looked angry too.

She fumbled through her purse for a compound mirror and shoved it into my hand. “What color are your eyes?” she repeated, and I knew the game was over, and that she had won.

I looked into my eyes, turning hazel behind the rippling of tears, and I said, “Brown.”

The prescription she gave my mother: Buy the girl a mirror, place it somewhere she can see herself. She needs a sense of identity.

It did work, I stopped wetting the bed. And whenever she told the story to her friends, colleagues, my friends, even Vlaho, my mother always marveled at how easy the fix had been. A mirror!

But it wasn’t the mirror I needed to see myself reflected in.

If I’d stopped wetting the bed, it was because I was too afraid to go back to that woman with harsh, impatient eyes who had defeated me at my own game.

And I wonder how my life would have turned out if she had told my mother what I really needed, the way I told Asier tonight. Would Mom have changed, or would it not have made a difference anyway?

I try to make myself move toward my mother’s grave to tell her something, anything.

That she hurt me. That I love her. That all those years that I was borderline rude and dismissive, all I wanted was for her to reach out and hold me and— God!

—love me. As I am, for who I am. But I’m still glued to the side of my car in the parking lot, not able to take one step.

So I sit back in my car.

As I’m driving home, the road blurs.

“My eyes are hazel,” I say to the empty car. They always are when I cry.