Sometimes I wonder where it went wrong with you and I. Once I arrive at this place of wondering I spend hours, sometimes even days perusing my memories, turning them over and inspecting them. It’s like those hot Summer days of yard sales in so many stranger’s brittle and yellowing yards. You touch items, pick them up, looking at the prices scribbled on strips of masking tape or neon stickers, until you find something you think is worth the asking price. You know it’s junk, these are people’s discarded and rejected inventory and yet you cannot deny their allure. You buy a lamp, a book, a plate, a musty smelling sweater and you’re now the proud owner of someone else’s junk. These memories I own are a little of your junk and a little of mine and sometimes I can’t tell the difference between the two. Even compiled, I’m not sure they amount to much.
Sometimes I think it must have been the long drive home from the adoption agency office, all four of us crammed into the cab of the blue Ford truck. Maybe my sister asked too many times why the new baby’s skin looked so red? Maybe I cried too much, maybe I cried because I kept getting further and further away from Her and the only heartbeat song I knew how to sing the lyrics to. Maybe my cries were too loud or maybe too weak, bouncing inside that tin truck cab and you wondered if you’d made a serious mistake.
But then I think, well, it was probably the well water. The water came from that dark, cold space under the ground and it always smelled of too much sulfur. You drank it from glasses with mushrooms painted around the middle and I suckled it from bottles. But never in large enough amounts to satisfy maternal worries and doctor’s orders. This small, sickly baby who wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t gain weight. I think maybe it was the well water that was full of metals and minerals meant for the earth but not for the dark caverns where our hearts are held. It made hard shells around our hearts and left deposits on our myelin sheaths. This made it impossible to hear or learn each other’s songs.
But then I think, “hold on, that can’t be right.” Because you loved me enough to fill those bottles and hold me as I sipped them. Frustrating feedings, sleepless nights, weighing, measuring, warming.
I wonder, maybe it was the day I sang and you said, “oh my, too bad you aren’t a good singer like your sister.” My face blazed with shame and it must have singed my vocal chords beyond use because I didn’t sing in front of people after that. Sound got stuck and stayed there inside my throat. Not even at those school Christmas concerts where there were enough voices to cover my displeasing one. I just moved my mouth to the lyrics, no sound coming out and no one was the wiser to my silence. Most of the time you weren’t at these concerts anyway. I looked out at the face of your third husband, dutifully playing the father figure. I didn’t know then, about the scary thoughts grownups house inside their heads. But I know now and I wonder if he had to fight his erection for me then, at 7 years old, like he would do 4 years later and years after that. I’ll never know because I’ll never ask. Maybe the day you said that I was a terrible singer you saw how much it hurt me and you were amazed at how easy it was to crush someone and not feel sorry. So you just kept on not feeling sorry.
The argument is raised that you must have loved me because every once in awhile you would let me brush and comb your hair with every styling tool I could plunder from the bathroom drawers. You would sit on the couch in front of the picture window and I behind you, enraptured with this activity. Ponytails, braids, buns, bobby pins and curlers. You were patient and the sun light would catch the usually mousey brown of your hair and spin it with hidden rose gold that I thought was magic. I can see your hair perfectly but I can’t recall how it felt in my hands, tied up in my little fingers. That seems like it should be a metaphor for something or some deep, tortured Freudian reference. But I won’t ask if you won’t.
Maybe none of these were talismans of our wrongness. Maybe we were perfectly fine in those moments. So maybe things went wrong when your second husband decided he hated me or maybe it was just that he wouldn’t allow me to exist in the life you two were stitching together so I learned to walk into the living room through the French doors like a ghost. Haunting you both in what I was supposed to call “home.” It wasn’t ever home after he moved in. I was too young at the time to know which of these ways were what he actually felt, hatred or apathy. And now, I’m old enough to know that there really is no difference between the two. Maybe it was because the day he dragged you into the front yard by your hair I only stood on the porch and screamed. Maybe you hated me then because I had no gun to shoot him down, no knife to cut him from you, my muscles and fists too small and meager to do damage to his body. Maybe you hated me for not being a man, not protecting you. But I think you let me lie beside you and stroke your hair after he exhausted himself and left our front porch under the watchful and judging eyes of neighbors. That must have been you loving me, to let me try to comfort you in the depths of your sorrow. You faced the wall and cried and I didn’t know if your tears were for yourself, for you and I and what we had suffered or if your whimpers were for him. Mostly I thought they were for him.
Maybe, just maybe, it all went wrong when your third husband, the one at my school concerts, stopped seeing you even when he was staring right at you. Maybe it was when you had to start yelling from the top of the stairs, “Hello? What’s taking you guys so long?” when you sent him to my room each morning like an alarm clock with hands that didn’t tell time but went places that had nothing to do with getting up and getting ready for school. Maybe you hated me because you could hear me straining my brain, desperately trying to summon you down those stairs. “Please, come help me Mom. Look what he’s done.” I knew those thoughts would never reach you, my silence deadened the signal. But maybe they did reach you and you hated me for it, for putting thoughts in your head that you didn’t want to think. If things weren’t going wrong between us before then, they were sure as hell on the path to being ravaged now.
Maybe things went wrong when you left me in the school counselor’s office without even looking me in the eye because somebody finally told on your slinking, sneaking, soul snatching, handsy husband and you couldn’t bear the shame of others knowing the secret I suspect you had known for a long time. Maybe because in that moment, as soon as someone else could see our mess, I became the woman your mother had always warned you was “after your man,” instead of the daughter you once wrote was “a true gift” on stationary adorned with cherubic cartoon children.
Maybe it was the time I yelled into the crowd “Fuck you Bobby! Don’t talk to my Mom like that!” the night you came to watch me cheer at a basketball game for the very first time. I threw my pom poms on the ground and came towards him, chest puffed out and ready to fight and the crowd parted like I was goddamn, fucking Moses. Maybe you realized then that I was a little bit trailer and a whole lot of trash and you would never recover from the shame. I thought I was a good daughter, I’d show Bobby Johnson who the fuck he was dealing with and you’d finally feel protected by me. But you took your honor and your camera and you went home without me and I spent the rest of that game and three more being benched in uniform so everyone would see and point and snicker at my mistakes.
Maybe things went wrong when I would bring out that crazed and clenched rage in your face for doing something that made no sense to you. Things that you yourself would never do. Maybe your eyes bulged because in those moments you thought to yourself, “This is clearly not my child. This child belongs to someone else.” And you were right. You had to keep the floodgates of your jaw firmly shut or those words might come smashing through your teeth and betray you.
Maybe we took that wrong turn when my children were born, maybe you felt bitter that I wouldn’t have to write letters to another mother, thanking her while referring to her child as my own. Maybe you felt angry at me when I held my children against me and their tiny faces under my chin looked just like my own face and you remembered that my face never looked like yours. You never saw any piece of your face in my babies soft and fragile faces. Maybe that’s why you can look at my sister still, with favor, because you can see your own reflection in her features. But you said you loved my children, and that must be an extension of the love you have for me. That would only make organic sense. But nothing about us makes much sense. When my sister remarked what a good mother I was, you simply replied, “I guess,” and I knew that you would never allow me that kindness and I would stupidly spend the rest of my life chasing after you for it anyway. I wondered if you enjoyed knowing that you had never purposefully made me feel like I was anything other than your own flesh and blood, had always acted in outward ways as though I was your own but I existed regardless with a subtle layer of knowing I was “other.” That was my own knowing, my own making and you took smug joy in knowing I felt out of place and it wasn’t your fault. I wondered if you hated the fact that I had built out of my two sons, a bloodline that was of my own, made something that I truly belonged to and belonged to me. My children don’t have rooms for you in their heart anymore and I wonder what the rooms you have for them in your heart contain. How do you decorate those rooms for the strangers who will never sleep in them again?
I know for certain, that whatever may have been hanging by a thread for us was severed and sorted into the pile labeled “Wrong,” when I healed my vocal chords and began to croak my truth. It was raspy, caught in my throat at first. Some of the words snagged and stayed on the inside when I first tried. But I drank and drank water that didn’t smell like sulfur anymore and soon it was a song that rose from its grave and I didn’t mind if you said you didn’t like the melody. I’m still singing and you’ve turned the dial and changed the station.
I don’t know if any of these things were what did us in. I’ll never know because I stopped asking when I realized you couldn’t or was it you wouldn’t, hear the question. We may have been doomed the day your mother smashed your own heart into pieces and sewed them into her sequin dresses that were always too tight, sized for the body she wanted, not for the body she actually had. There was no thought of daughters in your head at that time, except you. In those days you were the daughter and there was only space for when was your mother coming home and when would she leave you again for a man or booze? It was always both, not one or the other. Men and booze were two crutches for one wicked and broken heart.
I wonder if it’s possible to love someone and pity them at the same time. Maybe I pity you because I love you. Maybe I think I love you because I pity you. Maybe it’s wrong of me to hope that there are days where the weight of missing me makes your heart so heavy that it droops in your body so low that you have to reach down and hoist its volume with both arms and when you lift it, it wells up and sloshes around and up and spills out of your eyes and down your face in rivers. That can’t be what loving daughters wish, but maybe that’s what ruined daughters wish for. You too, are a ruined daughter. What do you wish for?
A witch I respect very much once said of her own mother, “I can love you and leave you in the same breath.” When I read those words, I heard that sliding closet door with the giant red strawberry painted on it, slide shut in my head. I heard the dull thud of it as it reached the wood of the frame and I felt my fingers in the rough, faded and dulled gold of the handle. I looked down at my hand, surprised to see I had shut the door on my own. You and I have always loved and left each other in one breath haven’t we? Maybe you can’t leave somebody that never belonged to you. We both know the wretched truth of it is that neither of us will ever fully leave each other. We’re pages sewn into the bindings of each other and the only way to get rid of the book is to burn it. But you and I have had our share of being the match under the other’s pyre, haven’t we Mother? And each time like some grotesque and unwelcome phoenix, our story rises from the ashes and makes us choke on the leftover embers doesn’t it? I wonder how much our story would go for at a yard sale?