Going Down Slow
The Little Birds of Memory
Now, Mom wakes, groggy, and pushes the white cloud of hair away from her face.
“Daddy’s sleeping,” she says.
“Yeah.”
She heaves a sigh, swings her legs off the recliner, and scuffs into her flats. “I’m going to the little girls’ room.” She shuffles past the unoccupied second bed on her way to the bathroom in the corner and closes herself in.
Dad has his head back, propped on two pillows. His jaw is slack, and he’s snoring, but softly. Under tissue paper lids, his eyes shift. I can tell he’s dreaming. He’s become gray-faced these last few months, and his muscles are stringy, his flesh flaccid. But he still has a presence. When he’s awake, you know he’s aware even though he rarely speaks. Those knowing, brown eyes follow everything in the room. He keeps pain to himself, and asks for little: ice, chapstick, back rub, fetch a nurse. But when he sleeps, I hear, in his moans and shouts, a man approaching death. It frightens me, like solid ground shifting under my feet, to hear him.
There’s a flush, and Mom reappears, tugging at her blouse. She plops into the brown vinyl recliner and lifts her feet to the footrest. She pushes off her shoes with one foot, then the other, and wiggles her stockinged toes. “Rub my feet, honey, my poor aching feet.”
I scoot my chair close to her and start working on her arches.
“I hate to see Daddy like this. So sick. The doctors here say his heart is giving out.” Her eyes are wide and focused inward.
I stop digging on the ball of her foot. Will she say it? Will she say “he’s dying”?
“When I met him, he was the handsomest man, especially in his uniform. When he came to San Francisco State to pick me up from class, none of the guys could take their eyes off him.”
“Guys?”
“Well they weren’t lookin’ at me, honey.” She throws out her arm with a limp wrist and wears a tolerant, wise-to-the-world smirk.
I’m embarrassed by her caricature of the gay men she knew in San Francisco. Lately, she’s seemed less inhibited somehow, and more forgetful. I suspect these changes are because of Dad’s illness.
I glance up at the TV bolted high on the wall at the foot of Dad’s bed. It’s always on, but the volume is low. Mom follows my gaze and is taken in by the program—some soap opera. We point our faces in the direction of the TV, but I’m thinking about Mom and Dad, about their relationship—the shape of it, the trajectory of their fifty years together. I knew they’d navigated the shoals of a life-long marriage: sickness, career shifts, teenage kids, infidelity, boredom, different visions of the good life. I had memories of their “getting sideways” with each other, as Mom called it, but many more memories of them laughing together, teasing each other, working side by side on home projects, debating politics over a pitcher of martinis, and doing daily what it takes to keep a family going. But I couldn’t remember much of Dad before he and Mom married, when I was only four years old.
“Mom, how did you and Dad meet?” It’s easy enough to lure her from the TV.
“Oh, in San Francisco. There was a war going on—the Korean War. Back then, Frisco was full of military men. I had plenty of guys interested in me, but Daddy was the nicest. And he had a college degree, and he was an officer . . . Quite a catch.” She smiled in Dad’s direction.
“I remember that time. I remember we lived in that boardinghouse.”
“Yeah, the landlady took care of you while I was working. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you.” She didn’t mention my biological father, but if she had, she would have dismissed him as she usually did: “Long gone and useless anyway.” I remembered him from those years only in flashes—a loud, laughing, blue-eyed man who carried me piggy-back and gave me swallows of his beer, then went away.
“I was an X-ray technician at Mission Emergency Hospital, and that was no easy job. We had gunshot wounds and stabbings. I didn’t want to raise you in the city. I thought we’d have a better way of life with Daddy. Of all the guys who were interested in me, I thought he was the best.”
Mom had said “all the guys,” and that’s how I remembered it, too. In the evenings, the front room of the boardinghouse harbored two or three young men—some in uniform, some not—waiting for their dates to descend the rather grand staircase curving down from the upstairs rented rooms. I didn’t like the men who waited for Mommy, but I was polite because they were grown-ups. I let them jostle me on their bony knees “playing horsey”. I let them pull me onto their laps for smacking wet kisses goodnight. I dutifully tried to answer their questions and told them my favorite color (green) and my favorite animal (budgie). I smiled when they poked my stomach or dug fingers in my ribs—“Are you ticklish?” But when Mommy said “Time for bed,” I clambered eagerly up the stairs to our room off the second floor landing, shut myself in, and carefully pushed the button lock. Our room was small and quiet. No one poked me in our room. No one said “Gimme a smile.” I’d lie on the foot of the bed and fold the gold quilted satin bedspread back over me. It was cool and slippery and smelled like Mommy. I would rub the satin piping between my fingers, waiting for her, waiting for her rustle and perfume in the dark, until I fell asleep.
Mom is continuing with her story. “Daddy wrote to us while he was overseas, fighting in Korea. And when he came back, he proposed. He was only twenty-three, but he took us on, an older woman and her little girl, and no regrets.” She raises her voice. “Right, honey?” She glances at Dad, but he sleeps, oblivious.
“But, Mom, do you remember how you and Dad first met?”
“Well . . . no . . . I don’t remember right now. I mean, it’s not that I’ve forgotten, but I just need to be reminded, a little jog of my memory . . . Isn’t that funny, to forget something you used to remember so well.” She wipes imagined crumbs off the arm of her chair into her palm. “Sometimes my memories are like little birds, flying away.” She wiggles her fingers to make the birds.
My breath halts. Mom’s not right, I can tell. But I explain to myself that she must be overwhelmed by being Dad’s caretaker: the medications, doctors’ appointments, special diet. She must be undone by her own sleeplessness and fear. I bend over her feet, using both hands to scrub away the calluses, the hard, rough times.
Then Mom says, with a delighted smile, “Remember that huge box of crayons Daddy gave you when we were dating?”
“I do.” I’m glad to have a memory to share with her. In fact, it’s the only memory I have of Dad from before he and Mom married.
He had come to the boardinghouse to take Mom out for a date. We were all standing in the front room. I remember Mommy holding me by the shoulders in front of her, turning me to face him.
“And this is Tess,” she said. He had shiny black shoes.
Then a quiet man’s voice said, “Hello, Tess.” And that was all. No questions, no trying to shake my hand, no gambits (“I hear you’re quite the little ballerina”). Then to Mommy he said, “Oh, I brought something for Tess.” He reached down into a worn leather bag on the floor and pulled out the biggest box of crayons I had ever seen in my short life. He held it out and I reached for it with both hands. I held the box close and fumbled a little in pushing up the flip lid. The smell of cardboard and tallow filled my nose, and all the colors in the world marched shoulder to shoulder in rainbow rows.
“Are these all mine?”
They laughed. Then he said to Mommy, “You’ll need a sweater, I think.”
“I’ll be right back down.” She left me there with him.
There were no other people in the front room. I sidled over to the sofa and sat at the farthest end, clutching the crayon box. He ambled away across the room with his hands in his pockets to inspect the Victrola. He didn’t ignore me exactly. We intercepted covert glances at each other as he wandered the perimeter, then casually sat himself down on the other end of the sofa. We waited. It was quiet except for the loud ticking of the parlor mantel clock. I cut my eyes quick at this man who’d come for Mommy. He was studying the ceiling.
I said, “I know my ABC’s. Do you want to hear them?”
He angled his head at me. “Okay.” I could see how his eyebrows were black and thick and his eyes were brown.
I started singing the alphabet in a soft voice, frowning at the carpet, stuttering over “ellemenopee” and just as I was done, Mommy called “I’m ready!” She drifted down the staircase in her high heels, smooth as a feather rocking gently toward earth, the flared hem of her cotton skirt swinging around her knees, her nylon stockings glistening. Like a jack-in-the-box, he was on his feet, parade rest, but tracking her with his eyes, mesmerized by the dark curls pinned back from alabaster skin, the red-lipsticked girlish smile, the whispering white silk blouse.
Did she see the future then in our upturned, entranced faces–in a man’s smoldering brown eyes, and in a little girl’s adoring gaze?
