Carol Black

20. One Gray

My mother was lost in pieces. 

A great piece of her was gone before I was born, of course, as is so often the case. My earliest sense was of that great loss, although I did not know it at the time, and so like other children I attempted to pour myself into the absence, to fill it, make it whole. Without being aware of it––since one so rarely is––I was still unspooling myself into her when the great avalanche began in her brain, when not just crust but mantle and core began to rumble, then to unlatch and move.

The morning that Eva died I had come downstairs to find my mother and father in the kitchen. When I told them she was gone, they quietly held me, first one then the other. Morning light slanted through the blinds. Cups of coffee cooled on the kitchen table. A little canyon wren kept flying back and forth between the grass and the acacia outside the window, hopping from branch to branch and then stopping, rotating its head one way and the other, looking with bright black eyes. Every once in a while it would stop and chi-chi-chatter fiercely about something. What you fussin’ bout, Grandma Janie would have said.

We were quiet for a little while longer. Then my father turned to me. He paused as though he were about to say something important.

Finally he spoke:

“I was looking for a replacement hinge for this cabinet at the hardware store,” he said, opening the tilted cabinet door to the left of the sink. It squeaked a little on its failing hinges. “But they didn’t have the right kind. It didn’t match the other ones. So I didn’t get it.”

I looked at him. Wait, what? 

“I’ll try another hardware store this week. To see if I can find the right hinge.”

The canyon wren flew up past the window, wings fluttering in the bright light. It landed in the acacia, bouncing a little on a slender twig. It looked right at me with its bright black eyes.

“Oh. Okay. Thanks,” I said. 

The wren flew away.

So that was what my father said when my daughter died. 

I don’t remember what my mother said. 

I know she was kind; I know she was gentle. But as far as I can remember, she said nothing.

A year later we’re sitting in the same kitchen, at the same table, drinking tea. This time late afternoon sunlight floods the room. I’m pregnant again but I don’t yet know it. We talk about the birds, the weather, the light. A weight hangs over us, a silence. A great piece of me is gone, torn off. A great piece of my mother has always been gone, always gaping, a crater. Invisibly, silently, I pour my life into that great hole; but visibly, verbally, I stay away; I steer clear. That day I walk up to edge of it. 

It is unfenced, open. 

And so I ask her, Why don’t you ask me how I am?

Why don’t you ask me how I feel?

You never say anything about it.

You never say her name.

She doesn’t answer, of course. She’s never unkind about it; it’s just the way we are. We don’t speak of it. We add it to the weight of the unspoken; we carry on.  

But that day, I speak of it. I ask her:

Why don’t you ask me how I am?

Why can’t you say her name?

It’s hard to describe the sensation of saying the things that are unsayable to the people you come from. If your family’s not like that it seems like nothing. If your family’s like that it seems like walking off the edge of the earth and standing in air. Even now, so many years later, I feel embarrassed to mention it; I flinch. In our family your baby dies and your aunts go to the drug store and buy a card, a card with roses, with lilies, a drift of glitter on clouds. They sign their names; love, Evelyn. Love, Charlotte. Love, Edith. That’s it. Your father says nothing. Your father’s brothers say nothing. Your mother and your grandmothers say nothing.

(Your grandmother may die of it, of course. It may be the last tiny thing that finally breaks her heart into a million pieces. That may happen. But if it happens, we won’t speak of it.)

Where do all the unspoken things live in the brain? The unwept things? All the things unspoken and unwept in an entire family, a lineage, a clan? What is their life there? Are they vivid, like dreams? Are they fertile, like seeds? Do they watch us, like eyes? Do they haunt us like shades, like souls beyond Lethe, ungraspable, gray, cloudlike, forgetful of who they are and where they come from? Do they reach out with sorrowing hands? Do they melt like snow? Do they decompose in our brains, spread through us like dry rot through wood, softening, weakening, then finally breaking us? Do they seep into our bones, demyelinate our nerves, aggregate in our veins, blight the DNA in our cells?

I could not leave my little one in the realm of the unspoken.

I had to say her name.

Do I feel that I broke something in my mother that day? That something snapped, like a tree branch, cracked like a foundation? Do I feel there came a point where it was either her, or me, and that I chose? 

Do I feel responsible?

For the first time I saw confusion in her eyes. 

For the first time I expressed anger.

For the first time I realized our conversation was circling.

For the first time I thought:

She doesn’t remember what we said five minutes ago.

Then felt anger flicker, die down, become ember:

She really doesn’t remember.

I’ve sometimes tried to describe our family to people of other ethnicities by explaining that we show our love for each other for by sending frozen meat through the mail. My aunt Charlotte was the one who originated the family custom of honoring major life passages and transitions with a quick phone call to Omaha Steaks. Catalog meat shopping was the logical modern iteration of family traditions that greeted birth with pot roast and death with baked ham; no doubt our ancestors under similar circumstances would have slaughtered a bullock. In any case, five months into my pregancy my parents had come to see us again, and a long hollow needle sucking DNA out of my amniotic fluid was deemed a fit occasion for fried chicken.

The amnio itself had gone fine, with the slight exception of the moment when Dr. Hussein tried to distract me by asking if we had baby names picked out yet, and I made a little joke, and then I chuckled. Which was when I discovered that it is not a good idea to laugh when you have a large needle in your uterus. My belly rose and fell quickly and I thought, ‘whoa.’ But after the fleeting look of alarm faded from his face, Dr. Hussein assured me there had been no harm done, and sent me home with instructions to rest and relax in order to minimize the slight increased risk of miscarriage or bleeding that followed the procedure.

 By now I loved Dr. Hussein with the kind of fervent patient-doctor love that you rarely see outside of television medical dramas. I don’t usually go in for that sort of thing; in general I’m the kind of patient doctors dread seeing come through their doors, armed with journal articles, statistics, and an attitude that I think of as “intelligently skeptical” but that they clearly think of as “a huge pain in the ass.” But Dr. Hussein was never too busy to answer my questions, never too egotistical to seriously and respectfully engage with my concerns. Gently he told me to go home and relax, the softness in his voice reminding me that stress must be minimized, because of the amnio, and because— we did not need to speak of it.  

 When I got home I crawled into bed to watch TV, and my mother came to the door and asked if she could bring me anything. I asked for a glass of water, so she brought me the water, then sat down on the edge of the bed, and we chatted for a bit. But to understand what happened next, you have to understand that my mother was not fussy or clingy or intrusive in the ways that other people’s mothers are sometimes fussy and intrusive. She had always been the grounded one, the centered one, the gravitational force that pulled us back in when we all went spinning out of our orbits. So it was a little odd when she asked how my doctor’s appointment had gone, because she had already asked, and I had already told her, but I assured her again that it had gone fine. 

After a minute she went downstairs, and then, after a few more minutes, came back up; then hovered for a moment, restless; then picked up the paper, leafed through it, and set it aside. She seemed unsettled, which made me irritable (the first low rumblings, almost inaudible.)

It was odd when she asked again, repetitively, if she could do something to help. 

Perhaps it was partly to get her out of my hair that I said I would love to have fried chicken for dinner.  

It was partly because my mother in the kitchen frying chicken was one of those childhood memories that gave me comfort; coming into the dark living room on a bone-cold winter day while through the kitchen door came yellow light and that delicious crackling smell. True, my mother was the kind of woman who cared more about economics than cooking (you could say she took the “home” out of “home economics”), but the fact is she was an expert chicken fryer, master of the science and the art of it, more skilled at achieving the perfect tint of crispy golden brown than a houseful of my Kentucky aunts. She took the intellectual depth and precision that should have gone to a brilliant career in international relations and brought it instead to a detailed analysis of each female relative’s chicken-frying errors; putting a lid on the pan so the steam condensed and dripped back down onto the chicken, making it soggy; crowding the pieces too much or not crowding them enough; keeping the flame too high or too low. You have to fry chicken by the sound, she always said. When it’s the right temperature you can hear it.

But when I wandered down to the kitchen later to get a cup of tea, it struck me that she was circling. She had a pan on the stove with the burner on high. Across the room was a bowl of flour, and on the counter over the dishwasher was a plate with five chicken pieces coated in flour and three more that were uncoated. She glanced around her, searching, then found the tongs and put two pieces of the coated chicken into the pan. Then she seemed to see the uncoated pieces. The pan was too hot, and crackled furiously, three large drops of hot oil popping out into the air. She hesitated. She picked up the uncoated pieces of chicken and carried them to the bowl of flour. The oil popped again, and she turned back to the pan without them.   

For a moment she stood in the middle of the room, her eyes clouded, hands dusted with flour, tiny particles of white drifting slowly to the floor.   

“Should I turn it down?” I asked. Maybe it was just the unfamiliar kitchen. She looked at me. The oil in the pan was starting to smoke. “I’ll just turn it down a little,” I said. “These burners heat up really fast.” I dialed it back until the sound coming from the pan was a soft even crackle, just the way she taught me. 

I waited a moment.

“Did you want to put those other pieces on now?”

My mother started. “What?” she said. Then she seemed to gather herself. “Who took the tongs?” she said, irritably.

I brought her the tongs and the bowl of flour. Then I went back to bed, ignoring the chill that stirred in the pit of my stomach. When we ate dinner that night, the chicken pieces were scorched in places and pale in others. The conversation meandered. At one point I quickly spit a piece of meat out into my napkin; it was slimy, pinkish. We did the dishes and I went to bed early, but woke up sometime after midnight. Within minutes I vomited the first time, and then was so violently sick for the rest of the night that by morning all the blood vessels in my eyes were broken and the whites of my eyes were ruby red. Dr. Hussein told me to go to the emergency room and get on an IV and a baby monitor. 

I lay in the hospital bed behind the white curtain and explained everything to the young emergency room doctor. 

Her diagnosis was not difficult. Salmonella poisoning from undercooked chicken. I lay on my side, staring into this new gray sea, watching the delicate tracing of my baby’s heartbeat rise and fall and rise and fall again, rhythmically, in my blood red eyes no tears.

When clouds move in over the ocean, the horizon disappears. You see the front of the cloud coming toward you. Then you are in it. What’s distant comes close, then touches you, enters you.

Sea and sky one gray.

This is the sense that I have of that time.

Breathe it in as coolness, breathe it out as warmth. 

 How can you tell a story that unfolds inside you? One story in my belly, one in her brain; unfolding unseen, in darkness. 

The cloud descends and holds you.

The sense of it fills me, but still I cannot see it. Even after all these many years. 

My mind moves over it and over it, like a dog licks her paw over and over, until the fur comes off then the skin grows raw and red and bleeding.

As a girl I would come up behind my mother washing dishes at the sink and put my arms around her. She would flinch, as if in terror; then turn, and smile.

How did you get to be so affectionate? she would say, her heart still pounding. You didn’t get it from me.

Because, mom, whatever happened to you didn’t happen to me.

Whatever you have failed to do, you accomplished that much.