How had it come and gone so fast?
She’d barely blinked, and she was back.
So, my mother’d had an education. She’d wandered through one of the largest libraries in Ohio for four years: all those yellow pages eaten up by worms and doubts, and that musty air in her hair when she went back to the dorm to sleep.
She’d never gotten into a sorority. For four years she’d studied English and worked in a cafeteria, cutting squares of Jell-O and spice cake with a flat knife, then placing them carefully under the chilled cafeteria glass.
Why the idea of a real career never came to her in those years between college and my father, I do not know.
Why she didn’t do something later with her good education is a puzzle. It must have been a puzzle even to her. Those four years in college, perhaps they turned, after five years at Waterhouse Steel, into a cool and trembling cube in her mind. Perhaps she was afraid, after all that time, to turn it over in her memory, afraid to lay it out again on the plain, white, cafeteria plate of her life.
Her job was dull.
Her father was not a talker.
She’d started to look for excitement in Toledo bars at night, looking for a man, looking for a future. She was beautiful, and smart. A sexy, witty, desperate woman.
Once, in a magazine I picked up in a dentist’s waiting room—perhaps Dr. Heine’s office, waiting for my mother, perhaps Woman’s Day—I read a statistic that surprised me: The most likely place for an American woman in her midtwenties to die is in the passenger seat of a car.
I tried to imagine it. All across America, young women in passenger seats, watching the continent roll past them from those car windows, counting crows, and cows, and rest stops, crossing and uncrossing their legs, flipping the mirrored sun visor down to get a look at themselves—pretty, lipsticked, hair tucked neatly behind their ears—while some man drives them somewhere they may or may not want to go. To a bar, to a movie, to bed.
For a while, my mother was one of them.
She was single, twenty-seven, a receptionist at Waterhouse Steel. She lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Toledo with her father, who was turning into an old man. She needed to get married, but what she wanted was excitement, and there she was, trying to find it, night after night in the passenger seat of some bass player’s, or pilot’s, or Marine on leave’s car.
I could easily imagine my mother as a young woman in the passenger seat of that car. There it was. All that trust in nothing, like faith in God, letting this guy decide when to change lanes, letting this guy (and maybe he’s been drinking beer all night, maybe he’s stoned out of his mind—which, even sober, was never razor sharp) roll through the intersection under a blinking light.
Like faith in God—only he’s no god. He’s wearing plaid pants. He flunked out of high school, or he studied marketing in college. Maybe he fails to see the semi, bearing down, or he flips the car he’s driving, with that young woman beside him, into a ditch. Perhaps, before they come to rescue her with the Jaws of Life (she’s pinned in the wreckage while he smokes a cigarette at the side of the road, feeling bad about what happened, telling the cops it was an accident) she sees it all flash before her eyes. She thinks, This was bound to happen. There’s blood, and something worse—something soft and squidlike—on her tongue, and then it’s done.
“Is this Eve?” my father asked when he called one week after they’d met in the lounge of the Franklin Hotel. He’d been there for a conference. She’d been there to watch a bass player she’d been dating.
“Do you like to dance?” she asked him on their first date. They sat in the red vinyl booth of a restaurant downtown. My father chased a rack of ribs, bloody with barbecue sauce, around on his plate with a knife. His hands were slick.
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
My mother pushed her plate away and put her hands in her lap. She imagined herself with a diamond on her hand saying, “I quit,” to the president of Waterhouse Steel. But she couldn’t look across the table at my father, who had a red gash of sauce stretching from the corner of his mouth to his ear.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Phaler says, “our time is up.”
I’M WEARING A NIGHTGOWN MADE OF FOG, AND I’M INVISIBLE in it. My mother dusts my bedroom with a huge fan of feathers, and the motion, the wind she’s lifting, billows around me.
“Mom,” I say, “stop. I’m going to blow away.”
But she doesn’t hear or see me.
She’s dusting the top of my dresser, and the windowsills, and the comers of the floor. A cyclone of dust is kicked up by her feathers, and somehow I know that, really, it’s my father she’s trying to dust out. I can tell by the angry trembling of those feathers, the way she shakes them like a soft fist all around her all at once, making a storm of the calm. But I’m only fog—
I feel my feet lift off the ground.
She opens the window, and I feel myself sifted into a million little wisps, drifting out the screen.
Slipping past her I say, “I was there, too, but you didn’t see me.”
“I KNOW SHE DIDN’T HAVE ORGASMS,” I TELL DR. PHALER.
Though there is only the slightest change in her professional expression (What is it? A minute widening of the eyes? A barely registered raising of the eyebrows?) I can see she’s interested. “How do you know?” she asks in a tone of total composure, as if her voice is coated with wax.
“There’s a book, in her dresser, in a shoe box, Achieving Orgasm: A Woman’s Guide.”
“What made you look in her dresser?”
“Oh.” I shrug. “I looked in it years ago. I was curious.”
“Have you looked there since? Is the book still there?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Do you think there’s something significant about this?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I guess it’s just more evidence of her dissatisfaction. Her frustration, I guess. I guess her sex life with my father must have been pretty dull.”
“What does this mean to you?”
I think for a long time. I think of my mother reading that book in the afternoon while my father was at work, while I was at school. She spilled coffee on it, broke the spine, then shoved it back in her drawer, in that shoe box, to hide it—but she couldn’t have learned anything she didn’t already know:
You need to relax, it urged.
You need to learn to let go.
You need to believe you deserve pleasure, then go off in search of it.
The book was full of silly, New Age suggestions:
When no one is at home, take a long, naked look at yourself in a full-length mirror, and tell yourself you love what you see. Say it out loud. Say, “I love my body,” to yourself. Say, “I love you,——,” to your mirror.
I couldn’t imagine my mother doing that. I couldn’t stand to imagine my mother doing that.
“She was getting older,” I say to Dr. Phaler, but my voice sounds far away. “She didn’t want to die like that.”
“Like what?” Dr. Phaler asks. I see her through a scrim of cold ash, as if we are in one of those plastic globes of snow, shaken.
“She was tired of baking Christmas cookies”—and, up on Dr. Phaler’s ceiling tiles, I see all those sheets and tins and ovens full of cookies, all that frozen dough in the freezer. I remember Hansel and Gretel’s witch in the woods. How her house was made of candy and cake, and how she was crippled with rage.