Sand in My Eyes, page 6
I can’t promise to record the exact day you first smile, or which tooth you grow first, or whether you said “mama” or “dada,” but I’ll start by saying butterflies from the yard next door are fluttering over, landing on your bassinet, and hummingbirds are whizzing by, and cardinals are sitting on a nearby branch. This is the world you’ve entered. And it’s a breathtaking one!
Every morning of your little life I’ve taken you out here as I sit in awe, trying to figure her magic, discover what tricks my neighbor is performing in that yard of hers to attract multitudes of magnificent beings. Maybe it’s her music—Mozart, every morning. We are blessed to be living next door to one of Portland’s rose enthusiasts, only I wish I knew how to grow them myself. I wish for a lot of things, darling —for a bathtub in my house, like my neighbor has, and a telephone, too. She’s the only one on our street that I know of who has both a bathtub and a telephone. Her husband, by the way, is a dentist. He makes $2,500 per year. I wish your daddy was a dentist, and that our home was as big!
“What ridiculous eyes that baby has, so blue,” she said moments ago, as she heard you fussing and stepped up to where my yard meets hers.
“She’s got her daddy’s eyes,” I replied. “What a beautiful yard you have. I wish I had a yard like yours. I’d love a garden but wouldn’t know where to begin. All that work.”
“It is a lot of work,” she said, “but I love it to where it doesn’t feel like work.”
“I should buy a packet of seeds and give it a try, fix up this yard of mine,” I told her. “I should be productive, do more with my days.”
And it was then, Fedelina, that she told me something I never want to forget. She said, “Cora, what you are doing when your children are small is working on the underground roots, the things not seen, but vital below the earth.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling more important than I had ever felt before. And in that moment, the hair on my arms stood up and something in my stomach fluttered, and you will find this, too, darling that your stomach flutters when you realize something you didn’t know before—I call these instances butterfly sightings—and all of a sudden, in the instant that she said that to me, a metamorphosis took place within me and I will never be the same again. From now until the day you are grown, I will view my job of mothering as vital to this earth.
It was then that I heard a phone ringing and knew it was hers, for no one else on the street has a phone. She went running inside, and I thought about going in, too, to put you to bed and pamper myself—wash my hair with Borax or egg yolks, which I do once a week. A little pampering goes a long way!
But as I stared at you in your bassinet, I suddenly wondered about all the things you must know to live a vivacious life, the lessons I must teach you. For now your newborn mind is easily content, and mothering is simple—cuddling and bathing, diapering and feeding. But I’m no dummy. I know the day will come when you notice that your mommy sings off key, and forgets all the words, and knows hardly anything. I know the day will come when you no longer see me for what I am, which is perfectly in love with you, and when you no longer want to sit in my arms or hear me sing, but expect more from me.
That will be the day that I cry. But it’s the other day I fear worse, the one I hear about from other mothers of daughters, the day in which you tell me you know everything and I know nothing. That will be the day I retreat into the corridors of my own insecurity, no longer daring to share with you all the things I felt were important.
And so I’ll write it all down now, everything I want you to know about life, and when I’m gone someday and you reach that point—it usually happens to women once they have babies of their own—where you wonder whether your mother might have known a thing or two, you can pick up my writings and find out.
I’ll start by saying I hope you cultivate beauty in your mornings. Mornings are important. They set the mood for your entire day. It’s why I start ours sitting out here listening to Mozart and the birds. Like classical music, nature has a strengthening effect. Listen to the birds and let them sing for you. It’s good for the body and the soul in ways I do not understand, but know instinctively. Ten minutes of sitting outside with you in the morning puts me in a fine mood and establishes my state of mind for the rest of the day. And if you’re not a gardener yourself, living next to one is a blessing. It has me caring a little less about the small house I’m in. I like to believe that living in a small house with a good view out one’s window is better than living in a mansion with no view at all.
But one more thing, Fedelina—life is short. The average life expectancy in the United States is forty-seven years. So please, baby, delight in your days. It’s your life! Make it a life you relish! A life you are proud of! Live—live your life!
Being Cora, your mom, is who I want to be right now, and I am savoring it, fully engaged, aware it won’t last forever, not in this way. In case I forget to say it when you’re older, I will say it now, “Thank you, Fedelina,” for giving me the experience of mothering you. But babies don’t stay babies forever, and you are to me now like a dandelion in my hand. With each breath I take you will change, lose your baby ways, and then I must let go of who you were. When that happens, I don’t want to look back, perplexed that all of a sudden a big gust of wind came and took you away, and so I try now to be aware of the subtle breezes, the things I can’t see with my eyes but can feel. And I’m trying to figure out how I can make it feel like forever that I am holding you—this dandelion—in my hand.
If before having you I wanted to become a doctor, or when you’re older, I feel like becoming a lawyer, all is achievable. You’ve been born into a world that is starting to favor women, and being a woman is the best thing to be, better than, say, an orchid. Orchids are beautiful, but cannot change their variety, whereas a woman has the liberty to constantly adjust who she is, how she thinks, behaves, reacts, what she learns, pursues, talks about, as well as who she wants to be in life. And if she finds she no longer likes parts of herself, she has the ability to change what it is she no longer likes.
Uh-oh—you’re acting hungry. Time to go,
Cora, your mum
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BELVEDERE
OH, ANNA, I MISS her so much,” Fedelina said when I stopped reading and looked up from my manuscript. “It doesn’t matter how old a woman is, she will always miss her mother.”
“Not a day goes by when I don’t miss mine,” I told her. “She died before I had my babies—never got to meet any of them.”
“That’s hard,” Fedelina said, pausing before adding, “I can’t believe you put that letter from my mother in your story!”
“Do you mind?” I asked. “Because I don’t have to use it if you don’t want me to.”
She fidgeted around the side of her bed until she discovered her glasses and put them on. “I don’t mind,” she said. “But I don’t remember seeing any ambulance in your driveway that first day I stopped over.”
“I thought that’s why you came by, because you were concerned.”
“No, I didn’t know it came to your house until you told me. I came by for another reason.”
“Oh?”
“Your fire alarm—I kept hearing it go off.”
“My fire alarm?”
“I’d be out in my yard chopping vines and I’d hear it—the same time every day, always around breakfast.”
“I was making eggs,” I told her. “And my stove top was crusted. I never found time to clean it.”
“That’s what I figured. I came by that day to share a trick with you, to ask if you knew about putting foil around the burners.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Oh, you looked like you were already self-conscious.”
“I did?”
“Yes, that your kids weren’t quieter, your house cleaner. The last thing I wanted was to make you feel embarrassed, and besides, the alarm wasn’t so bad. The noise of it had me chopping at my vines faster and harder.”
“I know about foil on the burners now,” I told her. “It’s taken me twenty years to figure it out.” I felt sweat forming on my forehead and wondered whether it was from all this talk of fire alarms. “Is it hot in here or is it me?” I asked, pulling off my cardigan.
“I was thinking it was rather cold.”
“Then what’s wrong with me?” I asked, not expecting a real answer.
“Menopause!” she said matter-of-factly, using the same diagnostic tone she had used years earlier when letting me know I was suffering a full-blown case of motherhood. “You look surprised. Am I telling you something you didn’t know?”
“No, I kind of figured that’s what it was,” I told her, “especially after my daughter sent me a book from college, a book on menopause—how dare she?” I laughed.
“Marjorie, did she really?”
“Yes, I think she noticed all the words I was forgetting. And not sophisticated words, but basic words, words no one should forget. And I have been getting these hot flashes, I admit, but my denial has me blaming global warming. Gosh, I can’t believe I’m there,” I told her. “The big ‘M.’ How can life be going by so quickly?”
I put my cardigan back on and walked over to a blanket folded on the counter. “Of course it’s menopause. I’m a dummy to think it’s anything else,” I said, and handed her the blanket.
“My body temperature goes up and down and I forget my words all the time,” she said. “I wish it was menopause, but it’s not, Anna.” She picked up the orchid that had been on her stomach all this time and slowly started to caress it with her fingers.
“You remember what kind it is?” I asked her.
“A blooming cattleya,” she said, her lips curving into a smile. “Some things a gal never forgets. So what happened next, after you read my mother’s letter? Did you find a spot in your house suitable to the orchid?”
I picked up my manuscript and started to read where I left off last.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHEN I CLOSED THE letter my neighbor’s mother had written to her, I noticed the orchid starting to hunch, as I had for months, walking around with my neck lowered, shoulders wilting. Of all the things I dreamt of having, an orchid never made the list. But it was mine now, as was the challenge of keeping it alive and getting it to flower.
“How difficult can it be,” I told the poor-postured stem, “to give you what you want, to get you to flower?”
I had to act fast. I knew it wanted a pleasant spot in my house, suitable to its needs, as much as I had for months wanted, needed, pleaded with my husband to allow me an itsy-bitsy amount of time for myself — an hour, maybe two—but all he did was make me feel guilty, or give me an hour of “personal time” locked up in my room folding laundry. It took me falling apart at the seams for him to grant me this week to myself.
I carried the terra-cotta pot with me into the kitchen and placed it on the window sill above the sink. But then a red-and-green card stuck by magnet to my refrigerator caught my eye. I pulled the Christmas card, postmarked December and stamped in four different states before arriving months late and one house over, off the refrigerator. I needed to tear it to shreds, get rid of it, should my neighbor stop by, should she come in. I would cringe if she saw it, and if she saw me that day standing in the road, holding the opened poinsettia card, reading the handwritten letter inside, meant for her, the one in which her friend wrote about a lunch she had with a group of ladies, “mostly widows like us who get together every month, and how we wish we could all wake up and find the holidays over!”
You have to pretend to enjoy it, the holiday season. You have sun and warmth and none of this heavy, wet, white stuff. We got four feet yesterday. You were wise to get out. Hope your heart behaves and you feel well. Do your best to have a happy Christmas, not too easy these days.
I don’t know why I opened mail that wasn’t for me. Loneliness has a woman do strange things. Despite it being written from one senior to another—and I was nowhere near the age of a senior and at a completely different stage in life—I could relate. It’s why I kept it all these months, I thought as I took a pair of children’s scissors and started cutting it to pieces. I, too, had pretended—for the sake of my children—to like the holidays. And I, too, had wanted to fall asleep and wake in the new year. The letter, and my lack of enthusiasm for this past Christmas, was one more reminder that life does lose its magic. Once a girl grows up and becomes a woman—especially a mother—there are incalculable balls she juggles, tricks she pulls, alterations she makes behind the curtains, and it all diminishes the wow effect of the magic, making it tough for her to stay awake and enjoy the show.
And I too was lonely, as strange as it sounds for a mother of three young ones to be so, but I was in a different sort of way—hungry for adult talk and all those big, juicy, sophisticated words. But none of this justified what I did the day I stood in my street opening and reading the letter addressed to her. I should have taped it shut and put it in her mailbox where it belonged, but I didn’t. I hung it on my refrigerator instead, where it had been ever since.
When I finished cutting it to shreds, I went for the orchid on the sill. “This room is too quiet,” I told it as I left the kitchen on a quest to find a more suitable spot, and to find who I was as a person. After all, what my neighbor had said to me made sense, that like the orchids, we need to know our kind—who we are—before we can properly care for ourselves. So who am I? I asked myself as I headed into the great room like a woman sailing across the sea, with no extra arms weighing me down, or temper tantrums to navigate through. I no longer felt like the neat freak I once was, or like a beautiful woman, happy wife, or publicist extraordinaire as I had been called at work.
I am that woman who, during the holidays, hustles and bustles for the sake of her children yet never feels she does enough and, despite those seconds of glee on their faces, goes into her room and cries herself to sleep out of exhaustion. And the woman who goes six months without changing the polish on her toenails, and who, when she feels something is wrong with her body, finally makes a doctor appointment only to reschedule six times, and who hasn’t read a novel in years, and whose personal measure of contentment is how clean the house is and, because it is never clean, is never content. I am that discontented woman who spots herself in the mirror at the store and sees she only got around to putting mascara on one eye, and who pours herself a cup of coffee at seven and has lost it somewhere in the house by seven-fifteen and who finds it by nine and downs it cold. And that woman who drives the way I do—purposely in the middle of the road, so my tires go over the bumpy reflectors and put my baby to sleep. I am a woman who fantasizes about life as a cloistered nun—the silence and solitude of it.
“You know who you are, what you like, you cattleya,” I told the orchid as I set it on a coffee table in the great room, close but not too close to the fan. “And I know who I am, too.” It all depends on the morning, I thought as I plopped down on the sofa where my husband typically slept. Some days I was the little engine that thought she could, and other days I was Old Mother Hubbard and often the woman who lives in a shoe, the one with so many kids she doesn’t know what to do. I could accept being all of that, but who I didn’t want to be was the one my daughter would look at soon enough with eyes of justice, declaring mommy “mean” for making daddy sleep in his makeshift bed.
I got up, gathered his sheets and pillow, and threw them in a bundle on the floor, questioning which things in life a mother is supposed to tell her daughter and which she is not. Sharing with Marjorie the reasons for my wrath, that daddy is no good, would only put an end to the way in which she giggles whenever he enters the room, and how she steps on his toes, waltzing along as he steps side to side. Dance to your daddy. It’s what I wanted for myself when I was young, and what mothers want for their daughters, to love their fathers madly. I would keep quiet about it all, but one day she would find out for herself how hard it is to be a wife, think back to those faces her mother made, and understand me better.
“It’s okay. Little girls don’t see it. They don’t see their daddy’s flaws,” I would tell her on that day, a long, long time from now, the day she learned of his immorality and started sympathizing with me for grudging poor daddy—the man she felt sorry for all those years. “But it’s easier for a little girl to love the man who is her daddy than it is for a wife to love the flawed man who is her husband.”
“This room is too overwhelming,” I declared as I took the orchid and stormed out, heading next into my bedroom. There, I set the flower on the bedside table and flicked on the overhead fan, recalling what my neighbor had said about orchids liking subtle breezes. But then I gave the night-stand a good shake. It was wobbly, and so was I, for there were moments in which I found it easier to stay with the father of my children, and others in which I knew leaving him would be best, and that the boys needed to know soon the sort of man their father was so they might never become like him.
“Should I sit my boys down one day,” I asked myself, “and tell them what their father did, let them see the hurt in my eyes, so hopefully they will never do it to their own wives?” But if I were to do that, it would only raise other questions, like why I didn’t leave him, and it would interfere with what I am trying to teach them—that when they do something wrong, there are consequences. Little boys need to know this. It’s the only way they can grow into men who are accountable for their actions.
I didn’t want to be wobbly-minded, and knew the orchid didn’t like wobbly tables. I moved its pot over to my writing desk instead. “This spot is just right,” I told the orchid, wishing my own contentment could be so simple. “Come morning, the sun pokes through this window, and you will be a happy flower.”
But what would it take to make me the happy woman I once was? I walked out my front door, got into my car and drove to Captiva Island, to the cemetery that lies next to the library, beside the Chapel by the Sea. There was no better place for a woman to go when she was grieving and missing horribly the person she used to be, back when life was simpler and more carefree. As I opened the white picket gate to the cemetery and strolled in, I was overtaken by emotion, aware that I had been stumbling in circles for too long, trapped beneath a tarp of sleep deprivation, one that suffocates a mother’s spirit and smothers her ability to see both the beauty of life and her very own aliveness. And then I walked past sites belonging to babies, some with the same names as my own babies, and it was hard to see the names of my children on tombstones. Life can be short, I thought, and I wanted my children back home again, home again, jiggety jog. I reached up and pulled a white hibiscus off a low-hanging tree. Its petals were delicate as tissue and I could have used it to wipe my tears, but then I dropped the hibiscus and let myself be overtaken by emotion as I read the inscriptions for individuals living as far back as the late 1800s.
