Anyhow, our house was near the lake—and the “beach”—and my sister and I had kept it after our mother died because I guess we hoped it might be worth something someday. To be honest, I didn’t have the stomach to sell it.
Now I walked toward that house with my back hunched like a fugitive. I had left the scene of an accident and surely someone had discovered the car, the truck, the smashed billboard, the gun. I was aching, bleeding, still half-dazed. I expected to hear police sirens at any moment—all the more reason I should kill myself first.
I staggered up the porch steps. I found the key we kept hidden under a phony rock in a flower box (my sister’s idea). Looking over both shoulders, seeing nothing—no police, no people, not a single car coming from either direction—I pushed the door open and went inside.
THE HOUSE WAS musty, and there was a faint, sweet smell of carpet cleaner, as if someone (the caretaker we paid?) had recently shampooed it. I stepped past the hallway closet and the banister we used to slide down as kids. I entered the kitchen, with its old tile floor and its cherrywood cabinets. I opened the refrigerator because I was looking for something alcoholic; by now this was a reflex with me.
And I stepped back.
There was food inside.
Tupperware. Leftover lasagna. Skim milk. Apple juice. Raspberry yogurt. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if someone had moved in, a squatter of some kind, and this was now his place, the price we paid for ignoring it for so long.
I opened a cabinet. There was Lipton tea and a bottle of Sanka. I opened another cabinet. Sugar. Morton salt. Paprika. Oregano. I saw a dish in the sink, soaking under bubbles. I lifted it and slowly lowered it, as if trying to put it back in place.
And then I heard something.
It came from upstairs.
“Charley?”
Again.
“Charley?”
It was my mother’s voice.
I ran out the kitchen door, my fingers wet with soapy water.
Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother
I am six years old. It is Halloween. The school is having its annual Halloween parade. All the kids will march a few blocks through the neighborhood.
“Just buy him a costume,” my father says. “They have ’em at the five-and-dime.”
But no, my mother decides, since this is my first parade, she will make me a costume: the mummy, my favorite scary character.
She cuts up white rags and old towels and wraps them around me, holding them in place with safety pins. Then she layers the rags with toilet paper and tape. It takes a long time, but when she is finished, I look in the mirror. I am a mummy. I lift my shoulders and sway back and forth.
“Oooh, you’re very scary,” my mother says.
She drives me to school. We start our parade. The more I walk, the looser the rags get. Then, about two blocks out, it begins to rain. Next thing I know, the toilet paper is dissolving. The rags droop. Soon they fall to my ankles, wrists, and neck, and you can see my undershirt and pajama bottoms, which my mother thought would make better undergarments.
“Look at Charley!” the other kids squeal. They are laughing. I am burning red. I want to disappear, but where do you go in the middle of a parade?
When we reach the schoolyard, where the parents are waiting with cameras, I am a wet, sagging mess of rags and toilet paper fragments. I see my mother first. As she spots me, she raises her hand to her mouth. I burst into tears.
“You ruined my life!” I yell.
“CHARLEY?”
What I remember most, hiding on that back porch, is how fast my breath left me. One second I had been at the refrigerator, dragging through the motions, the next second my heart was racing so fast I thought no amount of oxygen could sustain it. I was shaking. The kitchen window was at my back, but I didn’t dare look through it. I had seen my dead mother, and now I had heard her voice. I had broken parts of my body before, but this was the first time I worried I had damaged my mind.
I stood there, my lungs heaving in and out, my eyes locked on the earth in front of me. As kids, we’d called this our “backyard,” but it was just a square of grass. I thought about bounding across it to a neighbor’s house.
And then the door opened.
And my mother stepped outside.
My mother.
Right there. On that porch.
And she turned to me.
And she said, “What are you doing out here? It’s cold.”
NOW, I DON’T know if I can explain the leap I made. It’s like jumping off the planet. There is everything you know and there is everything that happens. When the two do not line up, you make a choice. I saw my mother, alive, in front of me. I heard her say my name again. “Charley?” She was the only one who ever called me that.
Was I hallucinating? Should I move toward her? Was she like a bubble that would burst? Honestly, at this point, my limbs seemed to belong to someone else.
“Charley? What’s the matter? You’re all cut.”
She was wearing blue slacks and a white sweater now—she was always dressed, it seemed, no matter how early in the morning—and she looked to be no older than the last time I had seen her, on her seventy-ninth birthday, wearing these red-rimmed glasses she got as a present. She turned her palms gently upward and she beckoned me with her eyes and, I don’t know, those glasses, her skin, her hair, her opening the back door the way she used to when I threw tennis balls off the roof of our house. Something melted inside of me, as if her face gave off heat. It went down my back. It went to my ankles. And then something broke, I almost heard the snap, the barrier between belief and disbelief.
I gave in.
Off the planet.
“Charley?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
I did what you would have done.
I hugged my mother as if I’d never let her go.
Times My Mother Stood Up for Me
I am eight years old. I have a homework assignment. I must recite to the class: “What Causes an Echo?”
At the liquor store after school, I ask my father. What causes an echo? He is bent over in the aisle, checking inventory with a clipboard and a pencil.
“I don’t know, Chick. It’s like a ricochet.”
“Doesn’t it happen in mountains?”
“Mmm?” he says, counting bottles.
“Weren’t you in mountains in the war?”
He shoots me a look. “What’re you asking about that for?”
He returns to his clipboard.
That night, I ask my mother. What causes an echo? She gets the dictionary, and we sit in the den.
“Let him do it himself,” my father snaps.
“Len,” she says, “I’m allowed to help him.”
For an hour, she works with me. I memorize the lines. I practice by standing in front of her.
“What causes an echo?” she begins.
“The persistence of sound after the source has stopped,” I say.
“What is one thing required for an echo?”
“The sound must bounce off something.”
“When can you hear an echo?”
“When it’s quiet and other sounds are absorbed.”
She smiles. “Good.” Then she says, “Echo,” and covers her mouth and mumbles, “Echo, echo, echo.”
My sister, who has been watching our performance, points and yells, “That’s Mommy talking! I see her!”
My father turns on the TV set.
“What a colossal waste of time,” he says.
The Melody Changes
DO YOU REMEMBER THAT SONG, “This Could Be the Start of Something Big?” It was a fast, upbeat tune, usually sung by a guy in a tuxedo in front of a big band. It went like this:
You’re walkin’ along the street, or you’re at a party,
Or else you’re alone and then you suddenly dig,
You’re lookin’ in someone’s eyes, you suddenly realize
That this could be the start of something big.
&n
bsp; My mother loved that song. Don’t ask me why. They played it at the start of The Steve Allen Show back in the 50s, which I recall as a black-and-white program, although everything seemed to be in black and white in those days. Anyhow, my mother thought that song was “a swinger,” that’s what she called it—“Oooh, that one’s a swinger!”—and whenever it came on the radio, she snapped her fingers like she was leading the band. We had a hi-fi, and one year for her birthday she got an album by Bobby Darin. He sang that tune, and she played the record after dinner as she cleaned the dishes. This was when my dad was still in the picture. He’d be reading his newspaper and she would walk over to him and drum on his shoulders, singing “this could be the start of something big,” and, of course, he wouldn’t even look up. Then she’d come over to me and make like she was playing drumsticks on my chest as she sang along.
You’re dining at Twenty-One and watching your diet,
Declining a charlotte rousse, accepting a fig,
Then out of the clear blue sky, it’s suddenly gal and guy,
And this could be the start of something big.
I wanted to laugh—especially when she said “fig”—but since my father wasn’t participating, laughter felt like a betrayal. Then my mother started tickling me and I couldn’t help it.
“This could be the start of something big,” she’d say, “big boy, big boy, bigboybigboybigboy.”
She used to play that music every night. But once my father left, she never did again. The Bobby Darin album stayed on the shelf. The record player collected dust. At first I thought she had changed her taste in music, the way we did as kids, at one point thinking Johnnie Ray was a good singer, but eventually thinking Gene Vincent was so much better. Later, I figured she didn’t want to be reminded of how the “something big” had backfired.
The Encounter Inside the House
OUR KITCHEN TABLE WAS ROUND and made of oak. One afternoon when we were in grade school, my sister and I carved our names in it with steak knives. We hadn’t finished when we heard the door open—our mother was home from work—so we threw the steak knives back in the drawer. My sister grabbed the biggest thing she could find, a half gallon of apple juice, and plopped it down. When my mother entered, wearing her nurse’s outfit, her arms full of magazines, we must have said, “Hi, Mom” too quickly, because she immediately became suspicious. You can see that in your mother’s face right away, that “What did you kids do?” look. Maybe because we were sitting at an otherwise empty table at 5:30 in the afternoon with a half gallon of apple juice between us.
Anyhow, without letting go of her magazines, she nudged the juice aside and saw CHAR and ROBER—which was as far as we got—and she let out a loud, exasperated sound, something like “uhhhhch.” Then she screamed, “Great, just great!” and in my childish mind, I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad. Great was great, right?
My father was traveling in those days, and my mother threatened his wrath when he got home. But that night as we sat at the table eating a meat loaf with a hard-boiled egg inside it—a recipe she had read somewhere, perhaps in one of those magazines she carried—my sister and I kept glancing at our work.
“You know you’ve completely ruined this table,” my mother said.
“Sorry,” we mumbled.
“And you could have cut your fingers off with those knives.”
We sat there, admonished, lowering our heads to the obligatory level for penance. But we were both thinking the same thing. Only my sister said it.
“Should we finish, so at least we spell our names right?”
I stopped breathing for a moment, astonished at her courage. My mother shot her a dagger-like stare. Then she burst out laughing. And my sister burst out laughing. And I spit out a mouthful of meatloaf.
We never finished the names. They remained there always as CHAR and ROBER. My father, of course, blew a gasket when he got home. But I think over the years, long after we’d departed Pepperville Beach, my mother came to like the idea that we had left something behind, even if we were a few letters short.
NOW I SAT at that old kitchen table, and I saw those markings, and then my mother—or her ghost, or whatever she was—came in from the other room with an antiseptic bottle and a washcloth. I watched her pour the antiseptic into the fabric, then reach for my arm and push up my shirtsleeve, as if I were a little boy who had fallen off the swing set. Perhaps you’re thinking: Why not scream out the absurdity of the situation, the obvious facts that made this all impossible, the first of which is, “Mother, you died”?
I can only answer by saying it makes sense to me now as it makes sense to you now, in the retelling, but not in that moment. In that moment, I was so stunned by seeing my mother again that correcting it seemed impossible. It was dream-like, and maybe part of me felt I was dreaming, I don’t know. If you’ve lost your mother, can you imagine seeing her right in front of you again, close enough to touch, to smell? I knew we had buried her. I remembered the funeral. I remembered shoveling a symbolic pile of dirt on her coffin.
But when she sat down across from me and dabbed the washcloth on my face and arms, and she grimaced at the cuts and mumbled, “Look at you”—I don’t know how to say it. It burst through my defenses. It had been a long time since anyone wanted to be that close to me, to show the tenderness it took to roll up a shirtsleeve. She cared. She gave a crap. When I lacked even the self-respect to keep myself alive, she dabbed my cuts and I fell back into being a son; I fell as easily as you fall into your pillow at night. And I didn’t want it to end. That’s the best way I can explain it. I knew it was impossible. But I didn’t want it to end.
“Mom?” I whispered.
I hadn’t said it in so long. When death takes your mother, it steals that word forever.
“Mom?”
It’s just a sound really, a hum interrupted by open lips. But there are a zillion words on this planet, and not one of them comes out of your mouth the way that one does.
“Mom?”
She wiped my arm gently with the washcloth.
“Charley.” She sighed. “The trouble you get into.”
Times My Mother Stood Up for Me
I am nine years old. I am at the local library. The woman behind the desk looks over her glasses. I have chosen 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. I like the drawings on the cover and I like the idea of people living under the ocean. I haven’t looked at how big the words are, or how narrow the print. The librarian studies me. My shirt is untucked and one shoe is untied.
“This is too hard for you,” she says.
I watch her put it on a shelf behind her. It might as well be locked in a vault. I go back to the children’s section and choose a picture book about a monkey. I return to the desk. She stamps this one without comment.
When my mother drives up, I scramble into the front seat of her car. She sees the book I’ve chosen.
“Haven’t you read that one already?” she asks.
“The lady wouldn’t let me take the one I wanted.”
“What lady?”
“The librarian lady.”
She turns off the ignition.
“Why wouldn’t she let you take it?”
“She said it was too hard.”
“What was too hard?”
“The book.”
My mother yanks me from the car. She marches me through the door and up to the desk.
“I’m Mrs. Benetto. This is my son, Charley. Did you tell him a book was too hard for him to read?”
The librarian stiffens. She is much older than my mother, and I am surprised at my mother’s tone, given how she usually talks to old people.
“He wanted to take out 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne,” she says, touching her glasses. “He’s too young. Look at him.”
I lower my head. Look at me.
“Where’s the book?” my mother says.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Where’s the book?”
The woman
reaches behind her. She plops it on the counter, as if to make a point by its heft.
My mother grabs the book and shoves it in my arms.
“Don’t you ever tell a child something’s too hard,” she snaps. “And never—NEVER—this child.”
Next thing I know I am being yanked out the door, hanging tightly to Jules Verne. I feel like we have just robbed a bank, my mother and me, and I wonder if we’re going to get in trouble.
Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother
We are at the table. My mother is serving dinner. Baked ziti with meat sauce.
“It’s still not right,” my father says.
“Not again,” my mother says.
“Not again,” my little sister mimics. She rolls her fork in her mouth.
“Watch, you’ll stick yourself,” my mother says, pulling my sister’s hand away.
“It’s something with the cheese, or the oil,” my father says, looking at his food as if it disgusts him.
“I’ve tried ten different ways,” my mother says.
“Don’t exaggerate, Posey. Is it such a big deal to make something I can eat?”
“You can’t eat it? It’s inedible now?”
“Jesus,” he groans. “Do I need this?”
My mother stops looking at him.
“No, you don’t need it,” she says, scooping a portion angrily onto my plate. “But I need it, right? I need an argument. Eat, Charley.”
“Not so much,” I say.
“Eat what I give you,” she snaps.
“It’s too much!”
“Mommy,” my sister says.
“All I’m saying, Posey, is if I ask you to do it, you can do it. That’s all. I told you a million times why it don’t taste right. If it ain’t right, it ain’t right. You want me to lie to make you happy?”