Shadows Like Birds, Lights Like Jewels
Here is a photo of my mother lounging with the sultry grace of a movie starlet. The harsh, insistently sensual cupid bow mouth drawn in red, as was the fashion in those days, is at odds with the laughter in her eyes and the insouciant flip of her left shoulder. Her legs are bent just so (there are little crescents of shadow behind her knees) and her feet are tucked to one side, out of view of the camera.
Thirteen years later, when I buy my first bikini, she will rewrite her own history. “I can’t see why you bought that. I never liked them. They’re so vulgar,” she will say. In the photo her bikini is brief and polka-dotted. She is very daring.
Behind her, blurry and out-of-focus, is the palm tree that stood in the front yard of the house where she grew up. I recognize its massive cylindrical trunk. One autumn while we are visiting her mother, my grandmother, the tree will tip over in a hurricane, and plop to the ground without much effect, narrowly missing my grandmother’s house, its enormous but shallow root ball an ineffective anchor against the driving wind.
The next day I will stand at the front gate as a bright yellow hydraulic shovel and an earth mover dismantle the tree. My grandmother, a collection of bony angles and frizzy hair, is somehow heartened by this disaster. She rushes downstairs before she has even put in her dentures. Smelling of lavender, she stands beside me and we watch the machines pull and tug at the fallen tree. “Look at that,” she says in a high, brittle voice. Her bright excitement at the drama, and the sharpened angle of her chin, her lips receding into her surprisingly empty mouth will be etched clearly in my memory.
Behind the palm tree, behind my mother in the photo, a mass of bougainvillea splashes across the wall that surrounds my grandmother’s house. In the photo discrete blooms on the vine are illegible but I recognize the cloud of colour. This is a hot climate, southern California; beaches bake; palm trees — unlikely sentinels that look shabby and ratty by the end of June — line the streets.
My father, transplanted from the east, will tell me later how exotic it all seemed to him when he first arrived, the heavy matted carpets of flowers, the dry heat so different from the muggy humidity he was accustomed to. My mother, a native, is unimpressed. To her, familiar with these langorous scents and colours, it is the idea of snow that possesses her imagination. She has heard stories from her father who spent years in Canada. Two decades after this photo is taken, when she has lived in the northeast for a dozen years, winter’s first snowfall will still transfix her. But now, before the snow, before my father’s appearance, she lounges in the sun.
She squints against the light. When a breeze moves the leaves on the banana tree, which is in front of her, out of the camera’s range, shadows flutter across her dazzled eyes, shadows like birds. The shadows make her think of the nuns at the convent school she attended, their dark billowing habits. Stern, harsh, austere, they always frightened her a bit. They knew so clearly what was right and what was wrong. She is sure they would think it is wrong of her to be wearing this bikini, that they would tell her bikinis incite lust in men. She imagines how the nuns would look if they saw her now, their eyes blank, their mouths straight and pinched. The thought of their disapprobation cheers her, she tilts her chin up pugnaciously.
Unaware that at the marine base across the street my father is spending his days marching in formation, polishing his boots and rifle.
She stretches out in front of the house her father built, a house of dark, polished wood surfaces and floors covered by red ceramic Mexican tiles. He paid for the house with money he made prospecting for gold in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in Canada. It is not clear that he ever found any gold; it’s just as likely he won the money gambling. “Colder than hell,” he would say of Prince Albert. And his wife, my grandmother, would hiss, “Samuel,” at him. Not because she objected to the topic of conversation — although Prince Albert was rarely discussed since he had been married to someone else at the time — but because of the hell.
“But that cold money landed me here,” he would laugh. “In the sun.” Then he would rub his shiny bald head and suck on his pipe, an amused expression on his face. As if he suspected all this warm weather was just a Chinook, and any minute the cold could move in again.
However he came by it, my grandfather was better at making money than at keeping it. By the time my mother lounges in this photo half the servants have been let go, half the rooms in the house have been shut up, the furniture muffled under heavy sheets to keep off the dust. The gardener was let go several months ago and purslane has invaded the alyssum my grandmother plants in the back yard each year. It does not entirely rout the alyssum, though. On hot mornings my mother and grandmother eat their breakfast on the patio. Mother breathes in the sharp smell of the small, white flowers. My grandfather, dead for five years, doesn’t know about the purslane, the darkened rooms, has no ideas about the economies his widow practices.
He doesn’t know how she worries, how anxiety pitches her voice high and sharp, like a complaint. Constantly, it seems to my mother living in that house, she hears about the high cost of things — the car they drive only on Sunday (to church), clothes, maintaining the house — until my mother measures each mouthful of food she eats, estimating how much it costs. She thinks her life will be like this endlessly, economizing, weighing, scrimping. The thought makes her tired.
But today, as she poses for the camera, my mother looks carefree. In this photo I don’t exist yet, won’t arrive for another year and a half. Just my mother, smiling at the camera, is.
It’s the weekend. She has two days off from her job as a social worker. She stretches out on the grass and does not think about the places she visits during the week, where she is required to check under beds and in closets for extra pairs of shoes — men’s shoes. She likes the people she meets through her job, mothers most of them, young Black women with several children and no apparent husband.
The apartments these women live in frighten her sometimes. They are appalling. Wallpaper droops from the walls in great curling sheets, broken windows are stopped up with cardboard. Once she saw a child who had scraped plaster off a bare wall and eaten it — the child gave her a small, milky smile.
She knows these people think she’s rich, with her camel hair coat and her correct grammar. They treat her with a distant civility, as if she’s a foreigner who doesn’t understand their language or customs. Mistakes she makes are tolerated. They have no idea how ephemeral her affluence is. She watches them closely to see how they do it, to catch the details of their survival. She wonders if she could be as gracious in their situation.
But sometimes she senses something that makes her uneasy, something like a smouldering heat that hasn’t ignited into flame. A year or two after men walk on the moon she will see this part of the city explode in rage and destruction. She will shake her head to think she walked down those streets alone, went into those dark doorways. She’ll wonder whether, if she had said something differently, if she had done something differently, things might have been otherwise. She will put a name to the wave she felt rising around her, see that it was anger, and ask herself if she could have seen what was happening more clearly, if she could have read the clues more accurately.
But today, the day of the photo, she doesn’t think about these things. She shifts a bit because the grass she’s lying on prickles, grass as foreign to this semi-desert as my grandfather was; grass irrigated by water diverted from rivers whose headwaters rise from lakes almost as distant and cold as Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. She doesn’t think about the water or the rivers or the cold. She thinks about the party tonight. Her two girlfriends will pick her up in a blue Studebaker.
They arrive at five. Unknown to my grandmother a bottle of wine is concealed in the trunk of the car, a squat, graceless bottle of bitter red.
Emptied, a bottle like this will serve as a candle holder in countless student apartments. My father and mother will have one, too. I remember picking at globs of hardened wax, an archaeology of wax, frozen on the side of the bottle. I remember the furniture. It was, I recognize now, the furniture of students: wood-crates covered with brightly-coloured cloth, a table jerry-rigged from a door. The desperate ingenuity of poverty. I also remember the celebratory flourishes my mother created: a splash of colour on one wall to make a dull room vibrant, a spray of flowers in a jar highlighted by sunlight falling through a window.
My mother isn’t thinking about the wine. As she reclines on the grass she is imagining the night ahead. The three of them — Sylvia, Sydney and my mother — will drive, laughing, out to another friend’s house that sits on a rise of hill beyond the city. Here, the four of them will drink wine, smoke marijuana — she knows the nuns would disapprove — and look out across the bay spread before them at the lights of boats and houses wavering on the water. “Lights like jewels,” she will tell me twenty years later.
But she is not there yet. She is still lounging. In the photo the smoothness of her skin is breathtaking. (By the time she enters my memory there is a fine web of lines on each temple and a sharp crease on either side of her mouth.) A thread of song runs through her mind, “Moon River,” or “Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” — something current, vaguely melancholy, vaguely romantic.
Later she will sing these songs and others while she works around the house. She will scrub the kitchen floor to “Marezy Doats” and vacuum the living room to “Oklahoma.” While she nurses my sister she will hum “Rock-a-bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody.” I will grow up with Broadway tunes echoing in my ears. Years later I will come across the orangey technicolour films that featured these songs. Their hopeful optimism is my mother’s — it shines like a new, untarnished copper penny.
She is poised, waiting for the shutter to snap. She doesn’t know about me or her mother’s dentures. She doesn’t know about her own faulty genes which will bring her, forty-three years later, to a nursing home in the middle of winter, and to the blank, white landscape of complete forgetfulness — the lights like jewels extinguished, the smell of alyssum evaporated.
For now, the moment is completely hers. She tips back, carelessly, recklessly, on one elbow and turns toward the camera, smiling. In a moment my father will step off the streetcar that stops in front of her house. He will see her stretched out on the grass. Her laughter will shimmer across the lawn to him. And, with an inflection that sounds slightly foreign to my mother — his words stretched into a drawl, his phrases more formal than she is used to — he will step forward and take the liberty, if he might, of introducing himself.
1999