My father told me that children who lose their mothers often try to lose themselves. I told him he was wrong, but only I fixate on the way pink blends to orange and back again when we sit together on the porch each dusk.
“She isn’t dead, you know? You aren’t gonna find her there,” my father says. He holds a cigarette still between his fingers as his body ruptures in laughter.
“I’m not looking for her.” Silence consumes us both. We both know there’s something in those colors, which triumphs the fact that nothing is here on our porch.
“Magdalena?” He holds the cigarette away from his lips, asking me to reposition my eyes onto him.
“Yes?” I keep my eyes on the horizon.
“What would you do if your entire life depended on one person?” I hate when people ask stupid questions and label them profound.
“I’d do everything I could not to depend on that person,” I responded. When you’re raised by a man with a nicotine addiction, you learn dependence is never the answer.
He chuckled. “Too bad you need to.” I don’t know where the bread on the table comes from, but it comes. There’s always tuition money. There’s always soap in the dispensers. And my father is always glued to his bedroom 30 feet away. I once told the girls in my eighth grade class that my father was rich after I watched him deposit thousands of dollars into an education fund. In this small town, only rich girls receive an education fund.
And, in a small town, word eventually circles back to the rumor’s origin. My father asked me how he was supposed to be rich if he was too poor for a trust fund and too sad for employment. “Magdalena,” he had said. “You’re the rich one here, you know? No one else ever wakes up with new money in this stupid town. You know what pays for that?” He pointed to the ceiling above us. “Your money.” He moved his finger to be inches from my face.
I remember that when I thank him on the back porch. “Thank you,” I tell him. It’s the tenderness of my gratitude that breaks him into some sort of halo. Some girl in my econ class told me that some people should never be parents. I swear she was describing my father — a man who never once sat front row at his daughter’s dance recitals, an unemployed idiot who grunted at the sight of a parent-teacher conference. But he had done it. Maybe he had sent the town into a gossiping frenzy with frequent smoke breaks outside our junior high, but he never once missed a chance to applaud.
My father stretches his arms toward the horizon, and the brown of his skin interrupts the sky’s pink. He hates talking, so flashing motions are his solution to deafening silence. My seventh grade teacher used the same mechanism — except his flashing motions were turning town small talk into philosophical conversation. Talk was that I was growing up without a mother at home to wash the dishes. “Do you feel like you’re missing something?” he had asked me.
This was the conversation my father had trained me for. “No, she’s off doing what God asked her to do,” I answered. Both my teacher and I knew this line was rehearsed, but when you mention God’s name, you don’t question it.
“Well, a life a few notches short of motherless has to have left your soul in fragments. So I’m here if you need anything,” he had told me. I don’t know who let him teach 12 year olds because I was 16 when I finally figured out what he had meant. My soul has been split into three: one piece in this small town, another with my mother, and the other with a life that replays in my head — one where I didn’t learn my bra size through measuring tape and Google searches.
He goes inside once silence consumes us again, leaving with a whisper of a good night and a blackening sky ahead of me. Silence has enveloped this relationship, and we both know the only tape between us is the sorry excuse of hope this horizon provides.
***
Beth was 22 when she bled out a baby in her bathtub, her tears leaving clean streaks on bloody skin. Beth curses at herself for asking for the baby that no one needed.
Eight months ago, her mother told her she was of child-bearing age, made a few offhand comments, and Beth blinked twice before she was in tears screaming about how she couldn’t ever be a mother.
The first time she blinked she opened her eyes to a faux diamond ring slipping her finger and her grip closed around roses at the altar. She reminded herself that marrying the boy she fell for in the closet at high school homecoming was a dream come true. Oh, when did this small girl in a big city turn into some hopeless romantic?
The second time she blinked, she willed for her mother to just shut up because not every girl is a princess deserving of a throne. And then Beth’s flooded eyes were wide open and staring at a positive pregnancy test. “There it is,” she whispered. “The future child of a hopeless princess and a nicotine addict.”
Beth was 21 when she begged to become an accountant. “Why, Elizabeth, would you want to become an accountant?” her mother had asked. “You can’t turn old money new. But you can keep old money from becoming older. Go become someone real. And then shove yourself into some corporation.” Her mother spoke with the kind of diligence that demands an empire.
A mother deserves an empire. But she never receives it from her daughter. Beth found herself in the graveyard — a cigarette in one palm and her husband’s hand in the other. “I don’t even want this baby.”
He took the cigarette from her. “I know you don’t.” He paused to look up at the blackened sky. “Believe me, if I could undo it for you, I’d do it. In a heartbeat.”
Beth squeezed her husband’s hand a little tighter. It is in these moments, not pretend-cheering over a positive pregnancy test, that she remembers how much she loves this boy. “It can be undone,” she whispered.
He sighed. “This can’t be your entire life. Shared cigarettes and graveyards. Failed births. Defying your mother.” He paused to look at his wife, her body at a standstill. “Your life doesn’t depend on her. You aren’t doing this for her. You know that, right?”
“Of course I do,” Beth replied. For once, Beth wasn’t lying.
“This is my life, Beth. I’m confined to this graveyard, but you’re capable of so much more,” he had added. “I’ll put down the cigarette for you. And the baby when the time comes.”
But when Beth was 22, she bled without a man in the room. “I don’t want to be a mother. I don’t want to be a mother,” she began chanting. Between heaving, dry sobs, she asked herself how vows at the altar became vows to her mother’s throne — if she lost her life when she chose this baby or when she chose a lifetime of obedience.
“Oh, God. I hate how time flies,” Beth whispered to the bathtub walls. Suddenly she felt 12 again, stranded in the middle school cafeteria. The boy she declared her boyfriend had called her fat for choosing to follow her cafeteria meal with a chocolate ice cream cone, but this time there was no girl to yell at that boy. This time Beth had broken her own heart. And that boy had turned from insults to cigarettes.
Beth stood in front of the bathtub. She looked at the drain. At her open closet. At the green dress attached to a metal hanger. And then she turned to the bottle of pills in the closet. She felt like a monster for mourning the birth of life. But this life, too, would bring death.
Her mother was gone. “It could just be me,” she whispered with a palm to her baby. “No, no, no.” Beth isn’t a murderer. She just isn’t doomed to motherhood.
She lowered herself into the tub, conscious of all the ways that chocolate ice cream cone swallowed her whole. Beth fastened her eyes to the horizon. Her dreams were out there. The stain-free work dress, the vibrant talks at a club past midnight, the number-crunching moments in unison, figuring out Beth with her dreams leading the way. Oh, and Magdalena? She’ll be at some beautiful home with a porch and a brain and thick hair like her mother’s and the dance classes her mother had refused. And at least she’ll have her mother to thank for the bread on the table.
***
My father left her photographs scattered on the floor of our living room. He has spent a decreasing number of days on the back porch, and for that I cannot blame him. The only escape from silence is not a coping mechanism. It is to run, and Beth beat him to it.
It has been seven years since we last spoke of my mother. My father had never told me much aside from the rehearsed lines and the fact that Beth was the bravest woman he had ever met. The scattered photographs, polaroid photographs clouded by cigarette smoke and selfies before an accountant’s desk, only tell part of her story, and the three of us know my father is expected to fill the gaps of my knowledge. But we all understand that a nicotine addict like my father could never admit that a woman left him, so we let him hide in silence.
I gather the photographs and tack them to the living room wall, a home Beth has never known. She will never know the way I look for closure in the horizon or the way bread on the table will never fill a hole that the absence of a mother leaves behind. But Beth, my mother, understands that when she split my soul, when she mailed these photographs here, she asked me to never run, never hide.
Statement Contributor Sneha Dhandapani can be reached at sdhanda@umich.edu