I love my mother’s handwriting. Its loops and edges please me. Always have.
I remember my sister practicing and perfecting my mother’s signature.
…missed school yesterday because…
I remember when my mother wrote this on the lined 3×5 card. We lived in Texas. She was miserable. Living in a miserable place. In a miserable marriage. She was trying to find her way out from inside herself.
She read many self-help books in the ‘80s. Books that would help her understand herself, her husband, her parents. Books that would explain the why or the how.
This 3×5 card was attached to the bathroom mirror. I remember walking into the master bedroom and looking over the two queen beds with the heavy dark wood headboards and the brown bedspreads and seeing no one. Turning and walking into the master bathroom and seeing my mother saying to her reflection how healthy and happy and terrific she was as she brushed her dark brown hair.
The bathroom was shiny brown marble. The naked lady wallpaper in the small toilet room. I wrote about that bathroom in a novel. She used gasoline to get that shine. I put it in the book. And as I was writing it I couldn’t figure out how to make it make sense in the book. It was a fact of my life but that doesn’t translate. I knew it had to be answered within the story but I couldn’t think of a valid reason. So I called her up. I said, “Mom, remember when we lived in Texas? And you used gasoline to clean your bathroom? Why did you do that?” She laughed and said, O, Nicki, you remember everything.
I never tried to remember. Things would just keep repeating in my mind. The things said. The things that were done. Just over and over. Relentless. Unrooted. I would close my eyes and there it was.
My mother in the living room with the green sofa and the fireplace, the two small coffee tables with glass surfaces and how when you cleaned them you had to lift the glass out, careful to hold it at the edges, and set it gently on the sofa and then scrub out the crumbs pinched at the sides of the wood and then set the glass back in and Windex it clean of prints. And on this particular day, I am walking into this room, into an argument between my sister and my mother. I’m in ninth grade, my sister is a senior. I could hear them yelling from my room. As I walk in, my sister’s long brown ponytail is in my mother’s hand and my mother’s hand is wrapping the hair around her grip and then she slams my sister’s face into the wall.
I’m so very tired of remembering.