The Mother

She smelled of some incredible combination of hair products, the cleanest food imaginable, wisdom, and new woolen tights. She had one gold front tooth and a tendency to laugh at the oddest
things–a banal line creatively delivered in a mediocre comedy could keep her in stitches, and be repeated for days. She had reached the incredible height of 5’4–shades of Frankie Addams–by the time she was thirteen and so forever walked as though she were a tall girl; she hunched her shoulders and so do some of her children. She liked: calpyso music, swing music, Dollar Brand. When Brand performed at this or that club, she’d get on the subway and go into “the city,” with her girlfriend and de facto sister-in-law and they would swoon over Brand’s unusual presence in their own way, which is to say they were quiet, eyes glistening like stardust in brown earth. She took two of her children with her when she went to the Lower East Side to buy said children shoes–brown Oxfords made in the nineteen-forties–they would not appreciate until they were older and someone else said they liked them. She walked to the back of those shops on the Lower East Side and talked to the shopkeeper, Mrs. Grossman, or whomever, between stacks of dusty boxes, hunting and hunting for God knows what–something called a savings. She looked at you crossly when the subject of money came up. She disapproved of children saying they were hungry, and there was “nothing” to eat: “We have milk, eggs, bread, and cheese. What do you want? Blood?” She was annoyed when you didn’t use your imagination–whether to amuse yourself, or other people. She used to say a line she loved from some movie (especially when her children were annoying her): “Why don’t you kids go out and play in the traffic?” She loved art and artists; later, some of her children fell in love with both. She made most of her own clothes–a pink wrap dress before Diane von Furstenberg started her rap about wrapping. She liked the idea of Switzerland–so clean–and the reality of Barbados: family. She was so insanely supportive of her children people are still jealous of them. She said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” when one of her children took her to see “Saturday Night Fever”; he thought it was a musical, she liked musicals. She took her two sons to see “Gone With the Wind”–twice. She never said what interested her about the movie but Hattie McDaniel didn’t bother her. She was distressed when you gave up–even momentarily–on dreaming a different future than the present tried to limit you to. She saved her children from the force and limitations of their poverty by teaching them that the imagination had nothing to do with all that; nor did love: both were limitless, or should be. She didn’t believe hope was a thing with feathers; it was real, but you had to work at it and whoever didn’t work at it wanted to live in their own smug misery. She watched one of her children climbing up the stairs to greet her, carrying a pile of books he could barely manage, and she laughed, delighted, and said: “My poor son.” She did hair, cleaned houses, worked as a teacher’s aid, made clothes, worked at other things: work was the point, taking care of your children and being connected to people you loved was the point. She never let her children forget about the discipline of her care; to this day, it would be difficult to recall any of her children showing up to anything looking “sloppy.” She went to see “Shampoo,” because it was billed as a comedy and said, “Oh, for God’s sake,” when she heard Lee Grant moan in the dark, but she laughed and laughed as Lee Grant walked through her big house looking for her maid, crying “Mona, Mona, Mona, I need you.” She never made you think she had been “like,” Lee Grant’s maid, even though she had done that job, too. She loved dancing, and dancers, and had a female friend who was a painter, whom she revered. She could make anything when it came to clothes, bags, hats, and yet did not consider that “real” art. She wanted you to go out into the world and if you couldn’t make it, she’d go out into the world for you. She looked at a photograph one of her sons showed her after he returned from Amsterdam for the first time; the photograph showed her child sitting on a bed with some new friends–Dutch friends, black and white. Her son was wearing black tights, a Jean Seberg boat neck meets James Earl Jones in his training woolies in “The Great White Hope,” jumper. She looked at the photograph and said to her child: “You belong with these people.” He blushed. She could make the world different in a minute. Couldn’t she see that, all along, he had always belonged to her, and how he lived for those moments when she’d describe their days together with a laugh, and a tenderly tended “us”?