Joanna Luloff

MY MOTHER, IN FRAGMENTS (FIVE SENSES)

My mother was a small woman, only five feet two, and even as a child, I could wrap my hands around her wrists so my fingertips touched. Unlike me, she had small breasts and narrow shoulders and a tiny waist. But I inherited her little pot belly and ugly toes and freckles. For two years when I was in middle school, we could share some of the same clothing. There was one dress we traded back and forth. It was a washed-out denim, drop waisted, with muted white flowers that you could only make out up close. It had puffed gatherings at the shoulders and a boatneck and it reached below our knees. Looking back, it seems like an ugly dress, but we both loved it. When it was my turn to wear it, I could smell my mother’s perfume in its fabric; the scent a mixture of honey and rose and something muskier. It was as if she were inside it, attached to me as I walked around in the dress. One day, I selected the dress to wear to a friend’s birthday party. As I walked to the car, my mother looked me up and down and smiled. “Suck it in,” she said. A harmless tease about my middle school belly pushing at the buttons that lined the front of the dress. But because I was twelve and self-conscious and always feeling ugly and clumsy, her words stung. I ran to my room and closed the door and threw the dress on my bed. I could still smell my mother’s perfume. Soon, my mother was on the other side of the door, apologizing, but I wouldn’t let her in. We hardly fought, but in that moment, I could feel the power I had over her. I could make her feel guilty and desperate. In my own hurt feelings, I could wound her. And so I sulked and enjoyed the fall of tears down my cheeks. Eventually, I would come out of my room wearing a different dress that hid my belly. “You look pretty,” my mother said, but I wouldn’t meet her eyes. We drove to the party in silence. It felt so easy to punish her, to create a gap between us. I rested my nose on the shoulder of the new dress as I stared out the window. There was hardly any smell to the fabric, only a vague trace of laundry detergent.

*

Once, my mother walked right past me in an airport as I waited to greet her. I had been living abroad in Sri Lanka for a year, and I had come to the airport from my job as a teacher, wearing a sari, my hair pulled back into a bun. I had lost a lot of weight, and though I rarely looked in a mirror, I could feel the places where I had shrunk. I reached my hand out to my mother as she moved through the crowd, but my father got to her first. He brought her to me, and we hugged and kissed, but as she looked at me, there was hesitation in her eyes. I suddenly felt invisible—or, not quite invisible, but transformed. If my mother couldn’t see me clearly, then what had I become? “You look so different,” she said. “I didn’t recognize you.” We laughed, but I felt fuzzy and uncertain. The air was hot and heavy and damp as we left the airport. My mother kept looking at me. Her illness made her memory unreliable, and I could feel her trying to make sense of what she was seeing. I imagined she was doubting her own memories of me. I bargained with a taxi driver in Sinhala and helped lift my parents’ bags into the trunk. We were making our way to a nice hotel in the capital, a place where we would all feel uprooted. A week later, my mother would be in the ICU of a hospital in Kandy. I would be racing between the hospital and town, gathering supplies and panicking. With my mother’s cropped hair, she had been mistaken for a man, and had first been ferried to the men’s wing of the unit. I bought flowery, frilly pajamas for my mother at the market, so she wouldn’t be mistaken for someone she wasn’t.

*

When I was a teenager, people would mistake me for my mother when I answered the phone. I took great satisfaction in this. I felt like a grown-up, like I could pass for an adult, and I was glad my voice had the same cadence as my mother’s. Her voice was soothing and calm, clear and vibrant. In the mornings, as we were all getting ready for the day, sometimes my mother would sing through her preparations. Ain’t nothing gonna break my stride. Nobody gonna slow me down, oh no, I got to keep on moving. I’m not sure she was even aware she was singing. She always got lyrics wrong. I remember when Van Halen’s “Jump” came out, she used to sing “Maxwell, Jump!” instead of “Might as well jump” because Cedric Maxwell played for the Celtics at the time and it made sense to her that the song was about him. After she got sick, my mother’s voice diminished. It grew less certain of itself, quieter and more hesitant. When I would call her on the phone, she hurried through the conversations. I knew she struggled to remember the details of my life, what questions she should ask, and hurriedly she would come to her usual escape. “Let me put your dad on. He’ll fill me in.” But I didn’t want her to give up the line so quickly. I wanted to hear her voice, to know she was trying to put the shape of my life into focus, and I wanted to know what she had been doing, what she was thinking about. I missed her. After she died, sometimes I would call my parents’ landline when I knew my dad was at work. He hadn’t changed the outgoing message, and my mother’s voice greeted me. Even on the message, you could hear the hesitation in her voice, as if she were following a script and was afraid she would fumble. I’d hang up and call again, always disconnecting just before the beep and the inevitable silence.

*

Thanksgiving was my mother’s favorite holiday. She was an atheist and appreciated that we could all avoid religion and sermons on the holiday, and instead focus on family, food, and sit in our own kitchens and living rooms rather than in the hushed, uncomfortable rows of the synagogue. Most Thanksgivings, we would join her older sister’s family in New Jersey, and I loved watching my mother and her sister together in the toasty kitchen, condensation on the windows, fogging the late autumn starkness outside. My mother would let me help her with the baking. Every year, it was pumpkin bread and pumpkin biscuits. My mother would gather the spices—cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, ginger—and lay out the measuring cups and spoons and lead me through the recipes. For my efforts, I got to the lick the mixing bowl, a sludge of spices and sugar, flour and eggs. The batter was gooey, a perfect treat of warming spices and the tastes of autumn. Then I would go play in the basement with my cousins, waiting out the morning until my mother called me to punch down the rising dough of the biscuits. The moment always seemed magical, my small fist denting the voluptuous rise, and then watching the dough sigh back into the bowl. We would then roll the dough out, cutting circles into it with floured juice glasses and leave the biscuits to rise one last time. When we sat down to dinner, I would avoid the turkey and instead focus my attention on the biscuits and cranberry sauce, delighted by the contrast of sour and spice, an echo of sweetness in the bread. My aunt died the same year my mother got sick. My cousins and brother and I have tried to keep our family tradition going, but the absence of our mothers created excuses for interruptions. Even when we aren’t able to all gather together, I make pumpkin bread and pumpkin biscuits for Thanksgiving. I lick the batter off my fingers and the wooden spoon. I bake extra batches of pumpkin bread for nearby friends and add chocolate chips, which my mother never did. If my niece and nephew are nearby, I give them the bowl to lick. I have no children of my own. I want them to have the same taste in their mouths as I did when I was a kid, a taste my mother taught me how to make. I want them to love Thanksgiving as much as my mother did. I want them to ask me for the recipes.

*

When my mother got sick, she was only forty-five years old, younger than I am now. Her disease made her seem even smaller. She had bruises over much of her body, from periodic falls. She lost her coordination and bumped into things. She had a scar from a tracheotomy where her neck met her chest, and sometimes, it was all I could focus on when we talked. When we took walks, my father or I would always point to some unevenness on the ground. “Watch your step,” we said. Our hands were always hovering around her elbows, at the small of her back, and I could tell that she hated this. Once, when we were walking just the two of us, she had a seizure and fell to the ground. I crouched next to her, helpless and horrified, as the tremors made their way through her body. The doctors assured us, as did my mother, that she felt no pain in these moments, but it didn’t look that way. Her mouth would snarl and grimace, and her forehead pinched and creased, and wet, guttural sounds came from her throat. After her body had silenced, I helped her back to her feet. Lifting her, she felt so light and insubstantial, like I was lifting cardboard boxes from the garage floor. She took my hand as we walked home. “You have the softest hands I’ve ever felt,” she said to me. She stopped and rubbed her two hands over mine. To me, her hands felt impossibly soft, cushioned and tiny and warm. I had inherited my soft skin from her. Now that she is gone, sometimes I sit with my hands in my lap, rubbing them together, trying to bring my mother back to me; although, to someone else, it might look like I was simply shaking my own hand, meeting myself for the first time.

JOANNA LULOFF is the author of the novel Remind Me Again What Happened (Algonquin, 2018) and the short story collection The Beach at Galle Road (Algonquin, 2012). Her individual stories and essays appear in The Cincinnati Review, Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, and Western Humanities Review. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, VCCA, Willapa Bay AiR, and The Mineral School. She received her MFA from Emerson College and her PhD from the University of Missouri. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is co-editor of the literary journal Copper Nickel.