‘Sometimes,’
I ventured, ‘it
doesn’t occur to boys
that their mother was
ever young
and pretty.’
My children are younger than many objects in my house, a fact I regularly remind them of. “Don’t break that dish, young lady, I’ve had it longer than you.” Not to put them in their place, but to let them know they’re in a place, and that the people who made it had lives before them.
Children don’t know. When I was a child, my own mother was still young, in the first half of her life, as it turned out. I suppose she felt young: I’m older now than she was then, and I don’t—won’t—think of myself as old just yet. Then, I wouldn’t have seen her as young. Now I do, looking at the slideshow.
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I remember my mother on the beach—we lived at the shore, then—in a black and white swimsuit. But maybe that’s from some lost photograph—not the one we’re looking at now—and maybe just the photo was black and white. Her world was in color: my world, if I could remember it.
But I don’t, really. I don’t know if I’m remembering one time, a composite, or what I was told. What I call memories are imperfect, distorted—and erased, even if I don’t know it. Like the beach. Do I really remember that particular moment, or any one moment? I’ve known that place since I was a child: shore pound sucking at my heels, wet slope, hot sand, cliff, 72 concrete steps, and panting, turning, back below, beyond lines of surf: the unending sea. But that’s not a memory, or not just one—not that one.
On the beach, kids said if you dug far enough, you’d get to China. But I knew, somewhere across that water— if you crossed it all, like my mother had—was Japan. I didn’t remember that—just told. But now, that’s what I want to know: the time before me: when she was young, and I wasn’t anything. Memory won’t serve for that. Maybe the photos will.
<<<
My brothers found the photographs while packing out the house. They phoned to ask if there was anything I wanted put aside, but I barely knew what to tell them. It’s hard to remember what’s always been there, like it’s hard to forget what’s already gone. I named a few items—silk wall hangings, a painted icon.
And hadn’t there been a set of small ivory figures, I asked, little statues she’d brought back from Japan? But they were gone, hadn’t survived the move from the beach—sold by my father along with the books, maybe, that one year.
Only one was left, on a shelf by some Murano glass. My earliest recollections of it, still on a round table with the others, must have been only a decade after she’d left Japan: living memories for her, ivory streamers still clinging to time and place. I knew nothing of that: toys on a table.
I think about places a decade old in my memory, how present they still are. No, surely it couldn’t already be ten years since Heidelberg? She came to visit, though already the signs—the lost passport, restless hands searching for keys over and over as if they might unlock the place her husband of fifty years had gone: streamers snapping, a life closing in, closing. Not that long ago, surely.
<<<
She had gone, after the war, crossed the endless sea, journeyed to the island on the other side: a young woman, teaching in the occupation. There she is, next picture, conical bamboo hat, leading a row of costumed students like ducklings; next slide, all got up in a kimono, going out on the town.
The closest my father got to Japan was shore leave on some atoll stacked with cases of beer. Japan had gotten closer, though below decks he never saw the planes diving. But it had been enough: a man who stayed 20 minutes on the rim of the Grand Canyon before announcing
“Time to head home.”
But my mother—who never demanded anything, who just smiled and said, “It won’t ruin my life”—mostly my mother won, and every summer my father grimly turned our Volkswagen bus into some hundred-mile detour to Loon Lake or Craters of the Moon. We went, because the woman who’d crossed the sea—the same sea upon whose nearer shore I later, long ago now, sat digging beneath her gaze—still somehow, settled as she was, never stopped wanting to. Next slide.
<<<
If she was settled; maybe nothing was; maybe it only looks that way, looking back. Meeting, for the first time, the father who’d abandoned her as he lay dying surely wasn’t part of a plan, but she went to the hospital all the same, just before her first was born. Her piety looked fixed, but she’d journeyed from her divorced mother’s hypochondriac Christian Scientism, and five churches later she found the God of Aquinas and the ladies’ auxiliary guild. After Japan, she’d found the man who turned out to be her husband.
But in the slideshow, here’s a picture: late 20s, friends, or a date. My brothers and I always kidded her about an old flame—“Buzzy,” really that was his name, at least she never contradicted us—and maybe that’s him. He’d be in his 90s now, or long dead, nobody watching the slideshow knows him: one more photo in the stream. But there’s my mother, smiling, his hand on the heat of her back. That’s her, too. That’s her.
<<<
Japan was always there, a distant tone. Every year a reunion—the Tokyo Four, that’s what she and her friends called themselves. Sometimes I urged her to go back—it’s been 40 years, 50, go, see how it’s changed—but she never did.
And in the slideshow—though in my mind it’s still in the hall of the house we sold, as you turn down toward the bedrooms—a photo of her eldest, my brother, scowling in faux samurai get-up: a last link, after the statues were gone, kitsch evidence of his own year of adventure, decades after hers. Decades ago. When he dies, her life that has seemed—been—full drains out like a cracked vase. Losing him, son bearing a husband’s name, the woman I heard raise her voice four times in half a century tells her own granddaughter she feels like screaming (not me, she doesn’t tell me). Then the falls begin, falling, impenetrable descent of sorrow’s veil: grief-broken vessel, she follows him within the year.
<<<
My mother’s dead, which is why my other brothers and their wives are sorting through old photographs, making a slideshow. I still say “not long ago,” though there’ll come a time when it’s no longer true enough, when it starts to feel like imposing on people who have to say, “I’m so sorry,” which embarrasses me.
The virus shaped her dying like stone a river. Weeks in hospital, no visitors, an old woman alone in a room, bewildered, uncomprehending. Then home, relapse, nowhere to go, dying of something younger people take over-the-counter medicine for. No heroic measures, only hospice and quick decisions.
And I don’t make it out to see her. I have my own family, my own settled life: One death’s enough in those early, panicked weeks, so I don’t fly. I think about driving, 38 hours from the Midwest, but two days later, it’s my mother who leaves; if I’d taken the car, the chance, I’d probably be near Flagstaff. What I tell myself.
Instead, a phone to her ear, but it isn’t my mother anymore—not the woman who’d crossed the sea, the woman who told me she’d never ridden a bicycle—only morphine. I tell myself that too, when I remember my brother getting back on the phone, the choice we make. That she’s already gone. Maybe so. Now there’s no maybe.
<<<
I don’t want to remember that—not only that. The life before.
<<<
After the photos from Japan, more slides—a latter life, set to show tunes—and when their turns at the microphone come, others speak much more than I do. But I’d gone first, so I could say something about the pictures sliding by, a person who became the person I think I remember.
Because even though I’m speaking at her memorial, I’m talking about a life I hadn’t known. Some people in this room were with her before I was born—prayed in her chosen church, taught with her in Japan—the Tokyo Four, now Three. They’re actually in the pictures, and in the moments those pictures seem to capture they’d made their bond to be here—knowing her, though not the day they’d make good the pledge—and now they’re gathered to honor that person: a full life that preceded me.
And maybe this is what it means to stop being a child: to know those here before you as full and complete people apart from you—so you can become a full and complete person apart from them. Something my oldest brother never did.
Which is why, soon, my other brothers and I, with our children, will be on that beach again—at a spot just over her shoulder, 50 years ago, 50 years later, if we go back to the first slide—digging a place for their ashes.
<<<
The last statue, the one she kept, was an okimono. A tiny ivory fisherman, perched on a dark cherry wood stand. It wasn’t part of the set—the others were shichifukujin, seven gods of fortune, but they were grotesques, striking poses, squat, distorted. The fisherman just looked like what he was: someone neither young nor old, head shaved into a chonmage, fishing. Dulled ivory, features picked out in black ink—a souvenir, nothing special: what my mother brought back. What she kept.
And there he stood, on the round table, from before my life started until he didn’t—not so very long. After a while, his lucky companions weren’t there. He’d lost his cherry wood stand, and his right hand was gone, broken off by some thoughtless child. But his arm was still raised, still casting the net he no longer held out into the green carpeted storm of our living room, his face no different for all he’d lost: still smiling his frozen little smile.
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