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My mother is magic
Antioch Review, The, Fall, 2004 by Dana Roeser
My mother has a kind of magic, but she
won't let me near it. She carries a huge stone
from some ancient cornice in Malta.
She carries two ship's clocks. She walks
erect, trailing her disabilities, her oxygen apparatus, strides
to the French door and tries to open it. She
wants air, not air conditioning, ocean salt,
not sealed-off panorama. This is her new apartment,
but she won't let me in.
My mamma's dying is magic. She spends
all day thinking of the dead that went before her. Her brother
Walpole whom she visited in Malta. Magic
Horace from Charlottesville. She didn't
love any women. I was the only one. Her mother forsook her,
took frequent sojourns at the state mental
hospital. Not appearing drunk, she took casseroles
out of the oven, set them carefully on the floor.
Mother has a picture her stepmother Eleanor painted
of her when she was seven. She had
on a red dress with white polka dots. She sat
with her ankles crossed. She told me how much
she hated that sitting. She looks fierce and
unreachable. Sullen and sad. I carry the painting
on my lap in the car,
hand carry it into her apartment.
My mother grants my daughters and me audience
one hour a day. Her lung cancer
is magic. She is riveted to her cancer.
Her runaway metabolism. She eats
like a horse and gets thinner. Her hair grows in lush.
My mamma, charisma. My mamma like Martha
Stewart. She smocks. She sews. She knits. She cables.
She designs big additions on houses--
or did. Skylights, cathedral ceilings, bay
windows with window seats. She is practically an architect.
My mamma voodoo. She carries a slim
black comb and five new twenty-dollar bills
in each of four tiny evening purses. She knows everything
about tidewater; which ones are the fiddler crab,
which ones the hermit, why
the trees stand silver and dead, like polished
driftwood, in the swamp. That the bay water
comes in from the ocean via
the inlet, but some is fed by freshwater springs.
She knows to tell which parts are fresh by watching
where the dog drinks. She knows the meaning
of "brackish." She knows how the ghost forest was made--
when the fat cats dredged the channel for
pleasure boats, the trees' roots were drowned.
She knows some of those fat cats. She knows high up
in the ghost trees' branches are the messy nests
of ospreys. The ospreys return every year,
she says, tidying slightly. On oxygen, my mother's brain's
prodigious. She remembers everything, but she says
it's hard to breathe. She magic
when I a child. Her dresser, which is going to her luxury
retirement condo, with the always
clean blue and white woven cloth on top
and the mahogany jewelry box. Rings
I occasionally glimpsed. The gold
Cleopatra necklace that was her stepmother's.
Her dresser a kind of shrine. Her whole
bedroom verboten. As I learned
every day as a child when
I opened her door during her afternoon nap
and was chased by her magic hairbrush.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Antioch Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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