All the Dancing Birds (8 page)

I add my latest letter and then select an older letter to read; it’s written on plain vanilla-colored stationery and folded in thirds. I open it and read.

My children,

This morning I sat on the patio with my coffee, watching as one puffy white cloud seemed to snag momentarily on the corner of the eave as it passed on its way to wherever clouds travel on Sunday mornings. It struck me right then‌—‌in that delicate and mysterious moment of a cloud’s passing‌—‌that you were raised by a particularly neglectful mother. That’s when a piece of that cloud broke away from itself and found its way into my throat, thickening it and making tears rain from my eyes.

After swallowing that piece of cloud, I considered things in a more rational light, realizing it wasn’t neglect I inflicted upon you, but rather my own prejudice of Sunday mornings and their practices. A mother’s influence is indeed great! I’m afraid I squandered mine with you and for that I’m sorry.

I could have offered you a different life. Instead of merely breathing in the sweet scent of your hair as I kissed your dear heads throughout the day, I could have filled those perfect heads with thoughts of all the churchy things that live in clouds and prayers and little squares of Jesus bread. I could have passed on stories of the Glad Tidings Holiness Church of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where I sat with your MeeMaw every Sunday morning. That was her church. Outside it was a simple square structure made of staid and conservative brick and mortar, but inside, that little building was filled with shouting, tongue-talking, arm-waving, Psalm-singing people who swayed as one to what always seemed a frantic, drumming rhythm. People ran up and down narrow aisles, shouting, crying. They danced and twitched and fell to the ground in gob smacked ecstasy. It was amazing.

It was frightening. It was glorious.

The Glad Tidings Holiness Church of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, sang all the way into your MeeMaw’s bones. It laid its hands on her. It gave her words that felt like rushing water etching deep pathways into the stoniest of hearts.

She sat in its pews only long enough for the Holy Spirit to take hold and shake her by the neck. Then, she jumped and twitched and danced in its aisles, waving her arms and speaking in strange, nonsensical words. She was slain in the Spirit so often a spot was reserved just for her, where she could crumple to the floor, her arms flickering in little spikes of trembling mystery.

Your MeeMaw’s eyes might have been dying, but her wild prayers flung to heaven were as alive as anything ever sent heavenward from the lips and hands of a churchgoing Southern woman while caught up into a visionary cloud of witnesses all crying at once,
Amen
and
Amen
.

Once a month, the ladies of the Glad Tidings Holiness Church of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, passed around tiny cups of grape juice and plates filled with cut-up pieces of white Wonder Bread. Ma said Jesus lived in the bread; he swam in the grape juice. On those Communion Sundays, I would sit in the pew next to Ma and feed her a piece of bread, then hand her a little cup of juice. Afterward, she would sit, her eyes like blue taffeta, little Jesusy prayers falling from her lips, her face mesmeric like an angel’s.

She was simply enchanted.

I remember when you were small, I would wonder if Ma was looking down from Heaven to see me carefully washing your hands before we sat at the table and then neglectfully forgetting to show you how to lace your little washed fingers together to thank God for the peanut butter and jelly sandwich you were about to eat. At night, I wondered if she saw that we never kneeled next to your beds, our hands in prayerful little steeples, saying our
Now I lay me down to sleeps
and asking for our souls to be kept or taken, depending upon whether we woke or not the following morning. We did none of those things. We didn’t pray. We didn’t go to church. We didn’t boldly raise our eyes to the ceiling, or bow our heads in humility.

I taught you nothing but the purity of hopscotch. I told you that poets and writers and possibly even mathematicians would one day decipher heaven. I taught you that your heads were always meant for kissing rather than condemning.

I taught you nothing churchy.

Of course, we could have spent our Sundays like your PaaPaw, at the side of a stream with fishing poles sticking out from our bodies. I could have taught you how to thread worms and toss out your line so it didn’t snag in a knot or catch under a rock.

I was neglectful there, as well.

I didn’t thrill you with stories of how the North Carolina sky filled every morning with yellows and blues and its tree branches dripped down like heavenly green rain. I should have, at the very least, told you about the Blowing Rock. You would have loved it‌—‌that large rock hanging out over John’s River Gorge like it had risen from the ground, a wild swelling ocean wave, only to be frozen solid into one reckless and furious moment of foam and watery heft. It was said the wind caused the snow to blow upside down and your own words to blow right back into your mouth.

Can you imagine that an entire town was built around a rock and upside-down snow‌—‌and yet I told you nothing of it?

It was there that your PaaPaw and I stood one wind-blown Sunday morning, our hair standing straight up from our heads, our voices screaming out for the wind to bring your MeeMaw’s eyes back to her. Her eyes stayed blind, of course. But still I stood beside your PaaPaw, our hands clutched together, our voices raw in the wind, our bodies bent and thrust over the edge of the Appalachian Mountains until we took on the same curved and wild shape of the Blowing Rock. It was magnificent!

I should have told you about it all, about how I danced the aisles of the Glad Tidings Holiness Church and also how I fiercely screamed into a wind so brutish it could cause snow to fall upside down. Both places offered magical hope; both gave, in the end, only poignancy and heartless truth. How could I have explained my loss without making it yours as well? I felt that a worse cruelty, so I simply kissed your beautiful heads, washed your tiny fingers and let it go at that.

If you’ve felt deprived, I hope you’ll forgive a mother’s irresponsibility. The fierce protection of one’s children doesn’t come without its unintended consequences.

As I write this, we’re well past the time for me to have taught you the stories of heaven and hell. Nevertheless, I hope when your own Sunday cloud comes by to snag itself on the eaves of your houses, or fill your throats with cloudy tears, I hope you’ll remember this letter. I hope you’ll remember that I’m sorry I didn’t have the righteousness to place you in a church pew, or at the very least, show you how to properly hold a fishing pole or how to scream into an upside-down wind. But‌—‌when you need it most‌—‌I hope you’ll remember how it felt to have kisses on your little heads, all throughout the day.

Love,

Your Mother

Once more, oh God,
once more
, I stand in my closet with the knowledge that unseen disturbances are changing the entire structure of my mind. My brain is slowly being strangled. I’m being slowly deprived of my oxygen and I gasp with anxiety.

I return the letter to its proper fold and then to its place in the box, alongside its newest companion letter.

I leave the closet in time to hear the first raindrop of a rare Sacramento summer storm crash against the window. It makes me look up with agony in my heart. It isn’t so much that an unusual rain has started to fall, but rather that I’m so stricken by its thunderous presence. I simply don’t know what I should do next.

I place my face against the suddenly cold bedroom window. The rain makes me think that time is passing by and I am passing by‌—‌and now an odd rain is knocking, knocking at my window.

Chapter Eight

I
’ve abandoned sticky notes that refuse to stay put on my thumbs and arms and, instead, now cleverly journal every idea and whim in small moleskin booklets that Bryan brings to me. I’ve also taken to wearing slacks with big hip pockets, which I fill with these little notebooks, along with pens of different colors. Ever the pragmatist, Bryan’s instructed me with the proper use of these blank books.

I write about every aspect of my days‌—‌who called, who did not, how the sky turned lavender at the end of the street, and how the garden now gasps and suffers under my neglectful hand.

Allison, on the other hand, fusses over my bulging pockets, clucking and loudly chortling disapproval of my little books. She’s come today to bring me fashion magazines: flipping through the pages, she points one delicately polished finger toward pictures of hollow-cheeked models, sleek and skinny in pants that threaten to fall from their tiny hips.

“This is the new style,” she says. None of the fashions appeal to me, nor do they have any practical application for my purposes. “Notice that not one of these pictures shows a woman with notebooks sticking out of her pockets. They don’t even
have
pockets.”

I bristle. “Without pockets, how can these pieces of cloth then be considered true pants? And furthermore, not one of these poor, underfed girls is over thirteen or suffering from Alzheimer’s.”

“
Mother!
It’s crazy that you and Bryan think you have some feeble old person’s disease.”

“Honey, it’s not what
we
think… it’s that rotten doctor who says these things. Blame it on her and
her
tiny little hipless body. I certainly do.” I offer a wan smile.

Allison peers over another magazine page. “I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with you that a little pampering won’t fix. See? Now, look at this.” Allison holds her fingernails out for my inspection. They feature a spotless French manicure; I coo over them, which makes her smile in triumph. “You should be doing
this
every two weeks,” she says, waving her fingers at me. “Twenty bucks and you’ll feel like a beautiful new woman.”

“Your MeeMaw,” I say, “now
she
was a beautiful woman, and never once did she have a manicure. Oh, I wish you could have known her.”

“Mom, please,” Allison says, her eyes screwing sideways. “You really need to get out of those awful fat woman pants. We only have two weeks before our trip… . Why don’t we run out and get you some really stunning items? I have a friend who works in designer clothes at Nordys. You’ll be gorgeous. Trust me.”

“Your MeeMaw, now,
she
was a beautiful woman. I wish you could have known her.”

“You just said that a minute ago. You’ve said that at least twice now… don’t you remember?”

“Ahh,” I say.

YOU TRIP. You trip over tangles of things that lie along the path of your memories. For all your vigilance over words that might repeat themselves without your permission, you find yourself once more wondering how you missed some sort of slippery string of thought that threads out from your mind. An obstacle over which to fall. “Ahh,” you say when your daughter reminds you that you’ve repeated a thought. Your ears tingle red with shame because duplicate thoughts keep falling onto your tongue, and “Ahh” is the only explanation you can manage. You picture words looping out again and again, like some crazy spirographic drawing and you can’t seem to stop yourself from adding more and more loops, until you have nothing but a jumble of black squiggles and a mouthful of “Ahhs” to mutter in apology. The horror is not that you repeat yourself; you don’t mind retelling your thoughts or your stories. Certainly, you understand your children saying, with a roll of their eyes, “Mom, you’ve already said that twice.” It’s clear you say things over and over, but still that’s not the terror of it all. No. Here’s the horror: your brain is breaking and no one can stop it. No one.

“Stay with me here,” Allison says, looping words around my neck and pulling me back to her. “Hawaii. We’re going to Hawaii. It’ll be
good
for you.”

Her words feel like her twenty-dollar fingernails have just scraped across the skin of my soul. “I understand,” I say, “but I
need
my pockets. For my notebooks.”

Allison groans.

“And,” I add, “of all the things I shall very soon forget, I hope this conversation is the first to go. You’re being rude and it doesn’t suit you.”

“Come on, Mom. I get it. You have a rotten disease. I know that and I understand… really. Here, I have an idea… if you
have
to repeat something, just keep thinking, Hawaii, Hawaii.” She spreads open a hopeful smile and I take advantage.

“Fair enough,” I say. “Still, I need
something
to carry my notebooks in. I can’t do without them and that’s just that.”

“How about a nice purse, then? Something colorful.” She still carries the remnant of a five-year-old girl wheedling her mother for a new toy.

The childishness of my daughter is off-putting.

Sighing, I do the only thing available to someone in my position. “Fine, then,” I say. “We’ll go shopping for new pants for your frumpy old mother, and as soon as we’re back, I’ll wear whatever I want. Deal?”

Allison’s lips curl up at the corners like delicious little red-skinned apple wedges. I want to eat them; I’m helpless against her soft mouth.

“Yay, shopping,” Allison says.

“Yay, indeed,” I say.

Before I’m able to change my addled mind, Allison maneuvers me to the car. By the time we reach the mall, all lingering traces of argument are scrubbed clean. We are once more chattering magpies, La La La Girls holding hands, smiles decorating our faces. With Allison’s encouragement, I buy three sleek, hip-smoothing slacks, not a pocket to be found anywhere. She’s delighted. While she trots off to the ladies room, I find two shirts embellished with Hawaiian prints and lovely breast pockets large enough to hold my little notebooks and pens.