Inside Mother’s heart is naught but everything in the kitchen sink. Mother’s sink never seemed to look like the others, but I suppose that was just how she liked it: wild, different, and forever lost on the concept of sensibility. The first time I met her, for New Year’s at the turn of the century, rather than gift toys of amusement to a five year old, she pulled out a Swiss army knife and demonstrated how to use it on the pale white walls of Grandfather’s bedroom. There’s a dent above the headboard to this day. When I was eight, I found a burnt photograph of a man in uniform with eyes strangely identical to my own. At nine, there was a plastic ring with a pyrite band and sugar crystal gem. All I remember is that it tasted too good to represent a shot at forever. On my twelfth birthday, instead of dirty dishes by birthday cake, she had put inside a hot pink leopard print lighter and cigarette nubs. The room smelled like Las Vegas poker for days afterwards. The last time I looked inside the kitchen sink, I was fourteen, and found a Barbie doll with my name on it, though the sentiment was nine years too late to be of use.
I can recall summer nights on the porch, or rather what she called a porch, for it was truly just a meager four-foot stretch of wooden planks with a roofed ceiling dropped overhead; was I seven at the time? There was something so intimate about leaning against the side of her house, the house of the foreign woman called “Mother”, as the fireflies drifted like stars in the Milky Way, but still within an attainable reach.
Mother’s voice was soft and slow, steady, in my ears as she slumped against me in her drunken stupor. Her breath used to tickle my ears as it blew strands of hair into the creases and folds. In my naïveté, I had believed her to be drunken off my presence, as if being near her child would make her intoxicated off the sheer mutual blood between us. Likewise in my stupidity, I had believed the pungent “water” she downed bottle after bottle of to be nothing more than her “own secret recipe for happy juice,” one that would bring her closer to a reality nothing short of fantastic; nothing short of all the magic I could conjure up within my child’s mind. In my gullibility, I soon followed suit, and at ten years old, found myself to have made like the Romans, for I awoke next to strangers who were best friends a mere twelve hours prior, and donated glass to recycling companies more than any child ever should. I could always feel her drunk breath pouring itself onto my neck, pulling me into her bottomless pit, to stay alongside her. Maybe she was lonely.
A heart can take only so many whacks before it simply gives at the next slightest prod. That was Mother’s heart the fall of ’96, a year after having given birth to me. I know of it only from the stories Grandfather would tell, of a daughter lost to the dirty winds of impassionate fire stroked too quickly for any sensible mind to comprehend, before it simply burned everything down to a crisp ashen blaze.
She left me with him, a daughter too close to the hedonistic coward who tore her down. And I grew up the first five years of my life not understanding how a grandfather and a grandchild added up to a generation gap.
She visited once, my first encounter with her, when I was five, when she thought a new millennia meant a new me; as if I looked any different from him 1,825 days later than I did the first. After that startling revelation she refused to come for another two. Not until Grandfather begged. For the first five years of my life, I did not know the word “mother” was an actuality rather than abstraction, nor was the term “Ma” in the slightest bit conceivable in my vocabulary.
She was fifteen when she first met him, him three years her senior. On break from the war, she was never meant to be more than a summer fling interest to keep him occupied for the hot months of July and August. Romanticized from the popular teen flicks, he was never meant to be short of the sole outlet of her love; her “true” love.
They had met at the night movies, on July 4th. Grandfather remembers because that was the first night the prim daughter he worked so long to raise did not come home. “The Bridges of Madison County” had only come out a month prior, and Mother’s friends were insistent that she go. Father was amongst the other soldiers at the cinema, and Mother told Grandfather later that week that his eyes had been the most startling blue she had ever seen.
“Like the ocean in color and temperature, enigmatic and cold, and yet bottomless in a warmth that left her breathlessly panting,” he said. “Or so Annalise claimed. I never met him; oh she would’ve had a field day with me if I ever did. He spun her crazy, and for a while, I didn’t mind so much. I was never the father who chased away all the boys before they came within 100-feet of the door. She always talked of how captivating he was; he made her heart swell, until deliriously happy, and I could never begrudge a man for that.
“He took her out every night, and charmed the living daylights out of my little girl. Annalise did it all; picnics under the stars, midday swimming in the oceans, stargazing off the roof. Even convinced her to take up shooting lessons, though I vehemently was against that one; if you knew your mother at all, you’d know she is one of those people that should never be within a mile’s radius of any firearm.” He smiled in reminiscence, Grandfather’s “Grandfather Smile,” the one that I had dubbed as such at the age of three when, for the first time, I noticed that his left eye became smaller than his right and they bent into small crescents with fanned wrinkles at either end.
“She lived with me, you know, as her Mother was too busy caught up in the Southern whirlwind romance with her current kid-lover of the time to pay attention to a teenage daughter on the cusp of bettering her in the department of amore.”
“You never speak of Grandmother,” I noted.
“Rosalie was a whole other story. I suppose all the women in this family are chicken crazy when it comes to love. Mid-life crisis, you see.” He chuckled emptily, with a wry smile on his face. I remember thinking that this laugh, coming from a man who, in my memories, always smiled and delighted in the small bits of life, was the most humorless I had ever heard; Grandfather’s heart was lost to Grandmother, but never reciprocated. I imagine that his heart was bled dry, like my eyes of tears when it came to those who deserted us even though, by virtue of the nature of this world, they should have stayed.
Bottled in for nearly a decade, Grandfather could not help the torrent of word that flew from his mouth on Mother. And yet, after hurting for almost a quarter century, Grandmother’s pain was a whole other story. I suspect Grandfather will always pine for the lost high school love who thought him to have robbed her of vitality and youth. Mid-life crisis, indeed.
“After he left, Annalise lost it. I did not discover that she was pregnant until much after he had left for the battlegrounds once again. He promised to write her, and she clung to that promise like a lifeline for the Titanic.” Grandfather breathed here. “He never did. After you were born, she couldn’t stand to live in a town where everything reminded her of him. So she left, simple as that.
“Annalise tucked your small body into the pram, and took you for a stroll that day. For fresh air, she told me. I was so foolish to not have noticed the large bag she carried in her arms, and the nervous dart in her eyes. She took you to the train station instead, and bade the ticket seller to send you back to me exactly an hour after she left. Every single time I think back, it feels as if I can hear her feet stepping off that platform, the most watery smile on her face, but never for us. No, not for us, and I don’t think it ever will be.” Grandfather almost stopped here in his story.
“I have the note that she stuck into your hands for me to discover upon your return to me. Would you care to see?”
After I nodded yes, Grandfather closed up and did not offer any more of Mother’s tales to me. It becomes hard to imagine the woman who I have spent seven years of my life watch drink an elephant’s worth in booze, foolishly and childishly vibrant in love. To this day I have yet to open the letter; I am not quite sure if I can handle any more of Mother’s sink.
For so long, I was tempted to ask more of Mother, to listen to Grandfather speak volumes—and he most certainly had the capacity to—about Father and Mother and the summer of ’95 whose heat seemed to melt the inhibitions and sensibility of the naïve, and only further fortified the corrupt; I was a rapacious woman, and in my stupid adolescence, I thought I wanted nothing more than to make-believe and have fairy tales fill her kitchen sink.
I passed up the chance to ask when I was seven, for the child’s perception I had on life could not fathom anymore of Grandfather’s words. I once again watched the opportunity walk by when I was fourteen, for the seven years’ worth of life I had now seen with Mother did all but forcibly push me running in the other direction. I have learned that, at times, some secrets and stories are always better left untold.
I am fifteen now, and save for my eyes, I see only Mother in the abyss of reflective glass that we call a mirror. I cannot help but wonder if cursed history truly does repeat itself.