Chicory

I don't remember when I first met her, but she remembered very well meeting me.

“They brought you to me after I woke up,” she told me, taking a long sip of black coffee. The twilight birds, the ones that swooped and shivered over the deck of the house my parents had owned for twenty years, chirped in the distance. Orange dust of the last fragments of sunlight streamed through the living room window and rested on my mother's hand, which gripped a white porcelain Café du Monde mug. After hundreds of dishwashings, the script had long since faded.

“This is after my one-pound dump?” I asked her, citing the ill-famed report of me being born nine pounds, but after my first bowel movement, being officially weighed in at a more modest eight. It was a story my mother liked to retell with astronomic laughter at the her own crafted line (“She pooped the weight of a whole other baby!”) and that I accepted as part of my own mythology.

But as she gazed out into the backyard, my mother wasn't taking the bait that night. “They say there are moments that you savor. And when they brought you to me, I remember looking at you and thinking, This is it. This is what they meant.”

While we sip our coffee and watch the cat settle into the cushions of the couch, a silence passes between us, and I'm a little embarrassed. What she had held that first time was a clean slate of a human being, as a careful configuration of cells and muscles that knew little more than to nuzzle up to her chest and breathe. And here I was now, 26, and I wondered if she still savored me, was proud of what I was, though it wasn't much: a poor writer, single, a renter. These called all be explained away – it was my path, it wasn't time to be anything else – but some nights, like this one, they felt like absolutes. I couldn't give her grandchildren or a place to come for Christmas. I couldn't even assure her I would be able to make a true living from the career I had chosen. Her friends' daughters and sons smiled in wedding pictures or in front of their new homes, and she had to settle for the photographs from Halloween where I was dressed as Tupac eating a turkey sandwich in a Subway. It seemed so unfair.

“You had these huge eyelashes,” my mother continued, finally looking at me. “Just so long. The most beautiful baby I had ever seen.”

I look down at my own mug of coffee, let the heat radiate through my fingers, even though it burned a little. If I moved, if I talked, the moment was gone, the moment my mother remembered when I was new and beautiful and hadn't yet had to ask her to co-sign a car loan or call her in hysterics when I was in danger of being downsized. In my mother's arms those first few moments, I had never betrayed a friend. I had never cheated on a test. She didn't know that I would grow up to yell in traffic or lie to boyfriends and tell them that I loved them when I knew I didn't, or become so enraged at her that I would drive off in a huff with her still standing on the porch, watching the violent ruby of my tail lights head for the home I had made without her.

“Oh!” my mother suddenly said, “I wanted to show you something - ” and picked up a catalog. “You were talking about white linen pants and I saw some in here. Hold on.”

She flips through the glossed pages and while I wait, I am suddenly 24 again, and I am going over my parents’ and have lunch with them. My father wanders to the loft and puts on the hockey game. My mother is cutting apple slices in the kitchen. She asks how things are going, then asks what my boyfriend and I have planned for the weekend. I tell her that we stopped seeing each other.

My mother’s eyes widen. “What happened?”

I start to lie, “Oh, we just decided it wasn’t working out…” but when I look at my mother, the truth falls out of my mouth and onto the table: “He was seeing someone else.”

“You kind of thought he was, didn’t you?” she says. Her tone is casual. She is trying to say, Oh, well, at least you were smart enough to know that, it’s no big deal, because my perception somehow equals my accord with the circumstances.

I pick up an apple slice and thread it through some peanut butter. “Yeah.”

Sensing my defeat, she resorts to making him sound like an idiot. “You tell him that wasn’t hard to figure out,” my mother says. “You tell him even your mother knew what was going on there. Pathetic.” She snaps a piece of celery in half and that’s the end of the conversation. He’s such a fool that even someone’s good-intentioned mother knew he was sleeping around. But he is no fool, and neither is my mother. That is reserved for her daughter, who is looking out the kitchen window at the family cat reclined in the azalea bushes, his black fur engulfing the light of its brilliant pink buds.

“Here!” she says, and I am again 26, taking the catalog my mother has dog-eared in my hands. “I'll get it for you. Just tell me what size you want.”

“You don't have to get me - ” I start, and my mother waves it away, her hand whirling in the air. It's nothing, let me, I want to. It's a conversation we have had before, and will have again.

She has lived a life of openness, giving and giving until she was used up, and her daughter would be taking, taking, sometimes without even knowing it, living a life of hysterics and floundering secrecy, staring off into azalea bushes when she should be thanking God for a mother who didn't think anything of going without so her child wouldn't have to.

But here she still was, handing me a catalog that she had researched because of an off-hand comment about liking linen pants.

“So whaddya think, girl?” she asks, and puts her mug down.

I lean over, cautiously, as if she will not accept it, me, a nearly grown woman wanting to hold my mother and tell her how much I love her and I wish I could be better for her, to live a life that she's proud of, one that we could look at together and say, We did this together. And as I come down, my head hitting her shoulder, what I'm really saying is, I'm sorry. Please don't stop loving me. I know nothing. I'm trying so hard.

But my mother doesn't think this way, and whether this is her greatest gift or her greatest flaw, I don't know. I don't know if she's proud of me because she has to be and I don't know that I even care. And when she takes me into her arms, wrapping me tightly and close because I need that and nothing else at that moment, just to inhale her gardenia perfume and feel the cloth of her t-shirt under my face, I know nothing else than to nuzzle up to her chest and breathe.

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