If there’s a heaven, it’s been short kimchi and Bloody Marys
awhile now. Short lime popsicles, green onions
dipped in salt, and soup from The Vietnam Café – you steered
the old Toyota through two different blizzards
for a bowl of it the winter I turned ten. You were so
hungry. A starving woman, greedy and
generous and so determined I know heaven is out of cottage cheese
and Clamato, low on boxed wine and Salem Lights 100s, and
and more salt, because nobody puts her foot down
in heaven. If it exists, somebody I know well will have
brought electric curlers and Kennedy biographies and dancing
on the newsroom desks back into vogue. Somebody
will have thrown her brassiere into a crowd of drunken
angels and she will have bared her giant Nordic breasts at them
and laughed and laughed until she couldn’t
breathe, and if heaven is hers, is
yours, the way earth could only be for so long, for a
woman like you, you will have felt no shame
and no fear. When you stalled
in limbo those years after you’d lived but before you
died of alcoholic hepatitis, you were forced off
cigarettes. You said, with this barren, in-between stare: “It’s
fine. Life is never going to be fun again, but it’s fine.” A last cruelty
left for me was to deny it. I
didn’t. That was a clue we missed.
When you thought I was Caroline Kennedy Herself,
I didn’t deny that: I let you believe every single
star-graced hallucination because from you I inherited
all kinds of beliefs, beliefs in the
tragedy of ballet dancers (you’d spent your life
reviewing dance for the paper), a belief in shrouding
the losing Democrat’s yard signs in dad’s black neckties, in lying
in bed with the kids and laughing about our loves, long past
the time we should have been dressed
and gone. You taught me that words make the world quake.
And you taught me that nobody loves a
stepmother. Some secrets to life only death uncovers and
I never guessed how deeply our minds
extended into each other’s until you laid on the other side
of a morphine drip. I didn’t know I’d know another love like ours
until you were dead, and my little girl was
six, was only a bit older than I was when you fell
through my father’s back door one midnight. I remember
beautiful limbs bent in laughter, jeans, and knee-high boots.
I remember you
were drunk like you would be. Your body
was illuminated from the inside out like you were plucked
from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I was
motherless. I remember
your entrance through that tiny door
by the wood burning stove
as a birth.
Leave a Reply