NONFICTION
My Mother's Hand
by Melissa Hart
How is it that a house can retain a scent for decades? Olfactory cells welcome in smell even as memory recoils. My grandfather's house emanates pine and cloves and another, more subtle aroma. I breathe it in now, attempt to identify its source.
As a child, I accompanied my mother on missions of filial piety, sitting rigid in a hard-backed chair on the rust- and ochre-braided rug. Propriety constricted my throat, permitting only clipped, formal syllables.
School is fine.
My favorite ... History ... no, English.
A veterinarian ... maybe an actress.
My mother and grandfather drank murky black coffee from china cups transported from the old world. I gripped my can of root beer. Soda, in this house, appeared only in aluminum. Bottles might tempt the teetotaler's craving, might spin his recovery out of control.
My hands around the can mirrored my mother's, square and red. Solid German peasant hands. Our hands were his.
I looked away, to a pair of giant red lips above the wet bar. Read and reread the adage: Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine.
When my grandfather excused me at last, I tiptoed through the kitchen, across the white-carpeted dining room toward the organ with its comforting delineation of keys. Red Keds-sneaker clamped down upon damper pedal, I squinted at sheet music. Für Elise. Bach fugues. Bridge Over Troubled Water. Fingers pressed enigmatic stops, drowning bursts of conversation — my grandfather's voice firing, my mother's deflecting even as it sought sanction.
He'd forbidden her, in childhood, to cough. At six, she took to clearing her throat, a tiny nervous scraping of palate against membrane whenever she reached for a cup, a pencil, a fork.
To be left-handed is the mark of the devil.
He'd decreed a right way for writing, for eating, for all activities automatic and natural to the left.
If you lack discipline, I'll tie it to your body.
And so he did, and thus bound, she met my father — the husband who unloosened her hands so that she might shield herself against his own youthful assaults. Why do we persist in loving, sacrificing decades in hope that the object of our affections will soften and reciprocate?
At 36, the age I am now, my mother sought liberty at last from her father and my father, found solace in the tender hands of another woman.
To be a lesbian is the mark of the devil.
Once again, my grandfather delivered his decree. Twice-yearly visits lengthened into bi-annual pilgrimages of a woman seeking to reclaim what was lost, what may never have been. What did I seek in continuing to accompany her, long after childhood duty had past?
My grandfather is dying now, shrunken and fallen, collapsing in upon himself. I sit in the hard-backed chair and watch as the couch swallows him. Slippers dangle above the braided rung. Suspenders tug polyester pants high. He is unrecognizable save for his hands, square and solid, seizing the china cup. His hands. Her hands. I regress.
My husband's fine.
My favorite ... essays ... no, short stories.
No children yet.
I glance past the kitchen to the white-carpeted living room. The empty space sighs in one corner. The organ has vanished, its sale a harbinger of assisted living, of impending surrender. And so I remain, the bitter black coffee like bile in my throat as my mother, to my right, falters in a voice I recall beneath long-ago tentative music.
The house is fine.
My job is fine.
The kids are fine.
And ... Annie is fine.
Her woman's name hovers in the acrid air. My grandfather's molten face cools, hardens. Pine and cloves converge, mingle with a subtle aroma that sickens me. My hands are my own; they slam the china cup in its saucer and wield my car keys like switchblades at my side.
This is my final visitation.
Beside me, my mother reaches for her coffee cup, then recoils. She clears her throat and grips her left arm, right fingers holding her hand tight against her body as she wills it not to betray her once more.
Melissa Hart is the author of a memoir, The Assault of Laughter (Windstorm, 2005). She teaches Memoir for U.C. Berkeley's online extension program, and Journalism at the University of Oregon. Contact her through her web site at www.melissahart.com.
Copyright 2006, Melissa Hart