Cold Mountain Review

She is order and I am impulse. She is head and I am belly. We are the same though, too. Same green eyes and dark hair. Same hands. We share shoes and books. And when we fight we are both quick to rage.

She was twenty-four when I was born, and I imagine her wholly capable, suffering none of the worries about nursing and sleeping, about wetting and crying that I felt at age thirty when I brought my own daughter home. Leaving the hospital, I felt as uneasy as a thief, and expected a nurse, sensing my incompetence, to come barreling through the exit doors to stop me before I got the baby into the car.

At home with my new bundle, I saw disaster around every turn. During the first bath I envisioned dropping her tiny, slippery body. At night, I pictured her smothering in her nightdress as I slept heavily in the bed beside the crib; and each time I left the house I couldn’t help but see her carrier sliding free from the hook of my arm and tumbling down the front stoop to the sidewalk.

Where she, I thought, had been innate skill, I would be insensible wreck.

There are times she cries, and I’m not sure what to give. I hold her. I offer her my breast. But she claws at my chest in her desperation for something else that I cannot know – claws at her own face–and leaves us both marked. She arches her back as if she wants to jump out of my arms.

She is muscle and will. I am will and gut.

When I was twelve and in therapy for refusing to eat, the therapist told us that eating, sometimes, is less about food and more about control.

“Yes,” she said. “She’s always been stubborn.” “He means you are stubborn,” I said. “It’s like when she was four and would eat nothing but macaroni and cheese for a month,” she said, and crossed her arms over her chest. “No,” I said, and pulled my arms into the sleeves of my sweater, pulled my knees up against my chest. “It’s not at all like that.” “But I won’t make the macaroni this time.” “Even if you did, I wouldn’t eat it.”

When she was twelve, her father, who was in the military, was stationed for one year at Fort Benning, Georgia, and so the family moved to the South from their home in rural eastern Washington State. They left everything: their extended family, the children’s school and friends, and the five-acre farm where my mother had spent most of her life. In Georgia, they knew no one. They moved into a small apartment on base and my mother shared a bedroom with her two younger sisters. Knowing her, I imagine she wallowed and stubbornly refused to accept their new life. I imagine my grandparents were largely unsympathetic, and I can picture them telling her, simply, to toughen up and make the best of it. Which is, in her way, what she did. She found the library, and a camellia bush in the yard big enough to swallow her beneath its branches. She could spend hours reading there, she has told me, falling into her loneliness. For part of each day she could enjoy the relief of completely disappearing.

When I saw her the first time, at the hospital, I had the strangest sense of recognition – not because she’d been inside me and I knew her, but because her face was so familiar. I couldn’t place it, and then later I saw my own face in the bathroom mirror and I thought how like her I look, how seeing her eyes was like catching my own sideways glimpse in the glare of a window. A daughter is a shock in this way, an unexpected revelation. She is the self turned inside out.

She and my father put me in the hospital that spring (as was, indeed, necessary for my health). I was bone and skin and little else by then, and I walked around in a state somewhere between waking and dreaming, my thoughts both intensely of the body and willfully separate from it. I hunkered into clothes that fit me like blankets. She says now that she felt she didn’t know me then, I had so nearly erased myself, and though at the time I would have said she had never really known me, couldn’t know me, I understand finally how terrible that time must have been for her.

She had been a nurse for twenty years and was accustomed to hospitals, but visiting me upset her, and she sat in stiff composure through family therapy sessions, asking questions like was I taking my vitamins? Did they watch to be sure I wasn’t hiding my meals rather than eating them, as I’d done at home? Her anger and my own met in the center of the room and sizzled there. We set our twin jaws, our determination to break each other humming quietly just below our breaths.

In one therapy session, I was given the assignment of drawing a sketch of my family. I liked to draw, and wasn’t too bad at it, but in my sketch the four of us looked strange and not at all like ourselves. I’d copied a photograph, but couldn’t get it right, and so I ripped the sketch in several small pieces and threw it away, and for the first time in my life skipped an assignment.

She puts her mouth against my face now when we play – her open mouth. I don’t know if she is miming kissing or nursing. Sometimes she sucks wetly at my cheek and then squeals in delight. It is as if she wants to eat me, literally. And when I kiss her back, blowing in a razz against the nape of her neck, I feel it too–the urge to swallow her whole, to take her back inside of myself so we are one again. We are so in love we could consume each other.

I am ego and she is pride.

In another therapy session the therapist, whose eyes were the icy blue of a glacier and could be accurately described as cold, looked back at his notes and told her she would have to give me more room – more freedom and independence – when I finally left the hospital for home. We were, he said, “enmeshed.”
For me, this word still brings to mind the strange, incongruous image of winter oranges, caught up in the red plastic mesh nets used in grocery store produce dis- plays. I hear the word ENMESHED and see, like a synesthete, two fleshy, dimpled oranges hung together inside a net bag. I feel the familiar pinch of citric tang inside my nostrils, taste that sweet and sour first bite and could almost pucker.

She has ruined my body. This is not what I wish to think, believing as I do in the wonder of childbirth, the true miracle of it, but in my secret thoughts I do often feel wrecked. Though several months have passed since her birth, and the scale says my body is my own again, the mirror says otherwise. She was a big baby, and the skin of my belly had to stretch thin to house her. Now, empty of her, the flesh there is like worn out elastic, puckered and loose. My navel will not shrink back into the cave of itself, a neat, tight knot like before. And the line of motherhood hasn’t faded as the books all say it should – my linea nigra, like a dark zipper down my abdomen. My breasts sometimes burn with a feeling like an electrical current, the milk mistakenly letting down and pooling into my bra cups when I merely think of her, a sticky reminder that my body belongs to her needs now.

When he says it, her body goes visibly rigid in her chair. “Enmeshed,” she repeats, though not as if asking a question.

How often do I pick up the phone to call her, only to have it ring in my palm and find that she is calling me first, as if we have thought of each other at exactly the 29 same moment? And why when she is upset must I feel ill? I would lie to her before telling her a disappointing truth. And she would see me anyway and call me liar.

She is not as hard as she seems, and I am not as kind as I try to appear.

Other ways we are alike: – We drink the same tea, and expect to find it in one another’s cupboards when visiting. – We are both graying in the same pattern – a shock of gray sprouting from our right temples, though she is in her fifties and I in my thirties. – We have both inherited an arrhythmia that sends our hearts flopping awkwardly out of beat now and then, though she describes hers as beating too rapidly, like an over-excited bird in her chest, the muscle squeezing in one extra pump as if to prove itself too good for its job; and I describe mine as a beat gone, a skip, my whole body hesitating for just an instant, the sensation like gasping for a breath and not catching it.

We are quick to judge, quick to worry, long to forgive. – Neither of us has ever forgotten a single thing the other has said or done.

I watch her when she sleeps. I cannot help myself. I stand over her and count her breaths, and when she pauses momentarily as whatever dream she is having trips on behind her eyelids, I feel in myself the small seize of panic.

More than once I have awakened her, touching her chest in anticipation of the next breath, even putting my finger into her mouth to stir her breathing. And then, when she cries and I have to reach into the crib and pick her up again and rock her back to sleep, I inevitably feel both relief and resentment.

She has worn the same perfume for years. When I smell it – on another woman or passing the cosmetic counters at a department store – it is still, always, as if I have put my head on her shoulder, my nose to the bend of her neck, and I am washed over by a feeling of reassurance.

When I was a child, on the nights my father was late from work and we were waiting supper, she would sit at the piano and play “The Lonesome Pine,” a song she’d learned when she was just a girl, to keep my sister and I from whining. I couldn’t sing its melody now, and I don’t remember if it was a simple or complicated piece of music. All I remember is her at the keys, her back straight, the bell-dome lamp leaning over the piano and lighting the front room with a warm glow, her stockinged feet working the pedals below the bench with a quiet pump and release as my sister and I looked on. That, and the thought that I was a girl with a pretty mother.

Her disorder is mine, I see that. But haven’t I changed enough for her already? How much can I give?

My body is not my own, I see that. But I want a line between us – something dividing us as skin, apparently, cannot•.

She dough and I am bread. She is green and I am red. She is withholding and I am wasting.

I have forgotten to say that she and I have not lived nearer than several hundred miles apart for over a decade. My mother is on one coast and I am on the other. I left for a job, at first, and then stayed away for a different job. That is the easy explanation for my distance, anyway.

I sing to her the songs that were sung to me. Lullabies and hymns. “Morning has broken...” I sing. “O, jolly playmate.” And the Joni Mitchell song about wishing for a river. I see me skating away from her on a steeled freeze of gray water, my blades cutting filigrees and gouges into the ice, the winter branches on the riverbanks, their boughs sheathed in cases of ice and glinting like glass spears, clacking together as I pass. Soon she is asleep in my arms, and I kiss her head – the soft spot where her pulse still lifts and falls below the skin – and smell her earthy-sweet smell like yeast rising.

When I was in the hospital giving birth to my daughter, my grandmother was in another hospital across the country having her hip replaced, and just after I brought my girl home, my mother brought her mother home to recover.
My grandmother slept on a hospital bed in my mother’s living room. She needed help using the bathroom. She needed my mother to climb into the shower beside her in order to bathe. She needed someone to sit up with her in the middle of the night when she was uncomfortable and lonely. My mother did these things, and she made meals and kept working, and she called to check in on the baby and me.

“Is the baby sleeping?” she asked over the phone one afternoon, and I told her no; the only way I could rest was to sit up in the chair, holding her. “Is she eating?” she asked. Yes, I told her; all she did was eat, and I spent the day sitting in the chair, feeding her and holding her. “Are you okay?” she asked, and I told her I thought I was, though sometimes I cried for no reason, and other times I cried because I was so happy, and other times I just sat in the chair and held her and looked at her and said nothing because I couldn’t find two coherent thoughts in my head to rub together even if I wanted to. My mother laughed. “Yes,” she said. “That’s sounds about right. But it will pass, and you will feel like yourself again before you know it.”

“Are you okay?” I asked. And she said, yes, she was tired but fine. And then in the background my grandmother called to her, and she said she had to run, but could I call her later and let her talk to the baby, just so she’d begin to know her voice, and also she’d want to hear how things were going for me, so could I please call?

Yes, I told her. She could talk to the baby, and would she please tell my grand- mother I was thinking of her? And would she please take care of herself – go get a cup of coffee or something, just so she had a minute alone?

Yes. And will you? Yes. Yes, we’ll talk soon.

It was June before I was able to take the baby home to see my parents. The baby, my daughter, was six months old and crawling already. I thought about how short, really, our visit would be, and how long it would be until we could come home again, and it struck me that she was missing everything.

“O, jolly playmate, will you come play with me?” In the next room my mother is singing to the baby. The baby will not sleep here at my parents’ house, where the room and the bed are unfamiliar. She has been crying for an hour, and I have given up getting her to sleep, gratefully handing her to my mother when she offers to try her hand at it. The baby’s cries are all rage and squall at first, then fretful but quieter. And finally all I hear is my mother’s voice, almost a hush, and the soft padding sound of the rocking chair runners on the carpet.

If I am honest – and I am trying to be honest here – she is, for me, both impossible need and complete fulfillment.

That summer of my adolescence, after I came home from the hospital, my mother and I walked around each other like we were both made of glass. We spoke to each other in measured sentences, each rehearsing the careful, empty lines the therapist had taught us to use instead of really talking to each other. I understand you, but I feel differently. When you say ____, I feel ____. I see now that we were afraid of each other and of ourselves. “You don’t want to hear it, but you’re just like me,” she had said during an argument we’d had before all the therapy. It made my blood boil then, because I believed her, and because I believed our likeness left me stripped of possibility, left me nothing of my own. That summer after I came home her words chimed in my mind again and again like a knife-edge striking a bell jar.
Now, I see that our likeness is inevitable but also small. And I am surprised to find that I am glad for it; I wear our sameness the way I have taken to wearing the same perfume she has always worn, its scents of cinnamon and citrus at the pulse of my wrist a sharp reminder and also a comfort.

How does the song go? I can’t remember all the words. Across the span of our distance, she sings into the phone to remind me: “O, jolly playmate, can you come play with me? And bring your dollies three, climb up my apple tree. Holler down my rain barrel. Slide down my cellar door. And we’ll be jolly friends forevermore.”

It is the middle of the night, and we are awake. She has been crying. I sing and rock, sing and rock, and she begins to relax – first her eyelids flutter shut, then her body relaxes, and her breath slows and deepens. I pause, shifting her in my arms, holding my own breath now, but she is really asleep. Then I lay her into the crib and leave the room.