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ISSUE 1 December 2000 MILKWOOD REVIEW

OTHER WORK: "A POET'S VISIT"

WINDOW TO THE PAST

Roberta had been living in their new home in Stony Brook for two years and she was attending the local university when tragedy struck-- both her parents died, one after another, her mother of cancer, and her father, just six months later, of a heart attack. She continued living in the house even though her friends and relatives said, "What do you want such a huge house for?" She couldn't let go of it and valued it even more now that she had lost her parents-- it seemed by being there she could keep their memories alive. They had left her enough money to live on comfortably and so she did not need to sell the house. Except for a few personal items she had placed around-- an ornate blue Mexican mirror, a silver-backed brush and comb-- she had not changed the decor of the house much. She had kept the white lace curtains in her parents' bedroom and livingroom, the blue blinds in the bathrooms and kitchen, the rose-pattern wall paper in the hallway. Now at the age of twenty-eight she was still living there.
After graduating from college she had answered an ad to teach English as a second language to foreign students in a nearby community college, and she got the job. She liked the interaction with foreign students, partly, she realized, because some of her happiest times with her mother were when on vacation in foreign countries-- Mexico, Spain, Italy. Her father had no interest in these travels-- he said he did enough of that in connection with his work. He was solitary by nature anyway and liked to spend time alone. On weekends, when home, he used to go on solitary hikes, and occasionally played tennis with people from the laboratory, where he worked as a chemist, but that was even too much social interaction. He would say, "If only I didn't have to have a beer with them afterwards." Her mother by contrast was gregarious and was always accessible to Roberta. As a nurse she met all sorts of people but she always called Roberta in the afternoon, when she was home from school, to talk, to find out if she needed anything.
Roberta often thought, after losing her mother, that she had not taken advantage of her openness and accessibility. Now she often tried to imagine guidelines her mother would lay down for her and tried to follow them, even in small daily activities. When she cooked for a dinner party she did it the way her mother used to -- arranging all the ingredients on the large oak table in the kitchen and then mixing them, before putting them in a pot or pan. She baked bread like her mother did. As she kneaded and rolled out the dough, the texture and the scent enveloped her in the happiness she used to experience when she helped her mother to bake. On Sundays she often invited friends over and made pancakes from scratch and served them with maple syrup which she heated in the microwave (doing everything like her mother did). And, like her mother, she did a thorough spring cleaning of the whole house and everything in it. She got the cobwebs off the corners of the ceiling and window sills. She vacuumed inside of the closets and under the beds. She varnished the wooden cabinets and floors, had the upholstery cleaned, took out all the dishes, glasses, silverware from cabinets and ran them in the dishwasher, polished silver items. She started the cleaning early in the morning, kept going until late at night, and continued with it the following morning until she was done. In some dream-like states of mind she believed her mother was watching, observing her. She could see her nodding in approval, smiling. She caught herself talking to her mother: is this the right way? or, do you like this better? And she imagined she could hear her mother's soothing advice.
Once after a relationship with a boyfriend had broken up, she had come across a note in one of the drawers of the kitchen cabinet in her mother's handwriting. It said, "Roberta, I will always be with you when you need me." A flood of strong midday sunshine pouring into the kitchen made the words clear and sharp. Strange that she had not seen the note before. Her mother must have left it for her long ago, at a certain occasion when Roberta had been upset about something, but still it comforted her in her present distress.
But her relationship with her mother had become cloudy when she told her that she had breast cancer and that it had spread. Doctors had said there was a slight hope if she underwent treatment, recommending chemotherapy and radiation. Her mother had quit her job and begun treatment. This had gone on for a year before the cancer defeated her.
Along with feelings of sympathy there was also a combination of anger and fear as Roberta watched her mother changing-- losing her hair, becoming thin and sallow and wrinkled. Her personality had also changed, from being cheerful to weary. She made remarks like, "I've attended to so many patients, I'm sick now myself. I used to resent and even hate some of the patients for their misery, their hopeless state."
All this was hard for Roberta to believe. Before the illness her mother looked years younger than her age. She was slim, her face barely wrinkled, her chestnut hair free from gray. She smiled frequently. Sometimes people mistook them as sisters.
Roberta, as if to compensate for the grayness at home now with her mother in bed, had begun to wear overly bright clothes, purples and reds and green, all mixed. She bleached her hair to a lighter color. She caught herself talking and laughing loudly when she was with her friends. She stayed out late with her boy friend, later than her parents liked.
Toward the very end her mother slept a great deal because of the pain-killers she was taking. During that period her father came home earlier to do some of the household tasks that Roberta neglected and which were beyond the cleaning lady's duties. Roberta and her father did the cooking together, set the table, and got her mother out of the bed to eat with them. Her mother who had normally been talkative now ate her food silently.
On a dawn in January her mother died in her sleep. Then there was the ambulance and her mother being carried away on a stretcher, the funeral, all blurry somehow, but leaving a clear hollow in Roberta's existence. She did remember clearly that it was cold and gray with flickers of snow falling when her mother was taken away from the house. Roberta lived in a daze of grief.
The six months of living alone with her father had not been easy since he was unable to show or share his grief with her. She wondered if her mother could have possibly been happy with this husband. The two of them never fought, at least not in front of her, but could two people with such different needs and temperaments be happy together? Was her mother's extra cheerful demeanor a reaction to his silence and taciturnity? Wouldn't she be angry, frustrated by his inability or unwillingness to give feedback or respond to anything she said and did? When with both of them in close proximity, Roberta had often been aware of a pressure in the air, coming from her mother towards her father, which did nothing to stir him. Something she had overheard her mother telling one of her friends on the phone, began to haunt her. "He's in an emotional prison." At the time when Roberta had heard those words, she had felt pain without knowing why. Now she realized, "he," must have been her father.
Then on an afternoon, while playing tennis, her father had collapsed on the court and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Within a few months of losing her parents she broke up with Toby, the boy she had been seeing. Toby was bad for her, she had decided finally. Her mother was right when she had told her, "It is an unhealthy relationship. It's self-destructive." It was true that he was bad for her. He canceled dates at the last minute, he found excuses not to see her on some Saturday nights. Her self-image had lowered since she had started going out with him-- looking at herself in the mirror she thought she was overweight, that there was something bland about her appearance.
She stopped going to the mall where most of her classmates hung out, smoking pot, eating popcorn, before they went to see one of the blockbuster movies at the Multiplex. She stopped wearing showy clothes and let her hair go back to its natural chestnut brown. Even now, seven years after losing her mother, sometimes when she was sitting alone in the house, her mind got all confused and her body shook uncontrollably by an attack of guilt. I was not emotionally open to Mother when she needed me the most, she thought.
Her relationships with men, since she broke up with Toby, had not been any better. But at least she was able to terminate them quickly when it became clear they were not going to work out, she thought.
On an aimless, lonely day she began to look among her mother's old belongings stored in the attic in a wooden box, which she had not yet opened. She was not sure why she had been reluctant to. A fear of finding something perhaps. The trunk was filled with disparate items-- her mother's nursing diploma, an album with most of the pictures missing from it, a pair of red ballet shoes (as an adolescent her mother had had aspirations to become a ballet dancer). Hidden underneath all that was a red, lacquered Japanese box, the size of a shoe box, with a lock on it. She took the box down, went to a locksmith with it, and had it opened.
In the box she found a stack of letters and a few photographs of her mother and a young man. In one photograph the two of them were standing under a lamppost on a wide avenue. Her hair, long and wavy with a thick bang across her forehead, was blowing around her face. There was a mischievous expression on her face as if she were getting away with something forbidden. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, good looking in a swarthy, Mediterranean way. He reminded her of someone. (It came to her later when she woke in the of the night, that he looked almost identical to Edmund, her high school boy friend. It was so amazing, she thought, shivering with emotions sweeping over her.)
The letters were dated years ago, before her mother had married, and signed, "Mario." She began to read them with rapt attention. She gathered that her mother and Mario had planned to get married. At one point he had gone back to Sardinia, his birth place, to be with his father who was seriously ill. He intended to come back in a month but kept staying on. He asked her to join him and they would get married there. He said his family was excited about her but insisted on her converting to Catholicism.

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