The China Frog (A Belated Mother's Day Card)

          My canary yellow bedroom was on a corner of the large apartment my mother and I shared, for $140/month, when I was 10, 11, and 12.
          One Saturday morning my mother and I crouched below the windows, one looking onto the gravel parking lot and the other onto a high, treacherous sidewalk between the buildings, watching Tommy McCabe stagger from his Dodge "Rambler" to the front door of his apartment building across the way.
          Tommy had spent all of Friday night at the "Moose" Lodge and was just making his way home—lapsing in and out of consciousness—after my morning cartoons. My mother, smelling like Crest and Aqua Net, was absorbed by the scene. She had probably seen him pull into the parking lot from the kitchen window and had come into my bedroom for the best view. 
          Tommy was her lover.

6:00 a.m. Bath

          It is a rare thing, a cold May morning. The painted radiator is hot to the touch, and the noise of the pipes comes from the heart of the old house—comforting and anonymous as a pulse.
          Tiny rounded pieces of four or five different soaps float on the milky water: rose, lavender, sandalwood, and patchouli tadpoles swim around my belly, compounding their scents.
          The steam from the tap rises and meets the first light coming in from the window. The corners of the room are dark, still in night.
          Everything is the color of pearl. The old white tub is smooth and faceted as the inside of a giant shell.  
          My cat regards me from the top of the toilet seat, closing and opening her eyes more glamorously than any actress, more attentively than any nurse. She stands perfectly as a toy; she is an illustration of a cat.
          I hoist my dripping leg into the air, but I cannot hold it straight. I have coiled and tensed through all my years—no warmth can open me now.   
          I step into a thick, clean white towel.
          I still love the world.

Easter 1967

     1.

     In those days Pennsylvania Route 30, the Lincoln Highway, went through Lancaster and Columbia without a bypass. After Gap, and the half block of fussy, oddly contemporary Amish shops that were like a five-second commercial strip tossed into a corn field, you entered Lancaster, passing by the Hamilton Watch building and WGAL TV 8.
     But my mother would have already pulled over, probably someplace outside Coatesville, at a converted gas station or perhaps a simple wooden stand, to buy flowers. 
     One year, it was a single pink hyacinth in a pot—entirely plastic—that I held in my lap like a goldfish bowl or a delicate treasure, picturing my grandmother's face when I would hand it to her.
     Together in the blue bucket seats of her Mustang, I can still hear my mother punch the cigarette lighter into the dash to get it started, and I can smell the raisiny tannin of her Viceroy pack as I fished one out for her to light. She held the metal cartridge up to her face and sucked furtively, suffocating me.
     The metal seat belts lay across my lap like chrome barbells.
     The drive to my grandmother's house, "100 miles!" as my mother used to say, always rounding up, as imprecise as her gift wrapping or her motley Swedish meatballs, was the greatest pleasure I knew as a child. Crossing the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge with its deco lanterns, driving by Lake Redman splashing up against the scoured-out rock of Route 83, and finally spotting the steeples—still only about as far south as Hametown—of the two facing churches at the very top of Main Street, each marker in the journey increased my excitement.
     A system of narrow, angled streets—and finally alleys—led to my grandmother's large backyard. As soon as my mother had pulled into the grass drive, defined by two handsome white fences and a lonely black lamp post, I was pushing against the heavy car door, running up the long flagstone walk with its treacherous caterpillars of sod between each gray or aubergine piece.
    The back door was already open, my Aunt Ada bracing it with her arm, one foot in the kitchen and the other on the top step, preparing to catch me in her arms like a runaway shopping cart.
     It is a moment—for the remainder of my life—with which I compare, by which I judge, every abstract pleasure. 
     It is a singular, ecstatic touchstone.
     Above my head, now buried in my aunt's apron, I could hear my grandmother greet my mother, her tone like contralto molasses.
     Well Marion!
     There was a reserved pleasure, and a hint of admiration—but nothing that you might expect toward a woman who likely predicated her much-loved only son's suicide.
     My mother would stay the night and leave after coffee and toast the next morning.
     The big old house, with its oversize furniture, lumpy carpets, and dark, stinky bathroom seemed stubbornly ill-suited to my mother's efficient style and constant grooming. The vanity lights on either side of the tiny bathroom medicine cabinet were never turned on except when my mother was there, applying or removing something from her face or daubing at her hair with a rat tail brush.
     Ash trays were produced from deep within cabinet drawers, and my mother's cigarette smoke hung in the air above the kitchen table—confused.
     The chiming clocks all had to be stopped for the night.

In the Alley

     Through a garage door two toilets sit together in a backyard smiling like ceramic dolphins.
     The sun is high and the shadows are short. No one is around.
     A sofa the color of Crayola #47, green yellow, waits for the trash man.
     Though I am walking slowly, too slowly for 53, the gaps in the stockade fences are still fleeting hints—accelerated as the dancing light from a film projector.
     The men in the group house gently float their muthafuckas into the air like quarter notes.
     My cat jumps off the step to welcome me home.

An Early Spring

     On a bright Sunday morning, the winter that never came loosens its grip on the grass and vines that never really went away.
     The older generation is gone, and all that's left are tiny paper bathroom cups and candy apple vials of Mercurochrome. I can't bring myself to throw the stuff away.
     And so many photographs of vacations and Christmas Eves and new cars.
     They were children in the Depression, and when they were 40 the earth was 40 along with them, squashing out its cigarettes and arranging colored glasses of Jello in the refrigerator to set. The stars clinked in the night sky like drunken ice cubes. A wall-to-wall carpet of sprawling elementary schools and jazzy churches rolled out on top of the old farms. As if there had been no time before, everything was modern.
     Now snow exists only in jpegs of Colorado, or David Guterson novels. Our correctness is our religion—a whole-grain enlightenment. Children are the new adults, fascinating and authoritative, thriving in the soil of our confused emptiness.
     Our Januarys cannot even freeze the ground. We cannot make a memory.

New Year's Day

     The pork roast is in the iron pot fat side up, like the bare back of a pasty, overweight guy passed out upon a mattress of sauerkraut and apples matter-of-factly, unresponsive to the beer and chicken broth splashed on top of him.
     Gary is on the phone, reintroducing himself to his mother. Last night he said, apologetically, I wonder what it must be like to begin a new year not knowing whether you will live through it. 
     He struggles with grief's suffocation, its undertow sucking him into unfamiliar depths, further out and further out from his bright, dry, breezy beach of Signals catalogs and upholstery swatches and New Yorker cartoons.
     The year begins with a groan—the expected hangover, the late, groggy start. My body moves to heal itself again, perfunctorily. For the date has not been reached when my organs can clean out their desks, take home their mugs and placards, or cash in their vacation. The job of taking me metabolically forward continues—a bit less efficiently, though, like the enthusiastic, unsteady song of an old dishwasher—into a pointless future.
     The boys nap at my feet like two wiry throw rugs, so certain of their lives with us, so happy within their rituals.
     I drink the rest of the beer I didn't pour on the pork.
     Gary hangs up the phone.

The Newness of Things

     I still experience the newness of things, the immediacy of objects that come under my scrutiny for the first time, or again after a long while. It's the only antidote to melancholy, which is pleasurable but deadly, like drinking poison.
     The computer facilitates this tactile work, like the putting on of a new cotton shirt, or the first step into the mouth of an unknown trail through woods—seductive, full of unfamiliar bends and pockets where little brooks flow.
     One by one I collected antique French chef's knives. The milky, pockmarked surface of the carbon steel blades thicken toward the bolster, heavy but perfectly balanced in the hand by the fastidiousness of an old craft. The metal is soft.
     I discovered M.F.K. Fisher, the sensual, gin-quaffing food writer who was the world's Julia Child before the later model—puritan, striving, horsey and middle class—emerged. I collected the unpopular books, filled with her open-ended sentences like the floating metaphors of William Carlos Williams.
     I lost myself in the dogma of the clarinet, the endeavor for good breeding in tone, a gigantic snobbery. The hand-tuned instruments of the 30s and 40s, asleep in their brittle cases aromatic with mold, are cool to the touch. The burnished ebony of the joints reflects the colors of brick and aubergine and even sky blue like soundless overtones.
     I plunged my face into a copy of The Common Reader twice my age, inhaling the odor as if it were the overcoat Virginia Woolf filled with stones as she stood on the bank of the Ouse. The old paper became the smell of knowledge itself, of possibility.
     I ate a buttered fresh beet, which I haven't done since 10, and life filled my mouth with its spice, not staled by its long absence—a frightening journey of loss, of adult pleasures that now seem childish, of towering commitments I couldn't honor.
     The depressive and the manic—heartbreak and blissful curiosity, sugar and salt—continue under the noontime sun.