Monet

When I am tired, I often think of lilies, lilies like Claude M. did, but the sallowesque ones, the soggy, waterlogged and drowning varieties reminiscent in color of when my mother roared out laughing and wet her skirt, blooming a small off-citrine stain on the badly-beige comforter of our mattress during 9 p.m. story time because something I said made her laugh violently, and directly afterward her laughter turned into a succession of sneezes as though she was allergic to hysterics, and she lost control of her insides and pee soaked through her pale blue denim skirt and into our bed where we sat with the Russian book, the one with the cool pastel spectrum and the wispy illustrations: The Boy Who Came Up Quietly. Then my mother dropped the storybook and ran out of the room still laughing, and somewhat crying, and her nose and air passages were mucous, and I followed her down the hall out of an eerie and clumsy concern, padding on the chill of the peeling linoleum to the bathroom where she locked the door for the first time in my memory.
 

If there is one thing that I often wish for now, I wish that I could remember what I said to make her laugh like that, but all I remember is the hurried red glow on the crowns of her Dutch cheeks as she scrubbed and washed our stained comforter late into the night, then forgot and rested as my mother had done as much as there was to be done. Her hands were spindly. With all she possessed, she did. I carried that blanket and ludic blotch with me from room to room, residence to residence, from Las Vegas to Ojo Feliz to Taos to Holman, until there is a precipitous void of fabric, a disappearance. Did I do it, did she? What happened to the blanket and its frayed edges is in the æthers, in the devil burn of things that school-time drug police say shouldn’t be inhaled, and the substitution, the covering that replaced my comforter is gone to me too, the fix never fixed, only necessitated. What an imagination we had, together.
 

How now then to unknot my mother’s gale? My fingers are thinning, my palms cusp less. If my mother had never read to me at 9 p.m., if my mother had never fallen asleep deciphering for me in white blizzards and Berber carpets, if I had never seen Baba Yaga fall from her chicken-legged house, never saw our Slavic Yaga stumble from my mother’s lethargic phalanges and enshroud my mother’s face and breath, then those story times would be the sole implementation that I would yearn for but never comprehend: hintered on the fringes, content as a form of its unregistered absence, camped where we always found ourselves, atop furniture and linens and overused floors gone dapple and threadbare, our holey socks and feet captured and cold, rendered in whispers. I am not want. As with Monet, I never had to starve for the later ponds and stewarding brutes of her arrogant gardens.