The shadow of her smile
by Stephanie Piper
One month after my 21st birthday, I gave birth to a son. We named him Nicholas, because I had been reading Nicholas and Alexandra.
One week after his birth, my mother came to stay with us in our tiny apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia. She slept on a fold-out cot in the living room. Nicholas slept next to her in a borrowed bassinet. She got up with him in the night and rocked him during the day. She ran up and downstairs to the laundry room, lugging baskets of diapers. She bought groceries and flowers and made boeuf bourginon from an old family recipe. She told me that hiccups were normal in infants. She charmed our friends.
None of this would be remarkable except for a single fact. My mother was an alcoholic. Two years later, she would be dead.
But that week in Charlottesville, against all odds, she was alive. She was sober. And she was present to me in a way she would never be again.
My mother was a beautiful woman with a smile that could make you believe in endless possibility. When I was in first grade, she was class mother. She chaperoned field trips and baked cupcakes for our holiday parties. Once she arranged a visit to a nearby farm. The next day, the class drew pictures of the outing. Everyone drew my mother, smiling in the spring sunshine.
By the time I reached fourth grade, the decline had begun. Bringing friends home was dicey. It might be a June Cleaver day, with my mother stirring something delicious at the stove or reading in the living room.
Or the hollow echo in the front hall would tell me all I needed to know. She was in bed, resting.
By the time I left for boarding school, the lows were lower. My brothers witnessed the final unraveling. They lost themselves in sports. They were never home. Winter and summer, they ran a large, noisy electric fan in their room at night. It blocked out sound.
My youngest brother has one memory of my mother sober. He was five, and she was throwing him a ball in the backyard of our house. She was wearing Bermuda shorts and a white blouse and smiling her devastating smile. After that, nothing. When my mother died, my brothers were dry-eyed. It wasn't that they refused to cry. They could not. For them, she had left years before the November day when they woke to flashing lights and sirens in the driveway.
Not one of us drinks. All of us did, for as long as we could. Each of us thought: Not me. I won't be the one. I know too much. As if knowing had something to do with it, as if the hollow echo of the front hall and the dull hum of the fan were protection against the inevitable. In the end, perhaps they were.
We never had enough of the person who was supposed to love us most in the world, and yet we had enough to save us. I had first grade, and Charlottesville. The week I became a mother, so did she—my private mother, for seven full days. The woman who never kissed, but only offered her cheek, pressed her lips to my baby's blond head. When he cried in the night, I heard her low murmur through the apartment wall. Yes, she said.
Yes, I know. I know, and I'm here.
My mother, dead at 50, left me a diamond ring and a double strand of pearls and the indelible stamp of memory. For a long time, I railed about waste and injustice.
Now she comes to me quietly, the mental snapshots softened by 30 years of life lessons. She is sitting in the living room reading as the afternoon sun slants through the leaded glass windows. Her dark hair is newly done, and she is dressed in a cardigan trimmed with grosgrain ribbon and a matching skirt. She smells of Arpege, with no base note of gin. And when I sit beside her, she looks up and smiles her luminous smile. Yes, she says.
Yes. I know. And I'm here.
May 17, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 20
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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