by Mark Brazaitis
My mother is making eggs and chicken sausage in the kitchen.
She died a month ago.
It’s eight in the morning, and I am waking up in a second-floor bedroom of her house in Washington, D.C. Even after I remember she’s dead, I smell the eggs and sausage. I wonder if I’m having a Pavlovian response to the bed and the room and the morning sunlight. Or is the scent of eggs and sausage still in the air?
This is the first time I’ve been in my mother’s house since she died.
After I dress, I walk downstairs to the kitchen. I expect my mother to be standing at the stove in her nightgown.
I remember she’s dead.
I look at the floor. I shake my head. What’s wrong with me? I’m fifty-five years old, too old to be in denial about her death.
Maybe our breakfast routine is determined to keep her alive. Maybe it’s more powerful than my knowledge of her death. Maybe my sense of smell is overwhelming my reason.
At my house, I usually have oatmeal for breakfast. This is what I make now. When it’s ready, I turn to ask if she’d like any. This time, I’m aware she’s dead, but it seems impolite not to invite her to breakfast in her own home.
I eat at the dining room table, my laptop open in front of me. Every so often, I look up, thinking I’ve heard her voice. I listen. I hear nothing. But a few minutes later, I look up, having heard her again. I finish my breakfast.
I’m here to clean my mother’s house before my sister and I put it on the market. My parents bought the house, located on a quiet street between Military and Nebraska Avenues, in 1975 after my father, a reporter for The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper, was assigned to the Washington bureau. Made of red brick, it’s two stories plus a basement and a tiny attic with pull-down stairs. Last night, I threw away what was easy to throw away: expired food and medicine, used toothbrushes and old dish cloths, broken crockery and depleted pens. Now I face the hard choices—about what to save, what to donate, what to sell.
I walk around my mother’s living room, gazing at what she left behind. A pink one-speed bicycle, its tires in need of pumping. Books by Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion. An antique winepress. Three hundred CDs, everything from Pachelbel’s Canon to Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me to an album I gave her, Tanya Donelly’s haunting Whiskey Tango Ghosts.
Sitting in a chair and facing one of the windows is a near life-sized doll of a bespectacled man in a plaid shirt. His bulbous nose is bright red, as if plagued by rosacea, his hair is an unnatural corn silk color, and his toothbrush mustache makes him look at once endearingly goofy and menacingly fascist. In the wake of an argument with her neighbors over a tree or trashcan, my mother bought the doll at a flea market and placed him in sight of their kitchen window. She wanted them to be unnerved every time they looked up from their sink. To ensure that he was a twenty-four-hour freak show, she shined a light on him all night.
I could be kind to her neighbors and remove the old man. But every time I look at him, I remember my mother’s laughter as she told me why she’d bought him. I don’t want her laughter to die.
Placing the old man in her window wasn’t my mother’s only act of revenge against a neighbor she found un-neighborly. In the last decade of her life, she lived nine months of the year in a one-bedroom, ground-floor apartment in the same building as my sister in Washington Heights, in New York City. A man in his late sixties who lived on the seventh floor objected to her allowing Dusty, her calico cat, to roam in the building’s vestibule. When my mother ignored him, he complained to the building’s board. The board gave her a written warning.
At the time, my mother was undergoing chemotherapy because of non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma. She’d bought a series of wigs to disguise her baldness. The next time she saw her uptight neighbor, she simultaneously flashed him her middle finger and removed her wig. Nothing says “Fuck you” more convincingly than a bald woman giving you the bird.
Years before, when my sister and I lived with our mother in the D.C. house, she regularly encouraged her two golden retrievers to defecate in a neighbor’s yard. The neighbor had once been her good friend, and on morning runs together the two of them had discussed plans to divorce their respective husbands. My mother counted it as a supreme betrayal when, after their divorces, the neighbor started dating my father. “She shit on our friendship,” my mother said, “so I’m returning the favor.” Eventually, she called off the dogs.
If my mother had a few enemies, she also had hundreds of friends: from work, from the neighborhoods she lived in, from the places near and far she visited. She was a middle school teacher, a daycare worker, a photographer, and the editor and publisher of Hammer and Dolly, the monthly magazine of the Washington Metropolitan Auto Body Association. She traveled to Australia, Cuba, France, Japan, the Netherlands and twice to Guatemala, where I was a Peace
Corps volunteer. She was active in her high school’s and college’s alumni associations. She was a grandmother who spoke with whoever was sitting next to her in the stands at baseball games and skating shows. She made friends swiftly and permanently. They were of all social classes, races, and political affiliations.
Her friends live in out-of-the-way places in her house: a bottom desk drawer (in the cards and letters they wrote her); a high shelf in a bedroom closet (in photographs of them in a dozen dusty albums); and the top drawer of a bedroom bureau (in the ticket stubs from the games, concerts, and plays my mother attended with them).
Her four grandchildren occupy more visible places in the house, their photographs and artwork displayed on the door of the kitchen closet, the mantel above the fireplace, and the wall in the main hallway. Sometimes she appears in photos of them, or in photos of me and my sister. Since she has had gray hair since her mid-thirties and her blue eyes have always had a timeless radiance, it’s difficult to tell how old she is in most of them. Only after her stroke, when she was
five months shy of eighty years old, did she look her age.
Evidence of my mother’s two marriages, both of which, after fourteen and twenty years, respectively, ended in divorce, is elusive. On the far end of a bookshelf in a room which used to be my stepfather’s mancave but, after he moved to San Antonio, became a storage room, I find memorabilia from their wedding: an invitation, a handful of photographs, a videotape. My father is an even scarcer presence. He appears most prominently, and most peculiarly, in a memorandum I find in the top middle drawer of my mother’s bedroom dresser. Dated December
14, 1981, addressed to my mother, my sister, and me, and composed on a manual typewriter—the boldness of the black letters suggests he pounded on the keys—it rails against our slovenliness and indifference to his desire to keep a neat house. The last line is especially memorable because of its ominousness: “If I see one more knife stuck with peanut butter and tossed in the sink…” What, I wonder, did he expect us to understand from his ellipsis?
I don’t remember this note, but I remember others like it, including one he taped to our overflowing kitchen trashcan, which he’d placed on top of my bed. I was ten years old. My offense: I’d failed to take out the trash the previous night. I hadn’t told him I’d become afraid of doing so after I opened one of the metal bins at the side of our house and a raccoon jumped out at me.
What I find odd about the note isn’t what it says but its very existence. Mom, I ask (or want to ask), holding up the note, why are you saving this?
She doesn’t answer.
Do you want a reminder of what an uptight, rage-filled asshole he could be?
Does it make you laugh because you found it amusing when he became so angry about so little?
Does it show, in a weird and convoluted way, his desire to remain a part of our family even as he found living with us stressful and enraging?
Before long, it’s afternoon, and I make lunch. I tell myself I don’t have the appetite to eat two sandwiches, only one, but my hands don’t listen. After I eat the first sandwich, I stare at the second. Instead of finding a container to put it in so I can store it in the fridge, I leave it on a clean plate on the dining room table, another offering to my mother.
As I roam the house again, I discover something else I can throw away: the rubber ducks that line her bathtub. There are twelve of them, in a rainbow of colors dulled by use and age. Once offered as incentive to her grandchildren to bathe, they haven’t seen service in a decade. I have a thirteen-gallon trash bag in hand. But when I reach for one of the ducks—its red is faded to a rust color, and there’s a ring of grime around its lower half—its smile seems to widen, as if it knows I’ll be incapable of sending it off for burial in a landfill.
Frustrated by how little I’ve accomplished indoors, I decide to mow the lawn. It’s mid-July, and the lawn hasn’t been mowed since the beginning of June, when a neighbor, after hearing about my mother’s stroke, volunteered his services. I walk to the shed in the backyard. My father built it four decades ago. It’s filled with old tools and cobwebs. The red Craftsman lawnmower is covered in dust. After I pull it out onto the grass, I worry it won’t start. But it fires up on the second pull.
I’ve forgotten earplugs and protective glasses, but I forego them, hoping I don’t go deaf and blind in the time it will take me to mow the grass. The backyard is small—it will take me ten minutes—and the front yard is smaller. I’ve only started on the front yard, however, when the lawnmower dies. I check the gas tank. It’s half full. I check the oil. It’s thick and black, but there’s enough of it. Nevertheless, I replace the oil. The lawnmower starts and stalls, starts and stalls, starts and stalls. I clean around the spark plug. I clean around the blade. I pull the starter
string. The lawnmower starts and stalls.
I gaze at the lawn. It looks like a bad haircut. I’m worried about my mother turning to someone else to finish a job evidently too challenging for her son. She never told me so directly, but I always suspected she had a faint contempt for my devotion to poetry and philosophy at the expense of what was practical and useful. As the editor and publisher of a trade magazine, she spent her workdays around men (and some women) who made a living with their hands. The most skilled of them, she said, could fix anything—from disposals to limousines.
I go inside the house, sit in front of my computer, and watch YouTube videos on how to repair a lawnmower. The most likely problem, I conclude, is a dirty carburetor. I’ll need a ½-inch wrench to unbolt the carburetor from the lawnmower’s frame. I look in the shed for wrenches but find only a rusted saw, a rusted hoe, a rusted shovel, dozens of rusted nails. I return to my mother’s house.
Mom, where do you keep your wrenches?
My frustration mixes with my sadness, which mixes with my loneliness, which mixes with my sense that I’m not quite alone.
Mom, did you hear me?
Mark Brazaitis is the author of nine books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and the novel American Seasons. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.