|
|
|
|
Soon after I turned thirty-five, I found my mother. She was singing into a microphone in the recreation room of an RV park. The day's trapped heat evaporated through the cinder block walls into the star-swept sky of the Mojave Desert, leaving a chill that shook my shoulders. I leaned in the doorway in the dark and studied my mother's features. Between white-haired retirees shuffling across the dance floor in soft-soled shoes, I caught glimpses of her crimson lips crooning the words to "Makin' Whoopee!" Rhinestoned glasses distorted her caked, blue eyelids. A red turban studded with bright gold brooches was wrapped around her head. Under the lip of the turban curled a clump of hair as white as goose feathers. My mother had grown thicker. Her chin folded and sagged. But her movements were familiar, thrumming the accordion's keyboard, bouncing to the kerchunk of the drum set, spinning through the refrain, her face spiced with music. Couples orbited the dance floor within the familiarity of their fifty-year marriages. Outside, their RV's glinted under the bright desert moon. They nodded politely as they spun past, eyeing my dusty traveling shoes, my wrinkled blouse, my nervous hands. Smoothing my skirt, I considered the ways I might introduce myself. "I'm Judith, your daughter, " I softly rehearsed. Since I was ten, Mother had lived only in a pastel portrait hanging in my hallway.
* * * Things happen, quite by accident, that change your life forever. Profoundly coincidental things that leave you with no other explanation but that they are a gift from somewhere beyond your own small life. Like glancing up at the moment a meteor enters the earth's atmosphere. You gather it up and every time you close your eyes, if you wish, you can see it again. Its burst of fire, its arched and smoking trail, its final fade into a black, star-strewn sky. And you wonder what good fortune had you tilt your head back at that moment.
Months before I found my mother I worked at the city library a few blocks from the old drive-in, where a traveling carnival had set up in the big open space below the screen. As I locked up the library, the sun dipped in the sky, rides jittered with colored lights, people clutching stuffed animals drifted to their cars, and I thought, for old times sake, I'd cut through the carnival on my way back home. When the Ferris wheel arced my chair over the top, I followed Main Street through the heart of town, drew a line through the fields to the house where I live, its tin roof glinting like mica. Back on earth, the ground throbbed from metal rollers skimming on fast tracks. Cotton candy and corn dogs buttered the air. Carnys hawked their games for a buck, jingling their money belts as they skipped and yodeled and clapped.
"Give it a try, Lady. You can't lose." I spun around to find a carny leaning from his booth, grabbing for my arm. Ashes scattered from his smoldering cigarette onto his table, stacked with plates and bowls and glasses, and at the top of a tower of saucers perched a blue flowered piece that matched my mother's china. One try, I thought, fishing in my bag for quarters. The point of the game was to toss a coin on the dish that you desired. And if its shallow bottom held the coin, the dish was yours. A small crowd gathered, blank faced, to watch as I stretched over the counter for a closer shot. My first coins clinked and bounced to the ground, but my last coin arched smoothly, chimed down a row of glasses, and landed in my target's bone-white center. "If she can do it, you can do it," the carny announced, gathering spectators in for a try. He plucked the plate and waved it over our heads, then wrapped it in newspaper and passed it my way.
As I hiked home, "Rock Around the Clock" drifted up from the carnival organ. Tinny and off-rhythm, it settled and soaked into the earth's thick layer of fallen leaves. Spiny branches reached into the blackened sky where the Big Dipper ladled out a swath of stars. I remembered my first day of kindergarten, sitting in our yellow-tiled kitchen, my mother singing that same song, the radio crackling at full-volume as she jitter-bugged with the refrigerator door. The music dwindled until all I could hear were my own footsteps slipping on wet leaves, keeping time with the sharp sounds of crickets and frogs and the swooshing sound of my breath climbing the final hill to my house. From my front porch I could still see the glow of the Ferris wheel bobbing above the treetops, its little chairs dangling like breezy leaves.
Inside, Celia stood over a sizzling skillet. Frogs' legs jittered nervously in the pan as she salted them. "God, that gives me the creeps," I said, watching them jerk. Through the screen door I could see their legless bodies lying in lumps in a bucket on the back porch. Barlow, our dog, licked at this treat, thumping his thick tail against the door jam.
"Went gigging as soon as they started croaking." Celia forked a large leg and held it up for me to see. Her smoky hair was pulled into a tail, thin as fennel. Her dress shifted across her bony back, the hem of it grazing her untied boots. As she shuffled to the sink, boot laces clicked on the linoleum. She had become stooped with age and I wondered what I would ever do without her. When I was ten, my father hired Celia when my Mother left. And for twenty-five years she has taken Mother's place. You live with the ones you love and I will never leave Celia. As she stood at the stove, every line in her face was familiar, unlike my real mother -- a memory as translucent as the steam rising from the pan.
I sat at the table and unwrapped my prize. "Look what I won for us. It matches Mother's old china."
"How much did it cost you to get so lucky?," Celia laughed, scooting the frogs' legs around with a fork.
"That carny didn't know what he had. I won it in maybe four tries." I turned the china over in my hand. "Pre-war Norataki. It's not even chipped."
The newspaper uncurled onto the tabletop. Just inside a torn corner, in faded black ink, was a photograph of a woman pushing her hand toward the camera. In the open palm of her hand was a fish the size of a cigarette butt. Behind her, water spread out flat to the horizon. "'What's all the fuss about?' Jean Freed wants to know," the caption read. Frantically I smoothed the paper out. "Jean Freed doesn't let a small thing like an endangered species rock her boat. 'My spring is full of pupfish,' she announced last week from the front porch of the Seaside Shangri-La RV Park and Spa."
My eyes darted back and forth between her photo and her name. She wore a turban, thick glasses distorted her eyes. I ran to the hallway and compared it to my mother's portrait. The smiles matched. The curved lips dipped just so. High cheekbones accentuated the same long face.
"Celia," I cried, running through the hallway. "My mother's in a newspaper. Somewhere by the ocean. She married the man she ran off with, see? She's Mrs. Freed."
* * * "I've never heard of pupfish," I said, digging through dog-eared books on the living room floor. A thin layer of dust covered their spines.
Celia sat back and flipped through the pages of a book swimming with fish. "I'll bet the more endangered they are, the more attention they get. Let's see. Pup. Pupfish. Here they are!"
I looked over her shoulder to face the little fish, staring up from the page with a gleaming eye. Fins, rounded as fans, gilded its silvery sides. Scales shifted from yellow to blue to green, forming faint stripes.
"Cyprinodon macularius" I carefully read. "Look how its mouth turns down in a frown." The sadness of extinction marked the fish's face. "What will I say if I actually find her?"
"When the time comes, you'll know."
I unfolded a map between us. "We're getting close. It's starting to click," I said, drumming my fingers.
"Look here," said Celia. "This book says more about our little pups. They're tolerance for heat and salt is greater than any fish known to man."
With her index finger Celia circled the salt-strewn deserts of West Texas, dragged her jagged nail through to Arizona. "We're getting warm. These are the areas where they survive," she said, moving towards the California deserts.
I followed her finger. "Salton Sea," I read aloud from a blue blob of water surrounded by nearly roadless desert land.
Celia clapped, "That's it, Judith! A sea. The Salton Sea."
I unfolded my scrap of newspaper and searched the photo again for clues. Behind my mother, the water's rim looked waveless. Tumbleweeds had lodged between a cactus and a fence. Her eyes were focused on the startled pupfish. Her hand was cupped as if she'd just scooped it up. I imagined her stooping and letting it go, her feet washed by a shallow spring. Glistening fins darted through bluegreen water. It nibbled at her heals and bumped her toes. I closed my eyes to my familiar memory of Mother, years before she left us high above me on a dock over a lapping lake where she leaned forward and clapped as I paddled below her. Putting on a show, I dove and kicked, rolled on my back and opened my eyes under water. Through the lake's surface I saw her dress smeared across the patio, her hair unfolding like blue flames, her arms waffling along the railing.
Her gauzy mouth opened to a gaping hole, but the only sounds I heard were my underwater life -- as silent as I imagine space to be on the other side of the marbled clouds that muffle our fretting earth, reducing it to a simple blue jewel.
After astronauts splash down they paint round, blue globes and talk about space in low tones as if their hearts could burst. They say the view through their ship's window is lodged in their souls, feelings they can't shake or begin to explain. They keep the palpable proof of earth-photographs lined up on their walls -- reminders of days, dangling in space, cradled in their capsules, the fragile earth floating far from their reach. As they grow older they know they may never return, but the lucky thing is, when their eyes close at night, they can recall this memory again and again.
In the desert, in all its unsettling darkness, away from the sweltering lights of cities and towns, it is easy to imagine space. My mother's mouth was opened wide, yodeling now, drowning out her pumping accordion and all the members of her band. At the end of the song she bowed to the clapping crowd, then sauntered forward. "Just a short break, and we'll be back."
My legs shot towards her as if propelled by something outside myself. I landed, startled, under the single stage light. From the riser my mother squinted down through her bottleglass cat-eyes.
I'm your daughter, Judith Ann, I silently recited. Then, tilting my face up, so I was drenched with light, I looked into the blue marbled irises of my mother's eyes.
