MEG MAHONEY
Mother, May I?
prose finalist in our 2020-2021 Writing Contest
Dad forgot the cars he’d owned, which is to say he forgot his life. As Mom’s dementia came on, she’d make a joke when she forgot, and I’d congratulate her for remembering what forgetting was. Together we reasoned her slips away, but that couldn’t save the names of plants she’d known or the twists of plot in a book. This is not a story about dementia, but I can’t leave the dementia out. It played a role in how I caught my own reflection in the mirror of family.
Deep down, she must have felt it. One day, Mom insisted I learn about how she tracked their money. We were in her kitchen when she brought it up, hot mugs of tea steaming on the table between us. The styrax tree she’d planted when she and Dad had moved to Seattle was blooming white outside the window, so it must have been May.
Tea in hand, I followed her to her study—the room with her computer, a 6-foot rack of African violets, and a closetful of unfinished sewing projects. The window shone with a purple tinge from hydrangeas blooming beyond it. Her bulletin board was pocked by pins, with snapshots at eye-level from her chair: grandchildren, a poem she’d found, a cartoon her sister sent, photos of old friends.
“This is where I’ve kept track of everything,” she said, handing me a small red, loose-leaf notebook, its pages filled with lists in her meticulous hand, printed over decades in columns for date, cost base, investment, price per share. In the corner was a two-drawer file cabinet, its folders still alphabetically arranged. She rummaged through a shelf to find an unused spiral notebook.
Handing it over, she said, “You’d best take notes.”
She watched, her blue eyes steady, as I found a pencil and unfolded a chair from against the wall. Store clerks often mentioned that we looked like sisters, even now that her hair had turned the white of clouds and ignoring the way her nose had a crooked bend from having been broken when she was a child. What they really meant was that we were both tall and lanky and that I was lucky to have inherited her glow of calm.
She explained the contents of her file and checked the words that I wrote down, folder by folder, no stumbles: accounts, insurance, stocks. Then she walked me down to the laundry room to meet her persnickety safe, insisting that I watch her work the old padlock several times. I practiced against the day when the safe would lock her out. Once she felt secure that I had it, she continued down the path of trying not to forget.
As she faded, I tiptoed into her inner world, the sanctuary of her study. It became the dishevelment of her intentions, turned from a place of quiet solitude and intermittent order to mishmash. A child of the depression, she’d spent a lifetime combing yard sales and alleyways for treasures. Collecting milk glass. A soggy hat from the curb, brought home to wash and gift away. Miniature Mason jars in their original box, a nickel price scrawled on each tiny lid.
She’d gathered bins and baskets and boxes over the years: odd-shaped, all sizes, any color, lidded or not. Each was filled with a mix of stuff: paper clips, sewing tools, rubber bands, bills, old letters, keys, envelopes, screws, and stamps. As her sorting failed, hodgepodge spread like an infection. I sorted.
Easy: pick it up, figure it out, put it away. A basket for old staplers, a box for thread. I labeled folders for her correspondence: her sister Virginia, my sister Deb, the kids, and me. She’d saved my letters over the years, as I’d saved hers. As I worked, Mom lost interest and retreated to another room, puttering in the kitchen or potting plants in the garage.
One day, alone among her things, I came across an email, printed out.
Pick it up: addressed to Mom, from Jeff.
Figure it out: Jeff and Dad grew up as buddies, children of long-time friends. Jeff’s wife and Mom had gone to plays together. On summer weekends, Dad and Jeff would decide whose boat to launch, and we’d water-ski along Lake Michigan’s shore from Chicago north, my family and Jeff. After Jeff’s stroke, Dad joined him for a weekly hand of gin rummy. I hadn’t heard of Jeff in years.
“Dearest Allene,” it read. There followed the chitchat that lovers use to fill a page: his health and what he’d been doing with his days. It ended with endearments.
My mind scrambled for footing among half-formed questions that slipped like rocks on a scrabble path, questions of how and when and whether. I was an intruder in a private place, confused. When had this come to be? Had they ever found time to be together or did their love live all in words? I read it until I believed it—that she’d found someone else to love her, just as Dad had done. I smiled with satisfaction, wanting to protect it, wanting it not to be lost.
Put it away: I had no folder labeled “lovers.” I stashed it loose between other folders I’d made. As I closed the drawer, my gaze rose to the bulletin board above her desk: to a picture of Jeff’s smiling face, with others cut away. I’d never noticed it before.
Another day, another intrusion. Still sorting. Mom was somewhere else in the house. This time it was a letter from the 40s, handwritten, no evidence that it was ever sent. It was addressed to Dad on the eve of one his long drives from Chicago to Colorado to visit her after the war, following all his letters from Burma. It was a woman trying express her doubts and turn the tide of his emotions gently, so as not to hurt his feelings. It was a break-up note. All this was clear in the first few words.
It was as if I’d opened a door to find two people deep in conversation. I backed out, hoping they hadn’t seen me. I didn’t read it. I let it mix back into the pile, shaken at the possibility that she’d silenced herself so early in life. Whatever she’d intended, they were married within a year. Recently, they’d celebrated fifty.
I planned to find it again someday, after she was gone. I wondered that she’d kept the letter all these years. It was too late to ask her. I probably wouldn’t have anyway.
After her death, I searched through every folder, separating every sheet of paper. I never found it. I can’t believe I didn’t read it when I had the chance.
She’s gone. All her papers are at my house now, and I’m sorting again: sitting on the floor in my own space, surrounded by boxes, a recycle bag, a wastebasket. I pick up a spiral notebook with a brown cardboard cover. Small, maybe 4” by 6”, with the usual printing on the front: the manufacturer and how many pages it once had. It’s thin, leftover from the ‘60s, I would guess. It must have been my sister’s; her childhood name is written on the cover in her high school handwriting—small, neat, slanted to the right.
Tossing papers as I am, I think it must be full of useless notes. I leaf through its first blank pages and then I see my mother’s writing, so distinct, halfway between print and script, black ink from a felt-tip pen.
1975 is jotted in the margin.
And then: Who am I?
I’m a woman – wife – mother
51, but don’t believe the age – tho I know the years are true. I like to dig and plant, and more and more, to be alone is a necessity. And a luxury. As a wife, I don’t feel complete – I’m a good homemaker, usually calm, fairly cheerful, a considerable stoic.
—But I take, too often, paths of least resistance and find myself doing things I would not choose because I feel other people care more—which would be all right if I did not resent it, which I often do. But if I feel this way, then I must really care as well.
She stopped.
I stop.
Empty pages follow. I’m looking at myself. Calm and fairly cheerful. I take paths of least resistance. Find myself doing things I would not choose. I resent it.
I’m my mother’s daughter, haunted by the way she hid. I have questions, but only myself to ask. Did she want her hidden places to be found someday and understood? Did she know I might turn over the rocks she left behind and find the squiggly worms beneath? How has my life spun out without my knowing the one at the center of all these scenes: myself? What will grow if I tell the story I find? Mother, may I?
After teaching dance to children of immigrants in a public school, Meg Mahoney has been fortunate to travel extensively with her husband. Her essay “A Man from Morocco” won the 2020 Writer Award in Prose from Nassau Review. “Mother, May I?” is part of a memoir-in-progress. To weather the pandemic, she’s been venturing by boat onto the waters of Puget Sound, learning things nautical.