The Mother Knot by Kathryn Harrison

Author:Kathryn Harrison [Harrison, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-53859-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

I CALLED the parish church my mother used to attend, the one where her funeral was held. I hadn't been able to remember its name for years, and it wasn't in any of my files, but it came to me when I was on the subway, returning home from my analyst's—Saint Cyril's. The church secretary told me that the San Fernando Mission cemetery was the one most likely to have interred my mother's body.

Mission, I thought. Mission Hills. Yes, that was where we'd gone to bury her, that was where her body was.

The woman who answered the cemetery office's phone put me on hold; a few minutes later, another woman's voice came on the line. It would take her a while to look up records from 1985, she said. They were old enough to have been moved to a separate building. Would it be all right if she called me back in an hour or so?

I went upstairs. As if under a spell, I opened the top drawer of my bureau and took out lingerie, old slips and camisoles of my mother's, most of which I'd never worn but had kept among my own since her death. I put them in a shopping bag to drop off at the local Salvation Army, hunted through my closet for whatever else I'd inherited from her: a pullover; an evening jacket; two cardigan sweaters; a black velvet dress I'd stepped into and buttoned and, when I saw myself in the mirror, taken off, at least once each winter since her death. I folded these and put them in the bag. Then I dumped my clutch of cosmetics out on the bathroom counter and extracted a compact of rouge, a concealer stick, and three eye pencils—also my mother's—and threw them away.

Like the lingerie, like the clothes I'd packed and unpacked through four changes of address, I'd kept her makeup with my own, seeing and touching and sometimes using it. Now I understood why I'd never told anyone of these daily communions: they were perverse, and on some level I'd known that anyone would judge them so.

During the following week, as I spoke daily with cemetery and mortuary personnel, requesting forms I needed, finding out the cost to disinter, cremate, and ship remains from Los Angeles to New York, my peaceful vision of a body floating away on a leisurely, lullaby tide changed. It became violent; it answered my perennial fascination with spilling blood; it reflected the deeper, older savagery I felt toward my mother. Fury I'd denied, because what evidence I'd found of it over the years—always in retrospect, always the scorched earth, never the flames—terrified me.

“I'm not so much having my mother dug out of the ground as I am exhuming her from my own body,” I told my analyst.

I described the operation I'd imagined. “I see myself on a metal table, under bright lights. The two halves of my rib cage are pulled apart by one of those spreading devices used for open-heart surgery.

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