How to Forget by Kate Mulgrew
Author:Kate Mulgrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-03-20T16:00:00+00:00
Chapter Twenty-Two
It began when I was still very young, far too young to attach any great importance to it, and yet even then the faraway look in my mother’s eyes unsettled me. I see her standing over the kitchen sink, in the gray afternoon light, wearing her soiled apron and pretending to do the dishes. She despised doing the dishes, and therefore she washed them with a carelessness that stopped just short of sloppiness. The glass would be dipped in the murky water, then lifted and placed negligently on the sideboard, no cleaner than it had been before. She would handle the dirty dishes robotically, never looking at them, never with a view to improving them, her slender hands moving in and out of the water, her simple gold wedding band glinting on her ring finger.
If I were coming into the kitchen with the intention of talking to my mother, the sight of her standing over the sink would stop me short. She was there, and yet she was not there. I sensed this as a deviation from the normal and would hide myself where I could watch her unobserved, stepping onto the base of the back staircase, leaning quietly against the wall. My mother’s gaze would be fixed on the view outside the kitchen window, on the cornfields and the apple orchard and the line of evergreen trees that led to a small grove, in the middle of which stood a statue of St. Francis. She gazed, but she did not focus. Hers was an inward turning, producing almost a trancelike state. It was not the stillness of her form or the stepping away from reality that so unnerved me, but the vacancy in her eyes. It was clear that she saw nothing, that her mind was at a standstill, and that whatever was causing this torpor was as powerful as a drug. My mother was inert, unresponsive to her surroundings, and lost entirely in another world.
From the vantage point of my hiding place, I studied her face with intense curiosity, and the longer I looked the more anxious I became. Her blue-gray eyes appeared spiritless to me, no sign of life flickered in them. A fear crept over me, one that I experienced as a coldness in my hands and feet, and one that also defined the physical distance between my mother and myself as unbridgeable, existing, as we did in that moment, in two completely disparate realities. Strangest of all was the profound sadness I felt at witnessing my mother in this state, and I somehow grasped that she, too, was filled with an ineffable sense of loss. Most disturbing of all was her extreme detachment. It was as if she were someone I had never known. I desperately wanted to wrench her from this state, to restore her to the mother I knew, and yet, I couldn’t move. I was transfixed.
When waiting for my mother to return to herself became unbearable, the time of her absence
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