Milk by Emily Hammond

Author:Emily Hammond
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781504023894
Publisher: The Permanent Press

SIXTEEN

Diffidently, I finger the nightgown I’m still wearing, though it’s one in the afternoon. In the hallway outside my room at the Alta Vista, I hear a person with a walker plunking down the corridor.

Last night’s dream after reading my mother’s hospital records:

My mother’s dead body is being brought into the mortuary and I am waiting for her there. There are tables for the dead people—sort of like a clinic—and I am standing by the one reserved for her. They bring my mother to me in a clear case packed in fluid, her dark hair undulating within, and I think, That’s her. They remove her from her case and lay her out on the table, naked. I’m to get her ready for burial. She is accompanied by a list of requests, written in her own hand, but her writing is sloppy with many misspellings, provoking a comment from one of the employees at the mortuary. But that just shows how far her mind was gone, I want to say; she was smart, she could write. I prepare to put her body inside a white tent, along with some of the things she requested—an infant’s blanket, a red papier mâché bird. Meanwhile, almost imperceptibly at first, her body starts to move a little here and there, her arms, her hands—the next thing I know, she’s sitting up, her rubbery white legs dangling off the table. She’s trying to stand and I help her. “Oh no,” she says, “I’m a boy.” She thinks she has a penis. I look down and check. “No, you’re a girl, just swollen from the packing fluid.” I mean to ask her about Charlotte, my baby sister, but before I can my mother lets loose with a stream of urine, smiling ecstatically with greenish teeth.

I haven’t dreamt of her in years.

As a child I wrote myself postcards, pretending they were from my mother. Postcards I would get in stacks from my father’s friends as souvenirs, brand new, not sent through the mail. Postcards of bears in Bern, Switzerland, beergartens in Germany, the Black Forest; cherry blossoms in Japan, kimonoed girls with fans upheld; the Queen of England, the Tower of London, a village in Wales—I pinned them up on my bulletin board in a mural, but on their backs were the notes I had written. Starting from when I could first write, they were like a child’s letters from camp, except they were about heaven or some such place. “It’s nice here. They have haarps.” “Weather is fine, no moskitos.” Supposedly, my mother wrote them from heaven, but I feared she was somewhere else, floating and vaporous in the sky or maybe right in my own back yard, behind the azaleas, or in my closet, reflected in a doorknob, in the pantry with the cans of Campbell’s soup. She hovered beneath the floor of my room listening to me with a glass and sometimes she was good and sometimes she was bad.

At thirteen I became convinced I could contact her, that she was trying to contact me.

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