Of Memory and Desire by Gladys Swan

Author:Gladys Swan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 1987-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

BLACK HOLE

That afternoon when they were together, it struck Ruth that she and her mother could have been any two women joined by a cup of coffee. As if their relationship had moved up or down a notch. Her mother had her shoes off, her legs folded on the couch beside her. The brilliance of sun through the pear tree outside showed up the streaks of dirt on the windows at the same time it gave a brief glory to the confusion of leaf and bloom of the houseplants Helen had crowded together on the sills. Helen still wore the bandanna she tied round her head when she worked in the garden or went out to feed the chickens and gather eggs, or to inspect the rabbits in their pens. She was a handsome woman still, but her significance lay elsewhere. In her expression, in the way she sat, in everything she did, something was asserted that made her arresting. To Ruth, it was rather disconcerting that they might have been simply two acquaintances drinking coffee, as though this woman had never been her mother, had never been married to her father, but was reverting back or moving forward to something else that wasn’t altogether clear, perhaps even to herself.

“Mother,” she wanted to say, while she waited for the woman at the drop-leaf table in the corner to find an article she wanted Ruth to read. Wanted to see her raise her head and respond, become familiar to her in the old way. For some reason, she thought of one of John’s patients, a cantankerous old woman they had been rather laughing over, who had spent fifty years as a salesclerk forced to smile and be pleasant to people all day long. And now she figured it was her turn—to be nasty to everyone.…

Was that how it was? You earned the right to some hidden part, some shadowy thing that lurked around the edges of all you had been called upon to do? Looking around, at the windows that hadn’t been washed in God knows how long, at the stacks of books and magazines that either represented her mother’s latest enthusiasm or were simply the piling-up of things not yet put away or thrown away, she had to ask, How did it happen? What was it that gave to her mother’s life this particular drift? Here in her little house on the edge of town, the furniture worn to her own particular shape and purposes, alone most of the time with her chickens and rabbits, which she killed and dressed and sold; alone, except for the visits to and from Ruth and her family—what had she become?

Her habit of going to the tavern in the evening—that was new. To the tavern frequented by workingmen and strangers traveling through. She’d never been one for going out, not even to the hotel bar where she might have gone, let alone to the tavern.

How did it happen?

That was the question she had first asked herself about what her mother’s life had become.

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