The Shelf Life of Ashes by Hollis Giammatteo

Author:Hollis Giammatteo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2016-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

WE DECIDED TO EXTEND OUR AGONY BY GOING FOR A walk. There was a park. It offered shade, the space through which to ramble and further dip into this strange phenomenon—perfect strangers, joined in the most fundamental way, whom chance had caused to part. I couldn’t reconcile the two, chance and the woman beside me. “Mother” was too big a term for what she was.

I kept wanting to drink her in, noting the details: curly hair, worn short; enormous earlobes hanging like a Buddha’s; the large, hooked nose. A path led through a wooded section of cedar, towering hemlock, and Douglas fir and rose up toward a rhododendron grove. The blooms, profuse, floated like airborne, crumpled tissues. Intuiting that Phyllis’s capacity to entertain my curiosity was on a short fuse, I asked, “What was it like in Philadelphia, what you went through, back then, in the . . . home and all?”

She hurled a sound outward and scaled it back to a shrill laugh. “Oh, my, it was a circus—all those crazy girls from all over, waiting it out. Just awful. There’s not that much to tell.”

“Oh,” I said, ridding my voice of expectation.

“You were expecting maybe happy memories?” Phyllis snapped.

We passed a woman in an apricot-colored wig. She was extracting crumbs from a crumpled bag and flinging them at pigeons.

“We made the best of a bad thing back there,” she continued. “All of us girls were just waiting to get out, or die, I guess, although no one actually said it.” She had changed her tone to one less brittle.

I reached for my mother’s words as if they were butterflies. I shivered. It was almost too cool in the woods. I wondered if Phyllis had heard herself call me a “mistake,” a “bad thing.” Before this, my moment, I had believed I wanted truth. I couldn’t have known its impact. I think I still believed it was better to know the worst than to live in ignorance.

“I’ve decided to take my name,” I said. “The name you gave me.”

“No kidding! What for?” Phyllis asked after a wary pause. “I love it,” I said. “Because I love my name.”

My mother looked at me quickly, and then away.

“My name is the most treasured thing I own,” I said, trying for lightness.

The air carried the scent of warm pine, sweetened by lilies and roses. “What time was I born?” I persevered.

“What?” Phyllis asked, and gave a laugh that almost split my eardrums. “I don’t remember that.” She snapped the “that” like the end of a wet towel.

Everything I valued seemed to have slipped my mother’s mind. “I don’t understand,” I said softly. “I thought that was something a woman does not forget.”

“We were put in white rooms, white walls, white floors, no clocks, nothing. Too much was happening. Who could keep track?” she said.

Enough, I thought. It was exhausting, all I could not say. I stopped, unable to maintain the delicate steps, skirting such issues as might upset her. It was impossible to be just pissed off, pure and simple.

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