can or should describe to my daughter the sensual pleasure her mother brought me. I tell her what I can.
“Remember how she used to mug for us? To be so beautiful, she could be incredibly silly. I’d come home from work and drag around the house and she’d start dragging, too. And remember how she’d pretend to be Woogie and get down on her hands and knees and pretend to charge you? You’d squeal and run jump on your bed.”
My daughter laughs with me, and a host of memories comes flooding back. These are easy-ones we’ve polished a dozen times. Like a tongue avoiding a sore tooth, I know how to stay away from the pain of Rosa’s death. Sarah’s laughter is perfunctory today, however.
“Was she afraid of dying?” she asks.
“Did she feel bitter about missing so much?”
I look out at the green, teeming fields. Sarah is bursting with life. Why this talk about death? Of course Rosa was angry at first. Who wouldn’t be? I explain the pop psychology of death.
“Supposedly, there are stages a person passes through. First, there’s denial; then you try to bargain with God for some more time, but finally there may be some acceptance. I think it was harder for me to accept than for her. Do you remember all of us crying on the bed together one night right before she died?”
“Not really,” she says, twisting a lock of hair.
“What happened?”
How can she not recall the most emotional night of our lives? I give her a hard look to see if she is trying to remember.
“It was about a week before she died. You slept with us that night.”
Sarah hunches her shoulders in irritation. I see that by not talking about that night, I may have deprived her of a valuable memory of how much her mother loved both of us.
Maybe a memory more important than a story about how happy we were. Yet, until this moment I had forgotten that Sarah had been on the bed, too. It had upset her to see me cry. Or that was how I interpreted her reaction. I was in sheer panic that night. Denial, still. What about the stages of death for those of us who go on living? That’s what religion is supposed to help you with; but if your wife dies young, to hell with it. Maybe, Sarah wasn’t as scared as I thought, just sad. Afterward, I got therapy for myself; it never occurred to me to take Sarah. Now, by not talking about Rosa’s death, I realize perhaps I have taken from her the opportunity to grieve for her own mother. We’ve never talked much about how Sarah felt. I figured she felt sad enough, so whenever the subject of her mother came up, I sentimentalized Rosa so we both would be left with a nice, warm glow. I have short-circuited her death so as to avoid the pain for her. As usual, it was for me, not her. I decide to take the plunge. My heart pounding, I say, “Believe me. You were there. It was after supper, and we were all in our bedroom. Your mother was in a lot of pain. I started crying and remember trying to leave the room, but she wouldn’t let me. She said something like, “For God’s sake, I’m dying! Stay and face this.” It made you start crying, and we all just sobbed. We ended up sleeping on the bed with her. Woogie, too.” My breath has started to come in short gasps, and suddenly tears are running down my face.
Sarah reaches for my hand, and her chest heaves.
“Didn’t she go back to the hospital the next day?”
And never came home again. I nod.
“After she was admitted some stupid bitch tried to make you stay down in the lobby because you were only thirteen.”
Something triggers the memory of that night for her, and Sarah, too, begins to cry.
“Let’s pull off the road for a moment,” I say, glancing behind us to make sure no car is about to rear end us if we slow down. I help guide the Blazer to the shoulder, and both of us cry together for the first time since that night. What have I been trying to accomplish by trying to pretend my daughter hadn’t seen me lose it? I’ve made Rosa into some kind of plastic saint. I’m surprised I don’t have a little figurine of her on the dashboard.
Her head on my shoulder, Sarah begins to hiccup. Finally, she says in a tiny voice, “Mom was a lot stronger than you, wasn’t she?”
Maybe it is time I admitted that. I swallow but a sour mass seems lodged in my throat.
“Somehow, she had the courage to face her own death and wanted me to face it, too. I didn’t want to. I guess I still don’t want to. That’s why I never talk about it to you. Just the marshmallow stuff.”
Sarah presses her head hard against my shoulder.
“It’s okay. I can take it.”
I wipe my eyes. Maybe character, too, is genetic. My life has been spent trying to avoid pain; my daughter seems ready to wade into the middle of it.
“Your mother,” I say, trying to remember what Rosa really believed and failing, “wasn’t the type to use crutches much. To her, the subject of God was more of a religious mystery than a crutch, and knowing she was dying didn’t change that.”
For some reason, Sarah seems to brighten.
“Why haven’t I remembered this before?”
I lean against her as cars and trucks whiz by us. Their drivers probably think we are lovers who have pulled off the road to neck.
“Probably because it was too painful, and you knew I didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t really know about her religious beliefs. She always said it was more important what a person did than what they thought, and I guess I took her at her word.”
“Mom was an existentialist, huh?” Sarah says thoughtfully.
She already has a new vocabulary in three weeks. If I had tried to use a word with five syllables when I was in high school, my friends would still be laughing.
“If that’s what that word means, I guess so. She always said that talk was cheap.”
She turns and draws back to see if I am making fan of her, and apparently satisfied that I’m not, says, “I think she wanted to talk to me, too, but I was so scared.”
I touch my daughter’s bare arm in protest.
“You were only thirteen!”
Sarah, her face as severe as an angry judge’s, reprimands me, “She was dying!”
My stomach feels as if I’d swallowed my belt buckle.
Surely this is a burden she doesn’t need. My mind races to the day when I was about her age and I lay on my bed all day when my mother and sister drove from eastern Arkansas to the state hospital to see my father, who was dying of craziness. I couldn’t make myself go visit him. I tell her about that day.
“You shouldn’t expect so much of yourself, babe,” I say gently.
“It took me thirty years to forgive myself for not going to see my father.”
Sarah listens, but I can feel her judging me.
“We miss so much that way, though.”
I sigh. She’s right, but some people have more character than others. Some of us seem only to be able, as the song says, to do whatever it takes to make it through the night. I suppose I am of that ilk. I apologize.
“I should have spent more time worrying about how you were coping.”
My daughter pats my knee.
“You did all right. We’re both in one piece.”
More or less. I try not to think of the nights I came home late to find Sarah sitting on the couch in the living room wrapped in a blanket pretending to watch TV while all she was doing was watching the clock. Most of the time she was so glad to see me she didn’t mention that I stunk of bourbon, cigarettes, and the smell of a woman’s genitals. Some of the women I had the nerve to bring home. Sarah never gave them a chance. They weren’t bad just lonely, alcoholic types you can occasionally pick up in a lounge if you work at it hard enough.
“You want me to drive?” I say. I worry about the Blazer overheating.
The air conditioner already sounds under normal conditions like a 707 reversing its engines.
“I’m okay,” she says and checks the rearview mirror.
Instinctively, I turn my head to make sure no cars are coming a habit from the days when she was learning to drive.
She notices and frowns.
The rest of the way home I try to talk to her about what her mother was like as a real person, not some
