You are reading an archived issue of Sleet Magazine. To return to the current issue, click here.
Volume 2 Number 2 • Fall - Winter 2010-2011
“This is my wife Marilyn. Handsome is her middle name.”
This is the way my father introduced my mother at dinner and cocktail parties for years, even to family friends who, of course, knew her name. It was his favorite joke, but why did my mother put up with it? Because it was hard to hold onto anger in the face of my father’s golden boy charm, his soft-polished glow like a young Redford, a charm that remained even after the most near-sighted waiter mistook him for a boy and mistook his wife for his mother. He charmed like that right up until his heart gave out on an early-morning run through our neighborhood the year he turned forty.
Also, there was an element of truth to my father’s story: if he was all liquid gold grace and sport, my mother was a roughly carved block of a woman. Appointments with the best hairdresser on Newbury Street and the finest clothes money could buy to add curves to her shape were never enough. She wasn’t ugly or even unattractive, but she looked more settled than dashing, even before she birthed my sister Eulah and me.
And, in point of fact, Hansom was her middle name. Hansom, as in the hansom cabs that carted heroines from midland to moor in 19th century British novels, but it was not beneath my father to play on that inaudible linguistic difference. To the best of my knowledge, my mother never called him on it, even as she noted what he was saying.
Hansom is a family name, my mother’s mother’s maiden name. I was six or seven before I even realized that Grandma Hansom sharing a name with the soup was anything more than coincidence. My great-grandfather patented his canning and jarring machine the year before the War Between the States, as it was called back then, and securing a loan, opened up a canning factory in the Connecticut Valley. The rest is, as they say, history: we’re not the Campbells (having met the Campbells, dissolute and still uncomfortably uncertain Warhol didn’t mean to offend them, I for one am thankful), though we do all right.
My grandmother, Henrietta Hansom, the current family scion, sits on the board of a handful of well-respected charities, mostly concerned with children’s health issues. It’s not that the family business is raking it in now: we’ve been effectively relegated to some obscure, upscale corner of the domestic market and actually do better overseas, stocking American diplomatic functions and the like. But the money accrued over the years has been as effectively preserved as anything out in one of Great Great Grandpa Hyde’s cans. I’ve always thought of the sacred mission of the Hansom family as one of preservation. I imagined I was part of it when I took my Montessori preschool watercolors behind the house and sprayed them with Aquanet.
Since then, I’ve had a bit of a fascination with all things that are old and valuable. It’s only natural I loved my grandmother best because she was the oldest and most valuable of all our family, and that I looked forward to her lunches with my sister and my mother and me. The week in question, I was especially eager to see her because I’d just found a first edition copy of Twice-Told Tales offered on an online auction site, and knowing that she was a fan of literature and any contemporaries of her grandfather, I hoped she’d lend me the money to purchase the volume. I had creased and re-creased the paper certifying my bid, which had been accepted in spite of my not, technically, having the money to pay it. But before I was able to bend my grandmother’s ear, my mother made her announcement.
“I’ve enrolled in an experimental procedure,” she said. “I’m not telling you this because I need your approval, but because I want your support.” When my mother was sixteen, she forged my grandmother’s signature on the form to drop out of high school because she felt like she wasn’t getting enough out of it. She hired my father to be a foreman on the floor of the canning factory because she wanted an opportunity to see more of him: she has always been famously unilateral when her mind was made up. She always lived with the consequences, whatever they were.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of botox,” she said.
“Oh pooh,” my grandmother said and dismissively raised her water glass. We’d all seen my mother’s vain tiltings after beauty in our time, and I was the only one, I think, who admired her determination to not leave well enough alone. “You certainly won’t stand on my consent before you have a couple wrinkles puffed out of your face. By the same token, I don’t expect you’ll expect me to pay to indulge your vanity.” She pressed her free hand under the steel-colored curls over her ear and gave them a cavalier lift. “And your children, I can’t see what business it is of theirs.”
“Mother,” my mother snapped, and then stopped herself. “I am not talking about botox, but a rather more radical procedure. A doctor friend of mine, I met him through the Foundation, tells me that he can, through aggressive therapy, reverse the course of aging. With his help, I can,” and here my mother’s voice stumbled as if she’d fallen down a deeply shameful well, “finally have my youth now that I know what to do with it.”
My grandmother set her water glass down sharply and with an almost petulant, thin-lipped frown. For me, it was hard not to feel reproached, that my sister and I were the unconscious products of her original, misspent youth.
My mother took a midday train into the city to meet her doctor in his boutique office and came back the next day on the same train, unchanged at least as far as I could see, when I found her waiting for me on the platform. She was wearing the same oversized sunglasses as when she drove Eulah and me to soccer practice twenty years before. She wouldn’t tell me about the procedure, and instead talked about the shopping, but all the styles she described were last year’s fashions or the year before’s. This was about my mother recovering her modesty, her sense of the self she always wished she were, so I didn’t call her on her fib. Instead, we chattered about my work, my collections, and the shops I would visit when I next went to the city.
If I thought at first that the procedure was a wash, I quickly learned how wrong I was. It’s not as if my mother could wave her hand in the air and the folds age had set in her palm would disappear like the crease in a tablecloth when you shook it out. But by the time I called her for dinner, the series of concentric rings around her elbow that told her age as convincingly as those in a tree trunk retreated into folds that were of the moment, the pressure of her present weight on the table top. The next day at lunch, I looked up from a late 19th century edition of Irving ’s biography of Oliver Goldsmith, whose condition I was grading for a friend, to notice that the crow’s feet had disappeared from around my mother’s eyes. She wouldn’t tell me anything about the procedure, whether it was a shot or a vitamin, some hours spent under a lamp with a limpid blue bulb, but it looked like the age was being steamed out of her.
I accepted, at least intellectually, that the fat around my mother’s middle and breasts since she delivered Eulah and I had migrated to someplace less obvious (though it was emotionally harder to accept: when I was young and she would indulge my desire to wrestle on the couch and I pressed against her stomach, she called it my twin brother because it was born at the same time as me. To admit that it was gone was almost like accepting the loss of a family member.) Her breasts shrunk, her voice became higher. Her breastbone and shoulders acquired an angular grace that was betrayed by the gawky way she moved herself. Two weeks passed and my mother was physically at an age where it made me a little uncomfortable to be around someone that age, and then it seemed like the process accelerated.
By bedtime on a Tuesday, my mother threw a tantrum when I turned off the TV and reminded her she needed to brush her teeth before bed. I soothed her with promises that she could listen to her iPod before bed, and I made plans with myself to talk to her in the morning, to ask if she’d gone far enough, if she couldn’t live her life again from this point, regaining through a new slow set of years the wisdom and class that I loved in her.
I’d waited too long; at 4 a.m. I was awakened by her voice at the door. She’d had a bad dream and asked permission to sleep beside me till morning. It was a struggle to get her, now with the body of a four year old, onto the raised mattress. And it was worse when my alarm clock woke me in the morning, and she was barely an infant. We’d slept through those months when her cries would wake a parent every hour. Expecting my mother to understand well enough to change her mind or in some other way to temper the process was no longer an option.
I wanted to do something; Last week, I made plans to have my grandmother advise me about how she’d survived her unruly daughter’s bratty outbursts. If I was to do something now, though, it would need to be something medical, something scientific even. I prepared a bottle and bath and tried to decide what to do.
I was washing my mother’s back in the sink and she’d been leaning forward, snapping her neck back and forth playfully as I scrubbed her with the washcloth. I stopped to rub the washcloth against the soap and she arched her back to look up at me. She’d had been chirping like a bird since I put her in the tub, and I’d gotten used to it, like you would with an actual bird, asking yourself if it was meant to communicate anything at all or were they noises birds made to feel less alone. My mother stopped singing and arched her back to look at me. She looked directly at me, her eyes focused on me like I was the only thing in the world, and began to cry like only a baby can cry, with complete abandon. I wanted to scream at her for what she’d left, and demand that she explain how she could betray my sister and me like this. But that’s silly; an infant couldn’t be expected to explain that. All that mattered was comforting her.
I pulled a towel from the hall closet, wrapped it around her and lifted her out of the tub. I walked back and forth down the hall outside the bathroom for an hour, at first patting her with the towel to dry her but then just because when I stopped walking she would start to cry again. I tried everything to figure out what was making her cry, but it was impossible for her to tell me. Eventually she fell asleep, still wrapped in the towel, and I set her gently on the bed in my room without even turning on the overhead light.
I walked out to the couch, and before I even knew what had happened I was awakened by the sound of my sister fussing and pulling through the cans in the kitchen looking for something to eat.
“Grandma’s coming over for lunch,” I said, joining her in the kitchen. I tried to decide between the cans of Hansom soup my sister taken out of the cabinet and set on the counter so she could find the matzo bread. She loved it as a snack, a habit she’d developed in prep school. I said, “Save some for the rest of us. We can have them with the soup.”
My sister smiled at me, shyly I think, though maybe she just thought she was putting up with me, and pulled an extra sleeve from the box. “Where’s mom?” she asked.
“I put her down for a nap,” I said, not intentionally or altogether lying. “We’ve had a busy morning.”
“I’ll bet,” my sister said, but that was all she had in her, because a second later she was breaking the bread with dry snaps and piling it on a plate. I left her there when I went to check on my mother.
At first, I thought my mother had somehow gotten up and I’d be forced to find her wherever in the house she thought to hide, because all I could see was the towel on the bed. But I stopped myself before I threw it into the laundry hamper, and I was glad I did: I folded back the towel, and buried in the folds was my mother, curled in on herself and about as big as an ear. I could see she was still breathing. I saw the light from the hallway reflect off her dark pupil, but I didn’t know if that was any kind of life. I didn’t cover her over again, and headed back to the kitchen.
“I was thinking tomato,” I said, sorting through the cans my sister had left on the counter. My sister and grandmother were in the other room, talking about women-things and barely even interested in what I said.
“Tomato sounds good to me,” my grandmother said. “I always loved the recipe for that. It’s better than those others; who needs seven beans, anyhow?” My sister agreed, so I opened three of the cans and for a moment I inhaled the strong aroma that had been locked inside, then I emptied them into the pot on the range. I lit the burner beneath it, and then went back to my bedroom and brought the towel with me.
I didn’t even have time to say goodbye properly, but had to hastily drop my mother, shrunken even more now, into the soup. My sister had walked in from the dining room, and eyed me suspiciously. “How’s it going in here?” she asked, and I leaned forward quickly, using the towel to wipe up a spatter of soup from the range top. It was hard to even identify her: she was smaller than the chunks of tomato that rolled over like porpoises breaking the surface of the soup. “It’s fine,” I said.
“You know we have towels for the kitchen,” she said, and pulled one from where it was hanging off a drawer and tossed it to me. I caught it in the air and pressed the bath towel to my shoulder like I’d been using it to feed a child. But we were the ones who would eat now. I looked down and could only guess which of the chunks in the soup was my mother. But I had a naďve confidence that when it came time to dip the ladle into the soup and to fill the three of our bowls, whatever portion I allotted to myself would be rich with whatever my mother had left to give.
Matthew Dube’s work has appeared in 42Opus, Pindeldyboz, and elsewhere. He teaches English at a small college in mid-Missouri and is the fiction editor for H_NGM_N.