Page 54 - WTP VOl. X #4

What We Hold On to (continued from preceding page)
something. My mother has an idea. In National Geographic, they have published the first maps of the ocean floor. It is 1967, and science can see almost everything. Soon we will see the moon up close. Now we are traveling underwater. My mother gets a big box, maybe three feet by three feet, and puts the map on the bottom of it. We take blue clay and begin to shape it to look like the picture on the map. Pressing down, we make deep indentations and then pile it up around the “valleys.” It’s a very big project, and cold in the basement, but my mother is really into this, and I don’t want to disappoint her. Night after night, we are making a whole world together. And as we
do, my mother talks about my “real” father and how someday she hopes that I can meet him because I would like him a lot.
“We will go find him together,” she says. He worked with interior decorators and had a “good eye and is artistic like you.” They had an apartment in an old house when I was little with a bat in it because it was in an old house. His sister, she tells me, lives on a lake with her family, and I went there when I was very little.
She pauses, “What I’m telling you about your real father, Malcolm, is something that would upset Daddy.” Then she pauses and looks at me sadly and says, “We were so young when Malcolm and I got married,” and looks down at the clay map, frowning about how much work still must be done on it.
We sculpt for quite a few days. I know it will look dif- ferent than anyone else’s project and I will feel embarrassed. I am already different than anyone else because I have a secret father. I feel the loneliness
of that ocean, its gray empty depths and the compli- cated land masses that exist far under. There is a mo- ment when I am sculpting a mound when she says, “No, not like that,” and “I’ll do that part,” and I shrink back because she knows the right way, and after all, it’s her idea—although my name will be on it.
What did I learn from that project? Names of ocean ranges, elevations, the depths you can’t see through the murky waters. My mother’s fascination with what’s underneath and how she wanted me to un- derstand something bigger than the broken shells, the starfish, and the ugly sea creatures of my imagi- nation. That she needed a map for herself to know what to do and that I would come to understand the otherworldly terrain she created.
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Nanna and Nonno, my grandparents, are coming to visit, driving down from Gloversville, New York to stay for a week. My mother makes a special pot roast for dinner the first night and Daddy sits at the head of the table. My mother has put out candles and the dishes with the gold rims. Nanna, lips pursed, asks Daddy how his new job is going and suddenly, as we finish our carrots, he pushes back his chair hard and leaves the table before my mother serves us the cake with cool whip.
“I told you not to talk about that,” my mother repri- mands. Nanna lifts one eyebrow which she showed me how to do the last time they visited. She doesn’t like Daddy. She and my mother start to talk about people I don’t know. Nonno shakes the silver cannis- ter for the martinis hard, not saying anything.
Nonno is my favorite. After dinner, he’ll read to me and my sister from The Wind and The Willows or the Jabberwocky poem as we sit on the couch, curled against his chest. Nanna doesn’t sit down until she helps load the dishwasher, washing the cooking pans separately before my mother can. My mother says, “Relax, you’re visiting.” But Nanna still picks up our puzzle pieces and troll dolls from the floor before we go to bed.
~
Now my mother rubs polish on the living room end tables and lines up the books on the shelves, mutter- ing to herself as she pushes the vacuum noisily from room to room.
“Go clean your room, too,” she demands, “It can never be tidy enough for her. And don’t forget to dust,” she adds. Her mouth is tight, and she yanks the cord
from the vacuum to plug it into the outlet in the next room. Dusting is my task ever since I wrote “dust
me” with my finger on the table next to the chair in the master bedroom where we often watch TV. My mother didn’t think it was funny. “You’re like your grandmother,” she smirked, “since you have so much to say about it, you can do it.”
A few months ago, my mother yelled at me about cleaning up. Her face twisted as she grabbed my toys and books and clothes and threw them all around my bedroom, making it messier. “It’s disgusting,”
she screamed and slammed the door so hard that
my picture of the Unicorn in Captivity shook in its frame and almost fell. “Don’t come out of there till it’s done,” she yelled.
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