Eve Joseph

A five-year-old asks his mother if the clouds are solid and wants to know why, when he looks up, he can’t see the old people and their old cats. I must have dozed off. The trees were bare when I fell asleep but now their leaves are that impossible newly minted green. Tom Waits is bellowing downstairs and any second now someone I love is going to walk through the door. I want to know why the clouds told the Serbian poet their names in the quiet of a summer afternoon. And why didn’t he share those names with the rest of us? Perhaps they did not translate into English. Perhaps the old want to stay hidden and keep their secrets all to themselves.

My mother was a white sheet drying on the line. Wooden clothespins held her tight as she lifted and snapped and filled like a sail. At night, when she covered me, I inhaled lily of the valley, burning leaves, the starched collar of a nurse’s uniform and the stillness of a recently abandoned room. She taught me how to iron the creases out of a man’s shirt after all the men had disappeared. My mother played piano by ear in the basement. A long line of hungry people gathered outside to hear her play. They wanted news from home. Overhead, handkerchiefs fluttered in the breeze. Little telegrams sent but never delivered.

Now that I live by the sea, I am never sure what the day will bring. Gulls stomp on the roof like heavy-footed prowlers causing me to wake in alarm. Broken shells litter the garden: clam, oyster and torn crab pincers serrated like nutcrackers. I’m standing at the window, sipping my morning coffee, when I see her. My mother is rowing against the current in the rain. I cup my hands and yell, Come in for a gin and tonic. It’s not that awful rowing toward God, nothing that dramatic. It’s just her, after all these years, the creak of oarlocks and a small wake trailing behind. Like the hapless Aeschylus I walk bareheaded, forgetting to look up at what might be hurtling toward me.