I don't even know how old my mother was when she died, maybe forty-six, perhaps forty-eight. Only that it was in the spring of 1951. And that it had taken four years for stomach cancer to consume her. She died when I was twelve, taking with her virtually all my memories of her presence, of my father, my older half-brother and myself. It is as if we have been bleached from memory. Gone, too, is all feeling of having lived within a family and of ever having been a child.
The realization that I’d forgotten my mother surfaced the summer I was sixteen, away from home for the first time, serving breakfast at the Gray Inn in Provincetown. To get to my rented room under the eaves, I had to pass through a larger, dark one which held a double bed covered with a navy quilt. Perhaps my fear that some night a guest would occupy it, that I’d find a stranger sleeping under the coverlet as I crept past, heightened my perceptions because it was just as I crossed the threshold to my little room that the awareness that I remembered virtually nothing about my mother surfaced.
Suddenly I knew how much I’d lost. It was as if I’d tried to look back at the beginning of a book, but when I turned the pages, they were blank, the story erased. I only knew what my mother looked like from snapshots in the family album in which she appeared as a tiny, gray figure. The awareness of loss that surfaced while I was passing from one room to the next divides my life into before – still not understood – and the struggle to piece together a cohesive self afterwards.
Nothing more about my early childhood has revealed itself in the last fifty-three years; no memories have been added to my carefully catalogued list. The help of seven therapists has not enabled me to come any closer to recapturing those lost years, my lost family. But, the last two therapists have encouraged me to consider that certain feelings emerging under stress--the fear of abandonment, flashes of panic, a continued sense of deep worthlessness and failure--may be rooted in those forgotten years. In bad times, I sleep in my clothes with the lights and TV on. If I don't consciously fear going to bed, I recognize an uneasiness about surrendering to the dark. I have no proof that anything but my own dreams made me feel unsafe, no memory of traumatic events occurring when I was a child in bed. I don’t know what happened to make me afraid.
I count and recount memories from those years, fearing I will lose the precious details I possess. There are three types of recall. The most specific look as if a movie camera on a dolly has tracked from room to room. But something went amiss when the film was processed. Some of the objects are in sharp focus; others are blurred or shadowy. Images from the dining room are dark, but precise while those from the kitchen are smudged. All are devoid of people.
Another type of memory resembles a snapshot. Some of these images are distinct, as if this roll of film has been successfully processed and printed. Others are damaged. In one, an area of brown appears across the top of the frame above a triangle of beige. I amplify these blurs into elements positioned in the far corner of the living room – rug, polished hardwood floor and brown bits. They convey the certainty that I've done something wrong. An accompanying explanation goes: “You spilled rose dried petals. This made a mess. You had to clean it up. You used the vacuum, but the hose was plugged into exhaust. This made a worse mess.”
In the third kind, a stark sentence accompanies certain visual cues. For instance, across foggy impressions of the sink in the third floor bathroom, comes the explanation, “Your brother accidentally dropped a razor blade on your right hand which left that small scar between your thumb and index finger.”
My only remembered image of my mother is of a shriveled, yellow creature lying curled on the left side of my parents' bed. A sheet covers her. She had been returned, a near skeleton, from weeks of experimental treatment in Mother Cabrini Hospital in Chicago, the city where she was born. When called into the room to visit her, was I warned that she was nearly unrecognizable? I remember the shrunken and distorted mask, but can't get close to it. The whites of it’s eyes were bright yellow.
One sentence is left from the week it took my mother to die. Perhaps I am walking down the hall to my room when I hear Lou, the nurse who accompanied her on the plane, say, “Hold it, Sophie, hold it. I know you can.” Somehow I understand the details of the scene taking place behind the closed bedroom door – the enema, Lou's hearty voice urging my mother to heroic efforts. Years later, the humiliation of enemas will become an integral part of my sexual fantasies.
I am playing with my friend, Diane Rohn. The sun is out. I am afraid of heights, proud of having boosted myself onto the brick wall by the garage, but worried about how to get down. Has Diane climbed up, too? Will she help me? I notice that my father has driven up and parked in front of her house. How did he know where I am? Does he get out of the car and walk up the short path? Does he tell me that my mother has died or do I know simply because he's there? Do I cry and curl on the front seat with my head on his thigh as he drives home? I don’t remember.
Over the years, when friends casually refer to ordinary childhood experiences – “Don't you remember when your mother called you to come in on a hot summer night and you hid?” – I never do. These innocent questions reinforce the feeling that something unnameable is wrong with me. I am defective because I've forgotten.
My memories are only impersonal visual fragments. What I can’t remember is the everyday or the feelings. All sense of connection, particularly with my mother, is gone. Little trace remains from my experience of her: no scent of her skin; no shape of her body; no sound of her voice; no touch of her hand. I don't even know the color of her hair.
If my mother isn't there, I am left alone. I must be unworthy of love. My father isn't there either, but that doesn’t matter so much since I have a strong sense of him after the divide which separates me from my mother. I know the shape of his slender fingers, the way he held the pencil when he wrote on yellow legal tablets, the smell of scotch on his breath. I can trace the web of the implicit expectations for me that this quiet man with a PhD in math had – read diligently, formulate thoughts cogently, and never get angry.
I am missing also. There is no little girl into whose presence I can curl. Positing what the child Melissa might have been like is an abstract exercise rather than the sifting of emotions.
To place myself in context, I try to imagine the four people occupying a large house in the 1940s and early 1950s--mother and father, older son from her first marriage and their young daughter. I understand now that the whiff of early divorce separates these characters from strictly conventional expectations of that time, but my construct rests on a solidly middle-class family in impeccably ordinary surroundings.
The mother I've created packs my school lunch, finds a lost mitten, tucks me in at night. I assume that she really did these things. There is no evidence that I was a child whose depressed mother lay inert on the couch, leaving the daughter to care for herself.
The father I’ve created comes home from work, mixes a drink, puts the garbage out, rakes leaves. The brother, sixteen years older than his half-sister, goes off to college, then the army, finally to study in New York with brief visits home.
The child, Melissa, must wake up, eat breakfast, brush her teeth, walk to school with her friend Cinnie, sit at a desk and raise her hand hoping to answer the teacher's question. Unfortunately, I don't remember eating anything at all, wearing clothes or brushing my hair, much less feeling anything like hopeful expectation that I have the right answer.
In one fragment of memory, my brother's voice comes distinctly from the hallway, “You must be crazy or have money in the bank to be talking to yourself.” I am so desperate for certainty about my childhood that I would stake my life that this is an exact quote. The setting is the sunroom. I do a quick memory scan of the tall crank windows, low bookshelves, stopping at the polished surface of the desk where I must be playing with China dolls usually locked behind glass doors. Now I add an explanation: “My brother heard our mother talking. He didn't know I was there. He assumed she was talking to herself and is teasing her.” But there is absolutely nothing, not even a shadow, in that space she should occupy.
Another memory is a small snippet of film. It takes place in my parents' dark bedroom and is shot as if I, the camera, am looking down upon the blurred edge of a tray with toast on it. It's tricky to catch hold of the actors, but the shadow in darkness behind me must be my mother. The nothingness which entered the room must be my father. Now comes the gesture which creates a drama--the ghost father places a jelly jar down heavily on the tray. Something out of the ordinary has happened. I add enough narrative to construct a subdued drama similar to that in a Pinter play. My father has carried up a tray of breakfast for my mother. Perhaps there is toast for me. Something subtle passes between them. The slight thud of the jar registered as an abrupt change in his quiet, measured habits and alerted me to an emotional shift. He must be angry.
Two other scraps of memory hint at my mother's presence. In one, the camera is angled down toward a small ant mound in the cement cracks between the flagstones of the back porch. Sunlight. The focus is on steaming water being poured into the hill. There is emptiness where the person holding a tea kettle would be. This absence is surely my mother taking care of the ant problem.
Hard fingers rub the back of my head. A white field is in front of me. I deduce that my mother is washing my hair while I lean over the porcelain sink in my parents' bathroom. I can't picture either of us. I never appear in the mirror of memory and experience little from the inside out.
I should hear my mother singing, “You gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up in the morning,” but no one sings to me just as no one reads stories or stirs oatmeal. I don't exist and nothing happens everyday. Nothing recalls my mother's presence except a scolding interior voice which still tells me I've done something wrong. I am certain it echoes hers, but have no proof this is true.
My story begins in April of 1939 in a quiet suburban town on the north shore of Long Island at the end of the commuter line to New York City. I am born twelve years after Sophie Strunk marries Bob Shook. My brother, Richard Frank Samms, son of her first marriage, is then sixteen.
The house I remember was at 74 Litchfield Road. Perhaps my parents bought it when I was two or three. It was large, had dark shingles, a slate roof and was set up on a slope with enough property around it to insure that no neighbors looked into our windows. The house implied solidity, a home that grown children visited. My brother did. There are snapshots of him standing in his army uniform on the back porch.
Each detail, each fragment of that house, no matter how foggy or shadowed remains important to me. This is all I have. No one is ever home except Crooker who comes to clean every Thursday and she's but a shadow, though I still treasure a string of tiny glass beads she gave me.
Come with me while I finger house memories. I know you will think--there are so many details, why does she say she doesn't remember her childhood? Because I don’t remember living through it. If I can’t recall crying or wanting to be held or being angry or feeling sad or looking forward to a trip, I am left with a toehold in the wall by the front walk, mica flecks in the black and white rock.
Let me lead you to the kitchen. I can’t visualize the stove, but the "ice box," a family term, sits in a recess near the pantry. A bowl of clear gelatin made from fresh lemons, a few pits suspended, sits on one shelf of the bare interior.
One of the few details my father ever revealed to me about my mother’s illness was that she developed a metallic taste in her mouth. Hoping to solve the problem, they bought a set of copper bottom Revereware. I still use the pots, though the copper is crusted black.
Was the kitchen table round or square, bare wood or covered with a cloth? I remember a shining waffle iron and the sentence, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.” How often did I ask for more than I could eat? There are no lunches, dinners or snacks to catalogue though lamb chops, baked and mashed and sweet potatoes, meat loaf and pea soup are familiar food. My mother must have prepared them for us.
The dining-room is dark, though windows line the wall onto the covered back porch. There's a built-in china closet with drawers where my mother hid my Easter basket before leaving for her last hospital stay. Memory unties no packages, receives no presents except Crooker’s blue beads. All Christmases and birthdays are obliterated. Only those tiny china rabbits and jelly beans left for me to find that last April she was alive remain in my carefully maintained archive.
I catch the outline of one Thanksgiving dinner only because Mr. Atwood, name remembered, person invisible, is in the downstairs bathroom when I most mistakenly open the door. There is no hint of festivity or smell of turkey roasting, only a feeling of shame at catching a glimpse of a man-shadow standing in front of the toilet in that tiny room.
The living room is fogged and shimmery. The overall tone is beige. With effort, I materialize dark end-tables by the couch, bulbous white-based lamps on top. Later, one of them will sit on a bureau in my Aunt Marion’s guest room. I remember brass andirons, fire tools and a folding screen across the front of the fireplace. After my father’s death at age ninety, after I’ve put my aged, forever-forgetting step-mother, his third wife, into a nursing home, I find the andirons and a poker in their Nova Scotia attic. I also retrieve two oil paintings my mother and father bought from their exuberant Greek friend, George Constant, nudes of his black-haired wife reclining akimbo on a couch. The portrait that he painted of me several years before my mother died, blue eyes, pale face, a forlorn watercolor that hung in the Litchfield living room is there, too.
Christmas trees touching the ceiling, set in the corner of the room opposite bookshelves, appear in deckle-edged snapshots in the leather-bound family album. There are no real trees in any corner of my memory although strands of yellow, red and green imported glass beads, tarnished tinsel ropes and all the ornaments are still stored in the same cartons my parents packed them in each Christmas until my mother died. Now the boxes are shoved under the eaves of the dusty attic of my tiny two-family house. When my mother was alive, they were kept on wide, lined shelves of the third floor closet, boxes stacked neatly.
Up the three steps from the ‘sunken’ living room and into the hall. The stairs are to the right. Slide down, feet first, bouncing hard on each step, squealing ahhhhhhhhhh. I recall the sound of my voice jarred by the bump of each stair even if I don't remember inhabiting the body. Upstairs to the left are my parents' bedroom, bathroom, and sunroom.
Because Lou, who became my father's second wife, scolds him into wearing tennis shorts when I'm around, I deduce that he was in the habit of being nude. Even into his late eighties, he wore nothing to bed and reluctantly put on a robe to walk down the long hall to the bathroom when there was company. When I was a small child, did I crawl into bed with naked parents? Did I snuggle with them in their double bed under the quilt? Only the automatic impulse to type 'guilt' rather than quilt remains. I know this still repeated mistake is lodged in their bedroom, that it represents a feeling of pervasive guilt, but I have no idea why.
My parents' room is dark. The head of the double bed is against one wall, a throw rug next to it. What's in my mother’s closet besides the gray suit with an A-line skirt she wears in the snapshot taken in Bear Mountain State Park? After she dies, Lou gives me my mother’s salmon wool dress with knife-edged pleats, the short uncharacteristically frilly pink nightgown purchased the week she was dying and a black satin evening bag shaped like a box.
The bathroom is across the hall; white and black floor tiles, porcelain sink, tub and toilet, narrow window above the radiator. When I am in my fifties, my dreams center upon bathtubs, toilets and swimming. In one, I kneel by a small pool watching an older man playfully somersault in the water. When his nude body arcs out of the water, I notice his erection. Turning to the man next to me, I say, “We must pretend we didn't see it.”
My brother's sparsely furnished room with a walk-in cedar closet is down the hall to the right. Mine is to the left. Painted blue. Down two steps. The door latches. My bed is along the wall, foot toward the door. The aquarium for my turtles is by the window. Salt was small and green and Pepper was darker, maybe greenish black or brownish green. He was a little misshapen and I liked him best. I remember my left arm, palm up, resting on the green desk blotter. Pepper sat on my skin, eyes closed. My arm began to ache and I knew that if I moved, the moment would be over and he would no longer be sleeping there.
I must have liked staying home from school, sick. Later my father told me that I often had colds, that my mother worried, and carried trays of food upstairs and down until she became tired and irritable from the trouble I caused. It was comforting to hear the life of “Stella Dallas, poor girl from a mining town who might find happiness with a wealthy, entitled Englishman” on those afternoon radio soap operas.
It's dark. I'm crying, maybe screaming. Shadows must stand at the door. One or both must come closer to comfort me. For years I believed this incident meant my father had threatened divorce. Had I heard something in my sleep, my parents’ fighting, and awakened, frightened? My father never confirmed that this was true. Maybe I’d just had a bad dream.
In the forty-three years my father outlived my mother, he seldom spoke of her. Though he knew that I had seen many therapists and had become a photographer because I only knew what my mother looked like from black and white snapshots, he told me virtually nothing that would help me understand who my mother had been. I’ll never know about his life with her, whether family tensions developed because she was ill for so long, how much her personality changed during those years.
In his late eighties, after he’d recovered from a stroke, I coaxed him to write about his childhood in Ohio. Pages of measured script closely described details such as the Sunday morning the pet crow flew above when he and his parents walked to church. It fluttered outside until someone held the door open long enough for it to fly in and hover over the congregation before swooping down to perch on his father’s shoulder, much to his tight-lipped, teetoatling mother’s disapproval. I hoped writing would loosen his resistance and I could slip in a question about my mother and their life together, but he adroitly sidestepped any direct request for information.
But enough of my father’s reticence. The house tour is over. Let's go outside.
Grass was confined to the small upper and lower yards. Pachysandra covered the back hill down to the barberry hedge. There were rhododendron and laurel bushes, a dogwood, white birch, Japanese cherry that dropped pale petals and a widely branching ornamental apple with small red blossoms. Forget-me-nots bloomed in the lower front garden near the peonies and a drooping forsythia grew near the flat stone that marked the septic tank. The summer it overflowed, Cinnie and I must have held our noses against the stench as we sang “Don’t go by the forsythia bush, don’t go by the forsythia bush.” I hear our thin childish voices.
Because I remember dandelions in a patch of grass near the front door, I reconstitute a parent who instructs me on how to dig out the deep roots. My mother must be scolding me because I haven’t done it correctly. This memory easily slides into “anything worth doing is worth doing well” and “a stitch in time saves nine,” proving that I'm not weeding properly in spite of being shown how. An ambiance of failure permeates this memory, even if my mother never materializes.
A chasm separates my buried experience of childhood from the one I provided for my daughter, Krissy. My belief in home was crushed after my mother’s death when the house she’d loved was sold, the furnishings she had so carefully chosen were dispersed within a year. I fled from the quiet, suburban streets, from an immaculate house, from the unexplained mystery of my mother's illness and death, from my father’s silver martini pitcher and tumblers of scotch.
For my daughter, the perils of our poverty and fragmented home life were obvious. The noisy, dangerous tenements of the Lower East Side in New York City bore no resemblance to quiet dramas conducted in large houses set back on well-tended yards. The sounds of city traffic, honking horns and screeching tires, the delivery truck idling below our apartment, were unlike the sounds I must have heard as a child – the occasional car, a Good Humor van rounding the corner, the rattle of the milkman's bottles.
The sidewalks of the Lower East Side were dirty with cigarette butts, beer and soda cans, papers and dog shit. Junkies nodded against cars parked on our block, police locks on apartment doors, gates on fire escape windows. I was frightened living there and knew why.
My obsession to photograph the chaotic atmosphere in which Krissy spent her first nine years was connected to my childhood losses, the bedrock for my creative work and recklessness.
What I barely acknowledged was that I was so busy escaping reminders of my past that I was incapable of thinking about what I was creating for my daughter, the inter-racial child of an unmarried mother, born in the midst of the civil rights struggle and Vietnam war protests.
Though I never provided a secure childhood, much less a loving father, for my beloved daughter, hopefully I didn’t squelch her voice, her imagination. I loved listening to the monologues mimicking the Ukrainian and Spanish she heard around us as she skipped up 5th Street, bemusedly watched as she climbed up onto the bathroom sink, poured out a mound of cleanser and sang commercials into the mirror as she scrubbed. I knew how much the lively, adventuresome spirit of this sinewy little girl with long, tangled curls mattered to me, how grateful I was for her presence, for what she taught me.
Published in Potomac Review