Violation Read Free Page B

around my birthday the little ornamental cherry tree in front of her house bursts into bloom, luxuriant and top-heavy. I used to sit in its lap of low branches; now I pick blossoms off the top. The bubbling frog creek is a dry gully; the noisy park clean and quiet. I see strange faces in the streets, new shapes, house-peaks along empty hills. It is time to think things through, to follow the thread where it enters the knot until I find its exit. Time now to confess my tenuous hold on adulthood before I am orphaned in turn.
    She has filled the drawers of my old dresser with her wedding albums and old baby pictures and clippings of my brother’s high school football games, neatly scissored. She takes with her where she goes a voice I’ve heard from birth, a step, a chime, the smoky car. A door closes, irrevocably, on rooms cluttered in certain ways by her passage, on a dusty piano, sun-dried towels, and certain plays of light on certain trees. Chipped crystal stays, without her use, and the dark bedroom and high dark bed, without her smell. I begin a definition of love made fundamentally of the familiar. These things and these places, the way a shadow casts in August and seamstress hands and the cool wet smell of the grass in the early morning, are not things I’ve used much for years. I have been inattentive in my turn and made another family, holding hers in reserve, available. She is dying and sad and scared to die, and takes with her the remnants and desires of my life till now. She lets go and I hold back, watching her grow weak and frail, disconcertingly familiar as she disappears from sight.
    She was never the mother I wanted her to be. We have never chattered over coffee, grown girlish together while my daughter watched. For a long time I tried to change her, reproachful, and failed, not seeing how she had tried to change me long ago. She won’t change now; she is merely herself. So is my father, blusteringand mad. He meticulously catalogs videotapes of old movies, John Wayne and Errol Flynn, their favorites, to watch alone half-asleep in the evenings after she dies. My silent brother and my shrill, half-panicked sister won’t change, not much, and neither will I. We are the gifts we were given. I sit by her bed in sadness, an unspoken summing-up held, like so much else, back. These are the people I am accompanied by, my escorts. We dance attendance on each other, as families do, and little else. There is little else to do.
    And I go home, wherever it is, and confront a son resentful of my tight rein. He demands a faster adulthood, receiving power in unexpected shifts and abrupt shufflings. I grab the leash and run the other way. He is hurt by my mother’s coming extinction, blustering like my father, his grandfather, her husband. I grow dizzy in the sticky threads, resistance against the spin. He is letting go of me and I am holding back, for I know he has no idea, no possible idea of all the many surprises still in store.
    Zyzzyva , Winter 1986–87
    For more than thirty years I’ve been writing about the way family wraps around our lives. There is no escaping it, even when we escape—one way or another, we are made of it. This was one in a series of essays I wrote about the sticky threads woven around us by both parents and children—a web we create, long for, celebrate, and hate.

      Fetus Dreams
    WE DO ABORTIONS HERE; THAT IS ALL WE DO. THERE ARE weary, grim moments when I think I cannot bear another basin of bloody remains, utter another kind phrase of reassurance. So I leave the procedure room in the back and reach for a new chart. Soon I am talking to an eighteen-year-old woman pregnant for the fourth time. I push up her sleeve to check her blood pressure and find row upon row of needle marks, neat and parallel and discolored. She has been so hungry for her drug for so long that she has taken to using the loose skin of her upper arms; her elbows are already