My Mother's Words | Michelle Ladner

Works: Works

My Mother's Words

I remember the feel of the couch. Its thick, knubby threads were black and white. Running my small palm against them, I pressed into the side of the cushion. I was seated on the floor, inching my fingertips toward my mother’s long wiry hair, awed at how those ebony waves spilled onto the reddish-brown carpet. Her hair reminded me of a waterfall in one of those romantic movie scenes meant to show people what love looked like. I didn’t dare touch her. My fingertips stopped their pursuit a couple of threads away from contact. One black thread and one white thread rested between her hair and my finger. Even then I realized thread was not the obstacle between us, but I pretended that it was.

I shifted my eyes upward, perhaps to focus on something other than that two-thread distance. I watched the smoke from my mother’s cigarette swirl and bend, rising up to the yellowed popcorn ceiling where her dark eyes were fixed. The house was quiet and the television was off, which meant it was a weekday. My father was at work and my brother at school—this was the way of things. Everyday we shared this quiet break before she prepared for their return. Mid-day sunlight streamed through the window over the couch back, filtering through the haze-filled room. Those rays of light, though diffused, were my companions and warmed my cheeks from the outside in.

My mother could lie so still. Her wrist rested gently on her forehead as she balanced a pillar of ash on the end of a cigarette from between two fingers over her lush black hair. Maybe it was then that I felt the urge to retrieve my Barbie and Ken dolls. I could never just watch her the whole time. I posed their rigid bodies in an embrace in front of Mom’s cascade of hair, staging the movie image in my mind, making sure not to let the dolls touch even one stray strand. My mother’s eyes never left the ceiling.

“Meh?” Making my dolls bounce back and forth to the music in my head, I asked my mother, “Will I fall in love?”

“No one love you like Mom,” she said.

Looking at her, not fully understanding how this was the answer to my question, I placed the dolls on the carpet and reached up to touch her coffee-colored hand which rest unengaged by her side. Before my fingers could reach her, she shifted her cigarette into that hand and sat up. I watched her stub out the butt in the ashtray on the end table. My mother stepped over the dolls, still linked in the only embrace that their stiff straight arms would allow, and quickly she disappeared into the kitchen.

Letting my hand smooth over the warm spot in which she had lain, I left my dolls on the carpet. I climbed onto the couch and took her place. I tried to lie still, listening to pots and dishes coming to life in the kitchen. Inhaling the smoky, spicy scent she left behind, I pressed my cheek deep into the cushion. My fingers, however, couldn’t remain still. Instead, my busy hand ran along the edge of the cushion once more, and again thick black and white threads were under my fingertips. Without thinking, I forced my finger through the space between the threads to see if I could touch the stuff inside.

I might have been four when I first began to read my mother’s words. I don’t remember if she had learned to write yet, and I’m certain that I couldn’t actually read. However, the understanding that a person’s words had to be interpreted and that they possessed complex multiple meanings came to me quite early. Examining her words as she spoke to me would be like learning a language that only she and I used. I came to understand this because throughout my life two things were constant—my mother discouraged me from learning her native language, which I regretted, and I was forced into the role of translator to her broken English, which I resented. Whether I was situated as commentator to the antics of Bert and Ernie when my mother and I watched Sesame Street together, or I was repeating to the Sears salesperson the exact English words my mother used when she attempted to purchase a new washing machine, I found the problem of language integral to her relation with the world. And because of my relation to my mother, it would become my problem also. Though others failed to understand her, she and I conversed fine, but we would never communicate like mother and daughter. It was more teacher and student. Often, I was the teacher. Or at least, for a time, this was my perception.

My mother’s memories of Thailand had always been the word key. I remember spending hours at every stage of my life listening to my mother tell stories about her childhood. I know now she was teaching me. Her lessons were simple. These stories were meant to show me the ease of my life in America. My mother could be a hard and closed woman, but I learned that through these tales I could get a glimpse of my mother from the inside out.

I drove home for the weekend from Florida, where I lived and worked to put my husband through graduate school. I was twenty-five. Having driven the four and a half hours non-stop to my parent’s house in Mississippi, I had plenty of time to think. It was then that I decided I would write about my mother. On my arrival, I fell into the routine of my usual homecoming, predictable as the sun rising in the morning. If I arrived in the day, I would find my mother in her garden. If I entered the house at night, my mother would be in her bedroom waiting, and it would be my charge to seek her out. It was then that she told me stories. It was these stories I would decide to write.

I left my bags in the living room and walked toward the doorway where the light glowed yellow and soft swirls of smoke billowed into the hallway. Propped up against several pillows, with three cats purring and splayed across sections of the full-sized mattress, was my mother shelling pecans with a crab leg cracker and a metal finger nail file. I have never known my mother to remain idle long—even while lying in bed.

Her cigarette was in reach, next to her full coffee cup. I took my place. There was enough space between the bed and dresser for me to sit on the floor with my back against the drawers. I started to watch the muted Thai-dubbed Indian soap opera playing on the television. She complained that there were too many cats and that we needed to have a barbecue. I watched as she stopped shelling pecans long enough to scratch Casper, the overweight gray tabby, affectionately behind the ears. All of this was part of my education.

I asked her, “How many pecans are you going to shell?”

“I already do two bags.”

“How big are the bags?”

She held her hands out chest wide then positioned one hand above her head and the other at her knee.

“You’re kidding?” I knew she wasn’t.

“No,” she said. “And I have two bucket in laundry room.”

“What are you going to do with them all, Meh?”

“Eat, give away. Take some to husband when you go.”

I nodded.

“Water still hot, make coffee.”

I didn’t want coffee, but I got up and went to the kitchen anyway. Before compromising on hot tea, I poked my head into the laundry room to take a look at the buckets my mother was planning to shell. People hear the word ‘bucket’ and tend to think maybe something in the five-gallon capacity. I decipher my mother’s words, and anticipate two ten-gallon buckets. What I saw were two thirty-gallon trashcans full of pecans and about forty one-gallon freezer bags of shelled nuts stacked on the dryer. I realized that there are words that I will misinterpret and that my mother’s concentration and patience will never cease to amaze me.

I returned, settling onto the floor with my tea. My mother’s eyes were focused hard on some point beyond her hands.

“It was raining.” Her fingers were busy manipulating the nail file. With a gentle flick, the nut came loose from its shell perfectly whole.

“Today?” I sipped my tea.

“So much water. The worms coming up from the dirt.” She shuddered as she cracked open another pecan. “So many worms. That why I hate worms.”

I realized now, she was remembering. “I know, Meh. I remember this story. But tell me anyway.”

She went on to tell me how the river near her first hut flooded and she, and her family, had to run from their home through puddles of water to a boat. She was old enough to walk and to talk yet not old enough to understand that this was the last time she would see this dwelling. The puddles grew and the worms surfaced. My mother cried out, frightened by the writhing masses of earthworms that she found herself wading through. Finally, huddled in the small wooden rowboat my mother and her older sister sat clutching each other as the rain drenched them. Her sister was wailing, she said, but my mother was not—there were no worms in the boat. Her mother used cupped hands to scoop rainwater collecting in the boat, and tossed it into the rising river. Her father wanted to paddle the boat straight across, but the current was too strong. They ended up three miles downstream.

My mother smiled at the thought of this, though I knew no one was smiling when they watched their hut wash away. I learned through her stories during my life that she would move many times. She would not always be with a family that loved her and she would carry more heartache and loss than anyone I would ever know. I would learn of her abuse—emotional, physical, and I suspect, even sexual—which closed my mother off from me in many ways. I reveled in her smile.

I told my mother that one day I hoped to write her story down. She nodded approvingly and said, “the mind forgets.” I

asked her if I could record her storytelling. She agreed. I made a mental note to buy a hand held recorder.

One month later, I arrived again at my mother’s house from Florida with my recorder. I dropped my bags and walked into her room where the smoke swirled out into the hallway. Her cigarette was there, but she was not. I put on the kettle and sat down at the kitchen table waiting as I flipped through an advertisement from the day’s mail. From the laundry room, my mother emerged with a notebook. Black and wireless. She dropped the notebook in front of me and walked to the kitchen counter.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“What’s this, Meh?”

“You ask for story. I give you story.” She didn’t turn to face me. Instead, she started washing a basket of vegetables.

I flipped through the notebook, astounded. My mother’s scratched words covered pages of this notebook. Over eighty, I counted later. I looked at the first page and this is what I saw:

Original home. and native land, rura district is Banphongmaung. Village district. is Khakanphutphon. Province is Ubonratchatani. If short call Ubon. First hut in village It look new Is built with bamboo shoot. Using some of leafs to make walls. Use grass for roof…

I blinked, letting watery eyes scan the rest of the page. The recorder was obsolete and forgotten. My mother chopped her vegetables refusing to look at me. I held her words in my hands.

“Meh?” I placed the notebook down on the table. “Thank you. I can’t believe you wrote all this in one month.”

My mother remained unmoved.

I knew how hard a task this was for her. I also knew the black ink that filled these white pages would be an inadequate depiction of what my mother had felt and experienced. Yet, they were her words and I dared to make them my own. How I wished at that moment, I understood my mother’s native language. If only I could read Thai. Though her writing skills were no stronger in her native tongue, I figured different words might bring me that much closer to real understanding.

I touched my hand to my mother’s shoulder, catching a strand of hair with my fingernail, and she twisted out from under me. She dared not soften. Without turning toward me, she busied herself filling a pot with water. I took her place at the cutting board, and began the tedious process of cutting Kaffir lime leaves into threads with a large knife for panang curry.

“You my daughter,” she said finally, breaking the silence. “No one love you like Mom.”

Published in the Oracle: Fine Arts Review, University of South Alabama, Volume IV, Spring 2008