“Please come back”
My mom’s twin sister, aunt Grace keeps a shoe box in her basement that contains a worn pair of pink slippers (the last thing my mom could fit her badly swollen feet into), her last hospital ID bracelet, and a few letters. My mom passed away 30 years ago, but every now and then Grace brings the box up from her basement and we tenderly unfold the now brittle pages of the letters, re-read the familiar lines, and touch the slippers and bracelet as if through them we will be able to reach back to 1987 and feel her again.
Most of my memories of my mom are like these fragile relics, brief flashbulb moments. Conjuring them is like trying to recreate a tender and vivid dream by laying still in the morning holding on to the images, events, and feeling before it slips away.
The most vivid memories I have of my mom are from the two short years we lived with her in a trailer park 30 minutes west of Dubuque. It was the summer of 1980, a year after she and my dad divorced and she had found a job there as a night-shift nurse. At that time my older sister Trinity, and my younger sister Leah, and I were little girls, ages ten, four, and six.
In those days we were allowed and encouraged to play outside. Alone, or with packs of the neighborhood kids, we were out until suppertime, or dark, whichever came first. A large open field with tall grass next to the trailer park excited our imagination, and we pretended to be Indians on the run from cowboys.
If the weather was bad, my mom played us records. We especially loved her exercise record and would follow the moves along with her doing laps around the tiny living room in our underwear. Our favorite song on it was Copa Cabana. We belted out the lyrics in silly voices as we shook our little hips to make our mom laugh.
Our mom took us to pick out a kitten. We fell in love with the smallest calico and named her Cotton for her soft white belly. While we ate supper, we loved to giggle at the leaps and rolls Cotton would do as our mom teased her gently with a string. After supper Leah and I would fight over a spot in our mom’s lap while we watched TV. If it was Leah’s turn, I perched on the arm of the chair so I could rub the little mole on my mom’s arm. I was fascinated by how it felt. She had interesting scars on her arms too. A rectangular scar on her bicep from her smallpox vaccine and bigger scars around her armpits from the skin grafting she had when she was a teenager. I really liked to feel the thick scars under her arms, but she hated to be touched there.
Before bed, mom would pour us a little glass of RC Cola and dish out small bowls of vanilla ice cream with Hershey’s syrup. Then while we lay in bed falling asleep she played the piano and sang. She liked to play songs by Anne Murray, Barry Manilow and other sappy 70s love songs. She always carried a little bit of sadness in her eyes, and when she sang it was the longing in her voice that fascinated me. She seemed to drift into a different world when she played and sang. Her voice was beautiful, creamy, like golden velvet.
She wanted us to play piano, too. Trinity was good, but I didn’t have the patience for learning the notes and would rather be outside studying the shapes of clouds. When I practiced, she would become exasperated with my lack of trying. Once she got so mad she pulled me off the piano bench by my hair. After that I stopped playing and we never spoke about it again.
On the nights that my mom worked our babysitter, Dana would arrive and sit down in my mom’s chair. She smoked and watched TV with an expressionless, disinterested face while we got ready for bed and my mom rushed to get out the door. Dana felt like an imposter, and when my mom was gone we all had trouble falling asleep. Our trailer was close to the train tracks and at night as the long freight trains approached and sped by the trailer shook. They sounded close enough to crash right into us. To feel safe I slept with all of my stuffed animals. I arranged them in bed in the same order every night, saying good night to each one with a kiss. It was a ritual that tried the patience of whoever was putting me to bed. They had to kiss each one, too. The animals took up most of the bed and I had a little sliver by the edge. In the morning if I noticed one had one fallen off, I would be sad and afraid it’s feelings were hurt after being cold and alone on the floor all night waiting to be rescued.
In the morning the babysitter got Trinity and I up and ready for the long ride to school. It took almost an hour on country roads to get there and we were gone before my mom got home. The morning rides felt long. With sleepy eyes I followed the monotonous curving lines of the telephone wires as the bus slowly went from house to house. On the way home we could get our driver to play music for us. She had a tape with The Oakridge Boys’ song Elvira, Alabama’s Mountain Music, and Kool and the Gang’s Celebration. We cheerfully sang along and it passed the time. Leah didn’t go to school yet. When my mom came home from her long shift in the morning she went straight to bed and the babysitter left. Leah had a step stool so that when she woke up she could reach the cereal and turn on the TV. She was a sweet little girl and occupied herself quietly while my mom got a few hours of sleep.
Sometimes when my mom wasn’t working she left my older sister in charge and drove to Dubuque to go rollerskating or to choir practice. We started those evenings watching TV like we were supposed to. We lay close together on the floor under a homemade quilt propping our heads up on folded arms to look up at the little screen. Someone was always tugging on one end of the quilt, complaining that they didn’t have enough. Soon it was all out tug-of-war. Trinity could manage to pull the blanket all of the way off to her side, rolling up in it like a cigar. We would laugh and pile on top her. Forgetting all about TV, the goofy games began. In foot wrestling matches, two of us would lay at opposite ends of the couch with our feet touching in the middle. The winner had to pin her opponent’s knees to her chest any way they could. We learned to pinch each other’s thighs with our toes as part of the winning strategy. We also liked to stand in a circle with the ends of our socks pulled out just a little bit and stomp on each other’s feet until our socks came off. We had tickling contests to see who could keep from laughing the longest, we cut our own hair, and fed ketchup and cold spaghetti to our dolls.
We loved to torture Cotton by dressing her up in doll clothes or paper collars decorated with markers and glitter. Sometimes we would trap her under a laundry basket, or lock her inside of our toy schoolhouse. The schoolhouse was our favorite. After we rang the bell and opened the door she would run like mad around the house while we squealed with laughter. Poor Cotton.
Leah was small enough to fit in a toy doll stroller, and Trinity would push her up and down the hall making a dare-devil turn in the living room while I jumped up and down cheering them on. It was all hilarious fun to us — until it wasn’t. Inevitably, Leah would fall out of the stroller, someone would get pinched too hard, or trip and fall over a sock, and there would be crying for mommy, and threats to tattle. We fought over all kinds of things too, especially Barbies. They make great weapons and a hit with a Barbie over the head is especially painful. It often got a little out of hand when we were alone.
Sometimes there was hell to pay, but not for what you might think. Our mom needed her rat-tail comb to put her hair up in rollers. If we had misplaced it there would be an awful scene. Usually Trinity got yelled at for this — she should’ve known better. Our mom turned the trailer inside out and there would be no peace until it was found.
As a teenager our mom had a rare skin condition. Her skin turned pale and dry with large areas of dark painful plaques under her arms, on her inner thighs, and her lips. So much of her hair fell out that she and her twin sister, Grace, both got very short hair cuts. In most pictures of the twins it is impossible to tell who is who, but in their senior pictures you can see a dramatic difference between them. Grace has lustrous hair, while my mom’s is dull and frizzy. Grace has a twinkle in her eye, a winsome smile, and pert upright posture, while my mom seems to be working hard to smile through painfully dry, thick, and cracked lips. She was badly scarred by the skin grafting that she had to endure, but also from the emotional trauma. After the symptoms mysteriously went away she meticulously guarded her appearance.
I only knew her with long chestnut hair that was always carefully curled so that it fell in soft waves around her face and over her shoulders. I almost never saw her without makeup, she even put it on to go to bed. She called this, “putting on her face”. I loved to watch her apply it, looking up fascinated by her, but also with a critical eye. Not only did I wish she would wear more colors, like bright blue eye-shadow and red lipstick, I questioned how thick she always applied the black mascara and eyeliner around her eyes. She penciled on her eyebrows in a thinly tapered too-perfect arc. It pained me to think how erased and blank she must have felt without it.
We did not go out very often, because mom wouldn’t leave the trailer until everything was just how she liked it, but every Friday after school we piled into her old white Pinto station wagon and went away for the weekend. We were wither headed to Wisconsin to visit my dad, or to our grandparent’s farm with our mom. Before leaving the house the last thing she did was the vacuuming. We would stand on the small piece of linoleum by the entryway with our bags packed and our shoes and jackets on, while she vacuumed us out the door leaving perfect stripes in the carpet.
The following year, mom started bringing boyfriends home to meet us. We were daddy’s girls and this felt like a betrayal. Some of her dates had kids and we were expected to play together which made for long, awkward evenings. It wasn’t long before she was talking about one man in particular, Tim. She met him in the hospital when he came in with a broken arm. We didn’t like Tim at all. He was so different from our dad who taught elementary school, loved to play Dungeons and Dragons, read, perform as a mime, and do crafty projects. Tim was a boastful and macho man. He wore cowboy boots, watched football, and drove a Bronco. Mom said he was a self-made entrepreneur and was moving to Colorado to start a business with a partner — a staffing agency for temporary workers. She began floating the idea of us moving there too. We said no way, and that was that. Goodbye, Tim! Or that’s what we thought.
We spent that summer with my dad in Monroe, Wisconsin. We couldn’t wait to see him and play our favorite game, Tickle in the Mud. Laying on the floor, we would take turns being the tickle monster while the others tried to squirm out of reach. That summer Trinity played on a softball team, and Leah and I rode our bikes to the pool everyday. I met a girl named Katie at the pool. She was a tom-boy just like me and we bonded while doing dare-devil jumps off the high dive. Our dad gave us money to buy snow cones from the concession stand and when Leah and I came home we proudly showed off our blue lips and tongues. On those long summer nights all of the kids on the block would play outside until dark. We made mazes of sheets and blankets hanging from the clothes line, and played countless games of hide and seek, tag, and four square.
While we were away our mom went to visit Tim in Colorado.
Late that summer when we were getting excited to go back home to our mom, she called us. In a matter-of-fact voice she said that she was going to stay in Colorado with Tim. She had sold our trailer home and furniture and told us that we would be staying with our dad. She said she was going to start over and wanted a chance to find herself. We immediately understood that to mean we were part of the old life she was shedding, that she no longer wanted us. We weren’t given a choice in the matter, but if we had been, I am not sure any of us would have known which parent to choose. Our dad was our hero, and our mom was our rock. Our dad and his girlfriend, Kathy, did their best to reassure us that everything would work out. We were unconsolable, begging our mom to come back, and when we hung up the phone we cried with our arms wrapped around each other until late in the night.
We moved into a bigger house and dad married Kathy. That fall my little sister had her first day of kindergarten. Kathy took a picture of her for my mom. I can still see Leah standing on the sidewalk clutching her new backpack with a big tooth smile and her baby blond hair. When she smiled for pictures she squeezed her eyes shut and her straight freshly trimmed bangs just grazed her eyebrows. I started third grade and was happy that Katie was in my class. On the first day of school one of the 4th-grade boys bullied me into a corner with a group of other kids gathered around watching. Katie rushed in and drove them away yelling and waving her arms. It was thrilling to be rescued like that by such a brave and loyal friend. Trinity started the 7th grade and between playing on the volleyball team and band practice she was almost never home before suppertime. My dad took an extra job coaching after school to help with the new expenses and Leah and I were home for long afternoons with Kathy. She was nothing like our mom, and we felt lost without her.
That fall marked the end of an era for us, and the beginning of one filled with intense longing for a mom that felt further away with each passing year. Five short years later, she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that swept over her like a hurricane. It only took six months before she was gone.
We had no idea that those two years in the trailer would become a film we played over and over in our minds in an attempt to hang on to the few memories of our mom. As I write, bathing in a dream-like nostalgic fantasy, and attempting to remaster the memories of our mom into high-definition, I realise that its not my mom, but my sisters who are the real the stars in the film. I will wipe away the one tear that rolls down my cheek and call my sisters. We will share baking tips, talk about the latest adorable thing my niece Sammy said, and how well my nephew Jared is doing in basketball. Most importantly, we will laugh and in all of the unspoken ways know how very dear we are to each other.
On a beautiful spring day in 3rd grade, the year after mom left, our teacher had us think of a message we would like to send into space like in the Voyager mission, but with balloons. We had tiny pieces of paper to write on, then we rolled them up tightly, and tucked them inside of the small opening of our balloon. The teacher filled them with helium and we walked to the park to launch them into space. I wrote a message to my mom, “Please come back.” Would anyone find and read my message? Would she? Just like I did then, I imagine I am letting go of the string and watching it float up into the blue sky to live among the pillowy clouds. I can once again fold the letters along their well worn creases and tuck them into the box with the matted pink slippers where they will stay until I need to feel them again.
