Accidental Falls

While returning home with a borrowed bottle of wine, my mother tripped over the pavement, scraping the skin from her palms. The bottle shattered. My mother, a hysteric by nature, screamed and cried and drew a crowd—my father chief among them, who discovered that a shard of the green bottle glass had imbedded itself in the center of my mother’s forehead. He removed it, telling her it was all right, that she was not hurt. This was no comfort to my mother, who was fixated on that she could have been blinded. This was my mother’s world, the could-have-been of multiple horrors and outcomes. He helped her to her feet as she cried, the crowd gathered round and gave her comfort with the one platitude she claimed as her own—how awful that this should happen to you.

I watched from the front steps, a ten year-old aware of my mother’s high-strung nature, my father’s inability to be enough to keep her calm, and my own sense of curiosity as to whether the glass shard would leave a scar on my mother’s beautiful forehead and thus make my father’s life and mine an endless nightmare of the horrible things that one could never get over in life, because, after all, the wounds were there forever, were they not?

And she was right about that. My father did not succeed in removing all the glass, and a sliver buried deep in her forehead soon festered and swelled into a marble-sized knot that required the expertise of a doctor to excise. Five stitches and a two-week dose of antibiotics, and soon the swelling disappeared and the wound healed, but left in its wake a noticeable indentation and a small white scar.

For my mother, this was devastating—a deep tragedy. She was no longer perfect but marred. When she looked in the mirror, the scar was all she saw. And she was convinced that it was all anyone else saw, too. Not her high cheekbones, her full lips, or her autumn brown eyes. Not the striking tone and glow of her olive skin with its burnished softness. Not any of it. Just the indentation.

There was no consoling her. There was no comfort, no hope, in telling her it was a tiny imperfection, barely noticeable. Gradually, in her anguish over her loss of perfection, my father and I drifted from her sight and from her world. We were no help in assuaging her sadness.

And so it went on like this—she moving farther away, and my father and I drawing closer. In time, I became immersed in my own world of dreams and fantasies, and my father sought release in his job as an accountant. He found new love in his columns, countering my mother’s disdain.

What my mother did with her days was unknown to us. Sometimes she was home, but mostly she was gone. In her absence, my father and I ate meals together—breakfasts at fast food places that created fluffy yellow scrambled eggs from egg substitutes, lunches of sandwich meats on grocery store bread made soft and pliant by added chemicals, and pot pies for our dinners. We did not talk much during these meals and never mentioned my mother. She came and went very much like a moth drawn to the light in the darkness and withdrawing in silence during the daylight.

It was not until years had gone by that we learned she had spent many of her days with a friend of my father's who lived only two streets away. He read to her during the days and evenings. This part my father and I had the hardest time understanding. An affair perhaps, even a friendship, but the sharing of books made no sense to either of us. My mother had never expressed any interest in reading. Her focus was on fashion, and clothing and jewelry had always been her passion. And travel—she would have gone anywhere around the world if finances permitted. But books and ideas, were not, as she might say, her cup of tea.

It was the letters that affected my father and me the most. Apparently my father's friend had the tenderness to touch my mother's small, delicate scar—even to kiss it sweetly in those moments when she was most sad at the loss of her fine beauty that had brought her so much pleasure. Apparently he understood something my father and I did not. We had only words to offer, and words were not enough. My father's friend would sit next to my mother on the couch, put his arm around her to draw her near, and read to her. Poetry was her favorite. Poems were short, and after each poem, she would receive a gentle, delicate kiss on her forehead, the man's lips finding ways to say everything my father and I could not. The tenderness was touching, and it made my father feel empty. Eventually it made my father feel bitter, and soon he was as consumed with his bitterness as my mother was with her scar. I was in the middle and lost. There was no room for me inside his bitterness or her sense of how tragically life had treated her. The times I was home, I was mostly alone. I ate pot pies by myself and wondered where my father went in the days and evenings that my mother was with my father's friend. It became unimportant for me to be at home because nothing I had to offer mattered. My words were ineffective, just as my offers to listen were dismissed as irrelevant.

From his diary and a handful of notes I found after my father's death, I learned that he had gone to listen to music in those times he no longer wished to be home. Jazz—the coolness, the unpredictability, the freedom, and the wonder. It had all captivated him and lifted his spirits beyond the heavy weight of my mother's isolation. He no longer needed her and did not care that she no longer needed him.