Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
27.1
Brett Griffiths
Something Like a Broken ArmSome can count on cold air in September, newborn nights in autumn’s darkness. Perhaps you can believe in dewy pavement and kids playing on rocks in the yard in front of a church, or in a red car with its steel-cage protection. Or maybe not. Instead, you count on the tall oak tree and a car spinning out of control. Some people trust the reality of vodka. This is a story about a child, told twenty years later. So you can’t even trust the cold air. You can only forgive memory for betraying itself in all the right places, memory learning to forgive death. Or, maybe, the other way around.
In September of 1979, the air cooled more quickly than our summer skin was used to, and the beginning of school and the end of the high dives and cannonballs for one more year hung on our minds as heavily as the moist chill of autumn hung in the Michigan air. Several of us waited outside of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, a wood building with deep, sweeping angles that sat just off Baldwin Road. We waited for our ride. My mother had promised to carpool us home, and I waited anxiously. As a six-year-old, I derived satisfaction from having my mother drive the carpool. I would get the front seat while the other kids scrambled for a window seat in back. The car would smell like me, and I knew exactly when I would be dropped off: carpool security. That night, my mother was late. I knew she would come, however, and when the Baccho kids offered to call their parents, I stopped them. My mother had been delayed. Only hours before, I’d seen her with Marriage Encounter couples in the living room singing John Denver songs as she hugged me good-bye and promised me she’d pick me up.
Finally, after what seemed like hours waiting for her car, a station wagon arrived; Mr. Baccho was driving. I refused to get in the car. I said, quite matter-of-factly, I would wait, but Mr. Baccho insisted, I got in. He let me have the front seat, and then he told me that a tree had jumped out in the road to wrestle my mother’s car, but that she had won and was at the hospital with “something like a broken arm.” Now, maybe he didn’t know what had happened, or how severe the accident was. He hadn’t spoken to any of the adults in the waiting room of the hospital who had seen the tubes and chambers hooked up to her body. Suspense is not part of this story. She died. Whatever he knew, I knew he was lying.
It is the first time I remember being aware that an adult was lying to me. At the same time, the lie was factual. True, the tree and the car “wrestled” one another. True, my mother was at the hospital; no doubt, she had something like a broken arm. His lie was made up entirely of truths, and I knew not to believe him. When we finally got to the Markus’s house, where I would sleep that evening, I found my sister in the front room. “Mom is dead,” I said and got on Mrs. Markus’s stationary bike, “and don’t try to tell me she isn’t.” My sister jumped up from the floor by the TV and chased me around until I promised never to say that again. I promised, and I went to sleep in a sleeping bag in the room of the youngest Markus child.
The next morning, I could hear my father’s voice in a whisper in the front room of the house. It was a lime green room, though lightly decorated and tasteful in that late seventies cocktail manner. I peaked out at him and saw him pacing and talking. I went out, and this is true, thinking I should help him tell me about my mom. He took me on his lap and told me she was dead. I cried. He cried. I asked if she was okay, if he had made sure she was in heaven. Then, and every moment after when the story of that night was retold, he said he was there, he saw her, and she never knew what hit her. She died immediately. The ambulance workers found a fresh-lit cigarette that had burnt itself out under the driver’s seat.
~~~
The story goes like this: It was raining. Mom drove down Baldwin Road with a Winston hanging out of her mouth. She looked down a minute and fumbled for the lighter. The passenger-side tires went off the side of the road. Mom looked up in time to swerve, light the cigarette, catch the same tires on the curb of the road, and spiral down into the ditch. She hit one oak tree head-on, and, as the car continued to whip to the left in the milliseconds after the crash, the passenger side smashed up against another tree. Mom’s head smashed the windshield and the driver’s side door window. She died immediately. She never knew what hit her.
~~~
Dad heard about the accident from a neighbor who had driven by right after. He had called to make sure it wasn’t my mom’s car and then, when Dad told him my mom had just left the house and was, in fact, driving the red Mirada, said, “Gary, you better get over there quick.”
My dad ran out of the house. He left the company in the living room and ran and ran for a mile down to the accident site.
My cousin, sitting across the street in the cul-de-sac where we all used to play, remembers laughing. Uncle Gary looked crazy running and screaming like that down the road.
I don’t know why he didn’t take the other car.
~~~
People began seeing my mother almost immediately after she died. My cousin, Angie, who was bulimic then, saw her first. While purging her food, she felt what she described later as a cold, hard hand on her shoulder; looking around, she saw the ghost of my mother standing in the bathroom. In that same house, what must have been only a week or so later, my aunt went into the nursery for my youngest cousin and saw, instead of diamond-patterned wallpaper, paper with my mother’s face everywhere: typing, on the phone, brushing her hair, reading a book.
Soon, it seemed, everyone had seen my mother somewhere. I heard about ghostly sightings from grown women in our church and various acquaintances in my mother’s clubs and social circles. The stories searched for intrinsic validity, which seemed dependent upon my believing them. Often they started with the phrase, “I saw your mother, my best friend,” or, “ I saw your mother, the Girl Scout leader,” or even, “your mother, my neighbor.” Each story’s introduction prefaced with “your mother,” followed by the “my” relationship, the reason I should believe the story was true. What the teller invariably misunderstood was that I needed no convincing. I believed each of these stories, like the horror movies I’d watched from my hiding spot behind the couch. I knew how good people died and came back to kill their families. I fell asleep each night beneath a pile of blankets pulled over my head and prayed to God that my mother please not come to see me that night. I would bury my head beneath the blankets so that, if she came, she could not find my neck and cut off my head.
At six I had already been introduced to the supernatural, and my mother’s death taught me to fear and mistrust the relationship I’d developed with it. On a weekday evening, what seemed to me a long time then, but I’ve been told was only months prior to my mother’s death, my sister, my mother, and I heard a voice. My mother lay on the couch crocheting, I on the loveseat picking patterns out of the black and brown mottled carpet with my eyes, and my sister washed dishes in the kitchen, which connected to our living room by one railing and a step. I remember my sister and me fighting and my mother pleading with us to stop. Perhaps we fought over the dishes or what we would watch on television that night. Perhaps we only fought because I was five and she was eleven and that made for lots of things to fight about. My mother had just put down the afghan she was working on and asked us, for the last time, to stop fighting. That was when we heard it.
It happened in stereo, so that later, when people asked us to determine from where the voice projected, we could only answer, “everywhere,” and that meant it could have come from “anybody.” At first, my mother asked if we had heard anything, or maybe, we asked her. She checked the garage and called out for my father, who was on his way home from work, and then for my uncle, who lived across the street. The voice permeated the air, deep and loud and hard like thunder. No men were found in or near the house. I learned later that my mother told my father that night that she would die soon, and made him promise to remarry. My mother said she had a special visitor that night, and told him the story. My father asked what the voice said exactly.
The fact is, none of us remembered exactly. I remember the sound of it prickly like static in my ears and booming from the walls around me, but I don’t remember what it said. My sister and mother talked and conjectured that it said something like “Be happy while you are together” or “Be happy now” or “Appreciate what you have.” Yet no one could agree. I don’t remember words at all, only the feeling of being scolded, and not feeling very afraid. I understood the context, and the context of all of these versions was true, but none had the words exactly.
For the first year after my mother’s death, I asked my sister repeatedly what real words were spoken, and I disallowed all her attempts to approximate them. I wanted the message, if we had heard one at all, to be clear, prescriptive, and decisive. I wanted it to answer “why?” and “what now?” I wanted it to be literal. Still, no matter whom I asked, my sister or the friends of my mother who had heard the story, nobody could convince me of the verbal content of the message. My father, who never heard the voice, tells me emphatically that the voice said, “Try and be happy now.” Even as an adult, I’m not sure I heard words at all. The voice was so loud it was as if it came from inside my own head. I heard it and didn’t hear it, understood it without words. The sound was deafening. I remember the warning: those moments—my mother and I in the living room across from each other, her couch against the wood-panel wall where the long-thong skis hung, I on my loveseat against the brick wall by the sliding glass door and the kitchen railing, my sister in the kitchen with her hands in sink water—these things, they would not last.
There were premonitions, too.
Sometime before my mother died, we made cookies. I sifted flour while my mom cracked the eggs. I watched the sifting flour, looking once in a while at the metal band that swung around like a jump rope inside the metal canister. I watched the yolks and whites of the eggs dropping, disappointed that I could not break them myself. She told me then that sifting flour was most important, because it made sure that nothing else got into the cookies but the flour. Thinking some about this, I covered the sifter with one hand and continued to watch through the gaps between my fingers. I wondered exactly what other things were trying to get into the cookies. I had been preparing to tell my mother my story, but I continued turning the handle of the sifter until I scared myself and blurted out, “You’re going to die.”
My mother stood there for a while looking at me before she asked what had made me say that. I told her about my bad dreams, about the car and her tied on the roof and falling off on the road, told her we wouldn’t make cookies again. She said, “I will always be your mother.” As an adult, I remember this and ask myself, what else could she have said? Even if she thought she would live a long life, she could not have promised it. In retrospect, she knew more than that. She knew I was right to be afraid, for she herself told my father she would die soon. What’s more, she knew that I knew. For some reason, though the conversation with my mother resolved nothing, I felt at ease. I didn’t worry about the nightmares I would have. Instead, I spent what seemed like hours looking into half eaten cookies, searching for specks of flour I’d put there. Unable to separate the flour parts from the egg parts, I settled on finishing them, knowing only the ingredients that belonged in the cookies had been baked.
~~~
Even the supernatural events before my mother’s death did not prepare me for the stories that people told. For a year, these stories seemed to self-generate, so that the same story told in October grew into other stories by April and May. Soon, the hairdresser who claimed she saw my mother in the grocery store told of my mother following her home and keeping watch over a colicky baby or a dying pet. Soon, the voice that my sister and I heard was heard by others who claimed, “I was over that day with your mother. I heard that, too.” It is difficult, if not impossible, for a six-year-old to tell adults that they are lying, that they are inviting themselves into memories that are not their own, memories where they are not welcome.
So my memories also grew to accommodate the stories I heard. Even though I didn’t have words for it then, I was learning that adults tell stories that are not true, not because they are liars, but because truth becomes what you would have happen and not what is. Maybe that is why people still insist that my mother was not drinking a Bloody Mary the night she died. Maybe that is why the ladies gathered around our house to tell us where and when they’d seen my mother. Maybe they wanted to have seen her. And when my sister and I told them the story of the voice, some of them believed it, because they wanted a truce between the living world and the dead one. Others didn’t believe, I think, because we were children. They did not want children knowing death, much less conversing with it. When I told them stories about the dreams of the road and the car, they laughed and told me about the nightmares that they had as children, because mine were not true for them. They did not want children predicting their own parents’ deaths, and so, I learned to tell their truths.
I began telling and writing stories of my mother that were true for them. In the second grade my teacher, Mrs. Arnold, assigned us to write about a favorite memory. I wrote simply this: “My favorite memory is my mom.” I knew I was lying. I had already begun to forget what I had known about her. I understood that she should be a memory, and she was the favorite memory I didn’t really have. My Aunt liked what I wrote, too, because she saved it in a scrapbook that she gave to me later. First, she took the wide-band handwriting paper alone with her into her living room while I ate ice cream in the kitchen.
My stories grew in competition with the ladies in our town. So, too, grew my fear of the world I lived in and my place in it. Finally one night, my sister (down the hall) and I (in my bedroom on the corner atop the stairs) heard stomping. Having fought, we had just slammed the doors to our bedrooms and were sulking when we heard it. We both opened the doors and stepped into the hallway to yell at each other for playing tricks when, each seeing the other in her proper doorway, we understood that neither of us had made those noises. Later that night, when we finally spoke of the stomping, we also spoke of the other stories we had heard that year until she asked me if I’d seen our mother. I, who went to bed each night with visions of a blue zombie mother who wanted to cut off my head, who prayed each night that my mother not come back to kill me, answered, “Yes.” I told my sister that my mother came nightly to tuck me into bed. In the telling of the story, I gained a weapon against my sister: our mother hadn’t visited her.
Siblings do these things, I suppose, even when both parents are alive. I wanted her to feel left out as I had around all the women in our neighborhood who seemed to be playing bridge with my mother’s ghost as a fourth partner. I had been told that my mother “passed” or “was taken back by God, because she was so special.” These euphemisms failed to answer my question: why was she gone all the time? This is how I knew that the women in the bridge clubs and the gourmet club were lying, were perpetually inviting themselves into memories they did not own.
I knew this: my mother, if she were allowed by heaven to visit earth in some ghostly form, would not visit the hairstylist or the dishwasher repairman’s wife. She would visit me. I, the same child who lay awake each night holding off my mother’s spirit, desperately wanted to be chosen over the others, over my sister. So I invented another mother about whom to tell stories. This mother came to visit her youngest daughter. This mother didn’t visit other people’s houses unless I gave her permission. This mother belonged entirely to me. This mother grew in strength and detail the way the other one grew in town stories. This mother visited the school playground to scare boys off the monkey bars. This mother haunted my new stepmother during the days when my father worked. And it worked. My new stepmother often kept a butcher’s knife beside her during the day when she thought something was trying to get her while my father was gone.
At six, I learned to make exceptions for truth that could not be made for death. I created separate realities. At school, my mother was real; she had a body and a voice, though I’d long since forgotten hers. So convincing was my school reality that one time, when I came home with a star on my paper, I ran up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom to show her my work. My sister followed me in there and pulled me, finally, from the stale smell of my father’s sheets and back into the reality that was home.
Home had a father who had to work, a sister who tried to be mother, cook, and disciplinarian, and a new stepmother who forbade discussions about my mother. Home had sweet sweaty smells, stale cigarettes that my sister and I began smoking early on, and white iron furniture out front where my mother used to entertain; but it failed the truth that was my mother’s body. In my mind, she waited somewhere for news of me.
As I got older, I told myself that she had never died. Rather, she had been too good to be a mother and had gone off to Hollywood to be a movie star. I looked for her name during movie credits and searched for her face in grocery stores. I told myself that someday, when I did something remarkable, she would regret leaving and come back. These are stories we tell.
This mother gave me entry into the adult story-telling world. Now, I could tell of sightings in my bedroom or the bathroom or the school bus. I did not question the exactness in each telling the way I had with the stereo voice in the previous year. No, this mother spoke and appeared when and how I wanted. The stories of her sightings no longer ruled me; I ruled them. As women in the town would begin at some picnic or Super Bowl party to conjure up the ritual of stories, I listened and competed with them. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that the lies I told were truer than the experiences I’d had. The mother who tucked me in and protected me from schoolyard bullies had more permanence, then and now, than the mother who died. Even as an adult, the concept of death and forever dulls when compared to the ghost stories we tell at family gatherings. These sightings depended on truth the way death never does. Death stops at the borders of the body.
Later, when I became an adult, my father told me how he’d ached for my mother’s body, how the night before her death when she’d wanted to make love, he hadn’t, how the night he came home from the hospital, after they turned off the machines, he’d longed for her body more than her conversation, her nervous giggle, or her gap-toothed smile, had wanted her body present so he could enter her, crawl inside her body, all of him, as though his skin was the first to begin grieving, as though his skin told the only truth that he could manage.
What the mind forgets, the body remembers, so that, even now, as when I was seven, I need photographs to remind me of my mother’s face and hands and hair. I am surprised to learn from these pictures and the alteration of her wedding dress for my own wedding, that I have her shape, her hands, her behind, her breasts. I don’t remember her voice or the way she folded napkins. Somehow, though, I can remember the way her thigh pressed into mine when we sat together in the overstuffed corduroy chair and read picture books. I think, sometimes, that my back can remember the pressure of her arms and my face the pressure of her cheek against mine when she hugged me, that my nose can recall the smell of her perfume, my mouth the taste of the chocolate milk she made for me after my first day of school. These memories, when called upon, are stronger than the memory of her death, but they begin and end with the body. Perhaps it is only the body and not the mind that remembers anything.
After my mother died, the family had a private viewing. My father held me up to the casket so that I could see her body. I was afraid to touch her, and when I did, her hands were cold. Her knuckles and a spot on her right cheek were blue. She felt, of all things, full. Her skin didn’t give or flush when I pressed against it in short, immediate jabs, afraid at any moment she might sit up and grab my arm. Her skin and hair were recognizable to me, not as bruised and stitched up approximations of a body, but as my mother.
My father, my sister, my Aunt Sandy, and I talked about opening or closing the casket lid. I wanted it open. My father took me on his lap and told me that people would feel sad to see my mother in “that shape.” “People,” he told me, “should remember her the way she was.” I knew that, too, was a lie, because the way she lay there, not moving, was the way “she was”: still and not moving. It seemed to me that closing the lid only made her more distant. What if, I thought, she wakes up and can’t get out? Then, she would be scared and would die trying. I didn’t understand how the glass from the car and the impact from her head on the doors had reconfigured her. To me, she looked like my mother, only a little blue. Her body said she was alive and impatient to awaken.
They overruled my vote, and I watched from behind my father’s legs in the hall of the funeral home as they covered her with plastic and shut the lid forever. I watched them pack my sister’s favorite doll, Cina, in the casket on top of the plastic, though they had promised to put it in my mother’s arms. I held on to my own doll, Betsy, which I had taken back at the last minute when I understood I would not get her back, ever. I took it from the funeral director whom I’d charged with the final killing of my mother. I watched as he wrapped her forever in satin and fiberglass, with only my sister’s doll and my two pet rocks, not with her, but between the plastic and the lid. I watched him carry out the lie and the murder and said nothing, but thought how sorry they’d be when she tried to get out and couldn’t.
Months later, my father took me to somebody else’s funeral. We went to another church or funeral home, and he showed me the little gray woman with gray hair that lay in the casket. He closed the lid and let me bang with my fists as hard as I could to try and wake the strange lady, and then we talked in the car later about sleep and death and waking. Throughout the duration of the drive, I remember not understanding why we’d gone to see the strange old lady and wondering whose mother she was. I didn’t connect the two stories until years later, and the evidence of the story still seems like some element of fiction that neither furthers the plot nor develops the character. To me, she was somebody’s mother, in another blue box, waiting for the lid to be opened, and perhaps, still waiting.
It wasn’t until twelve years later, at a friend’s viewing, that I understood the lies the body tells. At that viewing, my friend’s forehead had been reconstructed with putty where the bullet that killed her had exited her brain. There, staring at the foundation smears that covered her waxy face, I first understood my father’s decision, and I questioned the human need to feel and see a body. I began to understand that adults know death no better than six-year-olds do, no better than the strange gray lady in the casket, no better than the stories people tell in an attempt to keep death from belonging to the present. Funerals, despite all their humane opportunities to aid the grieving process, are another way we lie to one another.
Or maybe that is wrong, too. Maybe lying is the most humane act we do for one another.
I was in my twenties when my dad, our family’s storyteller, while helping me work on some writing projects, let it slip what he had seen that night when he got to the car. After he ran that mile to the red Mirada in a ditch against the old oak tree that has long since been cut down, he saw my mother through the smashed open window of the driver’s side door. She lay sideways in the car. She could not see him. She could not hear him. She kept repeating, “Help, somebody, I’m all crushed up inside. Please help me.” He crawled into the car and lay sideways next to her, as best as he could. They waited for the ambulance to come. Occasionally he placed the back of his hand in front of her nose, what they taught him in Korea, to see if the breath was still coming out. He said, “I’m here. I’m here,” and knew she could not hear him, having seen this before, and continued saying it until the breath stopped and the sirens and tubes and electric currents arrived.
~~~
As the years passed, fewer people spoke of seeing my mother at the grocery store or the beach. Occasionally, my mother has spoken through mediums or dreams. Six years ago, a psychic told Elaine Kelch, my mom’s best friend, that a spirit said something about her toes. When my “Aunt” Elaine told me this, she also told me a longer story about the summer she and my mother had spent in Europe in the mid-1960s. On a beach somewhere in Greece, I think she said, my mother had bragged about her toes being prettier than Elaine’s, and they play-argued for the rest of the trip all the way to Seville where they drank too much sangria and were kicked out of a hotel for flamenco dancing on the marble floors of their room.
On the night of my wedding, I dreamt I sipped red wine in a Spanish courtyard with my mother. She told me she would be at my wedding and would give me a sign. The next morning, I was married in my mother’s dress. The dress had just been altered and cleaned to remove the wine stain my mother had left on the bodice in 1968. At the reception, a guest spilled red wine down the front of my dress where the stain left nearly thirty years before had been, and I took that as my sign. Because these things happen. But they lose currency in story-telling circles, except among those few of us who still need to see her, smell her, hear her, who need to believe that the tulips’ early bloom is a sign and not nature running on a fast clock. What remains true about the stories people tell, whether or not the memories belong to them, is what remains false about death. We tell stories because we have to, and in their telling, they affirm that the unthinkable, the chaos of the universe, can be ordered, quite humanely, quite easily even, by the human tongue.
