Close-Ups

Ashes

Ashes Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. —Proverbs 23:31—32 M y mother died. She was fifty years old. She had so many times told me how she would choose to die: as her own grandmother had died, at the age of ninety,in her sleep, after digging the whole day in her own garden. My mother did not have a garden. When I was a child our family spent the winters in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida. On shop signs and beach towels, everywhere, there was a fat, smiling sun radiating blazing rays. On days when there was no sun at all, the newspaper was given away free. We could take the sun that much for granted. Five months before my mother died she returned to Y 50 Close-Ups St. Petersburg Beach, to the Gulf Winds Apartments, as she had done each year for twenty years. One hundred miles farther south, in Miami, I lay in the sun and watched my legs turn gold. When I could not stand it anymore, I took a bus to St. Petersburg. I stayed with my mother there for one week. It was the beginning of March, and the air was cold and raw. We waited for the weather to turn. I awake in the bed across the room from the bed where my mother has been sleeping. On her bed, the bedspread, tan with giant green palm fronds, has already been pulled over the sheets and pillow.My mother is sitting at the table by the window that looks out into a courtyard. Outside, the day is gray. There is no sun. My mother's head bends over the table. From the back, her neck is thin, too soft and white where the spine supports the neck. From the back, too, her dark hair is thin and limp. Next to her on the table there is a coffee cup. Mymother's fingers hold the cup. Asanother mother might carry a baby, my mother carries the cup everywhere with her. When it is empty she goes back to the cabinet underneath the sink. In the mornings shefillsit with red wine; in the afternoons, with bourbon. I sit up in bed, taking it all in: this small panorama. Each morning I have been here it has stunned me that it is still here: this room, not redecorated since the fifties, my mother in it, sitting at the window, looking out into the gray courtyard. I stretch in bed and look at my long tan legs spread out from a short nightgown. I am twenty-fouryears old. Ashes 51 My mother turns to me. "Would you like some orange juice, Pumpkin?" I wish she were not so nice to me. It is a superb performance , considering, but it distracts. It assumes that I am a daughter visitingmy mother in Florida. It assumes my presence is not a mission or a bludgeoning—but a visit. We go to seafood restaurants and eat shrimp. My mother does the driving; I let her. She squints through the windshield, her two hands clutching the wheel. She doesn't drive over twenty miles an hour. If she crashes I will not be hurt. I swing my legs over the bed in slow motion. When I am up I touch my toes twenty times. I do this every morning. My mother gets up from the table and walks the few steps to the kitchenette. She walks on brittle bones, carefully , as though each step may not carry her inches farther along the carpet but instead plunge her into an abyss that wavers at the edge of each step. She takes a quart of orangejuice from the refrigerator and pours some into the glass. I let her do these old things for me. "Here," she says. She is smiling, but the smile hurts her. The hurt lies dark behind her eyes, betraying her smile. She doesn't see me. Her eyeshowl. I take the glass of orangejuice. I try not to touch her hand. Today is an important day. Mymother and I are going to the beauty parlor. My long hair troubles her: it has always been this way with us. "I'll have it cut," I have told...