My mother told me to watch out for people who say I love you.
But people never listen to advice, least of all their own.
My mother has perfect eyesight but wears cloudy glasses– cloudy like the sheets of mist that gather before the ocean to worship, stealing the stars from sailors on their way home. My mother wears glasses because she doesn’t trust her eyes. She’s afraid they aren’t enough.
I don’t think my mother knows what I look like, the shape I make in the doorframe of her bedroom. She tries to read her Bible, but cannot see beyond the words, so she traps the impression of them with memorization.
We live in winter in our house by the sea, and it is always winter. I collect sea glass for my windowsill and walk along the jetty towards the lighthouse that shepherds the sailors to port. No one ever quite reaches the lighthouse.
Roseanne knows this – she used to race the jetty with her father. He would whisper in her ear, Last one to the lighthouse is a rotten egg, and her little legs would gallop beneath her school uniform jumper, until her father decided wherever they were to be close enough, and it was time to turn back. They did this until the day her father decided to walk the jetty alone.
My best friend is made of glass. She would cut to the bone, but now she has a burden like a stone. Roseanne decided she was to by my best friend in the first grade. She was gracious enough to give me a forewarning. She whispered in my ear, “Last one to the seesaw has to beg.”
Roseanne gives me advice because it’s the best she has to give. She tells me to wear my skirts short. To blotch my lips red. Undo that button. What are you trying to hide? But Roseanne is always hiding – behind hollow paints and powder; behind curses and contempt; behind the smoke of her weeping cigarettes. She doesn’t run anymore, she hides in plain sight.
The nuns cluck their tongues; the priests avert their eyes.
Roseanne is brave enough to swim but has swam enough to fear. She’s afraid of girls, afraid of boys, afraid of the absence of girl’s whispers and the absence of boy’s stares. She fears salt water – fears tears for their insinuations, their truth, and the shame their truth brings; fears the ocean for its refusal to reconcile. Roseanne is so scared she lies to God. She avoids His eye. Her confessions are extemporized.
Several years ago, an altar boy burned down the house of God. Some say the calamity was retribution for his negligence – he was young and thoughtless, so guileless as to be ignorant of consequences. Hope, peace, joy and love: three purple candles, one pink. I think he just loved the prettiness of their light against the life of the wreath and wanted it to endure. I can’t blame him for that.
But light and life don’t mix, and when Christmas came, St. Brendan Parish was a shell with its holiness coughed out, soulless and attenuated. And Jesus was born again amidst the destruction that momentary beauty bore.
Roseanne was stricken. Look at what a match could do.
One morning, when we could still love, Roseanne knocked on my door, a box of matches in her hand. Be my witness, please. We walked out along the jetty and halted, firmly astride the sea. It met us meekly with outstretched palms, but we avoided its gaze.
Amidst the numb gray of the unfurling dawn, Roseanne lit a match, and we pondered its dignity, the wondrousness and impossibility of its being – please, God – until Roseanne let it slip from her fingers toward the sea. We waited for Jesus to stroll across the next swell, for a rupture, a conversion to light inaugurated by a drop of fire.
The sky looked on dispassionately. Two girls in a tundra of craters and ridges. Alone with the mindless determination of throbbing, thrumming, thrashing sea. In the meanwhile, we lit another match, just in case.
One by one, prayer after prayer, the matches were lost – lost to a city of shells and skeletons and shipwrecks. A city of remains pounded by the darkness.
We were waiting for the matches to run out. The ocean was resolute.
In flutters and drops, our hearts were rewritten to match the ocean’s beat. I held Roseanne and swayed with her, swayed as the ocean swayed, so that it would forget we were standing there, but the ocean stole our tears anyway.
That day, Roseanne’s heart washed up on the sand. I kissed the carved glass and put her on my windowsill with the other reminders. Water can fill your lungs, starve your heart, and then toss you back out again. Light can’t do much more than caress your skin.
***
Some days my mother won’t leave her room. The ocean is swollen and unknowable outside her window, so she draws the curtains to choke the light, and, rather than risk tripping over the truth, she lies in bed with her eyes wide open. I call the hospital, tell them my mother is in no condition to work today. “She’s feeling unwell; you understand, don’t you?”
“Of course,” the voice is edged. “But there is a policy. Please ask your mother not to miss any more days this month, or else it may be out of our hands.”
I don’t know how to undraw the curtains, or how to pry my mother’s glasses from her eyes. I read the bible aloud to her scrubs, dangling like skeletons in her closet.
I talk to God from my windowsill. When the clouds are negligent and there are fissures in the vaulted gray, light from beyond smiles and kneels so as to ripple through the line of sea glass on my windowsill, and I believe in love. These days it is always raining, and the only light available comes from the windows lining the street– each home a comrade in arms against the impossible and the obstinate. The new St. Brendan proffers a shining cross.
Water seems benign as dewdrops. A companion of the light.
Roseanne gives me more advice, but it is more incoherent than the ocean. She can’t understand my mother, can’t see that she is just like her. She hates my mother like she hates herself.
She remembers the lighthouse she could never reach and her father’s sandy, one-way tracks towards the jetty. Her father walked into the ocean knowing he could not walk on water. I wonder when the day will come when she sets herself on fire and leaps into the froth after her love.
Sunday mass, and the congregation shivers in His pews. Now that it has known fire as a friend, St. Brendan is colder than ever. Roseanne scuffs her feet in a few pews in front. Besides me, my mother is very small. I could blow her out with one puff.
I think it was just bad luck. If the handmade wreath hadn’t been quite so robust and the flame quite so ardent, if their proximity hadn’t been quite so unpropitious, the glow would have gone quietly from the church like a wave departing the shore. A silent, requited falling out of love.
But my mother is not sitting beside me in the pew that bears our name. Not really. My mother is peering in through the stained glass. She has forgotten love and wonders where the door is. She must have known once, or else she would not have learned so well what sadness is.
Soon it will be Christmas. I string lights. I wrap empty boxes with gaudy paper and arrange them beneath a plastic tree so that I, at least, can pretend. The air is red and green, and tight. The hearth sits empty. The crucifix hangs heavy above the doorway, but we don’t have a nativity scene. Why don’t we have a nativity scene? Mare. My mother says my name and I crack like glass.
God, is she blind.
She does not ask, but I tell her. Love is you, and it is me.
You exist behind your glasses – on your boat, indifferent to the stars, following the inkling of a prayer.
I tell her, Love is the ocean.
We contend with its passion, its volatility, its folding and fleeing, tapping and repressing and lurking.
I tell her, Love is how I hold your hand despite the ocean. Love is the lighthouse we will one day reach. Love is Mary holding God in a manger. Love is the candles I have placed in all the windows. Love is a choice.
People never listen to advice, least of all their mother’s.