like fish bones, swayed in breezes. Mourning doves made calls like out-of-tune woodwinds. The sidewalk around some tree trunks was cracked and warped.
“It’s the tree roots,” my mother said. “They’re strong enough to push up the cement.”
In the shower with my mother, the droplets made their way down the wall. Droplets were like animals: they jerked and took winding paths, slower and faster, leaving a trail. The shower was dark and closed, tiled and curtained. When my mother turned the water to hot, we yelled, “Open pores!” and when it was cold, we yelled, “Closed … pores!” She explained that pores were holes in the skin that opened with heat and closed with cold.
She held me in the shower and I nestled against her and it wasn’t clear to me where she ended and I began.
My mother’s goal was to be a good mother and a successful artist, and every time we moved, she brought two large books with us: an album of photographs of my birth and a book of art she called her portfolio. The first I wished she’d throw away because it contained nudity, and the second I worried she might lose.
Her portfolio contained a series of her drawings encased in plastic. That it was called a portfolio gave it dignity. I would flip through the pages, enjoying the weight of them in my hand. In one pencil drawing, a woman sat behind a desk in a windowed office, a gust of wind lifting her hair up into the shape of a fan and scattering sheets of white paper all around her, like a storm of moths.
“I like her hair,” I said. “I like her skirt.” I couldn’t get enough of this woman; I wanted to be her, or for my mother to be her.
She’d made this drawing sitting at a table, using a mechanical pencil, an eraser, and the heel of her hand, blowing graphite and eraser leavings off the page. I loved the low murmur the pencil made on paper, and how her breath got even and slow when she worked. She seemed to consider her art with curiosity, not ownership, as if she weren’t really the one making the marks.
It was the drawing’s realism that impressed me. Every detail was precise like a photograph. But the scene was also fantastical. I loved how the woman sat in her pencil skirt and buttoned blouse, poised and dignified amid the chaos of the flying papers.
“It’s just an illustration, not art,” she said dismissively, when I asked her why she didn’t make more like it. (It was a commercial piece, and less impressive than her paintings; I didn’t know the difference between the two.) She’d been commissioned to illustrate a book called Taipan, and this was one of the pieces.
We didn’t have a car, so I rode in a plastic seat on the back of her bicycle over sidewalks under the trees. Once, another rider came toward us on the sidewalk on his bicycle; my mother steered away, the other rider did the same, and they collided. We flew onto the sidewalk, skinning our hands and knees. We recovered on a lawn nearby. My mother sat and sobbed, her knees up and her shorts hanging down, one of her knees scraped and bloody. The man tried to help. She sobbed for too long in a way that I knew must be about more than the fall.
One evening soon after, I wanted to take a walk. She was depressed and didn’t want to go, but I begged and pulled at her arm until she relented. Down the street, we saw a leaf-green VW hatchback with a sign: “For Sale by Owner, $700.” She walked around it, looking in the windows.
“What do you think, Lisa? This might be just what we need.”
She wrote down the name of the owner and his telephone number. Later, her father brought her to his company’s loan department and cosigned a loan. My mother talked about my dragging her out for a walk that night as if I’d performed a heroic feat.
As we drove, she sang. Depending on her mood she would sing Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” or “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” or “Tom Dooley.” She sang one about asking God for a car and a television. She sang “Rocky Raccoon” when she was feeling happy, feisty; it had a part where she went up and down the scales without real words, like scat, making me laugh, making me embarrassed. I was sure she’d invented