Another Mother’s Day down, the awkward ceremony survived. Loaded like a German fruitcake, you smiled wide as a freeway, wobbled under tulips, chocolates, a witty card, wished her all the happiness in the world and told all the old stories. Wasn’t it fun? Wasn’t she pleased, the ancient matriarch who, in a time so distant that it seems made up, slid you out soaked, milky, blind into the sheets? On her designated “day,” that same panting, sweating girl sat dry as a museum bone, a china plate receiving alms. You remember her as reckless, consenting to squat to catch what you called your Feller fastball: clumsy, imperiled dame. Young mothers have the constitutions of gaming stewards, the organizational ferocity of sergeants, show an abundance of guts and style. Want to go to the park, Mom? Yes. Want to watch me do a jackknife dive? Yes. Sure. Can do. Can read Tom Sawyer aloud at bedside. Can tie sneakers. Can poach an egg, hold a job, do long division, mend porcelain, ride bikes, chase dogs, go. But these days the eyes water like a weak opinion, and the skin on her hand < feels like pie dough rolled on an enamel tabletop. A Whistler pose, she is content to sit staring outward much of the time, as if on the deck of a Cunard liner, or to dip into that biography of Abigail Adams you gave her , at manageable intervals. Television interests her not, except occasionally the nature shows that PBS specializes in. Motionless before the mating eland. The memory clicks on and off. The older the anecdote, the clearer in detail. Typical of her much analyzed years, she will forget the sentence before last but in the next will come up with a name from 1923 and a Gershwin lyric that, once sung, swims her back into a world she really occupied. In the world as it is, she seems only to have the place of a designation. The Aged Mother. Like a painting of the aged mother, or a play called The Aged Mother, or an essay in a magazine. Swathed in the shapeless dress, the indefinite hairdo, she has become something to be noticed and attended, as if she were forever on the verge of vanishing lest one remind oneself to look in on Mother.
