Remember This Morning by Victor McConnell
My mother was taller than me, I think. I’m not certain, because she died when I was seven, and I’ve never asked anyone how tall she was. I’m five foot eight inches. From pictures, I know she was around my height, but I don’t really know if she was a little over or a little under. I imagine looking up at her, and I have some reason to believe that would reflect reality, as my mother’s sister, who is still alive, is about five foot nine. One would think a photo somewhere would clearly show them side-by-side, but my mother was almost ten years older than my aunt, and few photos of them as adults seem to exist. In some, my mother appears as tall as my aunt. In others, shorter. So, I’ve grown comfortable with the simple mystery of not knowing how tall my mother was. I sort of prefer it to knowing. That’s why I never asked my aunt, though I’m not sure I could trust her response anyway. You’d be surprised how bad people are at eyeballing height, at figuring out how long or tall or far away something is. I should know – I measure things for a living. I’m a surveyor.
I don’t say that with any particular pride. I didn’t set out to be a surveyor – not that I need to tell you that. It’s a given. Who plans for it, or even knows what it is, as a kid? Though the field does have a certain romance to it. I mean, ever hear of John Randel, Jr.? No? He laid out Manhattan’s grid. Bit of an obsessive. George Gauld? British guy who surveyed British West Florida in the 1700s? No again? Fine – here’s one for you: George Washington. You know, our first President? Yeah, he was a surveyor first.
Okay, so that makes it seem like I am proud. Again, I’m not. ‘m just painting a picture of what surveying used to be. What I do and what they did are worlds apart. Things were different then. The 1700s and 1800s were kind of the glory days for surveyors. They were charting uncharted territory. Their maps seemed to expand the world, which captures people’s imaginations a bit more than figuring out what the setback requirements are for the proposed restaurant in the shopping center abutting Fox Meadows subdivision (my most recent project). I’m not complaining, though. Too many people whose parents died young are complainers. I think it stems from being constantly told how proud their parents would have been. You know: Your mother would be so proud of you. Somewhere, your father is looking down at you and he is proud. I never heard anything like that. My dad died when I was two, five years before my mom, and neither my aunt nor my mom’s parents ever bothered to tell me that either of my dead parents were proud of me. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision or if that’s just how they were. I noticed, of course, and it used to bother me, but now I’m thankful.
I think it helped me reach the place that everyone should eventually reach. The place where you stop being ashamed of yourself. And so when I say I’m not proud of what I do, that is what I mean. I don’t mean that I am ashamed. I just mean I’m not actively proud. After all, there is a certain dignity to it. Yeah, I’m not out there on the plains, fighting off disease and Comanche attacks. Not bushwhacking through jungles or braving mountains of unknown size. Yeah, I’m mapping out new suburbs. But I’m providing a service, something that is objective. The architect designs it, the contractor builds it, and I measure it. A new McDonald’s, a new Walgreens. Two thousand bucks for my “as-built” survey, which will go in a file and be referenced only sporadically, like when the property sells or is appraised or renovated or involved in a lawsuit. I try to be conscientious, but I’m not exactly out there mapping coastlines in 1800. No ships will crash if I’m a little off. Nonetheless, I don’t mind it. It’s fine. It’s all fine.
I’m not really here to tell you about my career as a surveyor. But context is important, and I want you to know where I’m coming from.
I want to tell you about my mother, about the last time I saw her. I don’t remember my father, but I remember her. Like I said, I was seven. She was 30. There is something particularly sad about dying at 30. Dying at 30 means dying at the beginning of your adult commitments. My mother was starting her career, finding her place in the community, saving up to buy the house we were renting. Mostly, though, she was still at the beginning of her commitment to me.
I know that she would have been happy that I lived rather than her, but I kind of wish it had gone the other way. I missed her so much as a child. If I could have avoided that feeling by dying, I think I would have done so. She would have hated that it was her death that turned me from religion, as she had such deep faith. Knowing what I know about her now, I’m not sure if she would have preferred that I live if my life would be one that was without God. God surrounded me throughout my childhood, but he was no substitute for my mother. No one understood that. It was small-town, 1970s Texas, and the way everyone handled death was either with silence or with God. By age twelve, I had to stop myself from screaming at my aunt when she told me for the thousandth time that my mother was looking down at me from heaven. And she wasn’t the only one. Teachers, ministers, my friends’ parents. According to all of them, my mother was watching over me. By the time I realized I had the power to kill myself, I no longer believed that my mother was waiting for me on the other side. If I had, though, I probably would have done it in hopes of joining her.
This isn’t to say that my aunt or uncle or grandmother were cruel to me. My story isn’t the tale of the abused orphan, and I wouldn’t be writing this if they were around to read it. I wouldn’t want to hurt them. I do wish I could tell them that their attempts to comfort me were misguided, for if they approached things differently, perhaps I would still believe in God. And I miss Him, too.
There was a book my mother used to read me, about Mickey Mouse and his crew all having a picnic. I loved that book for some reason, and she kept reading it to me long past when we stopped reading other books from that part of childhood. I remember the last time we read it because it was the evening of the day before she died. It wasn’t my last memory of her, but it was close enough to the end that I can still recall the way her voice sounded when she did her Donald Duck impression. And the way she looked – she couldn’t do it straight faced, and her grin would stretch wide while she rasped and quacked out the words.
***
She normally stood in the shade of an elm tree beside the bus stop. Sometimes she would be reading, but usually she was just leaning against the tree as I approached. Other parents were at the bus stop, too, but in my memory she stood a few feet away from them, a little apart.
That day wasn’t the first time I got off the bus to find her not waiting. But it was unusual enough that I remember worrying as I walked home. In retrospect, I find it odd that they let me walk home alone. Apparently, no one had wanted to tell me the news at the bus stop, and I guess they didn’t know how to walk home beside me, carrying the knowledge but not telling me. It seems a bit cowardly to me now.
When I was a hundred feet or so from the house, I could see three people in my driveway, though I couldn’t make out who they were. One motioned in my direction, and the other two walked away, toward neighboring houses. Getting closer, I could see that the one who remained was Mrs. Morgan, our across the street neighbor. She sometimes looked after me when my mother was stuck at work or had to run errands.
“Your mother…” Mrs. Morgan said. I remember staring up at her, waiting, wondering why she was there, on my driveway, why we were talking outside my house. “Your mother was… she was in a car accident today.”
I thought of the car first. It was a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass. As a kid, I thought the car was special because it was my mom’s. And because my favorite color was (and still is) blue. I’ve since learned it was one of the most popular cars in the country at the time. That knowledge hasn’t changed my memory of the car, and for a decade or two after she died, whenever I’d see one I would invariably think of my mother. There aren’t many Oldsmobile Cutlasses still left on the roads these days.
I knew what car accidents were. I’d seen cars bent and broken along the side of the road or hoisted up behind tow trucks. Smooth, shiny metal crumpled and distorted in ways that transfixed the seven-year-old me. And I imagined the Cutlass being lifted up onto a flatbed trailer, windows shattered and wheels akimbo.
I asked Mrs. Morgan about the car. She seemed flummoxed and pained. Her hand was on her chest as if she were trying to hold something in. The car must be really bad for her to not know what to say. Before I could ask another question, or start crying, she finally spoke.
“I don’t know about the car. I think they can fix it. Your mother isn’t okay, though, David.”
Mrs. Morgan always called me Davey and I almost corrected her when she spoke.
“What about a different doctor? For mom?”
I was trying to tell her that maybe a different doctor could help her, for I still had the image of the disfigured Cutlass in my mind, and I imagined someone trying to fix car and human at once, which I thought would be difficult. I couldn’t picture my mother’s body in any other way than as I’d always seen it.
Mrs. Morgan was confused. I didn’t know how to explain to her what I was thinking. She waited a few seconds for me to clarify. When I didn’t, she said, “It’s not about the doctor, dear. Your mother is gone. There isn’t a doctor in the world who can bring her back.”
Her voice had broken a little as she spoke the last sentence, like a staticky radio. Of course, like any child, I wanted to know where my mother was. I didn’t ask, though. I’d have time in the years to come to think about where she’d gone. Before I could say anything, anyway, Mrs. Morgan said, “Your aunt should be here any minute.” Mrs. Morgan was clearly uncomfortable, and I could sense that she was trying to convey to me that my aunt would be the one to answer questions, not her.
My aunt lived on the opposite side of town, about a half hour away. I learned later that she was coming from the hospital, that they’d taken my mother, as crumpled and distorted as any wrecked car, to the ER. She had died on the way, in the ambulance, and there was nothing for my aunt to do at the hospital other than talk to the hospital staff and sign paperwork. I’ve never been with someone when they died at a hospital, and the idea has always felt incongruous to me. It’s a place you’re supposed to come away from better than when you entered. I sort of imagine the paperwork saying something like We know we’re supposed to fix people here. We couldn’t this time. We’re sorry. She’s all yours now. Sign here.
I don’t really remember my aunt’s arrival. Or what I did until she got there. I do remember walking inside my house. I assume Mrs. Morgan followed me inside. I just remember, even at that age, realizing that I’d never again be in my house with my mother. It was quiet when I walked in. My mother usually had music on after school, listening to the radio while I did my homework and she cleaned up. So the quiet was noticeable, something I could hear. It was the first time I noticed the high-pitched ring of silence, that thin scream that fills your head if you strain hard enough to hear something, anything, in a quiet room.
The toys I’d been playing with in the morning before school were still on the living room floor. A miniature world of Matchbox cars and Legos. Normally I would have squatted down and resumed playing. I didn’t on that day, though. I just stood still, staring at the bits of plastic and metal strewn across the carpet. They looked like toys that some other boy had lost. Toys that I didn’t know how to play with anymore.
***
The funeral was on a Wednesday. I was ashamed about being glad to miss school and arrived at the funeral thinking about my classmates at first, not my mother. Kids at funerals are always spectacles. A crowd is a bunch of individual eyes that combine into a collective awareness. The looks and murmurs of fifty people, wondering if I would cry, what I would do.
My mother’s head and face were intact enough for an open casket, and I stood beside it and looked at her, feeling that collective awareness on my back. Sometimes people say that the dead don’t look like themselves, that something ineffable is different, gone. Maybe it is the make-up, or the changes that occur to a body in a few days. Blood drained out, organs gone. But I thought my mother looked like herself. Her hair was styled with the usual swoop, the bangs cresting above her forehead in a small wave. Her eyes were closed. I guess when you’re seven you don’t look at your parents while they’re asleep very often, and I remember thinking that it was strange to see her with her eyes closed like that. Music was playing. Church organs. My mother had never liked those much, religious though she was. She used to complain about them to me after Sunday service. I don’t know how or why organs became essential to church service, but God knows there are better instruments. I don’t think I ever responded. I always kind of liked the organs. They reminded me of battle scenes from movies.
My eighth birthday was only a few weeks after the funeral. Something about her stillness made me think of it. She had told me that she might get me a dog for my birthday. I didn’t mention that to anyone, and I never got the dog. Looking back, I wish I had, because maybe it would have made things easier. But by the time my birthday arrived things were already so different.
Before the funeral had started, when my aunt was telling me what it would be like, I asked her who the funeral was for.
She tilted her head at me and said, “Your mom, of course.”
“But everyone says she is already gone,” I said.
“Yes, she is, dear. But the funeral is so we can tell her goodbye.”
But how will she hear us? I thought, but didn’t say. By my way of thinking, once someone was gone, they were out of earshot, and you could no longer tell them goodbye.
***
But I didn’t want to tell you about the day she died, or the funeral. As I said, what I wanted to tell you about was the last time I saw my mother. I don’t count the funeral. As my aunt said, she was gone then. The day before she died was a Sunday and it was warm and springtime and she took me out for a picnic. She knew I loved picnics. We always went to a park we could walk to, and she would spread out a blanket, just like in that Mickey Mouse story, and she’d carefully set out snacks and books. When I was small, she brought little toys for me to play with. As I grew older, she brought less and I would roam around the park, learning the best spindly climbing trees and the ones with thickly leaved exteriors and hollow insides that made good hidden forts. I’d play with other kids on some days, but on others I’d just sit on the blanket the whole time and let her read to me while I explored the food she brought. I liked that there were no plates or tables and I liked to watch the birds come and eat our crumbs when we packed up and walked away.
On this day, she’d brought lemons, ice, a handheld juicer, a thermos of hot water, sugar, and an empty pitcher. She let me help squeeze the lemons into the pitcher even though my hands weren’t really large enough or strong enough to get all the juice out. Then she poured in the ice and steaming water and sugar. She’d brought a big wooden spoon and she was swirling it around the pitcher, around and around, and I remember her finally sitting back and smiling and exhaling and saying There. As if it were just so. She leaned back on one elbow on the blanket after she said it, and looked at me. She reached out with the hand that had just stirred the lemonade and placed it atop my head, ruffling my hair. Even at age seven, I felt a sort of instant nostalgia, a separateness as the memory seared itself into wherever in the brain such things are stored.
The picnic wasn’t the last time I saw her, though. That was Sunday, and she died Monday. The last time I saw her would have been Monday morning before school. She would have been standing under that elm tree by the bus stop. I try to remember that morning, that specific day, and I can’t. It blends in with the others. Sometimes I feel like I can sense it floating out there in front of me, her face almost visible. And if I could see it clearly just once, then I could zoom in and see her the way I could when she laid beside me to put me to bed, her eyes a few inches away and her face like a small campfire, shedding warmth and light on me in the moments before sleep. I imagined if I could see her face on that day, on that morning before she died, I could find something there that would give me an answer.
But it always slips away before I can catch hold of it. Memories of other days come flooding in, other early spring mornings with my face pressed against the cold glass window. Her motionless and me on the move, watching her until we turn left at the stop sign and she disappears from view. She may have kissed my forehead and told me to have a good day before I boarded. But I was old enough by then that I sometimes ran aboard the bus without a goodbye kiss. I don’t know if I did on that day.
The memory, or the lack of it, has lodged itself somewhere inside me all my life long. In my late teens and early twenties, I thought it would metastasize into something else, slowly growing and eating away at other parts of me. But somewhere along the way it shrunk instead, becoming more an itch than a cancer. Not one that ever went away, though, and not one that I could ever scratch.
I tried talking about it. With friends and even in therapy, back when I thought that might help. People at first thought I felt guilty, and they’d reassure me. I’m sure you she kissed you goodbye, that you hugged her and didn’t forget to wave. Do you think you could have done something different? Something that would have changed things? Mostly I humored them, told them no, that it just bothered me I couldn’t remember. That I just missed her. Once, with a girlfriend in my mid-twenties, I’d been drunk and had screamed and tried to tell her how of course I could’ve done something different. How I could’ve tripped and skinned my knee, delayed the bus. Stayed home sick. Made a funny face through the window, or just looked at her a little differently. Swapped out some small link in the chain. She didn’t understand and we were near the end of our relationship and whatever sympathy she’d once had for my orphaned childhood had long since been used up and I remember me crying and her not crying and just standing there, not telling me what she was thinking.
I stopped talking about it with others maybe a decade ago, but I still have echoes of that morning hit me on various busses from time to time. A window seat on a city bus, a woman under a tree beside a bus stop. Shadows cast across half a century by a memory that doesn’t exist.
***
I stand beside the intersection, a stoplight blinking above me. It controls traffic that enters and exits the shopping center, which is nothing memorable. A new neighborhood center anchored by a grocery store. As I mentioned, they’re building a fast-food restaurant on the corner, one hundred yards from the main building, and I’m measuring out the lot lines. It is Sunday before business hours and so the parking lot is mostly empty and clean. The land where they’ll build the restaurant is not yet paved but is already level. The measurements are clear, and I doubt there will be any problems developing it. Shopping center owners are always happy to have a new tenant, fast-food franchises are happy to have a new location, and suburban municipalities are happy to collect more property taxes. I don’t know how the shoppers who come and go feel, but they do fill the parking lot.
I’ve finished staking out the ground, and the pink tape I’ve left atop the stakes flutters in the light breeze. The manicured grass curls above the curb on the parking lot islands. Funny that they’re called islands, I think. I stand with my hands on my hips and watch as the first shoppers arrive to buy Sunday morning groceries. A young family parks in a van and gets out, two kids holding their parents’ hands. I can’t make out their faces. They’re just the right distance away.
Victor McConnell grew up in a small town in Texas and graduated from Dartmouth’s creative writing program in 2004. He spent a year in and out of a wheelchair in 2005-2006, and, after a long dormant period, resumed writing fiction in 2020. He has an 11-year-old son.
30 December 2022
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