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Show Moon - 191 Does it help that I'm doing this now? For you are here-inside me, always, and here, now, in the same place. If we both stood up at the same time, we'd bump heads, if we weren't so far apart in time. Gloria is alone now, for Tommy was killed by a sniper hidden in a jungle tree just before the war officially ended. Soon after, Gloria and Michael moved to the Oregon coast in a hurry, for Michael's cancer had gone into his liver and he wanted to die at the edge of his son's ocean. Gloria wrote me all this months later, after she'd moved back to their old house in Evanston to be with her lifelong friends. Whatever I remember her as being like, she is more so now: pillow bosom, gray-streaked hair bundled on her head like a precarious bundle of twigs, eyes like a bird's never still, missing nothing. She rushes up to me at the gate at O'Hare, holds me close for a moment and I think I know now what it was my uncle saw in her. No one of us, not even Alice, can make a person feel like that with a single hug. She holds me at arm's length and says, "You look like your mother." Just two days ago Ruth told me the same thing. Sometimes I wonder if my mother has possessed my body and if this isn't why I've been dwelling on death, and why my body has stopped its moon-cycles, as if I, too, have had my womb cut out like the heart of a bird. Or perhaps I am a younger version of my mother, with a uterus hoarding its blood to feed a tiny being curled up inside. The thought of this sends a shiver through my body that is like fear and also like delight. Forty isn't so very late. Lots of older women have babies these days. |
