Lilies of the Valley

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My mother planted lilies of the valley along her garden’s edge. It was a rare mundanity, and the memory has remained with me. One early autumn day, wearing her orange clamdiggers, matching gloves and shoulder-banging earrings, she carried a bag of bulbs, a spade and a small braided rug to the garden.

She rolled out the rug to kneel on, to protect her knees from the damp earth. She had shattered them both in an accident years before I was born. A truck, oblivious to the winter’s effect on the winding country roads, skated around a bend and over the top of my parent’s little car. I’ve imagined her lying there, a mouthful of shattered windshield burrowing into her gullet like seventeen-year locusts into the ground, her bright blood sketching her outline in the sterile snow.

Mother was not expected to live. Even Maud, the mighty Southern Baptist mother-in-law, abandoned her latest disownment to declare a bedside farewell. But, as is Mother’s wont, she outraged the family yet again. With a turban around her shaved head and extravagant rings dangling all from one ear, she left them slack-jawed at the hospital as she traipsed off with a limp to other eyebrow-raising pursuits.

Indeed, planting bulbs with me was one of the more temperate of my mother’s moments. She knelt on the rug her mother had braided with remnants from her prodigious sewing basket: scraps of worsted wool from Grandmother’s childhood skirts, bits of camel’s hair coat handed down from the generation before, remains of the blanket she had suckled when her mother was not at hand. Settled on her legacy, Mother dug down into the rich, moist soil to place the bulbs, to bring definition to her garden path. While she sowed, she taught me the lilies of the valley song in her voice that had lost its music to the ravages of swallowed glass.

White coral bells upon a slender stalk
Lilies of the valley deck my garden walk
Oh, don’t you wish that you could hear them ring
That will happen only when the fairies sing

In the spring, she said, we would see the graceful stalks and ribbed leaves draw the garden’s border, and the blossoms would soon follow. I watched and watched where the bulbs had disappeared and cared only to hear the bells ring and to catch a fairy in the house I’d made of twigs and berries. But autumn prevailed, spring would not come, and I was distracted from my vigil by the joys of lining up pilfered apples, roadside to roadside, and watching cars press them into apple butter as we, my siblings and I, rolled in hilarious fits behind the hedge, delighted with our miscreant deeds. I suppose my mother watched us from the window, pleased with our simple pleasures and wishing they could stay that way. She certainly knew better, though — she has forever been anything but simple.

My mother did not bake cupcakes. Instead, she filled our little brown bags with cream cheese and caviar sandwiches, a dash of lemon juice and grated onion to temper the salt. We desperately tried to trade them for peanut butter and jelly or baloney or even Velveeta, but to no avail.

She did make her own green tomato relish, for the bridge club — the best in town, so they said — and she decorated the tally cards with whimsical caricatures of unnamed women. Little did they know that the buxom gal with the rhinestone beauty mark, the card that set them all atwitter, was one of their own. She delighted in telling the ladies, as they politely nibbled her cucumber and watercress sandwiches and savored her relish, that the tomatoes grew wild over our septic tank.

On occasion, though, Mother did try to comport herself within the bounds of normalcy, she tried in her way. The day she stood behind the elementary school lunch counter, lovingly handing out milk cartons to my peers, she wore her outrageous hoop earrings — two on one ear — and her flowing caftan reached well below the accepted hemline of the day. The children wanted to know if that Gypsy was my mother. I fled the milk line to hide in the girl’s lav until lunch was over.

Some years later, they redefined my mother as she sat on the floor of my attic room amid my circle of friends. They liked to come to my house, they said, because my mother was groovy. She let me sleep on a mattress on the floor, with Indian beads and fabrics decorating the slanted surfaces of the garret and incense poking out of the fieldstone chimney’s chinks — incense she’d selected because it reminded her of me, she said. That night, the savory smoke filling our adolescent heads with unspoken notions, Mother asked if we got high. Then my friends knew she was truly cool, and I knew the only thing to do was crawl behind the decorations of my groovy room and silently suffer a humiliated teenager’s death.

But eventually, having a daughter of my own, I came to wince at how my mother must have ached while I hated her. I’d been so certain she didn’t — couldn’t — understand, and I did punish her for that. And I feared my daughter would be as cruel as I — and her daughter to her. Yet, when I first gazed down at my nursing child, I was finally able to define that warmly, wonderfully safe feeling that thoughts of my mother often bear with them today. She, of course, had nursed me as well. Even now, I can rest my face on her bosom and know indeed all will be right.

Except when mother told me she ate in lieu of sex. I had come of age, and I understood, though it saddened me, that she and Father had sex and that they didn’t. A little loss of weight was a cheery sign they were once again intimate, and it made me squirm. Midnight raids on the fridge meant the worst, and allowed my puckered fanny to relax. That fridge was the source of so much consolation.

When I chose to no longer be pregnant, my mother reached into the fridge and fed me comfort, all my favorite things — chocolate éclairs, Napoleons and, yes, caviar and cream cheese. She put her hand on my brow and asked me about it. I told her of the vacuum, slurping from my womb like the dregs of a strawberry soda. She cried with me and brought more tasty morsels to sooth our sadness.

Now I wonder, where does my mother end and I begin? I’ve always been afraid of becoming her. Would I have her girth? God forbid! Or her bent toward excess? Please, no! But her social grace and her clever humor: that is my unattainable desire. Oh, to make the most awkward of guests feel honored at my table or to give the dyspeptically staid a case of the vapors with a line as smart as it is unseemly or to bring back to earth the loftiest of egos — all with the eloquence and wit of a finely-crafted quip. Well into her eighties, Mother could still be a contender at Dorothy Parker’s table.

But one day my mother will die. And I, I will wade along the shore of sorrow, waves lapping at my legs, in and out, in and out. I will look to the fridge for solace, searching for sweetness to surround the pain, opening and closing the door fruitlessly. I will resort to cinnamon toast, sprinkling more at the edges, as she did, to make the crusts easier to bear. I will dream of her, burying my face in her pillow-chest. And I will re-braid the unraveling ends of my mother’s mother’s rug with the clothes of my childhood. Then I will take my daughter to the garden. We will kneel on the small and well-loved rug, and we will plant lilies of the valley while we sing.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt