Full Exposure

“Cover me please. Just cover me.”

No matter how much my mother yanks and finagles the tie, the hospital gown slips open revealing bare skin. The first time it happens, I lower my eyes. As we walk to the bathroom, she roots and bunches the threadbare fabric. The hem hikes up brushing a lattice of green and bruised red veins.

“We could use my robe belt,” she whispers.

I kneel and wrap it around her waist to keep the gown closed.

In the first years of married life, my mother changed more than 25,000 diapers: my siblings’, and mine. She viewed and lathered six sets of baby bottoms, patted and powdered six sets of inner thighs. Now role reversal had begun to seep in. Like imaging dye on an X-ray, it had entered and was coursing at will.

I playfully grab my mother’s hand and feel the jutting wrist bone. I kiss her face and sense a hollow slackness. Arms crossed, I lean into the hospital wall and interrogate her doctor.

Conducting his evening rounds, he smiles serenely, like a man for whom a wife and a warm meal wait. When he speaks, the gently parsed words slip from his mouth like Scrabble tiles sliding off their tray onto the corridor floor: weakened...vascular...system.

That’s what he says. This is what I hear, “Her heart is decimated, shot, kaput.”

From what he can tell, over the last two decades my mother has suffered several small heart attacks. Before I research the drug interactions of her newly prescribed pills, before our roles ever truly switch, my mother has another. She dies chasing her breath.

In spring, when daylight begins to lengthen again, my sisters and I go home. My father has summoned us. He has washed the dishes, wiped the bathroom sink, and folded the guest towels the way my mother used to do. But he cannot do this. As we sit in her room, among her possessions, he pokes his head in, but just his head. The rest hesitates in the hall.

“Your mother had lovely things,” he says. “Things she never wore. Please take them, just....”

Just?

Just open her private drawers and touch her private things? Just inhale the scent of her? Just discard one dress and withhold another?

Dad heads to the kitchen to make coffee whose aroma reaches the top
stairs but which we never drink. We begin touching, but mostly as though we’re late-night stowaways in a museum. We skim books and lift silk scarves, peer at jewelry and music boxes until one of us punctuates the air.

“I can’t believe she saved this. Do you remember that? Do you remember how we pooled our allowance to buy this brooch?”

My mother’s life lies bare and open, but it appears to be mostly our lives she kept.

Glassine bags with locks of first haircuts, baptism scrolls, and report cards of each child. We peel back layers of school playbills and final exams.

I tie up her voluminous collection of magazines and catalogue maps of countries she marked but never traveled. My sisters fold blouses and camisoles to be worn by women in shelters my mother never knew. We read letters not addressed to us on cream cotton stationery. The longhand stretches to the paper’s edges as though evenings once unfolded infinitely.

Our work progresses until I find the photo stack, family pictures in black and white. We girls sit in velvet Christmas dresses, our fat, pale dolls on our laps. The boys in Little League uniforms stare out to the diamond as dust whirls at their backs. Dad carries in a Thanksgiving turkey. There are dozens of images, dozens of us. Then I spy it, a single shot of her.

“So beautiful,” my older sister murmurs touching the photograph’s edge. We stare at first trying not to blink then look away, finally grasping her
absence and former youth.

Thighs crossed, my mother sits on the edge of my parents’ bed. Dressed only in a slip, her slender arms pour from the ribbon straps. The echo of a lipsticked mouth and the loose curls of evening’s end frame her face. Her hand moves to cover her mouth in surprise and a final futile “shoo.” Caught in the spotlight, she doesn’t know whether to succumb, but she does. She succumbs. Her chin leans into that flash, and she laughs.

This could be a perfume ad, but it’s not. It’s my mother. When I look at her, the household I knew dissolves—the lockstep kingdom where parents wore bathrobes with belts that wound and rewound their waists and children pulled on slippers to protect wood floors from damp footprints. I do not see the woman who, that day, had folded umpteen cloth diapers and sliced peanut butter and jam sandwiches on perfect diagonals. I see a young girl captured by a camera.

In my mother’s bottom drawer of the final bureau we clear, we find little else: the last emergency room bracelet and unworn hospital slippers. In a manila envelope, lab films chronicle her damaged heart, but I slide back their bleak shadows. Her real heart stares from one exposure, ardent and youthful, laughing in bare light.

~Wanda Fleming

Wanda Fleming is a Washington, D.C. freelance writer and artisan. Her most recent piece is “Parents Lost and Found,” forthcoming in The Washington Post’s Style Plus section.