Lessons from My Mother: A Life in Fictitious Careers

          My mother worked the register at the corner store. She toiled during long, lazy afternoons while the more gainfully employed breezed through their office jobs. She scanned barcodes of single quarts of milk, reams of lottery tickets, and forty-ounce beers and returned home with beep-induced migraines that she suffered in silence.

          She restocked the shelves. She mopped the spills. She changed the bulb in the heat lamp that kept the rubbery hot dogs and slices of pizza at a minimally safe temperature. She made change that grimed her fingers in grit and said, “Have a nice day” no matter how rude or dismissive the customer behaved.

          I spent my summers behind the counter, perched on an upturned crate, reading. A rusted fan swiveled above, and we propped the glass door open with a brick, but neither air circulation nor strategically hung royal pine fresheners could beat back the bite of sweat and body odor. When no customers perused the aisles, my mother chipped away at a jumbo book of word searches, and though I could spot the answers faster than her, the disappointment that washed across her face when I pointed out their locations taught me not to intervene in her glacially slow process. Similarly, I learned not to touch the dial on the radio that perpetually crooned Santana, or to mention my father, or to intimate any fun occurring outside the walls of the corner store.

          One day, the slushie machine failed. Red goop burst from its gyrating tub and oozed over the counter and across the floor. My mother and I made surprised eye contact over the pages of our respective books.

          “Should I…?”

          My mother shook her head, placed a pencil in the spine of her puzzle, and disappeared into the cramped storage room to find the mop. I ducked beneath the lip of the counter to avoid customers mistaking me for an employee and continued reading.

          When she returned from cleaning the mess, red dotted the bottoms of my mother’s jeans, like paint thrown at a canvas or blood splattered across the walls of a murder scene. She rubbed the cuffs with a paper towel but only succeeded in coating her fingertips as well. She tossed the wad into the trash, shrugged, and delved back into her word search.

          But the stain didn’t wash out in the laundry. It didn’t diminish when scrubbed or blasted with a hose. It didn’t vanish in a vinegar soak or when scoured with baking soda. It didn’t even fade when bleached, which transformed the surrounding denim bone white, throwing the slushie goop into gruesome relief. On the contrary, the stain seeped up the ridges of fabric, as if sucked through veins, until it branched from ankle to hip. My mother never eradicated the stain, and she never stopped wearing the jeans.

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          My mother farmed the wild fields surrounding her property. They brimmed with row after row of spinach and carrots, marigolds and string beans, tomatoes and sunflowers, zinnias and potatoes. Cucumber, watermelon, and strawberry plants spread their striving vines and runners wide, and she even grew a pair of pistachio trees that she swathed in burlap most of the year to ward against the cold. It was exceedingly dissimilar from the blacktop roads of my childhood and the lone sumac tree that burst its way through our backyard concrete.

          On weekends, I rode two buses and a train to visit, and work whittled away the days. My mother harvested by hand all summer, filling basket after basket with crops and carting them into the house to rinse and store, pickle or jam, and arrange into boxes that a neighbor I disliked drove to the local farmer’s market and sold for her. I helped halfheartedly, pulling weeds or spraying neem oil in the evenings.

          In autumn, when the plants drooped and wilted, my mother cut them down and threw their remains into the compost pile. She turned the soil. We raked. I worked slowly and made only the barest attempts to pretend to sprinkle the fields with leaves.

          In winter, the jobs slackened. My mother plucked stones and maintained the leaf beds, but we often just ambled quietly up and down the roads together, our boots the first and sometimes the only tracks disturbing the snow. If we walked far enough, I could convince her to duck into the diner on the outskirts of the nearby town to warm our noses and grab drinks before heading back to her cold, crumbling shack.

          Spring kept my mother busy. She uncovered the fields and mixed in fertilizer. She blanketed every surface of the house with starter trays of the seeds too fragile to germinate in the frigid spring but needful of a long growing season, and she directly sowed what hardy greens and roots could bear the stiff and icy soil. She watered, and she transplanted; she built trellises, and she watched patiently as seedlings sprouted and reached for the sun at their snaillike paces, sweeping away impediments as they arose. I sat on a rock and read or finished the incomplete crosswords my mother haphazardly cast aside.

          One wet summer, bugs infested the farm. Slugs and caterpillars and aphids and beetles and other unknown crawling creatures inched along leaves and devoured them. My mother knelt in the dirt, picking them by hand and dropping them into buckets of water to drown. She sprayed diluted dish soap. She bought ladybugs and praying mantises and released them at the bases of the stems. But nothing slowed the plague or curtailed its destruction.

          I watched with a grim ring of pity burning in my chest as my mother pinched at the greenery in silence, sometimes pausing to pass me a few still-edible string beans, which we munched on together though they made my throat itch, as the fields undulated and blackened around us.

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          My mother departed our ruined planet to explore the cosmos. In truth, she lacked the qualifications to safely traverse the stars. She wore glasses; her feet swung when she leaned back in seats; the number of years of her life exceeded the ideal; and her formal education wanted for degrees, but funding for space missions had dried up long ago and the agencies, rarely receiving applicants, ignored their own requirements.

          On holidays, I flew across the country to quiz her out of an old, weathered guide. At first, it was slow-going but, like a boulder rolling down a hill, she picked up speed. She could imagine how 2-D shapes would unfold in three dimensions. She knew which directions gears in diagrams spun. She could predict which box would come next in a sequence. She flew without passing out. She tumbled without vomiting. She could solder a wire while her helmet filled with fluid and not panic. She passed the aptitude tests and accepted the task of traveling into the void to search for life or places that could sustain it.

          We parted on the launch pad. She looked like a squat marshmallow whose flimsy shell wouldn’t protect her from the cold, the dark, the radiating poison of space. Unsmiling, she cradled her reflective helmet under one arm and put the other, ungainly with lack of practice, around my shoulders. I did not bother to ask her why she chose this or if she would change her mind.

          “Message me,” she said.

          “I will,” I promised, handing over a book of sudoku I knew she’d only undertake if the loneliness drove her to hitherto unimaginable levels of desperation.

          She blasted off in an explosion of fossil fuels that damaged a planet so battered it barely noticed the new wound. Her rocket, a sparkle in the smoggy sky, twinkled and flashed and then escaped the overbearing grip of Earth’s gravity forever.

          She docked with the recently abandoned space station and sent me harrowing pictures of dark and cramped passageways crowded with floating debris. On the moon, she kipped briefly with the satellite’s skeleton crew and snapped photos of the ghostly helium mines and the hydroponic gardens fueled by melted ice.

          Next, she set off for the unmanned outpost on Mars. I responded to her communications dutifully but fitfully, updating her on my goings-on, but as she traveled farther away, her messages and even her photography became routine and monotonous, and sometimes I’d receive another of her voice notes before I remembered to send my reply to her previous one.

          I first noticed the growth creeping across the side of her ship upon her departure from Mars, when she transmitted an image of a blue-tinged sunset she’d experienced on the surface. I asked her about it in my next text. Her response, recorded immediately and reaching me twenty-two hours later, said not to worry. She’d just picked up some stubborn rust.

          The stretch between Mars and Jupiter spanned over eighteen hundred days, five years in which my mother, hopping from asteroid to asteroid collecting ice and minerals, became little more than a voice in my inbox and sporadic photos of time-sucking experiments teetering on consoles covered in green fuzz that she wouldn’t talk about. Eventually, she stopped sending photos. Eventually, I stopped asking. Busy with my own problems on the scorching Earth she’d abandoned, I hardly noted her seemingly innocuous ones.

          When she arrived at her target, Jupiter’s frozen moon Europa, my mother whizzed past. The greatest minds in the world tried to contact her. They hailed her. They pinged her. They pointed telescopes in her direction and altered the flight patterns of satellites to track her, but they never received an answer. They could only observe and speculate as her blurry, green-tinged vessel, a colossal waste of money and resources, sped into the darkness.

          People gave me their condolences. She died in an accident. Or she killed herself, the years of solitude overwhelming her. I thought so, too. I began dispatching messages again, penance for my previous lax communication. I told her ghost about my work in the coral reefs beneath the boiling seas. I described the beauty of the sunlight as it filtered through the sloshing blue that I no longer believed was dying, only changing. I confessed my partner possessed long hair and a quiet nature, like her. And I transferred a shaky video of my daughter, toddling and wreaking havoc.

          Ten years into the voyage, her ship cruising past Neptune on solar power, I received a reply. The grainy video rippled like an old-timey, rabbit-eared television not receiving a strong enough signal. Some recent or long-past calamity had hollowed her cheeks, shadowed her eyes, and drained her skin to an ashen, corpse-like pallor. Her rope of hair had fallen away and something mossy moored in its place. She appeared ancient and alien, like a ruin in her own skin.

          “I’m sorry…” she said. The picture popped and puckered. My mother blinked slowly.

          “It’s so, so beautiful,” she whispered. And then the static roared, and unending pixels of snow overtook the feed, which rolled on and on over the years but never again revealed a glimpse of the woman who delivered me into this world, shepherded me through it, and then jetted far away from it, where I could not follow.