Waterlily
My mother is a waterlily, brushstrokes and all. Those giant ones, canvases full on the walls of the Orangerie, tucked into the round room like curtains closed. My father and I walk past them after she is gone, visit Paris like it is our destiny, like we will find her here, floating on the green blue water.
On Wednesdays, when the lights are off, my mother hangs like glass panes off the balcony doors of our apartment, the sheen of them in their transparent light. My mother is the dog-eared pages of cookbooks from that year I moved away—all the way to Italy and what did she do but write a lifetime of suggestions, advice, scribbled in the margins like love letters to her younger self. My mother is my younger self. She is the way the kitchen smelled on Christmas Eve. Pie crusts with jam on Thanksgiving. Floral pillow cases and me tucked in on a July night. She is fireflies and long blades of grass, the childhood summers, the song of the cicadas, the slip and slide. My mother is the time the sky got so red that she grabbed the keys and we drove out to see it, packed ourselves into the car and drove down 10th Street toward the golf course. Past Arlington, left on Pleasant Run, faster and faster like you can drive to the sky, like it is there waiting for you: its heaven-orb the size of Montana.
On the bad days, my mother was an even keel, a steady hand while the rest of us were the waves that rocked her. On the bad days, my mother kept lists of the questions to ask the doctor, collected bandannas to tie over her head, cut down on salt, on sugar, read every book you could find on how to get better. My mother was the accountant. The press secretary. The plumber and the electrician. My mother was the mechanical engineer. The one who sat beside me when I test-drove my first car, that red Pontiac on the lot near Eastgate mall, and the car dealer wondered who these two Asian women were, taking over the front seats, rolling down the road. My mother was the firecracker. The Fourth of July. The heart that you follow across the ocean if you have to, that somehow leads you home. On the bad days, my mother was the voice on the other side of the phone, trying to stay calm, listening when I could only say I love you, I’ll be there, I’m buying a ticket, packing my bags. My mother was long haul transatlantic, the sky with the clouds below me, the next day starting as the last day drifted by.
But now my mother is the double rainbow that will not subside as my husband and I drive the long roads from the mountains to the small Italian towns, each honey brick village held tight in the embrace of those two faint lines. My mother is the deer on the road that we will swerve to miss, whose eyes will meet ours for that click of a moment, that long step into the middle of the highway and then, just like that, she is gone again into the night. She is the dark skin on my own brown body, the knowledge that we were from somewhere else, that I can carry a place with me even if I’ve never seen it: her skin my inheritance, her dimpled smile a gift, a memory. The ghost of her. If I forget my mother—the sound of her voice, the freckles in her brown eyes—she will come through in smaller things: sunflowers that fill Italian fields in the month of July. Quiet churches with their stone walls, leading me through the back roads of Rome, never lost. Or the cat gathered at the foot of the bed, curled the way we all are, twine and spool and how we will all unravel, every last one of us. My mother is our greatest fears, our wildest hopes, our own rickety fate. Dreams that we will wake up from and wonder where she went—how her hand was just in mine and now? Oranges to the rafters in the Orangerie that smell of citrus, like the back streets of Paris where we once ate Nutella crepes. And before that I was small and she played peek-a-boo in the long mirrors of the bathroom. And before that she was a teenager in her satin ballet shoes. And before that a child holding her own mother’s hand. And before that. And before that. And before.
Jacqueline Goyette (she / her)
Jacqueline Goyette is a creative nonfiction writer from Indianapolis, Indiana who lives with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom in a small town in the middle of Italy.