Mother's Day

I bought my house for its mirrored walls in the master bath from which you could fancy yourself as a forties' film star, your flawless body soaking in billowing suds, or stepping into a glassed-in shower, large enough for a tryst with Tarzan, be he resident of a nearby tree. I imagined Don Perignon cooling in a basin, and me: Maureen Sullivan, with or without an Ape Man, poised for my swinging life, coupe in hand. Instead, stumbling in half-light toward morning ablutions on the quotidian blank page of my life, mirrors conjured up not Hamlet's perturbed, parental spirit, but a woman with my mother's face. In her summer frock, frenzied with flowers, prim white hat, and a crocheted bag in the crook of her arm, she is standing on the sidewalk outside my grandmother's white- columned house in Georgia, where she sought safe haven before a failed life, Jack Daniels whiskey, and the cancer monster claimed her. "So easy to spoil" it was said, so how is it life did not work for her? -- "My beautiful, beautiful daughter, wailed my grandmother like a banshee, she, of the stiff, upper-lipped Prussian forbears, as we drove forty solemn miles to lay her favorite in Rebel heaven alongside a great-grandfather who lost an arm at the battle of Cold Springs, his grim-faced wife, bedrock beside him. Peace was the prize my mother never won, no treaty ever offered, pardon long in coming. I see her poised like a dancer, sad history surrounding her, a smile as unreadable as Mona Lisa's under eyes like mine that have seen too much of the sorrow of this world. "It all comes down to this," Anne Sexton wrote, "We ARE our mothers--that's the main thing."