A Tomb by the Sounding Sea

by S. Holt

Aunt Fran had called with my mother’s death announcement. She was barely intelligible, blubbering into her phone, her tears probably clogging the buttons and ports. “She ran the car in the garage,” she sobbed. “Nothing they could do, just kept her on life support until last night.” She swallowed, collected herself. “They think your father really did take her in right away. Tried CPR. Which almost makes it harder to take.”

I processed the words quickly, immediately accepted the reality that my mother was dead. But I didn’t feel pain. I was sorry to hear it, but it was all cerebral. I felt the grief of a death anniversary, not the very event.

I don’t believe my mother was a naturally-depressed person. She had never been one to lie in bed all day, or skip meals, or cry when it didn’t make sense to cry. She liked to whittle woodland creature paperweights, she liked to watch Hitchcock movies and cover her eyes at the murders, and she liked to bake 14 varieties of cookies every Purim. She asked everyone she met detailed questions about themselves–detailed, sometimes, in a way that bordered on meaningless–and she always remembered their answers. She would never forget your favorite brand of toothpaste or that you weren’t a fan of mustard.

She was incredibly warm, a trait I did not inherit. But it did not shock me that she took her own life.

I cursed myself for this quick acceptance. Because if I wasn’t shocked, then I should have seen it coming. And if I should have seen it coming, then I should have prevented it.

I wondered how long Fran had taken to call me. For most people, the sobbing would mean no time at all, but Fran had always been a crier. I tried not to think about the fact that no one had let me know she was in the hospital.

“Should I come out there?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say. My relationship with my mother had been so fraught, so muddled in my head, that the idea of trying to comfort Fran, to offer simple, meaningless platitudes, was beyond the pale.

She cried harder, big nasty sobs that meant I had to hold the phone a few inches from my ear. “She’d be so proud of you…she is, was so proud of you…taking charge of your life…”

“If she was proud…” I cut myself off. “So I should come out?”

I really didn’t want to come out. Not because I didn’t care, but because my mother had been the only person there I would ever want to see. Still, I knew I had a responsibility to at least offer. It wasn’t all of their fault that I saw my miserable youth reflected in their faces, my mother’s cage in the curves of their backs.

“We’re not even sitting shiva, considering…of course, he might want to host something…God, I don’t…”

“I can talk to him. Was he the one who found–”

“Yes,” she choked out. “Kept her locked up in that house…”

“I know.”

“She hated him…”

“I know.”

My first memory of my father had been his absence. The first week he skipped town–too angry to stay, or before he left, speak–for some supposed offense of my mother’s, the content of which is lost in time. In my mind, he is out of frame, holed up in some motel for a few days, maybe staying with his brother, maybe a mistress. I don’t know. But I can picture her, her image hazy after 20-some years, eating her lasagna alone across the dining table. I remember the catch in my throat, the feeling that any sudden movements would throw both of us on the floor, flat on our faces. Hit by our situation, if not his fist.

I didn’t want to go back to Missouri, to see her corpse’s slow decay. I didn’t want that to be our ending, impersonal as it would be. But I never believed that the dead are where their bodies rest. I could send her off from wherever I thought of her, wherever the wind blew and the current roared. Wherever flowers grew.

*

After I got off the phone, I drove to this flower shop my mother and I had visited once in the Mission District. I had long since moved out to Pacifica, but I welcomed the chance to drive straight into traffic, to fill my head with the immediacy of unprotected lefts and illegal merges.

She had believed in the power of a task, in its ability to protect you from your conscious mind. I was on a quest to send my mother her flowers, to send them out to sea. My quest was noble, and it would protect me from my thoughts. It would protect me from confronting my absence.

13 years ago, we stopped in the flower shop on our way to the Tuesday night farmers’ market. This was the first time she’d come to visit me, a rare victory of her independence. We had spent the morning at Ocean Beach. As we looked out on the sea, I had asked her to stay there with me, never to return home. She told me she would think about it, she really would.

The store sold beeswax candles and enamel pins and all the bouquets were suspended from twine. She had shaken her head at the prices of the flowers. $7 for a single dahlia, $42 for a dozen roses. “How do people even get married anymore?”

I was 19, untethered. Proud of myself for up-and-leaving the St. Louis suburbs, $600 of babysitting money to my name. I took a sick pride in my distance from how she thought. Hick, heartland, parochial. I wanted to show her how easy it was to be free like me, how much better. How much happier she would be without those old Midwestern values rotting out her independence. “They don’t.”

“Oh,” she said. She examined a parcel of white sage. “Well, how about when they die? People here still die, I assume.”

“Can I help you?” The shop clerk shot up from her elbows.

Mom held up the tag on a pretty but small bouquet of peonies and carnations. $72. She smiled at the clerk. “I don’t think you can.”

When I left Pacifica for the city, I didn’t remember what the flower shop was called. I didn’t try to figure it out; I just got in the car and started to drive. I knew it was on one of the side streets off Valencia, somewhere near Flor de Café, where she had discovered that she did, indeed, like Mexican food. “Your father can’t eat anything spicy.” We were ravenous; I had to enjoy the five al pastor tacos I had just received for free, and she had to savor this first and likely only encounter with a good, real burrito. She pushed her glasses up with her thumb, getting a splotch of salsa verde on the lens. “I’m a real foodie!” She put too much emphasis on the second half of the word, sitting awkwardly in her mouth, but in a small moment of mercy, I didn’t correct her.

I tried not to think of her, to simply focus on the road. I watched Highway 1 bend around the hills before me–sea on one side, cliff on the other–and I wished she had asked me to tell her about this road, to convince her to stay. To let me drive her up the entire west coast, all the way to Canada, all the way to Alaska if she wanted. She would never have to go back to Missouri again; we could have been like Thelma and Louise if Louise were Thelma’s daughter.

I arrived in the city without fully noticing it, as if I had simply taken a cat nap on a train, coming to at the announcement of my station. I circled the blocks around Valencia Street, looking for a free parking spot. This could take a lifetime if you weren’t careful, but today I wanted to be careless. I wanted to cruise until I ran out of gas. I wanted to fall asleep at the wheel. I watched a purple-haired woman arrive at her Prius, grocery bag in hand. I didn’t put my hazards on; I kept making the rounds.

I went down 20th Street, then took Guerrero to Cumberland. There was a giant space open that I couldn’t afford to ignore, so bad were my parallel parking skills. When I lived in the city I didn’t have a car, partially because I couldn’t afford it, and partially because I couldn’t stand the idea of parallel parking on a hill with a 12% incline.

I had no trouble finding the florist. There was a pink neon sign that I hadn’t remembered from before. “Sassy Sisters Snips” with a line drawing of a rose at the end.

A bell rang as I walked through the door. The clerk–the same woman who had been there before, now sporting thick red glasses and salt and pepper hair–stood at attention. “Welcome in,” she said with a smile. “Anything specific you’re looking for today?’

“I’m going to a funeral,” I said before I had the time to think. And yes. Suddenly it was true. This would be a funeral, of sorts. “So something for that.”

The clerk put on her best appropriately somber look–eyes cast down, hand on her heart. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” She walked out from behind the counter and motioned for me to follow her to a corner filled with pre-wrapped bouquets.

“The most traditional funeral flower is the lily, of course, but we don’t usually work with them as they don’t fit our design style. But carnations and chrysanthemums are also great mourning options.” She gestured to two bouquets, one with fluffy light-pink flowers and tiny white ones sprinkled throughout, and one with yellow flowers that looked somewhat alien, thick and long tendrils poking up from the center. I had no idea which was which.

I pointed to the pink ones. “How much for those?”

“Usually $74, but I’ll do $65.”

“Sure, thanks.”

“Would you like me to wrap it?”

After I left Sassy Sisters Snips, I didn’t quite know what to do. I didn’t have anywhere to be, not by any set time, but I also didn’t want to go back to the coast just yet. Before long, my husband, James, would be home from work, and we’d have to talk, and I’d have to admit that it was all real, that she was dead. He had only met my mother a few times, so there wasn’t any mourning to expect on his end. But I wasn’t ready to be comforted, to be held. Aunt Fran’s call was so distant, almost fiction.

I found myself walking towards Flor de Café. I wasn’t hungry, but I ordered a burrito and an orange jarritos anyway. I sat at a sticky table by the window, taking small sips of my soda without even bothering to unwrap the burrito. I watched the passersby. A guy in a neon bro-tank red-faced on a run, a woman in all black yelling on the phone as she pushed a stroller. I hated them, I hated everyone. How lucky they were to be here and to be themselves, probably rich, probably happy without realizing it, probably free enough to know they could leave if they needed to. I wished I had given her that, I wished she was just screaming into her phone right now, entitled and oblivious and able to yell and run and live freely.

I was down to the bottom third of my soda when my phone began to ring. I briefly stopped breathing. Annabel Levine, read the Caller ID. I picked up the phone.

“Mom?”

“What?” The voice on the other end was gruff, cold, and possibly drunk.

It hit me. Both her cell phone and their home phone were under her name.

“Dad.” I thought about hanging up, but something kept me on the line.

“You did hear the news, right? Fran said she wanted to tell you. Always inserting herself.” He coughed hard into the phone.

“Yeah. When did it happen?”

“Tuesday. Well, that’s when she went in. She passed last night. Nothing they could do.”

I didn’t know what to say. There was silence on the line.

“You doing okay?” I asked.

“How do you fucking think?”

“Calm down.”

“You abandoned her.” He cleared his throat, and when he started speaking again, his voice was higher. It wobbled. I sat mute, stunned. “She needed you, and you might as well have killed her. You avoid me, hate me, after all I did raising you, well, fine. I can handle that. But she wasn’t strong. She wasn’t…” He stifled a sob.

“I gave her a choice.” The woman behind the register glanced over at me every few seconds, looking away when I tried to hold her eye-line.

“She would never let you take her away from me,” He said. “All she wanted in the world was to be loved by me. My sweet…” He let a guttural cry into the receiver.

“She would rather die than live with you.” The woman was staring now.

“You’ve always been a selfish shit,” he said. “I’m sure your husband knows it. But she didn’t know it. You broke her heart. She died of a broken heart.”

“You know I had nothing to do with it.”

He was still saying something when I pressed the red button.

My burrito was cold, but I forced myself to eat it. For her.

It was in this shop, despite the food she loved, that she told me she couldn’t stay. She was smiling, flapping her hand at the heat of the salsa, when her eyes rested on the same spot behind me. I had turned to see the cashier and the cook, clearly an older couple, probably the owners of the restaurant, sharing a kiss. They looked at each other with an openness, a tenderness, I had never seen between my parents.

“I have to go back to him,” she said. I had sobbed.

*

I moved to San Francisco at 19 because I understood that to be where artists went and an artist was, vaguely, what I wanted to be. It turned out that I was not an artist but merely someone with an artistic temperament, which is not the same thing. Still, I liked where I was, and I liked that it was far from where I had been.

I did the young and underemployed and uncommitted thing for a few years; by 27 I was tired and poor and lonely. When I met James at a 6 AM hot yoga class a friend had dragged me to, it didn’t take long for us to move in together. Until we bought a place and moved out of the city, he kept going to that same yoga class, every Monday and Wednesday. I had gotten what I needed from it.

Once James proposed (Sunset at Land’s End, stunning and private, if a bit overdone), Mom began calling me every Sunday evening to discuss the wedding plans. She asked about wine selections and whether Grandmother’s veil went with my dress and if the florals should be mostly peonies or anemones. She made me promise to work with a florist outside of the city, horrified by the prices we had once seen.

She didn’t mention my father or her week-of logistics, and for a long time, I didn’t ask. She RSVP’d yes for two. We arranged a hotel block at an inn. I reserved a room for them; she mailed me a check.

Only about a month out from the ceremony (a classic Napa winery ordeal) did I approach the subject. I asked what airline they were flying and when they got in. We were considering arranging a shuttle from the airport; I wanted to know how many people might be interested.

Up until that point, we had been in the midst of a heated debate about whether one of my bridesmaids’ heels were quite the right shade of champagne. She insisted they were not, and I was hesitant to make my movie-theater-usher friend drop another $130 on shoes.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said. “So I might as well just say it. We can’t come anymore.”

“What?”

“We’re not coming. Your father…well, you know.” Clearly, I did not know well enough.

“We’ll send you some money. How’s that? Enough to cover a good chunk of that honeymoon. Italy isn’t cheap, I’ve heard. The Howards down the road, they went last year. Said Florence was as bad as Paris; couldn’t believe it. What’s that clicking sound?”

“Oh, sorry.” I hadn’t realized it, but I had begun clicking the pen I had been using to write to-do notes.

“Well, anyway…”

“So it’s just because, because what? He doesn’t feel like it?” My voice returned to my throat, my mind to my head. “You’ve already paid. And clearly you care about this. We wouldn’t be arguing about florals if you didn’t.”

“I don’t need to tell you what he’s like.” Her voice turned hollow. “He’s never liked planes.”

“Just you come, then.” The back of my hand was wet and cold, like walking out into the rain. I had started crying without realizing it.

“You know I can’t defy him like that.”

“Why not?”

“C’mon, honey.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m begging you. I hate that I have to, but I’m begging you.”

“You don’t know how he’d be when I got back,” she said, after a pause. “How he’s been when I’ve visited you before. And now, he specifically said he doesn’t want…

“He’s different. Worse. Suffocating, completely suffocating. I never leave the house. And those stupid delivery services! I don’t even have a reason to go to the grocery store.” She paused. “Not that it was so great when you were here.”

“So come live with us,” I said.

It would be fine with James. He’d get it. He was close with his parents, dutiful in every way. We wanted to move out of the city soon anyway, get somewhere bigger. Hopefully, a yard, though it would probably be small. We could get her some flower beds. She could spend her days gardening, looking over the cliffs to the water’s edge. In my vision, we were right on the sea. She could even go back to work if she wanted. She could be a real career woman again, like she was before me. The future came to me quickly. There were so many options, so many choices to be made.

“You know I can’t do that to him.”

“But you can do this to me?”

“Baby.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “You can run away. You can start over.”

“I can’t.”

“I’ll help you. I’ve already done it.” I was gaining steam. “We can go up the coast. We can go on a ship, I don’t know. You can go anywhere, and I’ll support you.”

“Stop asking me to do things you know I won’t do.” She was crying now. “I’m not like you, okay? I moved from my parents’ house into your father’s. I’m glad you were able to do it. Really. But I…”

I swallowed my tears. “If you don’t come, that’s it.”

The day after we returned from Naples, a bouquet of blue hyacinths arrived.

There was no note.

We never spoke again.

*

The walk back from Flor de Café to my car was short, but in that limited time I managed to strangle several leaves off the sides of the bouquet, leaving my hands speckled with a green vegetal residue as I held the steering wheel. I placed the flowers next to me in the passenger seat. They reminded me of a child allowed to sit out of their booster seat for the first time, sliding down beneath the too-high seat belt.

My mother hadn’t been in my life for five years. But until now it had felt like a reverse-staring contest we were both too stubborn to lose. Yes, I had set the rules, but she never broke them. She never wrote me a letter, never even sent a FaceBook message. Perhaps this was out of respect for the boundary I had set.

But when each birthday passed, when we bought a house, when my grandfather died, I noticed that my first thought and my last disappointment was that I heard nothing from her. If James died, my first thought would be to hope it brought her to me again.

Her eyes were permanently shut. She was forever somewhere where I would never be, where she couldn’t hold my gaze or even say my name. And what’s more: she had chosen to go out like that. Never losing the game, never turning towards me.

I drove to the Taco Bell on Pacifica Beach. When we first moved in, it was still an old graffitied-up building, still a fortress for skaters and stoners and those with nowhere else to sleep. Now it was largely the same, just requiring payment.

I walked out onto the beach, bouquet in hand. The walk over the sand felt long, much longer than it had been in my head. The sky was uncharacteristically bright for foggy Pacifica. I had had this perfect vision in my head of getting the bouquet and taking it out to sea, like a stand-in Viking funeral float, but the reality was robotic, uncinematic. I was keenly aware of the young family just up the beach, sitting in half-on wetsuits after an afternoon surf. I felt their eyes searing into me. I was sure that someone was about to yell at me for littering.

When I got to the water’s edge, I realized an additional problem. I had pictured myself simply getting to the shoreline and throwing the flowers in, where they would automatically drift off to sea. But the water was too gradual. Without getting in the water at all, I would only be able to throw the flowers into about a foot of water, where they would quickly drift back to land. Plus, there was the rubber band holding them all together. I knew I really shouldn’t throw that out there.

I took off my boots, socks, and jeans. I pulled off the rubber band, holding the stems together myself. I took a step into the water, immediately tightening all my muscles from the cold. But this was good, this was closer to what I wanted. I wanted some physical sacrifice, I wanted to lose something of myself for her.

I took another step, then another, then another, until I felt the even deeper chill of the water hitting my waist. I wondered how my mother would feel, seeing me now. Would she applaud my free-spiritedness? Would she want to run in after me, envious from the shore? Of course, I wasn’t doing this because I was a free spirit. There wasn’t joy in this swim, this wasn’t a celebration of life. This was ritualistic. The real funeral, to release her soul. This was a mikvah, a cleansing rebirth.

A wave came crashing into me. I held my breath and ducked under it, salt water still getting into my nose and stinging my eyes.

I lifted what remained of the flowers out of the water. Many of the leaves and petals had been taken, but their soaked centers remained. I released them.

Some of the stems trailed me as I swam back to shore, but that was okay. I had given them a chance to escape–what they did with that was their choice.

 

S. Holt is a writer in Louisiana and an MFA candidate at the University of New Orleans, where she is a managing editor for Bayou Magazine. You can find her creative nonfiction in Collision Literary magazine and her coverage of the dating industry at DatingNews.com. In her fiction, she writes about religion and womanhood.