Heart Berries: A Memoir(9)

It’s strange that my grandmother and my mother and my aunts died from blood clots or cancer. I think again of entropy and of the body.

When my mother had her first aneurism, I received a call from my siblings. I swear two of them held the receiver. They said, maybe in unison, “Mom misses you. She isn’t speaking.”

I don’t like to say I am the sensible one in my family, because we all are dependent on each other. Maybe I am the logical mechanism in the family, and I shudder to think that, with me here in a crazy house. They told me she was walking into walls. I called emergency and booked a flight home.

I ran away from her as a girl, and a blood clot called me back.

The first thing she did when she saw me was laugh. She didn’t have the capacity to speak. They said she hadn’t made any noises until I arrived.

I touched her foot first and started a routine of questions to make her happy: Is there cable here? My show is on. I don’t trust the white women with the IV—they’ll do you like they do in the soaps. We’re going to need a sign language for all the insults you can’t call us. How will we know when you want to hit us?

She was so small that her snarling was endearing. I always made her laugh.

What little I have told you in the past seemed problematic. You seemed engaged by my dysfunction because you are a writer and not because I had experienced it. It is odd that I went to foster care while my mother worked in a group home. But it was not odd to me.

I can only elaborate on the small things, like her smallness, and how light her fists were—how she pinched the fat of my fingers to tell me she loved me. She was always aware of her struggle. A single mother with four children is destined to die from exhaustion, unless there is a miracle of fortune or justice.

We came close to fortune and justice when I was a kid. Paul Simon needed correspondence, and my mother had written long before to an inmate named Salvador Agrón for a Broadway play about Sal’s life—he was convicted young and earned a degree on the inside: he became an activist and that’s how he met Mom.

She spoke about Sal like I speak about you. We should have wanted for simpler things, but in many ways my mother taught me love was divine—like a hermitage or vision or picking from the tree of knowledge. Mother didn’t like the Bible, but I appreciate it for how suffering is related to profundity.

Paul Simon called while I was watching TV. Our landline was screwed into the old seventies wood panel of our kitchen wall. I was ashamed of the house. The room was barren. There was an orange, thrift shop dinette set, and a shrine on our counter for Stevie Ray Vaughan. It was a picture of him surrounded by barks and sage my mother picked, with red ties and turquoise jewelry. The bracelets and rings were gifts from my uncle Lyle, a jeweler who idolizes Elvis and wore a bouffant until old age turned it into a less voluminous side part.

Mom was in the bath. Paul’s voice was timid. He asked for Mom. I yelled to her that Paul was on the line. Mom told me to keep him on the phone while I heard her body emerge—splashes and her small wet feet running.

“How old are you?” Simon asked.

“I’m ten. What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m an artist,” he said.

I told him that was nice and asked him what kind of art. He laughed at me.

My mother, wrapped in a towel, ripped the phone from my hand. She carried on several conversations like this. I began to suspect they were flirting when I went with Mom to the library to look up if Simon had a wife. I didn’t want Paul Simon to be my new father. I saw an album cover once. He wore turtlenecks. He was pasty. He had beady eyes.

“He’s married to some redhead, I think. White woman,” Mom said. We had seen some news clippings and rented a biography. He was a god, and not the personalized one of benevolence, but the type who could take things away.

She sent him every letter between herself and Salvador Agrón. I had read the letters in our basement. There were images of horses and dirt and bodies, and nothing of love until it became all about love. Simon was inspired by Salvador’s plight.

Mother’s narrative was eventually drowned in Simon’s version of it all, and nowhere was Sal’s story. He was dead.

We became self-important Indians with every call. Mom floated around the house after three-day shifts at a group home and became happy. After years of writing manically in her room, someone was finally using her words. A camera crew came to interview Mom. I recently saw film of her, where a narrator with a rich English accent said, “Paul Simon and his team researched every detail of the story. They even located Wahzinak. She offered Paul Simon her intimate memories of Sal’s character.”

“He was much more beautiful in real life,” my mother said. “He just illuminated. His prose was phenomenal. He could talk about the prison life. He could talk about his poverty. People come along and they grace your life, and they make it extraordinary.”

After the interview my mother cried into the phone, and she didn’t speak to us. She didn’t sit at the table; she sat on the floor. I watched her body shake. Maybe it was having cameras in our rotting home. It was infested with mold and ladybugs and old furniture we didn’t wear down ourselves. Maybe that’s my shame talking. Maybe it was that Indians are at a ripe age when they’re fifty, and Mother was there. Maybe it was that Salvador was kind.

She met a serpent in prison who was my father. The same provocation and sentimentality drew her in, and he wasn’t kind. The legend is that he was banished from the house after many transgressions, and that we all waited by the door with weapons in case he came back, even me, a baby then, holding a hammer or a bat or a broom or a doll. The story has shifted because it’s not funny anymore.