FROM MOTHER . . . WITH LOVE BY ZOA SHERBURNE

I just wanted to share this short story that I read in Highschool in Mr. Alex Vista's Literature class. It just seemed fitting to post it here today, Mother's Day, so that we can all remember the one person that gave us life --our Moms, Mamas, Nanays.

Thank you mom for all the love and patience and for the trust each time you leave the decision up to me. I would not be where I am if not for you. You are my inspiration and my strength. (Same as dad, but it's your day today so we'll talk about dad on father's day instead Ü)

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

-----


The day that Minta Hawley grew up was a crisp golden day in
early September.

Afterwards she was to remember everything about that day with
poignant clarity. She remembered the slapping sound the waves
made, the pungent smell of the logs burning, even the gulls that
soared and swooped overhead; but most of all she remembered
her father's face when he told her.

It began like any other Saturday, with Minta lying in bed an
extra hour. Breakfast was always lazy and unhurried on
Saturday mornings. The three of them in the breakfast room—
Minta's father engrossed in his paper; her mother flying around
in a gaily colored housecoat, mixing waffles and frying bacon;
Minta setting the table.

They talked, the casual happy talk of people who love each other
and don't have to make conversation. About neighborhood
doings . . . about items in the paper . . . about the clothes Minta
would need when she went away to school in a couple of weeks.

It was after the dishes were finished that Minta's father asked
her if she would like to go down to the beach for a little while.
"Low tide," he said. "Might get a few clams."
Minta nodded agreement, but her mother made a little face.
"Horrors, clam chowder for another week!"
"Sure you wouldn't like to go, Mary?" Minta's father asked.
"The salt air might help your headache."
"No. You two run along. I'll curl up with an apple and a
television program." She yawned and stretched, looking almost
as young as Minta.

Minta ran upstairs and got into her heavy shoes and jeans.
"Shall I call Sally and ask her if she wants to go?" She yelled,
leaning far over the banister.
"Let's just go by ourselves this time," her father answered rather
shortly.

He was silent as they drove toward the beach, but it wasn't the
companionable silence that Minta had come to expect from him.
There was something grim about it.

"He's going to talk to me about school," Minta told herself. "He's
going to try to talk me out of it again."

It was funny the way her father had acted when she announced
her intention of going to MaryHill this term. It had always been
such an accepted thing; her mother had graduated from
MaryHill and it followed that Minta should be enrolled there as
a matter of course.

Last year was different. With mother just recovering from that
operation it was natural that he should expect Minta to stay
home; she had even wanted to stay. But now going to MaryHill
was something special. She would live in a dormitory and be
part of all the campus fun. It wasn't as if MaryHill were clear
across the country, either, she'd probably be getting home every
month or so . . . and there were the Christmas holidays . . . and
then spring vacation.

Minta's chin was lifted in a stubborn line as her father parked the
car and went around to get the shovels and pail form the trunk.
It wasn't like him to be so stubborn; usually he was jolly and
easy going and inclined to leave such matters entirely up to
Minta's mother

She followed him down to the beach, her boots squishing in the
wet sand. The tide was far out and farther up the beach she
could see bent figures busily digging along the water's edge.
A scattered beach fire smoldered near the bank and Minta poked
it into place and revived it with splinters of driftwood until she
had coaxed back a steady warning blaze. When she sat back on
her heels to smile up at her father she felt her throat constrict
with a smothering fear. His eyes looked the way they had when
. . .

When?

Suddenly she remembered. He was looking at her and trying to
smile, just the way he had looked at her the time her appendix
burst and they were taking her to the hospital. She could almost
hear the wail of the ambulance siren and feel the way he had
held her hands tightly, trying to make it easier. His eyes had
told her then, as they told her now, that he would a thousand
times rather bear the pain than watch her suffer.

It seemed like a long time that she knelt there by the beach fire,
afraid to move, childishly willing herself to wake from the
nightmarish feeling that gripped her.

He took her hand and pulled her to her feet and they started
walking up the beach slowly, not toward the group of people
digging clams, but in the other direction, toward the jagged pile
of rocks that jutted out into the bay.

She heard a strange voice, her own voice.

"I thought . . . I thought you wanted to talk to me about school,
but it isn't that, is it, Father?"
Father.

She never called him Father. It was always "Dad" or "Pops" or,
when she was feeling especially gay, "John Henry."
His fingers tightened around hers. "In a way it is . . . about
school."

And then, before the feeling of relief could erase the fear he went
on. "I went to see Dr. Morton last week, Minta. I've been seeing
him pretty regularly these last few months."

She flashed a quick frightened look up at him. "You aren't ill?"
"No." He sighed and it was a heartbreaking sound. "No. It isn't
me. It's your mother. That's why I don't want you to go to
MaryHill this year."

"But . . . but she's feeling so much better, Dad. Except for these
headaches once in a while. She's even taking on a little weight–"
She broke off and stopped walking and her hand was steady on
his arm. "Tell me," she said quietly.

The look was back in his eyes again but this time Minta scarcely
noticed it, she was aware only of his words, the dreadful echoing
finality of his words.

Her mother was going to die.
To die.
Her mother.

To die, the doctor said. Three months, perhaps less. . . .
Her mother who was gay and scatterbrained and more fun than
anyone else in the world. Her mother who could be counted on
to announce in the spring that she was going to do her

Christmas shopping early this year, and then left everything
until the week before Christmas.
No one was worse about forgetting anniversaries and birthdays
and things like that; but the easy-to-remember dates, like
Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day and Halloween were
always gala affairs complete with table favors and three-decker
cakes.

Minta's mother wore the highest heels and the maddest hats of
any mother on the block. She was so pretty. And she always
had time for things like listening to new records and helping
paste pictures in Minta's scrapbook.

She wasn't ever sick—except for the headaches and the operation
last year which she had laughingly dismissed as a rest cure.
"I shouldn't have told you." Her father was speaking in a voice
that Minta had never heard from him before. A voice that held
loneliness and fear and a sort of angry pain. "I was afraid I
couldn't make you understand, why you had to stay home . . .
why you'd have to forget about MaryHill for this year." His eyes
begged her to forgive him and for some reason she wanted to
put her arms around him, as if she were much older and
stronger.

"Of course you had to tell me," she said steadily. "Of course I
had to know."

And then—"Three months but Dad, that's Christmas."

He took her hand and tucked it under his arm and they started
walking again.

It was like walking through a nightmare. The steady squishsquish
of the wet sand and the little hollows their feet made
filling up almost as soon as they passed.

He talked quietly, explaining, telling her everything the doctor
had said, and Minta listened without tears, without tears,
without comment.

She watched his face as though it were the face of a stranger.
She thought about a thousand unrelated things.

Last winter then he had chased her and her mother around the
back yard to wash their faces in the new snow. She could still
see the bright red jacket her mother had worn . . . the kerchief
that came off in the struggle . . . the way the neighbors had
watched from their windows, laughing and shaking their heads.
She remembered all the times they had gone swimming this past
summer. Minta and her father loved to swim but her mother had
preferred to curl up on a beach blanked and watch them.
"You have the disposition of a Siamese cat," Minta had accused
her mother laughingly. "A cushion by the fire in the winter and
a cushion in the sun in the summer. . . ."

"And a bowl of cream nearby," her mother had agreed instantly.
She was always good-natured about their teasing.

But in spite of her apparent frailty and her admitted laziness she
managed to accomplish an astounding amount of work. Girl
Scouts, PTA, Church bazaars, Red Cross. People were always
calling her to head a committee or organize a drive. Young
people congregated in her home. Not just Minta's gang, but the
neighborhood youngsters. She had Easter egg hunts for them;
she bought their raffle tickets and bandaged their skinned knees.

It was like coming back from a long journey when her father
stopped talking and they turned back toward the car.
"So that's why I can't let you go away, Midge." Her father's voice
was very low and he didn't seem to realize that he had called her
by the babyish name she had discarded when she started to first
grade. "It isn't just your mother I'm thinking about . . . it's me. I
need you."
She looked at him quickly and her heart twisted with pity. He
did need her. He would need her more than ever.
In the car she sat very close to him.
"We didn't get the clams," she reminded him once, but he only
nodded. Just before they reached home he reached over and
took her hand in a tight hurting grip.
"We can't tell her, Minta. The doctor left it up to me and I said
not to tell her. We have to let her have this last time . . . this last
little time . . . without that hanging over her. We have to go on
as if everything were exactly the same."
She nodded to show that she understood. After a moment she
spoke past the ache in her throat. "About school. I'll . . . I'll tell
her that I decided to wait until next year. Or that I'm afraid I'd
be lonesome without the gang. I've been sort of . . . sort of
seesawing back and forth, anyway."
—
It seemed impossible that life could go on exactly as before. The
small private world peopled by the three of them was as snug
and warm and happy as though no shadow had touched them.

They watched television and argued good-naturedly about the
programs. Minta's friends came and went and there was the
usual round of parties and dances and games. Her father
continued to bowl two evenings a week and her mother became
involved in various preholiday pursuits.

"I really must get at my Christmas shopping," she mentioned the
day she was wrapping trick-or-treat candy for Halloween.
Minta shook her head and sighed gustily.

Her mother started this "I-must-get-at-my-Christmas-shopping"
routine every spring and followed it up until after Thanksgiving
but she never actually got around to it until two or three days
before Christmas.

It was amazing that Minta could laugh and say, "Oh, you . . ." the
way she did year after year.

It was a knife turning in her heart when her mother straightened
up from the gay cellophane-wrapped candies and brushed a
stray wisp of taffy-colored hair back from on flushed cheek.
"Don't laugh," she said, pretending to be stern. "You know
you're just exactly like me."

It was a warning though. She was like her mother. Inside,
where it really mattered she was like her mother, even though
she had her father's dark eyes and straight black hair, even
though she had his build and the firm chin of all the Hawleys.
She wanted to put her arm around her mother and hug her,
hard. She wanted to say, "I hope I am like you. I want to be."
But instead she got up and stretched and wrinkled her nose.
"Perish forbid," she said, "that I should be such a scatterbrain."

She was rewarded by the flash of a dimple in her mother's cheek.

—

It seemed to Minta, as week followed week, that the day at the
beach had been something out of a nightmare: Something that
she could push away from her and forget about. Sometimes she
looked at her father, laughing, teasing them, or howling about
the month-end bills and she thought, "It didn't happen . . . it isn't
true."

And then at night she would lie sleepless in her room, the pretty
room that had been reconverted from her nursery. She watched
the moonlight drift patterns across the yellow bedspread and the
breeze billow the curtains that her mother had made by hand,
because that was the only way she could be sure of an absolute
match.

"Yellow is such a difficult color to match," she had explained
around a mouthful of pins.

And in the dark hours of the night Minta had known it wasn't a
nightmare. It was true. It was true.

One windy November day she hurried home from school and
found her mother in the yard raking leaves. She wore a bright
kerchief over her head and she had Minta's old polo coat belted
around her. She looked young and gay and carefree and her
eyes were shining.

"Hi!" She waved the rake invitingly. "Change your clothes and
come help. We'll have a smudge party in the alley."
Minta stopped and leaned on the gate. She saw with a new
awareness that there were dark circles under her mother's eyes

and that the flags of color in her cheeks were too bright. But she
managed a chuckle.

"I wish you could see yourself, Mom. For two cents I'd get my
camera and take a picture of you."

She ran into the house and got her camera and they took a whole
roll of pictures.

"Good," her mother said complacently. "Now we can show them
to your father the next time he accuses me of being a Sally-Sitby-
the-Fire."

They piled the leaves into a huge damp stack, with the help of
half a dozen neighborhood children. It wouldn't burn properly
but gave out with clouds of thick, black, wonderfully pungent
smoke.

Her mother was tired that night. She lay on the davenport and
made out her Christmas card list while Minta and her father
watched the wrestling matches. It was like a thousand other
such evenings but in some unaccountable way it was different.
"Because it's the last time," Minta told herself. "The last time
we'll ever rake the leaves and make a bonfire in the alley. The
last time I'll snap a picture of her with her arms around the Kelly
kids. The last time . . . the last time. . . . "

She got up quickly and went out into the kitchen and made
popcorn in the electric popper, bringing a bowl to her mother
first, remembering just the way she liked it, salt and not too
much butter.

But that night she wakened in the chilly darkness of her room
and began to cry, softly, her head buried in the curve of her arm.
At first it helped, loosening the tight bands about her heart,
washing away the fear and the loneliness, but when she tried to
stop she found that she couldn't. Great wracking sobs shook her
until she could no longer smother them against her pillow. And
then the light was on and her mother was there bending over
her, her face concerned, her voice soothing.

"Darling, what is it? Wake up, baby, you're having a bad
dream."

"No . . . no, it isn't a dream," Minta choked. "It's true . . . it's
true."

The thin hand kept smoothing back her tumbled hair and her
mother went on talking in the tone she had always used to
comfort a much smaller Minta.

She was aware that her father had come to the doorway. He said
nothing, just stood there watching them while Minta's sobs
diminished into hiccupy sighs.

Her mother pulled the blanket up over Minta's shoulder and
gave her a little spank. "The idea! Gollywogs, at your age," she
said reprovingly. "Want me to leave the light on in case your
spook comes back?"

Minta shook her head, blinking against the tears that crowded
against her eyelids, even managing a wobbly smile.
She never cried again.

Not even when the ambulance came a week later to take her
mother to the hospital. Not even when she was standing beside
her mother's high white hospital bed, holding her hand tightly,
forcing herself to chatter of inconsequential things.

"Be sure that your father takes his vitamin pills, won't you,
Minta? He's so careless unless I'm there to keep an eye on him."
"I'll watch him like a beagle," Minta promised lightly. "Now you
behave yourself and get out of here in a hurry, you hear?"

Not even at the funeral. . . .

The friends and relatives came and went and it was as if she
stood on the sidelines watching the Minta who talked with them
and answered their questions. As if her heart were encased in a
shell that kept it from breaking.

She went to school and came home afterwards to the empty
house. She tried to do the things her mother had done but even
with the help of well-meaning friends and neighbors it was hard.
She tried not to hate the people who urged her to cry.

"You'll feel better, dear," her Aunt Grace had insisted and then
had lifted her handkerchief to her eyes and walked away when
Minta had only stared at her with chilling indifference.

She overheard people talking about her mother.

"She never knew, did she?" They asked.

And always Minta's father answered, "No, she never knew.

Even at the very last, when she was waiting for the ambulance to
come she looked around the bedroom and said, 'I must get these
curtains done up before Christmas.'"

Minta knew that her father was worried about her and she was
sorry, but it was as if there were a wall between them, a wall that
she was too tired to surmount.

One night he came to the door of her room where she was
studying."I wonder if you'd like to go through those clothes before your
Aunt Grace takes them to the church bazaar," he began haltingly.
And then when she looked up at him, not understanding, he
went on gently, "Your mother's clothes. We thought someone
might as well get some good out of them."

She stood up and closed the book and went past him without
another word, but she closed the door behind her when she went
into her mother's room.

There were some suit boxes by the closet door and Minta
vaguely remembered that the women from the bazaar committee
had called several times.

Her hands felt slightly unsteady as she pulled open the top
dresser drawer and looked down at the stacks of clean
handkerchiefs, the stockings in their quilted satin case, the
gloves folded into tissue wrappings.

"I can't do it," she told herself, but she got a box and started
putting the things into it, trying not to look at them, trying to
forget how delighted her mother had been with the pale green
slip, trying not to remember.

Once she hesitated and almost lifted a soft wool sweater from
the pile that was growing in the suit box. She had borrowed it so
often that her mother used to complain that she felt like a
criminal every time she borrowed it back again. She didn't mean
it though . . . she loved having Minta borrow her things.
Minta put the sweater with the other things and closed the box
firmly.

Now, the things in the closet—

Opening the door was almost like feeling her mother in the room
beside her. A faint perfume clung to most of her garments. The
house-coat . . . the woolly robe . . . the tan polo coat . . . the scarlet
jacket . . . her new blue wool with the pegtop skirt.
Minta started folding the things with almost frantic haste,
stuffing them into boxes, cramming the lids on and then starting
on another box.

At the very back of the closet were the two pieces of matched
luggage that had been her mother's last birthday gift from her
father. They were heavy when she tried to move them—too
heavy.

She brought them out into the room and put them side by side
on her mother's bed. Her breath caught in her throat when she
opened them.

Dozens and dozens of boxes, all tied with bright red ribbon, the
gift tags written out in her mother's careful script. Gaily colored
Christmas stickers, sprigs of holly. To Minta from Mother and
Dad . . . to Grace from Marty . . . to John from Mary . . . to the
Kelly Gremlins from Aunt Mary . . . to Uncle Art from the
Hawley family. . . .

"So you knew," Minta whispered the words. "You knew all the
time."

She looked down in surprise as a hot tear dropped on her hand
and she dashed it away almost impatiently.

She picked up another package and read the tag. To Minta from
Mother . . . with love.