Is this really me, this white trash harpy, involved in a domestic dispute with her brother in the hallway of our father’s senior-citizen apartment building on the occasion of his 71st birthday dinner? Is it really? It started at the dinner table, then my step-mother gently booted us outside, and now the neighbors are prairie-dogging their white-crowned heads out of their doors: “Is everything alright out here?” “Can I help you with anything?” I point to my father’s door and chirp, in blatant repudiation of what’s on my face I’m sure, “Oh, we’re OK, we’re just visiting Tim,” thus guaranteeing my dad exciting community laundry-room run-ins for the next few weeks. I am such a bitch.
We are fighting about photos from a trip taken over 20 years ago. I took them from my brother – he kept them in a drawer like a magic talisman – so that I could make a scrapbook of them. Of course I haven’t gotten to it yet. I’m still working on Bean’s baby album for chrissakes, and he just turned THREE. As in three YEARS. So fine, I scrapbook slowly. My brother’s drawer, my scrapbooking pile – who cares? Here’s who cares: my brother. Apparently.
It is my brother’s assertion that he has asked for the photos back many times and I have told him repeatedly that I’d return them and then not done so. He is in essence calling me a liar. It is my position that asking, “How’s that scrapbook coming?” – which is in general a running joke between The Uptight Yankee and me – does not equate asking for the photos back. If he’d asked for them back, I’d have given them back! They’re old photos! I can make copies! I mean, it’s 2011 – we have the technology. Jesus.
But he has not asked, and that is my complaint, that in fact he has not said much of anything to me in years. Here I was an eager fool, looking forward to seeing him – why? Why keep looking for the one thing someone can’t give you? - and this is what he chooses to do: lob an accusation of – what? Lying? Theft? Hoarding? Whatever it is, it was not what I had been looking forward to.
There are about 250 photos, from our drive around the country. The entire country. As in, the U.S.A. In a camper. There are many photos of trains (my brother was and is a railfan), mountains, canyons, famous buildings, a bell, a spaceship, a trout. A bison. Me in all my awkward 14-year-old glory. And then there are about a dozen photos of my mother.
They aren’t even good photos: she never photographed well and she knew it, hated having her picture taken. These photos show her from the side, from the back: her anxious face peering through the camper windshield as my brother and I huddle in the howling wind next to the Powder River Pass elevation sign. (9,666 feet, for those who are wondering.) Her from the back, silhouetted in the space between the two engines on the track at Promontory Point. She is glancing to the left, probably thinking, “Where are those ungrateful jerks?!” as my brother and I snicker and take her picture. Her from above, standing on some kind of observation platform atop some stupid waterfall. She’s not even looking at the camera, she’s looking off to the side.
Our mother, who died less than three years after these photos were taken: that is what my brother and I are fighting over. As the years go by my mother disappears more and more, leaving us scrabbling to grab at any remnant. To an outsider we appear to be grabbing at nothing – garbage, or flakes of ash that melt into oblivion as soon as we touch them – but to us they are precious fragments, shards of a life that used to be whole and real.
After our little hallway incident, I make new prints of all the negatives, then start sifting through the photos. I had started the scrapbook by sorting out the photos I wanted to use, jotting little notes on the back. Now they must all be re-sorted into original order so that I can compare new with old and – anyone with a sibling will immediately get this – make sure my brother and I get the exact same photos. The sorting process goes a little like this: train photo, train photo, train, train, train… bullshit, bullshit, bullshit… ah! Mom! Or: ah! Liberty Bell! But, in the soft snick and snap of shuffling and sorting prints, it is the photo of my mom standing in the mist from a waterfall that finally causes my breath to fail. There she is, her hair, her watch on her wrist, that shirt: she’s so real in this photo. But she’s so gone.
It’s these pictures that form the landmarks of the trip for me. Who gives a shit about the Grand Canyon? I can go visit it again whenever I want. It’s the person I want most who I can’t get, have, or reach, ever again.
Even after all this time, it’s so hard to understand why one person’s days stop while another person’s days keep on coming. I’m grateful for all these days, and places, and people – I am. It’s like my uncle used to say when I complained about the difficulty of waking up in the morning: “It beats the alternative, Greenie.”
I tell myself all the time that I can learn to live without anyone – that I have learned. [On the off chance that God is lurking in the blogosphere, though, I’d prefer not to test this theory in the case of one small blond boy, and one 41-year-old excellent husband. Just sayin’.] Witnessing my mother’s life wind down has undoubtedly been a source of strength for me: you know, a kind of morbid girl-power chant of “I made it through that so I can make it through anything!” The hard truth, though, is that I’m not really through it. Time does not always ease loss; sometimes time deepens the separation relentlessly. My mother is stranded alone on an island, growing smaller and smaller in my mind’s eye, while I am on the back deck of a ship chugging inexorably away from her. I keep waving and waving, but I know that soon she’ll be out of sight completely.
To ward off fits of pining for her, of an almost panic at the thought of her being all dead and alone, I try to tell myself that she is never alone - she must have a room in God’s crumbling mansion of a house, right? Maybe it’s next door to the room of a man who looks like Kevin Costner – she had a crush on him – and down the hall from her parents and brother. Maybe she is right now readying a room for a loved one I can’t foresee. All I know is that every day, I must leave her behind a little bit more; I have no choice. In this case, time does equal distance.
