BV Lawson

Since You Went Away

BV Lawson

Winter 2020

The best the doctor could do was prescribe structure and routine. Thus, these weekly pilgrimages with Candace’s mother were circled in red on the calendar every Saturday morning for ten o’clock. They parked in the same spot, used the same door, visited the same stores in the same order, and ate at the same Five Guys hamburger stand. Candace dubbed it the Mall Memory March.

Candace clutched her mother’s hand as they walked side-by-side, heading for their usual first stop, the bead store. Candace made the mistake once of leaving her mother alone for two minutes, and it took three security guards to find her after a half hour of searching. Right now, as the older woman stared at the store window, her normal blank face was beaming. Beaming just like the little girl skipping out of the store clasping a balloon as the girl’s mother kept a close eye on the child.

Candace’s mother Bella hated crafts and wasn’t fond of jewelry. Yet it was now a religious rite for her to dip her hands in every single bin in the bead store and praise the various beads—green and purple glass, white bone, brown shells, multi-colored Venetian and African. They always had to buy at least one bead so Bella could take it back to Sunset Village and hide away in a drawer like a squirrel burying nuts in holes, later forgotten.

“Oh, look.” Bella held up a turquoise stone that mirrored the color her eyes used to be. “I want this one.” Candace helped her count out the right amount, which Bella insisted on paying herself.

Bella bought an identical bead two weeks ago, but Candace didn’t say anything. It would cause an argument, then hurt feelings, followed by stony silence. Another refrain from their decades-old song of a relationship slightly out of tune, modulating into dissonance.

Candace remembered her tenth birthday, which her mother had overlooked while still sleeping off the stupor from her latest binge. When Bella finally climbed out of her dark hole back into the light, she’d apologized. “I’ll give you anything you want, Candy. I’ll make it right, I swear.”

Candace hadn’t answered her, hadn’t spoken for days, placing the pink-and-yellow wrapped present she found on her bed the next day unopened in the bottom of a drawer. Like her mother with her beads now.

“Mom, look,” Candace pointed to the next store on their circuit. “They have a new display at Arhaus. It’s your favorite.”

Bella frowned. “Where did the table with the pretty ceramic tiles go?”

Candace sighed. “But these are your favorites, red-and-white toile chairs and ottomans. Remember?”

Her mother squinted at the plate glass, and her expression softened. “Mama used to sit on that chair and sew me pretty Shirley Temple dresses. After I got married, I sewed your Jackie Kennedy A-line skirts. You were such a proper young lady back then.”

Candace looked down at her tank top, black jeans, and huaraches. One more item in a long list of things Bella disapproved about her daughter. No worse than getting divorced or not having kids, but close.

Bella whooped into the store and made a beeline for the toile chair where she plopped down, slipped off her shoes, and balanced her feet on the ottoman. “Look at me, George!” she cried. “I’m relaxing after dinner without doing the dishes. And I’m going to watch Mary Tyler Moore instead of baseball.” Then she laughed the same nasal cackle she used whenever she got her way.

Not that Candace’s father, George, was a saint, but he’d provided for his family as best he could. Divorce wasn’t as common in the ’60s, so he stayed on, growing prematurely white, his shoulders stooped. Candace used to resent him for taking the coward’s way out when he died of a heart attack at age fifty, free of the arguments and fights. Now, she just wanted to have him back again so she could apologize.

A clerk from the store approached them. “Those new pieces arrived yesterday. Looks like they were tailor-made for you. A perfect way to spoil yourself. And we could all use more spoiling, couldn’t we?”

You have no idea, Candace thought.

“We’ll take them,” Bella declared, to which Candace replied, “Of course, Mom. Let me talk with this helpful woman here. I’ll straighten everything out.”

With an apologetic explanation to the annoyed clerk, Candace berated herself for getting everyone into another awkward situation but realized if her mother remembered the encounter, a brief little lie, “The furniture is coming next week, Mom,” would suffice. Bella’s tiny room in Sunset Village was barely big enough for the bed.

“Are you ready for the bath shop, Mom?”

Bella slipped her shoes back on. “Do you think they’ll have any soap there, Candy? The only soap the nurses give us is the plain white kind. That’s for babies.”

“I think they’ll have soap, Mom. Let’s go see.” And sure enough, like the week before and every week before that, the bath store did indeed have soap. The marketing manager in Candace had to hand it to them—they pegged every health and beauty phobia known to womankind and created a soap for it. Lavender soap to calm stressed nerves, hemp oil soap with antioxidants, herbal antibacterial soap to ward off the latest germ scare. She was surprised there wasn’t one for broken hearts.

Bella gravitated to a corner of the store with a crayon-colored display of handmade soaps sculpted into orbs. She picked each one up in turn and smelled it, then triumphantly waved an orb in the air. “I want this one.”

Candace stared at it. “But Mom, it’s white.”

“Smell.” She shoved it under Candace’s nose.

Candace took a whiff. It had the aroma of chamomile and jasmine, like the perfume her mother used to wear. “You’re never fully dressed without your perfume, Candy,” she’d say, as her daughter watched the misty cloud form around her mother’s head. Candace was the only one among her friends she knew whose mother smelled of jasmine and Beefeaters gin.

With their one bead and one bar of soap in hand, they headed off to the food court. They ordered hamburgers, cheese fries, and Sprite, and sat at a table off to one side, where they had a good view of their fellow companions at the other tables. There was an indoor playground and pint-sized train driving around in a wide circle, the laughter and cries of the children a counterpoint to the white noise of conversation.

A girlish scream of joy caught Bella’s attention, who studied the child for a while. “That could be my granddaughter,” she said, in-between bites of her cheeseburger. “You should’ve popped out kids while you had the chance, Candy.”

Candace’s knuckles turned white from gripping the table. “We’ve been over this before, Mom. My marriage was unhappy, and it wasn’t right to bring children into it.” Unlike yours. Unlike so many of her friends, many divorced more than once or trapped in unhappy lives. Her co-worker Gillian said to her last week, “You know, David is only two, and I’m already tired of being a mother.”

There was another reason Candace was fervently grateful she’d not had kids. Losing a mother in bits and pieces as she faded into a stranger—it was like watching a soul thief at work, with no one to arrest for the crime. Alzheimer’s ran in families, and Candace knew her turn could be next. She would never have wished that on her own children.

“Are you ready for the music box store, Mom?” Candace watched her mother fold the burger wrapper into half, then half again until it made a small packet she tucked into the french-fry bag and then popped into the empty soda cup.

“I like the one that plays ‘Love is Blue.’ The song by Brahms. You know the box, don’t you, Candy? It has roses on top with the doves.”

Candace didn’t correct her mother, knowing the song was by André Popp, not Brahms, but she knew which item her mother meant. As they walked to the store, she could see in her mind’s eye a similar music box her mother gave her for Christmas when she was in fourth grade. Candace treasured that box.

Then one day, while Bella was drunk and angry over some little thing Candace couldn’t remember, her mother took the car and ran over and over the music box, until it was crushed into tiny porcelain pieces. Candace got over it eventually, like her mother conquered her alcoholism a few years ago, only to be diagnosed two months later with Alzheimer’s.

The diagnosis day was burned in Candace’s memory. She hadn’t known whether to rail at God that her mother’s first chance to experience a normal life was ripped away from her, or be relieved Bella would have no recollection of the fights, arrests, the missed plays and recitals, the whispers and stares from neighbors.

But Candace remembered it all. Maybe Bella was the lucky one.

Bella went from one music box to another, until she found the box with the roses and doves and wound it up, transfixed as it started to play. Candace knew the lyrics of the original song by heart:

Blue, blue, my world is blue

Blue is my world now I’m without you.

Gray, gray, my life is gray.

Cold is my heart since you went away.

After the song ended, Bella wound the box again and replayed it several times back-to-back. Bella’s eyes welled up with tears, but Candace’s didn’t, not yet. Plenty of time for that later. For now, Candace picked up the little music box and carried it to the register.

The three-legged walnut table in Bella’s room was the perfect place for it. The nurses would get sick of the thing after Bella had played it a few hundred times. Yet Candace wanted to believe in her heart that with each playing of that tune, a mother would find remembered fragments of a daughter long ago. A daughter who’d squealed with delight as she opened an identical box under the Christmas tree, then hugged her mother tightly as if she’d never let go.