One Ocean and a Lifetime

Michael Stone leaned back in his chair and surveyed a wide stretch of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains rising beyond. When he and Joanna had taken the apartment, they hadn’t really been able to afford it, but the view had been too good to pass up. He kissed his fingers to the mountains, stretched, and turned back to the drawing due in his client’s office in the morning.

“Honey, can you reach this for me?” Joanna called from the kitchen.

“Why don’t you use a chair?” Michael grumbled affectionately, strolling into the kitchen and reaching up over her head to hand down the jelly jar. He kissed the top of her curly, red head and returned to his project.

Just as he was sitting down Joanna called again, “Honey, could you open this for me?” She leaned provocatively against the door jamb, balancing the jelly jar in her palm.

You tease, Ms. J. Could it be you’re wanting a little attention?”

She nodded and grinned, tangling her fingers in his as he took the jar from her hand. The phone rang. They raced for it, laughing and scuffling.

He reached the phone first, gave her a wicked look, and answered, “Jo’s steakhouse.” She made a face at him. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the two of them in the art deco mirror in the hallway. For a moment he pictured them at seventy, still playing together. Then he erased the image with the swipe of a mental hand. Bad luck to imagine the future, especially with the people he loved.

As time passed and he remained silent, his face reflecting dismay, delight, dread, Jo whispered, “Who is it?”

“So where are you? I’ll come pick you up,” he said to the phone.

“Michael, who is it?” Joanna hovered impatiently at his shoulder.

“Well, OK. We’ll see you, then.” He hung up and stood staring out the window biting absently at a finger.

“Michael!” Jo shook his arm.

“My mom’s back in town. She’s coming over. Now.” The suspended moment collapsed. “Well, Jo, you’re finally going to have a chance to meet her.” He gathered Joanna into his arms and squeezed her little, round body close. He and Jo, in the course of talking about their lives, had analyzed their childhoods and their parents’ insufficiencies, but Michael felt he’d never managed quite to capture his mother for Jo, had in fact avoided a number of pertinent details. His chest tightened, a muscle jerked in his jaw. So she was back, and breezing in as if she’d seen him just yesterday.

Suddenly Joanna looked frantically around the room and wriggled free from Michael’s distracted embrace. “The house is a mess. And my hair.” She rushed her fingers through the tangle of curls. “And dinner. Oh, Michael, how long do I have?” She fled across the room and into their bedroom. Then she ran out again and into the kitchen. He could hear her banging and rattling kettles and cabinet doors. “Do you think the chops and a salad will be enough? And I could make those quick muffins, don’t you think? I’m so glad for the microwave.” She ran back into the bedroom.

During Jo’s frantic activity, Michael stood staring out the window, looking at fragments of memories that clattered together in a plotless shadow play. He imagined a warning roll of drums, a crash of cymbals ominously announcing the mother’s arrival.

The next time Joanna passed through the living room, she noticed his immobility. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

He rubbed his unshaven jaw, raised his eyebrows, came back into focus. “Look, about my mom,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve really made it clear just how. . ." He paused while he searched for words. The doorbell interrupted the pause. “Oh, damn, is that her already? She must have called from around the corner.”

“Oh, no, nothing’s ready.” Joanna scurried around picking up the clothes and books scattered around the living room.

“Don’t worry, Jo. Don’t worry.” He opened the door. A thin woman with long, gray braids and a shabby denim jacket unslung a battered pack from her back and reached up to hug Michael, laughing and crying both. “Michael, Michael, it’s been eons. Oh, how I’ve missed you.”

Behind him Michael could sense Jo hanging back from an introduction. He pulled her to him with a protective arm around her shoulders. “Mom. Joanna.”

“You can call me Lily, if you like,” his mother said and hugged the younger woman. “So this is your wife.” Lily held Joanna off a little, gazing at her as if she were an exotic bird. “Well, Michael knows I’m not all that hot for marriage as an institution. But that detail aside, welcome to the family.”

Michael watched Lily as she stood examining their bookshelves. Half the time her eyes strayed out the window, caressing the blue and white mountains across the gray water of the Sound. “You have a spectacular view here.” She glanced around the room, seeming to approve of the casual elegance. When she noticed him watching her, she grinned and gave his shoulder a teasing poke. “Quite a change from the mess you lived in at home, né?”

“Joanna got me in line.” His feelings were running in an alternating current of anger and love.

“Yes, it looks like she’s good for you.” She wandered off to look at one of his paintings, delicately tracing her cheek with the feathery end of a braid as she peered at some detail. Michael could hear Joanna in the kitchen hurrying dinner toward the table.

“Michael, honey, would you give me a hand for a minute?” Jo called.

“Can I help?” Lily asked, following Michael toward the kitchen.

“No, no, that’s all right. Just make yourself at home.” Joanna’s flurried response barricaded the kitchen doorway.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll take a quick shower, then, and change. I’ve been on the road for a couple of days now, and washing in gas station bathrooms doesn’t leave me feeling quite clean.”

“Oh, oh dear. I didn’t even think.” Joanna scurried into the bathroom. “I’ll lay out a towel for you.” Her muffled voice floated through the apartment.

Lily cocked an eyebrow at Michael. “Is she always this agitated, or is it just the first meeting with the mother-in-law?”

“First meetings.” He smiled a tender and protective smile. “Don’t be mean.”

“Don’t be mean! When am I ever mean?” She slung her pack on one shoulder and disappeared into the bathroom.

“Oh, Michael.” Jo collapsed in his arms when she returned.

“She’s not all that terrifying. I was trying to tell you about her, sort of, ah, unconventional lifestyle.”

“How could she stand to wash in gas station bathrooms for days?”

“I think she was exaggerating.”

The three sat at the dining table, white candles throwing irregular light through the burgundy wine and glinting off the crystal salad bowl, a wedding present from Jo’s aunt and uncle. When he and Joanna had decided to marry, they’d picked a date far enough in the future for his mother to get there, but he’d put off letting her know about it. He knew she’d respond with some pointed comment about oppressive, patriarchal institutions. Finally he wrote. The letter had come back a couple months after they’d married, no forwarding address known. By then of course, he and his mother had said what they’d had to say to each other by phone, an angry exchange that had only confirmed her betrayal, the final one in the long string of betrayals that had built up over the years.

“You’ve been traveling for quite a long time, haven’t you Lily?” Joanna dutifully tried to converse.

“Yes,” Lily munched on a spinach leaf, “most of my life I’ve been on some kind of journey. I guess the search has always been more exciting for me than reaching the goal.”

Michael translated, “She wants to know what you’ve been doing for the last few years.”

“Oh.” Lily raised an eyebrow. Shook her head in self-mockery. “So, my dear, you were asking for the story of my travels?"

Joanna nodded, passed the chops to Lily, who smiled a thank you and passed the plate to Michael.

“Well, first I went to see all the old monuments and archeological sites...Carnac, Stonehenge, Chichen Itza, Machu Pichu. . .then I started looking for the holy places. And,” she shrugged a shoulder, “after a while I decided to stop looking on the outside and start looking on the inside, so I found a small Zen monastery in Japan, and I’ve sat there for the last two years.”

“You must have tons of photos.” Joanna passed the muffins.

Lily smiled.

“Did you get enlightened?” Michael asked sarcastically.

Lily pushed her wire-rimmed glasses, the only ones Michael had ever seen her wear, up on her nose. “Did I get enlightened?” She stared off into middle space for a while, then looked at him with a slow, bright smile. “No.” She shook her head. “I didn’t.” Ate another bite of salad. “But I did learn enlightenment isn’t necessary to be happy.” There was no regret or bitterness in her voice. “How about you? Have you been enlightened yet?” He knew she was teasing him.

“When I’m hungry I eat; when I’m tired, I sleep,” he quipped with irritation.

“Yep, that sounds like it.” She nodded without irony.

“More meat, anyone?” Joanna broke in.

“Thanks, no.” Lily examined Jo and the meat with equal interest.

Michael regarded his mother’s plate. “Want some cheese or something?”

“No, that’s OK. I’m quite full.”

After dinner, Jo caught Michael’s arm and pulled him into the kitchen. “Why didn’t you tell me she’s a vegetarian? I felt like a clumsy fool.” Her voice thickened with the tears she refused to cry.

“Jo, honey, don’t worry. She wants you to like her. Just like you want her to like you.”

“I just want to survive this. How long does she plan to stay? There’s no extra room here, and I have to study for mid-terms, and. . .”

Michael decided to get his mom off alone and sound her out on her plans. “Let’s go out for a walk, Mom.”

“Great. You can fill me in on all the things your letters, as wonderful as they were, never told me about your life.” She squeezed his arm, pulled him close, and kissed his cheek.

“Like what?” The moment echoed and reechoed in him through layers of years, sounding depths he’d forgotten, her teasing questions that he never felt he could adequately answer, her love that never quite made up for their haphazard life.

“Like, oh, like how do you feel when summer finally settles in, or do you ever walk along the lake and watch the ducks. Important things like that.” She laughed and stretched her arms above her head. The damp dusk wrapped around the two. “I love you, honey. I’ve missed you.”

“Me, too, Mom,” he answered perfunctorily. A memory suddenly overlaid on the moment. He’d been ten or eleven. They were walking together in an autumn evening mist, and he was explaining the Universe to her. A leaf had fallen into his hand at some telling moment. They’d both laughed with delight at the coincidence.

The damp dusk turned to a drizzling night. As they strolled along around the block, chatting about details of the past few years, they fell back into a comfortable familiarity. Michael found himself telling her enthusiastically about his design projects. She described the odd couple who’d given her a ride from Portland.

They picked up threads of old conversations as easily as if they’d seen each other just last week. Later he knew he’d hate it, how she seemed like some kind of time traveler, moving from the past to the present in one or two strides, dragging him along with her, stumbling to keep up. As they approached the apartment he stopped her and asked, “Mom, how long are you going to be staying with us?”

“Well, I have to be back in a month. That’s how long my plane ticket gives me.”

“You have to be back! I thought. . .you mean you haven’t come home for good?” The gap between them began to stretch slowly wider. She’d never been there for him; she’d always been off somewhere, leaving him home alone and waiting.

“Michael.” She laid her hand on his arm.

“You mean,” he closed up against her, “you’re only going to be here for a month?” His teeth clenched around the words.

“But I’m not camping out with you for a whole month,” she reassured him. “I understand how hard it is for you to have me here invading your living room, your life together.”

“No, no, it isn’t. Well...”

“Yes, I can see it’s hard for Joanna. I know some other people who have spare beds. And want me to visit.”

“Who will you stay with?” He recalled a string of her old friends.

“Remember Rob?”

“That guy?” One of her old lovers. Michael felt his voice harden, though he tried to keep it light.

“Oh, Michael. You’re grown up. You have a wife, your own life. . .”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t need a mother closer than an ocean away. Why should I have to keep telling you how to be a real mother?” he burst out.

She laughed affectionately. “Does it really feel like I’m abandoning you?”

“Yes. Always.” His answer was a stone dropped into bottomless resentment.

“Well, I guess you have to feel the way you feel.”

“Damn it, you’re always allowing me. I’m my own person now. You don’t have any authority over me any more. No more allowing.”

She was amused. “You mean you’re still waiting for my permission?” They fell silent. “Well, then, when are you going to allow me to be other than a schoolbook mom?” she finally tossed at him.

“Never,” he said ruefully, feeling stupid about the conversation and his clinging to her presence even when she made him angry.

After a pause she laughed. “My astrologer told me that we were warrior comrades in a previous life.”

“So?” Michael ignored her teasing.

“That’s why we get along so well,” she continued ironically.

“So, why don’t you stick around then?” he grumbled.

“Oh, honey,” she hugged him. “Both of us do need to carry on with our separate lives. You know that.”

“Mom?” His voice sounded plaintive to his ears.

“Hmmm?” The vague hum of her response floated up from where she’d bent over to pick up some yellow maple leaves.

“Don’t you think you ought to finally settle down, get your life stable, for a change?”

“What!” She stood up in surprise. The leaves she held were yellow flames in the street light.

“I think you should settle down. Stop wandering aimlessly around like you’re doing.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’ve been frittering your life as long as I can remember. Don’t you think it’s time you grew up? Finally.”

“Aren’t I supposed to be saying that to you, Michael?” She grinned and socked his arm.

“Well, I want you to think about it, anyway.”

“About what?”

“Don’t be so slippery. About settling down.”

In the middle of the night, the apartment as black as the bottom of a cup of coffee, Joanna heard a noise, maybe a noise. She got up to explore. She always said Michael was such a sound sleeper they could steal the bed with him in it, and he’d never wake up.

Cautiously, quietly, she crept down the short, dark hallway and peered into the living room. City light filtering through the room silhouetted Lily, sitting facing the wall, unmoving. Jo fled back to the bedroom and shook Michael awake. “Honey! Honey! Your mom, your mom!”

“What?” Michael was groggy, half dreaming still about a train, or a long dock full of huge, containers, and his mother somewhere among them.

“Honey, your mom is sitting and staring at the wall. In the dark. Don’t you think you should see if she’s all right? It’s still the middle of the night.”

He pulled on his pants and groped his way out to his mother. Yes, there she was, facing the wall, as distant from him as she’d always been, mysterious and undefinable. He could remember his friends thinking she was so neat; she never made him clean up his room, never yelled at him for things like the garter snake collection that escaped in the house one night.

And he’d always wanted her to be like their moms, there when he came home from school and when he woke in the middle of the night, though she was always there in the morning as if nothing had happened, as if everything were normal. And here she sat cross-legged, still acting like it was the 60s instead of the 90s and she was still twenty-five. Well she wasn’t twenty-five anymore, and he was fed up.

His brusque voice announced his presence. “Mom! What are you doing?” She turned her head, her face shadowed, ancient; for a moment he feared for her, his dream rising in him again, and his mother lost among the huge, unmarked containers.

“I’m doing my morning meditation.”

“It’s not even five yet.”

“Michael, I’m used to getting up at four every morning.” She smiled that old, familiar smile of reassurance.

He sat on the edge of the couch and watched her. Finally, “So, uh, how was the monastery?”

“Well, uh,” she mimicked, “a little barren.”

“God,” he sighed. “Why do you do this? Why go traveling for years like this?”

Her posture never changed as she tilted her head a little, in thought maybe or maybe just easing her neck. “I’ve always wanted to travel. But then I had you, and there never was enough money or the opportunity until you were out on your own.”

“You just couldn’t wait until I was gone. Is that what you’re saying?” He glared at her, wanting to shake her into some concession.

“No, not at all. But once you were grown, travel was unfinished business I wanted to take care of.”

“You just won’t give in, will you? He heard his voice rise.

“Michael!” She shook her head and faced the wall again.

He retreated to Joanna. “She’s meditating.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“I think she’d call it early morning. Go back to sleep.” Michael lay awake though, turning his mother over in his head, trying to find a simple place for her in his scheme of things. She just wouldn’t stay in the “mother” category he kept trying to put her in. But what other category was there? His dreams seized him again. They were seaweed he tangled in as he tried to move. His mother swam ahead like a fish.

Since it was his turn to cook, Michael stopped at the Pike Street Market fish shop and picked up a salmon for dinner. As he recalled, his mother at least ate seafood. Jo met him at the door. “She’s not here.”

“I wish you could just talk with her for a while. You’d probably like her. She’s really not all that bad.”

“I can’t think of anything to say to her. And she just sits and, and watches.” Michael nibbled on Jo’s neck. “Why does she have to look at me like that?” Joanna glared in Lily’s presumed direction. “She watches. She watches like I’m some kind of, of thing. So what if she watches me, right? What’s the hurt, you’re probably thinking, and after all she is your mother, so I suppose I should be more generous, but. . .”

Michael absently tangled his fingers in her curls, traced her cheek bone. “She’s just, well, intent on you.”

“Yeah, like a cat with a bird. Probably her eyesight’s bad, and I’m a fool. Jeeze, Michael, am I being crazy?”

“No, babe. It’s not just you.” He kissed her.

“Well, what is it, then? That Zen business?”

“No, she’s always been like that. She likes to pay close attention, I guess,” His hands traced bones and muscles down Jo’s back.

“Well. . .since she’s not here. . .” Joanna suddenly switched thoughts. Grinned at him and began to unbutton his shirt.

“You devil, you.” He picked her up and carried her off to the bed.

After they’d made love, Michael held Jo and mumbled into her hair, “I know I could say to her, ‘Look, this is really important. Please don’t go away again,’ and she’d stay. If it were that important, she’d stay. But you know, actually there isn’t a lot of room for her in my life anymore. I hate the sound of that, not much room, and for my mom. It’d be great to have her around again. But it seems stupid to insist on her being in this town, when I don’t know how often I’d actually even see her.”

“She doesn’t have to go stay somewhere else, you know. If it matters that much to you.” Jo snuggled against him. He breathed in the musky fragrance of her satin skin.

The next day, before Joanna came home from school, Michael confronted his mother. “You make Jo nervous, the way you peer at her.”

“Peer? Maybe I should get new lenses.” She pushed her glasses up her nose.

“No, it’s the way you’ve always been. You look at people like what they just said was probably one of the most interesting things you’ve ever heard, only unfortunately it was in a foreign language, though you might understand if they’d just keep talking.” Michael paused and measured the width of the Sound, melted into gold by the brief appearance of the setting sun. “You know,” he continued, “when you’re a kid, you figure you know exactly who your parent is, as a person, I mean. Then when you get older, you realize there are vast stretches that you don’t know at all. I guess I’m afraid if you stay away much longer, sometime we’ll meet and we won’t even recognize each other.” He watched her gaze into some other place, the rest of her life he supposed. Or was she only retreating into some meditative mind-set, casting off his clinging demands. He sighed.

She examined his face. “We’ll always recognize each other,” she said lightly, “You just have to look in a mirror, and there I am.”

”I just can’t seem to get through to you,” he rubbed a hand over his face, “There’s no way to reach you when you’re half the world away, and. . . .”

They were interrupted by Joanna struggling through the front door with an armload of books and grocery bags. Michael and Lily both leapt to catch her falling burdens. The room rang with exclamatory fragments, laughs, admonitions. “I didn’t think I’d make the last few feet. Everything was headed for the floor.” Joanna’s creamy skin blossomed red from the outside cold and burdened exertion. She collapsed onto the couch.

“Stay there, I’ll put this stuff away.” Michael sorted the groceries into cupboards and refrigerator, grumbling to himself all the while about his mother and her stubbornness. With a certain chagrin he recognized how much he did resemble her.

In the living room, Joanna stretched luxuriously. “I’ve been sitting all day. What a way to spend a life.” Out of the corner of her eye she observed Lily’s wiry body lounged beside her.

Lily caught Jo’s glance. Smile lines crinkled at the corners of the older woman’s eyes. “Michael says I make you nervous when I look at you.”

From the kitchen doorway Michael could see Jo flutter under his mother’s direct, appraising gaze. He watched Jo catch her breath for a moment and then straighten her shoulders and face the onslaught.

“Yes, you do. I still have illusions about myself. They, they all go pale before your eyes. You. . . oh, I don’t know, I suppose if I had nothing to hide, I wouldn’t care that you saw everything.” She moved the black vase round in a small circle on the side table.

Lily said nothing. Watched Jo.

“Mom!” Michael’s warning tone snapped her from her reverie. “You’re doing it again.”

Startled, Lily murmured, “I have illusions about myself too, dear, but none of them includes knowing everything. Probably it’s wanting to know everything that you see in my look, you know.” She raised a crooked eyebrow. “Just curiosity, not judgment.” A long pause. In the distance a ferry blew its warning horn.

Leaning toward her, Joanna broke the stretching but not uncomfortable silence. “You know, Lily, Michael would, I mean you don’t need to move on right away. Michael would love for you to stay. It means so much to him, but he has his pride, you know. It’s hard for him to ask.”

Lily nodded. “Does it seem like I’m dashing away?”

Joanna nodded. “Are you?”

From the kitchen Michael watched the two women reflected in the rain-washed window. For a moment they looked as if they were floating up some endless waterfall. He gave the soup a stir and took the bottle of wine and three glasses with him into the living room. They were chatting easily when he joined them, their differences apparently dissolved in conversation, as he had guessed would happen. He poured wine, and they all raised their glasses in a silent toast. Michael couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t inane or too painful. He turned to watch the city lights rimming the dark void of the Sound.

“Well,” he finally said, “the soup’s probably ready. Why don’t we eat?” The three of them stood and hesitated for only a moment before they closed in a triangular hug.

“You’re my most special people, you know,” Lily said huskily in their ears. Rain blew in gusts on the window glass; the falling water rippled their images, making each of them vanish and reappear from moment to moment. Michael watched his reflection standing there clinging to his mother as if she were a rock. He could feel her heart beat steadily against his chest, hardly distinguishable from his own, the woman who strode down the path ahead of him, while he trailed along behind calling, “Mom, wait for me,” like he was still four and afraid.

And then in one of those abrupt reversals, like seeing one picture in two different ways, the old and young woman for example, he saw his mother holding on to him as if he were the stone she clung to while waves and wind tried to suck her away. And it was suddenly easy to say, “Don’t stay away so long this time, Mom. We’d like to have you closer to home.” His throat was gruff around the taste of tears.

Lily patted his shoulder and walked over to the window, the night rain dappling her reflection. “I’d forgotten how good it was here, this beautiful land . . . and you, always my son. I’d forgotten. . .” She waved a circle including the room and sweeping out and around the city. Her reflected hand lifted into the rain as it ran down the window.

“Forgotten what?” Joanna pressed for an explanation.

Lily shrugged. “That the earth is round.”

“Mom, talk to Joanna so she can understand,” Michael warned her.

“That you may not be able to go back home,” Lily murmured half to the window, “but you can go home. Just keep moving forward, and you’ll end up there eventually. The earth is round, you know.”

Previous version published in Women’s Words (1998)

Like what you're reading? Don't keep it to yourself.

Yarrow House

One Ocean and a Lifetime

More Stories