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In September In September of most years, I spend two weeks with my mother. It is a good time to be with her; she has usually disposed of my grandmother and brother in some way that makes them happy and we can be alone. She lives in Florida right now. The heavy late- summer sun is raiment that becomes her marvelously. It heats her glossy dark head, reflecting off of the expensive hair coloring. It makes the oil seep out of her pores a bit more, especially on the hard planes of her cheeks, and on her eyelids. Her skin, so dusky in other places and other months, is a dense and lush tan. Her melanin has an orange cast, like the iron and bacteria rich dirt on the mountain she was born. Even the whites of her eyes and the edges of her large, smooth teeth are golden. Though we will spend most of our waking hours together, thinking back on it, I will mostly remember mornings. Somehow, later in life, I have started sleeping with her again. There are no curtains in her white bedroom—I wake up dazzled by the light and comforted by the smell of her perfume and the warm scent of the little dogs that sleep between her knees and at her neck. She has never woken up early, not even when I had to go school at six in the morning. My cousins and sister and I had worked together in those years, independent of her, to brush teeth, make oatmeal, brew coffee, and then wait for the shuddering bus. Grandma, ancient and crabby, woke before her to make a little farina and boil an egg. I’m not really sure when Mama got up, I was never there to see it. But now that I do not live with her any longer, I am there to see her wake up during my visits. It is around eleven, maybe ten thirty, that she will start blinking against the light and turning her face deeper into the pillows. We don’t really look at each other, or speak, but I like to lay there near her. Later, I will roll out of bed and flick the switch on the coffee machine in the kitchen. But for about ten minutes, we stay there tasting the same sweetness of a good night’s sleep. In this and in many ways, we are very similar. My mother and I taste things. Sleepiness, happiness, anger, memory are all associated with a distinct taste experience, in our mouths and the back of our noses. It is something I describe poorly, since other people don’t seem to relate to it, and since taste and scent can be so difficult to qualify with words. When I was very young and learning the piano, I remember telling her that minor chords, A minor specifically, tasted like bittersweet chocolate and red berries. Delighted, she sat next to me and went over all the notes, spicy chromatic scales, bath-water G major. Sometimes I see her poised at the door, smacking her lips a little, and I know that she tastes that she has forgotten something. I taste it too; it tastes like vanilla and an empty stomach. We reveal these things to each other like thieves, over breakfast. Fried eggs, even though her cholesterol will kill her, toast, caffeine, tabloids. In this spirit of charmed confidence, I am often choked with the vastness of all the things I have not told her. “Dulce Maria,” she calls to me, “te deje la ropa en la escalera.” I choke on the nickname, too. I have walked very far from Sweet Maria, in a time when she was sleeping, and now I am left wincing at her admiration. Every now and again, she sees through her endless cloud of sun and notices when I take too long to respond to her questions. In the supermarket, this last September, she was going over all the new pregnancies in her bible study group. “Lourdes says to me that she will take a pregnancy test every day for a week, she is so excited this time, but I think this is a lot of money.” “Well, pregnancy tests are only about eight bucks.” “Why do you know that?” There is a pause while I think. Then she says, “Who was it?” And all I can do is laugh and think—who wasn’t it? We were silent for the rest of that grocery shopping trip, and for most of the day afterwards. We were quiet during dinner, and quiet as we watched the evening news in the big white bed. Our secrets lay motionless with us, entwined, loving. The trazodone in her medicine chest, her second wedding ring, my father’s pristine white shirts hanging dead in the closet. “Was it Brian?” she whispered to me. “Yes.” “You were both virgins?” “Yes.” I turned to look at her, and saw the shadow of her face among the down pillows. Her small slanted eyes, reflecting light from the television, were made bright by the mascara digging down into her deep lower eyelids. “That’s very special,” she whispered again, and pressed her eyes shut. “Before Papi and I got married, we would go to the movies and take off our shoes in the dark. We would touch our feet and it was—,” she stopped. I knew what it was. It was toothpaste and sewing needles, and periwinkle, all up through her legs right to the base of her skull. “Periwinkle,” I said in her same soft voice. “I don’t know what that word means,” she replied, without opening her eyes.
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