Dead-Heading
Dead-Heading
“Darlin’, why you all muddy?”
Preoccupied with whatever’s brewing on the stove, she presents me with her beautiful back.
“Playing, Mama.”
I sniffle, a classic distraction ploy - colds are to my mother what demons are to a prophet: something to be immediately exorcised. The bait lies, unnibbled.
“Must’ve been some game to get you smelling like that.” She cannot see the state I’m in, but Mama knows filth when she smells it. “You been digging tunnels again?”
I imagine the wrinkle of distaste like a piercing on her right nostril, filling in her details - the pink varnish of the stove’s heat brushing her cheeks, the stray wisp billowing above her forehead with each breath.
“No, Mama. It’s a new game - I learnt it from you.” Beaming with pride, I await her adoration. Instead, a detached “Oh yeah?” drifts over her shoulder on a palanquin of steam, along with the stench of her cooking. “Yeah. I been gardening.”
This, at last, elicits a reaction. “Gardening? At this time? I’d better not go out there tomorrow and find Mama’s pretty flowers all torn up. What you mean, ‘gardening’, anyhow?”
Still, she will not grace me with her face.
Beaming, the moon to her sun, I report: “Dead-heading, Mama. Like you taught me.”
She flinches. Drops her hands to her sides, where they ball like frightened hedgehogs. “Where’d you learn that big word?” Her taut posture sets off alarm bells, but they toll in a distant city.
“I seen you do it, Mama - it’s good for the flowers, ain’t that right?”
The grin hurts my face, but I can’t erase it. I’ll have to endure this happiness. For I am thinking of the little mounds in the yard, my tiny burial ground, the bits they won’t miss; the dropping flowers that only drained, never bloomed. I am thinking of the sadness and excess curiosity - of tantrums and frowns and self-pity, the remnants of an ungrateful brat, now trapped beneath the earth in the backyard. I am left smiling because I can’t not smile, and because this pruned, dead-headed version of me is going to be so much more lovable than the real version. Mama might get happy, start singing again. Pa might even come back when he hears.
“Sure, hon, but you gotta learn to tell which ones is dead and which is still waiting to blossom. How you gonna tell that in the dark, huh?”
Sometimes you can feel your way around. Sometimes it’s all dead, and you gotta lop it off in great big chunks. Sometimes there’s a malignant outer layer and you gotta peel it off and step out of it, leaving raw sinews and red flesh exposed like a butcher’s slab beneath.All you can do is pray that one day it heals and grows back stronger, better, more complete. But I don’t say any of this to Mama. I just say, “I did my best.” And with that grin still fixed in place, as it will be until someone digs up the sorrow or excavates the darker memories from their tombs, I head for bed. Mama calls after me to wash up before touching anything.
But tonight, just one more night, I’d rather sleep in my own filth. There are funeral rites to be said at the sink in the morning.
*
The smell from her pot makes her head reel, but her right eye focuses, laser-like, and her right hand continues to stir with the metronomic regularity of an automaton. She couldn’t let her baby see her face, not tonight; he wouldn’t understand. But with time, he will. You see, she’d done some dead-heading herself. Who needs two of everything? Forget the left - left to starve, left for dead, left behind. One is plenty when your baby needs to eat. And so on she goes, late into the night, watching herself dissolve from both above and below, stirring parts of herself into a stew that will last three days at a push.