Over here, says Hip, look at this!
He has brought me to the window of a little music shop where along with the flutes and mandolins there is a woman seated behind the streaked glass, playing at a small keyboard; the music issues out to the sidewalk in brittle gusts through a gap in the door, which is narrowly ajar. We are not alone in watching; a small gathering, children, one or two women, stand before the window as well, staring intently.
We are silent, all of us, watching, waiting.
Two days she’s been here, Hip says. Ain’t that something? Ain’t it?
Behind the glass the musician lifts her arm to turn the page of her score, shifts disjointedly, with a roll of eyes resumes her play, which is awkward, the flanges stiff in the fingers though those fingers are slender, pale as flesh, paler, the nails small and delicate and rosy.
Look! cries Hip. Ain’t that something? She looks just like your Ma! Don’ she? Don’ she? When she turns her head like that?
She don’, say I. Not at all.
I can be discriminating now, even if at first something did jump up in me. Blue of eye, whorl of ear, tilt of neck, slope of shoulder, all these resemble, but being lifelike without life, point up, instead of resemblance, its opposite: the lack, the gap, the fissure. The distance between.
Growing larger.
This is not my mother. Despite the golden hair.
Though the eyes are blue.
My mother is gone.
My mother is, and is not, on the sea.
Unable to bear her absence I must bear it some more.
Hip is disappointed now.
If we go inside, he says, they’ll show us the motor. D’ya want to see it?
Naw.
That’s all right. I seen it already.
With the crowd we stand a while and watch, as the sleet comes down on us, until I cannot stand it anymore. It grows horrible, watching, in the end.
Let’s go.
• • •
At the top of the hill Hip says, I thought you’d like it.
Tone injured, slightly defensive.
• • •
And then when we are at the gate, Do she always watch you like that?
Who?
Your Ma.
She ain’t watching.
Is too.
Isn’t.
He gestures by jut of chin over my shoulder toward the house; turning toward the Birdcage I see the light on in the parlor window, and my mother there, having pressed back the curtain, watching. From where I am standing I can see the glint of firelight on her hair, the outline of her cheek, this is clear as day almost, despite the sleet and the impending darkness; I can even see, behind her, the row of terra-cotta heads on the mantelpiece above the hearth. Abruptly then, as if she has noticed us noticing, and doesn’t like it, the curtain falls.
She’s beautiful, your Ma, Hip says, with a rapturous expression. So golden.
He touches me then, my hand with his hand, my lips with his lips. We are warm together in the cold.
This is a thing of mixed feelings. My mind is elsewhere.
I think, My mother has returned.