LAURIE ANN DOYLE
|
ROSES AND FORMALDEHYDE
Late at night I heard my mother cleaning: the roar of the Hoover, her quick footsteps, then chairs scraping across the floor. The smells of Lemon Pledge and sudsy ammonia wafted into our bedroom. “Zach, do you hear something?” “Not really,” my boyfriend grunted. “Maybe.” “What’s happening?” “Beats me.” He rolled over and fell back asleep. My mother died six months ago. She’d had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, doctor’s appointments all the time. Last January, she beat back double pneumonia and was her old self again. Calling me two, three times a day, wanting me to come over and fix the TV, check the checkbook, dust. The last time she phoned she asked me where the aspirin was. I told her in a not-very-patient voice. Then, feeling guilty, I offered to bring over chicken soup. She was my mother, after all. And I, her only daughter, my father long gone. She pulled in a raspy breath. “It’s nothing,” she said, not sounding very happy either. “I’m fine. Really.” That night my mother died in her sleep. Quickly, the doctor said. Now here she was furiously cleaning my apartment. I heard her rustling on the other side of the wall, humming “Stormy Weather” and talking to the furniture the way she always used to when she rearranged it. “Not bad,” she said. Then, “Old friend.” I didn’t want to go see. Maybe her face was decayed and half-crumpled in, maybe she was just a bodiless voice, a vacuum running through air. Or maybe she looked the way I remembered her as a child, just five foot three, but huge to me, with a long pale neck and eyes that turned from brown to green in bright sun. In life, cleaning had not been her thing. Rearranging furniture, yes, but never cleaning. She’d sponge the kitchen counter in big fast circles, leaving behind a thick trail of crumbs. Before Zach and I moved her into the senior facility, I had to scrub congealed blood out of the refrigerator meat compartment. Now I heard my mother washing dishes with a vengeance at three in the morning. Something crashed. Then something else.
4
Volume 17 • 2022
