Julian Raymond

At five years old, I decided to preserve my mother. 

Biting my nails beneath the covers as she tucked me in, brow furrowed in angst, I asked her to tell me everything. What was she like as a kid? What were the names of her elementary school teachers? What kind of bubblegum did she chew? I had to capture every detail, afraid that parts of her would vanish if I didn’t.

Her father died on Sept. 27, 2011: a cardiovascular surgeon dead from a heart attack. With his death came my formal introduction to fear. My mother’s father was gone — dead and never coming back — which I quickly learned was the eventual fate of all mothers and fathers. That day, my aunt Delilah had called my mother, luring her out the front door, phone clutched to her soft cheek. I couldn’t hear what my aunt said to her; I couldn’t see my mother’s face from my hiding place below the kitchen window. But I heard her cry.

She’d never made a sound like that, nothing like that wail rattling out from beneath her ribs. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to say. I crept out of the house with my Dracula PEZ dispenser, an early Halloween purchase and followed the sound of her stifled sobs. 

She was folded in half at the bottom of the stairs. I hovered behind her for a moment, tracing the arches and bumps of her curved spine with one hand, my fingers opening and closing Dracula’s hinged neck with the other. I tapped her on her shaking shoulder and I held out my PEZ dispenser. Dracula leered at her, clenched tightly in my small, grubby fists, waiting for her to look up from her phone. Tears blurred her face, her eyes rimmed with red, and she smiled when she saw Dracula’s head pop open. In a garbled, tear-choked voice, she told me: “Grandpa’s still with us, as long as we remember him.”

From that moment on, memories of my mother’s life became my scripture. She answered any question I dared to ask. I needed to know everything: the first time she rode a bike, the first time she’d felt alone, the first time she’d learned that one day, her mother would leave her too. I listened to each account with reverence, furiously memorizing every detail like a balding monk in burlap robes, transcribing biblical texts before the raiders of time came and burned her memories to ash. So long as I could remember her life, she’d stay with me. That childhood fear remained, clinging to my backpack as I hiked through high school and crawling into my suitcases as I packed for college.

Life here has made my memory hazy. College has dragged me leagues and miles from that porch and PEZ dispenser, filling my head with more Directed Studies readings than a human should ever attempt to comprehend. The clutter of college has washed over my tiny room: crumpled copies of the Yale Daily News splay out over my desk, shifting beneath my laptop as I write. Plato’s “Five Dialogues” hides beneath my bed while Homer’s paperback epics lurk on the floor beside my dresser, spines broken and cracked open. Traces of my mother are few and far between.

The details of my mother’s life have started to blur and smudge, nearing illegibility in my memory; but lately, I’ve been reminded of a story she once told me.

The summer Van Halen released their second album, my mother had her first kiss. She didn’t remember the year, not exactly, but she remembered the music blasting from her football player boyfriend’s Plymouth Barracuda. That night, she’d crept from her first-floor bedroom window, leaving behind her flowered wallpaper and plastic horses for the smothering heat of a Texas summer night. She was fifteen then, so much younger than I am now. Her bedroom was peppered with “Horse Illustrated” and “Western Horseman” magazines, pages splayed open on her floral sheets, the dog-eared pages left stained and greasy. I try so hard to remember those details, thumbing the necklace she gave me, its chainlinks like prayer beads: Van Halen, first kiss, Barracuda, fifteen, floral sheets, magazines.

At 19 years old, my life does not resemble my mother’s. I’ve never kissed a boy — never slipped from my bedroom into that hot, sweltering night. I haven’t lived the life she lived, but I feel her echoing in me. When my headphones slip from my ears — playing Van Halen in their tinny, electronic tone — I can hear my mother’s voice, laughing in the backseat of a football player’s car. When I glance over my dorm room, messy and spattered with tangled copies of campus publications, I glimpse an alternate version of my mother’s childhood. 

I feel guilty for forgetting so much, for letting the memories slip through my hands, but I feel her footsteps in mine. The details may fade, dissolving into my unconscious, but I live with her guidance. When I leave my dorm, slipping out to study with a boy I like, I feel the courage I think my mother must have felt as she clamored over the windowsill.