At Seven I’m Glad My Home Comes with a Clothesline

My mother is a blur of movement, always on the go with a chore at her heels or one filling her arms, hard to pin down or know how to approach. My mother, always so busy. I know now that mothers who attempt to run some kind of smooth household with young children are just that. But when my mother comes to a standstill, it is usually to inhale deeply from her cigarette, taking her as far away as the disappearing wisps of smoke and no approach seems to distract her. Reading her isn’t necessarily easy, so by seven I have learned that to stay away offers the best safety as she charges through the house or out the kitchen door to the backyard. I like to hide in the lilacs that border our property near the clothesline, Eldridge Street’s version of “woods” to traverse through. One time I crawled through the dark shade of the thick branches of the lilacs only to discover that my father had strung barbed wire in order to keep me out of them. The barbs caught and sliced into my stomach, a wound which I hid for fear of punishment as long as I could. But this day the lilacs are still a safe spot to hide, and so I watch my mother maneuver the laundry basket filled with wet clothes. She tramps out to the backyard clothesline, hanging the day’s washing, as did nearly every woman in the neighborhood, and she fills one long row efficiently, then another, moving in a bend-and-shake, reach-and-clip dance all her own. Then she turns abruptly back toward the house, the screen door slamming behind her.

I stare at the last row filled with my mother’s blouses, one after the other, pinned to the line in such a way that fists of the wind pummel on down the row, gathering speed, then push up and out, trying to take the blouses with them. Only they hold on, puffing out as if my mother hangs headless and legless from the line, one blouse after another. So many of her! And running, now laughing, I will carry my life long the consequences of where I find my mother. Fingertips touching the silk of one blouse’s arm, my cheek brushing the fluttering softness of another, I lightly finger the buttons at the nape of my mother’s rounded collar and reach, so carefully, into cuffs for disembodied hands. I hold on, onto all the mother I think I can have. And then it becomes all of this mother that I want. I use it as the template for what love means and the ways it works, both in the giving and receiving, the distances it keeps, the hidden or simply absent flesh, how it enters the heart in anxious sighs, and the long stillness it keeps. At my home, love hangs on a clothesline: safe, soft, bodiless.