Small Brown Suitcases

I can still see my mother's hands as she pressed and guided fabric under the foot of her sewing machine. Her fingernails were almost perfect ovals and she wore them long and unpolished. She did her sewing in a faded white room that had been added onto the back of the house. There were windows on all four walls but they were high up and all you could see out of them were swaying treetops and the blue southern California sky. That room was a big magic sewing box. All over the walls were pictures of women wearing dresses that my mother wanted to copy or get ideas from. Tumbled together were bolts of fabric in the corners, spools of thread on shelves, patterns, ironing boards, scissors, tailor's chalk, hemmers, sewing machine attachments and pincushions. The acrid smell of fabric dye would shoot up your nose, and the constant purr-purr of the sewing machine could become a roar. But the magic inside that room really came from my mother's hands, the hands I watched from my little girl height, eye level with the machine.
I remember the women who would come and stand in my mother's sewing room while she measured them and made notes on a yellow pad in her large flowing handwriting. She'd have a tape measure around her neck and pins in her teeth and would talk with words pushed through the pins. The women would stand on a little platform while my mother knelt down on one knee and went around the platform, talking with her pins-in-the-teeth voice as she measured and basted their hems. I don't know if it was because she was down on one knee and they were up on a platform, but when the women would come, my mother always seemed to get smaller. She'd tell me to be real good and real quiet because Mrs. So-and-So was a very important person who brought her lots of customers. It scared me when my mother told me to be good. I'd do my own kind of shrinking down on one knee back into the corner, terrified that if I did something wrong I would be bustled back again to the Little Flower Orphanage and left there for another two years until my father could come to get me.
My mother sewed for pale, skinny women with long white faces and dark shiny hair done up in smooth rolls on the tops of their heads. They wore a lot of perfume and they flashed and tinkled with bracelets and earrings. To me, they weren't not nice, but they weren't nice either. I was a little bit afraid of them when they were there and a lot afraid of them for my mother. It seemed to me that they had a power over her that could make her crumble down to the floor right off that carefully planted knee. It also seemed to me that, if they wanted to, it would be much easier for them to make her cry than it would be for me and that unlike me, they wouldn't care much if they did.

I remember one time my mother took me to a department store whose name she spoke barely above a whisper.
"Saks Fifth Avenue," she breathed. We were going there to return Mrs. Moskowitz's dress for her.
"But why'd Mrs. Moskowitz buy a dress she didn't want?" I asked.
"Oh, it's not that she didn't want it. She wanted it all right. She just wanted me to copy it and make it for her at half the price."
I felt ashamed when I heard my mother lying to the sales clerk about how the dress just didn't fit. I could feel that we didn't belong at Saks Fifth Avenue, and I felt that the clerk knew it too. I saw then just how far my mother would go to keep Mrs. Moskowitz happy and I hated everybody in the world for making it so, including my mother.
Later in my life, when I was a grown woman with babies of my own, that same shameful feeling crawled over me one morning when I got a phone call from my mother. I had been surprised to hear from her as she didn't call me often. She had kept on sewing and I had kept on being the fearful, good little girl in the corner - - not a formula for closeness. So when she told me in a shaky voice that she wanted to tell me a secret, it made me uncomfortable. In fact, I didn't want to hear her secret at all. She and my sister had always gotten along better. Why don't you tell her? But I didn't say what I wanted to say and my mother began her story.
When she was first married, my mother had been left alone to make her way with me and my sister.
"You girls were both in diapers and your father was overseas fighting in the war." She got a job in a factory making purses from pieces of scrap velvet.
"It was a sweatshop."
But the shop boss liked her work and slipped her a few extra dollars every now and then. One night, he asked her to stay and have some coffee with him after work.
"You must be lonely. A cup of coffee won't hurt."
But she didn't trust him.
"I was worried about leaving you with grandmom," she said. "You know how she hated to baby-sit. But I was afraid to tell him no, he was my boss. He could've made things hard for me. I stayed late ...several nights."
There was silence on the phone.
"Mom?"
"He raped me."
"Oh God, Mom ..."
"I thought I was pregnant. He gave me some medicine to 'help' with the pregnancy."
She fed some of the medicine to the cat.
"It turned out the medicine wasn't poison. And I wasn't pregnant. I couldn't deal with it, the rape and all. That's why I put you and Loretta in the orphanage."
"But, Mom ..."
" ...If I'd been pregnant, she would have been twenty-six years old."
My stomach lurched. She? What was my mother really saying? I could hear her telling her customers one thing or another to gain their sympathy when she couldn't deliver their orders on time. I saw all the velvet drawstring purses she always had lying around her sewing room. I even had one she'd given me to play with, which I had taken to the orphanage with me. Why had she kept all those reminders around?
My mother's voice broke in. "Orphanages aren't such bad places, are they, Melanie?"
"Well, ....no. Mom." ... not if you don't count being three years old and watching your mother walk away in her pink high heeled shoes, the hem of her blue skirt bouncing, and her never turning around to wave good-bye. Or if you don't count never seeing her again for the entire two years you're there because she never comes to visit. Or if you don't count that you don't know what you did that was so awful that your mother would pack you and your one-year-old sister up, all your clothes fitting into two small brown suitcases, and drop you off at a place filled with women who wore long black skirts with long black veils who could hardly speak English and couldn't speak Italian and who barely spoke to you at all.
I wanted to tell my mother that at an orphanage you learn to take care of your one-year-old sister yourself because nobody else can make her stop crying. And that you figure out how to get people who don't know you and don't care about you to like you. And that you finally pretend that you don't have a mother at all so that you won't keep falling into that hole in your stomach. I wanted to tell my mother that after all the time that I was there I had adapted myself to it and that when I heard I was going home, I didn't want to go home, I wanted to stay. The orphanage had become my home.
One day the nuns dressed me and my sister up and sent us out to the porch to wait.
"Your father's coming for you."
Who was he?
There were no suitcases this time, there was nothing to put in them. We were wearing other little girls' clothes. After two years, the ones we came in didn't fit us.
I saw a man walking across the grass toward us. He was tall and thin and he was taking long, eager steps, to close the gap between how far he had come and this moment. He had a big white smile on his face. His hair was black and he had his arms out.
I wanted to tell my mother that, after all, my father had turned out to be the best mother I ever had.
But that's not what she wanted to hear.
"...no, Mom, orphanages aren't such bad places."
She and I never spoke about the orphanage again, or her secret again, or even that telephone conversation again.

I don't remember that my father was ever in or even around my mother's sewing room. I don't remember that my sister was ever there either. It seemed to be a room separate from the rest of the world, a world of its own, a room that included only my mother, her customers, and me. While I was there I always hoped that my mother would teach me to sew, but she never did.
"Just watch," she'd say.
I never did learn about sewing from sitting inside my mother's sewing room and watching her sew. Instead, looking back on it, I learned about desperation and frustration and despair and fear. I learned about humiliation and class distinctions and depression. I learned that by keeping your head down, close to the needle, you maybe wouldn't see that the rest of your world was not what you wanted at all, that in the rest of your world all the seams were crooked and frayed, that men couldn't keep their zippers up, and that you yourself could be buttonholed into a life not much bigger than four walls because you could sew.
Eventually my mother went to work for a large department store in Scottsdale, Arizona, from which she finally retired as head seamstress. She was almost eighty years old when she died of complications from Alzheimer's disease. I vividly remember the day when I, along with my father, dropped her off at the nursing home from which she would never return. I was pulling out of the parking space to go home when I noticed a small brown suitcase of my mother's that had yet to be carried in. For a moment, I thought I saw a three-year-old little girl standing behind it looking back at me.

Putting Your Play Shoes On

You get up in the morning
and you pull on your shorts
and the hair on your legs is yellow
and shines in the sun
and the birds are shouting their lungs out
and you cram down your cornflakes
and you run across the street
and you are out of breath
and you knock on the door
and the mother comes and stands behind the screen
and you ask her if your friend can come out
and he’s already there in the hallway waiting for you
and he has his play shoes on
and he comes crashing through the screen door
and you hear it slam and bang
and the two of you leap off the porch
and fly back across the street behind the houses
to the vacant lot where your fort is
and you both get sweaty
and your hands get dirty
and you smell like playing outside smells
and your mothers call you in for lunch
and you both know
you’ll be back
to play again
and your friend looks at you
and his eyes are blue
and his mouth is open
and for the rest of your life
you remember
that’s what it feels like
to fall in love.

Holding Hands Deeply

A couple of years after my husband was diagnosed, he and I had one of our errand days. The first stop was Costcutters. I'd introduced him to the wonders of a five dollar shampoo while we were on vacation in West Texas and he had put getting a shampoo at the top of our errand list.

We were sitting in the lobby area on blue plastic chairs waiting for the stylist to come out from the back when he murmured something to himself about how if he took his money out of his wallet now and put it in his shirt pocket he'd be ahead of the game. I'd been looking out the window when I glanced down at his hands. He was holding his wallet in both hands, trying to open the dollar bill section with one hand while withdrawing money from it with the other.

His hands trembled and disobeyed. They revolted and wouldn't move the way they were supposed to or as fast as they knew they could. They were thick and slow and wore invisible cement gloves. Once they pulled the six single dollar bills from out of their hidey hole they wouldn't fold the money. They just more or less put the bills on top of each other and pushed them down into the front shirt pocket in a puffy wad and the pocket was bulging from the dollar bills stuffed down inside it. When I looked I felt like getting up from my chair and just walking on home by myself so that I could cry out my tears without anybody noticing.

My husband has beautiful hands. Beautiful hands and wrists. He's always worn a silver and turquoise bracelet on each of his wrists and I've always told him he gets so many compliments on his bracelets because of his beautiful hands and shapely wrists. "Believe me, those bracelets wouldn't attract so much attention on some other guy. " His hands are big and strong-looking and veined and shapely. They look like they could do anything. You used to be able to give them a command and they were there, on the spot, ready to perform. You could ask them if they could fix something and they’d say, "Yes sir, right away sir." They looked like the kind of hands a man's hands are supposed to look like. The hands of Hercules, the hands of Einstein, the hands of fate. He has tender hands, warm hands, and when he has held me, I've felt that he was holding all of me in his hands.

When I first met my husband and we were dating, I was struck by how much he liked to hold hands. Walking down the street, in the car, at the movies. Just touch his hand with your pinkie and he would take hold of it -- and I mean take hold, as in put your hand in his and hold it, with a grip. He's the only man I've ever known who truly held hands deeply. I remember in church one day, he held my hand as we sat in the pew and he began caressing my palm, moving his fingers across it. I could feel his hand holding me all the way from the tip of my toes to the top of my head and I leaned over to him and whispered "let's get out of here."

That's the kind of hands my husband had. The trembling hands I watched in Costcutters looked the same. Still brown and veined and shapely. But they didn't act the same and they didn't perform the same and I hated my husband's new/old hands. I hated them.

When the woman finally came out of the back and called out for her next appointment and I watched my husband slowly walking behind her, ever-so-kindly telling her that he didn't mean to take her away from her lunch, when I saw him walking with such dignity towards a shampoo bowl where someone else was going to shampoo his hair because Parkinson's wouldn't allow his arms to move repetively back and forth over his own head, I wanted to run over to her and tell her that she should be grateful that she was even being allowed to touch the head of such a gentle and tender man. I wanted to tell her he was a treasure and that just because he trembled and he walked slow and moved slow, on the inside, he still had the strongest hands I've ever known and the best hands I've ever held and she should be so lucky that he would ever even touch her with them. Instead, what I did was walk over to where my husband was getting his shampoo, and without missing a beat, slipped my hand into his so that he could take hold -- deeply.

Surrounded by Love

I was sitting in the car behind the wheel watching my husband as he came out of the Circle K – slightly bent over, shuffling a bit, the coke in his hand trembling. A big, tough-looking man wearing a tank top and baseball cap took hold of the door my shorter-than-he-ever-used-to-be husband was trying to push through and stood aside, gesturing with a nod that my husband should go on through, he’d hold the door.
One night, about a year after my husband was diagnosed, just as his symptoms were becoming noticeable to others, I was sitting on the edge of our bed in our bedroom when he came in from going out to pick up a paper. He sat on the bed next to me. What? The hardest thing about this disease is the pity, he said. What pity? The pity people give me. I see it in their eyes. What happened? Somebody asked if they could help me with the door when I was coming out. They had that look in their eyes. What look? Pity, he said.
I told my husband then that I thought he was misunderstanding people. I told him that having always been a strong, healthy, capable man; he’d never been in a position in which people could see that he needed help. I told him that perhaps he was misreading the look in their eyes. I told him that perhaps he was confusing pity with love.
The other day at the Circle K, my husband saw that I had noticed what happened with the big tough-looking stranger who was holding the door for him. He saw that I had seen him look the stranger full in the face. He saw that I had seen him tell the stranger thank you. When my husband got to the passenger side of the car I reached over and opened the door for him from the inside. He sat himself down in the tortuously slow way that Parkinsons forces on him and put the Coke in the holder. I’m surrounded by love, he said.
After he and I had that conversation on the edge of the bed those few years ago about seeing people as offering love instead of seeing them as offering pity, my husband changed. No more pity for him. It has always been my belief that if you offer people something tender and real, they will respond in kind – from their best selves. I have seen waiters help my husband on with his jacket, store clerks carry a single grocery bag out to the car, massage therapists offer to button his shirts – over and over, I have seen people reach out to him and over and over, I have seen him now let them do it.
Through it all though, what has been the most moving aspect of the dynamic for me is that I have seen my husband allow others into his life in ways that help him and quite possibly helps them as well. I have seen Parkinson’s change my husband and more or less change the very world he lives in. He’s right. Everywhere he goes, he’s surrounded by love.