It is the start of my birthday week. I think it’s an appropriate time to offer a sneak peek of my memoir in-progress. This section, “Maybe,” will be excerpted in a few weeks, as I don’t normally like having my writing on my blog. Thank you for this journey and I hope you enjoy!
Maybe
[. . .]
When my mother would take me with her on shopping trips to the mall or my sister Lesley would take me once a year to the larger Galleria in Houston to see the Christmas tree that had been erected in the middle of the Olympic-sized ice skating rink, I would look for my birthmother in the wash of faces rushing past with bags from Neiman’s, JC Penney, Waldenbooks.
I pictured myself a detective in pursuit of the fugitive parent who had given me up for a better life, one, maybe, with a piano and ashtrays. As I held my mother’s or my sister’s hand, I would scan the crowds, and look into the faces of each woman, and hope to see a resemblance. Sometimes one of these strange women would catch me looking at them and I would hold my breath, waiting for her to walk over to me, bend down, say, hello, I’m your mother. It never occurred to me how unsettling this would be—to have my birthmother be in the same shopping mall that I was with my own mother or sister, and further, to have my birthmother walk right up to me outside the Sunglasses Hut or Corn Dog 7 and greet me as her very own. It never occurred to me how slim these chances actually were and how even if I did see my birthmother eyeing a strand of freshwater pearls in Dillard’s or buying perfume at JC Penney, I would never have known it.
He may be pouring her coffee. She may be straightening his tie.
When I would listen to Annie sing Maybe, I would imagine my birthparents in a house hidden by hill, one where my birthmother would straightening by birthfather’s tie while he poured her coffee in the mornings. I once drew this picture, which has been lost to time or the garbage can or a wayward house cat, but I remember it clearly. In the drawing, the green hill took up the largest portion of the white sketch paper. The grass, shown as small slashes and straight lines rising from the hill’s curved surface, appeared to wave in an unseen wind. There was a half-circle of sun in the far right corner, complete with yellow-orange lines representing rays. On top of the hill was a small house (the technique of drawing a suggestion of a house hidden by a hill was lost on me) with a chimney smoking its fire plume into the clear, colorless sky. There were windows everywhere and a narrow black door.
[. . .]
These were my parents: toy husband and wife in a house built of pencil, crayons, watercolors. A sun shined overhead and a chimney smoked into the white sky. The hill and the waving grass. A dark door. I sat on the floor and ran my small fingers over the house, the hill, as though reading its secrets. As though my parents were speaking to me: come find us. We are waiting.
Books & Baubles 