When The Mother Of The Bride Is Yours and Insane
And your freeze turns to fight
She sat on my in-laws’ new cream sofa. She wore a jade tracksuit that had seen better days; I had forgotten that she bought her clothes in charity shops.
I hadn’t seen her since leaving England the previous August and here she was, her red hair scraped into a ponytail, a cheesecloth scarf round her neck, gold earrings skimming her shoulders. She looked like an Egyptian cat with her sharp cheekbones, pointed chin and black kohl circling her eyes; her blue eyes that flashed black.
A year and three thousand miles had elided so much, had forced so much to the back of my memory: the second-hand clothes, the heavy-handed make-up, the home hair experiments.
She had arrived in a furore of mix-ups and muddles. It was a chartered flight on a cut-price airline with a strange flight number and when she landed at Logan, I was pushing a shopping trolley in Star Market, expecting to collect her that evening. Not finding anyone at the airport, she took a taxi to my in-laws’.
They clustered around her, my new family, gaping at this woman who currently went by the name Mary, this woman, who sat with a tray of tea on a small table at her knees, this woman, my mum.
