Lohmelle

My mother and I are close; we write to each other often. We call. I know which days of the week she volunteers at the History Village and the days she plays Mahjong. I know all her friends’ names and the states of their marriages. Barbara, for instance, is in the process of divorcing her husband who had an affair with his lab assistant, which is the slightly more interesting version of getting it on with his secretary. Graham, the husband, is deeply remorseful, but he’s ‘blown it,’ as Mum describes, ‘totally blown it.’ Mum texts me such details and together we speculate on who will keep the house, the car, the kids. Barbara, obviously. Barbara will keep all of it. So there’s no question my mother and I are close—I just don’t know what she looks like.

         I tell this to the woman sitting next to me who slowly lowers her magazine into her lap. She lowers it in such a way that means she’d rather read celebrity gossip than hear what I have to say, but I choose to ignore the signal. I talk about my mother and how involved we are in each other’s lives, and how I love that, and I love her, but now that I’m flying home to visit her, I feel nervous. There’s a swinging sensation in my gut, and the tips of my fingers are tingling, because I realized, as I boarded the plane, that I don’t know who to look for when I step through to arrivals.

         ‘But don’t you Skype?’ The woman asks.

         ‘She doesn’t know how,’ I say. ‘She uses the landline and writes letters, and she can text. Well, she thinks she can text. But she types in capitals and without punctuation, so it can get quite shouty.’

         ‘Huh.’

         I show the woman the last photo I have of my mother on my phone. It’s over eight years old, from before the pandemic. Dad’s thumb edges into the shot, a blurry halfmoon in the top right-hand corner. Mum leans against a railing gesturing to a waterfall in the background. My parents were obsessed with waterfalls and weirs—any body of water, really—and spent their days walking beside them. 

         ‘Well there you go,’ says the woman next to me, peering at the photo, ‘she looks like that.’

         I shake my head because the woman doesn’t understand. Since the photograph was taken my mother has aged eight calendar years. But, more than that, she has grown old. She has grown old because my father died, and beyond being the love of her life (or LOML, ‘love of my life,’ in her texts), he was the thing she grew around, like a vine around a tree. Solid and unwavering, he steered her in the direction of the sun. Dad took photos of Mum and sent them to me because Mum doesn’t know how and doesn’t want to learn. I have an album on my phone of these photos and they’re almost all exactly the same: mum, water, thumb. Since Dad died, there have been no new photos, no more pink thumbs, and Mum suddenly started abbreviating expressions in her texts. She’s doing it, I think, because of a deep-seated fear of running out of time. But she abbreviates them in such a way that they can be pronounced as words on the phone, preferably with a French accent, so that LOML, for instance, becomes, “loh-melle”.

         ‘He was my lohmelle, honey. He was my lohmeverything.’

         Sometimes I think she is parodying her own grief in a bid to make it hurt less. None of it—dad’s death, the abbreviating, the parodying—can be good for her. We are incredibly close, but I don’t tell my mother that.

 —-

Organizing a funeral by distance is a bit like writing fiction: there’s a lot of imagination involved. The funeral director from Kingsley’s took me on a video tour of the parlor and sent me a PDF brochure of coffins and urns. I sent her an email back that said please find my selections highlighted in green. I tried to picture the people that would attend the service and the hearse that would take my mother from the house to the chapel, with dad loaded in the back like luggage.

         ‘Shouldn’t we have your mother in a separate car?’ The funeral director asked via chat.

         ‘Too expensive,’ I typed back. Mum would be too upset to drive herself, and it cost too much money to hire two cars, so I relayed the uncomfortable news that my mother wished to ride in the front with the undertaker and would therefore like to know their name. 

—-

I couldn’t go home for dad’s funeral. At the time, no one could go anywhere. The country went in and out of total lockdown with the regularity of breathing, so that at some point a visit to the shops was like holidaying in Italy. A visit to another country, back then, was unfathomable. And then the pandemic seemed to dissolve but life on the other side was hard to pay for. Airplanes gained the same mythological status as spaceships: real, but also kind of not. Even now, sitting in this seat, eight years since I last flew anywhere, it’s like I’m on the way to Mars. I slide the window shade up to reveal a little oval of black, ostensibly because it is night, but a part of me suspects we have simply taxied into a warehouse and they’ve turned the lights off. The world has become so small.

         I know that when I land, Mum and I will go to the house where I grew up—what I now think of as The Dream House—and it’s going to feel different to what I remember. And then we’re going to get in the car and follow the exact route the hearse took to the chapel. I’ll recreate it for you, Mum wrote on her last postcard. It’ll be like you were there. We’re close, sure, but I don’t mention that this feels weird, somewhat macabre. I don’t write back, Please, I’d rather not. The front of the postcard is a picture of the local park. People don’t buy postcards of where they travel to, anymore, they buy them of where they live, to show the recipient their world, or to say, ‘Do you remember this place?’

         If she gets her way—which, undoubtedly, she will—Mum and I will sit in the chapel and hold hands and think of Dad. He had a sweet laugh. He was a nice man with gentle opinions. He took a lot of up-the-nose selfies by accident. We’ll probably giggle about that and Mum will shush me because we’re in a church, after all. And following a respectful pause, Mum will lean across and tell me that the chaplain who ran the service was quite terrible. Kept saying “um.” As in, “The Lord welcomes this man into his, um, kingdom.” I’ll hoot with laughter and then we really will have to leave. We’ll go get a sandwich from the café down the street because that’s what they served at the funeral: finger sandwiches and Persian love cakes. Instant coffee and a selection of teas. At the wake, Graham knocked a whole tray of petit fours onto the floor. “Honestly,” Mum tutted, “Graham is such a nuisance.”

         After our supper we’ll go to the ocean where my mother scattered Dad’s ashes. She said the whole time she was doing it she was praying: not for Dad, not for his soul, but for the wind to die down. But the wind didn’t die down (praying be damned), and a big cloud of Dad flew into my mother’s face. “It was the only time he ever slapped me,” she laughed. I was putting meat on the grill at the time, my mother on speaker phone. 

“God, what’s that sizzling?!” She shrieked, “It’s so irritating.”

         “Sorry, sorry,” I fumbled with the phone and turned the gas off. “Is that better?”

         My mother is all explosions: of laughter, of fury. My father may have been the one that propped her up, who showed her the open sky, but he was also the thing that kept her tethered to the ground. The earth in an electrical socket.

 —-

I know my mother intends to show me the new hospital where Dad spent his last days. It’s a busy itinerary she’s worked out, almost like a tour, and it makes me wonder if she’s become a little unhinged. At least, that’s what I say to the woman next to me. There’s nothing wrong with Mum, as far as I’m aware, she is simply grieving and missing Dad and missing me, but I thought my neighbor would find the conversation more interesting if perhaps my mother was crazy.

         “There have been signs,” I say, lowering my voice.

         “Oh?”

         “Yeah. Little things, here and there. Indications that maybe…” I trail off and tap my temple. “But it’s hard to know, you know, being so far away.”

         “Like what?”

         I scramble to think of something. “Like she addressed her last letter to Bella. That’s the dog’s name.”

         My neighbor’s eyebrows shoot up her forehead. “Oh dear.”

“I know.”

“That sounds serious.”

         “I mean, she wrote ‘hello bella,’ so maybe she meant ‘hello beautiful’.”

         “Oh yes. Maybe. What else has she done?”

         I swallow a lump in my throat and think. “She told me the same story three times in one week. It wasn’t even a story, just a piece of news: a tree had fallen and crushed a little cottage in the local History Village where Mum volunteers. It was lucky it happened overnight otherwise someone could have been killed. She told me she forgot she had potatoes in the oven and the smoke set the fire alarm off. She talks about my father as if he’s still alive.”

         “Perhaps she should be assessed.”

I scoff. “Try telling her that.”

My neighbor frowns in concern. “It honestly sounds like something worth investigating, even just to rule things out. Does she have a support network in Australia?”

         “Oh, yes, lots of friends, but they’re all as addled as she is.”

I don’t know why I said that. It’s true that my mother did repeat that story about the tree a couple of times, but only because it was the most dramatic thing to have happened in the History Village since it was a real village. And she did say she’d burnt some roast potatoes recently, but everyone does that. In fact, I did that a few nights ago myself. But last week she described falling over her hiking stick and having to sit on the sidelines of her hydrotherapy class because she had a nasty graze on her leg. “Like the naughty kid,” she said, “watching all my wrinkly friends play Marco Polo without me.” The way she said it on the phone made it sound funny, and we both laughed. That’s what we do, my mother and I: we laugh. We laugh at the pandemic and falling over and periodic visitations from Dad. “He’s moved the remote again,” she complained, genuinely peeved at dad’s ghost. “I just know it’s him and he’s put it somewhere stupid.”

But she’s fine, and her friends are fine—Barbara will be alright eventually. I reach into the seatback in front of me, pull out the inflight magazine and study the cover. The pages tremble a little in my hands. I’m nervous to see my mother and not see my father. To see her and see how much she has changed.

         “Look, perhaps it’s presumptuous of me,” the woman says, rummaging in her handbag, “but I work in this field and I know some excellent assessors who could talk with you and your mother.” She hands me a slip of paper with a name and number on it. “Give this doctor a call.”

         My heart flutters. I feel dizzy, having implied such things about my mother, things that are both true and not true at all.

         “I’m sorry,” I reply, almost in a whisper, “My mum is actually fine. I’m exaggerating.”

         The woman blinks and returns to her reading.

 —

We don’t speak for the rest of the flight. I do a crossword. I’ve gotten very good at crosswords the last few years. My mother even made one for me herself by coloring in the squares on a piece of graph paper and writing out the clues. It was probably the sweetest thing I have ever received. Except when I sat down to complete it, I realized all the words pertained to Dad, and this was just another of her weird expressions of loss. Six across was Lohmelle.

       We are served a meal, the lights are turned off, and we sleep. The flight goes on and on. At one point, the woman has to go to the bathroom, so she taps me on the shoulder and points at the aisle but doesn’t say anything. Her mouth is a thin line of disapproval. After an interminable journey, the captain proudly announces that we’re fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. We wait. The pilot drives the plane to the gate like a pensioner. As I reach for my bag in the overhead compartment, I try very hard not to make eye-contact with my neighbor, who is doing the same by examining the lining of her purse. We stand awkwardly in the aisle for a while and she uses the time to fire off some messages. Naturally, I assume they are all about me, so I crane my neck to read over her shoulder until she snaps her head around and glares at me. I want to scream in all caps with no punctuation, just like my mother: HAVEN’T YOU EVER BEEN NERVOUS BEFORE? Then we shuffle silently off the plane and into the terminal.

         I duck into the closest bathroom. As I sit there, in my cubicle, I try to visualize my mother. My mother plus eight years minus Dad. I was never very good at math. I try to picture her in fragments as I walk through duty-free: her hands, her hair, her nose, and put them together, but I was never very good at jigsaws either. And then I push through the revolving door that separates the travelers from the welcomers. I realize I have my eyes closed. It’s no good trying to walk with your eyes closed when you’re used to walking with them open, so I stop. Involuntarily, I stop. And the person behind me walks straight into my back with a surprised uhh sound. A push on my left shoulder; “Move it.” A big outdated poster reads Smile with your eyes! I wipe my face, which is suddenly damp, and drag my belongings to the side and look out at the crowd. Lots of heads. Lots of hopeful faces. And at that moment my phone chimes and I look down to see a text message from my mother: ‘I SEE YOU,’ it says. ‘I’M COMING.’

A small woman who looks nothing like my mother is striding towards me, smiling at me expectantly. Good God, I think, I was right to be worried. She’s lost about ten centimeters off the top and fifteen kilos off the sides. But I recognize her, I think. Hazel eyes, flecked with gold. Nice eyes. That signature coral lipstick—never leaves the house without it—and plump, creamy skin from years of being sun smart. Mum used to hassle me and Dad about sunscreen, and when I was about six Dad accused Mum of being a bit anal about the whole thing, which was the first time I’d heard that word. I thought that being sun safe was a good thing, and therefore being anal must be a good thing, so I tried to use the word to give compliments from time to time. “Mum,” I’d say, “That roast was totally anal,” or, “You’re looking very anal tonight.”  

I lean down and wrap the small woman in a hug. My chin is pressed tightly against the nape of her neck, my fingers are laced together behind her back, closing the circle. 

‘Hi,’ I whisper in her ear.

‘Hello there,’ she says.

I squeeze her and discreetly smell her hair until I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn around to find a woman who looks exactly like my mother giving me an incredulous look, flicking her eyes between me and this total stranger I’m embracing.

“Do you two know each other?” My mother asks flatly. 

“No,” says the woman, who, upon closer inspection, looks like she may have taken a generous helping of relaxants. “But I don’t mind.”

I apologize, citing jet lag. And because I’ve spent all my emotional energy on this other woman, I shake my mother’s hand. In the background, I can see the woman who sat next to me on the plane at the baggage carousel. Her gaze bobs around the terminal like a fish in an aquarium and I make a conscious effort to avoid it. Meanwhile, my mother scrutinizes my face. She’s looking me up and down, frowning, as if I’m a menu in a foreign language. It suddenly dawns on me that I look different. I have changed. It’s been such a long time, and I never considered how this reunion might be for her. I have likewise neglected to send photos of myself, being generally averse to taking them in the first place. I’ve cut my hair, changed my style. Maybe this is hard for her too: her only child, deep into a new decade, a new phase of life. And for both of us, a new phase of loss. My cheeks grow hot; tears threaten to spill.

My mother’s face splits into a grin. She hooks one arm through mine and starts leading me to the baggage claim. She leans in towards me and I think perhaps she’s going to say something lovely. 

“Guess what,” she hisses, gleeful, “Barbara’s taking Graham to the cleaners. He’s finished.”