Postmarked

My mother left our home for good when I was thirteen. She had been taking her dinner to the spare bedroom for quite awhile, episodes of “Call My Agent” playing on the TV, a burble of French urgency squeezing out the crack between the door and the floorboards. When I came home from choir practice one Saturday afternoon, my father informed me that my mother had packed a suitcase and left. I opened that bedroom door and he was right. The bed was neatly made with fresh sheets, the blanket wrinkle-free, as if smoothened for the next guest. Her favorite pair of earrings—white ceramic swans—were placed in the center of the writing desk. 

My father bet she bought a one-way ticket to Paris, but he didn’t really know what the money missing from their joint bank account was financing. When he tried calling my aunt in Sarasota Springs, it sounded like she knew even less than we did. He spent a lot of evenings on the phone with Aunt Jill, both striving to piece together my mother’s withdrawal from their world and her obsession with anything French. For my part, I had been excluded from my mother’s concerns at an early age. She was like a submarine that surfaces briefly: abrupt and opaque. 

From time to time, with a tired little smile, my father would say, “When your mother comes home…” but at some point—and I don’t remember exactly—it became an “If.” At this juncture, her absence hurt me less than it hurt him, probably because I had already learned to cope with it. 

When I turned eighteen and was living in my own apartment, the postcards started showing up. Daubs of chartreuse in Monet’s lavender sky—a bouquet of Van Gogh’s sunflowers—Klimt’s famous pair, his hands cupping her head. These appeared to have been purchased not in the south of France, but in art museum gift shops around the U.S. Except the postmarks didn’t correlate. Was there even an art gallery in Winterset, Iowa, population 5300? How about Paducah, Kentucky? The messages were in faded blue ink or pencil, signed “Mom,” with a single sentence: “You’re too young to wear beige, and your thighs shouldn’t dimple like that,” or “Square necklines suit you better with such a flat chest.” From Bell Buckle, Tennessee: “Pleated skirts are a no-no, especially orange ones; they accentuate your rear end.” From Las Cruses, New Mexico: “You outgrew bangs in middle school.” 

Why this focus on my appearance? And how could she know this when she was not here? More to the point: Why did she care anyway—Why now? 

I stopped shopping for clothes at the Barberry Mall and ordered online instead. When I shrugged into new pullovers or yanked up blue jeans in the privacy of my own bedroom, window shades drawn, I still could hear the scold of her words. Was she stalking me among the tofu bricks in the grocery store or in the library’s fiction aisle, studying my shade of Clairol, how my coat hem hung, assessing what needed improvement? I started tucking my hair into a felt cap, donning sunglasses, turning up collars. But I never felt safe from her (invisible) scrutiny. 

Today I decide to stay downtown after work and read some of my poetry at an open mic in a crowded Chicago bookstore. In my poems, swans swim in duet through Provence, their feathers padlocked together on a fence crossing the Sorgue. Women in orange sashay solo, snacking on chocolate eclairs they hold in each hand. They leapfrog, cartwheel past crones cloaked in black whose feet are cemented to the ground. I search the faces in the audience for women with auburn hair in the right age-range, curious if this one or that one (or the lady posing with a mop leaning in the doorway) is she. I wait for one to approach me when the event concludes. But it becomes obvious at closer range they are all strangers, not here for me at all. Later that week, another postcard, this one from New Orleans. A watercolor by Paul Signac of a sunset over foothills purpling with oncoming dusk. “This is my last postcard,” it reads. “Stop putting me in your poems.”