We Looked
For It
The summer I was fourteen, my mother saw that the diamond of her engagement ring had fallen out. She did not know when or where it happened. She only realized it was missing when she looked down at her artist’s hand and found herself staring into empty space encased by a tiny basket of golden spikes.
That same summer, something else happened. I think it was before the diamond left, but no one remembers for sure. My mother needed to paint a rolling pin. She meant that a rolling pin needed to appear in her painting, not that she needed to slather the kitchen utensil in color. In the painting, the rolling pin would be hanging from the sky. But there was something in the way, a block in her path. The only rolling pin in the house was one that had belonged to her mother, and she did not want to take it outside. My mother worked at a rented studio at a space called The Mill then, which was twenty minutes from our house, past the road on which I would later get very slightly rear-ended. She did not say why she did not want to take the rolling pin out of the house. She simply said that for “some reason” she did not want to. (I thought I knew why, but at the time I could not quite say the reason.) She did not say, either, why she needed to paint a rolling pin. She never said why she painted what she did until, occasionally, after the paintings were finished. She had retrospective reasons.
A work that begot a retrospective reason, though not the same kind, is sitting in our living room on a fold-up card table where my brother does his homework. It is a sculpture my mother made. It is made of wood, twigs, and cheesecloth, and the base resembles a backgammon board. (It doesn’t really look like a backgammon board; it looks like a series of triangles glued onto the wood, but I know it is supposed to be a backgammon board.) From one of the twigs, which is glued onto the base so that it looks like a tree (and it actually does look like a tree), a tiny half-hand made of plaster bandages dangles from an invisible nylon thread. The hand is my brother’s. When he was a small child and interested in fossils, my mother had my father bring home several rolls of plaster bandages and a large jar of Vaseline from work for us to make sculptures. Jonah made a mold of his hand. I didn’t know my mother had saved it. She didn’t know what she was saving it for, but she later said the reason must have been for the sculpture, this one. She called it “An Unconditional Love Poem in Three Parts.”
The kind of reason a rolling pin would appear in one of my mother’s paintings is more like the kind of reason the hand-fossil appears in the sculpture on my brother’s homework table, than it is like the kind of reason my mother kept the hand-fossil in the first place. I don’t know what that reason is. I don’t know why the hand-fossil is there. I do know that the backgammon board that doesn’t look like a backgammon board is there because backgammon is the game my grandfather used to play in Greece. Later, it was the game he used to play in America. He has a virtual backgammon application on his computer now, but he says the computer is much too stupid to play him. No one else in my family plays backgammon. We have a set because my mother bought it for painting. She can take it out of the house.
When my mother needed to paint the rolling pin, we lived across the street from my high school. My brother used to read the license plates of the teachers’ cars in the parking lot from a telescope he stationed in our living room. One morning, for exercise and new ideas, my mother went in her biker’s shorts to walk laps at the high school track. As she made her way around the quarter-mile loop counterclockwise, for some reason she looked diagonally in front of her, to the right. There, just beyond where the outer lane of the track loop met the grass, she saw something. A cylindrical lump. She slowed her pace. She veered a few feet off the track toward the lump. She studied a green handle and picked it up. It was a rolling pin.
A rolling pin in the grass can mean nothing, or it can mean everything. It depends on where the storyteller believes the story begins. If she believes it begins at the moment she finds the rolling pin on her morning jog, then the rolling pin is a strange thing to find at a track. If she believes it begins when she is looking for a rolling pin, it is coincidence. Luck, even. In my mother’s story, the rolling pin was a miracle. My mother’s story began with who she was. The perception of the miracle has more to do with her than with the block of wood she found. Had my mother not been my mother, she might not have needed to paint a rolling pin hanging from the sky. Had my mother not been my mother, she might not have had a problem taking her mother’s rolling pin out of our house.
Three thousand miles away in a house with a shingled roof, my mother’s mother was probably not using a rolling pin, while my grandfather sat near her, probably not playing backgammon. My grandmother was old and she spoke four languages and had hidden in the mountains in the Holocaust, and although that doesn’t explain anything, it was part of the reason her rolling pin stayed in our house. My mother would worry that if she took the rolling pin out, something would happen to it. Things sometimes disappear. She would lose the closest thing to a family heirloom she had, besides a large yellow mixing bowl. Why does one need an heirloom? Is it because it is a symbol of something not yet lost? One day, the rolling pin and the mixing bowl will really be all that is left of the Greek cooking that was once in the house with the shingled roof. My mother will need the rolling pin then. She will need it to be one thing not lost. I think this is what it boils down to. I think so because I think this way, too, even though I know we are the ones who draw the parallels. We create reasons for things as much as they have reasons of their own.
The appearance of the green-handled rolling pin solved the painting dilemma, which may or may not have been a dilemma, but it provided no clues as to the whereabouts of the missing diamond, which may or may not have been missing at the time. My mother is not the type to care about jewelry in the first place. Three summers later, she did not cry over my father’s quadruple coronary bypass. I can only assume she did not cry over a missing ring. But it was a hot summer of thunderstorms in Pennsylvania, heavy storms that poured unselfconsciously and, like chopped onions, gave you excuses to cry for other reasons.
On a sunny morning after many of these thunderstorms, my mother was on her way to her studio. As she drove her van down a quiet Manayunk road, for some reason she looked diagonally in front of her, to the right. There, where the curb of the road met the grass, where the sidewalk would have been had there been a sidewalk, a deer stood, nursing her fawn. Ordinarily, a deer runs away from a mini-van in fright. This one just stood there, scared but strong. She stayed for her fawn. She stayed to be a mother. My mother gasped, aware of the contents of her heart. She drove onward, to The Mill.
She pulled her mini-van into a parking space. In a routine that looked like a single motion, a series of sounds so familiar she barely noticed them, my mother put on the brakes, took her key out of the ignition, unbuckled herself, and opened the door. Something sparkled on the pavement. Her diamond, in nearly perfect condition save for a scratch on the corner that could easily be worked around, lay inches away from her front tire on the hot asphalt.
My mother does not tell people she is a writer. She tells them she is an artist. Maybe she is not so much a writer in practice as in mindset, but she is a writer. The ring story is hers, not mine, and not only because it happened to her. She told the story to me with the part about the fawn in it already, in a letter to me before it mattered. To my mother, the loss was of particularly poignant timing, which she would not realize until winter. The rediscovery at her feet in the parking lot was a reason to plow through the freeze into March. Not just an ethereal symbol of the closure that would later come, but something tangible to hold onto during a time of questions, a time when a mother could stay or flee. This is her terrain. To me, it was a good story—the enchanted sort of story that always seems to happen to my mother—that gained a kind of perfectly layered meaning we only appreciated because for some reason we looked for it.
Copyright © 2009 by Sara Mann
