I wanted this story to be a meaty one, so I wrote 500 words a day for six consecutive days, give or take, each one is a little chapter, I posted the first one a week or so ago and instead of eeking it out I wanted to post the entire thing today. It’s a beautiful day, the water is calm, last night was a full moon and you can still feel it, this lake is deep, thanks for being here.

WALLFLOWER by Sherry Cassells

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

I have soft shoulders, my mother says I am afraid of shadows, she is a literary snob who calls me The Child of Shalott. 

I hear her soaked lips spread across her teeth, it is getting dark, one day past summer solstice, one drink in, and I am for a short time the apple of her eye. She invites me to sit on the chair with her, there’s no room but I pretend to fit, my filthy summer knees with knobs of insect bites next to hers, a thin and pale eleven, like me.

This is the childhood I remember, the window I can today see through, I have learned that if I keep this imaginary window clear of clutter and debris I can return to the sprawling gardens of my childhood. My mother would have shoved the word privileged before childhood – like most people, she believed wealth and privilege were the same thing.

Peace in the twilight of a generous backyard – fireflies light, birds collapse, breezes flare, the heave of nearby shores – I remember it all.

My mother smelled of damp roses and gin, my head rested upon her soft shoulder, I squinted into the partial sun. I can hear her mouth open, the way she took in the last of the light and exhaled it in a sweet column of alto, somewhere on the flat cusp between hymn and dirge, her throat hugged the notes with acute control. She could torque to soprano at any time. It felt, and I remember this deeply, as if a balloon were about to burst as I waited for it, grateful when it didn’t come, shattered when it did. I preferred she save that shrill for the stage.

The gardens were many, they were beautiful and brief, we stayed five weeks in Barcelona once, long enough to see the midnight blue Irises into flower and back again. Usually we stayed in places for only two weeks, my mother and I, the supplied chefs, maids, a driver and a gardener, as well as her manager, Mrs. Buettner, who wore midi dresses always, one sleeve long and fastened at her wrist, the other short and gathered at her elbow. I’d seen her at bedtime and her nightgown was the same. The numbers on her forearm were blurred and indistinguishable, I didn’t understand why she would want them to be seen, and I only asked once what they said, she said they spelled out hell, and my mother cleared her throat. Everyone took notice when my mother cleared her throat. Mrs. Buettner inflated sharply, I pressed against her, she was my closest, my only, friend.

My busy mother left me to either Mrs. Buettner or the tepid pool of maids. Too young to question my intuition, I was bold with languages, and aside from being served escargot once when I’d ordered a hot dog, I was sufficiently understood. Things I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about I couldn’t communicate. Once a gentlemen asked me what my famous mother was, and I replied, in Spanish, a polish hen.

He smiled, his teeth were too big for him, I found it hilarious and we laughed together, he at my poltricidal accusations, me at his teeth. I urged Mrs. Buettner to get me something to draw with and I built that man from nothing to something over and over again, each time I howled.

Whoever he was, he is visible through the aforementioned window, and although I only saw him once, his face may be the first I recognize in heaven.

The Fragile Ones

In each new place I was at first tired and jet-lagged, without any notion of time or place, I was dull and uninterested, I felt as if I had emerged from deep water with a mild but enduring case of the bends. I wished myself not exactly dead but not quite alive either. My plugged ears made me wary and introspective, I had suspicions about fluctuating gravity, I did not believe the universe would maintain its churning chaos, but a sort of faith came upon me at day three and I was aware of scent and temperature again, the creak in my ears subsided and I no longer needed to open my mouth terribly wide, like my mother on stage, to activate them.

My Mother did not understand these days of purgatory, she said I was being stubborn and indulgent, it was easy for her, protected as she was by her entourage. We went from cold Poland to throbbing Kuwait and it didn’t phase her, she cared only for the turned up faces of her audience, they gave her the connection she needed, while I groped for any strands of love I could find, even those I imagined.

I tried to stick to my caregivers, I brushed against them to remind them of my existence, yes, but also to create a sort of static. They took me into their world wearing their garb. I memorized the shape of their bodies, the clothes they wore, in case the fundamental forces that held up the universe faltered and they lost me.

But in the gardens, and there were always gardens, I needed nothing and no one. 

Similar to my affinity for languages, I had a feel for the earth and its creatures, my audience. I crawled into their beds, I sniffed their flowers and leaves and stalks, I pressed my fingers into the ring of dirt they pierced. I was a spoiled child and in each new place I insisted my bedroom window overlook the garden, I heard the wind sigh through its bones at night, my mother’s footsteps down the hallway, The Lady of Shalott, half-tired of everything.

The summer I turned 13 we were in Greece, my mother said we had been there before but I knew otherwise, I would never have forgotten the villas so white against the blue sky. When we landed I did not suffer a head full of construction, I was neither sleepy nor dull nor drowning, I was energetic and happy, I ran ahead without looking back. 

They said her heart was fragile.

For a moment I did not understand the word, I tried to find it among the cascade of languages in my head but there was nothing for it – fragile was not a word anyone would ever choose to describe my mother. She was perhaps weak about love, I never blamed or scorned her, in my way I understood my existence was an obstacle for her, I was only mildly sorry about it.

But in Greece I was different. Busy with my sudden courage I swam alone, I walked without purpose through the streets, a flower tucked behind my brazen ear, I accepted the universe and the universe accepted me. I made a vow to understand its laws. 

I do not think this new courage was acquired, it was not accidental either, it was simply offered so that I would be able to steel myself against my mother’s death a few weeks later.

Uncle Frederick

There will always be things I wish I had asked her:

what was her mother’s maiden name?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
which was her favourite city in which to sing?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
had she ever loved my father?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
did she fall in love with Pavarotti that time in Rome?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
was the diamond necklace really from President Kennedy??
why was it so hard for her to love me?
did she know of her fragility?
why was it so hard for her to love me?

There are not enough question marks in the world to sustain the slew of queries I had about my father.

The venue in Rome where she had adorned the stage in the company of Pavarotti received a share of her estate, an aunt I had not known about received a similar amount, an uncle the same on both counts, a share for Mrs. Buettner, more names I didn’t know and other charitable contributions, the rest was put in trust for me.

As quickly as I had come into my courage, I retreated back, like the blue Barcelonian irises. 

I sat in the lawyer’s office wearing a black dress, Aunt Bea across the table, she was a lesser version of my mother with half her beauty and no style, she spoke exclusively through one side of her mouth. She was unmoved at our introduction. I thought perhaps a stroke had made her a lopsided syllable-skipper until Mrs. Buettner came into the room with her uneven sleeves and Aunt Bea smiled like a teacup.

I asked her about my uncle Frederick and she said oh Freddy’s an arse-knot.

Had her lips not approximated the shape in question I probably would have been alright, but it gave me a shove of giggles – the too-small room was suddenly hot – she said what’s so funny about that? in her sideways way and it pushed me over the edge, I did not have the throat control to suppress it, that peculiar insane glee so void of joy, it shook and flushed me, I knew how horrible I looked, like a shitting gargoyle, I groped my way out of the room, they probably called it shock and it probably was.

Still spasmodic, I watched someone float from the elevator, he was perhaps a pilot, he spoke to someone and then came to me, he took me in his arms and – what’s it called? – the opposite of the bends? – something to do with a confused inner ear when one is in space? – whatever it is, that’s how I felt. I half-expected to fall into a faint but instead I experienced the opposite, an absence of gravity, and I worried that if he held me any tighter I would shoot upwards right out of my clothes.

He took me by the hand and walked me back into the room. 

Somebody said ah, Frederick, and another somebody said, you must be the astronaut.

My Silent Era

I had not understood my situation, I simply put on the black dress the housekeeper hanged on the back of my bedroom door, slipped my skinny stockinged feet into the penny-loafers offered, and followed instructions.

I was driven to the offices of Decker & Dunn and launched into an elevator, I could see the curvature of the earth from where I sat at the long table, the room was barren and dull but for a small grey moth on the windowsill bouncing against the glass. Two weeks later I was living with Aunt Bea in a suburban townhouse reading a book in my tiny borrowed bedroom – it was my mother’s copy of Rebecca – I pulled my chair to the window, my head against the glass, I remembered the moth.

She hollered for me when she needed the potatoes peeled or something from the top shelf, I waited for her call after the toilet flushed in the mornings, she took her glasses off to weigh herself and I read aloud and charted the number. I lied one way when I wanted a good breakfast; the other way when I wanted revenge.

Excluding my episode in Greece, I had seldom applied myself, and it was for her, my almost mythological self, that I studied. I was quiet about it. Aunt Bea nearly had a bird when the school called and told her I had been accepted, at the age of 16, to university.

In the early fall I left without ado, my trust allowed expenses such as a car and an on-campus apartment, in the afternoon I pulled into a picnic spot within a forest, the trees had not turned but there was a spice to the atmosphere’s cool sway, I saw a bloom of orange to my left and was drawn into the madly moving shadows, a portion of forest where every branch, every frond, every flake of life gave perch to an enormous cloud of resting monarchs.

This was the second most important event of my life.

The banging moth for whom I had been host the past four ragged, miserable years – I do not wish to sound Jane Eyre but living with Mrs. Rochester will do that – was suddenly gone and in its stead poured the roaring butterflies, and for the first time since the streets of Greece I felt curious.

I went deeper into the forest at full speed. The air spewed pollen and seed and I remembered a perfectly horizontal snowstorm in Russia. This was a Canadian fall yet the earth said otherwise – it said irises in Barcelonian blue, it displayed in Roman numerals the bamboo forests of Japan, the calligraphic heather of Heathcliff’s moors against the sea, the gunshot spread of poppies in Romania, the roses of Seville, the climb of Manderley’s gigantic rhododendrons – I walked through it all, my head leaning into my mother’s alto at the verge of the forest.

After a year of general studies I devoured botany first, then chemistry, a side of language and literature, at 27 I became a medical doctor. Still in my era of silence, I had no friends, but there were others like me, we shared theories, we discussed algebraic formulas in whispers, we folded and passed notes scrawled with symptoms, we synopsized sonnets into glances, we mouthed the diseases most likely.

Uncle Frederick invited me to visit him that summer, I had not yet determined what was next, certainly it would not be practicing medicine. Aunt Bea was on a cruise and he showed me the picture she sent, there was bird shit on her sunglasses and we howled, he kissed my forehead goodnight.

I was cared for throughout childhood, tolerated in youth, perhaps admired at university, but never had I been loved until Uncle Frederick loved me. This was a revelation – but upon examination that sleepless night in Uncle Frederick’s thin-ceilinged bungalow – the revelation was that it was not a revelation at all.

I remembered the day of the moth, the smooth planet beneath me, Mrs. Buettner across the table, she would not let me catch her eye. When we were dismissed I scrambled for her but she was Mrs. Danvers, cold and remote, she turned away, she walked to the elevator and threw herself in. She had not loved me. As the night wore on, slow as evolution, I realized the same of sweet Celia in Rome, Grace in Taiwan, Miss Borden in Montevideo, Margaret in Belfast, more Graces, a Bernice, some Susans – women and girls all over the world – I mistook their kindnesses for love, but it was more than that, for even their kindnesses were forged, they were simply making their livings.

I thought of them not with scorn but disappointment, not at their insincerity but my interpretation of it, and then I thought of them no more. Into the space came the curdled grief I had been holding fast since my mother’s death, it unfurled slightly, and for an instant, aired itself out.

I had not forgotten my vow to understand the universe; I studied astrophysics at Uncle Frederick’s alma matar. He took great interest in this, we visited and wrote one another letters, I asked one question about my mother in each, he was able to answer all of them except he didn’t know her favourite venue and I suspected it was an invalid request, and that she had not had one.

I remained curious about my worth; still I did not know why it had been so hard for her to love me.

Zero Gravity

In the fall of my second year, Decker & Dunn sent an urgent notice that Aunt Bea had died. It was an eight hour drive back to that horrible place and I went, she’d moved from her townhouse to a country estate where the service was held, an old woman came to me and put her cheek to mine, she smelled of gin and roses and I half-expected my mother’s ghost but it was Mrs. Buettner, there were tears in her eyes that wet my cheek, I did not blame her for not loving me, I looked beyond her into Aunt Bea’s garden where a flock of spent irises blew, she sneezed in my arms, I said bless you and then I realized it was a sob, and said bless you again.

After my doctorate in astrophysics I applied to NASA. I am 34 and about to go into space for the first time. Uncle Frederick is in the control room.

I have butterflies.

There is a quiet moment before the most unquiet, and I am completely internalized, this is overwhelming and we are warned and counseled about it, trained to keep our minds engaged, but Uncle Frederick said it is an opportunity if you are strong enough, and you are, so I let mine go, and in the eleven minutes it takes from ignition to launch, I get the orange from the forest, it opens like a curtain behind which cut-out white shapes glow beneath a blue ceiling, the man with the too-large teeth laughs across the stage, the turned up face of the mythological me watches from a single-seat audience, and it comes to me – in the light of all the years – how loved I was.