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Mom opened Johnny Mathis with her teeth, threw a dollop of butter at beets, and let her lamb run under water. She picked and peeled her oranges, boiled them in cinnamon, and the house soon smelled like hot-spiced cider. She was playing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” so loudly, we had to shout over it. For the holidays, we no longer buy each other gifts like screwdrivers, place mats, or gimcracks. Over the years, we’ve bought Mom so many dainty bottles of exclusive perfume she could open her own boutique. Add the fancy hats she has and she could be Park Avenue. Mom wanted everyone to either save their money or give gifts that were events or experiences. “I have everything I need,” she said. This was true, but saving our money was out of the question, it was the giving that mattered to us, so we started giving Mom tickets to the opera, symphony, theater, and countless seats to whatever figure skating extravaganza was in town at the time. We always got Mom two tickets, so she could share these gifts with her boyfriend Wayne. We have always liked Wayne. He treats our Mom like a star of the screen. Mom has always given us gift cards to restaurants or to the movies. “Have a nice dinner on me,” she’d say, or “Here’s two tickets to the movies but don’t see the one with that guy in it.” She was never good with names like that. Still, we could go to the movies and avoid the flick we thought she was talking about, since she was a good judge of film. She learned setting, character, and plot as an undergraduate student in Acting, and years ago, she was in an off-Broadway musical, falling in love with singing since falling in love with Johnny Mathis. Now that she is older, her voice has aged into a warm velvet richness so she sings more often. She blamed this change on “Chances Are.” One time, she passed by my old bedroom door and heard a record I was playing. “Wow, that sounds good. Who is singing?” she said, and when I told her it was Echo & The Bunnymen and the song was “Seven Seas,” she said, “What on Earth is that?” It would be twenty-some years later when I would find an Echo & The Bunnymen CD in her collection, and when I did, I gave her two tickets to the Bunnymen concert downtown. The following year, she gave me a life-sized picture of her in a Bunnymen t-shirt and said, “This is evidence of my experience.” We used to think she was an astrologer. She would gather us around the table and read our horoscopes in a strange deep voice and watch us closely to see if we somehow connected the words to our lives. “What do you think ‘A project needs attention’ means?” Of course, I never knew the answer but would quickly learn that the project that needed my immediate attention was none other than cleaning my room. Mom was creating her holiday feast, wafting her favorite potpourri through the air, and moving side to side to Johnny Mathis while her feet kept time. We all sat in the living room, talked loudly, and arranged the gift envelopes in a flower-like bloom on the tea table. As usual, it was eventually time to eat, the music would be turned down, and chances were the conversation would move from what’s-going-on-with-you to do-you-remember-when. But not this time. This is when Mom surprised us. “I did it differently this year,” she said, referring to both the dinner and gifts. She cocked her left eyebrow in that saucy way she made famous in her photographs and she laughed at herself. “You’ll never guess what is in this bowl or what is in those envelopes!” She was right. For starters, we could not guess what was in this broth. It tasted as if she added a cat whisker, a spider web, dried toad skins, three fish gills, a bird feather, and watermelon rind. Mom has been known to make some unusual concoctions, but this maudlin broth was both snappy and dry. We don’t think of her as a sorceress hunched over a bubbling cauldron, cackling and chanting, or summoning some eye of newt. But, we have often thought of our mother as a type of gypsy, not the villainous stereotypes in old B-movies, but the kind of woman who was strong and mystical with jewelry, passion, and dance. The fact that she would break out in song in that deep voice from her tiny frame only added layers of mystery to our mother. Add that mischievous left eyebrow and we had ourselves a character. Maybe it was the broth, the lamb chops, the rosemary or thyme, maybe the sliced buttered beets, ginger sauerkraut, or lilac peas, we didn’t know, but we giggled our way from the dinner table to the living room. Mom said, “We’ll open ours first, then I want you to open yours, then you, you, you, you, and last, you,” she said, pointing to me. The Johnny Mathis CD stopped; you could hear the CD changer rotate, and then someone we couldn’t identify started chanting the first few lines in West Side Story. Mom took her usual seat in the high-backed Victorian chair while Wayne sat on the floor with my sister and her husband and daughter. My brother and his wife sat on the sofa, and I was on my favorite: the zigzag chair. The envelopes were either handed out or tossed across the room since no one was about to move. This was the spot to be. To give to each other like this was a scene we never wanted to leave. Mom opened her envelope from my brother and his wife and got two tickets to the opera. She was thrilled, and Wayne was pleased. Wayne was good like that. We always liked Wayne. Mom opened the envelope from my sister and her family and got two tickets to Champions on Ice. She stood up and moved through a super slow-motion demonstration of some slow-arm-waving-around-move or another. She sat back down and lifted my envelope to the light and she pretended to see inside. She held it to her ear and shook it and said that it sounded like a trip. When she opened it, she found hotel confirmations and two round-trip airline tickets to Prague. She repeated the word Prague several times - Prague. Prague. Prague, Prague! - and started singing, “The black light theater, the black light theater, the black light theater - whoosh!” With that, she swung her waist-length jacket like a cape. “Thank you all so very much. Okay, now Nadia.” My sister’s daughter, six years old, opened her envelope and found a treasure map inside. “What is this?” my sister asked. “It’s a map,” her husband said. With that, we all tried to decipher the clues Mother made in charcoal and chalk. Since parts of the map had smudged, we made a few wrong turns upstairs before we opened the door to the fourth bedroom, and in it was an entire rack of brightly colored outfits, costumes, hats, and props. Nadia screamed and wanted to try on every set; the princess was first, then the pharaoh, the palm reader, and so on. The CD downstairs had changed again, this time to The Four Tops, before we all headed back down to resume the opening of the envelopes. My sister, Victoria, opened hers and found a letter that detailed the reservations for an exquisite romantic weekend at a B&B in Charleston. Her husband opened his envelope and found a redeemable voucher for babysitting services at no charge on said weekend. Nims, my brother, hoping for money, who has been sweating this entire time, grabbed his envelope and said a silent prayer before opening it. He found a gift card to Home Depot. “You’ve been talking about finishing the baby’s room for awhile now, get to it,” Mother said. He painted on a smile like he was Van Gogh. I felt bad for him, but then his wife opened her envelope and $5000 fell out. She gasped, my brother thanked Mother profusely, and she said, “I see babies in your future.” This was true; my brother and his wife just started their efforts to begin a family, and Mom always thought, the more, the merrier. They’ve been preparing their home and turning their office into a potential baby’s room since October, and she knew it. How she knew it, we didn’t know. Mom had a devilish grin on her face as I started to open mine. I stopped to smell it first, as if I could detect the gift by scent alone. I wasn’t far off. I found a coupon for a massage by K. L. Koki in Manhattan. The date and time, February 29th at midnight, was curious. Mom lifted her left eyebrow again and said, “I also bought you a one-way plane ticket to New York. It will be up to you to see if you want to come back.” I landed at JFK airport. I took a taxi to the address my mother wrote down before I left. The street was well lit, and the address numbers shined brightly in brass. I paid out the meter, hopped over a puddle, closed my winter coat, and made toward the door with a window. I rang the buzzer twice, as instructed, and waited in the cold for Koki to answer. An entrance buzzer sounded, so I opened the door myself and saw a single staircase up. I took two steps in. The door slammed behind me, and I climbed the stairs for five flights until it led me to a single red door. I touched the doorbell one time and could hear wind chimes come alive inside. The door gently swung open, and a luminous woman dressed in all white introduced herself. “I am Kyoko Li Koki, Masseuse,” she said, “I have known your mother for years. I’m so glad she sent you.” The first room inside was nearly silent, except for the barely audible musings of a soft sitar from the Far East. We entered the thick oily air. Her eyes were serene and sincere, her hair pulled back in a half-hitch knot. She extended her left hand to mine and led me to a feather bed on legs in the back. She wore loose-fitting clothes. I could see her body through them. I undressed but she didn’t move. Maybe it was the warmth of the room, the security of the heavy front door, the wind chimes, the music, the beads, or her half-open robe and the small lamp behind her that illuminated the sides of her breasts and made a halo around her hair, I am uncertain, but I stripped, completely naked, and stood there, her looking at me naked, me looking at her half-naked, then I noticed my full erection. I hopped onto the massage table and rolled to my stomach, carefully, and she placed her hands on my shoulders and said, “You have knots under here,” as she kneaded things under my skin. As if armed with a canoe’s oar, her palm pressed hard, led into elbow, circled the study of muscle and nerve, dug a deep trench windward of spine, and lowered like water would in tide. Her fingers grappled skin as if anchored, and she leaned as if towed on skis. Her weight became two thumbs on knots thatreleased and spread like a pebble in a pond. Her elbows again planted deep in my back until the length of her arms rowed me to near-sleep. The air was thick with oil, lilac, and thyme. This perpetual motion flowed from my back to my left leg when she stuck a hard right thumb into the pulp of my left foot. This sent a signal from my sole to scalp as she came around with small candles to knuckle and convince the right. I fight off the urge to sleep and dream, but there are too few moments like these. Her hands know my body as if we’ve loved for years. My mother knows her. Did she invite her over for sponge cake and chai? I think we might enjoy dancing after lounging at dinner with mussels and port. I will take her hand, lead her to spin a pirouette softly into the cradle of my left shoulder. We’ll fly to Thailand. Visit the beaches in Vietnam. See Japan. I’ll take her home and make a house with her in my arms. We could have babies and read to them Li Young Lee. I have known her for years. My family knows her! Now she’s opening envelopes of instructions and time. We speak for hours about generals, parenthood, bottled water, and the protocol for proper hats. I draw 5000 pictures of her in pencil. There are no clocks in the house. Our chi keeps time. There are huge conic maps on the wall and wild rabbits out back. We keep small straw mats out front and sliced kiwi on plates. The plates are blue, rectangular, offset by 5/16th of an inch, hand-blown and cut from a liquid bulbous cup that endlessly bobs in the western most end of a distant white sea. I awake on my back to the smell of infused tea. I have never smelled anything so steeped. Some morning sun has come through a curtain, and I open my eyes and see a watercolor on the ceiling. Two people are dancing. They are on a balcony overlooking a city. They are throwing their heads back, surrendering themselves to music I can barely hear. The pastel sky suggests early morning and it smooths into a distant sea. He is holding a small book in his hand. She is holding a rose in her teeth, and looks like my mother, only younger. There are birds on a single angled branch above them and they are inspecting the morning through thin leaves. There are two snifters on the edge of one ornate table on the right side of this couple. They love each other. There is no peacefulness like theirs. I see evidence of tiny brush strokes in her red hair and pinpoints of dabbles on the cover of his hardbound book. It is lovely. Whoever painted this loved this couple. They loved the city, the balcony, the sea, that sky, that table, the glasses, birds, that branch, and those leaves. It might be the single most beautiful painting I have ever seen. “Koki, who is that man in the painting?” When she told me and pulled out a box of clippings and pictures, my heart sank. I knew this year’s gift wasn’t the flight, the taxi, the money, the unusual time and date, the mysterious door, the odd flight of stairs, the music, the air, the massage, that painting, this tea, that erection, or this woman. Damn it, I thought and sat there, patiently, as Koki turned the pages of a life I don’t care about, biding my time until I need to leave to make my plane. Damn it, I thought, the one-way ticket. Leaving here now is gonna to cost me. |
