MOTHER'S BONY BEHIND
by Elizabeth P. Glixman

There is a man in assisted living where I live. I am young compared to his one hundred and three years. He is straighter than me and has more hair. Mine is thin and sparse on my cranium. There are a few bald spots. I fluff up the strands and spray it. I will not use Rogaine. Take me or leave me as I am.

The old man Tom can't hear a word I say. I tell him the woman who serves us breakfast daily in the green and pink dining room has a fat ass. Tom says nothing. It might be because he is deaf. The bulbous waitress writes questions to him on a black board. Eggs over easy or boiled today, Tom?

"What? I can't hear you," he says. "Write louder."

One day he told me the woman who serves us breakfast needed to go on a diet. He must have noticed her extra flesh but was too polite to comment, or maybe I didn't write the statement loud enough on the black board. I bought loud green fluorescent chalk at Wal-Mart on our last group-shopping excursion. Tom hears me daily.

No one will comment that I am rotund. I do not have any extra flesh. I was five feet four and weighed ninety pounds before they yanked all my upper teeth out. I weigh eighty-seven pounds when I am naked and look in the mirror minus my uppers. I see someone I do not recognize. In my youth I was tall and straight like Tom, the hundred three-year-old man who died last week. Yes, he died. No one has to write to him on chalkboards with any colored chalk. I put the chalk in a small cotton pouch in my underwear drawer. The pouch used to hold tampons.

In my youth my teeth were sharp and my lips were full like the roll of a lush melon. Tom was lush too when he was young, a fireman from Montana. He was the wholesome type although when I leaned into his arm in the dining room to whisper the lunch menu, he grabbed my bony butt and said, "Haven't felt one of those since nineteen -seventy when my wife died."

"Feels good?" I asked.

"Yes," said Tom and he said, "It was funny. Eleanor, my wife worked as a secretary for thirty years and her ass never spread. It got smaller. What did you do for a living?"

"That is unusual," I said. "I was a wife and mother."

"Nice profession," said Tom. "I always wanted to be a mother, give birth. I never told anyone. What was it like, Leah?"

"Not all it is cracked up to be."

Tom shook his head like he knew. That was that. He never brought it up again. He was busy sleeping.

I was a wife and mother. I have a daughter who lives up North. Her name is Jane. She never visits me here in the assisted living or anywhere in the state of Florida where I have lived for twenty years. She says she is busy with her career and was told by the doctor not travel to a different time zone. Something about her ear drums, her allergies, and her boyfriend who was scared of flying. "I would come see you mother if Jake would come with me. He hates when I leave him alone, and you know a good man is hard to find."

I missed not seeing her. She is right that a good man is hard to find and that Jake is not a good one. If he was a fish he would be a small underdeveloped one with dark hard scales, and I would toss him back in the water without a thought. I used to fish. I went up in the mountains and fished my heart out. I could have watched soap operas. Instead I put on my rubber boots and took my rod like God, you know his rod and staff, and went fly-fishing. I went with Celia O'Neil. We both hated our husbands. They didn't mind us leaving them on weekends. They both had girlfriends. Lovely young things with big butts. I think my husband was boinking my hairdresser. I never tipped her after I suspected this. She never gave me the hairdresser's not-enough-of-a-tip angry eye. Things balance out. Reap and sow.

I told Jane about visiting me. Leave the scrawny bastard Jake home. Let him correct his math papers for his students. He teaches college math to kids who have no clue how to add and subtract. Not one thought in his numerical-minded head that had meaning. Bye, Jake. I longed to say that to him. I wanted Jane to stop wasting the time with men. They never did me any good. Choose a man or your mother I told Jane. She didn't even respond.

It has been a long time since my daughter visited. I visited her once when she lived in Maine. I had to. Otherwise I would have missed her thirtieth birthday. There is a tradition in my family when a woman turns thirty, we have a party and look at everything that will eventually decay. Her smile, her hair, her body. The long legs that are the hallmark of Stoenhem women. I went to visit her. I used my husband's frequent flyer miles. He didn't come. This was a woman thing. My three sisters who are all gone now in the river of debris met me there. They flew in from the west and the near east.

Jane lived in a broken down colonial with some scrawny guy named Saul who wouldn't eat cheese. He said his doctor told him not to. I would have fed that shmuck cheese, a whole case of cheddar cheese on cheezette crackers. The men my daughter picks are small and compact with large strange brains. They mostly work at universities teaching freshman things like how to pay their Visa cards and call home when they get arrested for dealing marijuana. She never went for meat and potato men. Muscles frightened her.

My plain Jane is an environmentalist, and works for a save the whales or dolphin foundation. It is not important to me. She has forgotten about save your mother. That is important. I don't need saving. I might soon. It is hard to be old. An old sea-lion on a beach has little chance of ever finding a home. I hear there are no animal shelters for marine life.

Until I found this place, I was living alone going to the emergency room weekly. I thought every twitch and ache would kill me. Finally my neighbors told me they couldn't stand me anymore. They told this to me via the police who visited me and told me I was too old a woman and obviously too considerate a woman to keep asking my neighbors for rides to the emergency room at one in the morning. Why don't you find a nice assisted living facility to live in? Where are your children? Don't they know how you are?

I have no children I told Patrolman Snider. He helped me. Patrolman Snider got the information, and the rest is history. Jane paid him. She couldn't visit me, the allergies and all.

I have always been self sufficient and rational. I was when the U-Haul took all the mementos of fifty years of marriage away including my fishing pole, and I was self sufficient and rational even when I knew my baby boy died in childbirth. He didn't die. He grew up to be my companion for years. I was so drugged at his birth I believed he died. I was chained. The pain was intense, and my husband was not allowed to breath with me like husbands can nowadays. The way people come into the world is not smooth. They yanked Joseph out with forceps like he was a pot roast, and his head had a crown. He was dough like moulded by the doctor's hands. There always was the remnant of a point on his crown. I saw it even if no one else did.

Yesterday I received a letter from my daughter about her trip to the gynaecologist. She has adenomyosis. Her womb is in a perpetual state of enlargement; empty but warm and waiting. I didn't want to hear about it but she went on and on.

I don't feel sorry for her. Maybe she will finally visit me if it is so bad she is going to die. I wouldn't wish anyone to die from barrenness. It does happen all the time. The worst thing that has happened to me or hasn't happened is I have no grand children. I have nothing to brag about but my bony ass. "That ass is something," I recall the fireman said. "Most butts here are so big you could get crushed if the lady sat on you. But yours is sweet."

Tom was a thin man who loved small fleshless women. They were easier to carry down a three-story ladder in a fire. Experience shapes us all.

Joseph was a fireman. He died twenty years ago; went into a burning building and never came out. The gas explosion killed two little girls and him. Two tiny angels sleeping in their beds. The gas company was investigated, and it was discovered they had not fixed a corroded pipe. No big deal a spokesman said. We will fix it now. And their parents all long faced and forlorn wept.

Jane's diary

September 1 2003

I am a precise woman. I count the fringes on the Persian rug in front of my desk. I count them one, two, three. They must be even and straight. I count the paper clips, the stamps and lock the desk drawers. I count the onions in the vegetable bin in the refrigerator. I count the words I hear from the media news reporters, the words my mother doesn't say, the foetuses inside me drowning. I am linear but I can draw my feelings in this diary. I can draw them straight without a metal ruler.

September 2

Most women wouldn't write about the relief they feel when because of circumstances beyond their control like a natural disaster, their appointment with Mr. Ob or Ms. Ob Gyn is cancelled. It's too personal. My mother was one of those women. Never talked about women's fluids or lack of them; never talked about male doctors going places no one but a husband should go. She only talked about fishing and my dead brother and recently an old man who liked her ass.

If you can talk about the pain, fear, and humiliation of trips to the dentist and podiatrist, why spare the Ob Gyn? They and their bag of birth control pills and other tricks are not sacred. I have yet to meet a hundred women who say 'I love to get on those stirrups and ride, ride, ride into the arms of hormones and surgeons who are too eager to use their invasive methods to curb, destroy or alter the female reproductive system.'

Now I realize these doctors of the nether regions do perform good. Without them many women could bleed to death or commit murder in the name of PMS. But like everything in our society we the people are contributing to anything we don't like by our lack of protest.

I say there are too many women out there who would rather have their reproductive organs removed than eat soybeans. Those phytoestrogens in soybeans do wonders. My mother would not eat soybeans for many years. She was one of the lucky ones. No reproductive organ was touched. She does drink soymilk now that she is lactose intolerant at eighty. My mother has remorse about her months of hormone ingestion. Just a few months where she had her period again at eighty. She wished she had taken them longer. My mother forgot the joy of the flow.

For those of you who have been inundated with hormones, don't cry to your doctor when your hormone replacement pills cause you disease or side effects after you agreed to believe in the wonders of drugs and modern medicine that after all is very modern. How long has it been around? Maybe a hundred years. A hundred years in the scheme of evolution is a brief and quick sneeze.

There are some medicine people who say we do the best we can with what we have. That is all we can do. We have no foresight and hindsight. Our sight is in our pocket books and in the HMOs. Our lack of sight could cause global warming; make breathing harder for our children; make drinking water a thing of the past. Yet, still we say we are doing the best we can.

Americans pay a lot for the health care they get and yet we are an unhealthy nation where asthma in children is on the rise, cancer is as quantifiable as the stars in all the galaxies. We advertise drugs on television. Our children are frequently driven to premature death by alcohol and teenage pregnancy is on the rise. With so many competent doctors, why is our nation getting sicker, more drug dependent and the children dying from neglect, illiteracy and disease?

I cannot blame the medical community, but I can say the doctor's oath is to do no harm. Someday we will look back on our culture, on our medical practices and see our savagery. We will wonder how we could think we are civilized, scientific, progressive. But it is all we have removing women's body parts, denying children nutrition and love, grouping the old into towers where they are alone and stuck on the twentieth floor not able to reach the elevator with their wheel chairs and walkers and oxygen tanks and their sadness.

September 3

I am getting old. My mother doesn't have to tell me. She does anyways. My mother has a theory that as you age you lose water and dehydrate. It is God's plan to have us dry out in the sun and then like a dandelion be blown away, dispersed in one sweep of the winds of death. Before this drying takes place, before it is final, we rebel and grow things, in a final attempt to shower our will on earth. We grow tumors and cysts. We grow brown spots and bulges in our torsos from sitting and drifting into filed dreams. If we are lucky like my mother we have a bony ass and someone around who appreciates it. After our last attempt at growing we start to lose things, our hair thins. We visit the dentist more often to fix our dentures, now the trend is to keep our teeth. He keeps his teeth who has the best dental insurance. The guys with spaces in their smiles are poor. We lose our walk, our memory, and then in that one burst the wind comes and tosses us away like tumbleweed. When this happens I want you to know that I kept myself together when I had a chance. I said no to the Ob Gyn who wanted to take my uterus out for no real good reason except that it was medicine's way in the twentieth century. I want to know that I was able to use my thoughts to create happiness and not to be dependent on a pill. When the winds of death pick me up I know that I will say thank you for this life. I am whole and unscarred by the thinking of doctors and lawyers and cable executives who see me as another TV viewer. When the winds come I will say to them I tried to be a human being, to feel love, happiness, pain, and joy in a world where pain was not allowed and love was sex and warm alcohol.

My mother is all dried out and doesn't care. She used to care but today she is waiting for the end, I think with only her mind intact and wandering. How unlike her I am. I am young and holding, and my mind is often in pieces. I crumble thinking about the meaning of hormones.

September 4

Last year the doctor told me to take oestrogen. This year after the bad press on Premarin he said, "My dear, you wouldn't want to take that stuff. It could kill you." I am trying to be clear. There are no crystal balls in the doctor's office or on TV news. My mother found her clarity watching the fishes live and die.

October 5

My mother keeps calling me from Florida telling me about this man who has pinched her ass three times in the last week. She told me she hasn't complained to anyone on staff since it make her happy to still think she has it. I have never had it. I guess that is why my womb is blowing up. It aches from each moment's disappointment. Here comes the egg and still no sperm. Did I know my boyfriends both had low sperm counts? I didn't. It would have been rude to ask.

Jake is in the study playing computer solitaire. He tells me it relaxes him. He needs to relax since the college is deciding this week if he will get tenure. I don't care if the bastard gets tenure. I am leaving him. I need to find a man with more sperm and soon. I am forty and I hear that grim reaper clock. Besides I need a man who will visit my mother in Florida before she dies.

November 10

How do I feel about my soft spongy womb unfit for human habitation? I am not sure. Jake has left and now I am taking aerobic classes to feel like a warrior goddess. I must transform my womb into a place where an embryo would be proud to live, not hurry in or out, but dwell for the right amount of time. You know the buns in the oven thing. They have to cook.

December 3

My mother wants me to visit her for Christmas. We can take the lights tour and see the Christmas decorations in the Florida snow for two hours, and you won't have to drive. I am tempted. There is no Jake to keep me here in the cold. The glaze of ice on my driveway will be thick soon.

December 10

I am going to Florida. Nothing can keep me away. I am taking my womb with my aerobic tapes and me. I will forget about reproduction and oestrogen and why I never got into fly-fishing.

December 24

Daughter Meets Mother

"And where are his testicles?" mother asked.

"Why in his shirt sleeve, where else would they be? I need to have a child. Hurry roll them up."

"It won't work that way. It is not how it is done. Hasn't anyone told you creation is a process that can't be changed?"

"Who are you?" I asked.

She turned around, and I saw her bony ass. "Mother what the heck is going on? The Birds and the Bees, you told me the story."

"Sometimes darling, mothers lie."

End of dream

***

Mother Meets Daughter

Jane came to visit me in December. She looks fine to me in her black polyester pants, silk blouse, hoop earrings, jean jacket. She hid her enlarged womb well. No one in the dining room noticed. "What a pretty daughter you have," they said. The ninety-year-old man who had been eyeing me all month disagreed. "She's not as pretty as you, Leah." I am glad Jane didn't hear him. I think she has no confidence in being a woman. I want to help her but she has ideas of her own.

I told her get rid of the black pants, get tight stretch ones and, Jane, get a shirt with buttons and unbutton the first two, and Jane go exercise and make your ass skinnier, and Jane stand up straight. I told her to take oestrogen and wear rouge. There is still time for her to flow. It is different now. I want her to bloom. I know about time and breasts. I am cooked like boiled potatoes. I accept this. Jane's skin is wrinkly. I told her I took oestrogen and hadn't dried up completely like she seemed to be.

"You once had such blonde hair and were so pretty."

"I was four years old then, Mother."

"It is a shame things have changed so much since then," Mother said.

Diary December 25

I have always been proud of my ass since I was a little girl. It is full and round and my father patted me on it and told me I was a beautiful child. My boyfriends liked my rear. I was padded. The only one who wanted everything reduced was my mother. She didn't want anything to grow. She suggested I get a smaller bra so I wouldn't look so big. She told me I was supposed to be the size of a large orange. No more. No less. Did I listen to her? Not exactly. It is all coming back to me why I haven't visited her in twenty years. It wasn't the boyfriend. It wasn't the time zone.

End of entry

***

I know why Jane hasn't come to visit. She is jealous of my way with men. I can see it. That young attendant here doesn't even look at her. He takes my arm and says, "Mrs. Stoenhem, can I help you walk to the dining room?"

Never says a thing to her or even smiles. He must be all of thirty, and you'd think he would love my Jane. There is something about her that men don't like. I don't even like her really. I know I am suppose to, she is my daughter. Something has always been off with Jane. Now I understand it is her womb. A woman who can't bear children is a woman no man can trust. There is an unnatural quality about her. I think the attendant knows this.

Diary December 30

They told me in the office my mother is getting forgetful She keeps asking the attendant to help her to dinner and says she is doing this for me. They think it is time to get her evaluated. It is hard for me to know if she is all right. I haven't seen her much these last years. She looks like an old lady to me but her mind seems clear. I know that her critical faculty is working overtime. It is time for me to go back North.

End of entry

***

"Jane, you didn't bring my grandchildren with you. I wanted to see the little one. Isn't Saul his name? Oh, how I love little Saul. I remember when he was born. They tied your arms. Remember, you thought he was dead. But he lived. Saul Stoenhem the second. I miss my grand baby. Bring him next time when you come with Saul Senior. How I love him."

"Yes, Mother I will bring baby Saul. Anything else you want, Mother?"

"For you to wear you hair short. Stop taking those vitamins."

"Yes, Mother, anything."

"Stop taking those vitamins, they will not help you to conceive. You need to find a fireman or fisherman; someone with reproductive strength. Are you listening, Jane? The pants, the makeup, the large man with the large organ. I know size is everything. I am shrinking."

"Got it, Mother."

"Write it down. Here is a chalkboard. Write it."

"Okay, Mother. Anything else?"

"When you see your brother, tell him to call."

Alone Up North February 2005

I got a call from the assisted living. Mother passed away. They found her in bed with a chalkboard. The nurse told me the words, 'I love fishing' were written in green chalk in large letters and underneath in red chalk it read, 'Tell my daughter to buy a fishing pole and go to the mountains. Tell her to take my grandchildren. They will all have a good time. It is all on me. There is money under my bed and a picture of Jane when she was four.'

© Elizabeth P. Glixman
Reproduced with permission

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