Dancing was one of Mom’s greatest joys, and she could fall into the rhythm of any song, her limbs moving with the graceful ease of a trusting swimmer. Her friends still talk about it to this day: how she just lost herself on the dance floor, and carried them along with her.
Even in the car, she liked to move, wiggling her torso in something she called “car dancing” while she sang along. She often quizzed me, challenging me to identify a band or song title before the chorus came in. She’d belt out the words, loud and a bit out of tune, while I mumbled, self-conscious and shy. She’d elbow me gently: “Cutie, sing!”
Once, in a moment of childish, ten-year-old bald honesty, I looked at her thighs, smushing over the driver’s seat, half-covered in shorts, and pointed out how big they were compared with the rest of her. She got very serious and, in an edgy, no-nonsense tone I’d never heard before, said: “I’ll have you know that these thighs are what many men love best.”
Which led to a similar moment: one day in fifth grade, I wore hot pink high heels to school. I remember her mischievous smile when we got them—they were steeply on sale, a fun, weird splurge. I wore them with leggings and a long, hot pink crocheted sweater, and even though I was in my fat phase, I felt fantastic. While I was standing out in front of the school on the ice, waiting for the doors to open that morning, an older girl ridiculed my shoes and for once, for just once, the teasing didn’t bother me. I told her she was jealous. I told her I looked fabulous. And I believed it, staring down this boring little bitch in her snow boots.
Once, a boyfriend left Mom suddenly, on the Fourth of July. He woke up at our place, went home to pick up some things before meeting her at a friend’s barbecue, and never showed up. A couple of weeks later, we drove to his house. I sat in the car while she went inside. After about half an hour, she returned, throwing herself into the seat, her right hand wrapped in a paper towel. It had little flowers printed on it and blood was soaking through, a dark, fast-spreading bloom. Many years later, I learned that she had slammed her fist into a window in a rage and broken through. But if I saw her explode that day, I don’t remember. Instead I remember her mouth in a taut line, and her left hand palm-flat on the steering wheel, carving a smooth arc as she backed us up the steep driveway and onto the road in one perfect, sweeping motion.
When she made the bed with newly clean sheets, she sprinkled baby powder between them. Under the covers, it was soft and crisp and dry and cool. She tucked the comforter an inch or two under the pillows before smoothing it up over them. She believed in bedskirts.
She had the beginnings of carpal tunnel. She had terrible migraines. Because of these, she eventually had to give up chewing gum. And then caffeine.
I’ve had one migraine in my life, when I was eleven, and even though she darkened the house and turned down the stereo, I’m convinced she didn’t believe me, that she thought I was faking, replicating her symptoms for attention. I wasn’t; I remember the pain vividly and terribly—and, worse, that it had started with fear. I’d been reading and suddenly the words didn’t make sense to me, became nothing more than black marks I couldn’t decipher. I was afraid they would stay that way forever.
In a town where no one did, she locked every single door at night. She checked and double-checked, flipping the brass bolts in and out. If it was hot out, she would leave a few windows cracked open. But it made her a little nervous.
She ate pickled green pepperoncini by the jar, sitting on the couch and pulling them out by their shriveled stems. She loved ice cream, could eat a pint in one sitting.
When kids at school called me Heifer, she told me to ignore them, as though this were possible.
Once, in sixth grade, two friends and I—all of us studious, generally well-behaved kids—got caught writing mean notes about our pregnant teacher, Ms. Shane, scribbling back and forth on a big, unlined sheet of paper. We were forced to take a photocopy of the note home and have it signed by our parents so they could see what we’d done. This was the most perfect, most terrifying punishment: I couldn’t stand it when my mother was disappointed in me.
When I showed her the note, crying already as I handed it over, she took a few moments to read it, and then said, simply, “Don’t get caught next time.” This was completely out of character, a gracious, one-off reprieve.
When some punk teenagers smashed the huge pumpkin we carved one Halloween, she wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper to shame them. Another time, she and her boyfriend passed a struck deer on the side of the road, still alive. She insisted they circle back, haul it into the bed of his pickup, and take it to a wildlife rescue farm. She appeared in the paper again for this kindness.
In her romantic selections, she could have done better, and she could have done worse. She was often imperfect in her own love, but that didn’t lead to her death.
Because of her, I used to try to save the tiny moles our cat chased in the yard.
Because of her, I sing along to the radio, in my terrible voice, and I drive with the windows down, the air whipping across my arms.
Because of her, I will always believe love is possible.
Her name was Crystal. She cast light.
* * *
Two days before my mother died, the sun hid behind the moon. For years, I would remember the eclipse as having occurred weeks before, a beautiful event that I—a precocious, nerdy twelve-year-old—had anticipated with great happiness. My memory wrapped it in weeks of empty time that had not existed, trying to keep it untainted, pristine.
It was a Tuesday of bright sunshine. I remember standing on the school lawn with my classmates, cardboard pinhole viewers held up to a greeting-card sky—solid blue, accents of puffy cloud. Everyone was giggling and jostling; we couldn’t see the moon approaching. But when the songbirds went silent and the disk of the moon appeared, not like a hole but like a solid piece of construction paper sliding across the surface of our viewers, everyone quieted down. As the edge of the thing bit into the sun, we gasped. I stood transfixed as it slid into place, much faster than I’d expected, and willed it to stop. If it had, we could have stayed right there in that perfect moment indefinitely, safe on the border of night and day, childhood and adolescence, school and home.