The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious : Lori Jakiela

 

My mother stood in the center of the driveway. She was decked out in garden gear – a lime green shorts set and running shoes, terry cloth sweatbands around her head and wrists. Her gray hair sprouted like a mushroom cloud over the top of the headband. She looked like a bad-tempered tennis player, the kind who smashed racquets and gave the finger to line judges at Wimbledon. My mother, however, was not the sort to give the finger. She thought giving the finger was vulgar. Instead, when she was unhappy, two scowl lines, like an equals sign, would be etched between her eyes. They were there now, finishing off their equation, sizing me up.

“Your butt,” she said, pointing like I was an orangutan at the zoo. “It’s huge.”

It could have been what I was wearing – an elasticized sundress and a pair of Keds. When it came to gardening wear, I thought it was practical. But still. I knew.

Over the past few days, something awful had happened. I was like a dried-up sponge someone tossed in water. I’d pouffed.

Up until now, being pregnant had meant that my face was splotchier and rounder than usual, but I was still recognizable as my old self. But since the pouffing, which made me likely to bump into walls and have trouble navigating rows in movie theaters, I avoided looking at myself from back or side views. Head on, things weren’t that bad. But in profile, I was beginning to look like Alfred Hitchcock. And from behind, well, I’ll let my mother tell it.

“I mean, look at you. You’re already a bus. If I’d ever been pregnant, I know one thing. I wouldn’t have left the house for nine months,” she said. “I would have been ashamed to show my face looking like that. 

My mother. A woman who still had the outfit she’d worn when she picked me up at the adoption agency back in 1964 – a cigarette-skinny pair of hot pink capri pants and a matching sleeveless turtleneck.

It had been two weeks since I’d sworn off seeing my mother. I was, I told myself, taking a break. I deserved a break. I was, after all, pregnant. I was 35, in love, and not married. My mother was not happy about this. Aside from the way I looked, there was the problem of appearances. I had not planned to be pregnant anymore than I’d planned to be living back in Pittsburgh, within proximity of both my mother and my past. I was, however, happy. Happier than I’d ever been. I was also terrified.

For my mother, though, things were simpler. She was furious.

“What will I tell people?” she said. “What will they think?”

“I’m almost middle-aged,” I said. “It’s not really a scandal.”

“Maybe where you’ve been living it’s not,” she said. “Everyone in New York is crazy. But around here, trust me. People talk. People say things.”

“And you care?” I said.

But I knew she cared. She cared very much. And even though the circumstances were different, we’d been having this conversation for years.

My mother has always been proper. Her hair has always been in perfect pin curls. Her shoes have always matched her purse. Still, she worried about two things: what people thought; and how I, her only daughter, was a reflection on her.

Maybe it had something to do with how she grew up, poor, during the Depression, her father paying for groceries with moonshine he brewed up in their bathtub. Or maybe it was because no one told her early on that she was beautiful and smart and good in the world. But whatever the cause, insecurity and fear – of embarrassment, of losing control -- have always been my mother’s prime emotions.

Take, for instance, the time I played a dog in a musical skit at Sugar Camp Day Camp in Pitcairn, Pennsylvania. This was 1970. I was six. The musical skit was the highlight of Parents Day at the camp, and a lot of people had come out to see it. My hair was long, perfect for pigtailed dog ears. The camp counselors taped a macramé tail to my shorts and painted a shiny black dog nose on my face. I thought I looked very smart. I barked. I romped on all fours. Then, in front of my fellow campers and their families, I ate a Milk Bone. It was green. It tasted like chalk and dirt.

When I padded over to my mother, tongue lolling out, Milk Bone on my breath, green crumbs in my hair, I expected a pat on the head. I expected my mother to laugh, or scratch behind my ears. Instead, she mouthed, “Get up.” Instead, in a voice so low only a dog could hear it, she said, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” she’d said when I told her I was pregnant. And it wasn’t long after that that I’d sworn off seeing her.

Every pregnancy magazine I picked up said the same things in bold print: Reduce Stress. Take it Easy. Take Time for You. And so I’d been avoiding my mother’s calls. This was hard to do since she called once a day, every day. She left messages. Her sentences were carefully punctuated with sighs and wheezing and what may or may not have been fake coughs. The messages added up to, “When I’m dead, you’ll be sorry you didn’t pick up this phone.”

The guilt finally got to me this particular morning when my mother, who did have legitimate heart problems and took fistfuls of pills, left a message saying she was off to work in her garden. We were in the middle of a Pittsburgh heat wave. The day’s high was going to be somewhere in the 90s with 100 percent humidity. My mother, who listened to weather reports like they were updates on the apocalypse, knew this. She also knew that, despite everything, I worried.

“I’ll try not to drop dead out there,” she said. “Okay then. Fine. Goodbye.” She said goodbye as if it were two words and each word was its own sentence. Good. Bye.

What could I do?

I drove the 20 miles from my apartment in the South Side to my mother’s house in Trafford. I’d spend the day hunched in her garden, looking from behind like one of those wooden lawn ornaments, the ones that seem to be gigantic polka-dotted fungi, but which, upon closer inspection, are actually fat women bent over, bottoms up, their slips showing.

When I got out of the car, I looked over my shoulder. I wiggled and checked my reflection in the car window. If my sundress had been yellow, I would definitely have qualified as the neighborhood short bus, but I pretended not to notice.

“I don’t know what you’re calling huge,” I said to my mother. “Everything seems fine. It’s good to see you, too.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” my mother said. “Lord help me.”

And then this: “Are you wearing a bra?”

It was, of course, about sex.

Even before I hit puberty, and long before I’d become pouffed and pregnant, my mother started to fixate on my body and how it was changing into something dangerous.

“You don’t want to send the wrong message,” she’d say. “You don’t want people to get ideas.”

And then she’d tape my nipples.

Not tape, exactly. She used Band-Aids.

“The spongy part goes over the top, the sticky part on the sides,” she’d say, strapping a nipple down like it had been scheduled for a lobotomy.

Like any good psych patient, my nipples resisted, and so my mother would have to use two Band-Aids, crossed one over the other, like an X. She did one nipple, then the other.

“That should do it,” she said, standing behind me in the mirror, hands on her hips. We both looked at my flat chest, with its two flesh-colored Xs.  It looked like the billboard for a porn movie.

“I don’t see the big deal,” I said.

“Oh, I see it all right,” my mother, herself an ironic double-D, said. “And if it weren’t for me, everyone else would see it, too.”

 I have always had overly large nipples, more like jumbo pencil erasers than actual body parts. They are solid and sturdy, the size and color of raspberries. They would serve me well when, after my son was born, they terrified a creepy woman from the La Leche League. She’d come into my hospital room and asked to see my breastfeeding technique. I pulled back my hospital gown and positioned my son in the La Leche-approved football hold – tucked tightly under one arm, head up. The woman, who looked as maternal as a flagpole and who seemed to think babies were, in fact, footballs, took one look and said, “Oh my god. Did he do that to you?”

“No,” I said, “I’m just made that way.”

This, for my mother, was the problem.

“I’d be ashamed to go out of the house looking like that if I were you,” my mother said the day I modeled a brand-new tube top. This was around 1978, and tube tops were very popular.

“What? Everyone wears these,” I said, and pointed at my top, a pink-and-white checked number, about the size of a picnic napkin. “Besides, you bought it for me.”

“I should have my head examined,” my mother said. “As for what everyone else is doing, if everyone jumped off the Westinghouse Bridge, would you jump, too?”

The George Westinghouse Memorial Bridge, 240 feet above the Turtle Creek Valley, spans the steel-and-concrete site of the former Westinghouse Electric Plant. Built in 1932, Westinghouse Bridge is, as every Pittsburgher knows, the bridge you take when you’re serious about killing yourself.

A memorial pylon on the northwest corner of the bridge reads: “In Usefulness to Mankind.”

“Useful like a heart attack,” my mother used to say.

My mother knew one thing. People do talk. They say things like “take the bridge.” They say, “might as well jump.” They say, “nothing ever changes.”

My mother reached out and adjusted the straps on my sundress. She stared at my chest, which, for the first time in my life, had sprouted cleavage. She stepped back and sighed.

“I hope,” she said, “you don’t go out in public like that.”

Then she handed me a pair of garden gloves, a bag of shredded pantyhose, and an armful of wooden stakes. The stakes were sharp and thick, the kind preferred by vampire slayers.

“Well,” she said, “we might as well get to work.”

 

Lori Jakiela is the author of a memoir, Miss New York Has Everything (Warner 2006), and a poetry collection, The Regulars (Liquid Paper Press 2001). Her essays and poems have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and anthologies in the U.S. and the U.K., including The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Chicago Tribune, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pittsburgh City Paper, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Her essay, "The Liberator," recently appeared in The New York Times (4/13/08). She lives in Trafford, Pa. -- the birthplace of the chocolate-covered pickle. Visit Lori at www.lorijakiela.com or www.myspace.com/lorijakiela.