I stretch out my legs on the sand. I can see her almost approach me. She is wearing a white beach jacket and a straw hat with a veil over it. In sunglasses and standing proud, her breasts sprout. No one would ever have suspected the loss of one or the other. She is smiling, and her mouth says, “I am happy in the land of palm trees, coconuts, and certainly, I don’t have to search for any monkeys because I was never one.”

She is seeing the wild big trees move and wants to move with them, to be up that high just once and be free, to take off her false pads from one breast, to shake all over and feel like a pelican swooping and diving for fish. She is happy to be with him—my father, and her man who she adores because he adores her and because they like to adore the warm sea breezes. We, their children, are safe up north and for two weeks she can be a pelican instead of a nesting robin. I am eleven years old.

My mother can glide in the air before the deep-sea fishing boats come in and wait for the parts of the catch of the day to be hers. She is part bird, part fish, and she’ll never have to be tied to a branch waiting for eggs to crack to make breakfast for us. She is happy in her independence. She doesn’t know that she is heading for her final independence.

In love with life, my mother loves to simply see the morning. Who is happiest to behold the long stretch of the horizon and coast? Is it her then or is it me now?

We had all believed that my mother would come back like the last time and the time before. I was looking forward to heaving the summer with her, to go to the beach together, even though she feared the water. She loved walking by the shore, and I keep seeing her white thighs and sunburnt legs from years of wearing Bermuda shorts.

I would be graduating from junior high school in June. Two weeks before graduation, I picked up the telephone and overheard my dad talking to my uncle. All he said was, ‘it could happen any day. It doesn’t look good.’ Then I heard his voice crack. I slammed down the phone, opened up my closet in a rage and began throwing my shoes at the glass windows until some of the panes broke. Then I tugged my own dresser in front of the door and began piling chairs and other things up high to prevent anyone from entering the room.

First, there was a little knock on the door and then yelling from my father, “Ada come up here and help me. Neil, Gloria, where are you?” Ada came up and said through the door, “Don’t you be foolish, child. What are you trying to do? You come out here this second. This family’s through enough without you scarin’ your poor daddy half to death.”

I am collecting seashells by the Gulf Stream, and it’s true what they say about the Gulf Stream breezes. I find small holes that one can use in the seashells so one can wear them as a necklace on a black shirt and see pink, see pink. I see pink when I behold the sand, sea, and feel the salted air breeze deep within my nostrils. When the willow trees shake wild their long fingers—fifty, no a hundred piano fingers wave to the ground. I dance wild in my mind. I stand by the willows and watch the fingers turn to hair, her hair – turn to long space-filled empty air on thin flags. I am wishing for a long deep row of weeping willows to encase the Gulf coast so I can walk between each tree, take a dip in the swaying waves, or float, and then walk around each tree while saying a prayer for her, my mother, who is dead before I swim and dance in swirls around the remaining cold speaking to God.

In this shiver, and the hot humid air, I remember her. I pray to God to look after her and make sure she is comfortable in heaven.

Daddy was yelling, ‘Move the furniture but don’t hurt yourself, don’t hurt yourself, honey. Oh, Daddy, I had thought how much more could I be hurt? Finally, my father climbed up a ladder and reasoned with me through the broken glass panes to move the furniture and open the door. When he finally came into my bedroom, his hands were slightly scratched from the ragged glass edges.

“Honey, Honey,” he shook my shoulders.

“What, What,” I said, “I can’t hear you, speak louder.”

“Honey,” he screamed.

“Stop yelling in my ear,” I said and walked out the room.

A week later on the morning of the day of my junior high school graduation, I was awakened at 4:30 am to see my sister, brother, father, and Ada all seated on my sister’s bed, which was directly across from mine, and they were all crying.

“Mother is dead,” my father said.
The Gulf Stream breezes are forceful now. I can still see her in front of our little Cape Cod house in Bellerose, Queens watering the weeping willow tree with a long green hose. When I sneak up and bend the middle of it, it stops and flows, and my mother has to look at me. She had been looking out to the horizon in our backyard.

Feeling the autumn chillness in her blouse, she says, “Stop that.”

I am six years old. She thinks to yell at me, and thinks that I will be playing in front of the house forever, that there is plenty of time, my being with her, and we’ll be together always.”

She is like the weeping willow bending and not having a reason to cry. She is looking out somewhere beyond me which I can’t see. I finally let go of the hose and nestle up to her, under her arm. She has not had her operation. She has both her breasts.

The cars were parked for miles to the entrance to Mount Hebron Cemetery. I was in the car sweating and still remembering.

“Go, go”, my Aunt led me by the hand, “take a last look at her.”

“I don’t want to,” my 12-year-old voice pleaded, and my father was nowhere to be found.

“Go, you’ll be sorry afterwards if you don’t look.”

I saw her. She was an angel of stars trapped in a coffin. Oh, mother, open your eyes and see me, I thought.

Soon afterwards the Rabbi gave speeches on my mother’s behalf. #

“Let us all remember Helen Epstein. She was the flower of the neighborhood, a musician, a caring piano teacher, a giver to the sick, an intellectual,” his voice cracked. True, she only lived to 39 years old, but one cannot measure the quality of life in years.
That night in our house my Grandmother could not contain herself. She berated my dad.

“Why didn’t you tell me; why did you let my daughter call me every day from the hospital payphone and pretend she was on the golf course. What the hell is this? I should have been told, I’m her mother.”

The breeze draws me into her waters. It is cool now, but the warm water takes me along in the quiet current. I see us. We are in her black Chevy convertible with the top down. It is summer, and the sun beats heavily on our heads. I am nine years old. We are going to the dressmaker with five years worth of clothes—hers and mine. We arrive, walk across a soaked lawn, and I ring the doorbell to Elsie, the dressmakers, with my mouth.

Elsie measures us with her tape measure. I am happy. I am 1/8 the size of my mother, but I am happy to be a little her.

Mary, a Yugoslavian refugee replaced Ada. Ada could not deal with my mother’s death. The food in the house quickly changed from fried chicken-to-chicken paprikash and I wondered if I would ever taste roast chicken or baked white fish again. Mary spoke with her tongue always extending out from her teeth. It was a wet speech full of saliva. One day I took the late bus home from school, and I forgot my key so I had to ring the doorbell. I could hear her shrill voice through the heavy oak door, “you kids must have driven your mother crazy.”

When I got inside I said, “What, what did you say?”

She said, “You can’t even remember your own key, your clothes are a wreck, you never put a dish in the sink, your brother leaves ice-cream bowls under his bed, your sister is out with boys drinking it up, and your father comes home at midnight. You kids, you’re evil. You did it, you caused your mother’s death.”

“Hell,” I shrieked. I was about to go at her when I heard the motor of dad’s car. I ran to feel the comfort of the wall near the stairs leading to our bedrooms. Dad found me sobbing into the wall.

“What is it?” he asked.

“She’s a sorceress, a witch,” I said.

“Tell me what happened,” he repeated.

“She said, we kids are evil, and we caused mommy’s death.”

Daddy began hollering that Tito wasn’t good enough for her.

“Get your bags,” he moaned.

“But Mr. Kaplan, let me explain.”

“Shut up, shut up and get your things before I take you to the train without them and burn them. You wicked woman, you’re a harbinger of dread and evil.”

“What’s a harbinger?” she smiled, “I made stuffed cabbage tonight.”

She left with her red wool coat half hanging off one arm and her gray cardboard suitcase stuffed and not properly closed.

My little brother came in and saw me crying, and asked me what was wrong.

“I’m tired, that’s all,” I told him, and enveloped him in my arms like never before.

I went to the window and prayed to God to please help me take care of my little brother.

The air is chilling my body. I wrap myself up in my big white terry cloth robe. I begin walking back to the hotel room. I can still hear her playing the piano downstairs. I am 25 years old, and I will be getting married soon. I see her long piano fingers race over the keyboard as if she were a willow – not knowing her roots would be uplifted soon from the ground. I imagine myself as a monkey swinging off trees in Africa, and she is playing Claire de Lune in the night air. I do not know I will only have a few more months left with her. She plays the piano wildly and forceful in her flight over the keys as if she has a premonition of what is to come, and she will be joining the horizons, the seas, and the coasts.

I am trying to reach one branch of one tree and then another branch with a fellow chimpanzee, but the choppy clanging of the music makes me lose my balance, even in my daydream. I fall to a lower height. She is kissing the keys with her light fingers; I am hearing the music softer and softer as I climb higher and higher. I reach the top of the tree and can see all over the world, but I can no longer hear her.

-Thea Schiller

Thea Schiller, a New York poet and psychotherapist facilitates a poetry workshop at the Somers library in Somers, N.Y. and practices psychotherapy in CT. She holds a B.A. in creative writing from The City University of New York, and an MS in counseling from Western CT State University. Her poem, “Sarah” was the Orchard Poetry Prize winner in Furrow, University of Wisconsin. Recently, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her poems have appeared in The San Diego Annual Poetry Review 2017-2018, Edify Fiction, The Ravens Perch, 4th & Sycamore, Hevria, Lucent Dreaming and The Tenth Muse as well as many small literary journals in the past. When given the chance she follows her muse from Norway to Greece.