Trial & Error
Jamie Nelson says our mothers are so different. Smugly says
that his mother was very intelligent.
And accomplished.
She’s dead and it seems rude to question him. Or punch him
in the face. So, what does that make mine,
I want to ask him.
It’s like he knows the last page is where my mother always
starts, flipping backwards through magazines/books/
Safeway flyers.
I don’t tell him she pores over words, unseeing, looking for
pictures because pictures she can understand. Holding the book
upside down,
licking her finger and turning the pages so carefully.
I don’t tell him she uses the telephone book to weigh down
the mass
that will become paneer. I don’t tell him she rips pages from the Sears
catalogue to line the kitchen cupboard where she keeps the
mustard oil
and ghee. I want to tell him that she’s learned things big things and
small things so many things by tracing them with her fingers, by
silently watching,
by committing them to memory. Committing everything to memory
not understanding that someday that will fail. She learned to cook by
trial and error.
She learned to sew by trial and error. She learned how to live in a new
country thousands of miles away by trial and error. She skims
people’s faces
and knows where the quarter goes into the shopping cart and looks
hard at the price tags for produce, so many tags, an endless
matching game.
She can’t read or write or drive but she knows where she’s going and
where she’s come from because she memorizes lamp posts and
bus stops
and corner stores and church steeples. She puts an X on the line
and it wobbles off the page because she never learned how
to hold a pen
or a pencil or a crayon. She’s proud of her X. A letter to replace her inky
thumbprint. She was the gendered outsider, chewing on bricks
outside the school walls.
Now, a whole letter is hers.