Mother as Water-Damaged Book

~ Susanna Childress When the rains came late in October, angry as a muzzled dog, seven boxes of my books were ruined. Mother told me at Thanksgiving after I’d found Thoreau, Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates belly up on the washer, I was drying them out for you, she said, and a great feral weight slipped from her eyes, rolled helplessly like cobble into a stream, to her knuckles bending and scurrying over hundreds of marred pages. Without warning, the entire basement was covered in open books, Sappho propped on the blender box, Midnight’s Children like a tentative palm on the old VCR, Norton Anthologies and periodicals lined the 2x4 planks at the window. When I started to cry, my own fingers uncertain how to touch the Leaves of Grass I’d marked up in college, Dr. Marj Elder having lent 48 years to the green ink of my marginalia, my mother, also, began to cry. She led me upstairs, where she pulled from under her bed the most substantive volumes: Moby Dick, my autographed Gwendolyn Brooks, a thickly bound Great Gatsby, the golden-edged Pocket Sonnets, all of them halved and breathing, tended to by my mother’s cautious culpability. I was afraid, she said, I was waiting for the right time, she said. And then, there in my hands, I was turning the dampened, molding sheets of my mother, her bleak ubiety, unable to recover the ironed-flat flick of the chapter’s end, some delicate scrawl on papyrus.