December Trees

When I was younger, I lived in a candy room that I was always proud to invite my friends to. The furniture in the bedroom was all hard wood, stained a dark chocolate brown. My bureau had a large ornate mirror in the center of it, and my mother arranged a variety of pink knickknacks on its flat top. It had a little wooden chair whose dark chocolate back consisted of carved curliques and plush pink velvet, like the expensive raspberry creams my father bought my mother every year on their anniversary. I had a set of tarnished silver hairbrushes that came with a matching vanity, and I used to sit on that little chair, brushing my long black hair for hours on end. Sometimes my mother would come in and brush my hair for me, until it fell in a long black sheen down my back. Sometimes when she finished she’d braid it into one long, loose braid, or two tighter ones that hung down the front of my chest. I loved it when my mother took the time to do my hair that way, because it wasn’t often.

When I was 10 years old, I got the chicken pox in my candy room, and I lay in bed for a week with a fever that topped 100 degrees and left my fair skin flushed and clammy. My mother bought calamine lotion that came in a little green bottle, and each day gave me a cool bath before putting a tiny dot of pink lotion on each itchy bump I developed. For lunch that week as I stayed home from school, she always brought me soup in bed, a different kind each day, with dry crackers on the side. I inevitably spilled a bit of it on my pink and white bedspread, but I was too sick for her to get mad at. My little brothers would come in to gawk at my ailment, and my brother John, who was just learning to count, once came in with a pen to write a number next to each pink-smeared bump; my mother was not pleased with his counting game, however, and admonished us both that I might get ink poisoning. I had no idea what ink poisoning was, but always hated when my mother chided me, because she didn’t often do that either.

When I was 15, I came home from school to find my candy room dismantled. My mother stood disheveled beside my bed, pulling apart my sheets and blankets, throwing them in a heap on the floor. When I asked what she was doing, she glanced over at me with a crazed look in her eyes, telling me that the room was too childish now that I was an adult. I didn’t at all feel like an adult. I was a sophomore that year, and had a steady boyfriend named Jack whom I did nothing more with than peck on the cheek before my classes started, and who walked me home on Friday afternoons while holding my hand. I had the body of a woman, but was still very much a little girl who treasured her candy room with its tarnished vanity and memories of my mother brushing my hair. My mother, I realized with a start as she collected my treasures from my desk and threw them into a large black garbage bag, had herself been 15 when the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, her hometown.

I remember pleading with my mother to let me keep my vanity and my hairbrushes. I didn’t understand why she was simply disposing of the music box I’d been given by my paternal grandfather when I was born. It still worked perfectly, and played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” when you wound it. I’d spent hours winding its thin little handle and singing the words to the song along to the stilted melody the music box produced. I watched as she gathered my sheets and blankets into a wadded heap, and picked them up all at once. They seemed to engulf her tiny frame as she waddled over to the balcony of the staircase and threw my bedding over the banister and onto the floor of our living room, where they landed with a rush of air and a swirl of dust.

“Come on, Debbie. We’re going to the store to buy you some new bedding,” she said to me as she descended our spiral staircase, her hair looking frazzled and slightly damp with the exertion it took to dismantle the room I’d kept neatly organized for 15 years. I just stared at her. I went back to my room, sat in my velvet candy chair, and stared at my face in the mirror, imagining what it must have been like for her, with a face as old as mine, facing the tragedies she’d seen. I couldn’t imagine it, and I couldn’t forgive her for what I imagined was her effort to make me understand the pain she’d gone through.

When my son Julian got the chicken pox from a little girl who attended his 5th birthday party, I’d suddenly recalled my own bout with the illness, a period I’d completely forgotten. Much about raising Julian had reminded me of my childhood, but I’d just as quickly pushed most of those memories away. I bought calamine lotion for Julian the same way my mother had for me, and then he and I spent hours numbering his pox with non-toxic markers, laughing and turning those that were close together into tiny funny faces. When he was 7, Julian awoke in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, screaming incoherently. When I got to him, he was sitting upright in his bed, babbling to me about the monsters he’d seen in his dream. His breath came in quick, ragged gasps and his words were strangled as he tried to convey the horror of his nightmare to me.

“They were trying to get you, Mommy,” he’d said, and then hiccupped. “They wanted to get Daddy too, and I couldn’t save you! I couldn’t! They were going to get you, they were chasing you!” He sat there gasping as tears rolled down his cheeks. I remembered hysteria then, and marveled that I’d ever been able to forget it in the first place. My mother had often had similar dreams, although not about monsters. The hysteria, however, was identical.

My mother married late, or at least comparatively late for her generation. She’d moved with her sister and brother to the United States when she was 20, all of them determined to learn the language and get good jobs. My mother was a secretary for a while, and then became a teacher. Prejudice persisted in the United States against those of Japanese heritage, and she began to research Hawaii, deciding that maybe the move there would make her feel closer to home. She relocated to Maui and met my father, who was a fellow teacher. I was born in Maui, and then my mother and father moved to Nebraska, where her siblings had settled. She said she’d wanted me to have aunts and uncles and a sense of roots that she didn’t think Hawaii could afford me. I always wondered how she could leave Hawaii’s sun-drenched beaches for Nebraska’s stark landscape and biting winters, but she never complained. I surmised later that she wasn’t happy there after all, and wasn’t worried about me so much as she just wanted a change, and to be near people who could support her if she faltered.

My mother faltered often. She went through spells of what she called “melancholy.” I didn’t know what melancholy meant until I was in high school, and when I finally understood what my mother had meant when she’d said all those years that she was having a “melancholy spell,” I could almost feel my heart physically wrench in my chest. When my mother was having one of her spells, I became responsible for making dinners, packing lunches, cleaning, and doing the laundry. My mother stopped working when my brothers and I were born, and my father was forced to work two jobs. By day, he was Mr. Irogama, beloved teacher at Eisenhower Elementary School, and by night he was Yamoto, serving cold bottles of beer, and drinks on the rocks, to the neighborhood fathers at McGinley’s bar. He always came home spelling of whiskey, his drink of choice, and stale cigarette smoke.

I learned early how to manage a household. When one of my little brothers got a good grade on a test or scraped his knee and needed hydrogen peroxide and a bandage, he came to me. My mother didn’t see the daily hassles of our family, only the serious problems and celebrations. She spent most of every day in bed, but she was there for every birthday as we blew out candles and took pictures. She was there when my father couldn’t pay the electric bill and we didn’t have electricity for four days, helping us to use matches to light candles. She was there when John broke his leg climbing the maple tree in the backyard, and drove us to the emergency room. She stayed in the waiting room while I went with my brother to have his leg set and plastered into a cast. I taught him later how to use his crutches. They were loaner crutches and my mother drove them back to the hospital when John got his cast off.

The younger I was, the more I accepted her behavior. The older I got, the more it puzzled and angered me. My friends’ mothers were taking them shopping for bell bottoms and new cars on their 16th birthdays. My mother was admonishing me that I wasn’t growing up quickly enough. She told me repeatedly that I didn’t know what true suffering was, and that I should be grateful that my father provided for me. At 16, she often reminded me, she was working in a suburb of Hiroshima, making barely enough to feed herself, while simultaneously caring for her younger siblings. I found it ironic that she mentioned this: she hadn’t worked since the day I was born, while I spent all my free time envying my friends for their “normal” mothers, and making sure my brothers stayed out of trouble.

When Julian had his nightmare about family-chasing monsters, I suddenly remembered the many nights I’d stayed awake, just to watch my mother sleep and count the rises and falls of her thin chest. When she awoke screaming, my father was always miles away, tending bar in the center of town. I feared that my brothers would hear our mother’s screams, and did everything in my power to protect them from that side of her. I’d rush to her room to find her sitting wild-eyed in the center of my parents’ queen-size bed, and I’d sit next to her and reach for her hand. At first, she’d always fight me. Most of the time she’d still be dreaming, and she’d speak of how my skin was melting, or ask what was wrong with my eyes. Sometimes she thought I was her mother, and she’d inquire after her siblings, her father, or her old neighbors. When she snapped out of her wild phase, she’d sit there gulping for air like a fish out of water, her eyes wide and glassy. She’d use one hand to push her damp hair back from her face, and would rest the other hand on her neck, letting it slide down until it rested just above her breasts.

When I was 18, my mother had her last nightmare. I rushed in as usual, and she looked at me, horrified, and told me that I was badly burned. She wanted to know where her siblings where, and complained that something had fallen on her head and she thought it was bleeding. She began screaming that we had to leave before the fire got any closer, frantically pointing toward her bedroom windows as though they were themselves ablaze. The wild look faded slowly, as it always did, and when it was gone there was only a blank staring, as she realized I was not her mother, but her daughter.

“Oh, Debbie, honey. I’m so sorry. I can’t help these nightmares. I just…” She choked on the ending to her sentence.

“I just can’t do this anymore,” she said, and began to sob. She put her head in her hands in such a way that I was sure her head would roll off her neck if she took her palms away from her face. Sobs wracked her body. I pitied the woman sitting in front of me, who was in such obvious pain. Suddenly, however, I could not pity her. Anger leapt into my chest, hot and bright like the fire of my mother’s nightmares, and I felt adrenaline spurting into my veins, making my heart beat hard against my chest plate. This woman in front of me was just a woman, not my mother. She’d never been nurturing; she’d never been able to be nurturing. She’d stolen my childhood from me because she was too weak to keep herself together. She’d missed out on a real life because she couldn’t just accept things and move on. She’d ruined a lot of things for both of us, and for no reason other than that she was too selfish to think of anyone but herself, and of anything but the past.

“You know, Mom,” I said, “it happened. We all know it happened. Why can’t you let it go? Why can’t you just be fucking normal, and get out of bed once in a while to take care of your children? We didn’t ask you to bring us into this world, but you did it anyway and then decided that you didn’t care anymore. Do you think I like taking care of John and Alex like they’re my own sons? I’m 18. I don’t have any children. But I’m sure as hell taking care of yours, and have been for years! Do you think I like coming in here and having to comfort you, when you were never there to comfort any of us? Do you think it’s appropriate that you dream that I’m your mother? Do you? Do you? Fucking answer me, Mom!” I screamed.

I realized, when I finished my tirade, that I’d been screaming loudly. My younger brothers were standing in the hallway, peeking through the crack of the open door. I glared at them and ordered them to get back to their rooms and stay there. They fled, and I turned back to face my mother.

My mother just looked at me, her almond-shaped eyes dark and foreboding, glistening in the dim light that streamed in through windows from the streetlights. Her cheeks were flushed from the nightmare and sticky with tears. She stared at me for what seemed like forever, and then turned her head away slowly to stare out the window at the bare branches of the trees that lined our street. It was December, a few days before Christmas, and the wind gave a desolate howl as she slowly lowered herself back onto her pillow and turned her back on me.

I left her room then, and when I went in to apologize to her in the morning, she wasn’t lying in bed. I checked the bathroom and the room my brothers shared before I went downstairs to check the kitchen, the living room, my father’s study, and the downstairs bathroom. We had a wooden patio with a sliding door and I expected to see her sitting outside, maybe smoking a cigarette on a lawn chair, her breath coming in foggy puffs.

Instead, I saw her lying in the grass under the maple tree that John fell out of the time he broke his leg. My father’s hunting rifle was at her side, and her blood had pooled next to her and begun to run slightly toward the tree behind her. Even from my vantage point, I could see that her lips were blue and lifeless.
I sunk into the lawn chair next to me, and put my head in my hands the way I’d seen my mother do the night before. And then I screamed.