Wreckollection...

I don’t think of my mother much.  I have a few very vivid recollections of her that rise every now and then, but the look back from here is distant and nearly without emotion—which surprises me because she and I had a violent relationship.  She was an angry woman who held everything in and then took it out violently on something or someone she could beat. I understand better today about anger, frustration, and mental illness, so yesterday is clearer but absorbed better in soft focus, and forgotten or stored more easily in the place that no longer matters.

She sat me down once when I was 13 and told me that the world was likely coming to an end—those missiles in Cuba.  A nuclear war was imminent and tomorrow might not happen.  I saw the fear in her face, the desperation in her eyes searching mine—while mine broke from hers and flashed back and forth to a muted Little Joe and Hoss on Bonanza.  I was thirteen, death was still a theory, and for a few moments we were equals.  We were victims at the same time and we were lost together trying to imagine what “the end” meant.

When I came home from camp that same summer and told my mother about an older woman (in her late teens) who introduced me to sex, she listened and appeared mildly amused.  She raised her eyebrows as she shifted another gear on the Austin Healy Sprite and said, “That’s great.  It really wasn’t a conversation I was looking forward to, but let me give you some advice, Romeo:  Use your elbows and share the wet spot, and you’ll do just fine.”

I thanked her, pretending I knew what she meant.  We never talked about sex again.

Years later as a young adult I was in bed with a woman who pushed me over and exclaimed, “Hey, Raggio … share the wet spot!”  I sprung up and said, “That’s what my mother said!”  I was fitting the memory into my current moment when she too sprung up, put on her glasses, and asked, “Your mother?”  The bell from her Abnormal Psychology class went off but I was still too young to take advantage of the situation.  I’m sure I could have had “couch time” with her for months had I just known a bit more about Oedipus.  I explained the comment.  The short disappointed “oh” I received and her fatal sigh told me class was over, for good.  I was too normal …