I felt like there was an extra layer of skin on my mothers' family, there was a toughness and a seeming indifference to sadness and hurt that I couldn't fake. My feelings were hurt around them, they teased me and had what I thought was a meanness. My Grandpap snapped chicken's necks with his hands. I later read in a book that if you hesitated it hurt the chickens more, you had to be swift and sure in your actions, so there was no room for doubt. This was the way they were. I had so much doubt I must have looked to them like the headless chicken running around the cellar with blood spurting out of its neck..

One of my aunt's told me that the imprint on Veronica's Veil was made because the bleeding of Jesus' face released his doubts. It was those doubts that the face on the cloth was made of, once he handed over those doubts about what God wanted him to do it was easy, she said. I understood all this because my Aunt M. had given me a book about child saints, and they were constantly purifying themselves to be good enough. I thought if you were never a little bit bad you couldn't be a saint because you needed that feeling of doubt.

When I got my tattoo of the Black Madonna and lifted the bandage off of it, there was an outline of her face on it. I knew it was only scabs but I did feel purer, like some of my doubts had been removed.

My mother has cancer, my dad is lying on the couch talking on the telephone smoking. I look at him and for a moment I can see the story through her eyes. When I was little she went into the hospital to have her gallstones removed. I wasn't sure what they were and I didn't understand how stones could get into your body.
When she was little she was swinging on a swing set. Everyone was yelling at her 'Stop, slow down, stop. You're going to go over the top, slow down.'� She kept kicking her legs into the air pumping harder and harder, until the swing did start to go over the top, but the chain snapped at the last second like a slingshot a little boy said and shot her forward.

They all looked expecting her to disappear into space but she fell on top of a pile of cinders which sliced into the back of her knee. Her dad came to pick her up and carried her home over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

My grandpap was a strong man, I often saw him carrying concrete. He worked in the open hearth part of the mill. Standing in water up to his knees, shoveling in front of a blazing fire. My dad tried to do this job but he saw faces in the flames. My aunt told me it was like looking into hell. There was an old Polish story that if you threw an orange peel into a fire, it would spell out your future. I used to go downstairs into our basement and look into the furnace which had a little orange flame with blue like a halo around it.

When my mother came home from the hospital she brought the stones, they were smaller than pebbles and perfectly formed, just as if they had been worn away by earth. They had dimpled skin like orange peels. I thought the inside of your body was like a garden then, that there were things growing in there and being formed no matter what you were doing and the most important thing was to cry because otherwise things would get too big from all the water inside you and you would have to die.

I held the pill bottles that held those gall stones. I thought what if my mother reaches into the medicine cabinet and accidentally swallows them again? They would be poison, they shook like maracas.

My mother was always very angry. She was angry not usually in a yelling way but more in a way that she was a judge and that you could never do anything good enough. No matter what I did I was criticized. My sister was like a saint, quiet and fair. When she was telling me everything she knew about our mother having cancer we talked about her and my dad and how mean she was to us.

My sister said 'None of that matters now, she might die and we just have to make what ever time she has left as pleasant for her as we can.'� I looked at her in awe. I maybe from being in California for so long, believed that she was sick because she was always so mad, that she was sick because she always had to be right, she had to do everything because if you did it, you wouldn't do it right and then she would have to do it all over again. She was sick because she didn't feel like anyone loved her and all she really needed was to be loved, but if you tried whatever you did was the wrong thing.

My mother complained about my body, 'Get your fat ass up off that couch, how much do you weigh now anyhow?'� No matter how confused I was about her age, or my dads, or anyone else's, I knew how much she weighed. 150 pounds. I thought she was enormous, not so much fat because she wasn't, but I thought she was 150 pounds of a metal, something like steel. Maybe if she cried she thought she'd rust., she was always poking and probing at my body as if it were a failure that I was made out of flesh.
I got as hard as I possible could. People tell me they love my body because it is so strong. I have muscles in my legs that are so firm that even I'm amazed, but somehow I have managed to keep a layer of soft yielding flesh over them so it is like I am both of us now.

When I heard she had cancer, I almost couldn't believe it. Cancer of the lungs and throat. I remembered sitting at the movies with her, it was 'The Trouble with Angels'�. In those days we didn't go to very many movies and it was rare to be alone with my mother. The movie was at a downtown theater where they had movies in the daytime and sometimes Broadway plays at night, it had box seats and heavy velvet curtains. The lights went down, and the curtain opened. I alternated eating buttered popcorn with watching my mother's face. She made expressions that puzzled me and she said no when she meant yes, one of her few concessions to Polishness.
The movie was set in a convent boarding school. Hayley Mills was in it, she had freckles and was bad. I was starting to realized that to some people freckles equal trouble. Ah, so this was it, I thought, a cautionary tale. My popcorn started to taste bad like the butter was congealing.

Before the movie ended Hayley decided to become a nun. Her friend left angry and alone back to the world. All of a sudden, I had a giant lump in my throat. I looked over at my mother. She was staring straight ahead not a muscle moving anywhere on her face. It took all I had not to cry, somewhere I was sure if I cried, I would let her down. My throat felt like it was going to explode.
Is this why she has cancer now? Is it all those tears bottled up? Has that lump been choking her for all these years until that night in bed when she was scared she was having a stroke. She told me it felt like someone hit her in the chest with a baseball bat. 'Sorry'� she said to me, because I guess she remembered my brother cracking my ribs with a baseball bat yelling at me that I was a whore and didn't respect our mother., while my father stood by hands hanging at his side.

She screamed at my father to take her to the hospital. When they got there, the nurse gave her something to calm her down. Then the doctor said 'Oh well, we might as well take an X-ray.'� It showed a spot of her lung, lying on her aorta, right near her heart.

I can't help but feel that part of that tumor is mine, that the bad things I did put it there and that if only I had been easier, better, that she'd be okay.

That lump in my throat was a longing to know that someone would miss me as much as Hayley's friend missed her, that I belonged somewhere. I remember for years afterwards, trying not to cry, because crying meant that I was lonely, that I needed someone. I would try to focus my eyes on something in front of me and breathe and hope that the emptiness would go away. My mother could never admit that she wanted to belong to anything, she trained herself to remain unreadable, to turn her back before you could see her pain. I remember when she went to the hospital to have her gallstones taken out, I told my sister they looked like solidified tears, the ones she never cried.

04/29/06

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