Claire Jennings - In the Hollow of a Mother

(LYRIC ESSAY)

IN THE HOLLOW OF A MOTHER

CLAIRE T. JENNINGS

The German doctor hovers over me, her face screwed up into a child’s drawing. She has said nothing for the last five minutes. The probe is still up me, cold as a popsicle and my legs are caught in stirrups. “I cannot find a heartbeat” she finally says, “we will have to force it out!” Her consonants are hard and spat. This isn’t the result I had expected from the scan. Only this morning I had been in Pottery Barn for kids. I picked up a small velvet rabbit for you; it is waiting in a plastic bag in the back seat of my car. Now it will stay there for months. I had no idea that you died in secret, that my womb was about to become a septic tank, like an aquarium we once had. An underwater graveyard of Blackbeard algae and little goldfish bones. So, you see, I cannot lay you to rest in me, my darling. My nearly child with your silk organs lacking, your tiny punctured spinnerets.

You had led me to believe that you were still alive. I thought I could feel you somersaulting, your wet eyelashes bruising my insides. My milky breasts still too heavy for my bra, my husband has been enjoying their roundness, their completeness. Two glorious planets spinning in his hands.

I swallow a pill and the doctor tells me to go home and wait. Morphine is wrapped in brown paper in an amber bottle next to the TV, just in case. I cry out as the first cramps come in and our cat jumps on the bed. I hear your grandfather’s radio from the other room, his country and western music piping through the walls again. The cat climbs on top of me. He lays his face on my stomach, ear to a sea shell waiting for your shipwreck to wash in. Neither of us know that tonight he will get hit by a car. That he will roll like a tumbleweed, alone. That the neighbor will find him in the morning under a lilac bush. Lithic, bloody and cold.

You have refused to come out all night, but now as the sun rises and I walk outside, I feel the remains of you drop. You finally leave me like a trembling star. Our cat is on my husband’s lap in the back seat in a cardboard box. He looks up at me, irises expanding into violent moons and I howl a goodbye again.

I am left alone to mourn the quiet constellation of you, your folded damselfly wings. I go into the bathroom, empty you out of my underwear and throw up. My father in law turns down the music and holds me in arms of whisky and bone. He holds me until noonlight rakes over us, until the last piece of you returns home

I spend the next three months eating cheesy popcorn in bed. My thighs have become plump balloons and my breasts have shriveled up. Personally, I would have preferred it the other way around. Our cat survives, but has three operations and loses the use of a leg. I have to take care of him when I have nothing left to take care of. I have to get out of my catacomb of a bed and carry him to the toilet. Get up to comfort him after a wirra of nightmares wakes him at 3 a.m. Three months of twice weekly vet visits and eventually the moons of his eyes became less. Until one day he stops rolling, gets up and walks to me instead. Baby steps of a timorous antelope, stumbling to his mother.

Claire T. Jennings is a writer and a performance artist. She has written and starred in two short films and a sold out solo show at the Santa Monica Playhouse. Claire was a winner of the popular ‘Top Tales’ in Los Angeles and was chosen to perform in the Los Angeles Story Telling Festival. She has been a guest speaker at the Santa Barbara University Literary Symposium, and is a member of the Redlights Writing community. Claire lives with her husband, a diva dog and a fat cat in a canyon in California.