Searching For My Eyes
Kathleen Fitzsimmons
“Do you have more ash trays?”
The question jarred me from my reverie. I had been staring into the same stack of plates for who knows how long. Everything seemed unfamiliar in a house I could have walked blindfolded through yesterday.
“They’re all taken. Here.”
I grabbed a saucer from the cabinet.
The throng of well-intentioned family members and friends threatened to overflow our tiny kitchen. Mom’s friends were discernible from my older relatives mostly by their use of NA coffee mugs. Several of them rivaled my Aunt Ginny with their wizened appearance.
My eyes burned and watered from the stale, gray smoke. I wished with all my heart that one of the Twelve Steps had addressed giving up cigarettes. In the end, it was her unbreakable addiction to nicotine that dragged my mother from this life, skeletal and wheezing.
###
Mom had been a cokehead in the ‘70s, when blow was as ubiquitous as mirror balls. My Aunt Theresa had shown me a Polaroid of Mom with her friends in the day, neon grins and electrified eyes illuminated by the small glass vial on the kitchen table. Two of the friends in the photo were already dead. One got caught in the crossfire of a bad drug deal. The other flipped his Camaro coming home from the shore.
My mother plunged into NA with the same dogged enthusiasm she brought to everything else. In her zeal, she purged all her mementos from 1974 through ‘77. She said that cocaine had blurred those years anyway and she could never get them back. I could understand and respect that. There was just one problem: I was born in January of 1978.
###
Mom claimed she’d met my dad in rehab until I did the math.
“One of us is supposed to be the adult here, damn it! Where do you get off preaching about honesty when I don’t even know who my real father is? Hypocrite!”
My mother fled to her bedroom and locked the door. A sonic assault of Blondie and The Ramones made further communications impossible. I fell asleep at the kitchen table, still clutching the letter from “Dad” confirming my calculations. Mom emerged the next morning, fragile and haggard. She hugged me. Then she looked away and asked me never to bring him up again.
###
A reassuring hand on my shoulder pulled me back into the present: Aunt Theresa.
“Hey. How are you holding up?”
“I want to scream,” I hissed.
“There’s stuff I want to show you. Come on.”
“Sure,” I shrugged.
We trudged upstairs. Aunt Theresa paused to look in my mother’s room. A half-packed suitcase for hospice lay open on the bed. We continued our ascent into the attic.
“What are we doing?”
“Something your mother should have done long ago.”
The dusty air was suffocating and hot. A stifled sneeze imploded in my head. Aunt Theresa picked a serpentine path through the clutter, pausing at an old shoebox.
“This is your right. I never told your mother I saved these things.”
She dumped the contents. Yellowed cassette tapes. Backstage passes. Faded, sticky snapshots. A bottle of dried-up black glitter nail polish. An ancient diaphragm crumbled to dust in a vinyl pouch.
A concert bill fluttered out. “Lipstick Stiletto/April 24, 1977/Durant Theatre, Springfield.”
The weathered picture had been bathed repeatedly in tears and lovingly brushed smooth again. A leather-clad front man flung his tousled caramel mane in an explosion of ecstatic defiance. I held the truth in my hands at last. I could see it in his eyes.
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