Maura Seger
I was twenty before I realized that my mother’s interest in my friends stemmed
from her need to hoard information to be given to the police in the event of my
disappearance. Or worse. What’s his name?, she would ask. He works where?
Does she live near Wal-Mart? She became expert at seeking out addresses on-line,
matching them to names and numbers. What I didn’t realize at the time was
that she never threw any away so that her records, all the little slips of paper
shoved into her desk drawer, became a midden of my adolescent friendships. Long
after I had parted from someone or other, the name and other pertinent details
lingered in my mother’s custody.
I discovered this years later after she died (of a weak heart, they said). I
sat at her desk on a thick, overcast day and trawled through my own history.
It was a strange experience, filled with flashes of the mothered girl, already
half
a stranger to my motherless self. By the time I had all the little pieces of
paper in piles on the desk, I knew what they really were—talismans meant
to protect me. If she had them, she would never need them.
She didn’t need them for me, as it turns out. I remain, she’s the one
who is gone. And I have no slips of paper, no talismans, no one to call or seek
out, nowhere to go in the hope of finding her whole and safe. There’s only
the emptied drawer and the little fragments of memory I scoop up in my hands
and let go like confetti.
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