Letter to My Mother: In Praise of Your Yellow Car

In my favorite photograph of you, you’re looking over one shoulder from the driver’s seat of a pale lemon Karmann Ghia. Your dark hair floats around your face in the bouffant style made popular in the early 60s by Jackie Kennedy. I imagine its loosened waves blowing from the open window as you wind along the one-lane roads of Northern Ireland to the coast. Your blue eyes are the color of the Sea of Cortez, half a continent away. A half-smile hovers on your lips, as if you know a secret you will not reveal. Though I know now the precise circumstances of this moment of your life were quite different, I choose to believe in the story told by the brilliant coral polish on your fingertips around the steering wheel and the jaunty tilt of your head.

They tell me you are going somewhere. The rest of your life has yet to happen.

I am not yet born, and you have not yet crossed the wild Atlantic, made the weeklong sea journey to arrive in America and step down the gangplank in New York City into your new life as a young married woman, with one child not yet beginning to walk and two glossy black steamer trunks layered with Irish linens and wedding china. You are still a smiling girl with an impossibly small waist, the white of your skin as fine as the petals of a lily. On the weekends, you laugh and dance with your suited dates, careful of the stiff corsage at your wrist, your pristine white-gloved hands. You speak four languages and wear a university scarf carelessly draped around your neck as you leave your parent’s house, stepping in high heels into nights filled with stars and music, into the singular moment of your beauty and youth.

Sixty years later, you drive a dove grey Mini Cooper, your silver hair a glimmering halo around your face.

I still hear the lost accents of your voice in my dreams. Call to mind the years we spent together, as you raised three more children, married the love of your life when I was a teen, the many nights we debated art and literature, sat together in darkened theatres watching French films with subtitles, as I passed from child to woman under your care. The hours in the car back and forth to piano lessons and yearly July trips to the shingled cottage on Long Island Sound. When you stood at the kitchen counter to read the first poem I wrote as an awkward twelve-year-old, typed letter by letter on a manual Olivetti typewriter. The sound my tortoiseshell hairbrush made when in a fit of teenage rage I threw it against the closed oak door as you left my room. Evenings on the porch with iced teas and menthol cigarettes, the sound of crickets rising from the damp grass as the pink wash of late summer sky shifted to black. When we said goodbye on the front steps of your colonial house the week before I moved to California to repeat your emigration story, and start my own new life away from everything I’d known.

I will never know who I would have been without you.

You live in me and in my children in ways not always visible. The echo of your shy smile as I bend over the pages of a book. The determined toss of my head in departing one place and moving towards the next. The way my daughter leaves the driveway with a vroom in her own red Mini. Your blue eyes set into her face. My son’s gentle voice, the hushed music of his laughter. My words, flowing like a ribbon of road through the countryside in the hills outside Belfast.

Your yellow car, improbable and rare, full of bright unaccountable hope.