Lena St. Clair
To this day, I believe my mother has the mysterious ability to see things before they happen. She has a ese saying for what she knows. wang chihan: If the lips are gohe teeth will be cold. Which means, I suppose, ohing is always the result of another.
But she does not predict whehquakes will e, or how the stock market will do. She sees only bad things that affect our family. And she knows what causes them. But now she laments that she never did anything to stop them.
Oime when I was growing up in San Francisco, she looked at the way our neartment sat too steeply on the hill. She said the new baby in her womb would fall out dead, and it did.
When a plumbing and bathroom fixtures store opened up across the street from our bank, my mother said the bank would soon have all its money drained away. And one month later, an officer of the bank was arrested for embezzlement.
And just after my father died last year, she said she khis would happen. Because a philodendron plant my father had given her had withered and died, despite the fact that she watered it faithfully. She said the plant had damaged its roots and no water could get to it. The autopsy report she later received showed my father had had y-pert blockage of the arteries before he died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-four. My father was not ese like my mother, but English-Irish Ameri, who enjoyed his five slices of ba and three eggs sunnyside up every m.
I remember this ability of my mothers, because now she is visiting my husband and me in the house we just bought in Woodside. And I wonder what she will see.
Harold and I were lucky to find this place, which is he summit of Highway 9, then a left-right-left down three forks of unmarked dirt roads, unmarked because the residents always tear down the signs to keep out salesmen, developers, and city iors. We are only a forty-minute drive to my mothers apartment in San Francisco. This became a sixty-minute ordeal ing back from San Francisco, when my mother was with us in the car. After we got to the two-lane winding road to the summit, she touched her haly to Harolds shoulder and softly said, "Ai, tire squealing." And then a little later, "Too much tear and wear on car."
Harold had smiled and slowed down, but I could see his hands were ched oeering wheel of the Jaguar, as he glanervously in his rearview mirror at the line of impatient cars that was growing by the minute. And I was secretly glad to watch his disfort. He was always the one who tailgated old ladies in their Buicks, honking his horn and revving the engine as if he would run them over uhey pulled over.
And at the same time, I hated myself for being mean-spirited, for thinking Harold deserved this torment. Yet I couldnt help myself. I was mad at Harold and he was exasperated with me. That m, before we picked my mother up, he had said, "You should pay for the exterminators, because Mirugai is your cat and so theyre your fleas. Its only fair."
None of our friends could ever believe we fight over something as stupid as fleas, but they would also never believe that our problems are much, much deeper than that, so deep I dont even know where bottom is.
And now that my mother is here—she is staying for a week, or until the electris are done rewiring her building in San Francisco—we have to pretend nothing is the matter.
Meanwhile she asks over and ain why we had to pay so much for a ren