Bella Mahaya Carter
Planted
I fill two terracotta pots with lavender cosmos and place pink and white impatiens underneath the camellias. Still, six weeks pregnant, I don’t have the strength or stomach to yank the dying rose bushes and create a new summer bed, like the realtor suggested.
“I’ll do it,” Jim says, dragging my recliner chair through the sliding glass doors onto the brick patio and bringing me a glass of water. It’s noon, but not too hot for July.
He sinks a shovel into the ground, digs, and with leather-gloved hands, twists and pulls thorny stems.
I close my eyes and wonder, when was our child conceived? At what moment? My calendar says we had sex on May twenty-sixth. I’d gotten up early to call my mother and sisters while Jim slept and crawled back into bed before he awakened. I must have charmed him into me, knowing I was ovulating. But then again, he never needed my charm—he had plenty of his own.
I didn’t feel the moment of conception. No owl hooting. No choir of angels singing Halleluiah. No magical feeling deep inside my womb. No flash of recognition or spark of new life.
But our sex afterglow lasted longer than usual. It lingered into the afternoon as we held hands in the back seat of our realtor’s white Mercedes on our way to see three, small Spanish-style houses walking distance from Melrose Avenue.
It lingered into the evening listening to Ron Carter’s band at the Catalina Bar and Grill. A jazzy night filled with sexual innuendo and touching, we kissed with red, wine-stained lips, and smiled at each other in the dark. Was conception happening while I tapped my foot to acoustic bass notes?
Or had our child’s life begun before that night?
Was she conceived fifteen years earlier at my surprise twenty-second birthday party in Grace Scripps Hall? I barely knew Jim then, but he watched me give a male stripper a run for his erect, gyrating money. The young women of Grace had found it fitting to celebrate me, their Resident Advisor, in this way, perhaps because of my fearless rendition of “Flamin’ Mamie” performed spontaneously at freshman orientation, where I hammed it up big time on the Miss America steps stage.
Or, perhaps, our child’s conception had been set into motion the night Jim and I first spoke in Merrill’s dorm room. Stoned, sprawled over her down comforter, coupled away from the others, we gazed out the window into the courtyard. Palm trees. Ivy. Terracotta roof tiles. Through the pot and purple, shadowy moonlight, we decided the campus looked more like a castle. Together, we weaved a tapestry of stories about stone walls, turrets, a draw bridge, and a mote.
Later, he asked, “May I walk you home?” We laughed because “home” was down the hall. We shared sleep but not sex because I first had to break up with a newish, impotent boyfriend.
But what if the inception of our child’s life took place before we even met? Had our baby been a speck in the universe—a particle floating in my great, great grandmother’s body?
There were numerous possible points of entry, and many seeds planted.
“How’s this?” Jim asks.
I open my eyes. He is kneeling beside our new summer bed, sparkling with pink petunias, orange and yellow marigolds, red dianthus, and purple salvia, bordered by blue lobelia and white sweet alyssum.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
I watch him burrow into the rich, fragrant earth, loosening root balls and patting soil, and I think, my husband is planting me a garden.
Ghost of Christmas Past
The living room floor was a sea of torn wrapping paper. All eyes were on Mom. Even the grandkids looked up from their toys to watch Nonna unwrap Papa’s present. She’d saved the best for last. Her eyes twinkled. She removed the red bow and stuck it on her wrist like a corsage, smiling at her husband. Mom untied the ribbon with her knobby, dexterous fingers, removed the paper, and shook a rectangular box. She lifted the lid and peeked inside. Her smile vanished. She stared at her gift.
“Do you like it?” Ralph asked.
Mom hesitated, then said, “No.”
Kicking a piece of reindeer wrapping paper off his brown leather slipper, Ralph stormed out of the room.
Silence.
“What happened?” my eight-year-old nephew asked.
“I was just being honest,” Mom said. “What was I supposed to do, lie?” Tears filled her eyes.
“What is it?” my sister asked.
Mom held up a massage gift certificate.
“That’s nice,” my other sister said. “It sounds very relaxing. You could definitely use that.”
“I was hoping for something—” Mom paused and added, “more personal.”
I’m not sure what she expected. Fine jewelry? Chanel N°5? A wide-angle lens for her Pentax?
After church, all sixteen of us gathered around Mom’s table: Italian lace cloth, gold-rimmed china, crystal, polished silver, starched napkins, place cards, candles, and a poinsettia centerpiece. After the Antipasto, Mom served Tortellini in chicken broth, followed by turkey with all the trimmings: potato casseroles, stuffing, cranberry sauce, fluffy, home-baked bread with butter, string beans in garlic and olive oil, and later, homemade cookies, pies, and Neapolitan Struffoli.
Sated, we retired to the living room, the morning’s mess cleared. Mom played Christmas carols on the piano. Some of us sang, others unbuttoned a waistband and complained of being too full.
The next day, Mom ended up—as she often did after Christmas—in bed with lower back spasms. For seventy-two hours, she did not leave her room. She dozed, stared at snowy tree branches outside her window, and cranked up the heating pad while knitting and watching TV. She was done planning, shopping, baking, decorating, wrapping, cleaning, and entertaining. Extended family and friends had received her handwritten cards and tins of home-baked sweets. She’d been driving 100 miles per hour and crashed—for the second time that season. Her grown children and grandchildren would soon return to their own lives.
***
Thirty years have passed since that last time our whole family gathered for Christmas.
Every year since, Mom’s “No,” my ghost of Christmas past, shows up around Thanksgiving. “Slow down,” it says, but I forget.
In 2012, after Mom’s heart attack, I surrendered all holiday tasks to sit by her hospital bedside. I was given a get-out-of-Christmas-jail-free card. It was the holiest of seasons.
You don’t need someone to die for that, my ghost of Christmas past whispers.
Bella Mahaya Carter, an award-winning author of three books, believes in the power of writing to heal and transform lives. A devoted wordsmith and lifelong student of spiritual psychology, Bella facilitates online writing circles for writers, artists, healers, and seekers. She’s currently working on an intergenerational family memoir in Flash.
