The Embraer-ERJ 170 descends, tilting through cloud banks until I see it, the landscape of dark green pines slashed by clay the color of ochre, like dried blood, as dry as I am after flying. Suzy Locker and her developmentally disabled son Donny meet me at the end of the jetway. Suzy at sixty is wiry and strong and lifts both my bags while Donny, forty-two years old and still childish, cries and pats my arms, shoulders, back and whatever he can reach with his long Gumby-stick arms, pats me gently as if I might break or disappear.

“Rosalyn, you look good,” Suzy says. “I know your mama will be glad to see you.” Her Toyota waits just outside the sliding doors. We insert my bags, then ourselves into the air-conditioned interior and begin the drive that will take me back home, not for the first time, but for the longest—three weeks or maybe more—since I left Augusta, Georgia, some twenty-odd years ago. At the end of the road my mother waits, just home from the hospital where an orthopedic surgeon took her knee apart, removed its worn-out ligaments and cartilage, and replaced them with rubber and Teflon-coated metal. In the back seat I open one suitcase to check my pills. There they are: one bottle for anxiety, one for depression, another for sleep. The tiny lorazepam I can take without water; it slides in and vanishes almost before I can swallow.

We take the long way home because Suzy never drives on the freeway, even though she has had the courage to take care of a severely disabled child by herself for forty-two years. I am filled with nostalgia for the old Sears building, which has been converted into a warehouse, and the Archibald Butts Bridge, flanked by two golden lions. I remember being small and sitting in the backseat with my friends as my mother drove us over the bridge fast so we would lose our stomachs.

One of the drugs I take seems to encourage my nostalgia, plunging me dizzily into a past that can seem, for minutes at a time, more real than the present. Suzy stops at Publix to pick up some things for my mother. I wander the aisles behind her, but when I see a woman wearing a tight calf-length skirt and open-toe pumps, I am suddenly five years old, sitting under the dining room table at my mother’s house, surrounded by legs.

My hair is a shiny black helmet, the curly ends combed and lacquered into two earmuff shapes that cover my ears. Uncle Fred drums his fingers on his knee, trying to draw my attention. Uncle Fred, tightly buttoned into his sadness like an old jacket too expensive to throw out. I move away, closer to the nylon smooth brown legs of the women. I can see their ghostly white garters lurking in the dark caverns between their knees. One garter makes a bump under the gabardine skirt covering my mother’s crossed leg. Most of the women wear Playtex girdles, latex woven into white strips sewn together so that they look like armadillos from waist to thigh. Uncle Fred wiggles his finger to get me to come over. He wants to fondle me. I shift my bottom until I am sitting on the side of my patent leather shoe and I start to rock. I would rather fondle myself! My left foot hurts because that afternoon I was walking barefoot outside and a stick pierced its fleshy tender arch. When my mother put down her rake and pulled the stick out, I could feel the bones move inside, but it didn’t bleed. She washed it with peroxide and put on a Band-Aid.

The table that I am under wears a white tablecloth embroidered by my Granny. On the dining room wall hangs a mirror from Germany, from Uncle Fred’s family. It is carved with cattails all around the frame, and it is so beautiful. That is one of the reasons I don’t want to give up on Uncle Fred. For dinner I have on a dress, tights and black patent leather shoes that make my feet hot. The people who have come for dinner are Aunt Dot, Uncle Fred, Laura Ann, Freddy, Aunt Ginny, Uncle Joe, Aunt Corinne, Uncle Ed and Linda. And Granny, whose birthday it is. She threw up her hands and said whee! when I brought in her birthday cake. Then I crawled under the table while my mother was out of the room.

She is not my real mother. I was a “chosen baby.” There is a book about it that she reads to me. It is the only book, aside from the Bible, that I ever remember her reading. People say we are both attractive, that I look like a little Jackie Kennedy (not yet Onassis) and that she doesn’t look a day over thirty-nine even though she was forty when I was adopted. For years I think she is frozen at thirty-nine. She is slim but wears a girdle anyway, and her hair is chestnut brown without any gray. She buys and sews me the prettiest clothes, but I mess up the effect by sucking my thumb even though I am five years old.

My foot swells up so much I have to take off the shoe. Sitting on the floor under the table, sucking my thumb and rocking against my other shoe takes my mind off the pain. Later I get a high fever and hallucinate. The stick had some dirt; the dirt got into my blood. Mama bathes me in alcohol and I am afraid because she looks like the cottonmouth she killed in the backyard last week. Because I am so hot, I think of the fourth of July and how she left me in the car with our Chihuahua, Trixie, when she went to get barbecue at the firehouse. She was gone a long time and the dog started to pant and then howl. I joined him, arching my back, letting my grief flow out in long wails. The people who passed our car on their way to get barbecue either smiled and waved, or turned their heads to look the other way.

Trixie and I have a lot in common. When I ask to go to my next-door neighbor’s house, my mother always says, “No, you’ll be underfoot.” When Trixie follows her heels too closely and nearly trips her, my mama says, “Get out from under my feet!” One day I am sitting on a rubber mat next to my mama’s feet, which are planted there, her legs strong and firm rising up as she washes glass jars for the church in the sink. Suddenly one shatters, cutting her hand. I look up to see ribbons of blood. She curses me; I scatter, but not fast enough. Her blood arcs down to baptize me, to forever mark me as her own.

Standing behind Suzy in the checkout line at Publix, I jolt back to the present, but it’s shaky, more dreamlike than the world I just left. I need cold water, in a bottle or on my face, something to keep me here. I excuse myself to find a restroom; on the way out I buy a large bottle of Dasani purified water because the name reminds me of the desert and I feel stranded as well as dry. We are only one mile away from my mother’s house.

The physical therapist is there when we arrive, his shiny new SUV parked squarely in the middle of the driveway, so Suzy has to park in the street. Donny refuses to leave the car. He sits in the backseat, whimpering and pawing the air as I tell him good-bye. Then we walk, Suzy and I, from the curb, lugging groceries and suitcases. The therapist and my mother sit in the den talking because she has refused to start without me. She doesn’t hug or kiss me because we are in a stranger’s presence. There is always a reason.

“Rosalyn’s here, so I guess we can start,” Mama announces, and we move, a small caravan led by a wounded camel (she walks with a hump now, leaning on her aluminum walker), past the washing machine that sits across from the breakfast table, through the entrance hall, into the dimness of the long, narrow hall, and all the way back to the end, back into the pink bedroom. I can smell Estee Lauder’s White Shoulders as soon as we enter the hallway.

Mama heaves herself onto the bed. I guess she hasn’t colored her hair in a while, because instead of the chestnut brown, it is iron-gray, but still wavy and cut into a style that reminds me of Bea Arthur from “Golden Girls,” who is one of her TV heroines. The therapist, a man of medium build with smooth contours and large wire-rimmed glasses, sits beside her on the bed. I choose a red velvet chair on the other side of the bed. The chair is as bright as blood in its pink surroundings, like the long vertical scar on her knee, sunk in its bed of pink flesh. The therapist pulls out a sheaf of papers. “Here are the exercises we’re going to do today. I’m going to give you a paper with diagrams that will help you remember them when I’m not here.”

“I don’t have to do them when you aren’t here, do I?” she asks plaintively.

“You have to do them twice a day every day, but only if you want that knee to get better. I’ll give these,” he waves the papers in his hand, “to your daughter. I’m sure she will be a big help to you.”

“She can’t read,” she says, laughing. Then she tells him I have a PhD degree. The remark about my not being able to read was a way to bring it up without appearing to brag.

The exercises are hard and painful. I watch, dreading the sessions in which I will have to coach and count repetitions, reposition a limb, cause her to cry out. The last one is not really an exercise, but a stretch. From his bag, the therapist extracts a white box, about 8 inches square. “The final thing you need to do is rest your foot on this box, with your knee straight, lying there just like you are now, letting the box stretch the muscles in the back of your leg.” He lifts her leg and places her stockinged foot on the box. She grimaces and keeps it bent. When he tries to push the knee down, she grimaces more and says, “Unh.” She has never been one to react much to pain.

The therapist says good-bye, directing her to keep her foot on the box for five more minutes. As soon as he leaves the room she takes it off. “He’s crazy as a loon,” she says, looking at me, “if he thinks I’m going to do that two times a day!” When I don’t respond, she says, “I wish you would put on some make-up when you go out.” I put the box away and we hump our way back to the den on the opposite side of the house.

While Mama watches TV, I make dinner out of the supplies that Suzy purchased, ground beef, spaghetti noodles, sauce from a jar, and salad with iceberg lettuce. Mama eats hungrily, has seconds of spaghetti, then asks, “What’s for dessert?” I tell her Suzy didn’t buy any dessert, so she tells me to look in the refrigerator for some lemon meringue pie. “I just have to have a little something sweet,” she says. “Don’t you?”

When I tell her we don’t usually have dessert at home, she says, “So that’s why you’re such a sourpuss.”

After the dishes I ask if we can watch Biography, and she says okay, she enjoys that program occasionally, and changes the channel with her gigantic remote control. The playwright Tennessee Williams is the subject and we both grow more and more uncomfortable listening to the stories about the man’s mental deterioration and homosexuality. When it’s over, she keeps saying, “The man I remember didn’t look like that,” and finally, “I wonder if they would have let him sing on Hee Haw! if they’d known he was homosexual.” I realize she thinks she’s been watching a biography of Tennessee Ernie Ford. I try to explain her mistake, but she interrupts me, asking, “Would you please tell me something? How in the world do two men have sex?”

Waking up, eating breakfast, doing her exercises, watching television, going to bed: this becomes our routine. In the afternoons I try to get out of the house for a little while, running errands with her car, taking walks, driving aimlessly down familiar and not so familiar roads. I get lost once on the River Watch parkway and then accidentally end up back near her house without knowing how I got there. I panic for a moment, because it’s like one of those circular nightmares where I am trying to leave a place but keep coming back instead.

We sit across from each other at the breakfast table where we take all our meals. One day, she pauses with her fork halfway to her mouth and says, “I miss Mama. Do you know that for years I was the only one who ever put flowers on her grave? I finally quit doing it.” She waits and I respond, “But you still think about her.” It’s the right thing to say because she looks at me hard, but then keeps on eating. Then I remember what she said when Granny died, on the way home from the funeral. “I am so glad we chose the blue dress. I believe she is the prettiest corpse I’ve ever seen.”

My cousin Brenda drops by with a rum cake, the fourth cake we have received this week, packed in a space-age Tupperware case. After Brenda leaves, my mother explains that these cakes are the reason everybody else in the family is fat. “Roly-poly fat,” she says, “But not you. You have always kept your figure.” She smiles, satisfied, and I smile back, glad to have pleased her.

One day when I come home from buying her make-up, she accuses me of shortchanging her. By way of apology, and to show her appreciation for my coming to take care of her during this time, she gives me her MasterCard and tells me to buy some pretty little dresses. She still likes to see me in dresses. The next day I find her at the kitchen table with her checkbook out, making a list of annotated numbers. When I ask what she’s doing, she says, “I’m trying to figure out how much it’s costing me to have you here.” On the paper I see one number for groceries, one for a portion of the electric and water bills, a larger one for the two dresses, a small one for the change she again thinks I failed to return. Noticing the time, I remind her that we need to do her exercises. She argues but then acquiesces, and that is her pattern. It’s important for me to coax her, then beg, then command as if she’s now the child. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to be her mother.

Sometimes she is funny. Like the day the nurse from the VNA came by to take her vital signs and draw blood. While the nurse massaged cocoa butter into my mother’s wound and talked to me about her life growing up in Haiti, my mother read Ann Landers’ column in the paper. She often glanced at us over the top of her reading glasses. When she came across a word she didn’t know, and couldn’t pronounce, she said, looking at the nurse, “I think it’s a medical term, so I’ll spell it for you. “M-a-s-t-u-r-b-a-t-e.” The nurse said, looking at me, “I think I’ll let you take that one.”

So there are times when we laugh together and I feel that all is not lost, that the past can be cancelled out after all, just like the Vicodin prescribed by the doctor cancels her pain. When the drug starts to work, she takes out her partial plate and talks with a lisp and laughs about how Uncle Mel got so fat that he broke Granny’s bed, or how one of her neighbor’s children once stole all of the bulbs out of her outdoor Christmas lights and then sold them back to her the next day when she went to complain to his father. At times like these I can see age creeping up, making her hair dull and her wrinkles sag and she seems so human that I want to embrace her. But I can’t. We have almost never done that. The next morning we have an argument where she accuses me of putting trash down the drain in the kitchen sink and clogging the pipes. “Those pipes never get clogged when you’re not here,” she explains. “I wonder why that is.” I briefly imagine stuffing myself down the drain, remembering the time she said I was trash for dating a “Negro.” She said Negro because he was educated and worked in a bank.

It’s midnight and I can’t sleep. It was the bathtub instead of the sink that refused to drain, but it was still my fault because it has to be someone’s. The plunger didn’t work so we had to call the plumber. She says she will send the bill to me. She refuses to do her exercises and when I encourage her, says, “Rosalyn, I think you’re beginning to put on weight. Maybe you’re the one needs to be exercising.” Again, the pursed lips. I remind her that if she doesn’t do her exercises her knee will take longer to heal. She says, “That’s okay. I’ve got you here to take care of me.”

The house makes a noise like breathing at night and now the toilets have begun slowing down, giving incomplete flushes. Mildew grows on the walls at the back of the house and its smell mingles with that of her Estee Lauder perfume. The mildew has gotten into some of the picture frames. There’s one I want to save, four photographs of me at ages one, two, three and four, the last one with the helmet-style hairdo she liked so much. All four in one long, rectangular frame. I offer to take it to a photographer to have it cleaned. She sits at the breakfast table, looking at me with her gray hair poking out in every direction because I have forgotten to comb it. She finally says, “”No. It will cost too much.” I say I’ll pay. She refuses again, pursing her lips and looking out the window at the parched grass of her front lawn. “You can’t pay. You don’t have any money,” and then, “I wish you would water that grass, Rosalyn. It’s looking right bad.”

I am awake again but have turned out the lights so she’ll think I’m asleep. I listen to the sound of her getting up off the couch, where she has fallen asleep watching Fox News. She humps past my door and into her room where I imagine her slipping into the pink nylon gown she bought to take with her to the hospital. I listen to the gagging sound of her brushing her teeth.

When the house is quiet I slip back into the den. A big, squat cabinet with sticky, hard-to-open doors is full of photographs, in albums, hatboxes, shoeboxes, envelopes, and a baby book. I look through the boxes until I find the one that I want—of my father just before he died, looking both dismayed and astonished to be holding a baby in one arm while an IV tube pumps fluids into the other. Behind this picture is one of me on my mother’s shoulder the day we arrived “home.” I turn over my first-grade class picture to find in her faded handwriting the names of every student, along with a key to their location in the picture. Returning these to their boxes, I begin a tour of the house, stopping to look at more photographs of me—on the walls or propped on the furniture of every room, and finally at the ones in her wallet.

What am I looking for? Something unnamable as yet, that is missing, that has always been missing. This woman has photos of me everywhere. Also in the boxes with the photos are every single one of my report cards, any childish art work I made for her, any newspaper clippings in which my achievements, academic or otherwise, were mentioned, and every letter I wrote to her. And yet—I have never felt any deep sense of warmth or affection from her. The photos make sense in a way, I suppose, because they are all about the surface, the appearance, of me, and that is what she seemed to care so much about—dressing me up, taking me out, showing me off, bragging about me. And how is that not love? What was missing?

I think it was “presence,” which I put in quotations to set it off from the literal sense of the word, because it is more than just being there. If it were just being physically present, I would have nothing to complain about. After all, I slept in the bed with my mother until I was ten.

This is what presence felt like: I remember my Aunt Dot sometimes reading me my bedtime story, and the way she would look in my eyes and make funny voices, and be perfectly serious and earnest about it until she would make herself laugh. That is the presence I am talking about, and my mother didn’t have it.

There were a handful of women that I felt close to—intimate is the word—in childhood. Aunt Dot and Aunt Ginny, my mother’s sister and sister-in-law, were down to earth, physically affectionate with their forever bony arms, women who talked with me, who seemed interested in what I had to say, who asked questions when they didn’t understand, and who explained when I didn’t. Aunt Clarice, my father’s sister, whose height, bronze-red hair, and imposing demeanor gave her the charm of a Disney villainess, had a different way of being present, so maybe “present” also means genuine, true to oneself. That is something that children notice. Aunt Clarice would take me on madcap adventures when I went to visit her in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta. One of her favorite activities was to “go junking” on Saturdays. This was the day homeowners could legally put out furniture and other belongings with their trash, left conveniently at the curbside in front of their houses. Clarice and I would get up early and drive around upscale neighborhoods in her red and white Falcon convertible, looking for the treasures that were other peoples’ trash.

In contrast to the other women in my family, my mother was like a paper doll, one of those fashionable ones. The Jackie Kennedy doll reminded me of her the most, with the pillbox hats and the small patent leather purses and the black and white suits that still managed to look ultra-feminine, yet also distant, reserved. Dress her up and stick her on the refrigerator—that’s what my grandmother would do, until Mama came home and said it looked tacky, even if it was the First Lady.

Mama’s spirit seemed thin, thin as paper, so although she could, and often did, lash out with her words, I believe she was terribly vulnerable. Like some really vulnerable people, she kept her hurts to herself, only using them to fuel the anger simmering just below the surface, until someone stumbled close enough to be within its reach. Then the surface split, her rage arced out and splattered—mostly me. I have often wondered where that vulnerability, the part of her that hid behind the shield of anger, came from.

I recently learned that when a parent of a baby or young child suffers a serious loss, such as the death of a partner, it can permanently impair that parent’s ability to love the child that they are left to raise alone. Maybe this is what happened to her. My father was terminally ill when he made the decision to adopt me so that my mother wouldn’t be left alone when he died. “That was Wallace’s decision,” she once told me, when asked why they had chosen to adopt a baby under those circumstances. “I didn’t want a baby,” she had added. Again, lashing out, and I could only, in that moment, be damaged by her words.

Now that she has been gone for three years, I see her words in a different light. If she indeed did not want a baby, what was she to do? Say no to her dying husband’s last great wish? But how in the world could she love that child? What other choice did she have but to pretend, to concentrate on the surface of things, to make it appear as if she loved me by dressing me up in those adorable frilly dresses, by having my hair done in those gravity-defying hairstyles, by insisting that my behavior always be that of the perfect Southern lady? And when I turned out to be more than a paper-doll, when it became obvious that I was a person, too, with my own wants, needs, and pain, that, unanswered, turned into outright rebellion, what else could she do but lash out? At least she had something, I think. At least she had that. Anger isn’t everything, or the best thing, but it is better than mute acceptance. It is real, and if it comes, often the best you can do is to acknowledge it and hope it allows you to use it, rather than overwhelming you in a huge wave that engulfs and then carries you away to some unknown country. I fear that my mother was carried away, so far away that she could never reach me, nor I her.

Now, looking back on my life with my mother, thinking about all those dresses, all those photos, all the report cards and newspaper clippings she kept about my every little achievement, I feel that I can only echo Robert Hayden’s concluding lines in “Those Winter Sundays”: “What did I know, what did I know, / Of love’s austere and lonely offices?”