Monday October 29, 2001

Anne Owens

I think the first song I ever heard must have been my mother's. Maybe that's why I fell in love with the flat, off-key and shaky one-part harmonies sung unabashedly with vacuum cleaner accompaniment.

Maybe that's why my mother's voice, delivered to me now over the crackle-pop of long-distance phone lines, seems flat in a new way. The rising and falling of the same voice that sang me that first song doesn't carry over the phone the same way it did when it filtered through the screens of our open living room windows, out to the quiet evenings where I sat sticky and wasp-stung under peach trees.

When I was 7 (maybe I was 6, but 7 was just around the corner,) my parents built a room onto the house for me - a place to live the 100 secret lives of a little girl. Downstairs, my mother lived the 100 secret lives of a grown woman. I put on mascara and danced to whatever was on the radio. She put vodka in cranberry juice and graced empty rooms with a clumsy a capella version of "Dear Prudence."

A decade or so later, when my secret lives were made of bad boyfriends, late-night phone calls and my mother's vodka, she took all of her secrets and harmonies to a new house, and a new man.

In the throes of my parents' messy divorce and my own messy life, I converted the upstairs window that had filtered all of my lives out to the neighborhood into a doorway. I would pad up and down the quiet streets of my little town, watching the blips and smears of other people's lives through their windows - rows and rows of yellow squares, lit up like TV screens.

I sat in narrow alleyways between buildings and listened to all the music that came seeping out into warm evenings from other people's windows, and I have never loved a song more than when it came to me from someone else's life - silent, invisible.

I slipped in and out of my bedroom window silently and randomly - a funny upstairs-ghost thing. I skipped dinner every night and forgot all the functional purposes of doorknobs. I announced my presence with the occasional creak of floorboards and the hiss of water running through pipes. My mother, with all the messiness of ex-husbands and angry daughters, simply stopped coming through the door at all.

She tells me now, crackle-pop, that she wants to buy a boat and live out the rest of her days on the sea. I listen to her tall tales and melodies over long, long distance in my little house with inoperable window latches. She tells me, crackle pop, that she loves me. I tell her, as the soundtrack of our lives slips by in the background unnoticed and unaccompanied, that I love her, too.

I must have told this story 100 different times with 100 different words. I've told it bleary-eyed and red-faced. I've told it like a fable and like a long joke with no punch line ("So, my mom and this stranger walk into a bar ... "). I've told it in mosaics of broken dishes and broken homes. I've yelled it at my mother and explained it quietly to my father. I must have told it 100 times, and I think I will probably tell it 100 more, and it still will never be the same.

In the end, you can only love your mother. After all the time you spent running away from her, you always find yourself coming back home to her. She remains flawless, even when you have seen the immense proportions of her flaws. My mother sang me the first song I ever heard, and in the end, it's the only song I know.

I sometimes sit in my own window now and watch the parade of other people's lives up and down my street. I listen to all the sounds and songs and secrets that leak out of other people's windows. I sing my own and turn out the light. I turn off the TV screen of my bedroom window, and I wait for my mother to sing me to sleep.