the men on my mother’s roof

brett ann stanciu

IN HER EIGHTIES, MY MOTHER BELIEVED PEOPLE LIVED ON THE ROOF OF HER HOUSE. Someone had stolen her sewing machine and was banging away with it above her bedroom ceiling. 

The men lived down a hall no one else could see. My mother said she offered them her homemade quilts at night, “As New Mexico gets cold,” but asked for the quilts to be returned every morning. The quilts, after all, were hers. My father, a theoretical physicist, tried to reason with her. If he had never seen these people, then surely the men did not exist. 

My mother hadn’t fully trusted his judgement, ever, that I knew, and she didn’t change now. At dinner, she set the table for four. When he insisted only two were eating dinner, she replied, “Two seems meager.” 

The pandemic made my parents’ old age very meager indeed, isolated and dull, their children rooted on the east coast. With nothing to do but fume at the internet and no hobby interests, my mother lost her mooring. She drank wine in the afternoons. She was jealous of my father’s writing, the friendships he had nurtured for decades with colleagues and former students. She hadn’t seen her sole surviving sister in years. My sister and I prodded our parents to move back east, but we were stymied by the conundrum of where and how they would move, as if old age were something that might be put off, kicked down the proverbial road of time. 

On Zoom, my mother shared that she had been living in Europe with a man who—she waved a hand dismissively—had to go. “You know,” she said.

We didn’t know. I refrained from asking what I wanted to know. Did you love this stranger? Did you kiss beside the Eiffel Tower? 

When she returned to New Mexico, her belongings had been removed from her house and arranged in another house two doors down from where she used to live. Everything she owned, that is, except a set of silver dishes. “It’s very strange,” she pondered, “this whole thing. Someone gave me this house two weeks ago.” 

My father showed her the deed she had signed thirty years before. “See?” he asked. 

TWO DAYS BEFORE HER 85TH BIRTHDAY, I signed into a Zoom call. 

I knew little of my mother’s childhood. She had grown up in Toledo and spent summers in Minnesota with the extended family. Her right kneecap was marked with a white scar about a half-inch long from when she crawled into an abandoned car and cut herself on a broken windshield. 

She told us that her mother had systemic lupus erythematosus. I had heard this, but I hadn’t known she and her husband traveled to Detroit, seeking a diagnosis for the disease that plagued her. “My mother had lesions all over. She itched a lot, and she was…irritable.” My mother laughed in that way I found particularly annoying, as if she were above the world’s petty problems. “She wasn’t very nice.” She and her sister Nancy were left to themselves. Their father, a missionary, was charged with starting a new church, and his wife did everything expected of a minister’s wife: play the organ, teach Sunday school, polish her family spit-shine flawless, serve the congregation’s needy. 

“We had a gas stove in the basement for canning. Or maybe it was upstairs. I can’t remember. My mother said she was going to stick her head in the oven and turn on the gas. Nancy and I were like—” she trilled her voice in a falsetto, as if she were joking “— No! No! Don’t do that.” 

I asked, “How old were you?” 

“Eight. Maybe.”

“And then your mother had another child.”

Her mouth bunched into a moue. “Nancy and I had to take care of the baby. Suzie was our baby—mine and Nancy’s. In her birthday card to me, Suzie wrote, ‘Thank you for being my mother.’ Then Nancy grew up, and she left. She wanted nothing to do with any of us.”

I asked, “Did you ever talk about any of this with your father?”

“No, no. There was no talking with my father.”

My father asked her to describe the best part of her life.

Summers, they drove to rural Minnesota where her extended family were farming. She and her sisters bunked in with the cousins. She got to ride a horse. “I loved that horse and those visits. It was just kids playing all day.”

I walked away from my laptop’s camera, eased a log in the woodstove, and swept tears from my eyes.

WHEN MY SECOND AND LAST CHILD WAS BORN, my mother refused to visit the baby.

That summer, I cried frequently. One afternoon in Montpelier, Vermont, I held my baby in one arm while struggling to dig quarters for the meter out of my cut-offs’ hip pocket. A woman hurried from an outdoor restaurant table and fed the meter with her coins. “Your baby,” she gushed, “is beautiful. In that yellow dress, she looks like a rose blossom.” Cradling my infant in my arms, sunglasses on, I walked down the street to pick up cards for our maple sugaring business, weeping, weeping.

When my daughters were nine and fifteen, their father and I divorced. That summer, I flew with my two daughters to New Mexico. My mother argued with my oldest, who was seventeen, about how to use her washing machine.

She ordered us to leave her house, shooing us with her hands as if my children and I were stray dogs. I rented a hotel room. My youngest swam alone underwater in the pool. My oldest lay on a lounge chair, staring at her iPhone.

I would never make my mother happy.

THE DOMINANT THEME OF MY CHILDHOOD was that I kept taking things from her. As a child and teenager, she forbade me to ask for shoes or clothes. We lived a solidly middle-class life, but we were not in the family endeavor together. She decided how she spent her hard-earned nurse wages, choosing the clothes she bought me, even as a teenager. When I grew up, she accused me of stealing from her house, claiming I took turquoise earrings, flowered sheets, my sister’s collection of Faulkner novels. 

In that video chat where my mother shared those flashes of her childhood—a distant father, a troubled mother—I recalled a cheap kid-lit paperback—House of Stairs by William Sleator—that drifted around the bookshelves in our New Hampshire village home. I wasn’t a fan of science fiction or horror, but one gloomy winter school vacation I read the book, mesmerized. The book’s setting took place entirely on stairs without railings or risers suspended in a void. A band of orphans had inexplicably found themselves on those metal slats, with no clear direction for their lives, surrounded by emptiness. Listening to my mother, I remembered this book, as if I were traveling via my mother’s story into murky bygone years, clinging with my mother to a chilly piece of metal, surrounded by an abyss. For the first time I had a glimpse of my mother and her sister as two little girls, frightened of their father and fearful for their mother. A door eased ajar, offering me a shadowy view of a childhood she had concealed for so much of her life. 

Despite our murky screens, I saw how the lives of those two troubled sisters had spread into my life. Even more, I saw how the missionary’s wife—the young woman driven nearly mad by unexplained lesions and itching, the toll of motherhood and keeping up the 1940s appearances, the grandmother I remembered who loved a lavender pantsuit her daughters bought her—had rooted and gnawed into my broken marriage and my daughters’ compromised childhood. All these years, I had been running from her, making my life in cold and rural Vermont, seeking a geographical cure doomed to fail.

THE FINAL PHOTO OF MY DAUGHTERS, their father, and me—pre-divorce—we snapped at Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico. My husband and I furrow our brows. Our youngest clutches her teddy bear, our teenager wears red lipstick. None of us understand what is happening, what unseen forces are sculpting our lives.

THE DAY AFTER THAT TUESDAY ZOOM HOUR, my father called and said my mother had suffered a heart attack. I opened my laptop and bought a ticket. The flight was scheduled for dawn. Eventually, my daughters went to bed. I remained awake late, stitching together small pieces of our lives—rescheduling my youngest’s wisdom teeth extraction, Venmo-ing money for groceries, stashing skeins of yarn into my suitcase for the sweater project I was knitting. I washed our teacups and swept up mud crumbles at the kitchen door.

I had been in a foul headspace for months. Loneliness haunted me, the sheer solitude of my bed and my life, of raising daughters with no one to troubleshoot the hard things—what curfew made sense for a sixteen-year-old, anyway?—and no one to share the satisfied joy of parenting. The pandemic, a steady but dull job I disliked, the lack of affection and sex, of someone to commiserate with, had brought me to a clenched-jaw abyss of sadness. I wanted to joke with a partner, let’s just fend for dinner, each doing our own thing, together. Bleakness suffused me, and for the first time in my life, I began to consider what a relief my own death might be. I didn’t contemplate suicide—I was determined not to stamp that curse on my children—but I was bone and soul weary. Saturday afternoons, while my daughters worked, I sat on the couch in the sunlight, cozied up with our two house cats, knitting, yet never felt replenished. I mirrored a leaking bucket.

In the middle of the night, my daughters sleeping, I kissed our cats goodbye and picked up my suitcase. I stood at the door for a moment, looking at our kitchen walls that I had painted lemon-custard yellow. How far I would have to travel. So much lay ahead of me. When would I return to my beloved daughters? 

I double-checked that I had my boarding pass and ID. Then I stepped on the back porch and closed the glass door quietly behind me. A curl of gleaming crescent moon hung over the neighbors’ metal roof. My whole life I had fixated on myself and my story, terrified by the scary abyss surrounding me, like the endless firmament overhead. For years—years!—I had filled my body and soul with alcohol to keep the abyss at bay. But now, for the first time, as my mother neared the earthly end of her life, I imagined her as a girl in a 1940s ruffle-hemmed dress and starched stockings. 

I hefted my suitcase into the back of my Subaru, slammed the hatch, and tipped my face up to admire the starry night’s radiance. Earlier that evening, a cold rain had fallen, and the driveway smelled of mud. A milk truck rumbled down the road. The dark swallowed its red taillights, and I was alone again. I wondered about my grandmother, the woman who had scratched her skin bloody and bore a baby she didn’t want. Did she wear lavender in those days, or did that love blossom in her later years? 

I turned my car key, rolled out of our driveway, and headed into the two-thousand-mile journey across the country to my old parents. Years ago, my grandmother had seen a flouncy blouse in a store in one of our cousin-jammed summer vacations. Too long displayed in a window, its brown cotton was permanently sun-stained on one side, its price slashed. She told my mother I would love that blouse, and my mother should buy it for me. I wore that gift to rags. In replacement, I bought myself a thrift-store pink blouse, the color of the wild mallow flowers behind our house, their centers bright yellow coins, shimmering with nectar, swaying with bees busily feeding their hive.