Pearls

Around my mother’s neck was a necklace: a string of jaggedly spherical crystal beads. I don’t know why she chose that necklace for that night. Her sister’s wedding perhaps called for the touch of a family heirloom, or perhaps she simply liked the way it sat above her collarbone in a path of smooth stones. All the same, it was on this night that she chose to wear it — this favorite piece of hers — a gift from her late grandmother.

On my mother’s lap I sat in a curl — no older than seven, with little patience for adults or conversation or wedding parties. With my ear to her breast, her voice reverberated as though echoing out of a dim cave in the wells of her chest.

My mother’s boyfriend was tall and lanky. He had a reddish face and his ears looked as though they had been pinched by the lobes and stretched out an extra inch. His eyes were gentle, but I had no taste for men that were not my father, and was too shy to accept his numerous offers to dance, as my mother eased naturally in and out of conversation with the other women at the table.

"She’s living in Corpus now."

"That’s right. She married an optometrist, didn’t she?"

"Charlie Campbell."

The band music, these women’s voices, the vibration of my mother’s chest, had all begun to blend into a slow rhythm, and I stared at the old women on the makeshift dance floor waltzing with their sons.

Between my right fingers were the jewels that settled around my mother’s neck, that spiraled and entwined in the small of my hand, tightening at her throat, twisting effortlessly, the cool stones rolling over the tips of fingers, sliding across palm.

Had my evening ended like this, the entire memory would have been lost in the pile of my past like any other childhood moment. But it did not. In a snap as quiet as the sound of a pin popping through fabric, my mother’s necklace unleashed from her throat, a ripple of beads falling to the floor like rain. She gasped, pushing me from her lap, leaving me wide-eyed and mesmerized by the glittering pellets that rolled and hopped off the carpet, some even reeling their way to the hard edge of the dance floor. Under the table, past the chair legs, she and her boyfriend bent over desperately, plucking the shimmering rocks and filling their hands with them.

My mother never spoke a word of that night in my presence. I was not scolded, nor punished. Instead I watched her eyes build a thin glassy layer that she would not allow to form into tears. I watched her try to string them back together days later — new thread, fewer beads — a sort of concentrated muteness drawn over her features. A reproach in itself in the meticulous movement her figures made to lead a needle through tiny clear holes. A lesson that could not have been learned from scolding: here the actual ache of guilt in my stomach. A lesson in my mother’s silence, and that image of cascading beads, a shower of crystalline globes like tears from the caverns of her chest.