YRKB
07-05-2011, 10:44 PM
My Mother
My mother loved to dance. I think it was the only thing she did love, truly.
The sables and fur trimmed jackets, trouser suits, sun hats, bug-eyed shades and pearl-set-in-gold pieces - though she never left the house without one or the other - never inspired the same vigour from her. She just put them together well, naturally.
She loved to dance. More than me, without a doubt. More than cocaine.
It was the 70s, we were on the West Coast - everyone loved cocaine just about the same.
It had to be just me and the maid home with her - her door would be half open and the music would be loud as she could get it, so you couldn't hear your own shoes across the corridor’s marble tile. She'd have the curtains drawn - so in the middle of the afternoon she’d be a silhouette against the blood orange backdrop, swaying, strutting and twisting to the funk - her red, manicured, ringed fingers making fists and figures high in the air above her.
She’d get tired and kick back on the chaise, nursing a whiskey for a small while. The time out would pass like it never happened, and she'd be back up – cooing her appreciation, lyrics rumbling from her tongue.
Sylvia Robinson, Cheryl Lynn, Andy Gibb, Cher, Patrice Rushen, Marvin Gaye - the records were on constant spin. When my father wasn't home.
When he came, on the days she missed hearing his car crawl into the drive – he broke her spirit like it was his birthday. I only remember him seeming happy when he seemed powerful, and it wasn’t any kind of happy I’ve known there could be since.
He made out it was about the noise. The embarrassment of her big, brash adversity to a quiet living alongside people who didn’t care about us.
Really, it was just snatching her out of that high and burying her alive.
It would send chills through me when I heard the first record strike up, even when I knew he was in another State on business. That she could even dare.
By then I think she would have been so high, she couldn’t have strung a sentence together to tell anyone – but she’d be dancing.
The last day I saw her, she lowered the volume and wandered out of her room – eyes kind of glassy, whiskey in her hand, and kissed me goodbye. If she was at the door for a while, I never recall.
I was going to stay at little Carlo’s place.
We heard the music pick up on our way out of the drive. Carlo’s Ma, Jean, didn’t say a word, but I remember him laughing a little bit.
Copyright Yafeu-Khamisi Rodway-Brown
My mother loved to dance. I think it was the only thing she did love, truly.
The sables and fur trimmed jackets, trouser suits, sun hats, bug-eyed shades and pearl-set-in-gold pieces - though she never left the house without one or the other - never inspired the same vigour from her. She just put them together well, naturally.
She loved to dance. More than me, without a doubt. More than cocaine.
It was the 70s, we were on the West Coast - everyone loved cocaine just about the same.
It had to be just me and the maid home with her - her door would be half open and the music would be loud as she could get it, so you couldn't hear your own shoes across the corridor’s marble tile. She'd have the curtains drawn - so in the middle of the afternoon she’d be a silhouette against the blood orange backdrop, swaying, strutting and twisting to the funk - her red, manicured, ringed fingers making fists and figures high in the air above her.
She’d get tired and kick back on the chaise, nursing a whiskey for a small while. The time out would pass like it never happened, and she'd be back up – cooing her appreciation, lyrics rumbling from her tongue.
Sylvia Robinson, Cheryl Lynn, Andy Gibb, Cher, Patrice Rushen, Marvin Gaye - the records were on constant spin. When my father wasn't home.
When he came, on the days she missed hearing his car crawl into the drive – he broke her spirit like it was his birthday. I only remember him seeming happy when he seemed powerful, and it wasn’t any kind of happy I’ve known there could be since.
He made out it was about the noise. The embarrassment of her big, brash adversity to a quiet living alongside people who didn’t care about us.
Really, it was just snatching her out of that high and burying her alive.
It would send chills through me when I heard the first record strike up, even when I knew he was in another State on business. That she could even dare.
By then I think she would have been so high, she couldn’t have strung a sentence together to tell anyone – but she’d be dancing.
The last day I saw her, she lowered the volume and wandered out of her room – eyes kind of glassy, whiskey in her hand, and kissed me goodbye. If she was at the door for a while, I never recall.
I was going to stay at little Carlo’s place.
We heard the music pick up on our way out of the drive. Carlo’s Ma, Jean, didn’t say a word, but I remember him laughing a little bit.
Copyright Yafeu-Khamisi Rodway-Brown