I called my mother on her 80th birthday last month. My brothers and sister and I were emailing each other as we’ve done every birthday of hers since she died more than six years ago. One of them remarked, “You know her phone is still working, right? You can hear her voice on her outgoing message.”
It hadn’t occurred to me before. I called immediately. “Hi,” my mom said. “I’m not here right now. But you know what to do.”
Of course, what she meant about knowing what to do was to leave a message. And in her thick Spanish accent it was kind of an inside joke between her and her friends and kids about the kind of old Hollywood movies she watched all day and too late into the evening, the kind of movies in which femmes fatale use that kind of language, and often in a foreign accent, to talk to their paramours. I remembered how her efforts at vamping always made me laugh.
It reminded me of the last conversation we had before she became ill. We were in Puerto Rico to bury my grandmother who had died at the age of 106, Thanksgiving Day. Her daughter, Maria de los Angeles, my mother, would survive her only by a month and a half, dying at 74. My brothers, sister, and I sat with her at a restaurant by the ocean that we’d been visiting since we were children. It was only partly the death of her mother that brought out her own most maternal instincts. “I’m worried about you,” she told us. “I’m worried about all of you when I’m not here anymore.”
Maybe that’s most of what motherhood is, preparing your children for when you are not here, so they know what to do. You know what to do.
I imagined I might call a lot, like at times when I didn’t know exactly what to do or I needed to talk it out to know what to do. Certainly she’d be a sympathetic listener. Or maybe I’d just call to hear her voice, which could not fail to make me smile. I have a friend who goes to the grave of a dear friend of his every year on his birthday to tell him a joke. I wanted to tell my mother a joke but couldn’t think of one. Still I imagined her voice breaking into her crazy staccato laughter, and I started to laugh, imagining she was telling a story. They were usually about her against the world, more particularly her squared off against another emissary from the dark continent of rudeness and cluelessness. The narrative turn—indicating that the black hat was about to get his comeuppance from the white hat, my mother—was premised on the same phrase for every story. “So, I said, ‘Excuuuuse me.’ ” That was my sister’s working title for my mother’s autobiography: “So I said, ‘Excuuuuse Me.’ ”
I imagined I wouldn’t call her at all. Isn’t that the default position of most children, at least as the mother sees it?
“Why don’t you call me? Is it so hard to pick up the phone?”
“Mom, you died.”
“That’s a terrible excuse.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll call.”
I imagined other people calling too. I’d tell friends to call her if they needed help or just wanted a friendly ear with lots of experience. “I’m not here right now, but you know what to do.” You know what to do. She would like lots of people calling her—St. Angie of the Cell Phone. It would’ve been like that time my grandmother had a plant with the leaf on it that looked like Jesus praying. Word got out about the plant—it was a miracle! A sign from God! There were lines around my grandmother’s apartment building in San Juan for people waiting to take the elevator upstairs nine flights and see the plant.
I imagined millions of people calling my mother at the same time, asking for help, praying, telling a joke. If there were that many people who needed to hear her voice, they’d never shut down her account, they could never take her away from the millions who needed her now and those who might need her in the future, even if she wasn’t really here. And maybe it was just right now she wasn’t here, but everything would be okay. Because you know what to do.
