Taking the last few steps, she blurted, "Cloris!  What are you doing here," before her words trailed into the internal echo of her head.  I thought you were dead!

Looking down, she knew she would not receive an answer.  Part of her was elated about this fact.

Disoriented and floating in the midst of the sweet, flowery scent, she was unaware if it had served as a mask or an escape.

           

"The girl—her mommy—just didn't like her anymore, I guess," she said, breathing a sigh, and locking her gaze with Maureen's.

"Why," Maureen returned, as she filled her pail with sand again?

"Dunno," Lilly responded, digging her sneaker deeper into the dirt, before shifting her weight to the left and noting the indentation her pudgy figure had left in the sand.  "That's what happened on TV last night.  I guess when mommies don't like kiddy cats anymore, they leave them in a field.  There were so many flowers."

Maureen, whose locks and lips served as orange threads to her Irish roots and the father she had been too young to know, trembled, trying to mask the fear as she deeply inhaled the fragrances of spring, surrounded by purple lilacs, yellow honey suckles, and pink azaleas.  Inevitably, they were replaced by "that smell."

The ground thundered as her mother approached, bleeding, as always, an oral exhaust of alcohol.

With half-lit eyes, Maureen exclaimed, "Mommy!  Look what I made," pointing to the ground-rising sandcastle.

But her mother's eyes only beamed with hatred and through the cracked slit of her mouth verbal marbles escaped, tumbling over one another.

"Get up," she screamed, throwing her string-like hair back!  "You get up right now!  Ladies don't play and get dirty like pigs.  You get up right now and get into that house before I slap you."

Rising from the ground and flushed with embarrassment, Maureen turned toward the house, unable to look at Lilly again as her castle returned to the individual grains of sand of which it had been comprised.

Feeling as if she were internally compressed by a vice, Maureen externally groped for a few spare inches of space in the crowd in which to adjust her gown.  Those around here seemed eager to stand out among the hundreds; she had hoped to get lost in them.

"You see," she pleaded with Lilly.  "It's probably dragging on the ground," as a bolt of fear shot through her.

"So what, Maureen?  Look around you.  No one's gown fits perfectly.  Who's going to see how long it is?  You'll only be in it for an hour anyway.'

"You don't understand.  My mother…"

The meticulously-mowed athletic field, usually alive with football games, cheering pompom girls, and bleacher-restrained fans, had been transformed into a stage for the last high school walk, and the air was assaulted with the blare of Pomp and Circumstance as the tassel-sporting procession filed past the pride-beaming parents—and Maureen's mother, a motley collection of expression, emotion, and body parts that never seemed able to fuse into a cohesive person.

The scent of the roses crossed Maureen's path as Lilly's parents carried them to their daughter, bestowing her with hugs and congratulations.

"Look, mother," Maureen proclaimed!  "I made it.  And I graduated with honors."

As befitting a person who has lived on a liquid diet, her mother was a poster child for emaciation.

"Like everyone else," she spat back, her voice throwing fine needles that were nonetheless piercing. "And what good are they going to do you, anyway?  The real world doesn't give a crap how high your grades were."

Fighting the disdain coursing through her body and attempting to salvage what could have been their latest train wreck, Maureen looked down, as her mother turned and slowly retreated behind her.

"Where are you going," Maureen asked.

"Into the school."

"Into the school?  For what?"

"A drink—to celebrate."

"Ah, mother, this is a school: They don't serve alcohol here."

Stretching her rubber neck, she lifted her head.  "No alcohol?  What kind of school is this?  Hundreds graduating today," she waved toward the gown-clad crowd, "and all these parents want to celebrate—and they don't even give you the means?  What kind of place is this?"

Turning, she moped toward the parking lot, as Maureen's degree began to disintegrate into dust in her very hands.

Punching the numbers with her thumb, she held the receiver with her right hand and the document in her left.

"Cloris?"

"Around here—around."

"What?"

"It's melting and going around.  Who's that?"

"It's Maureen, your daughter!"  She could hear the ice clinking in her mother's glass and instinctively pushed the vase on her kitchen table away from her.

"Is th-that," she slurred?

"What?  I can't understand you."

So deep had been the trench that her mother had dug in her soul, that she had no longer been able to pull enough endearment out of it to even call her "mother."

"Could it be?"

"Oh, Cloris, will you put the damn drink down long enough so that I can tell you something!"

"Tell, oh, tell, just…"

"Cloris, will you listen to me for one minute!  It's official—as of this morning."

"Morning?"

Releasing a cyclonic sigh, she continued, "The divorce.  I signed the papers this morning.  Thank God it's finally over."

"Over?  It shouln't've begun.  It takes a lot to hold a marriage together and I knew you certainly couldn't."

"What?  After all I went through with him, that's the only thing you can say?  After all I told you?  After all you knew?"

"I know one thing—and that's that you didn't stand a chance in hell of keeping it together."

"But, Cloris!  Look who's talking!  What about your own?"

The ice clinked.  The telephone clicked.

Holding the divorce decree and focusing on her freshly etched signature, she vigorously shook her head from side to side, momentarily swearing that it flashed her mother's name instead of her own.

Were my mother's comments about my divorce really about her own, Maureen wondered?  Was all of her negativity about me really about herself all along?

Carrying the cellophane-wrapped blossoms, Maureen penetrated the corridor, each of the wheelchairs positioned like sentry guards outside the rooms to which they belonged, and the stooped over, wrinkled bodies in them somehow appeared alike.  Half-soulless, they seemed as if they had all been circling some invisible airport, awaiting clearance to land in the next world.  How her mother could suddenly appear so indistinguishable and benign after the trail she had left, she could not understand.

Head bowed and frail, Maureen's mother had lapsed into semi-consciousness in the wheelchair outside of her room, a state that had ironically characterized most of her life.

"Hello, Cloris!  How are you doing?  Look, I brought you some flowers.  Aren't they pretty?"

Raising her head, she asked, "Who?"

"You, Cloris.  I'm your daughter, Maureen."

"No, we've never met…I was playing."

"I don't understand."

"I was playing…look inside…in the sand…I started a castle."

"A what?"

"Look.  See the hole in the sand.  I started digging.  Bring me my shovel, will you."

Taking the last few steps, she blurted, "Cloris!  What are you doing here," before her words trailed into the internal echo of her head.  I thought you were dead!  Like Ping-Pong balls, they bounced from wall to wall in her brain, but she was unable to catch them.

Looking down, she knew she would not receive an answer, unable to determine the emotional or intellectual source from which the question came and unable to account for the decades of her life which had somehow been reduced to minutes—the minutes it took her to reach the casket.

Cocooned in blue chiffon, her mother's body was domed in silver bristle, her cheek and nose bones chiseled, as if made of alabaster rock, and her skin had weathered into leather.  Now, she was completely devoid of soul.  Ironically, it was the first time that she had been able to distinguish any of her features.

Chewing on the events of her life, as if they were the cholesterol of trauma, Maureen allowed the sweet scent of the coffin-flanked flowers to bathe her nostrils with pain-anesthetizing wafts.

Spring had returned.  The meticulously arranged headstones reduced the otherwise velvet green lawn to a checkerboard and the scent of the season floated through the air like olfactory notes of music.

Like a sponge, Maureen had absorbed the abuse and the word projectiles and the emotional destruction until she had been numbed into nothingness.  But as the casket was slowly lowered into the fresh, earth-reeking cut, and that physical form which she had come to identify as her mother had just as imperceptibly disintegrated into dust, an internal hand wrung her out.  Like blood oozing from open wounds, it trickled down into the trench with her.

Tossing a single rose toward it, she somehow knew that her mother, despite the trail she had forged here on earth, would now bloom into a beautiful bouquet.