Megan Mayhew Bergman
How to Make Collard Greens
Her hair fell into the skillet.
This is how you make good collard greens, I
said. With hot sauce
and sugar. Sugar keeps
the bitterness away.
But your mother knew more about bitter tastes
than I. She
rinsed her mouth with water before eating, the angry wash of
medicine inside of her body made even peaches taste of metal.
*
Her hair fell into the pages of my open book.
I closed the book and vowed never to open it again.
I wanted to keep those pieces of her inside forever.
*
I would like grandchildren, she said one night
over dinner.
What I couldn’t say was this:
it is strange to make love in the face of grief.
Another thing I couldn’t say:
I am not ready.
And another:
I may never be ready.
Her hair fell into the sink.
It mixed with my hair.
And yours, her son.
That summer, I watched it climb the walls of the sink when I
washed my hands.
*
I arrived home, obsessed with health, lettuce
leaves from the market curling over the top of my canvas bag, and
thought of her garden.
Marigolds warding off deer, sugar snap peas clinging to the wire
fence, buttercrunch lettuce bursting from the newly warmed
Vermont
soil. Zucchinis the
size of my arm, mustard-colored flowers coiling around them,
raspberries underneath the shadow of the corn.
Your father plucking rocks from the rototiller, pretending to
smile. The arthritic
horse grazing, unfenced.
*
In college a professor read to us from Pliny.
He read: some
were praying to die from the very fear of dying.
Many were lifting their hands to the Gods; but the greater
part imagined that there were no Gods left anywhere.
I had a dream about the streets of Pompeii.
It was day but darker than night.
Vesuvius was blazing.
The rich were pushed out to sea by their slaves, canvas sails
limp with smoke.
We were in the streets.
All of us.
Waiting. People always
say that they would make love their last day on earth, but we were
scared out of our fucking minds.
*
We didn’t count days, we weren’t scientific.
We merely fell into each other after nights at the bar.
You said to mark the calendar, and sometimes I remembered.
Some days I was not convinced I should love anything more
than dogs.
My cycle was not with the moon, it was slave to
irregular moons, rogue moons, infidel moons, moons looping Jupiter,
praising Saturn. But we
became astronomers. We
would find the right time.
This one thing we could give her.
We should give
her. I wasn’t sure if I
wanted to give her.
*
I used to think I could get pregnant from
toilet seats, long kisses.
Still a virgin at seventeen I once drove thirty miles to a
town I’d never been to, a town that wasn’t a town but a highway
exit, and unwrapped a pregnancy test in the bathroom of a video
lottery joint, fluorescent lights popping overhead.
I hovered over the toilet, still in my soccer uniform,
speed-reading directions as I urinated on the tip of a plastic wand.
The white tile was smeared with mud and hair, a
trickle of brown water leaked from the back of the toilet.
I got the result I wanted.
I ate two bags of potato chips on the way home,
licked my fingers, sang to the radio with the windows down.
Now, with envy, I think about that ripe body.
*
I wanted to be the kind of woman who could deal
with a snake in her backyard, but was not.
I found one, as thick as a pencil, the color of creamed
coffee, coiled on the patio in the late afternoon sun.
It tried to look menacing.
I thought of your mother, holding the Gartner
snake that has lived in the pool shed for years by the tail.
She was standing in the grass, wearing her blue one piece
bathing suit, a baseball cap, loose shorts, smiling.
Behind her the Stargazer lilies were in full bloom around the
pool. The dogs stood on
the first step, submerged to their bellies in unnaturally blue
water.
My next door neighbor came by with his
seven-year-old, who smiled and put the snake in a Mason jar.
I’ll release him in
my yard, he said, running
off. I pictured him
laughing at me over dinner.
That woman afraid of the tiny snake.
I recognized courage more often than I used it.
I remembered your mother no longer had
eyebrows. I remembered
the story she told us about the abortion she performed on the German
Shephard, how she had cried over each fetus.
I remembered nights, driving home from dinner with the
headlights off in the country dark, where she named every bone in a
dog’s body.
*
Fifty cents worth of collard seeds could feed a
family of four for a year.
That’s what the farmer told me when I bought two bunches.
What about a family of two?
I asked.
Don’t forget the neckbones, he said.
You have to boil them with the neckbones till they want to
fall apart.
I stood in front of the sink, remembering the
sound of her kitchen with all of us in it.
Our house was quiet; the city spilling noise into the vacant
lot behind our fence—donut trucks, sirens, lawn mowers.
Somehow dog hair had already woven itself into the asparagus
heads. I scrubbed the
collards clean for half an hour, snapped peas until my fingers bled.
Would we be those people?
The people with the quiet house?
*
We painted our bedroom blue.
It came out darker than I wanted, truer even, as it always
does, never the color you think you are choosing in the store.
I examined it from the bed, naked, your head on my hip.
The spaniel curled into the backs of my knees.
You said, I love you, and stared at the ceiling
fan.
The way you cook is making me fat, you added.
*
Once a week we ate collards.
I washed the giant leaves, pressed them flat into kitchen
towels to dry. I ripped
ribbons of leaf away from the central stems and tossed them into
simmering stock. The
kitchen smelled like a back alley cafeteria, a place my cornbread
had nothing on.
I insisted on draining the pot.
This here, I said, is the pot liquor.
Full of antioxidants, beta carotene.
I was steeling us against disease, you
understand. Preparing
my body for life.
*
I started saving voicemails, afraid I would
lose the sound of your voice, her voice, anyone’s voice that I loved
and needed to hear again.
It’s me,
I’m coming home.
Would
you remember to pick up milk?
I was
just thinking about you.
*
Her hair fell into everything.
It disappeared, then started to grow as if it belonged to
someone else. Curling
in new places, astonishingly silver.
*
I sat with my face in my hands at the doctor’s
office.
We don’t have much time, I said.
The nurse handed me a tissue, then forms for
fertility testing. A
set of embarrassing plastic cups.
I don’t know if it matters, but I’m late this
month, I said between sobs.
But I’m always late.
I sweated through my gray t-shirt as I waited
for the test results. I was
sure they’d given me the pregnancy test out of sympathy.
The rabbit is dead, the nurse whispered.
I did not understand.
In other words, she said, you’re pregnant.
I returned the cups.
*
I couldn’t tell you or not tell you.
My voice was lodged somewhere else.
I pointed toward my flat stomach.
Yes, I finally said.
Standing there with your bike in the kitchen,
red mud on the carpet, you grinned awkwardly.
*
I was afraid of babies and afraid of
miscarriage and afraid of everything.
These feelings had not disappeared with the blue line.
Pregnancy’s magic had limits.
It could make me a mother.
It could not make me fearless.
Your mother came into town the week of my first
ultrasound.
I didn’t realize it was vaginal, she said.
We pretended not to be embarrassed.
Then, on the screen, a pulse.
A sac, rimmed in light.
A flashing heartbeat.
Proof.
*
I felt I was growing a boy.
Seventeen weeks and six days. The night before we found out,
she kicked for the first time, responding to the warm hand you’d
wrapped around my stomach. As
if she knew it was what you needed.
*
We spent time in Vermont with your family.
Winter was stronger than the year before.
I fell in the driveway, skinned my hands on the ice.
Ate Italian sugar cookies by the woodstove.
Let the cats roost in my lap.
Your mother took walks in the snow, watched
movies with the corgi on her blanketed lap.
You stayed busy, fixing doors, mixing gasoline
for the snow mobiles.
We ate dinners in front of the television, pretended nothing was
wrong. I did not sleep
for two weeks.
*
When my grandmother was alive, she made New
Year’s supper—collard greens, hog jowl, black-eyed peas.
Time to eat our “mess” of greens, she always said.
I had turned up my nose those years, loathed the smell of her
pot, thought her superstitious and country.
This year I put a pot of greens on, heavy on
the brown sugar and hot sauce.
It didn’t matter that we were up north, or that the collards
were frozen and fell from the bag like green ice chips.
I had never wished so hard for a year of good
luck.
*
I collected myself when we returned home,
planned things.
I took it easy on mothers now.
If I was bad at directions, parallel parking and math, it was
my own fault. Not being
breastfed was inconsequential to my development.
I was in charge of my own flaws—they were not given to me.
Suddenly, my own mother was a saint, her
sandwiches priceless and perfect.
I used to begin sentences on mothering with, “I will never.”
Now I said, “I hope I can be as good.”
What harm would I unleash?
A new version of myself lay months around the corner and I
could not predict what it would be, or if it would be any good at
all.
*
I got to know a body that was not mine.
This body was slow.
This body embarrassed me, solicited looks and spontaneous
touching. This body
could not be satisfied.
This body did not know if it was happy or sad. This body made a new
bed for the cat at night.
She nested in the slope of my hip, rested her chin on the
baby-full swell of my stomach.
*
Down east, they say a cooled collard leaf can
cure a headache. They
say collards got many families through lean times.
But nothing is working for your mother.
It feels as though we are rounding a cul-de-sac, waiting for
a path forward, or a path anywhere.
Our questions are answerless.
You come home from the clinic tired and
smiling. I find you
upstairs hours later with red eyes.
I try to wrap my arms around you at night from behind, but my
stomach presses on your back, keeps me distant.
I am a grounded bird.
Vulnerable.
Worried I will not be able to fly north if something happens.
*
Have I grown this child with cottage cheese,
chocolate-covered pretzels, and strawberry yogurt?
It is time again to plant the garden in
Vermont.
Last spring we were with your mother.
We grabbed handfuls of heirloom seeds from plastic bins at
the feed store, bought seedling kale and collards.
Our fingers froze in the newly defrosted soil.
She reminded us to make moats around the seedlings—to help
them receive water, but keep them from drowning.
We planted the collards six inches apart, a half-inch into
the rich compost. We
wanted everything in perfect rows, dreamed of arugula drizzled in
olive oil and salt.
Down here, the first collards will mature in
March, though purists wait again for the first frost.
They’ll be boiled with neckbones and butter, hamhocks and
cider vinegar. The
leaves will be torn not cut, tossed into black cauldrons, served
with cornbread to soak up the pot liquor.
We’ll head to the farmer’s market for a few pounds.
A mess of greens, my grandmother would say.
Unsure of what the spring holds, we will learn
the new sounds of sleepless nights.
We’ll get by doing the things we know how to
do, and those we don’t.
Megan Mayhew Bergman