The one time my mother showed an ounce of compassion was when she set eyes on me in the delivery room and, fleetingly moved by the sight of my future suffering, asked God for forgiveness and named me Mercy.
She, of course, had another justification for the choice of her only child’s given name, alleging it was because “God is mercy and the Bible teaches us that we need to show compassion to others.” Yet I still have vivid memories of the day she wouldn’t allow the new pediatrician with skin the warm, rich color of earth to measure my leg for a brace. “Don’t touch my daughter,” Mom hissed, “I won’t let your kind lay a finger on her!” Holding my breath, I watched the doctor’s eyebrows arch like bent-over comas, her mouth gape, her arm freeze in the air with the stethoscope dangling from her hand as if she’d been fossilized by the assault. Then, without any warning, Mom grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the exam room. And I flinched under the power of her grip and the weight of my shame. I was five years old.
My childhood memories of Mom’s social graces are like the pageantry of bigotry, each exhibition more disturbing than the previous one. When I was six, she returned fuming from a parent-teacher meeting because the school had hired a new counselor with pierced earlobes. “But Mom, I like Mister Elliot. He’s really nice.” I whimpered. “He is a faggot,” she snapped, “a degenerate and a sinner.” She spewed the words like I spitted sunflower seeds in our backyard, aiming for the rusty coffee canister I’d placed by the fence. I remember dreaming that night that Mom had shriveled up and turned into a dry, dark, hard walnut.
She didn’t just curse people like Doctor Regina and Mister Elliot; she despised foreigners, atheists, liberals, and epicureans equally. There wasn’t anything that required cooking in the fridge, nothing flavorful either, and certainly no sweet indulgences of any kind, not even a juice box. She, on the other hand, smoked two packs of Virginia Slims every day until she died. Even when her lungs were too weak to push air past her throat, she still smoked, taking long drags as if baiting her morbid cancer to hurry her to the finishing line. In those last weeks, I sat by her bedside listening to the whirring of the oxygen tank, mesmerized by the white clouds flowing out of her nostrils between the prongs of her nasal cannula and wishing for a swifter and gentler death.
I knew of ways to grant her a better end. My grandpa, with his shirt stuck to his sweat, veins of soil under his chipped fingernails, and mud on his shoes, taught me the mystery of trees, the secrets of flowers, and the power of plants. And I knew their language.
From the day I could stand on my two chubby legs, he walked me through his perfect rows of pots, containers, and raised garden beds, coaching me on their sounds and scents. And every year, as soon as the chilly winds yielded to spring, we knelt side by side, digging holes in the dirt and planting new seeds. By the time I was six, I had become an amateur botanist and lover of the woodlands, and by age nine, my nose knew no bounds. I could identify the notes of thyme, oregano, basil, parsley, rosemary, and many more. He showed me how to pinch out mint bloom buds to stir more leaf growth, how to stop coriander from bolting when it was stressed out, and let dill grow where it was sowed. “Because dill hates being disturbed,” he whispered, cupping the bright, feathery leaves with his knobby fingers. As I grew older, his teachings broadened, extending to the nearby forests and meadows. He showed me how to recognize the whispering tunes of pines, elms, oaks, and birches, and I watched him have entire conversations with hardwoods, his calloused hands resting on their bark. Still, woodland flowers were always my favorites: the cheerful primroses, romantic violets, humble daisies, the bright yellow common gorses smelling like coconut, the pale pink dog roses clasping onto thickets and fences as if they were lifebuoys. They all had stories to tell, but the first one to whisper hers to me was jasmine. I was eleven.
Earlier that day, fixing myself a sandwich after school, the ceramic plate escaped my drying towel and shattered on the floor. It was the one that said, “He has risen. Happy Easter.” I haphazardly glued the pieces back together, but before I could slip it under the stack of religious theme plates piled in the cupboard, Mom walked into the kitchen. “You stupid, stupid girl!” she hollered, tearing it out of my hands, “I should have given you up for adoption when I had a chance!” Chin down, I kept my eyes on my shoes; I didn’t have to look up to see what her face showed; the curling lips and glaring eyes were always there when she spat the familiar words. “Get out before I do something I’ll regret, so help me God.”
I flew out of the house, made a beeline to my grandparent's home, and bolted into their kitchen, rattled and disheveled. It was Grandpa’s idea to have me prune back the overgrown climbing jasmine. “It’ll do you good, buttercup,” he softly said, patting me on the head. “Jasmine has a way of chasing worries away.” Minutes later, with my head buried between the star-shaped little white flowers, I suddenly felt every pore of my face open up, thousands of tiny windows laying bare and welcoming the vine’s sweet scent. My nose tickled, my nerves untangled, and tremors ran up my arms, but I didn’t move, afraid that the feeling would go away if I did. The longer I stood still in the mending moisture, the more beautiful that day was turning out to be. It was the first time I sensed my soul weave itself into the earth’s ether, but not the last.
From that moment on, I was hooked. I needed to touch, sniff, and rub on my cheek every new leaf and bloom sprouting in the neighborhood; then, in stillness, I waited for my skin to capture the scented message. Already a magnet for bullies, I became the laughingstock of my fellow fifth-graders, who followed me on the sidewalks as I hobbled to school. But I didn’t care; I was enthralled by this sense of smell that opened me up to a new world and made me forget my lameness and the shadow roaming inside my home.
Once in high school, I began bringing home library books on flowers and plants and discovered that besides being wholesome and beautiful, they could also change how people felt. So, I started testing their powers on unsuspecting neighbors, my teachers, the post office clerk, and the cashier at the drug store. But above all, I wanted the flowers to make Mom happy. “People can change, can’t they?” I kept asking myself.
Sadly, my botanical friends never had a chance to practice their magic on Mom, not even before she got sick. “Throw those filthy things out right now!” she screamed, clutching her chest whenever I brought one in. “Don’t you know they grow in the dirt?” Later on, when she was too ill to leave her room, I continued to scatter small pots and vases around the house without her knowing: lavender to lift her mood, peppermint to cajole her into calmness, peace lilies to help her sleep. But they all wilted and died within hours, every one of them asphyxiated by the sullenness in the air, the sourness seeping out of the walls, the bitterness she exhaled. Hopelessness will kill anything.
I wish the flowers had been given a fighting chance. Maybe then, things would have been different.
It’d be a while before the next opportunity to change emotions and lives presented itself. So many moons would rise before the flowers would have their say again.
But, by then, I’d be striving to keep those people alive when all they wanted was to die….
