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North Central Review, Winter/Spring 2005

Copyright Debra Anne Davis 2005
 
Mom’s Machete
 
My sister Lisa and I are sitting at a round metal table in the new addition (the room we will begin to call “the den” as soon as its concrete floor is covered with carpet and the TV is moved in from the living room) playing Monopoly. It is a summer day in 1979, and we are listening to the same side of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” over and over because we’re too lazy to walk over and flip the record. Our mom is outside hacking at the ice plant with her machete.

The machete was the only way to really keep in check the thick ice plant, its juicy triangular spikes and purple eyelash flowers spreading in a solid lumpy mat from the edge of our neighbors’ yard and down the steep bank to the edge of ours. On a gardening day, Mom would get up early and put on her special clothes, old pants rolled up at the ankles, a blouse that had somehow acquired an indelible stain and was now relegated to this lowest rung on the sartorial ladder, fake Keds. She’d go into the garage and reach way up on the storage shelf and pat her hand around until her fingers tapped the handle. Then she’d carefully pull out the machete, still in its thick leather sheath. She’d carry the huge knife across the driveway and then across the lawn. Even though she knew there was no one else around, she’d check over her shoulder just to be sure, then unsheath the machete and take one or two practice swings, the huge rounded blade gleaming as it arched over her back, its tip pointing menacingly at the ground. Then she’d begin. She’d chop from one end to the other, until we had the neatest, most prim ice plant bank in the neighborhood. The edge of the bank would be a perfect 90° angle, a tidy green crewcut.

There weren’t too many moms in Palos Verdes, an enclave of southern California suburbia, who had machetes. Or even who had seven brothers, used molasses as a staple, or balanced their checkbooks by counting out loud in French. Mom had grown up in rural Quebec during the Depression, which I used to think meant a time when everyone was sad but later found out it was a time when everyone was poor. I’m sure a lot of them were sad, too, and hungry, but according to Mom, her family always had plenty of milk from their dairy cows and wild berries in the summer. There were of course the long frozen walks to school in blizzards and such, but Lisa and I listened to these, in fact, not-exaggerated tales with incomprehension, and then we went to the beach.

Mom would drive us, and as many friends as we could cram into her Capri, to Torrance Beach. She’d park the car, and we’d all walk down the long ramp together. At the sand, we’d go our separate ways. Lisa and I and our friends would roam, en masse, until we found the perfect spot, not too close to other groups of people (unless they were cute guys), not too far from the lifeguard stand, which was where our mom would be looking for us later.

As we unfurled our towels and spread sticky white zinc oxide on our noses, Mom would be continuing her own trek across the hot sand and down to the wet sand. She’d stop to kick off her shoes and roll her pants up to mid-calf. Then she’d walk. Down the beach, all the way to the Redondo Beach Pier and back. Mom often spoke of Nature as an entity, as almost sentient in Herself. On these days at the beach, Mom would commune, not any more with maple trees and brambles but with the waves and the warm sun.

***

In our yard, we had a wooden barrel that was perfectly kid-sized. We’d lay the barrel on its side, and then one of us would crawl inside, feet, butt, and the back of the head pressed up against the insides of the barrel. Then the rest of us would roll the barrel around on the lawn. It was fun to be inside the barrel, but when you got out, you felt dizzy. Then one day the guy who lived across the street, Stacey, got an idea—“Let’s roll the barrel down the ice plant.” This potential disaster was met with gales of enthusiasm and not a single objection.

We rolled the barrel up the steep ice plant bank, Stacey got in, and we gave the barrel a push. Wow. That barrel moved a lot faster than you would have thought. It traversed the steep bank of ice plant in seconds and the lawn in even fewer seconds. The barrel had just clunked onto the driveway (making it now a considerably bumpier but not any slower ride) when Mom stepped out the front door. She moved herself into the barrel’s path and stopped it, bang, against her shin. Stacey got out, smiling and stumbling around, ready to go again. Mom said we should just roll the barrel around on the grass from now on.

She didn’t scold any of us. She could see, this landscape was different. Her kids couldn’t play as she and her siblings had, running wild. There were more limitations—and liberties. This was not rural Canada in the 1930s; it was suburban southern California in the “Me Decade.” We didn’t have long starched convent dresses or fields of sweet raspberries. We had skimpy Beach Bee swimsuits and a bank of ice plant. Lisa and I were happy with that. We didn’t know what we were missing, I guess. We’d only seen snow, for instance, a few times, when our cousins from Palmdale would call to tell us, “Come up and visit this weekend; there’s snow on the ground!” We’d never actually seen it falling out of the sky.

I sometimes wonder how my mom managed to reconcile these two worlds. Her childhood was, at least on the surface, so different from ours. No sex (the Church was very strict on that), no drugs—hell, rock ‘n roll hadn’t even been invented when she was a teenager. In school, she’d learned a lot about sewing but very little about physics or politics. As a very young woman, she’d gone to work as a secretary in a clothing factory, doing her part to help the Allies defeat the Nazis.

***

Lisa and I sat at the round metal table, buying and selling Boardwalk and Baltic Avenue, listening to Elton John again and again. We’d heard all the stories, the Depression, the War, the Snow, the Blah Blah. The ways, large and small, that our lives were different from what our mother’s had been were innumerable.

Mom really enjoyed working outside, in her hand the severe and efficient peasant’s tool slicing through the thick plants. I think the machete sliced through time, too. She had lived then and there; she now lived here. She scowled at our string bikinis. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Goodbye Yellow Brick Road drove her “crazy!” But she understood there were forces beyond her control. And she adapted. Instead of a vast stretch of forest to wander in, she now had a patch of weird juicy shrubs to tame—and so she would make sure to keep the edges carefully trimmed but, within this rigid structure, let the spikes and flowers grow.

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