The Fig

Mary Sadwell believed, like some daughters of difficult mothers, that her life didn’t truly begin until hers had died. No more lambasting her for indulging in second or third helpings; no more crooked pokes and prods into the iridescent question of her sex life; no more calls, cities away, demanding she call home more. The caged bird, as Mary sometimes thought herself under the gaze and measured judgements of her mother, was free to sing, loud and crystal clear.

The late Patricia Sadwell, “Sister Patty” as she was known to her congregation and neighbors, lived an exhaustive sixty-odd years, between raising her only daughter and serving her only God from the small confines of the townhouse on Grove Street. Mary was reminded of said service the day she finally resigned herself to return to sift through her mother’s things. Instead of enjoying the last days of summer cloaked in a thin film of sunscreen by the river, or reclining on cheap plastic in someone’s charcoal-soaked yard, she was here: standing on the steps of her old cage, months after Patricia’s passing.

She began to fumble and flail through her fanny pack for several minutes, fingers coated in sweat making the search for the key difficult (or was it the usual fear and trembling triggered by the “Be Kind” sign in the shape of a dove that hung over the peephole?). Relieved at finally finding the key, she ignored the sign and the reflection of her oblong face against the storm door, slowly turned it in place within the lock and, with a click, a flood of light pooled into a room of dank darkness.

The townhouse seemed little changed to Mary, minus the piles of boxes neatly stacked and already labeled by the wives of the pastor and deacons (“We’ve already gotten a head start to help you,” the pastor’s wife said to her several days before over the phone. “It’s only right that you come by, lend a hand to finish the rest. It’s what Sister Patty would have wanted. Only natural.”); four tiny rooms stitched awkwardly together by a taste for framed crucifixion scenes and pastel-colored walls.

Mary felt the wood groan beneath her as she moved through the living room towards the kitchen. Her mother hated the sound, ever since she first caught Mary sneaking food as a teenager. A thief in the night, her mother called her in sharp clicks of her tongue, Mary smuggling cakes and pudding cups by dim stove-light. God don’t like ugly—that’s what you’re becoming with all that gut, girl. Ugly.

She loved reminding Mary that she possessed more than a soul, but also the body that housed said soul, and therefore needed the salvation of both. When she started to take notice of her own weight, her mother stopped everything she did when Mary came home from school and made her run laps around the townhouse. There’s no such thing as faith without works, her mother liked to say, like a sagacious coach before a career-defining game. The body is a temple and we must work to keep it one. Sometimes Mary would throw up afterwards, stretched out on the cold bathroom floor beneath a painting of Jesus bleeding lipstick red rivers on the cross.

She loved reminding Mary that she possessed more than a soul, but also the body that housed said soul, and therefore needed the salvation of both.

She quickly shoved this, and the echoing memory of the neighborhood kids who laughed at her running laps, to a remote corner of her mind (another souvenir for therapy), and rejoiced that Sister Lillian and the other women kept her mother’s tea things unpacked.

“Every time a mother dies, her daughter’s taste buds grow wings,” she wanted to say and laugh, to no one in particular, but stopped herself in the dead silence of the house. Across the hall, a watercolor of the weeping Virgin Mary supervised her over the increasing hum of the kettle.

For as long as people knew her, Sister Patty was seen as a model martyr in the Christian act of sacrifice: the country and life she forsook; the American man who gifted her, then left to raise alone, a daughter; an education; the very clothes off her back—Mary grew up with no shortage of reminders, and guilt, of what her mother gave up to ensure she had a better, “God-fearing” chance at life.

She recalled the sons of the church congregation who blindsided her when she came home on weekends and holidays from college, seeing their sloppy mouths checkered in crumbs at the kitchen table with her mother.

Mary, come meet Henry. Deacon Ellis’ son! (The pudgy neighbor boy who called her “Precious” when she ran laps as a kid.)

Lord, look at how handsome Jerrod has gotten. You remember Sister Charlotte’s nephew? (The boy on the High School yearbook committee who changed her name to “Oprah Sadwell” sophomore year.)

The kettle screamed, ripping her violently out of the past and prompting her into a thoughtless choreography of clinking mugs and glasses. She spotted a cherry red mug with “Be My Valentine” crudely handwritten in large font, and paused. It was a present she made at school and brought home for her mother when she was, god, six years old? Seven? A bygone time when she gifted her mother presents simply because she wanted to, not because it was expected. She poured a careful amount of hot water into the mug, watching the tea bags slowly sink to the bottom, and waited for the smell of cinnamon and citrus to fill the kitchen. She breathed into the steam, the corners of her lips curling. When it came to Mary and men and match-making, Patricia made a pointed decision to head to her grave in willful ignorance.

There’s not much to do really, she thought, or wanted to believe. Most of the townhouse that wasn’t already packed was sorted or categorized into piles of most-to-least important belongings in Sister Patty’s life: study bibles, cross necklaces, sword-and-sandal VHS tapes, worn and coverless romance novels. What was left for her to resolve were the scarce pieces of furniture, paintings of the anguished son of God, and whatever remained in her mother’s bedroom.
Her mother’s bedroom. Mary mulled over the image—the eggs of the past continuing to crack their thick yokes across her reluctant vision—where she first kissed another woman.

* * *

This was several years ago, one winter evening when her and a friend from grad school, visiting from out of town, swung by the house on the way to a holiday party. Ruth needed to use the bathroom and they were fortunate that Patricia, who hated all company unassociated with the church, was out volunteering for the annual nativity play.

“You both look so much alike, oh my god,” Ruth had said, picking up a framed picture on Patricia’s nightstand.

With the toilet flushed, its lid placed delicately back down, the tour of the townhouse concluded in Patricia’s bedroom: a greenhouse of verdant plants crowding every corner, overtaking the wicker furniture, and hanging from the ceiling like a garden of earthly delights.

The picture showed a tiny woman, her small face and hard eyes shrunken further under a brightly colored head wrap, standing next to a much larger Mary, whose shoulders were uncomfortably slumped under the weight and heat of a black graduation gown. Neither smiled, sharing the same unbent line of lips.

“Yeah, I really can’t wait until I shrink down to her size one day,” Mary replied sarcastically. “I know she’s marking her calendar, counting the days.”

Ruth, who knew enough about Mary to recognize the familiar tone associated with being a parent’s disappointment, placed the picture back down on the nightstand next to a small plate piled with browning figs.

“Her favorite,” Mary explained as Ruth’s mouth opened quizzically. “I don’t get it either. She always kept some next to her bed to snack on ever since I was little. She even had some in a zip lock bag in her purse at graduation.”

“Guess she loves dead things,” Ruth suggested matter-of-factly.

“What?”

“Figs. Wasp juice. I can’t remember who told me, but yeah, figs are figs because wasps lay their eggs in these flowers and the little wasps die inside. Something about the process dissolving them like puree, and the flower overtakes them and grows into a fig. I think?”

Mary went quiet, turning the image over in her mind. After several moments she said, “Yeah, I guess she does like dead things,” before her lips retreated into an unbending line.

Then it happened, like rain suddenly breaking open the sky. In the silence of the bedroom garden, Ruth placed her hand under Mary’s chin, forcing her dark eyes to face Ruth’s, and kissed her. No warning, no history, just two sets of full lips locked into a puzzle. Mary tried to deny any feeling at first, before letting the foreign dam within her crack, then rush in vehement force. For the first time she felt something warm bloom across her skin, down to the seat of her belly, and farther, hotter still. And it was good.

“It’s time to start living, Mary Sadwell,” Ruth breathed softly into her mouth. “Now you can start. But please do it now, before we’re late to the party.”

* * *

Many winters and many Ruths had passed, and still her mother’s bedroom was preserved with the same careful green thumb of a master horticulturist. Mary wondered how often Sister Lillian and the other women came by in the past few months just to water Patricia’s plants. The room was a museum gallery, nothing boxed nor moved nor labeled, but kept in pristine order for the collection’s curator. She found herself moving towards the bed, its pillows and folded quilts the same pastel colors as the walls, and sat down at its edge.

She hadn’t heard nor spoken to Ruth in years, but Mary could still hear her voice as she looked at the same framed picture on the nightstand, positioned next to a small empty plate.

“Apparently, I look just like you,” Mary whispered as she took the frame into her hands.

At the time, Ruth’s remark made her itch when she said it, but now Mary could almost mark the genuine comparison: the dark eyes, the delicate arch of the nose, the expression of tight lips that suggested a mouth that opened seldom, but economically. Good Sister Patty, standing next to her apostate daughter, gone to meet her God in a place she desperately worked her entire life to go. She wondered if God had purposely placed the cancer in her mother’s blood, deliberately watching the cells slowly dissolve one by one inside her, making of her body a different kind of fig for consumption.

Once the bedroom was packed, the garden displaced, this would all be final. No reasons for her to avoid or return to Grove Street; the cage emptied entirely, put on the market, and bought for some other, possibly happier, family.

Mary waited for the finality to reach out, sink in, and absolve her, as she grabbed for the empty plate on the nightstand, but absolution seemed unwilling to come. Sighing, she laid down on the bed, pulling the plate and photograph to her chest, and thought of all the ways she was now free from the only mother she had known. In the last hours of the evening, as the sun spread its red and orange plumage throughout the townhouse, the bird wept.