Keep Me Company
Aurora Lee Shimshak on the visual and the visceral, growing up in rural Wisconsin, and her mother’s amazons.
Mom is the one who taught me about the colors. First, sitting on a wooden chair in the living room while my little sister Zenda and I looked up at her from the rug: This is the color wheel. Colors across from each other are complementary. If you mix two complementary colors together, you get brown. She was doing her student teaching then, and when she asked us questions, it was like playing school but more real: What are the primary colors? Why are they primary? Later, when she moved into the cabin on our grandparents’ lawn, the two of us started going for walks down Tunnelville Road. She told me then the clouds weren’t really white.
They’re not?
No. Look, they’re brown and gray and yellow and purple. Sometimes they have green in them.
I looked and tried to see.
Is it possible to tease out seeing, to separate the mother artist from the daughter artist? An artist mother is not just her art. In addition to everything else, mine was the kind that didn’t ask where I was going when I went out barefoot and turned right at the end of our driveway as the sun was going down.
In high school, I ran down Tunnelville just as the fireflies were coming out. I wrote about them in my journal. Like cameras at the Olympics. It felt that way — triumphant with a whole stadium admiring. Would it have been like that if I’d had a different mother?
Grandma and Grandpa still kept the horses Mom had when she was a teenager, and she was teaching me to ride up by the tree line when she told me the top of the sky was cerulean. I liked the sound of that — cerulean. By the tree line, Mom sang. You could see the width of the valley and the river dividing it, muddy and crooked, catching sun in the middle where the tree shadows broke. We rocked forward and back with the horses’ walking, and Mom sang, I’m on top of the world looking down on creation. Whatever goes up, must come down.
But I’m making this all sound too pretty.
The truth is when Mom was doing her student teaching, she was also falling in love with a married woman. And the truth is that woman drank and was violent, and Mom couldn’t say no to her. The result of which was missed pick-ups, late nights at the bar with quarters for Pac-Man and where is Mom, and could we please go home? The result of which was Mom calling the police, afraid the woman would break in. And then, when I was ten and Zenda was eight, she lost custody.
The cabin came after that, after Mom split with the violent woman and moved to Madison for a fresh start. In Madison, she worked a string of general employment positions — caretaker for people with disabilities, canvasser for the Environmental Justice League, assembly line at Rayovac. In a year and a half, she moved apartments four times, each time, laying the futon mattress on the floor, unrolling the velveteen tiger rug, trying to find a place she felt safe. The cabin came because she was tired. Grandma offered, and Mom said yes.
Here’s the thing, though. I don’t want to change the pretty part. Because the pretty part feels just as true.
There was a summer on Tunnelville when Mom drew nothing but amazons. I was twelve, maybe thirteen, and she was working part-time at the nursing home, doing dishes. Dad still had custody, but he and Mom had planned it so Zenda and I would spend most of the summer with her. Days she worked, we slept in, let the light get bright in the cabin loft before rolling out of bed and walking across the lawn to our grandparents’ for breakfast. We helped with the dishes then walked back to lounge in our respective places, Zenda tanning on the Romeo and Juliet balcony out the sliding doors from the loft, me on the futon downstairs, both of us reading yellow-paged novels from the used store.
Mom got back in the afternoon and kept moving. She got us up to go swim in the river, gardened, did laundry, chopped potatoes and garlic for dinner. And she drew her amazons, cut paper from the giant roll propped up in the corner, opened the plastic case of colored pencils and sharpened what was dull with a knife.
Her definition of amazons was malleable. Daphne, the nymph who escaped Apollo’s rape by begging her father to turn her into a tree, was an amazon, as was the civil rights worker, Fannie Lou Hamer. As was the Aztec mother goddess, Chicomecoatl. She got a lot of ideas from a library book by Jessica Salmonson called The Encyclopedia of Amazons; others she made her own.
She drew me and her and Zenda, riding in a classic car — goddesses, queens, and warriors growing up out of the land to watch over us, some with heads taller than the hilltops. A rock-faced woman with vegetation hair and a river running through her shoulder smiled with closed eyes and mouth. The Furies, reimagined in corsets and petticoats, raised their hands in blessing. One of them sprang from a Greek shield and reached toward our car to catch colored-pencil music notes coming from the windows.
We sang in the car back then. TLC, SWV, and Dr. Hook in the tape deck, and all three of us loud on the chorus.
So you see, it was never just her story. We were all in the car, our voices mixing.
Mom needed the amazons. Sure, if she’d found something else, she would have drawn something else, but those women were what she found, and so, she needed them.
In the cabin, it was hard for her to find a lover, hard for her to make friends. Sometimes on our walks, she talked about it. No one calls me, she said. They don’t like me.
Sometimes she cried. I know she didn’t want to, but the ache was right there under the skin, swelling, bumping into things.
What about Mark and Janet? I asked her. They’re your friends. Mark and Janet, the hippie couple who owned the candle factory in town, had invited us over for a party once. Mark played “The Rose” on his guitar so I could sing.
Friends want to hang out with you, Mom said. They call. They want to see you.
At first when she talked like this, I pushed back. Mark and Janet were probably busy. Just because they didn’t call, that didn’t mean they didn’t like her. But after a while, I gave in. Yeah, I said. I’m sorry, Mom.
Walking with Mom, I reached out to touch the Queen Anne’s Lace, tall and blooming on the side of the road. The red part in the middle, someone told me, is for when they chopped off her head. But I didn’t picture that. I thought of the flower as a fairy’s skirt or of that painting in my old Pocahontas book, the one where her lace collar comes up higher than her ears. Or, I just looked at flowers, let them divide my attention.
I didn’t think then about how I’d started to close myself off from Mom, how my body was protecting itself by feeling only what it could. I just carried the little ball of ache until she stopped talking and I could invent something new — a date with Justin Urbanek, him and me walking up the hill, the turquoise tank top I’d wear.
I didn’t let myself think too deeply about Mom’s isolation either. I saw it in flashes: she refused to shave her legs, she didn’t shave her pits. She had dark hairs coming from her upper lip and from her chin. This, when all my friends’ moms sprayed their hair with Aquanet, curled their bangs, and walked around with what seemed to be naturally hairless faces.
But we lived in a county of back-to-the-landers, with other artists and eccentrics. I wonder now why didn’t they let Mom in?
There’s a version of the story where Daphne is a lesbian, Mom told me. She lived in a tribe of lesbian hunters. Mom explained that in most of the stories Daphne’s father turns her into a laurel tree. Mom got really excited about that because that’s her name, Laurel.
Early on she got the idea to make her illustrations of amazons into a book for children. Women warriors, she said. I said that sounded great. I let myself picture the pages. Turning them, they’d make that glossy, thick paper sound. I prayed, like I always had, just in case there was power in that, thought the word please and visualized a publisher with glasses halfway down her nose, opening Mom’s drawings and seeing something. Mom could live in New York, then, and we could visit her. Please.
There was an artist couple living on the ridge who made furniture from branches and antlers. Grandma tells me now that Mom invited them to dinner once, had the table set, pots on the stove, pitcher on the table collecting condensation. Grandma tells me that she waited.
How long before she was sure they weren’t going to come? Sitting on the futon, staring out the sliding doors, getting up to stir the pot, flip the record. And then, when she knew, what did she do with the hurt? Throw the silverware in the sink? Hold on to the counter with both hands and let the sound out?
This I know: in rural Wisconsin in the 1990s, there weren’t a lot of out lesbians. Besides a girlfriend she had when I was five, and a few others she befriended in Madison, Mom was the only gay person I knew. In high school, kids made guesses about the gym teacher, but others rushed in to say, No, that’s not true, as if to protect her. As if such a thing could only be rumor. When the other kids talked like this, I thought of Mom. I kept her story secret.
Sometimes reading Emily Dickinson, it’s like I could walk into her room, sit with her on her old mattress and hear the bed creak under us, like we’re both looking out the window at the bobolink and the graveyard, and she’s right next to me, keeping me company. For a second, our minds merge and I feel her God in the bird and the orchard and the sky and the sun.
Mom’s drawings would have been that way too. Only not just words, but the creation of a cheekbone, a posture, two feet, hip width apart. Drawing, Mom could talk back. She could say, Thank you.
One of the women she illustrated was Donaldina Cameron, a Presbyterian missionary who, around the turn of the century, saved over 3,000 Chinese women and children from prostitution and indentured servitude in California.
Researching Donaldina on my own, the fact that stuck out was this: a Chinese woman’s life expectancy after she became an indentured servant in California was five years. Five years of prostitution or other brutal servitude.
Mom drew her standing in a purple dress in the back of three rows of the women and children she saved. She colored the background red, except for a patch of yellow in the right hand corner with a light bulb, giant and free-floating. Here, she wrote in black pencil, “Violence. Cruelty. Must stop the prostitution of young girls. It is alive and strong.”
The violent woman Mom loved hit her too. Mom told me in my twenties that she encouraged her to have sex for drugs. I don’t know whether to believe this. I know I don’t want to believe this. Mom has a penchant for exaggeration, I tell myself. What I can say for sure is this woman once beat Mom so badly that she landed in a domestic violence shelter. And after she came back, I saw bruises on her thigh in shapes like the knots in wood.
The women standing with Donaldina had escaped violence too. How could drawing them not have been an act of communion?
Sometimes, too, you need the possibility of touching, the unpredictable way a hand moves through the air, the cut of human laughing. When Mom needed that, she went to Jeff Brown’s down the road. Jeff Brown drove by in his truck sometimes when we were walking. He slowed down and waved or he stopped to say hi. I heard his parties at night and his dogs barking when we passed his house. I heard him shoot his gun off-season, and knew he was missing a leg from a motorcycle accident. I returned his hi and looked away, waiting for him to drive off again.
When Mom drank, she put on her entertainer’s voice, got big and confident, said Fuck more. She didn’t talk with enthusiasm about amazons like she did with me. She didn’t talk about the giant timeline of human history she was making in the loft, couldn’t be who she was when she was painting or drawing. A self like this is hard to show.
At Jeff’s she could at least feel the effects of laughter, throw a line into the empty space, and hear the circle roar in approval. One night Mom got back late from one of his parties by the river. I was up in the loft in bed next to Zenda, pretending to sleep, but I could hear her down there on the toilet puking, then dry heaving on the futon. I grabbed onto the edge of my sheet and shut my eyes tight.
They’re my friends, Mom said when I asked her why she went to Jeff’s. But other times, she said different. Like when she was lonely, and I said, What about Jeff, and she said, He just wants to sleep with me. He doesn’t think I’m smart.
Mom took pictures of her amazons and glued one set onto the pages of a composition notebook. The other set she put in an album with notes and collage clippings all around the photos. In one note, she wrote, “This was the beginning of leaving the mental illness that was dad’s/Jeff Brown’s house. Strong women! Intelligence with me.”
In another, “The last group of women I want to cover are the battered women.”
Filling in with a chartreuse pencil, a suffragette’s skirt, Mom could make a lineage. She could link herself to a procession. Could look back and say, I see you. We deserve to be seen. If you did, I can. If you were smart, I can be smart.
I don’t know how hard Mom tried to get the amazon children’s book published. She had a show of the drawings at a local gallery, and then after a while, she stopped talking about them. At some point in college, she gave the composition notebook to me. Mostly it stayed on the shelf, but I do remember looking at it once. I knelt on my hardwood floor and flipped through the pages. I had the urge to hold the notebook to my chest, and I did. I clutched it, put my cheek to its cover, closed my eyes, kissed its pages.
Looking at those old drawings, a tenderness unlocked. Around Mom, it was different. I glued on a smile, asked cheerfully about what she was reading. Why was it with her art that I could be soft?
One answer: a drawing stays perfectly still. A drawing’s voice can’t get tight, can’t say the word lonely, can’t make you feel guilty. A drawing won’t know you’ve made yourself vulnerable, won’t know you love, still love, have never stopped with your love.
When I was in college, Mom moved back to Madison and made a few artist friends. Still, sometimes she talked about loneliness.
What about Diane? Diane likes you.
Diane is a good friend, Mom said. And then her face contorted. She wanted a lover. She wanted touch. It’s been ten years, she told me, ten years since I’ve had a kiss.
You know that sound you hear when you put a conch up to your ear? That’s how it felt when she said that, like a faraway wave building and not breaking. And yet, I couldn’t reach out and hug her, didn’t touch her knee or rub her back. We sat in our chairs like statues.
I still feel wrong sometimes for writing about Mom. In the last cover letter I sent out, I stole a sentence from my professor for my bio. She is currently at work on a memoir about growing up with a lesbian mother in rural Wisconsin in the 1990s, when the LGBT movement was in its nascent stages.
With a drawing, you can look and look. With a drawing, you can touch. Sometimes, looking at Mom’s art, a voice comes up from the cobwebs: Mommy.
Mommy, I love you.
There it is, that tenderness again.
Is it possible to tease out seeing? When I find pleasure in a train car, Coke can red, against sky with diagonal clouds, how much is she there? Rothko is there, and Stieglitz, and the professor I had for Modern Artists and Modern Writers. And her? Deep in the synapses, is she always there — my mother, my first audience, my first voice.
When Mom drew the amazons, a part of her went in. Queen Elizabeth on a horse, and something of Mom going out through her hand, some care, some concentration, some effort toward beauty — and something of Elizabeth came back. Elizabeth, in human form: I’m here to keep you company.
When I hold the notebook of amazons, without the words having to come, the mass of it is there. Mom and me walking down Tunnelville Road, me praying for someone to discover her art, her longing, whole years, and that summer — running over to Grandma and Grandpa’s afternoons to watch MTV in their air-conditioned basement, and then driving, windows down, Mom playing TLC, volume cranked, and the three of us singing and moving our arms as we dropped down into the valley. Because who was going to see us? Who was going to hear?
Aurora Lee Shimshak grew up in the hills of southwest Wisconsin. She is currently an MFA candidate in Wilmington, North Carolina and serves as the managing editor of Ecotone. Her work appears in Dialogist.
