nonfiction by gina twardosz

Swan Song

I watched the swan strut through the waterfalls of taffeta-draped chairs, rose petals sticking to its feet with each webbed step, oblivious to the tackiness of this wedding. It shouldered with one wing three little gray balls of dryer lint—baby swans waddling as fast as they could to keep up. They were headed to the pond on the other side of the arbor that dripped with plastic-pink wisteria, hot glued there so as to detract from the weatherbeaten appearance of the wood—which, once newly sanded in the ‘90s, was now like most things: a little rough around the edges. A man in a silvery gray vest, freshly ordained, leaned against the arbor unaware that the feathery onslaught was headed right toward him.

Earlier, when I had been deep within the confines of my brooding, I was approached by a groomsman who asked if I could “do something about that,” and pointed lackadaisically at the parade of feathers. “People in the office said you were in charge here.”

“Not really, you’re thinking of—” but before I could get out the words, he was already striding back across the lawn, my protestation dripping off into nothingness. I looked at the swan, and it stopped and looked at me. I started fast-walking toward it, hoping my sudden uptick in pace would frighten it enough to fly off over yonder. It did not. The swan hissed at me, yet decided our fate for us: it veered to the right and its babies followed. It dared not trespass through the arbor and, instead, took the more diplomatic path toward the pond, eventually sidling into the water with ease as if it had never caused any disruption in the first place. Guests clapped politely. 

It had done all that, I assumed, to protect its babies.

My mother, twice divorced, had found her second wind as a wedding guru: Kelly Ann, the gal with a wedding plan. She booked the weddings at a local arboretum, hired—initially—as a temporary worker filling in for an injured administrative assistant. But, as with most things, my mother ’s charisma wooed everyone around her. She was too much of a “people person” to languish behind a desk all day—even though, technically as a wedding coordinator, she was supposed to work from her office Monday through Thursday. My mother hated any sense of the word “confined” and would run free without a mere moment’s hesitation. This she did, always.

I had had a good ten years to think about my mother ’s affair—and think is all I did, for I felt as though I couldn’t tell anyone about it. In the early aughts of their custody battle, my mother denied everything, claiming that my father had over-reacted about a friend of hers.

“Yeah, a friend she fucks,” my father would spew each time he came home from a court hearing. He would eventually win custody of me and, because very rarely do fathers ever win full custody of a child, he’d never let me forget it. This victory seemed to salve the burn of being a cuckold, and he stuck to this—refusing visitations between my mother and I. I wouldn’t start to reconnect with her again until I was in my teens. It was then that I would finally ask her about the cheating after years and years of wondering—like leaving a play right before its final act.

“It was just one of those things that happened,” she would tell me. “It’s not like I planned it!” It was as if she could absolve herself of the crime because she had no premeditation. It was somehow worse this way, that she would consider throwing away seven years of marriage and a happy family for a whim.

Now, she was planning weddings. When she first started working at the arboretum, I would come visit her and it was only after sometime that she finally convinced me to come work with her. And with me by her side, my mother gained something that she quickly discovered was so hard to buy otherwise: the title of a good mother. She luxuriated in the compliments she received from working with me.

We were always getting mistaken for each other and I never knew why. We couldn’t have been more different. I was at least a head taller than her and always frowning to cover up the gap between my teeth, while my mother was always smiling, showing hers off. She seemed to rejoice in this, as if she could take credit for our likeness. She had known nothing of my life until recently, but the way I looked made her feel like she was in, some ways, still a part of it. Yet, we both felt like co-workers and our responsibility to one another ended at work.

*

My mother liked to sit and watch the ceremonies so I knew she would be out there, watching the one that had almost been upstaged by a swan. I asked her, once, what the point of it was—our work was over and it was time to decompress elsewhere.

“I don’t know, I just love love,” she said to me. “Don’t you?”

Do you? I wanted to sneer in an adolescent-like taunt. But, really, I just wanted to know if she did—if that word meant anything to her. I didn’t even know what that word meant, yet I had resolved myself to never finding out. She had taken the luxury of meaning when she left.

Because on the day that the divorce took hold, she was simply gone. Not gone in any way that was cemented or concrete. She had just left, becoming a figment of what once was, what had been, what isn’t currently. Is a mother without her children really still a mother? I thought this as her daughter. Only this for mere moments more—the sensation of it fading on my tongue like sticking a Sourpatch Kid in your gums to mellow out the spice of it, releasing it from the numbness only when it turns sweet. I didn’t say goodbye, because this wasn’t goodbye—but it was a farewell. I was seven, nine, thirteen then twenty one, still processing this moment of the absence. My father ’s words seemed like a permanent record scratch in the turntable of my mind: that bitch is gone. She’s not your mother anymore.

But what did that mean? I still can’t really say. I don’t know what he wanted me to say—my father, a man of many words, although none of them good. I felt his presence stretch over the implicit nature of my mother’s absence, smothering thoughts of why, when, how, or what. I couldn’t say it. I could feel the shade of the tree bearing its leaves down upon us, I could smell the lilies blossoming in the moist dirt, I could feel the open skin on my knee begin to scab—an injury obtained while she was still my mother, beginning then to heal by the time she wasn’t anymore—and I could say nothing. I felt so heavy that I almost crawled to the door, down the hall that seemed to extend infinitely, then to my room, then I was sitting down—sinking into a beanbag chair that was a gift from my brother who had grown up and left in his own way. And I was alone. I thought about what it meant to be alone—not really alone, but alone like this. It was still the afternoon.

I remember rising as the sun sank, going over to my mock writer ’s desk and penning a letter to my father, words on the page succeeding, resounding whereas they had died in my throat. I wrote carefully in cursive, I want my mom, and went back outside to where he sat in a lawn chair, relaying the news to our many relatives. Handing him the little slip of paper, I trembled. He looked at it and then at me. “So?” he said ultimately.

I knew I’d never see her again. 

And yet, here she was next to me, seemingly a stranger, yet still that same mother I had had. I’d found her on the hill, overlooking the wedding, where I knew she’d be. She had motioned for me to sit down next to her, as if no time had ever passed at all. I looked into her eyes, a deeper, chocolate brown than my own, and I failed at finding myself in them. I looked away and started to cry. She threw her arm around me, chuckling.

“I knew it’d get to you after awhile,” she laughed. I stopped breathing, wondering if in that moment she could read my mind. She nudged me. “But, that’ll be you soon enough!” I followed her gaze to that of the happy couple, the groom having hefted his bride into his arms as they proceeded back down the aisle together. “You’re only 17 now, but I married your father when I was 23.” My body shook and tears started flowing faster. She pushed my head into her shoulder and rubbed my arm.

“You’re a lot like me after all, Jean.”

Gina Twardosz is a nonfiction humorist from Chicago, IL. She’s been previously published in the literary magazines The Avenue and Masks, as well as in many local and national newspapers. Currently, she is working on some manuscripts and trying desperately not to spend an average of twenty hours online per day.