Sarah E. Dean, Class of '99

My mother was in the middle of making a sandwich for me when she decided to die. I say she decided to die because Momma never did anything without having decided to do it. She was solid like that. And I mean physically too. Momma was a big woman. She was the kind of person that made the floor shake -- each step slowly tapering off like distant thunder until the next foot came down.

She wasn't always like that. She used to be real pretty. I know because one day I was going through the drawer of the old chest in our living room and I found a picture of her. In the picture her dark hair was long, and curled up at the ends, not cropped close to her ears like it was now. And her eyes really struck you, the way her face was so thin and her cheekbones pointed out. I felt like she was looking right at me from the picture with those eyes. I grabbed the picture carefully by the edges and wandered into the kitchen to show Momma. She was frosting a red velvet cake for the school play. She looked up when I walked in.

"Jimmy! Where'd you get that? Put that away!"

She yelled like she never wanted to be bothered by me or an old picture, but I had seen her look at it for a second before she went back to frosting. She looked like maybe she wished she was that picture again instead of big middle-aged single lady with two kids frosting a cake. But I knew better than to say anything to Momma. I just put that picture right back away and never looked at it again until after she died.

She died the week after the play. We were standing in the kitchen by the huge window that looked out across the backyard. Sunlight was pouring in. I had not wanted to come in; not wanted to hear her walk into the street where my friends and I were playing, loudly calling my name. I was staring at her hands, watching her slather mayonnaise across the bread with quick, expert strokes. She had a habit of putting too much mayonnaise on sandwiches. I never said anything, though, because she knew it bothered me. She knew I hated all those little things about her: the way she always asked me about things too loudly in the check-out line, the way she constantly ground ice with her teeth, the way she always had a pair of socks neatly folded into my shoes waiting for me each morning.

"Jimmy," she would say, "you get embarrassed too easily. Now stand up and put your shoulders back."

What she didn't realize, however, and the reason I was so quiet, was that I knew it was no longer just her string of mannerisms that I hated. I hated her. Momma.

So when her whole body began to shake there in the kitchen, I could only stare. The plastic mayonnaise container fell to the floor, throwing little globs of mayonnaise all over the polished linoleum. The knife, ironically, she didn't drop. Her convulsions made her grip it tighter, and as she shook the sunlight glinting off the knife made strange patterns dance across the room.

Her other hand grabbed at her heart.

"Jimmy!"

I heard her calling me in the auditorium before the play started.

"Come help me find a seat."

I had been trailing behind her as we walked towards the seats. But as we got closer I realized that she could not fit into the seats. The minutes slowed to a horrifying crawl as I envisioned what was about to happen. But Momma kept plowing right ahead.

"You don't get nowhere by hanging back," she commanded me.

"Hey Jimmy! Let's go get our costumes on." My friend Albert was there, and John, and Nathan. There were parents all around us, buzzing like locusts that I was sure were waiting to devour their prey.

And I watched in slow motion as she tried to squeeze between the row of seats. I watched in slow motion as dozens of eyes slowly turned, and stared. I heard a sudden and awkward hush fall over the auditorium. And I saw my Momma, trying to push the rows apart in her usual forward, no-nonsense style.

"Jimmy!"

"Momma, please!"

I came to her side and pushed the chairs apart, my face coloring. The scraping was the only sound I heard. She sat down heavily. Keeping my head down, I quickly walked away to put my costume on.

"Jimmy!"

Momma was falling down. Her free hand clutched the counter as her knees came to rest on the floor. I stared at her, at the knife in her hand. I looked at the mayonnaise on the floor, the bread stuck to the linoleum.

"Momma!"

I grabbed her around the waist, as much as my small arms could hold. I watched her fist shake, never dropping the knife. And I stood there. "Momma, Momma, Momma." And after I stopped screaming I just stood there. She was just staring at me; her eyes were huge and they kept rolling around the room, stopping for intervals to look at me. She was not the Momma that I remembered.

Eventually the ambulance arrived, the neighbors came over to try to help. They told me she would be fine. Because I was young and innocent. And they had to tear me off of her. They tried to shake me off of her gently at first. But then they had to pull me away from her, my hands grabbing into her thick stomach for dear life.