my body is the prayer

My body is the prayer.

Blue cup resting on the table. Orange peels to my left. I dreamed often throughout the night. One with Catherine showing the farm to Asian farmers behind everyones back.

It’s the drama I had left. The farm. I knew that this was going to happen. That the fight would begin over the property and estate when my mother left. I wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing with my family. I knew that this is where everything would blow. The anger. The resentment. The hurt. The years and years of pain. I knew all of this. It’s why I wanted to leave. Why I didn’t want to become them. I saw their sickness. Trapped. Unable to leave. I had no where to go. For so long I wanted to follow in their footsteps. Now I began to see the gradual horror of what was happening.

It was thanksgiving 1986. Mom and I sit in the living room. True to Italian form, the living room and kitchen were one. Dad had been put to bed. It was just her and I sitting in front of the TV on the brown leather sofa. I am visiting. I am in my 3rd year at UCLA. It’s 10:00PM. The milking has been for the night. I can hear the workers hosing down the cement in the barn. Machines running disinfectant through all the steel pipes involved in the milking process.

“Dad is the way he is because you don’t pray”

The lights in the kitchen are dim. Newspapers are splayed across the coffee table to my left. The Lodi News-Sentinel, the Stockton Record, Conservative Digest. An empty glass dirty with the opaque residue of milk is nearby looked down upon by images of President Reagan and Pope John Paul 2 hanging on the wall in front of me. There is never a sense of orderly space here. Everything is accepted is as is.

Mom’s words come as a thunderclap. I am paralyzed, not just by her words, but more by the slight sickening grin I seem to see on her face. This had come out of nowhere. With no context. If we had been talking about Dad before and words from that conversation had vanished. Eviscerated by her white hot sword of righteousness. I can’t believe these words have come out of her mouth. It’s come to this point in front of my mom. That smile on her face.

Sink or swim. Swim away.

I stand up and face her.

“You’re wrong. You’re so wrong”

Fifteen years later, I am at the home of a chiropractor friend. He’s having an outdoor party. As I stand next to the pool talking to a woman, our conversation drifts towards the story of my mothers grin.

She listens intently

“It’s the first time I ever stood up to her face to face” I said.

“Do you pray for him now?” She asks

“My body is the prayer”