Glass Whale

When we lived in the house on Fenton Street, my mother brought home a glass obelisk with a whale etched inside.

“I brought you something that Jasmine can’t chew up,” she told me. We had a black lab in our house on the Fenton Street that used to devour my stuffed animals until one day she gnawed on a neighbor boy’s nose and was sent to live on a farm. (No, really. She went to a family friend’s farm, somewhere lost in Oregon’s trees and we used to visit her and my mother would swear she was happier.)

Jasmine had teeth made of steel and a heart made of bone and I loved her for standing in front of my bed while I slept through the rain and for eating from my palm while I sat by her bowl. She had already torn the head from a neighbor’s chicken though my father swears she was probably just playing. For about a year, Jasmine was our dog but my mother told me she was made for open fields without chickens but with rain.

When the obelisk spun in my hands, that whale would disappear and when the sun was coming down and our house on Fenton Street smoldered with orange lights, the glass would leak color onto my pillow. The gift came out of a trip my mother took to the Oregon Coast with her coworkers and her sister, which had made me feel jealous and lonesome at the time. Today I imagine her in a cramped store invented for tourists and doting mothers, thinking of her daughter, a wilted, sour thing, and what she would want, what she could have that the dog she bought a couple months ago could not sabotage. 

I imagine her finding that obelisk, the one with the whale etched inside, and inculcating it a family heirloom, one made in 2005 that could last until 3005 because who’s to say it couldn’t? Who’s to say what is here now will not be here forever? The obelisk moved around my bedroom on Fenton Street, from my windowsill to my night stand to my dresser. I dusted it regularly and sometimes clutched the smooth glass in my fist, feeling invincible against all odds.

Years later, when I was old enough and smart enough to appreciate my mother, she and I took a day trip to the Oregon Coast by ourselves. It was a two-hour commute from where she lived at the time and I watched the trees while she drove. I watched her, too and wondered if I was yet at the age where girls become their mothers (I was). My mother, made of rose petals and baby’s breath, took us through the Tillamook State Forest and told me she had always believed in magic.

My mother and I, we searched for whales and she asked the people standing near us if they spotted anything yet and I would have been embarrassed had we still lived in the house on Fenton Street but by then I had moved to Missouri and only gawked at how social and warm she was with strangers. She searched for tales behind desks, asking everybody in every shop how they liked working there, if they grew up in Oregon, about the last time they spent time with their mothers. She looked for mermaids under the water and for heaven in the sky.

I would have been tired and irritable had she brought me here when she bought the obelisk, which is shameful because everything was beautiful but I know I would have hated it, beauty and all. I would have bristled at her camera, I would have been quiet and sullen and I would have thought she deserved it. 

But that day, we roamed the coast and found shops that were probably what she had traversed through not ten years before and sought other heirlooms, other items to tether ourselves down. A green coat I still wear, a purse I still pack. I searched every shelf for a whale pendent inside a brick of glass. We found saltwater taffy in a shop that displayed how they made it by pulling the rubber candy back and forth, back and forth before it was cut and tied into wax squares for a mother and her daughter that finally talked about boys and bills on the Oregon Coast.

Had I gone to the coast with her when she went with her coworkers and her sister, had she asked me how I was doing in school, my voice would have raised and tremored at the response, testy and choleric. I would have embarrassed her and my mother would have sunk into herself – I can see now her shoulders and her smile droop  – and told me she was only asking about me because she wants to know, but I would have been angry at her curiosity. I would have been angry at the boats that glided across the dusty bay, angry at the people she spoke to and their respones and at the sand and the whales, angry at the taffy even. 

But ten years later, we stitched clouds into our hair and counted the sand, piling some up into our palms like dog food and taking a small jar back for my windowsill, my nightstand, my dresser in Missouri. We discussed how small Oregon feels, how time slows down once you’re there, how the sea was made for women and their daughters. How glass is invincible.

By then, that glass obelisk had shattered, whale and all, onto a hardwood floor made of glitter. We had a new dog, a smaller one this time with an easier temper named Suzie. We were in a different house by then too, this one on a street named after a number, though it still glowed in the dark. Suzie was running around the house after a bath, feeling cold and rowdy, and knocked into my dresser, unbalancing a myriad of infinity.