"You, Ma, and the Berkshires" by Owen Matthews

You, Ma, and the Berkshires

So he says to me, “I have a thing with you and my dead mother . . .”
“A thing? What does that mean, a thing?” I say back. What else can a person say to that?
“Every time I look at you, I see her,” he says, almost like he needs to throw up.
I try to give him a look, an I-understand-you-can’t-stop-yourself-from-doing-this type look. He’s embarrassed. I cross my arms over my chest. The kettle on the stove starts to whistle and I turn off the burner.
“Do you want tea?” I offer.
“Did you hear what I just said about you and my dead mother?” He says back.
I steep tea for two. On the shelves across from the stove are hundreds of Gourmet
magazines. In the sink is a crumby plate with a little jam smeared on the edge. In the latest issue of Gourmet, there was a letter from a reader who had travelled to Zion to go hiking and had stumbled across the best ever peanut butter cream pie at a restaurant there. Gourmet had sent an editor to retrieve the recipe for everyone back at home. It was too much trouble to make, in the end. What a stupid man. I don’t even look like his mother. The kitchen table has one short leg. It wobbles as I set down the tea.
“You’re a stupid man,” I say. And then it sort of hits me for real, the totality of the thing. “But wait a second now,” I say, “exactly how long has this been —”
“— You aren’t getting it.” He cuts me off, almost shouting, losing it a bit, “Stop. Listen. You aren’t listening.”
I stop. I listen.
“I’m listening.” I say.
“You don’t understand this,” he says back, “you aren’t hearing me. Listen: do you
remember that weekend we drove up to the Berkshires, fall of ’98 or ’99? You wanted to see the trees turn, you said, ‘babe, lets hit the road, I wanna see the leaves every color under the sun; I wanna see them turn blue and purple too, not just red and yellow.’ I said back, I said, ‘Baby girl, we gotta move! They’ll be brown by next week!’
“So we drove up in the junker VW that I basically stole from Ma and we acted like a couple’a lunatics. You bought that big sun hat and went around for a whole day goin’ ‘I say!’ in that goofy voice. And all the old folks were lookin’ at you, and you just laughed and laughed. And we went into that specialty store where they had baskets of bread to try all the different olive oils with, and we must have eaten a basket of bread each—they should have kicked us out!
“We drove around like they used to in the old days. When your dad or your gramps really cared about his Cadillac, and on Sunday after church the whole family hit the road just to hit the road, and you didn’t even stop anywhere or anything. That’s what we did, and that’s what everybody else did up in the Berkshires, you remember To see the leaves! Oh boy, and they were beautiful, weren’t they? I know you remember how pretty it all was. You said it, you said, ‘Oh, I could just about die,’ don’t think I forgot!
“But that was the thing, wasn’t it? Everyone else there could just about die. And I mean that literally. They were all so old! You remember? That weekend it was nothin’ but old folks in the Berkshires. I don’t know if it’s ever anything else but old folks in the Berkshires, if I’m being honest. But I couldn’t get it out of my head, being surrounded by them. Everyone besides us just knockin’ on the door if you know what I mean by that. Even the leaves! Just knockin’ on the door. I keep seein’em all melting, like, if it hadn’t been for that fall chill up there in the Berkshires, they would’ve been puddles, not people.
“And that’s just what I’m talking about with you and my dead mother, you understand? You remember Ma. You, Ma, and the Berkshires.”
Does anyone really ever understand? A thing like that—no, not like that. It’s clear that this has gone just about as far is it can go. A bird sings through a crack in the window, and the sun lights up the kitchen counter. Nice weather. I take sip of tea with my elbows on the table, and he looks at me like a dog. What could he be waiting for?
I went to Zion once. Out there is Angel’s Landing and the Narrows. Famous, sort of. Angel’s Landing is right in the center of the canyon, up some switchbacks and then across a vertigo-inducing pass, just a few feet wide with cliffs on both sides—they say some people died; they say it’s real easy to do. At the top you sort of float above it all; the canyon stretches out either way you look, and the landing protrudes into its center. The Narrows follows the river up the canyon, and as you wade through the water, it starts to close in on you. The sun slips behind those big, smooth walls, and the crystal-clear river makes your feet tingle. By the end you can practically reach out and touch the canyon on both sides—that same, enormous canyon you see up there on Angels Landing, ready to swallow you up. It’s about practicing perspective; here is
the end and back there was the big, wide middle.
Which is most impressive: the grand, openness of the center; the neat, imposing
claustrophobia of the last hurrah; or the truest fact—that they are one and the same, and that we would see it that way, if only we were a little higher, a little further up?

Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews was born on the north shore of Massachusetts and was raised in and around Boston. He is 27 and lives in New York. His work has previously appeared in the Red Rock Review.

Headshot: Juliet Bader

Photo Credit: Staff