"Becoming Acquainted with Rocks" by Kristin Collier

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

From “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold

I.

My mom is out of jail now. It seems like she was in jail forever, but she wasn’t. The thing about jail is that the person who enters is not the person who exits. My mom departed for her sentence as a distraught, blond, midwestern housewife, who spent her time in shopping centers buying things for her house and kids that she didn’t have the money for. She returned with brown roots that hadn’t seen light in twenty years and a penchant for the natural world—specifically rocks.

My parents live near the beach now in a house they were forced to rent after declaring bankruptcy, so my mom has access to rocks all the time. She collects them in rusted pails that line their tiny porch. Each grey dawn she rises and, with a glass of Lipton ice tea, goes to the beach with her aged golden retriever. There, she picks rocks like flowers from the wet sand and places them in an empty pail. With each rock, each new weight, she carries another of her many sins. A moonstone for the time she left my family for two days, a lightning stone for each of the checks she wrote to herself from the dentist’s office where she managed medical records, a basalt rock for the first time she took out a credit card in my name. Miles from their house, she walks home with the weight of the bucket tugging on her slender arm. I’m not there on those cold mornings, but I imagine my mom doesn’t stop to rest. I imagine she walks the whole way in the heavy, soft sand while the dog plays in the breaking waves beside her.

When she gets home, she sets the pail in the grass lining the back wall of the house. Next to it are the pails of rocks she picked the weeks before. They are grouped according to size and color. One holds round, grey stones like tired moons. Another is filled with pink ones that look like the soft petals of hydrangeas. Some clink together like cleaned silverware. Rocks have replaced the shrubs. The paint is chipped on their house, and the dirt driveway is flooded with the milky snow of winter. There is no pretending here.

After a few days pass, my mother will go to a bucket and scoop out handfuls of its contents. She will then glue the pebbles to flower pots and picture frames. On my parents’ mantle one photo is particularly striking. My family and I stand together, a Florida sunset as our backdrop, years before my mom lost control. It was long before I realized my mom could be cruel to me, could steal from me, and never pay me back. It was also before I realized she could steal from someone else, before I could imagine her wearing a prison uniform or shuffling in a line to receive her daily food. Her rocks are glued unevenly around us, and our smiles carry no hint of what it is to come.

II.

My parents’ rental house is off highway 62, which loops up the left flank of Michigan, crosses a historic bascule bridge, and courses through the tiny arteries of the lake-state. Behind my parents’ home is open land that belongs to a rich Chicagoan who lives in Turkey now. A decomposing shed stands in the center of the lot around which weeds have sprouted. When the spring snow melts, it creates a swampy pond that breeds mosquitoes and algae. On the other side of the small swamp is a hill leading down to the beach.

If you stand at the edge of the hill and keep your eyes level, you cannot see the sand. In front of you the whole world stretches. You are the Anishinabe Indians, Étienne, and Henry Ford. You are the poets and philosophers who have been hypnotized by the horizon. You are the woman who bore the child and later bore the handcuffs. It’s dizzying to stare so into the belly of the lake.  On the edge of the water, when the great lake swallows your ankles, you may find yourself sifting through the stones. The one that will likely catch your eye first, in the midst of clouds of granite and pieces of Mississippi shale, is the lightning stone. It looks like a petrified black heart threaded with thick white veins. I like to imagine this heart stopped mid-beat hundreds of years ago, the first time violence was committed on Michigan’s gentle shores. Since then a million more hearts have stopped and a million more have kept on beating. And from the sand my mom exhumes these tiny pieces of life from their home in the dark.

III.

My mother went to jail in October of 2008 at the age of forty-five. I don’t remember the day; I hardly remember anything from that time. I had recently graduated from college and was living in New York City completing the first year of my two year commitment to Teach for America. I spent my evenings in a computer lab creating lesson plans, listening to the hum of the printer and yearning for the hum of cicadas in Michigan. I was overwhelmed, so I made lists: finish your grad school paper for your teaching pedagogy class, grade three sets of essays, figure out what the hell you will do for class tomorrow.

I was a compulsive list maker. On nights when the computer screen flashed before me, a fractured star, and I realized it was 2 a.m. with hours to go before my work was finished, I listed items I had already completed, so I could check them off: call dad, buy toothpaste, remind your sister things will be okay. Tasks left unchecked were scrawled onto a new piece of paper the next day. Each day: white paper; each evening: a tattered list to be reborn the next day.

I also wrote lists of other kinds: things to see in New York (High Line park, Upright Citizens Brigade), records to buy (Joni Mitchell, Chuck Berry), books I had finished (The Road, a collection of poems by Adrienne Rich), and lists of groceries, restaurants to frequent, even my favorite insects.

My mom has rocks, and I have lists. Here is a list I was unable to write in New York: The List I Didn’t Want to Write About my Mom. I am angry because”-I asked her about her gambling problem, and she told me she only went “once in a while.”-She stole a lot of money from her employer and went to jail for it.-She took out six credit cards in my name without my permission.-She took out hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans in my name to fuel her gambling addiction.-She forgets to pay my debts in time.-I can’t clear my name of this debt, because she would go back to jail, and I would hate myself forever.-She was in jail for my first semester of teaching.-She picks rocks instead of calling me, instead of getting counseling, instead of getting another job.-I love the rock designs my mom makes.

IV.

The law of identity states A=A. It says a thing is always itself; through time it maintains an essential identity. Socrates uses this theory when talking to Theaetetus. He asks him to admit that sounds and colors are different and that each is the same with itself: a sound will always be a sound, and it can never be a color. The rocks my mom finds are always rocks. They will never be warm hands. They will never be apologies.

A geologist doesn’t think of a rock as just a rock, though. He might pick up one from my mom’s bucket and classify it as marcasite, a rock composed of many more parts, each with its own identity. It is made of iron sulfide with a crystalline structure similar to the yellowed doilies my grandmother dragged across a broken German landscape to her new life in America. It has the same luster as the car pipes of the aged vehicles in our driveway. It has a voice. If you scratch your name across driftwood with a marcasite, its powder-black dialogue will survive until the first high tide.

I am my mother’s daughter, and I will never be anyone else’s. I am the soccer games she attended every spring, the Christmas mornings we shared, our breath heavy with coffee and milk. I am the prayers she offered, kneeling beside my twin bed. But I am also the ulcer in my stomach she never learned of and the scar etched across my left knee I received while she was in prison. I am the first poem I wrote that she never asked to read.

V.

During the second semester of my first year of teaching, I took a writing pedagogy class. As part of our final project, we had to write an original piece. When the deadline approached, I spent my Thursday and Friday nights sitting underneath a quilted bedspread, typing a short story on my heavy, archaic computer. This was before I had blinds and long after my heater had stopped working. As I piled on blankets, my windows sighed winter air into the cramped room. I wrote a story of a girl who turned to stone.

The story has since dissolved into the thousands of e-mails, attachments, and handouts that accumulated during those years. I remember pieces of it, though. Like Jeffrey Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides, I wrote in the first person plural “we”: We watched a young girl lose her hair; we watched her walk with stiff legs; we watched her toe nails fall off, and we collected her discarded humanity beneath a dark sky.

I don’t have the story, but I have the research I completed while writing it, the stories of stone binding gods and humans together across time, punishing people, sparing people. Zeus lived because his mother was smart enough to feed his dad a rock. Later, he killed his dad and his daughter sprung from his skull after he swallowed his mistress. Sisyphus pushed a boulder up a hill for all eternity after fooling the gods and cheating death. But Andromeda was chained to a rock for her mother. Cassiopeia bragged to the gods about the divine beauty of her daughter, and because of it, her daughter was strapped to a rock for the pleasure of a sea monster. Thankfully, she was saved.

Now Andromeda is stitched across the sky. Although I’ve studied the stars a thousand times, I can’t remember seeing her. I will choose to imagine, though it’s hard to believe, that she loves her mom again—Cassiopeia, the nearest constellation to her in a galaxy of celebrity stars.

VI.

My dad has never enjoyed talking on the phone with me. I didn’t realize this until I moved to college, and I stopped hearing from him. When my mom was in jail, though, he called regularly. He asked me about school, if I had checked on my sister, Kelsey, and if I was doing okay. We talked openly about the state of our family. I found that despite years of discontent in his marriage, his loyalty to my mom did not waver.

My dad spent Thanksgiving at my aunt and uncle’s house. I didn’t have enough money to go home for Thanksgiving, so I didn’t. New York City was washed in orange, and I cried beside a television broadcast of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—cried because my hair was frizzy, cried because I overslept and was going to miss my train to the suburbs for my makeshift holiday, cried just because. My dad phoned me twice that day.

The weekend before I was to fly home for Christmas my dad called. I was standing across the street from Bloomingdales, which looked like it had stripped the sky of its stars and sewn them across its concrete storefront. Even the melted snow was drenched in reflected light.

“Your mom might not be out of jail for Christmas,” my dad said.

“Why? I don’t understand. I thought she was supposed to be released tomorrow.”

“There was a riot, and they think she was a part of it. I can’t talk to her right now. It’s part of her punishment. I’m sure she wasn’t involved, though.” I wasn’t as sure as my dad. Beside me people were wearing shopping bags stacked up their arms like bracelets. I couldn’t believe we were discussing my mom’s involvement in a prison riot.

“I’m not getting her a present then. There’s no point.” I don’t know why I said this, although it’s true that I didn’t want to buy her a present. I didn’t want to write her a card either.

“You can be bitter if you want. You can prove a point.”

“I don’t care about proving a point. She hasn’t called me once from prison. She didn’t even tell me what she did when she was first arrested; I had to hear it from Aunt Coreen. Why aren’t we talking more about what she did to me?”

He quickly said he was sorry before hanging up. I walked back to my apartment feeling the spaces in the city: the gutters, the white-washed sky, the vacant cab, and the few feet between the iron fence posts and the steps. I felt these in my marrow.

Last summer, searching through my parents’ room for documentation for one of the loans, I found a letter my dad wrote to my mom while she was in prison. He told her he loved her—that she was a wonderful, humble wife and mother, someone who would do anything for her family, someone he was proud to call his wife. It was a touching letter, especially since I’d never seen my parents hug in public and rarely heard them say “I love you” to one another.

My dad didn’t write a message in my Christmas card the year she went to jail, and he hasn’t written me one since. He’s never personalized a birthday card for me either. I’m still waiting for my letter. I have nothing to say about rocks this time. I tried to write them in but couldn’t.

VI.

My relationship with my mother has always been infused with creativity: together we created dinner, birthday cupcakes, clothing, and jewelry. Long before she discovered rocks, we pursued these tasks together. One of my earliest memories consists of my mother painting us matching Christmas sweatshirts, an event which later became a tradition. Each November, when I was still in elementary school, we would visit a local fabric store, choose intricate iron-on patterns, and return home to create our masterpieces.

In our kitchen I would watch while my mom heated the iron, smoothed the prints onto the white, thick sweatshirts, and then removed the iron, warm clouds like breath filling the space beneath the fluorescent light. Next, she painted the prints with sparkling puff paint, sometimes using specialty paint that dried unevenly to look like fallen snow hardened into ice.

I was in awe of this process: her tanned, strong hands, the flicker of her bright pink nails as they moved across the table, the confidence of her fingers as she outlined Santa Claus, the pine trees, the sky. I wore the sweatshirt like a diamond ring. I thought of my mom while I wore it.

Last summer, my mom hemmed a pair of jeans for me. Since my mom had returned from jail she had often offered to do things for me—make me soup, fix the rust on my car, help me stitch a button back onto a blouse, yet this was the first time I had accepted her offer. I stood in the kitchen, the floor cool beneath my feet, as she squatted beside me and turned the cuffs up to the proper length. I didn’t watch her hands as they folded the fabric, but I felt her knuckles graze my ankles. As she inserted the last pin, my eyes caught the pin cushion resting on the counter. Neon pinheads exploded from its center, miniature fireworks sprouting from a cloth tomato, and I was reminded of a geology class I had taken in college. My professor, in the middle of a lecture on plate tectonics, had told us that anything, if compressed enough, can be made into a diamond. For just a moment everything around me, the jars of rocks, the needles, and the thread, gleamed.

These days, my mom is all around me—in the hot pad made from beach glass, the mittens she made from my old sweaters, the pictures I have of us tucked in an old book, and in my hands. Each time I sit down to write another poem or another story, I see her hands typing back at me, the thick knuckles, the course skin, the smooth nails.

I never see her newest work, though, because I rarely visit my parents’ home. When I do visit, for a day or so over the holidays, my mom and I don’t touch. I no longer imagine diamonds in our kitchen. I still wear the jeans she hemmed me, and I still use a rock doormat she gave me that same summer—even though many rocks have fallen off, even though there are holes, even though it’s broken.

VII.

One summer my mom found a rock she thought was gold. She told her friends and family about her discovery, and everyone told her she was wrong. Some people were gentle with her and others were not. I wanted, more than anything, for her to be right.

Despite everyone’s conviction that her rock was not gold (perhaps it was marcasite with its golden incandescence), she set it on a shelf in the screened in porch next to her prized jar of beach glass. I saw her pick it up from time to time as she walked through the porch on her way outside for a cigarette or diet coke. Sometimes, she would take it with her and palm it as her cigarette burned—a halo in the night. One evening, toward the end of last summer, I sat with the rock deep into the night. Around me were the objects with which my mom had filled the porch, each aching for another world. The basalt missed the sand, the beach glass missed the sound of the waves, and the gold missed the shallow river beds it tried to hide in. It felt good to be near these objects filled with longing.

I have an official Michigan rock picking guide now. I never told my mom I bought it, but I read it often. Recently, I learned that in Michigan we can find gold in glacial deposits hiding in sediment near the bedrock. It’s heavy and seems frightened of the sun that sparks it and the quickly moving currents that might carry it into prospectors’ hands.

You are unlikely to find nuggets, but you can collect the dust over time. For every hour of work, you might find 50 cents worth of gold dust. If you were to work for seven days straight, not stopping to rest, you might find enough gold to make a ring.

If I told my mom this, she’d probably buy a ridged panning pan. Her hands would hunger for it. She would study up on gold panning technique and practice until she was great at it. She would swirl the pan so the big rocks were washed to the edges, and the gold stuck to the bottom. She’d never lose the gold substance; her back would tire as she crouched for hours scooping deep into the sediment, but she would not rest.

After each excursion, she’d dump the dust into a Mason jar she’d place by the beach glass. After a year, a visible layer would form. When she was with me, I would not look at her gold. I would let my eyes glide past to the mossy swamp visible from our window. But one night she would be out with my dad at their monthly card group—shuffling euchre decks for lottery tickets, sipping Budweiser in newly-cleaned garages. I would be left alone with the objects she loved so much. I would pick them up, one by one, and recognize them, not as the logician or geologist, but as the poet. I would hold the basalt close to me like my mom’s absence and the gold like her return.

Kristin Collier is a poet and essayist living in Chicago where she teaches high school English. She holds an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Michigan and a graduate degree in teaching from Lehman College in New York City.