Bliss Goldstein has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mercury News, and is CALYX Journal’s 2022 winner of the Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing. She’s passionate about croissants, her long-suffering husband, and working on a memoir about her mother. Reach her at blissgoldstein.com.
At my mother’s funeral, I discovered that she was a cult leader. Without telling me, she’d started her own religion, a mashup of Judaism, Jesus and herself. Those who believed in her called her “Momma.” She and her husband conducted services in a triple-wide mobile home on their property. She told her followers who to marry and what jobs to pursue. She gave them new names. She was their Solomon in Southern drag.
Before dropping my hands, she said, “Every bad thing that happens to you is because of those curses.” Then she disappeared out the triple-wide’s door.I stood there in shock. My husband ushered me outside and into our rental car. A couple of weeks later, my brother called me about the will. It began with “I have two natural born children, neither of whom are my inheritors.” Then she left my brother a little chunk of change.
“You are a child of the devil,” she hissed, her syrupy Southern accent stripped away. “I’ll never love you as much as your brother.”I pushed her, too angry to reply. She lost her balance and slammed into the bathtub. The shame I felt overwhelmed me. We never talked about it.At 40, I’d had enough and told my mother not to contact me. After 16 years without hearing her voice, my brother called. She was deep in dementia. And dying.
“What are you talking about, Ma?” I stroked the orange velour on the couch first in one direction, then the next. Mother’s Day is almost here. I think of her follower, the woman who cursed me, kneeling at Ma’s grave with a dozen roses cradled in her arms. She stands up, muttering vile words. Will I hear them in my dreams?In Judaism, when you visit the dead, you leave a rock on top of the headstone. Rock upon rock. Roses fade, but rocks can endure through time — portable, visible signs that the person was loved.
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