Lisa Marguerite Mora's "Bones Don't Lie"
by Lisa Marguerite Mora
I FIRST HEARD the song “Hips Don’t Lie” while driving through the Cotswolds. I'm sitting in the back seat utterly charmed by thatched roofed elven houses as they wind past, curve upon curve in a stately green and cobblestone procession. My partner, I’ll call him MP, is driving and his eighty-year-old mother is riding shotgun. We are taking her back to her home in the south of England. Am in a bit of a trance. The road is rain wet. It's winter. I've gotten used to being cold. No one is talking. But I'm looking out the window and singing. The other passengers are silently indulging me. (Truthfully, I wouldn’t have been able to stop, if they asked.) The station we're listening to plays an array of eclectic fare and I've just sung my heart out to Elvis Costello's “Oliver's Army.” A strange juxtaposition of lyrics against this ancient domestic landscape. The dj's are two middle-aged women who crack me up. Now one of them introduces Shakira's song as a song she danced to so hard, she ‘bloody broke her ankle’ —
Eventually it becomes colder, darker and it begins to rain hard. The narrow road is black with wet and we are hungry. MP needs to stop driving because he’s tired and since I don’t have experience driving on the left side of the road, I’m no help. His mother, like many of the English and like my own English mother, got through life having never learned to drive. Ahead we see the glow of lights and approach a commodious parking lot in front of a large establishment, a pub The King’s something or other. Inside are a couple of enormous fire places, beam ceilings, low lights, and comfy chairs everywhere. I stick my feet on the ottoman in front of one of the fire places and stuff my hands in the pockets of my down jacket and start to get warm. The fire crackles and pops. In my life when times were less than ideal I cultivated a habit of optimism. I can’t remember why I was on the edge of dejection at that time. Maybe knowing we would leave England soon, maybe sensing it would be a long time before we ever returned. I can’t remember if I was right because that was one trip in a series where MP was feeling out his home country deciding whether we should move to the U.K. It was like a fairy tale to entertain. In many ways not practical.
I wanted to move to England. I didn’t want to move to England. All my friends were in the States, I knew how to drive only on the right side of the road, and the Tube looked confusing. Sometimes people in the States think I have an English accent. They ask me where I’m from. And I know how to make a good cup of tea. Here in England under my feet the ground felt rock solid, unlike how California’s terrain seems to tremble and shift constantly forcing one to suspend fear daily that one will die crushed under a fallen building. It hasn’t happened yet, so maybe that’s a good sign or just ensures the likelihood is approaching.
All this is nonsense of course. In the end, where do we feel we belong? Where is the home of the heart?
The waiter brings us our food, I dig into my vegetable pot pie with chips. The crust of the pie is hot and flaky. My bones feel at home on this green jewel of an island on the edge of the Atlantic where the literature I prefer reading is written. My skin sucks up the moisture, perpetually thirsty from decades of living in a desert. I feel at home in California only in the canyons where I’ve walked miles and miles, my feet pressing in prayer, scent of wild sage, mustard pollen splashed across my skin. In the night the dank compact smell of water running beneath trees darkened with green, beneficiaries of this nourishment. Coyote yips, hoot of owl. And always the wind from the ocean. The ocean that connects everything.
Once when we were in England we walked along the shore bundled in our coats, shouting to hear each other over the crash of the waves. A gentleman passed us and nodded, no doubt thinking, ‘Bloody loud Americans.’ Watching the gray Atlantic gather itself just before the crash and hiss, I heard the hush and Pop! a sort of intake and release of breath before the buckle of dense water, scatter of spray and salt. And at that moment I thought, Home. The ocean is home. It recalled to me long summers in the heat of Southern California and also the mysterious fog clad winters, the packed wet sand I walked across with my mother as a small child. She longed for England then. Did she lodge this restlessness into me so long ago, a feeling of being an alien in my own country? In this familiar place of wave and sand on a different continent I thought, I could live here.
But I am torn.
The older you get, the more you worry about creature comforts, financial security, security in general. In the pub that night, I looked over at MP’s mother, hunched into her wool coat, she and he talk back and forth. Plans for the next few days, how we are returning to the North where the rest of MP’s family lives. It takes us all day to travel from one end of England to the other; A37 to the M5, the M6, trees and green everywhere and a very big light blue sky, save for the foray into and past a very industrialized Birmingham. Mostly our trek is unlike the dusty dismal five-lane-highways disappearing into the fine layer of smog I am used to. Smog does not seem to collect here. Just gray rain interspersed with often fleeting brilliant sunshine.
“We should move to the U.K just for healthcare,” MP says once. I remember when in my twenties, my neighbors were two young English lads who briefly went back to England to get their dental taken care of. Why would they do that? I asked. “It’s free there,” my roommate informed me. That’s amazing, I thought.
A couple of decades ago I had a dream that we lived in an English village, but it was at the turn of the 20th century. MP was riding one of those ridiculous bicycles with an enormous front wheel. Was it a ridiculous dream? Whimsical for sure. But in the dream I was happy.
On another all day trip from the south of England to the north in the middle of winter, we are tired, the day is again gray and mottled with clouds hovering. Gazing out the window I see a stone circle approaching, it looks familiar, and then we are speeding almost twirling past. “What’s that? Is that Stonehenge?” I crane my neck, press my face to the window. “Of course it’s bloody Stonehenge,” MP is in a somewhat foul mood. Again he is tired. “We are NOT stopping,” he adds. I am not perturbed in the least. I’ll be back, I think. My certainty in that moment I often wonder at.
The thing about England, it’s inside of me. My mother’s bones, my bones, her memories, my memories. And the bones don’t lie. She never knew I visited her country, having died a few years before my first trip. Or maybe she did know. Maybe she does. Maybe the best place for England, as my mother is now, is within my heart. For the time being, anyway. For the time being.
© 2022 Lisa Marguerite Mora
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