KL Pereira on Lost and Missing Mothers

In the 38th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, KL Pereira, author of A Dream Between Two Rivers (Cutlass Press), relates a history of absence.

Missing mothers haunt my work. It’s partially because of my obsession with fairy tales, to be sure. Mothers are often an absence, a shadow, a lurking thing that can neither be written out of the text, nor forgotten. In fairy tales, the mother has often died, a reality of times when coming through childbirth was far from sure, and stepmothers were a fact of life. Then, as now, mothers seem to be stolen away, and our narratives are full of looking.

There are so many mother-shaped holes in my life, my story. I’m always, it seems, trying to find them. But, try as I might, mothers always seem to elude me. They turn out as absences or shades, violent shadows. I can’t quite seem to fill their shapes. There’s something that rises up and blocks me.

And this is what I really want to write about, but can’t: We have a terrible tradition of losing mothers in my family. My mother lost her mother when she was 17. My grandmother had had ten children by the time she was 36 and by 39 her body had given up. I never knew her, none of her grandchildren did. Some of her children do not remember her. She became an absence that everyone felt and a fairy tale that everyone was too sad to tell.

My grandmother lost her mother when she was four years old. But her mother did not die. She was taken. Her children were taken. My grandmother and her siblings were seized by the state and their mother (my great-grandmother) was committed. Yes, that kind of committed. The one census record I’ve discovered cites schizophrenia as her illness. It’s a box on the side of a card that is ticked off by a neat “x.” There’s no explanation. She was an immigrant, spoke little to no English, it was the Depression and she’d left her young children at home while searching for her husband, her husband who, it was said, was running around on her, and what rights did she have, what rights do women and immigrants have now over their own bodies and lives?

I’m usually not a fan of the happy ending, where everything works out, even in fairy tales, but when it comes to this story, I want that ending. I yearn for it. Perhaps precisely because I know that it can never happen. I can’t save my great-grandmother, break her out of the asylum, rescue her children from the orphanage, reunite them. Because that is not how it ended for either of them.

Every time I find a new census record, it breaks me. There’s no other way to say this. Because of the way state and federal census records are released, I have to wait years between updates and each time it shows that my grandmother was still in the orphanage and then with foster homes that never adopted her. That my great-grandmother was still in the asylum and then, after being deinstitutionalized sometime in the 1970s, died in a nursing home, long after my grandmother’s death, and long after my birth. So many details are still missing, but I know that neither of these women got the ending I wish for them. And if I know the truth and it’s heartbreaking and there is no redemption for anyone, how do I write this story, how did I write so that it’s not like losing them, again and again and again?

Cutlass Press Gins up an Event to Launch KL Pereira's A Dream Between Two Rivers

By Nick Fuller Googins

Jamaica Plain, Boston 

Sept. 6, 2017

KL Pereira’s collection, A Dream Between Two Rivers, had its launch party at Boston’s Papercuts bookstore on Sept. 6, and it was a night of firsts: the first story collection put out by the independent bookstore’s publishing arm, Cutlass Press; the first stop for Pereira on her 12-city tour; and the first book launch I've been to that offered a preposterously large bottle of Tanqueray for the audience's refreshment.

Pereira at Papercuts
(photo by Katie Eelman)

There was also prosecco on ice, and most went for this chilled option after a brutally humid day and on an evening that wasn’t doing much to cut it. Plastic cups sweated in our hands as we waited for Pereira.

She appeared decked out a Ouija board-themed dress, appropriate given that the September moon was nearly full and that Pereira’s stories run the gamut from dark to darker to darkest. She read a “darker” one, her collection’s opening, “The Dark Valley of Your Lungs,” in which a girl with a killer voice (literally) finds a mentor of sorts in a woman with silver hands and feet. The story, creepy on its own, ends in a cemetery, and if that isn’t enough creep, know that it was written in one too: Pereira revealed during the Q&A that she’d penned the first draft one evening in nearby Forest Hills Cemetery. If there had been anybody in the audience wondering how one gets away with rocking a Ouija board dress, nobody was wondering it anymore.

Literary horror has long been in Pereira’s wheelhouse. She told the audience of an archeological dig through the mounds of school-work that her mother had saved. She’d recently excavated her earliest stories, composed at age nine:

• “The Haunted School”
• “The Secret of the Old Piano” (“pilfered from Nancy Drew,” Pereira confessed)  
• “The Fishing Trip” (spoiler alert: a shark devours the young narrator and her father)

In response to a question regarding the generative process, Pereira explained that she’s “always been interested in the weird” and hails from a “family of storytellers.” Her ancestry stretches back to Cape Verde, Colombia, Italy, and the Azores, providing her with a rich library of folktales and legends to draw upon.

It was fitting that A Dream Between Two Rivers launched in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood because Pereira wrote most of the collection there in 2009. She lives now with the witches and the spirits up in Salem, but the audience greeted her as if she’d never left. When she admitted that she was pretty nervous, and a friend had advised her to picture the audience as cats to help, the crowd erupted in reassuring meows.

After the Q&A, I asked Pereira what she’d done earlier that day. She’d been selected for the MBTA’s “Books on the T” program, so she and her publishing team had been guerrilla-dropping copies of A Dream Between Two Rivers in subway stations around the city, she explained. What this means for the rest of us is that Pereira’s unique brand of literary horror is right now making its way through the underground arteries of greater Boston. Innocent commuting souls: beware.