Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (A Man After Midnight)
It hadn’t even been a full week after my mom had passed when my dad demanded my brother and I clean out her car. I was still in school and had been using it as a distraction to not think about my mom. My brother had immersed himself in 50’s musicals and kept giving me trivia for the film Guys and Dolls to drown out his own pain. Meanwhile my dad was absolutely insufferable. He snapped at the smallest things and anything having to do with my mom set him off. At the time I just found it irritating to the point where I couldn’t even be in the same room as him because I’d immediately find myself in a worse mood than I was before talking to him. Looking back on it now, it was obvious my dad was in a lot of pain himself but was doing a horrible job hiding it. I’m sure he was trying to keep a tough exterior for me and my brother while upholding his own masculinity but we were all falling apart in our own ways and not communicating with one another. My mother’s death was the thing we never talked about, it was just the elephant in the corner of the room, stamping and trumpeting obnoxiously while all three of us were just trying to pretend we couldn’t hear it. Toxic masculinity can be a real bitch.
As my brother and I were excavating the golden Chrysler Seville, we decided to turn on some music to make the task easier to tackle. We noticed she had a CD in the stereo and decided to play it. We immediately heard “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)”—it was an ABBA mix. For one, we were both shocked she liked ABBA, but it also felt like a weirdly appropriate soundtrack. My mother loved to dance so it would make sense she would jam out to a Swedish Disco act. It also took out some of the morbidness going through my mother’s things listening to “Waterloo” and “Mamma Mia”, while at the same time adding a sense of ridiculousness of going through our dead mother’s belongings while singing along to “Take A Chance On Me”.
The last few months of my mother’s life she was going through a rough patch—she was technically homeless, battling addiction, with her shitty car being the only thing that had value to her name. My grandfather put her up in motels nearby our house to keep her afloat as she waited for her workman’s comp check to come through, which would have put her back on her feet to find work and seek out help. She died days before the check was issued.
Everything she owned was in the car—trash bags filled with clothing she bought at cheap little boutiques that reeked of stale cigarette smoke. I found her planner and discovered she was seeing someone new. She had the name of some random man with a heart drawn around it—she was supposed to have a date with him later on in the week. My dad volunteered to call him that day. I never found out the extent of their relationship but it must have been serious. My dad said the man he called was absolutely devastated when he broke the news to him about my mother’s passing.
I swiped some stuff that had meaning to it from her car—her purple wrap she used to wear to the beach. She bought it in Hawaii when she won tickets to the Pro Bowl via her work. It was a year before my parents divorced but she adored the wrap—it was in her favorite color with Hawaiian print tie-dyed onto it. I never saw her go to the beach without wearing it. I also saw she had her White Diamonds that had a quarter of perfume left in the bottle and a plaid printed button up that I attempted to wear a couple of times before I realized I was too busty to keep it closed. Every time I took a breath, the buttons would snap open.
After a couple of hours, we decided to bring the bags of clothing to Goodwill and toss the rest of her belongings. Every time I think about that first week, ABBA always comes to mind and I can’t help but wonder if Fernando ever heard those drums or if he remembered the night he crossed the Rio Grande.