I remember her not so much as a university student but as an Enchantress. That’s it. She was an Enchantress disguised as a sort of half-man-half-woman who cut her own bangs, who built her own kitchen table and who raised her own sons. The strangest things would come out of her mouth, things about which she was not self conscious. I wondered how she could say such things and not agonize about it later. I wanted to be the woman who could talk like that and never second-guess herself.
The Enchantress
I was twenty. We were studying French. I loved the musicality of that language, the way it required you to speak from the back of your throat and the tip of your lips all at the same time. As hard as I worked that year to remember the subjunctive tense, the past participles, the gender of a noun, it has taken no effort, however, to recall the words The Enchantress spoke to me all those years ago. She said it to all of us in that class, yet I’m convinced it was a magic spell pointed directly at me. I can’t for the life of me remember her name, though I can see her face clearly, framed in uneven chops of short tresses, a haunting openness in her eyes, and unapologetic facial hair on her upper lip.
“They say that the saliva of a woman in her child-bearing years has healing properties.”
Enchanted saliva.
Hmm…
Immediately my literal creativity jumped into action and I pictured pregnant women, running into the battlefields of war, following after the cries of the wounded soldiers, cries almost too heavy in blood to lift off and be carried in the air, “Please… spit…I…beg… you…”
Two years later I became a mother. You have no idea how much I wanted those words to be true. I guess it’s all connected, on some deep-down level, to my lifelong desire to be a doctor. I love healers. Dr. Jakiew was the first healer I knew. To a five-year old me, he was bigger-than-life. He wore a crisp black suit and he smelled like a cold day. I always answered the door when he came.
I knew my way around that bag.
It was my job to carry his big black bag as he made his way into the house. I was his assistant. Boldly I rummaged in that healing bag, locating the light that would beam into our little-girl nostrils and ears and throats. I knew my way around that bag just as he knew his way around our house. As a child I realized that once Mom saw Dr. Jakiew arrive, she knew everything would be okay, and peace came so much that even the walls in the house calmed down. I knew I wanted to be the healing person, the doctor, who smelled of a cold day and who could calm a troubled house.
He smelled like a cold day and we knew everything would be alright.
I grew up studying the human body. No, I mean, really studying the human body. When I was nine years old I enjoyed using words like scapula and patella. My favorite word was ‘esophagus’. I had no idea that it was pronounced ‘uh-SAWF-faggus’ and instead called it ‘ee-so-FA-gus’. Trying to be clever, I asked my teacher in fourth grade, “Mrs. Devereaux, have you ever had a sore ee-so-FA-gus?” Is it wrong that I still find this funny?
I never did become a medical doctor, but I still wanted to be the person who could calm a troubled house. I wanted to have the ability to make everything all better. And I was still enchanted by the idea of the saliva of a woman in her child-bearing years bringing healing.
Enchanted saliva; I know now what that is. It’s a mother’s kiss.
Since my children were born I’ve smothered them in kisses. I defy their protests confidently, saying, “Your cheeks talk to me, and they tell me to kiss them.” As the boys got older I would smell them. In Thailand we have this beautiful thing called the ‘sniffkiss’. I was always sniffing the boys. It was something they couldn’t wipe off in disgust; it was more like my face hugging their face. One day, one of the boys suggested that I sniffed them because I was suspicious and really wanted to see if they’d been smoking pot or not.
“No!” I was insulted. “That makes me sad. I was sniffkissing you, loving you.”
“But mom, you sniff my hair and my shirt too, not just my face.”
“I know, but there’s always been something that satisfies me in the pit of my stomach when I capture the scent of my children. It’s indescribable, really.”
“Ya, well, you do know, don’t you, that I always wiped off your kisses?” he gloated good-naturedly.
“Ya? Well you do know, don’t you,” mocking his tone, “that it’s impossible to wipe off a mother’s kiss?”
He rolled his eyes.
“No, seriously. Didn’t you ever see that episode on Discovery Channel? About mother kisses?”
“More like an episode on Magic School Bus and mother’s spit, don’t you think?”
“Well, Mr. Smarty Bus, I know for a fact that it’s impossible to wipe off a mother’s kiss.” And here’s where the words of the Enchantress came to life. “They are so indelible that they can’t come off. Your wiping is actually rubbing them into your skin. And then when kids like you leave home and go off to college and cry themselves to sleep because they miss their mom, all they need to do is add a few drops of water to their cheek –or anywhere, really, because by the time they leave home their entire faces are covered in years and years and layers and layers of mother kisses – and the drops of water bring out the power of the saliva that has been lying dormant and collecting power concentrate over the years, and the mother kisses come back to life. They smell like a cold day and you feel better, and you just know that everything’s going to be okay.”
There was a thoughtful pause.
“And this was on the Discovery Channel?”
“Or National Geographic. I can’t remember.”
You can never wipe it off...
Patricia DeWit
ZZDeWit Photos
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