Mountains and Molehills
By Dallas Starcher
Some people have a way of staying the same for decades at a time, looming mountains to the saplings that grow in the valley every year. Hair teased up into a half-hearted beehive, strawberry-white and pieced together by can after can of noxious hairspray, crime-scene tape barring the bathroom door in rows upon rows of stacked-up warning: don’t go in there, it’ll suffocate you. Jewelry jangles on her hands: a ring for every finger, gold and gleaming, as shiny as a crow’s nest after a season of stealing. Eyeshadow and blush perfectly placed, her soft lipstick outlining a mouth so thin tightrope walkers could use it for practice.
You’re probably wondering why a mountain needs to wear make-up. I wonder that too, but I guess even mountains want to be noticed. I think she wants to look the same as she always has, in the old blurry photos I see sometimes in the scrapbooks. She was a mountain then, certainly, and now it’s as if she thinks if she doesn’t wear the same make-up, if she doesn’t arrange her brambles of hair to match those memories, she won’t be a mountain anymore.
Mountains don’t change, but the longer you look at them, the more you see. This seemed especially true for my mountain, with her gleaming white face of rock. She was flawless to look at, an absolutely stunning sight, but as time went on, I began to notice the dimples and divots in the seemingly smooth surface. She’s riddled with holes that weave in and out and leave dark spots of shadows in all the wrong places. I don’t remember when I first noticed the smaller ones, but some of the imperfections are so massive, it’s a wonder I ever missed them.
There’s the hole on the side of her cheek, stones poking out like teeth twisted up in a Cheshire grin. I first noticed it when she promised to buy me a camera for my tenth birthday, like one of the three she got my brother: a polaroid camera, an electronic camera, and a video camera. When the day came, there was no camera to be found. As a child, it was a heartbreaking slap to the face, the materialistic embodiment of favoritism. She offered no explanations and no apologies. My brother, swooping into the rescue, offered me one of his own. Her lips stretched across yellowing teeth in a macabre imitation of a smile, some faint semblance of happiness etched onto her face even as she scolded my brother for his selfless act. That grin of hers still stares at me a decade later, unsettling and unchanging even when I know she’s grown angry, like a comedy mask glued to her skin.
The mountain seems to think she’s a God-given gift, sending water down to the valley to nurture the young trees that grow beneath her. As a sapling, I agreed wholeheartedly; the mountain could do nothing wrong in my young eyes. But steadily I grew and realized how cold and coarse the streams were and how little the mountain truly gave me. At ten years old, I went fishing with the mountain for the first time. My brother had been going for two years now, at least five or six times every summer. I was lucky to go twice; three times in one summer was a miracle. My brother even got to go night fishing, and it took two years of begging for me to earn the same privilege. I understood why he loved it so much, but I was never invited a second time. A few years later, when it was clear the imbalance would never be fixed, my brother stopped going as well, instead choosing to stay home with me in sibling solidarity.
Another gaping dimple peeks out from the mountain’s forehead. It seemed to pop up out of nowhere after all the voicemails of her shrill voice, denouncing my mother as the worst daughter ever on our answering machine, loud enough for the whole family to hear. Her crime? The mountain claimed my mother lacked the decency to call and wish my grandfather a happy birthday. Despite these accusations, my mother’s call log clearly showed that she had talked to him for ten minutes before he had to hang up. Simmering in our anger, my brother and I stared down that mar in the mountain’s surface, wondering if we could crack and chip away at it. Perhaps then others would see how ugly the mountain’s true face was. Even several years and hateful voicemails later, we never got our chance to try, stalling our righteous mission only to spare my mother the pain of listening to the mountain rumble even more.
More cracks seemed spiderwebbed across the broken façade of the mountain as I grew older and taller, becoming a tree despite the cracks and knots in my bark. When my brother graduated high school, he was gifted two things: a scrapbook filled with memories from the time he spent with the mountain, and $1000 in quarters, a true blessing and curse. The mountain was sure to tell me the same gifts awaited my graduation, and at fifteen I was still young enough to believe her. Three years later, I was secure in my status as the least favorite of five grandchildren, and knew I’d be lucky to see a dime. I was beyond the point of caring whether or not the mountain knew the word “equality”.
When the mountain confessed to my mother that she might not have the time to make a scrapbook for me, my mother played up the disappointment she was sure I would feel, pulling out emotion after emotion until she felt the mountain was sufficiently guilt-tripped. Her and I both knew I hadn’t even remembered the scrapbook was coming, but that was a secret we agreed to keep. Later that same week, the mountain gave my mother a call to let her know she didn’t have the money to give me the graduation lumpsum she’d promised. The lack of funds can be easily forgiven, but the mountain confessed that she’d spent most of it paying for my younger cousins to join dance and baseball before they’d even turned ten; all opportunities that were never offered to me. At my mother’s insistence, the mountain pulled together $600 and an IOU that, three years later, is still waiting to be cashed in. The matter of the money doesn’t particularly bother me, but I wear it as a shining badge of pride. The mountain may not love me, but I don’t think I’d want her to anyway.
The biggest hole on the side of the mountain sits right in the center of her chest, where the heart would go if a mountain had any. Every time I look at it, it seems to be deeper, like something’s chipping away inside of it. If I’d noticed it sooner, I may have tried chipping away at it myself; by the time I really recognized it, I knew there was nothing to be found. I saw it the first time my grandfather went to the hospital for chemotherapy to try and shrink the tumor in his brain, when he sat alone in a hospital room for two weeks because the mountain wasn’t going to move herself a full ninety minutes down to Pittsburgh to see him, even though she told all her friends she went every day. When my parents walked into his hospital room, my ex-marine grandfather who served in Vietnam broke down crying because someone had finally come to visit.
That hole looked darker the next time I dared to glance at it. I remembered, staring into it, how furious my mother had been when she told me that a spot opened up for my grandfather to get some testing done for his cancer months ahead of schedule, but it didn’t work out because the mountain couldn’t get him to Pittsburgh in two hours, not when she needed to shower and dress and put on her makeup, to look perfect for doctors who were far too concerned about saving lives to spare a shred of judgement for how a mountain looks.
I swear someone’s digging fruitlessly in that hole, looking for the mountain’s heart at the center of her stony facade. They won’t find anything inside, though. I remember thinking as much every time the mountain complained about her husband’s cancer, and how it was such a drain on her to have to cart him back and forth from the doctor’s, to have to spend so much time and effort to keep him alive. The same way she feeds him miniscule portions because he was recently diagnosed as diabetic but switching to a healthier lifestyle would be strenuous for the mountain. She might as well be poisoning his coffee, killing him from inside out one day at a time.
Mountains don’t change. The speckled pattern of imperfections might make it seem like someone’s hacking away at the face of my mountain, but I know those chips have always been there, even when I refused to see them. The mountains don’t change, but the way we look at them evolves over time. Some have little secrets tucked away, waiting to be spotted, for better or for worse. Sometimes the ruined bits of stone seem to appear out of nowhere, crumbling away from a seemingly perfect face. At least the trees acknowledge their change, sprouting new branches and twisting this way and that, ever upwards. We always reach higher, every ring building on the fibers of the one before. But sometimes a tree looks down and thinks, did the mountain shrink, or have they really grown that tall? It suddenly seems so small, all the way below on the forest floor, and they wonder for a moment if it was a molehill all along.
