from issue 04
I’m sore from this life and its demands.
Sick of it!
This is your mother speaking.
Sick of it!
This is your mother speaking.
I’ve been thinking: I keep losing track of all the things that have fallen out of my pockets over the years, so to speak.
I want to tell you something, and now don’t repeat this to your sister or anything.
At your age, I was more beautiful than I even knew. But at the time there was so much I would have changed about myself, if I had it my way — I mean, if I had the money and felt no pain, if I could bear every surgery and needle and pill. I think less about these things now, of course.
Sometimes I wonder if me-at-your-age is still walking around somewhere. I know she would love you to bits and pieces if you met each other, but I wonder if you would like her, and when I wonder too hard it makes me feel deep sadness. When you become a mother, you start to hurt for everything. The promise of reincarnation eases the burden. I have a book I need to show you sometime; you’ll lose so many things and people in this go-around, it helps to understand
it will all come back.
It was another decade — a different century. I was between school and work, and living by the ocean with a pile of other women. I called my parents back home once a week to confirm life. I don’t remember many of my lovers’ names —now don’t make that face, listen — I don’t remember because I always made them into whichever person I wanted at the time. For instance – and you should know this – if you don’t like a man’s name, you can pick a new one.
Like Patrick, or Donovan.
My best friend was Deborah, who was so beautiful. When you’d see her picking mercilessly at a small piece of hair or something in the mirror you’d be like, come on now! So, so beautiful, it was a mockery, even. I felt embarrassed just standing beside her.
We worked at restaurants across the street from one another, and when we’d get off we’d go downtown looking for something to happen to us. And we would find men. When you’re young, most of them talk to you the same, especially when they’re drinking and their masks slip: Now bark. Now dance. Now say something stupid.
You need to be on the defensive if you want to have any fun.
This one night, we landed in this bar with a ceiling framed in bright neon tubes. It was crowded for a weeknight and the light in there was like orange candy and it stunk like fake fog, which prompted some kind of bad reaction from me. It wasn’t long before I needed to get outside, but I didn’t want to leave Deborah, who was prowling for catharsis after a tough shift. We were sat at the bar, and this pretty-faced man drinking alone across from us made a horrible gesture at her from the other side of the counter, and so in my mood I raised my voice to call him dog-faced, which of course he wasn’t. Then softer, after I’d finished startling myself, I said: And anyways, why would you make a joke at the expense of a woman so beautiful? But of course we were girls, playing pretend. Deborah rolled her eyes and pretended she hadn’t heard any of this.
The guy touched his chest and came over to us, seeming sorry enough. He bought us drinks. Back then, when I still could, I only liked clear liquor, because I could drink it like water and never feel sick. I was a real workhorse! I called the pretty guy Corduroy, like the bear from the book. He had these big, dark eyes that looked so plastic and stitched-on.
Corduroy mostly liked men, not women. But he loved me and Deborah. He was a terror and worked at a grocery store on the east side of town stocking shelves. Or a department store handing out big plastic keys to the changing rooms. Or checking IDs at a club downtown. It was a new thing he told us every week, some short lived gig, someplace he never appeared to need to be imminently. He was certainly of interest – Deborah and I, we just wanted something with a plot back then. We had a lot of fun together. He was our court jester for a while, and then things changed.
At Deborah’s house one night, we all did some drugs. And we had a tortured kind of orgy. Now don’t tell me this is grotesque to you, it’s just a story, and me as a character, not me. It’s important you learn these things from someone who cares. Think of it as a fable;
doesn’t it sound like this all just fell out of my head?
Corduroy had wanted us to try some new substance he had discovered. I don’t remember what, because I don’t think I asked. We had smoked his pot together before, so I figured this could be fine. Again, this is a fable. Do as I say (I would be the town fool in the dark ages, to discover the health benefits of iron and take it as a sign to eat lead) not as I do.
I licked these bitter white crystals he gave me off the back of my hand like an animal, hoping I would feel some power or thrill, but it was nothing special ultimately. It never is, and that’s the part that’s important for you to understand.
The rest all happened so stupidly, us falling into bed together for what felt like days. Don’t worry, I won’t say any more. When it was over, I didn’t even feel fulfilled. I felt shameful and thirsty, two feelings that always overlap for me. They both come from some deep-seated desperation, maybe an impulse to drown myself. I think I died of exposure in a past life.
Anyways, there was a lull, and I had retreated to the foot of the bed to get my bearings. I heard something stirring and sat straight up. Deborah’s dog, Doofus, was by our bedside lapping the crusted remains of my nosebleed off the floor. I looked down to where I’d tracked blood all over Deborah’s sheets, which I’d mistaken for the fabric’s pattern in my stupor. I hadn’t even noticed that I was bleeding like a fountain – not even from the drugs, just from nervous fiddling with my face before we’d made the decision to do what we did, and these long plastic nails I always had at the time. Wearing my grocery money on my hands and leaving a trail of my own carnage, I remember thinking, Something really has to change for me, right now. I wrapped the bedspread around me to feel less naked.
And then, like I’d said it aloud to someone big and powerful, the very plates below us shifted -
an earthquake!
“Quake” sounds so delicate. It’s not a great word, a little biblical but not biblical enough. Doofus froze in place with his velvety ears sticking straight up like a bunny, and Deborah and Corduroy gripped the headboard behind them and I nearly dove to the floor. Truly, all hell was erupting around us and I felt punished for what we’d done. It started by shaking the house and when I looked out the window, I saw everything else shaking too. That’s when I started believing in God. Because He smashed Deborah’s cups and dishes in the kitchen but didn’t smash us.
Ours was the worst state to be in for this kind of phenomenon. I grabbed onto the corner of the mattress and kept repeating in my head, I love you God! I love you Mom! I love you God! hoping one of the two would make it stop. After a few seconds it did. We were all scared to speak, so we just stared at each other.
It felt like we were registering one another’s nakedness fully for the first time.
After a few seconds’ silence, the neighborhood dogs’ collective howl came through the wall, all thin and shaky, and Doofus sure looked rattled, like he too was a different animal entirely now. He joined in with them, louder than I knew the little mutt could be, and the sound made all my hairs stand on end. I had been so numb up until this point. Everything I told you before is from the perspective of a different woman altogether. But after God had shaken me by the shoulders, I felt this sound, the howling, in my bones. Suddenly, I had no hunger for the others – their bodies, their presence, even conversations with my best friend and our fool. It felt like a tipping point, where it seemed certain now that everything truly formative to me was already behind me. And with a few lapses, like getting married and when you two were born, I kept feeling that way for a long time.
I got up, still naked, and started putting Deborah’s fallen tchotchkes back up on her wall shelves while she and Corduroy stayed in bed together, barely fazed by the earthquake or the dog freaking out. My shivering self was overtaken by the urge to clean everything in sight. Deb and Cordy remained unreactive, still wrapped around one another long after I had broken away from whatever it was we’d done. I don’t think they registered the quake in any way that mattered. I kept tidying and tidying, and then wiping, and then scrubbing until I was cleaning the apartment harder than Deborah had ever done since moving into the place. Rich girls treat their houses like truck stops. I plucked most of the broken glass in the kitchen up shard by shard with my nails – very carefully – and left it in the sink basin because the garbage was overflowing. With a balled up pair of tossed aside panties and soapy water, I scraped all Deb’s gunk down to the previous tenants’, and then scraped them away too. It must have taken hours.
I moved to the bathroom and started wadding up wet toilet paper and rubbing at the tile and grime until it pilled apart in my hands. I stopped when I heard ringing in the next room, and since the others were catatonic still, I ran to find the receiver. Hands still filthy from cleaning hair out of the shower drain, I answered Deborah’s phone, and it was good I did – it was my mother, so mad she almost couldn’t speak. My housemates had told her I wasn’t home, and so she had been frantically calling around looking for me until she figured out I was at Deborah’s. I’d had the audacity to have run off with my friends when a disaster struck, that was my sin. Your grandfather would throw his hands up when I went to him for solidarity later on.
I sat on the bed beside the two lovers, who had decided in their rapture that I was beside the point. Oh well! Later on, after they really had pissed me off and I hated both of them fully, I put a vinegar-and-spit curse on them and it worked: Cordy stole Deborah’s dad’s car and Deborah’s parents sent the police to bang down his door, which it turned out was his grandmother’s door. But that was later.
I need to leave now, I told them after I’d finished pulling my socks back on, You have to be close to family when these things happen, and it looks like you two just want to be close to each other. When I was with them, it felt like a defect of mine to still be attached to something as silly as a mother. They were bad company.
I had leaned in close so they could hear me through their haze, right in their faces. After a beat of shared silence: She smells hungry, Cordy whispered, wrinkling his nose, and Deborah busted out laughing. It was true, I was still wired and hadn’t eaten since the day before. I’m sure my breath reeked of all the old sludge inside of me, but that’s not something to call attention to in a friend, especially so soon after the world broke open. I did the last button up on my blouse, took a deep breath, stood up, and with my hands on my hips I dropped a bucket down into a deep and bountiful well of hate, and it came up full. I yelled at them both – terrible things, which I don’t think you need to hear – until Corduroy was laughing at me, and then until he wasn’t laughing, just putting his clothes back on and bowing his head like a kicked cat. I was sweating, drowning from all angles now. I needed an ice cold shower. It’s always been so hard on me, getting mad.
Now don’t make a face.
I guess I needed to see some kind of proof to understand Corduroy and Deborah as bad, and there it was. So I left them to enjoy the newly sparkling apartment. The bus routes were tricky at that hour, but I figured my mother was in no mood to pick me up, so I traced the colored lines on the laminated map at the station and found my way. The city looked so unperturbed out the window. There wasn’t any visible damage that I could see in the dawn light, just a vague sense that something big had happened to everyone at the same time last night. I could almost have convinced myself I’d hallucinated the earthquake if my mother’s voice calling me degenerate through the receiver wasn’t ringing so clearly in my head. On Saturday – it was Thursday (well, Friday now) and I knew I’d sleep all through the next day – I will sit down and take myself and my life seriously, I decided. No more drugs or group sex. No more soda or liquor or sleeping in or forgetting to call home! I was shaken, but suddenly liked having lived through it all, and the thought of eventually being able to tell it as a faraway story. I know you’ll hate the idea of this until it actually happens, but it will for you someday too, and things will feel different but you’ll feel peaceful.
Mom died on the sofa sixteen days later from an illness she knew about and I didn’t. I’m sure I never told you this, about the time around when she passed. It was so before you. For a long time, I thought I had done it, that the shock of me being out in the world far beyond her ruptured something vital inside of her.
Sometimes I dream I still have a father to explain things to me, or at least to mediate arguments. Sometimes I feel a decision being made in the distance, on my behalf, and I can’t sit still, even when I’m laying down. (Mom, relax!)
I miss her fiercely all the time, but if I needed it, my sleeping world could almost sustain me: in a dream I’m on a cold beach with her, years and years before she died. And when I wrap my child arms around her shoulders, her purple mohair sweater is so soft, it kills me. In a parallel way these things still hurt me, but another me is here with you, and she’s fine, it seems.
After she passed, for a while every death in a movie I saw or book I read became hers. I guess even before I was a mother, there was this time when everything could wound me. Once I starved myself for days because I couldn’t even open the fridge. I’d weep for the milk and for the butter, the cows and their calves, even for the bright little berries softening in their plastic pints, and how my teeth would crush them to pulp. I hated her for bringing me into this vicious world, and for a long time I hated her even more for leaving me here. You were someone’s mother too once, you know, in a past life.
It’s just like folding a sheet.
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