Chapter 11
The next week stormed. Damp mornings condensed into tempestuous afternoons.
Claps of thunder shook the house and between them hung silences vibrating with significance.
When it wasn’t raining, I went for runs around the neighborhood.
I didn’t pass directly in front of Eleanor’s house, because I had some dignity to preserve, but I ran along the streets nearby such that she might see me anyway with my chest going up and down and my braided ponytail swishing between my shoulder blades.
That was how I would have liked to be seen by her, so I also felt certain that I wouldn’t be, which was its own source of comfort.
To run along drunk on the idea of my own attractiveness and untested by its reality.
When I got home, I didn’t allow myself to look into any reflective surfaces until after I’d taken a shower.
I didn’t want to find out that my face was bright red and my hair a fuzzy ring.
Sometimes it’s better to be nice to yourself by not knowing things.
And during those days, I was especially in need of my own kindness.
Once complete silence had been established on our personal thread, Eleanor began to respond, briefly, sporadically, to the messages I sent our group chat, but only after Margaret had also already said something, so that even in digital space we were never so much as briefly alone together, which of course was worse than not texting me at all, because it prevented me from imagining that she’d put her phone in a blender or thrown it off a cliff.
I hated seeing her name show up on my phone screen and having to wonder for even one second if this time she’d sent the message to just me and then feeling disappointed when she hadn’t.
I tried to compensate by brushing my hair elaborately in front of the mirror for twenty minutes at a time.
On one of my runs, I ran into Margaret. She had a sleepover bag slung over her shoulder and a look on her face that I wouldn’t have called happy. It dissolved into a false smile as soon as she saw me, the kind of smile she wore when she didn’t want to explain herself to someone.
“Hi!” she exclaimed from across the street.
I’d apologized repeatedly for getting her into trouble, mostly via text message but also once over the phone.
I’d tried sincerely, irreverently, and in manners burdened by self-loathing to communicate how sorry I was to have put her in that position, but none of these apologies seemed to work the way they should have, because Margaret accepted and dismissed them without actually convincing me to feel better.
Her texts were terse, in both the group chat and our own thread.
She’d hurried me off the phone and never called back.
“How are you?” I asked moments later with my arms around her neck and my face in her hair, warm from the sun that had emerged in the aftermath of the most recent downpour.
“I’m so sorry, seriously,” I added, in case she needed to hear it from me in person.
I sensed I’d have to stop apologizing soon.
The sorrys themselves had become unwelcome. She waved this one off with a hand.
“How are you doing?” she asked me back without answering for herself.
“All my Sims are thriving,” I said. “Really living their best lives.”
I hated being in a fight with Margaret, because she never admitted to being in a fight with me. She fought with her mother by shouting, but she fought with everyone else by pretending it wasn’t happening. She picked up her bag from the sidewalk and looked in the direction of her house.
“Do you want to come in?” she asked.
My face contorted, I’m sure. A sick hesitancy flushed through me. Entering her house would have been a deliberate break from the terms set by my mother. She wouldn’t ever find out, but still I couldn’t lie to her, not even by omission, as Margaret was well aware.
“Oh my God, I wish,” I said, playing dumb. “Really soon though, I hope.”
She looked me in the eye for half a second and then laughed. Laughter sometimes served as Margaret’s version of a confrontation. She already knew what I would and wouldn’t do; she’d merely been pointing it out.
“Moms aren’t the law,” she once said to me, and I sat there in silence because my mom was.
Margaret’s mom had a personal life. Mine didn’t, not that I could see.
Her mom’s personal life produced visible decisions that Margaret could critique, choices that Margaret could use to justify her various rebellions.
My mom’s personal life seemed entirely beyond my purview.
To me, my mom remained an icon. To Margaret, her mom was just a woman telling her what to do.
Her mom was a woman sleeping with at least one man who wasn’t her father, and Margaret had chosen not to tell me.
I walked home very fast with tears in my eyes.
The sun was a hot rock in the sky. My armpits and neck prickled with sweat.
I wanted to get off the sidewalk and indoors as soon as possible.
Even though my mom hardly used air-conditioning—she liked when the air inside the house matched the air outside the house and only turned it on at night if my dad couldn’t sleep—our interior still felt chilly compared to the blazing heat outdoors.
All our ceiling fans were set to whir, the continuous swish of their blades a symptom of summer as I knew it.
I stood in the kitchen and drank a glass of ice water and held the cold cup to my cheeks and prayed my mother wasn’t about to walk into the room and read misery on my face and ask me about it.
I hated seeing her every day of my punishment, eating breakfast and lunch just the two of us at the table, then dinner together with my father once he got home from work.
She didn’t seem like other people to me.
She was serious. She was morally upright.
She didn’t procrastinate. She didn’t have outbursts.
She drank only on holidays. She read the news without acquiring any knowledge of pop culture.
She’d wanted more children and miscarried many.
Her mother had died in a car crash when my mom was in her twenties.
Why did she have to be who she was, not the same as other mothers, and who was she turning me into as a result—not the same as other girls?
During those weeks of confinement, I felt the edges of this childlike complaint crumbling away before the arrival of a greater and uninvited nuance in my understanding of my mother as a person.
This nuance pressed upon me most in her presence, so I tried to avoid being together.
Unfortunately, she entered the kitchen in spite of my wishing with a book in her hand and looked surprised to see me, as though either of us could actually lose the other in the house where we lived.
She ignored the ornery tone of my voice when I said so.
“You’re always in your room lately,” she explained.
The two of us seemed more mixed up in each other than my friends did with their mothers.
My mom never lied to me, rarely even by omission.
She told me about the physical realities of sex early, as she imagined they might apply to me.
She wouldn’t let me win games as a child, and she wouldn’t say she liked an outfit if she didn’t.
“Today could be the day we work on the weeds,” she said.
“Today could be the day I light myself on fire,” I replied.
I refused to pretend to be fine, because I couldn’t bear the thought of her believing me. She gave me a judicious look. I knew she didn’t want to work on the weeds either.
“You always want me to do things at the worst possible moment of my life,” I said.
“In what way is this the worst possible moment of your life?”
“I’m not telling you.”
I wanted to tell her. And also, she couldn’t be allowed to know. I wanted her to yell at me and for both of our heads to bang together until I felt better, but she didn’t.
“How’s—” she began, and I knew the next word out of her mouth would be either Eleanor or Margaret, so I fled to the living room and flung myself onto the couch.
She didn’t follow or defend herself, no fisticuffs.
Rather than fight with her daughter, she weathered me.
My electric storms of feeling routinely coalesced and dispersed.
She had only to wait, and she was a woman of interminable patience.
I looked around the living room. Family photographs crowded the walls: aunts and uncles naked and smiling in the park as babies, my father sporting a beard I’d never seen in real life, my parents at their wedding, the glass crushed beneath their feet.
And my mother by herself too: a sly child wearing saddle shoes and full dresses; lying upside down on a couch with her head dangling off the edge; maybe sixteen in a white two-piece bathing suit, laughing as a wave of cold ocean water hit her bare legs.
I had a funny relationship with these pictures.
They seemed to me like exposition in a movie about my mother, like they existed to provide her with backstory rather than as evidence of a person named Celeste who had actually lived through every moment represented on that wall and the infinite unrecorded moments that surrounded them too.
That Celeste was once childless, unmarried, overwhelmed, filled with lust or anger or loneliness, once wishing she could drive, once happy and bare in a swimsuit, once known to her friends only as C—these were facts that seemed to slide off the surface of me whenever I came into contact with them.
I turned my face in to the couch pillow and closed my eyes.