Chapter 24 #2
We were both thinking about it now. Her reflection in my mirror, the training bra I never saw again, all the things we never talked about. The memory was still terrible but, I was surprised to find, no longer weighed the same. “I don’t feel sorry for you,” I said. “I miss you.”
She was quiet. I’d taken her by surprise. “Don’t be silly,” she finally said.
There was a rapping at the kitchen door. “Open up,” Lou yelled. “You’ve been in there forever.”
“Are you not alone?” my mother asked.
“I am, I’m in the kitchen. Give me a second.”
Lou looked flushed and cherubic, curls backlit like a halo. She removed a handle of tequila and a plastic bag of lime wedges from the refrigerator. No, I mouthed.
“I can hear you’re having fun,” my mother said.
“Lou is, yeah.” I kissed Lou on the cheek, went to her bedroom, and shut the door.
“Are you having a party?”
“Kind of. This happens a lot. Lou can turn any day into an event.”
“And you thought this was a nice time to call.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s like I said. I think about you all the time.”
Silence again on her end. Hints of faint and familiar sounds, the microwave beeping, a drawer opening.
I wondered what she was making. A plate of pizza bagels, maybe, which we used to love, or just a mug of tea, green with honey.
I could see her now, in the kitchen I grew up in.
Movie posters on red walls. Her black hair a sheet over the side of her face as she leaned over to blow on whatever it was that was hot.
The background noise faded, and her voice came out clear again.
“I think about you, too,” she said. Something inside me relaxed. Being thought of, little tongue of love.
I lay on Lou’s bed with my feet propped against the wall like James and I did the night we met. “Do you remember the summers we used to lie on your bed and listen to the storms?”
“You hated them.”
“No, I didn’t.” I pressed my toes into the wall. “I loved them. I loved lying there and listening to the rain. I always wanted to open your window and touch it, remember?”
She laughed. “No, you went to my bed because you were scared. You hated how sudden the noises where. I knew there was a trick to working out the time between each thunderclap, but I didn’t know how. I felt horrible. So I just pretended like it was exciting to not know. To just listen.”
That couldn’t be right, yet as soon as she said it, I knew it was.
My mother was the only person who knew which of my memories were true and which were my own creation.
If I could go back, I’d skip past my childhood and go to hers.
Spend one day with the girl she was before her mother left her.
Witness her happiness. Braid her hair. Remember everything.
“I actually am sorry that I’ve called you so out of the blue,” I said. “A lot has changed in the past month. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Tell me, Kitten.”
I caught my reflection in Lou’s vanity. Cheeks pink, lips stained with cherry liqueur. I smiled. She hadn’t called me that in a long time.
“I’m in Lou’s room right now. I have my own room, but it’s also the living room. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I’m paying rent and everything. The money you sent, it’s been so helpful. It’ll pay for the first month while I wait to hear back from jobs.”
“That’s good. And your boyfriend?”
“James is okay. At least, I think he is. We haven’t been speaking. He needed space from me. Needs. He struggled with what happened with Silver.”
“He’ll recover.”
I laughed. She used to say the same thing when I hurt myself, or when something bad happened at school: You’ll recover. The way she said it, so curt and confident—I always believed her.
“Lou thinks so, too. She thinks he’s obsessed with me, but really, I think he just loves me like a normal person does, only he’s not feeling very normal right now.”
“He seems like he’ll come around.”
This was the kind of uninformed assertion my mother liked to make. It was sweet. “You’ve never even met him.”
“I know that he cares about you,” she said. “If he didn’t, he would’ve already broken it off.”
“Lou said the same thing.”
“We’re similar, me and this Lou.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Outside, in the living room, Nicolo and Lou started singing a song in Italian.
“What about me?” my mother asked. “Don’t you want to hear about my life?”
“Tell me,” I said.
Her voice became shy. “I’ve repainted the walls.”
I swung my legs down and sat up on the bed. “You’re joking.”
“It took me a whole week.”
“What color?”
“You’ll just have to come back and see.”
“Is it all done? Can you save me one wall?”
“You can do your bedroom,” she said. “I haven’t touched that.”
“Is that it? You did everything else?”
“A whole bedroom’s not enough for you?”
I tried to picture this version of our house that I’d never seen.
For my whole life, when I thought of my mother, I thought of red walls.
It never occurred to me to repaint them.
Much easier to think of my mother as static, her life small, my place in it large and animating and necessary.
Much easier to think of mine the same way, attached to hers, neither of us free, but neither of us alone.
I looked again at my reflection in Lou’s vanity and thought about all the different ways people were unhappy.
How elusive the way out of that unhappiness could be until suddenly, for one night or a second, it becomes clear.
Memory of that first night in Holme, James and I discussing childhood over buttered scallops.
What people really wanted was the ability to do something for themselves.
Have whatever breakfast they wanted. A room of their own.
It was past midnight when our conversation ended.
We had a lot to talk about, none of it anything we’d spoken about before.
At the end of it my mother paused, then said, curt: “Thank you for calling me.” I felt touched, embarrassed, even, by the formality of her statement.
I returned her thanks. Our words were clumsy, and they would be for a while, but at least they had been said.
The apartment had become very quiet. From the living room, music trickled, faint and slow.
Lou’s and Nicolo’s sneakers had disappeared from the shoe rack.
Sucked-out limes were scattered over the coffee table.
Just below the far window, next to a stack of my things, my air mattress sat plumped and inflated, as if by magic.
A breeze crawled over my shoulder from somewhere I couldn’t see.
They’d left the kitchen window open, probably to smoke.
As I walked over to shut it, I thought I caught a glimmer of movement by the sink.
In it, dishes shone. Greasy plates, my glass of water.
A small bowl perched on the edge of the counter, full of milk, the surface trembling as if just licked.
Outside, the sky was a deep, real blue. I took a picture and sent it to James, along with the message: Blue.
Things had changed between us. I hoped they hadn’t changed too much that they could not change again.
Like describing a feeling or a color, there was no way to be sure, but you could try to figure it out, you could even get close.
On the windowsill, a family of ants marched over two kissing cigarette stubs.
Four stories below, students funneled vodka into plastic water bottles.
I stuck my head out and breathed in the thin November air, sweet and clipped with the scent of smoke and piss.
Leaves shook, animated by an unseen wind, making no sound.
A few blocks down, or maybe a whole neighborhood over, a dog barked and barked. The year would soon be over.
My phone buzzed. I pulled myself back into the kitchen. It was getting cold, but no matter how hard I tried, the window would not close.