Chapter Thirty-Eight
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I find the spare key in the potted petunias that died a long time ago. I try not to wake my mom. She’d been so surprised when I said I was coming to visit that she’d asked where I’d be staying. “Um, with you?” All she could say was “All right then.”
I hadn’t been home in two years. Roman, who had always been the diplomat, thought I should make an effort with my mom, so we flew to Houston for Thanksgiving.
My mom was still living with a retired radiologist named Javier in a sprawling starter castle in a new development in Sugar Land.
Javier and his three brothers deep-fried a turkey, proving their virility by tossing a bird carcass pumped up with hormones into a vat of flaming grease.
It was delicious. My mom had recently had back surgery and was too medicated that visit to make much of a scene.
She drank a bottle of pinot and passed out on a leather sofa, the Cowboys game on, drooling in Javier’s lap.
Now, two years later, I find her, single again, in a Valium-and-wine nap on the orthopedic La-Z-Boy that we bought my grandpa after he had a hip replaced.
It doesn’t go with the rest of the house.
The TV is on, a rerun of one of the Law the man who recently chased us down the Bowery groping his invisible breasts, shouting, “Mama. Mama. Give me some of that!” Anyone except my mom.
She doesn’t know how to hold him. She is clumsy, a hand between his legs and on his back.
I cushion his tush in case he slips. She grabs one of his bare feet.
“Mommy doesn’t put socks on you? Our whole body’s energy comes through the feet. Yes, it does…You’ll get sick…Yes, you will.”
I take him back. “He hates his socks. He pulls them off, and you catch a cold from bacteria, not bare feet.”
“Okay, Dr. Oz. Such an expert at everything now.” She stops cold, noticing the yellow diamond ring on my finger.
I fiddle with the ring. My mother clears her throat and looks to the top of the stairs. “How long are you staying?” she asks with a sting.
“A couple days, I think. It depends.” I make a first trip upstairs with half of our luggage.
I put Holden on his stomach on the carpet, a safe distance from the stairs, but too close to leave him unattended.
He’s gotten so fast lately, a wind-up toy let loose, never where I left him.
I don’t want to ask for my mom’s help, but here I am.
“Can you please bring me the Guava Lotus?”
“The what now?”
“The travel crib—lightweight, safe, durable, fits in the overhead. Just bring it?” She looks at a diaper bag, stuffed quokka, bottles, the baggage of a daughter she doesn’t recognize.
“Oh my God. The navy bag that literally says ‘Guava’ on it.”
She brings it to me. Her body is so deprived, she almost buckles from the weight.
She looks at me like she wants more, like this small favor means she deserves it. But I’ve got nothing left to give right now. “Thanks, Mom.”
—
My bedroom is exactly as I remember it—canopy bed draped in floral curtains that match the bedspread.
White wicker furniture with glass on top that a housekeeper named Franny used to Windex twice a week back when my family still had money.
The basket on the floor filled with teen magazines and dried-up Hard Candy nail polish and a crimping iron and one stuffed mangy sloth that my real dad won at Six Flags before I was born.
The mirrored vanity with the ballerina music box where I used to store my mood ring, my heart-shaped silver earrings, and then my joints and my condoms. The full cycle of a girl’s life fit in a tiny box.
I turn my phone on. Voicemail is full. I told Roman there’d been a family emergency, which wasn’t entirely untrue.
I needed to take Holden to Houston to visit my mom.
It was quarter end at work and he’d be too buried in spreadsheets and conversations about P and L and accrued expenses to worry too much.
Voicemail from Penelope. “Emily Joan! I’m back next week.
Hang then? Oh, did you get a chance to check on the—” I hit delete.
I scroll through Juju Bean. Moms angling to get into 527 Park.
I sit back against the quilted headboard, wiped out by a wave of hurt. I don’t realize that my sobbing is so loud until I see my mom in the doorframe, her glance subdued, her eyes slightly wounded. “Do you want me to turn on the heat?”
I nod. When the warm air starts to steam from the floor vents, my mom comes back with a bottle of wine and two glasses, both stained with lipstick.
She was always the most beautiful woman in any room, even now with an agreeable gauntness.
Her scent, the citrus and floral of an old bottle of Chanel No.
5. The way her Elizabeth Arden yellow-gold foundation cakes under her eyes.
The tiny hint of roots beneath thick jet-black hair.
She shivers and holds a blanket open for me on the carpet at the foot of the bed. “The heating bill alone in this house…”
We sit so close that our legs touch. I notice that the peach-colored carpet around my bed is dotted with stains.
I touch each one, trying to time-stamp them into my adolescence—the jelly of a PB and J, glitter from a fairy wand, liquid eyeliner, period blood, a cigarette burn.
My mom lets me cry, pulling my head onto her shoulder.
I feel the bone beneath her slim-fitting turtleneck.
“Now, want to tell me why you’re really here?” she asks.
—
I tell her that I caught Roman with Daisy.
How he’d held me hours later, pretending nothing had happened, like a damn sociopath.
I realize that I am talking so fast, like someone sharing a dream.
So I take a breath and start even further back.
I start at the bright lights of the OR and the forceps and the doctors standing by for a blood transfusion.
I start at the Juju Bean app and the boredom and hating my job, but having to work so that I can pay someone else to stay home with my baby.
I tell her about how Sue was supposed to help but got stuck in Australia.
How I became obsessed with finding Daisy.
“You remember my roommate? Freshman year and then she dropped out and started stripping and, you know…”
My mom starts to stroke her eyelashes with her forefinger, a nervous tic that made them all fall out after her second—or was it her third?—divorce. She asks me why I never told her. She would’ve helped.
“Can I finish?”
She nods, bending her knees, stopping herself from saying anything else.
The veil of superiority my mom had always worn had washed away.
She pulled at a loose string on her robe, looking slightly afraid, powerless.
This is the first time I see my mother as a normal person.
She isn’t some supervillain who can work her way into my subconscious.
She can’t control me like Daisy had. She can hardly pay the heating bill.
I tell her about the Wednesday afternoon when I found Daisy, about the incessant construction on our heads from the renovation next door, how I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
How I worried so much that Holden was missing out: on music classes; on a highly trained, multilingual childcare professional; on schools we couldn’t afford.
How I felt like I was failing him. “So 527 Park saved my life, in a way.”
She pours me another glass of red wine, her actions careful, like she’s being watched. The wine is warm and tepid and welcome.
“I always suspected something was happening upstairs, in the penthouse, but I don’t know, I thought it was Daisy’s private business.
I didn’t want to pry. She still has…I guess you call them clients?
” Thinking about how trusting I’d been creates a sort of revving feeling inside my throat, and I am overcome. With anger. With shame.
Until then, I’d kept it together. But then I tell my mom about Holden’s “Mama” jab, which had hurt me almost as much as catching Roman.
Without thinking, I would give Holden every part of me, my body, my ambition, my identity.
But I also don’t want him to grow up being the type of man who thinks that women owe him any of those things.
Why don’t any of the proud “boy moms” on Juju Bean ever talk about that?
Finally, when I’ve told my mom everything, I start to sob into her bony body, the body that gave birth to me because she thought it would make my dad stick around forever, and he just might have, had it not been for the accident.
She is silent. Her silence, a kind of love.
I am gasping and wet with tears and snot, and when it has all come out, my mom strokes my head. There, and there and there…
“I’ll be right back,” she says, plucking me a tissue out of a wicker box.
She walks to my closet and digs around on the floor as I snort.
I spy the butterfly wings that Daisy and I bought in New Orleans.
When my mom comes back, she hands me several journals with silver locks.
I can see that something is very wrong. She is looking at me like I am covered in sick and she wants to put me out on the lanai.
She is looking at me as if she’s looking into a broken mirror.
She touches my knee and speaks in a voice that is so syrupy and maternal that it feels like a five-alarm fire.
“Sweetie. You lived alone in college.”