Time gets wasted when people aren’t hard enough on the others around them. She taught us that, somehow. But our mother rarely got us to look up from the TV.
Behind her wafted the smell of cooking oil and vomit. She was a wee woman. She cared for us with laundry and things like that. My brother and I had it worked out when and which of us was going to have to feel bad about her. Because I was the girl, I may have taken on more of that responsibility.
My brother, a person whom I would later refer to as the brother I once had, just couldn’t bring himself to feel much for anyone. He left his shit on the toilet seat, wiped his snot on her, insisted she dress him in bed in the mornings. He’d just lie limp with his eyes closed, maybe fart as she pulled up his pants. We shared a room. I tried as much as possible to look in the opposite direction.
But it was true: she invited flatulence. She was big on cooking. Heavy, dripping meals on trays on tin-metal spokes she unfolded and set up in front of us on the floor. At first we took it that everybody’s mother fed her kid this way, that there was nothing special about it. We listened to the time tick by: the crazed taps of our mother’s spatula against the bowl. It seemed like we were all hungry for something, the three of us each in different ways. Thus our portions got doubled over, pancakes stacked head-high alongside big squirty containers of syrup, milk by the gallons, arm-long platters of fried ham. We learned how to look busy with our silverware.
“What, you don't like it?” was what she said no matter what our expressions. Our mother most often skitted around like a flea while we ate, her apron tied twice around her narrow waist, refitting the jars onto the shelves, bottles of spices, hazy plastic vials of black-and brown-colored kernels restacked alongside the little plastic baggies of meal-replacement powders she consumed in accordance with some sort of self-written medical regime. She was hard on discipline. Or at least that was what she showed of herself. On good days, she spooned up the thin soup and maybe allowed herself, in the company of others, a few elephantish multivitamins.
Of course we knew, squeezed side-by-side onto the dry, beltless leather school bus seat in the mornings, that the remainder of our four-course breakfasts were getting gobbled up and were fast on their way to the city sewer. Our mother rested on the plastic-covered couch with a can of diet ginger ale afterwards.
When we came home it was to a pot of stew, bars of butter melting in skillets on the immaculate gas range.
After school my brother and I battled over the remote: sleazy talk shows for me, whatever else was on for him, as much fun we could fit in before supper.
It’s not like we didn’t know what was wrong with our mother. We just didn’t have the word for it. She pronounced it with that clammy throat glottal-stopping the start and finish to the words: “Stomach flu!”
Not that our mother was a desperate, lonely type. She rarely asked for tenderness and didn’t seem surprised when we flinched away from hugs. At times she went into harried, salivatic fits. She’d feel her way into the TV room and tell us she was going blind. My brother put up his middle finger to ask, “How many?” Maybe at one time or another I agreed to pull a chair out from under her while she was sitting down, panting, fanning her face with her hand.
“Traitors,” is what she said when we crossed her. She never flat out blamed us for anything, but she had a temper. I tried to lay low when she was suffering hard.
My brother, however, had a repertoire of stuff he did to bring it on:
-Saran wrap on the toilet seat.
-Some cut cords of kitchen appliances.
-Rubbing alcohol in the vinegar bottle.
-The transportation of tins and boxes of cookies from one cabinet to a higher cabinet—one that needed the use of a step ladder to reach into.
-Whole cakes, casseroles, pies, sloshy lasagnas dumped into the trash while our mother was away from the stove.
-A gross rebalancing of the home scale. Every day it got corrected.
Punishment came to him in outdoor chores, anything to get him out of the house while she did her dirty work. He hated me those days, hot red eyes glaring into my nearly identical face while I stood by watching him do needless yardwork. “Fat-ass bitch,” he said, or simply stared at my barely-there breasts. Later he would pummel me on the bottom bunk, sleeping bare-assed and feet-to-face, saying, “I can smell it.” Saying, “It reeks, you know,” recalling brand names of douches and feminine creams we'd laughed at together the day before on TV.
In good turn I employed the latest school-taught vocab to name up his own anatomy. “Ball sack,” I used a lot, and “cock-sucker.” If we fought on the walk home from the bus stop he’d race ahead and be poised in the front yard with fistfuls of dogshit, waiting for me to make a mad sprint down the driveway.
“I'm gonna fuck you,” he'd say.
“Fuck shit,” I’d say in return. He didn’t scare me, really. I was taller than him anyway.
We loved each other. That was love. One moment he was putting his arm around my shoulders, moving the hair out of my eyes, speaking softly, fingers curling into my armpit. The next he was raging through my backpack, looking for some kind of damning evidence, sticking a finger up my nose, spitting into my ear, digging a penny out of my front pocket and swallowing it.
Sometimes it was better to get in trouble. It wasn't unheard of for us to be pounded into our mother’s car and wheeled out of town when she was mad. Punishment or family vacation? It was hard to say. Sometimes she just drove until it got dark out and dropped us off at a motel nearest the exit, handing us a wad of bills. She always picked us up in the morning.
Generally, though, when we were feeling shallow, things fell into a certain order at home. We were left to our own devices after dinner, our mother clanking around the kitchen with the talk radio on, calling out at times with some instructions to brush our teeth or whatnot. Her concern was all coverup; we knew that, for what inordinate schemes with food she'd been waiting all day to carry out in herself. It was me who snuck down to the kitchen and spied through the door cracks while she was eating. It was methodical, measured eating, rhythmical, birdish, precise movements, both arms bending synchronically at the elbows to create a diamondy space in which all transactions between plate and mouth required her to bob her head and blink in time to her chewing. I never really understood it or sympathized. She went through generous amounts. When it was over she made it up the stairs and into her quarters. Slow, hardened steps creaking down the carpeted hallway.
You know how it is: if everybody knows, nobody asks stupid questions.
What else can I tell you: our mother had a hobby that pertained to depilatory creams and bleaches. Every night before bed she ran a bath with the door open. She went through cans of shaving cream a week, slunk around her bedroom applying firming creams and anti-wrinkle lotions to her entire body. She had a habit of allowing glimpses to be taken during these hygienic procedures. When she bid her goodnight, her wet hair splashed on our shoulders, her backbones glinting in the yellowy light from the hall. A dried-up nipple made out in the shadowy silhouette, a sad gap between her legs.
When my brother said, “Mom,” it was always with this ironic, stressed-upon pitch.
Oh, you know, he and me, we used to talk. Solemn, curtained words passing back and forth, walking side-by-side past neighbors’ lawns. We agreed on a date and means to run away several times.
But let me give you a closer look at him:
-Squat, boxy, greased-up forehead with rows of small pimples along the hairline.
-Heavy, caterpillary eyebrows that shook while he spoke.
-Narrow, caverned greyish eyes.
-Peevish, stunted cheeks that drew down the corners of his mouth while he was at rest.
-Soft teenagery arms, brittle knuckles that swelled up after too much salt, the slightest paunch usually kept hidden under overwashed sweatshirts with astute, name-brand logos.
-Long, finished legs, same as mine.
A few years went by like that. Then my brother started staying out later, missing school, hanging out with people's older brothers, driving an old police car covered up in house paint, pawning her stuff, letting his friends—boys and girls—into the house to choose whatever they wanted to take home with them. Even my stuff. Even the stuff of hers I had chosen for myself to keep.
Weird, sinewy, leachy lips that barely parted while he spoke. “You do it,” was what he generally had to say to me when I pointed to the door behind which our mother lay in bed, a fine fur creeping over her forearms like pale mold.
Eventually, she disappeared on her own accord.
My life hasn't been all bits and bruises: like one day I happened to find her diary. She liked to use F-words. The word “Stephen” inferred to me a bearded, woodsy, educated type. A man who skitted in and out of her nervous cursive as though she were in love with him. So I contemplate that from time to time.
