Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

  “So I can’t go to work with Dad?”

  “You really want to spend a whole day at your father’s office? Can you say, boring? Do you have any idea what your father’s work colleagues are like? Do you really want to spend a whole day around smug little men in smudged glasses, talking about platforms and interfaces when you could be here with moi?”

  Will held his breath. He didn’t want to say yes.

  Josephine’s face changed. She looked thoughtful for a moment. “All right,” she said. “I’ll have a talk with your father.”

  Later at bedtime, she changed Will’s sheets. She gave him his nightly bath, the water near scalding, and the bath puff foaming with the peppermint soap that didn’t so much clean the skin he had but stripped it away to reveal a redder, subaqueous layer. Next came the part where Will lay faceup, across her lap, in his hooded bath towel. From that angle, she brushed and meticulously flossed his teeth.

  After that, they were nearly there. Will’s night-light was in sight, and he got to sink the lower half of his body under those bulldozer sheets. His head swam with exhaustion, but he knew he still needed to take his final round of pills—vitamins and bedtime medication—which Josephine lined up in an ant trail across his nightstand. She sang little songs of encouragement as he struggled to gulp them down in order of size and color. “Take the big ones first,” she always said. “Everything after will feel like Easy Street.”

  But tonight nothing felt like Easy Street. Will couldn’t shut his brain off. He could not stop thinking about his appointment with Trina the social worker. Wednesday, 2 p.m. He was destined to come off too emotionally flat. The very cold, logical way Will presented himself caused enough megadisasters with normal people, let alone a people person like Trina, someone who presumably went into social work because she considered herself a warm, caring, demonstrative lady. She was bound to think Will was detached to an unhealthy degree.

  And there was so much he and his mother hadn’t rehearsed. Was he or was he not supposed to tell Trina about the way Violet had been talking in circles when she left—saying the same things over and over and making the same strange, jerking series of gestures? Whooping. Flapping her hands. Saying, “Boom! Agh. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.”

  At the very least, he knew he wasn’t supposed to talk about Rose. He wouldn’t say a word about the moment Violet had widened her eyes and announced: “Look! Rose is here! Did you see her? I saw her!”

  VIOLET HURST

  IN THE HOSPITAL cafeteria, Violet cracked open her sandwich and let the pink flesh curl out onto her tray. But it was too late. The meat had sweated and sogged the bread, exactly like a living creature would.

  Violet’s stomach spasmed. Friday night’s dinner had been mushroom risotto.

  “Especially for my Violet,” Josephine said, slopping a ladleful into Violet’s bowl.

  From Violet’s stoned perspective, the dome of rice swarmed like a maggot colony. Each grain seemed to move, burrowing inward or climbing onto the twitching backs of others. Violet had known her mom made it with Fleisher’s beef stock because she hadn’t bothered hiding the empty carton, and because the rice was as dark as gravy.

  “Oh dear, I wasn’t thinking,” she said when Violet called her out on it. “Beef stock was just what the recipe called for. What’s the big deal anyway? It’s just broth, not meat.”

  Eating had been beyond Violet’s comprehension. She marveled at the way her family moved their jaws, and all the while she couldn’t remember how consumption actually worked, couldn’t picture the mechanics of it, the tongue-smacking up-down of it all, couldn’t remember what chewing was called.

  Everyone was staring at her.

  “Mom,” Will said. “Violet’s not eating her food. Does that mean I don’t have to eat my food?”

  Josephine threw down her fork with a clatter. “Violet is eating her food. Aren’t you, Violet? Because I’m not making two separate meals every night. One for the Dalai Lama and one for everyone else.”

  “Now, Josephine. Josephine,” Douglas said. Violet had long ago figured out why he repeated himself so much during dinner—it was so he’d have a second chance to repeat what had slurred the first time around. In this case, his first stab at Josephine had sounded more like “Juicy-fiend.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you this is just a sage?”

  Josephine sighed. She spoke in the gritted voice of someone who imagined she had a lot of patience. “You mean a stage, Douglas?”

  “She’s just doing it for attention. It’s just a fasting phase.” Possibly, he had meant “a passing phase.” His head wobbled at an unnatural angle.

  Violet had glanced at Rose’s empty seat and wondered why, in her unaltered life, she let herself get so upset about her family. It didn’t matter how much stress, fear, or even enlightenment Violet brought to the table—it didn’t even matter if she took off just like Rose—the Hursts would continue their long downward spiral, and everyone would remain exactly as they were. Violet had stood up without a word. She carried her untouched plate to the dishwasher and put it in, risotto and all.

  Josephine appeared behind her screaming something at the top of her lungs, but in Violet’s ears, her voice was like an infomercial playing in a far-off room: distant, agenda-ed, predictable. In any other company, this audio hallucination—selective deafness—would have been unsettling, but given the circumstances, it was bliss. Nirvana on earth.

  Even though Violet still hadn’t been able to bear the idea of eating, she’d flung open the refrigerator door and its related plastic drawers and begun pulling out every piece of produce she could find: a jalapeño, a flaccid cucumber, a quartered onion in a ziplock bag, a lacy bunch of kale, a bruised apple, half a lime. She dumped it all out on Josephine’s epicurean cutting board, grabbed the biggest conceivable knife from the slotted block, and set to work making her own goddamn dinner.

  She looked up just in time to see Edie’s red tray hit the table. Sitting down opposite Violet, she twisted what little hair she had at the base of her long neck. The blue pen she stuck through her bun was printed with the word ZOLOFT.

  “In group this morning, didn’t you say you have a sister who ran away? Do you think she’d let you go and crash at her place?”

  “I don’t know.” Violet paused and considered. “I don’t know if I’d even want to.”

  “You don’t like her? Your sister?”

  Edie had been a foster kid. CPS had moved her out of her drug-addicted mother’s house and placed her in a home with belching, acne-scarred, pedo foster brothers and a woman who branded her tongue with a heated spoon. Probably, she idealized sisterhood.

  “I don’t know,” Violet said. “I honestly don’t know her very well. When we were little, Rose was like this cleverly arranged slide show, projecting whatever my mother wanted her to be. And I don’t mean typical good-girl stuff, like try to be polite, try to be kind. My mom really wanted Rose to be a child actress. She was always taking her to acting coaches so she could perfect her fake Cockney accent or dyeing her hair different colors for castings: Irish red, California blond.” Violet had a brief but vivid flashback of her mother bent over the bathtub, hosing bleach out of her nine-year-old sister’s hair. How envious she had been at the time. In retrospect, the whole business horrified her. Later, she’d seen Rose crying about her burned scalp. Violet rubbed her palm across her mouth and shivered. “Even in everyday life, Rose seemed to be reading from a script. It wasn’t till last year that she finally broke character.”

  “Did she wild out?”

  “Sort of. She dropped her major in theater arts and went undecided. I think she was looking to transfer into something in the science department. Rose didn’t want to live at home anymore. She started screaming her head off about wanting a student room in New Paltz, probably so she could be closer to her boyfriend. No way she was gonna bring him home. My parents have all sorts of rules about ’no shut doors’ and ‘no boys allowed upstairs.’ ”

 
“Is he right for her? Her boyfriend … what’s his name?”

  “Damien.”

  “How very dark … and French. I know a Damien at Vassar. What’s his last name?”

  “Koch.”

  “So is he? Right for her, I mean?”

  “Dunno. Probably. It sounds like he got her back into theater or whatever. Personally, I never met him. Rose always kept her relationships top secret. She didn’t talk about them. She never once brought a guy home to meet my parents.”

  “Maybe she’s not into guys? That’s the reason most people hide who they’re dating.”

  Violet shook her head. No way Rose was sapphically inclined. “I think it was more like she knows no one will ever be good enough for her in my mother’s eyes. Besides, I always got the sense Rose was an undercover freak. A few months before she left home, I was giving her a hard time about being the Virgin Mary, and she looked at me with this filthy smile and said, ‘If you only knew what I’ve been up to.’ After she was gone, when the cops were searching her room, they found this little vibrator hidden behind the smiling side of her comedy/tragedy masks. My mom looked furious. My dad almost died of embarrassment.”

  “Cops?” Edie asked with interest.

  “Yeah. It was scary for a few days. My super-considerate sister moved out without any warning. My parents reported her missing. Turns out she’d only run away. It didn’t take the cops long to find CCTV from the MetroNorth station. The footage showed Rose buying a one-way ticket to Grand Central. She’d been alone, pulling a suitcase. She didn’t look the least bit distressed.”

  How was it possible to hate someone straight down to their marrow and still miss them? Violet missed Rose. Desperately. She had never let herself think that before, not one time in all the months since the first responding officer had pulled her aside and pointedly asked, “What do you think happened to your sister?” Even when Josephine started obnoxiously doting on Will and when Douglas—a marginal figure to begin with—fell clean off the pages of the family history.

  Sure, there was a time not too long ago when Violet was crying nightly and throwing things at her wall, and she took Rose’s absence as further proof that everyone would discard her in the end. But as the year progressed, Violet had found blotter paper, THC, and transcendence. She’d learned to turn her brain inside out and leave her emotions behind.

  But ever since Rose’s letter had arrived, Violet had been feeling like she’d stepped in the same shit again. Her feelings had roared back at high volume. She felt light-headed, off-center. Her shoulders were clenched so tight it hurt to turn her head.

  Edie was wearing a look she’d probably borrowed from one of the many shrinks she’d seen over the years. “Was it some kind of cry for attention? You think your sister is BPD?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Sorry. Borderline personality disordered. It’s like, an I-love-you-I-hate-you-Don’t-leave-me kinda thing. Emotional roller-coaster shit. Do you think she ran away hoping you all would come hunting her down?”

  “Maybe. When we were kids, Rose’s favorite game was hide-and-seek,” Violet said. “She loved hiding at the bottom of the laundry basket, knowing everyone was pulling their hair out trying to find her.”

  After lunch Violet borrowed Edie’s phone card. Clutching the greasy yellow receiver, her back to the booth’s closed accordion door, Violet was faced with a first-world problem. She could not remember her best friend’s phone number, which she’d always dialed from the saved entry on her cell phone.

  She had three misdials.

  She thought for a second and admired the graffiti that still showed through a janitor’s efforts to scrub it off (Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?). Then it occurred to her to call 411. Thankfully, Imogene’s parents had a landline.

  Two conflicting voices said hello. The frazzled one belonged to Imogene’s mother. The kind of endearingly monotone one was Finch. “I got it, Mom,” he said.

  Violet felt as though her tongue had been cut out. “Finch,” she said. Violet’s desperation—she was dying to talk to Imogene—gave her voice a breathy, stalkerette quality.

  “Yeah. Is that Violet?”

  For the past few months, she’d been trying to put the way she felt about Finch out of her mind. She wouldn’t allow herself to call it a crush. Crushes weren’t a precursor to love, they were a precursor to having your heart chewed up like Shark Week.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Violet said. “Listen, is Imogene there?”

  “She’s in the shower. What’s up? Where have you been?”

  “Is there any way you could get her? I don’t really know when I’ll be able to call again.”

  “Man, Hurst. Are you in the clink or something? Is this your one phone call? Do you need me to call a lawyer for you?”

  “I’m not in jail. Just get Imogene, okay? I’m calling on a phone card and I don’t know how much money’s on it.”

  After Violet spent a few more minutes perusing the phone booth graffiti, Imogene finally picked up.

  “Violet? Are you okay? Finch said you got busted for those seeds. That’s outrageous! They’re legal! For fuck’s sake, we bought them in the gardening section of Gordon’s Fairtrade Farm!”

  “I didn’t get arrested. It’s a long story. My mom’s lying about me, I think. Saying I’m abusive to Will. My dad brought me to Fallkill.”

  “Wait. What? The mental hospital?! What are you doing there? Do you need us to come get you?”

  “You can come visit me. I can’t leave until they say it’s okay.”

  “Which ‘they’? The doctors or your parents?”

  “The doctors.”

  “How is she saying you abused Will?”

  “I don’t know. Something happened to his hand. A knife or something. I’m afraid I might be in serious trouble. My mom is trying to decide whether she’s going to press charges.”

  “You’re fucking kidding, right? This is serious, Violet. You have to get the fuck out of there. My parents will get you out of there. My mom’s right here.”

  “No. Imogene, don’t trouble your mom with this. She’s dealing with enough—”

  “Violet? Are you all right?”

  Violet thought of magnanimous, huggy Beryl Field as the mother she always wished she had. It had been Beryl who’d taught Violet how to parallel park; who explained to her how to put on eyeliner (“Tilt your head back and close your eye about halfway. Think Marilyn Monroe”). On the night of the spring chorale concert, Beryl had gently suggested Violet take off the reinforced-toe pantyhose Josephine had earlier insisted she wear. (“There! That’s better, don’t you think?” Beryl had said, once the hose were balled in Violet’s pocket. “You looked beautiful before, too. But now, there’s nothing detracting from your pretty peep-toe espadrilles.”) Beryl asked the open-ended questions that Josephine didn’t: where Violet wanted to travel, what qualities Violet found attractive in boys, how she felt about applying for college. Naturally, Josephine thought Beryl was spineless and overindulgent; she liked to poke fun at the way Beryl was raising Imogene like she was a “precious little snowflake” when, in her estimation, what Imogene really needed was a mom with the courage and conviction to “rip the piercings out of her face.”

  “I’m okay,” Violet said, fighting back tears.

  “Imogene says you’re at Fallkill Psych? What happened, honey?”

  Violet couldn’t help registering the hoarse, tired tones in Beryl’s voice. She sounded so unlike the vivacious woman who used to find time to make giant abstract sculptures out of PVC pipes and teach a hula-hoop dance class at the Stone Ridge Community Center.

  Violet wanted to ask for help, but she wasn’t yet ready to fully fight her mother’s accusations. She needed more information. She needed time to build her defense case. Whatever had happened to Will, it was Violet’s word against Josephine’s, at least or until she was clear on whether Rose had really been there.

  The only words she managed to
get out were the understatement of the century: “Nothing happened. I had a fight with my mom and then a panic attack. Or maybe it was the other way around.”

  Violet had a sudden picture—a flip book, really—of her mom’s face that night in the kitchen: She saw her mother’s eyes shrink, then widen, then narrow as though she were taking aim. She had a flashback of Josephine’s mouth: first contracting nervously, then opening in a scream of horror, then snarling, her upper lip curling past her eyeteeth. What the hell had Violet said that had propelled her mother’s face—which was usually restricted to sadistic smirks and phony smiles—through such a range of expression?

  It still didn’t make sense, the way Violet’s freak-out had incited her mom to have one of her own. Hanging up with Beryl, Violet couldn’t shake Josephine’s good-bye face as she left for the hospital. Her mother’s eyes had held Violet with a looks-could-kill glare. It was a face that carried a vindictive warning. A face that told Violet, Just you wait …

  WILLIAM HURST

  “CAN I GET you a Coke?” Douglas asked without looking at Will directly. They were at his office, and he was powering up one of three desktop computers, the login screen prompting him for a password.

  Will flinched, then tried to cover his shock. Josephine had always forbidden him soda, and as a result, he’d never developed a taste for it. Everything about Coca-Cola—the smell, the excrement color, the carbonated hiss—made vomit rise in Will’s throat.

  “No, thanks,” Will said. “I’m not thirsty.”

  Will tried to peer over the desk and track his dad’s fingers as he typed his password. But Douglas was fast. Too fast. In less than a second, he was logged in. The striped IBM logo glowed bright on his monitors.

  Will couldn’t help noticing that his dad was different at work. He seemed to be witnessing a complete personality transplant. Before, Will had worried that his father had a parallel life, but the reality was something even more disturbing: his father seemed to have a parallel identity.