by Brock Clarke
With that, my father got up from the table, left the room, and went upstairs. My mother and I sat there, breathing hard, as if my father had taken most of the oxygen with him. My mother’s expression was so blank it couldn’t really be called an expression. Neither of us said a word, but I was thinking two things—My poor Mom, and Will he take me with him?—when my father came down a few minutes later, suitcase in hand, and my mother asked, “Did you ever love me?”
“And you ask too many stupid questions,” my father said. “That’s another thing.”
Then he left. We sat there for a while longer. I was staring at my mother, who was staring at her birthday cake. I was sixteen years old, the time in your life when you make your big irreversible choices, and I knew right then that my big irreversible choice was this: Was I going to be like my father or mother? Was I going to be a mean, bullying son of a bitch, or was I going to be kind and gentle and selfless and good? Was I going to mistake power for happiness, meanness for pleasure? Was I going to be the kind of person who made himself feel good by making the people he was supposed to love feel bad? Or would I be the kind of person who would, for instance, work hard to turn a loving mother’s worst birthday ever into something not so awful, not so devastating? My father was out there somewhere with Julie and her hair that felt like hair; but I was here, with my mother, on her birthday, and my father hadn’t taken me with him: he had made his choice, and now I was going to make mine. And speaking of my choice, I had a personal essay due for Mrs. Tooley’s English class the next morning, and up until that moment I had no idea what it was going to be about, other than it was going to be an essay about something personal; but now that I’d made my choice to be like my mother and not my father, I at least had the title, which was: “I’ve Made My Choice (I Am My Mother’s Son”). And as my first official act as my mother’s son, I picked up a knife and said to my mother, “OK, birthday girl. Who’s ready for some cake?”
“I am,” my mother said feebly. But before I could cut her a piece, she started flapping her hands in front of her face, the way she always did when she was upset, like her sadness was a smell she could get rid of by flapping her hands spastically, like a retard (which was the way Dad always described it), the hand flapping and her, the hand flapper. “I’m sorry, Bryan,” she said, and she jumped up from the table, ran up the stairs, and locked herself in the bathroom. After a few minutes, I knocked on the door and asked her what she was doing, and she said she was holding one of Dad’s razor blades at that very moment and was seriously contemplating slicing her wrists with it, which I doubted, since Dad used an electric shaver and had most likely taken it with him, in any case. But still, I felt pretty bad.
When I went to school the next morning, my mother hadn’t killed herself (she was asleep, not dead, and I knew she wasn’t dead because she was snoring, snoring that weird high-pitched, siren-like snore that was loud enough to be heard through her closed door and my closed door, too, and Dad once woke Mom up to say that the neighbors had been complaining about the noise and suggested she sleep on her back, or her side, or maybe in a different neighborhood altogether, and he also said her snoring had caused the neighbors to give her a nickname: The Following Is a Test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This Is Only a Test), but I still didn’t know how to make her feel better, and I hadn’t written my personal essay, either. So when it was my turn to get up in front of the class and read what I hadn’t written, I instead recited my title, told the class basically what I’ve told you, then turned to Mrs. Tooley. She was looking at me the way you might look at someone with a horrible, disfiguring illness: part You poor thing and part Are you contagious?
“Your poor mother,” she said.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “What should I do?”
“You could start by being nice to her.”
“Already done that,” I said. “But what else? Should I get her something?”
“Get her something?” Mrs. Tooley said. “You mean, like flowers?”
“Hey, that’s a good idea,” I said. So after school, I went out and got my mom a lilac bush. And I didn’t get her just any old lilac bush. It was a Korean lilac, because the people at the nursery said that the Korean lilac symbolized hope, grace, and rebirth, whereas the American lilac didn’t symbolize much of anything and was just your normal flowering bush, basically. I brought it to back the house, planted it right in the backyard garden (which, like my mother herself, had gone to seed, and was scraggly and barely presentable—this is what I thought, but I didn’t say it, unlike my father, who would have, and in fact had, so many times), and told my mother what it symbolized and that, no matter what Dad had said, she was a good person and a great mother with a lot of excellent qualities and a full life ahead of her. And that I loved her.
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “Is this my birthday present?”
“Birthday present,” I repeated, not quite getting it.
“I thought you’d forgotten to get me something,” she said. “I had started to think that maybe you’d forgotten to get me something for my birthday.”
Because I had forgotten to get her something for her birthday, which had been, as you know, the day before. I’d forgotten to get my mother a birthday present. This was indefensible, and I didn’t try to defend myself. But if I had tried to defend myself, I would have said something about school and trying to get and keep my grades above a D, like my mother was always bugging me about, and not having time to remember to get a birthday present for each and every person on this planet and how, besides, I’d remembered most of her other birthdays and my track record wasn’t all that awful, if you thought about it, and Jesus, I was here, wasn’t I? Unlike another person who had also failed to get her a birthday present, I was at least here. Although if she kept giving me this sort of guilt trip, maybe I wouldn’t be much longer: maybe I’d go out and find a different mother, the way Dad had gone out and found a different woman. And then there was the Korean lilac bush. Hadn’t I gone out and bought this highly symbolic lilac bush just to make her feel better? Hadn’t I gotten my hands and my favorite jeans all dirty while putting in it the ground? Did she know that I was being selfless and doing this all for her? Did it matter whether I gave her the bush on her birthday or the day after? Did it matter whether I’d gotten it for her birthday or just to make her feel better, regardless of the day and out of the goodness of my heart? Didn’t my mother know how hard she was making it, already, for my heart to be good? Didn’t my mother know how hard she was making it for me to be like her, and not Dad? These were just some of the things I could have said in my defense but didn’t. Instead, I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t give this to you yesterday.” And then: “Happy birthday, Mom.”
“Oh, Bryan, I love it. But will you take care of it for me?” she asked. “Because you know I’m not too good at taking care of plants.”
“I know,” I said. Over the years, my mother had killed all variety of houseplants, in all variety of ways, and there wasn’t one green, living thing in our house except for the mold in the back of the refrigerator. Speaking of the mold, just a week earlier my father had said that if the mold got any bigger and more disgusting and animate, then it would end up eating her, my mom, its creator, and then someone would make a horror movie about it, and my dad and I laughed: because he was funny—my father could say some funny things even when he was being such a huge bastard—you had to give him that.
“So you’ll take care of the Korean lilac for me?”
“I said I would, didn’t I?” And then, hearing my father’s voice in my own—not the funny father’s voice, but the one who didn’t have enough patience with the way my mom needed to be reassured about every little thing. It was that father’s voice that I heard, not the funny one at all, and so I said, more gently, in my own voice: “Yes. I’ll take good care of it for you.”
“Thank you,” my mother said. She leaned over, smelled the purple flowers, and smiled at me. “This is the nicest birthday g
ift anyone has ever given me.”
And then it died. I woke up two weeks later on a Saturday, went down to get some breakfast and juice, and there was my mother, coffee cup in hand, staring at the Korean lilac, smack in the middle of the garden, brown-leaved and cobwebbed and so dead it would have won a deadest plant contest, hands down. Huh, I thought, and then: Oh well. Because after all, the Korean lilac had lasted two weeks, which was probably a long time for such an exotic bush. It’d had a good run. Besides, the bush, when it was still alive, had really seemed to cheer Mom up: she was locking herself in the bathroom less often and had started washing her hair with this special conditioner to make it less hay-like. Of course, the Korean lilac wasn’t magic or anything; it couldn’t work miracles, and the first time Dad had come by the house, to get some clothes he’d left behind, Mom had reverted to her old pathetic self and begged him to stay, and had even held him by the ankles to prevent him from leaving, and he’d dragged her across the floor until finally shaking her loose (and I felt for my father a little bit: because Mom really made him look undignified and like a caveman, the way he was dragging her across the floor like that; she’d put him in an impossible position, really, even though he dragged her as gently as possible, didn’t kick at her at all or scream, “Get your hands off of me, woman,” like he easily could have done, but instead said, quietly, patiently, when he got to the front door, “Are you going to let go of me now, or am I going to have to drag you down the steps and out onto the sidewalk?” I was grateful for his tact and would have told him so, except that he didn’t even seem to notice that I was there, holding the door open for him). But by the third or fourth time, my mother just let my father take whatever he wanted—furniture, flat- or stemware, even stuff that was my mom’s from before they were married—and I attributed this sea change to the Korean lilac. Yes, she had gotten some of her dignity back, thanks to the Korean lilac, and, hell, I had, too: during those two weeks I’d spent only two days in after-school detention, I’d hit only one kid in the back of the head standing in line in the cafeteria (he was moving so slowly and asking for it, and even then I restrained myself and could have hit him much harder, and with more knuckle), and I even tried to pay attention in my classes, even did my homework, or some of it. Because, I figured, education might be the cure for meanness, and if I had my father’s mean gene, I thought I could maybe learn it out of me. This was what I was trying to express to my English class in my Alternative Forms of Poetry presentation, during which I got up, grabbed a book off one of my classmates’ desk, and rapped, “What, what, what is the cure for meanness?” and then pointed at the book and rapped, “This, this, this is the cure for meanness,” which would have come off a lot better if the book hadn’t been a driver’s ed manual and if I hadn’t been holding it upside down. The class started laughing at me—even Mrs. Tooley was smiling and shaking her head in an amused way—and I almost told her and them to go fuck themselves. But I didn’t; that’s the point: I didn’t tell my teacher and classmates to go fuck themselves, and I had the Korean lilac to thank for that, and my mother did, too, and we couldn’t really ask more of it, I didn’t think.
But then I looked over at my mother and she was crying, crying the way she tends to: silently but open-mouthed, the tears running down her cheeks and into her mouth, as if she were her own irrigation system. Or maybe she was her own drainage system. If I’d paid more attention in my earth science class I ended up failing, I would have known which one.
“My Korean lilac bush died,” my mother said during a pause in her quiet weeping, and then turned and looked at me meaningfully, as if it were my fault.
“Hey, don’t blame it on me,” I said. “It just died on its own. These things happen.”
“I’m not blaming you,” she said. “But is it possible you didn’t water it enough?”
“Oh, I watered it,” I said. Because I had; twice, thrice, sometimes four times a day I’d watered that bush, giving it a serious soaking each time. “I definitely watered it.”
“Maybe you watered it too much,” she said.
“Let’s not argue about how much I did or did not water the bush,” I said. “I can get you another one.”
“I don’t want another one,” my mother said. She started crying again, and there was so much liquid going in her mouth that I thought she might drown—drown from drinking her own tears—and how awkward that would be for me to try to explain it to the investigating authorities, and how hard my life would be afterward, when it became known that I was the son who let his mother drown in her own tears. So I felt bad again and begged her to stop crying. “Please,” I told her. “Please. I’ll get you anything you want,” and I listed all the things she might want: a tree (a birch maybe, because my mother had grown up in Massachusetts and was pretty nostalgic about birch trees and what that poet wrote about them and what the Indians did with them), or maybe a fern, or a bonsai, or one of those very pretty flowering miniature trees whose fruit or blossoms or leaves were deadly if eaten or touched for an overlong time, or sometimes even just sniffed. But, no, my mother said she didn’t want any of those things: all she wanted was her family back, and no plant or tree or bush was a family, and besides, those things were like everything else and would only, like the Korean lilac I’d given her, end up leaving her, betraying her, and making her feel even more lonely and like dying herself. “I don’t want another plant,” she said, and then she ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom before I could point out that it wasn’t a “plant”; it was a “bush,” and you would have thought at her advanced age, she’d have been smart enough to know the difference.
But in any case, I got the message—plant life of any kind was out—and so I got my mother a dog. This time, I was smart and didn’t do anything too fancy, like look for a heavily symbolic exotic-but-not-so-hearty dog. No, I did the smart thing and I went right to the pound, right to the good old-fashioned all-American pound, and looked for the most weathered pooch they had, a dog that had seen the worst the world had to offer and had survived, and was still around and barking and eager to provide a lonely discouraged middle-aged woman a little canine companionship. After a little searching, I found one: way in the back of the pound, in the cage closest to the incinerator, I found a ravaged but sweet-tempered one-eared 110-pound pit bull who had so much spark in him that he nearly chewed his way through the cage while I was standing there, looking at him, trying to picture him in our house, in the backyard, curled up in front of the ventless gas fireplace, thinking about what kind of companion he’d be to my mother. The way that dog kept lunging at me, it was like he was making a case for himself: it was like he was saying, Me! Me! Please pick me! I asked the guy in charge how much the dog cost, and he said, “Man, you can just have him,” and he handed me Jugular’s (that was the dog’s name) choke collar and chain from his dogfighting days. They were the strongest, thickest choke collar and chain I had ever seen, and must have cost someone a pretty penny; but the guy offered to give them to me gratis, just like the dog, which was pretty much the clincher as far as I was concerned. Besides, I thought Mom might appreciate my frugality, because we were on a pretty tight budget since Dad had left us and neither Mom nor I had a job, nor were we qualified for one, at least not any decent-paying ones, and I figured that if we really got desperate, then Jugular probably had a few more dogfights in him and maybe we could make some money off of that. Which was another plus.
Anyway, I brought Jugular home and presented him to my mother. As a token of my love for her. In giving my mother Jugular, I was actually saying: I am your son, and this is my heart, and I am giving it to you. Although at first, she didn’t take it that way. At first, she was dismayed by the way Jugular pulled on his chain and frothed at the mouth and gnashed his teeth when she reached out, tentatively, to pet him. It was the gnashing of teeth in particular that concerned her.
“Will he chew on things?” my mother wanted to know.
“He’s a dog,” I said, through gri
tted teeth, because I was trying to hold Jugular back from my mother and he kept lunging at her, and it seemed like the only thing standing between my mother and a mauling was the choke chain and my arms, which were kind of spindly, which was something I’d gotten from my mother: I’d gotten her skinny arms and not my dad’s biceps, which really were impressive and which sometimes, while watching TV, he rubbed, as if giving them a good shine. I repeated, “He’s a dog, Mom. Odds are he’ll probably chew on something.”
“Maybe he’d like to chew on my slippers,” my mother said. She took off her slippers, her slippers my father had gotten cheap at the factory outlet store—there was something barely wrong with them, some weak seam or irregular stitching or substandard lining—and had given to her for her last birthday, and put the slippers under Jugular’s nose and let him sniff them, first the left and then the right. Jugular stopped pulling on the chain immediately and started wagging his little stump of a tail. He took the left slipper into his mouth gently, as though the slipper were a duck he didn’t want to wound, and hopped up on the couch next to my mother, where he sat, contentedly chewing the slipper my father had given her, just last year.