Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  The other thing on my mind regarding word usage pertains to vanity. You call your dresser your “vanity.” And it has those big mirrors, one on your side and one on Dad’s, and then you have that big mirrored tray with all your perfume bottles on it. So I could sit on the bed and watch you get ready in three planes: real life, vertical mirror, horizontal mirror. Usually I just used the mirrors. I felt I could be more invisible if I looked at your reflection, rather than directly at you. I never wanted you to catch me looking, but you never seemed to mind or notice if I was there. Of course my favorite combination was the yellow dress with the red belt and red shoes, and then the cloud of Chanel.

  We have the same crooked mouth,

  Agnes

  There are these strawberry-flavored muffins, bright pink, at the coffee shop on campus. They taste like the marshmallows in cereal. There’s also something called coffee milk, which people here are obsessed with. It’s like chocolate milk but it’s flavored with coffee instead of chocolate. I pick one of those up along with a muffin, and I’m in line when I feel a change in the air and hear the tinny clatter of music issuing from somewhere very close to me.

  “Hey. Nice dinner.” His voice is loud and deliberate, his headphones neon yellow, their cord rising out of the pocket of his olive-green barn jacket. I take him in entirely, his cheeks flushed with cold, his slightly rumpled hair, the torn canvas of his sneakers. To hide my panic and excitement, I try to concentrate on paying and probably look like I don’t know how to add up money.

  “Do you want a bag for this?”

  I shake my head and put the stuff in the pockets of my big coat. I stand there while Tea Rose pays for his small coffee.

  “Don’t you work at the dining hall?”

  “Yes.”

  “So can’t you get better food? Like, secret food?” He is still too loud. We move to the side.

  “It doesn’t really work like that. Usually we eat before whatever meal we’re working, so I’m not very hungry, and afterward I don’t always like eating what I’ve been around for three hours.”

  “Ah.” He puts his headphones around his neck. There is suddenly no sound between us. “Hey, do you know Nirvana?” He says it like we are at a party and he is our—mine and Nirvana’s—mutual friend.

  “Um, yeah. Doesn’t everyone?”

  He rolls his eyes. “I don’t mean like, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ I mean their early stuff.”

  How could he know I had an older brother once who knew everything there was to know about music? “You mean like ‘Bleach’?”

  Tea Rose lights up. “Yeah, yes. Totally. That’s exactly what I was just listening to. It’s fucking brilliant. Do you want to sit somewhere?” He looks around for a table.

  “I have to go, actually. I need to get some reading done. And call my dad. And do some laundry.” I don’t know why I’m doing this. What I want is to stay with him more than anything in the world.

  “Wow. One excuse and two alternates. Impressive.”

  I think if I kissed Tea Rose, I would definitely keep my eyes open. I’m convinced that if I loiter too long in his presence, I will reach out and start rubbing his face. It reminds me of the polished minerals I used to covet from the gift shop of the museum of natural history. Agate. Calcite.

  “I’ll see you in class.”

  He raises his cup a little, as if to toast. “Okay. That’s a big coat you’ve got there.”

  “Thanks,” I say, before realizing he isn’t necessarily complimenting me. “I mean, it’s my mother’s.” Now I’m practically mumbling. “I like to be prepared. You have no idea the stuff I can keep in here.”

  Tea Rose laughs, an easy sound. “Maybe we can get together and listen to Nirvana sometime. Or, you know, talk about coats.”

  I don’t tell him that I don’t really care about music anymore. But I would listen to whatever he wanted. And then I am extra grateful for my coat, which feels like it’s actually keeping my heart, now spinning as wildly as a piñata after the first hit, inside my body.

  * * *

  At the start of Parents’ Weekend, I meet my dad at the student center and we hug each other, and I have to try very hard not to let loose the ball of unexpected tears in my throat. His beard tickles my neck and he smells like Pour Homme, the drugstore cologne he’s been wearing for a thousand years.

  There is a breakfast set up for students with their parents, and I don’t have to work. We go to it, the stench of powdered eggs rubbing against our faces as we walk through the door. My dad puts a lot of food on his plate, and when he runs out of room, he puts it on my plate. Eggs, French toast, sausage links, bacon, a muffin, hash browns, fruit, and a few packages of saltines from near the silverware. The saltines are part of some final, desperate act. The last grabbable, edible thing.

  We sit down at the end of a long table. At the other end, a group of girls sits with their parents. All of the girls seem to be wearing some combination of pink, green, and white, with scarves tied through their belt loops or in their hair. Their mothers are aged holograms of them, incandescent in their crisp white shirts, with their crisp white skin and frosted hair. Their fathers sit in pleated and plaid button-down shirts, silent and embarrassed. We listen along with them as their wives and daughters decide on the places they want to hit and do.

  “So, okay, we’ll do the museum, then,” one of them is saying.

  “Yes!” says another. “The museum!”

  “We’ll do the museum, and then we’ll hit the mall, and then we can squeeze in a quick run—”

  “Or tennis!”

  “Ooh! Tennis! Yes. Let’s totally do tennis. And then…maybe Cactus Fred’s for margaritas?”

  “Yes! Totally! We should definitely hit Cactus Fred’s!”

  My father and I watch the same way we watch television at home. I turn to him after a while.

  “Dad.”

  “Hmm?” He is hovering over his food, as if newly reminded of it.

  “Should we do the museum? Or would you rather do Cactus Fred’s? Or we could, you know, do both, with a little fro-yo in between…”

  My dad smiles, a bit of ground pepper between his front teeth. “What’s the museum like?”

  I tear the tops off three packets of sugar at once and empty them into my coffee. “There’s a Mary Sargent collection, I think. And a few suits of armor.”

  “Sounds pretty good.”

  The coffee won’t get sweet. I stir it some more. “I’m kidding about wanting to go.”

  “Oh. Well, whatever you want. Whatever you want to do.” He is staring at one of the mothers. He is thinking about my mother, because we are always thinking about my mother.

  The girls and their parents disperse after some prolonged goodbyes and a few more rounds of schedule recitation, dumping their trays of egg-white omelets and fruit at the trash station and exiting through separate doors, linking arms with their mothers while their fathers trail behind.

  We wind up at the outlet mall and walk around and around, not saying much. We buy caramel apples, each the size of a baby’s head, and eat them down to their cores. My father keeps eating past the core, seeds and all, until he’s left with only stick, which he holds in his mouth like a giant toothpick. We are in front of a sneaker store when he finally removes it.

  “So you’ll be home for Thanksgiving, right?” he says.

  I look at my dad, taking in the rough, sad terrain of his face and the garish mall carpet and the dozens of sneakers in the display window next to him. Home seems like the most taboo word, subject.

  “I don’t know.”

  He’s looking at me now. It’s not really in our contract to be looked at this way. I am unaccustomed to the openness in his eyes, the want, the sadness, his very here-ness. I want to disappear into the carpet, the sneakers.

  “I’m just…not sure I can handle it right now. ”

  How to tell him without hurting his feelings that without Simon and without Mom, there’s no home to speak of? He who
is, after all, there, home, alone.

  “Where does that leave me?” He is pinning me here. He is not being rhetorical. The possibility for more sorrow is thick between us. My mouth is gluey from the caramel. I don’t want to answer his question, and I can’t answer his question.

  My dad returns the apple stick to his mouth, tries a different angle.

  “She might come home if you do.”

  “Dad. That’s a lot of pressure.”

  His whole body is a frown, head and shoulders tilted forward as if bracing against a stiff wind, knees buckling slightly against all the feelings and objects of the world, namely, hope and the mall. I have been looking at and not seeing his face for my entire life. I close my eyes briefly and try a composite sketch in darkness, the stiff beard and mustache that conceals his small mouth; the tired, deep-set eyes; the bald head now reflecting the sickly overhead light, the hair at the back of his head surprisingly dark and silken, the hair of a much younger man. I look nothing like either of my parents. When I open my eyes again, he’s attempting to smile.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’m not trying to put pressure on you. The situation with Mom is…complicated. I myself don’t…” He trails off, rubs his face. “I just would like to spend more time together. With you.”

  I used to be his helper. Yard work, grocery shopping. He always put an extra pack of Juicy Fruit gum on the conveyer belt at the very last second, for me. The predictable thing that was somehow still a surprise every time. When did I stop being his helper?

  * * *

  Later we’re in my dad’s hotel room, each on a bed, eating Vietnamese takeout. We are two people who generally connect via eating. The food is our euphemism, everything we can’t say. The news is on mute.

  “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  My dad jabs his noodles with a plastic fork. “What else is in here? Tofu?”

  “Yesterday, a month ago…?”

  He chews for a minute. “Hmm, something like that. Things haven’t been easy for her. She’s very sensitive.” He looks at a piece of shrimp on his fork for a long time, as if searching for answers.

  “Don’t you think this is abnormal?” It’s unprecedented for me to be this direct.

  Dad puts the shrimp in his mouth just as a commotion breaks out in the hallway. A crash and someone saying, “Sir, sir.” The sound of squeaky wheels and a slow rubbing against the wall, as if someone is dragging someone else against it.

  “This is a strange hotel.” My dad puts the paper container on the nightstand, unmutes the TV.

  We watch the second half of a Law & Order and then another Law & Order. Eventually, we put the food containers back into the takeout bag and try to squeeze the whole mess into the tiny wastebasket. My dad puts it out in the hall. “Wish we could open a window,” he says.

  “Fresh air gives people too many crazy ideas,” I say, purposely not making the joke about suicide. Not that it’d even work, I think, here on the aspirationally named “garden level” of the hotel.

  We take turns using the bathroom and getting ready for bed. Then, lying in the dark, each in our own double bed, we take turns making settling-down sounds—I sniff; Dad clears his throat; Dad sighs; I yawn—as though to dissuade one another from talking.

  “Dad.”

  He waits a few seconds before answering, as though debating whether he should pretend to be asleep. “Mmm-hmm?”

  “Remember when it was my seventh birthday and you drove me to school because Mom wasn’t home, and we had to stop at the deli to get stuff for my lunch and you felt bad so you bought, like, a huge paper bag worth of stuff? Like a family-sized bag of chips—I shared them with the whole lunch table. And you did my hair that day; you tried to braid it.”

  “I think I remember, yes.”

  “Where was Mom? Why wasn’t she home? I mean, it was a weekday. And my birthday! But the craziest thing is how it didn’t seem strange to me then, the way it does now.”

  My father adjusts his pillow, slaps it lightly, clears his throat. “I guess she was visiting her sister? Or wait. Actually, I think she’d gone to find you those what’s-it-called, those dolls you liked? One of those cabbage dolls? Cabbage head dolls?”

  “But couldn’t she have done that before my actual birthday? Remember we were all sitting around after dinner? And Simon really wanted to go out, and you kept saying we had to eat cake first.”

  “Well, your mom went all the way to the city for the cake. She wanted it to be really special.”

  I start to respond but think better of it. There can be no definitive family history. We will always have our own versions. In mine, Mom walked into the kitchen, where we were all sitting—waiting—with nothing in her hands and gave me a distracted hug and kiss. And then told us she’d forgotten something and left again, the car peeling out of the driveway. My dad scooped ice cream into bowls for the three of us and lit a candle in mine, and sang Happy Birthday, and then gave me some cash and a set of marbles. Simon gave me a kiss and a beat-up Meat Is Murder cassette, which I listened to almost every day for the next year. Later that night, when I was trying to fall asleep, my mom came into my room and gently touched my face. I woke up and there was a slice of cake on my nightstand and a Cabbage Patch doll in a brown shopping bag, and we shared the cake and freed the doll from her plastic trusses. I realize now that it’s still one of the happiest memories I have of any birthday, despite the fact that she missed it almost entirely.

  “Dad?”

  He doesn’t answer, not even when I try again. He has fallen asleep, or committed to pretending.

  Dear Mom,

  Dad wants everything to be fine so badly. “Fine so badly” seems like a good description for how we relate to one another, how we pass the time not being fine but not wanting to hurt one another with our own pain. You have made us so polite.

  Good work (sarcasm).

  Agnes

  My dad and I say goodbye on the walkway outside my dorm. He brings me two bags from the store filled with instant oatmeal, saltines, Juicy Fruit, cans of grapefruit and pineapple juice, mixed nuts, detergent, legal pads, and toothpaste.

  “Thanks for coming, Dad.”

  He hugs me briefly and hard. “Let’s see you at Thanksgiving.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  We look at each other through a veil of something. Campus is quiet. Everyone is at the final luncheon. There had been a moment earlier when Surprise’s parents had asked if we wanted to sit with them. Both of us had reacted strongly, deferentially, citing the long drive ahead. Surprise’s mom, Poppy, gave us a big smile, but her eyebrows were having another conversation.

  I look up for a moment and the sky is like paper, the branches overhead a sloppy crosshatch.

  “Bye, Dad.”

  “I love you, Agnes.” He turns in the direction of the parking lot, his beige pants and beige jacket some kind of official uniform of leaving.

  “You too.”

  * * *

  On certain days I just want to play the piano and wish I’d gone to a school where that was all I had to do. I don’t know anything about those schools because I’ve never been good enough to consider them. I imagine them like the ones from television: passionate kids who are passionate in a general way about everything, writhing and crying on piano benches, bony hands whittled from practicing. My own hands seem lazy and lumbering in comparison.

  At the music library, I borrow a Chopin waltz. Early October has become unexpectedly warm, and there is a feeling like an awakening across campus, a broad desire to do things, a low-level excitement not directed at any goal.

  Earlier today I took note of people on benches outside. Classic bench behavior—chitchat, sunglasses, books in a heap on one end and bodies leaning lazily on the other. One of the bodies on one of the benches was Tea Rose. He was facing forward but angled sideways toward a girl’s ear, saying something, and she was laughing quietly, the laughter of an intimate moment. I’d walked quickly past, blood suddenly ec
hoing in my ears. I was strangely embarrassed, as though their mild affection was a public announcement of my hunger, my loneliness.

  The music library is empty. I take the sheet music and walk through the breezeway to the practice building. The girl at the desk has fuzzy blond dreadlocks and paint-chipped nails but otherwise looks like a young Joan Baez, like the photo of her on the cover of Diamonds & Rust in my parents’ collection: dark eyes, full high cheeks and forehead, lips that seem preternaturally parted.

  “You’re in my Energy and the Environment class, right?”

  I look at her face. All I can think of is Joan Baez, about my father saying her voice was celestial, and my mother arguing that her voice was reedy, and me saying, over the chords of “Sweet Sir Galahad,” that they could both be right.

  “I usually sit behind you.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “Hey. That class is not going smoothly for me! I thought it’d be all easy. Did you do the homework for Tuesday yet?”

  “No, I haven’t started it.”

  “Me neither!”

  There is something that she wants me to do. She looks at me openly, expecting something. After a moment, she looks down at the notebook on the desk.

  “Looks like all the rooms but one are empty right now. Do you have a preference?” She wrinkled her forehead and kind of shuddered at herself. “Not that it would matter since there’s just the one room.”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Here’s 4A. Do you have your ID?”

  I hand it to her. Her nails are the color of a nail polish I had as a kid that came with a set of other makeup specifically made for kids. Tinkerbell? I remember biting the lipstick, one of the times I locked myself in the Pink Bathroom to be alone and do weird things. It was so smooth, waxy, impossibly shiny, and it rolled up like a whisper from its plastic case. I’d rarely put it on. I’d take it out, roll it up, and dare myself to bite it. And then one day I just did it, bit the whole stick off. It tasted like candy you’re not supposed to eat. I held it in my mouth for a moment, without letting it touch the sides and then spit it into the trash. Mostly I’d just wanted to sink my teeth in, to leave a mark.