Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  The other day we went to lunch. She wore makeup and a little jewelry and I wore a ponytail and one of your big coats. I felt like my aunt from the city had come to pick me up at the youth home for a day among civilized society. I even found myself walking a half step behind, until Surprise said, “Hurry up, I’m starving,” and grabbed my arm.

  We went to the place on campus where they have a deli and a hot bar and ice cream cones and got in line at the deli section. Surprise chattered away, telling me about her boyfriend, how different it felt, how he was a grown-up, responsible, how they liked the same things.

  “And he’s such a gentleman too,” she said. “Holds doors, stands up when I get up from the table, doesn’t try too much when we’re, you know, alone together.”

  When we got to the front of the line, Surprise ordered a turkey sandwich, dry, with fruit instead of chips, and a diet soda. I basically ordered the opposite. When Surprise’s stuff came, she took one look at the corners of the bread and stepped back into line, cutting off someone else midorder.

  “Excuse me. This sandwich has mayo on it. I’d like another one, please, per my original order.” She smiled sweetly. I stood with my tray and watched, riveted. She wasn’t being obnoxious. She was, I guess, being correct. And I saw, in that instance, that it wasn’t about the sandwich or the mayo. It was about expectation. She expected something to be a certain way, and when it wasn’t, she used her will to change it. Today, it was lunch. Tomorrow it would be a job or marriage. “Per my original order”: Surprise’s life philosophy.

  She told me, while we ate, that she was dropping psychology to become a business major. “I like math, I like that kind of thinking, and most of all, I’ll be able to do something with it when I graduate.” Her boyfriend, she added, was a great tutor.

  Lest you think, though, that Surprise has become some uptight bitch, she sensed, despite my nodding and laughing where appropriate, that how I was feeling was light-years from how she was feeling. She moved a piece of hair from my forehead and asked if I was okay. She said softly, “Agnes, you don’t have to be sad, you know. A lot can make you happy, if you let it.” (Per my original order, I’d love to be happy!)

  The nights that I’m not out late prowling and she’s not sleeping at her boyfriend’s, we still sit on her bed together, close enough for legs or shoulders to touch, and look at magazines. I’m not sad—that’s what I told her that day. I’m just waiting for…something.

  Agnes

  Winter is losing some of its resolve. I start loosening my scarf. My neck, when the cold air wraps around it, feels like a new neck. Frequently I am reminded of my body—the weather and Tea Rose taking turns exerting themselves on it. Tea Rose meets me after work. I am standing around back with Terrence, smoking one of his cigarettes. Mr. Figgs’s handwritten NO SMOKING sign is taped above our heads. Terrence is telling me about his youngest brother who moved to Texas.

  “Hi,” Tea Rose says.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” Terrence says. He looks at me and lifts his eyebrows gently as if to acknowledge something but not judge it.

  It does not occur to me that Tea Rose would want to be introduced until he introduces himself. Terrence shakes his hand but looks mostly at me.

  “Go on, Agnes,” he says. “Get to class.”

  I put my cigarette out on my shoe and drop it in a trashcan. We say goodbye to Terrence. Tea Rose takes my hand as we walk away. We skip class and go to his room, practically skipping. It’s a growing need, to be with him, to be undressed with him. But the need is starting to feel better unmet, and I never somehow remember this until we meet it. What I want is one need, on its eternally protracted way to being met, and to have it met moments before dying. I say this, more or less, out loud.

  “Always with the death and dying,” he teases. “This is so much more fun.” He kisses me. He is ready to go again. He is never not ready. I let Tea Rose kiss me, and I let myself enjoy it. I touch his hair. What he lacks in mystery he makes up for in beauty.

  “You’re so serious all the time,” he says.

  I pay attention. I’ll never turn down a chance to hear what someone thinks of me. “I don’t think I’m that serious,” I say. “I just…I don’t know how else to be. What would an unserious person be like?” I lie on my side, propped on my elbow.

  Tea Rose turns on his side too. “I don’t know.” He laughs a little. “I like the way you are. I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

  “Is it because I like to talk about cults?” I ask, deadpan. He had teased me about this once before, when he “caught” me reading a book about Jonestown at the library, a few days after I’d mentioned that I’d been glued to the Waco coverage as it unfolded last year. “Don’t you think it’s fascinating,” I’d asked him, “that nobody ever knows they’re in a cult until it goes bad? Like, it has to get really appalling—suicides, pedophilia, all kinds of abuse—in order to be a cult, right? Up till then, it’s just a religion.”

  He’d looked at me, bemused, so I’d carried on. “Did you know that David Koresh’s mother had him when she was only fourteen?” “No, Agnes, I didn’t know that.” “Did you know that one of the child Branch Davidians who died was stabbed in the chest by someone inside the compound? He was three.” “Jesus, that’s horrible.” “It’s true. And before all hell broke loose, they wanted their phone fixed. I always think about that detail. They wanted to call someone. But who?” Tea Rose humored me for a while, then kissed me to make me stop talking. I didn’t get to tell him that the final day of the standoff, April 19, also happened to be my parents’ anniversary. They were supposed to go out to dinner that night but sat with me on the couch instead, unable to turn off the news.

  “You do enjoy a good cult,” he says now, lightly.

  “I think,” I say, inching closer to him, “that it’s a safeguard. I’ll never be, you know, susceptible.”

  Tea Rose closes the narrow gap between us. “What about me? Do you think I’m susceptible?”

  I imagine Tea Rose in loose white garbs, haloed by a radiant light and surrounded by pretty young girls. It’s not hard to do.

  “No,” I lie. “You could maybe start one, though.”

  “I’ll be in your cult if you’ll be in mine,” he says, pressing on me with his full weight. I succumb, obviously.

  Dear Mom,

  What day is it, what day was yesterday, etc.? Do you know? I can’t get a grasp on myself, where I’m standing, where I’m going. I feel a general lack of volition. Being filled with emptiness is its own kind of being full. Tea Rose and I are together a lot. I have been spending many nights in his room. I bumped into Surprise on campus and I’m amazed by how different she looks every time I see her—older. We made vague plans to meet for breakfast one of these days. Funny how you can live with someone and not live with someone, but I don’t have to tell you about that.

  Tea Rose and I are changing in ways I don’t know how to name fully. This has something to do with time. In the beginning, there was no time. Time did not exist when we were not together and then it did not exist when we were together. I was the clock and he was the clock. We missed class. I missed a couple of shifts, which got me in minor trouble. Now we are aware of the time, almost constantly. A few days ago I woke up in Tea Rose’s room. It was early, just before first light, and everything had that purple, paused look. Tea Rose was not in the bed. I squinted at the piece of paper on the nightstand, which said “Gone for a run” with maybe ten hearts scrawled all over the rest of the page. I lay there, processing the information, never having known that Tea Rose ran, for sport or necessity or any other reason, having difficulty, actually, picturing him midrun, all of his cool smoothness blurred by exertion, his pale face ruddy. I didn’t know he owned sneakers. I could only imagine his barn jacket, flopping indecorously, books and Discman spilling everywhere.

  I lay there on my back, and my thoughts went to Simon. There is a certain kind of stillness that invariably leads to sadness about Simo
n. The ceiling became a screen for my memory to project haphazard images onto: Simon in his car, Simon in his room, Simon at the dinner table, Simon with the puppy you made him return, the happiness on his face beforehand the purest thing I’d ever seen. I wonder if he ever forgave you. Eventually, the room brightened, and though I wanted it never to end, the movie faded out. Naked in my boyfriend’s bed, thinking about my dead brother. I guess that’s one way to start the day.

  I was leaving the dorm as Tea Rose was approaching, his face a marbled pink, like the sun had risen within it, and the hair around his temples was wet with sweat. He wore a pullover fleece and mesh shorts and sneakers, just like any guy who ran, and I felt some combination of admiration for how different this was, how far from my clumsy speculations, and disgust for how much he looked like anyone.

  Still, Simon came to his room. That’s enough to make me go back. I avoided kissing him and headed straight to work, my clothes soft with being worn for the second day in a row.

  I wish you’d let him keep that dog…

  Agnes

  I’m at a party, drunk. Tea Rose is talking to someone across the room. It seems everyone on campus is here. Surprise is sitting next to her boyfriend on a plush, oversized chair, him squarely in it and her angled halfway up on the armrest. She looks uncomfortable in various ways. I’m standing against a wall, trying to determine how drunk I am. Someone spills on my shoe, apologizes. A boy comes over and asks if I’m in one of his classes. I do some combination of nodding, shrugging, and shaking my head, for which he puts his hand up to high-five. I touch his hand with my cup-holding hand and he leaves. These strange transactions.

  I’m trying to get Tea Rose’s attention, which consists of willing him to look over here. I don’t feel capable of doing more. The person he is talking to was originally a boy but now it’s a girl, much shorter than him, the back of her head facing me and her hair bobbing and rippling like a pond getting hailed on. Whatever he is saying is creating a lot of movement in her. Someone turns the volume up and it’s one of those two awful songs by Tone Lōc and I know all the words, and the girl’s hair starts moving ferociously, and I see her step closer to Tea Rose and thrust forward a little, supposedly an invitation to dance.

  I’m too drunk to compute the jealousy I feel. I move toward the bathroom. There is a line. Two people in the line are making out. I wait behind them and indulge in the pleasure of staring openly, because they are too enmeshed to notice, and I am too drunk to care. A boy comes out of the bathroom and a girl goes in, and I keep staring. When the girl comes out, I bypass the kissers and slip inside. I use the toilet, clumsily, and wash my hands. I cup my hands under the cold running water and scoop some into my mouth and over my face and feel almost instantly steadied. I spend a minute, maybe two, maybe five, looking at myself in the mirror, this crooked face, this truculent hair. What, I think for the zillionth time in my life, do people see when they see me?

  I hear loud banging. I barely realize that I am lying on the filthy tile, my head on my arms, my arms on the damp bath mat, my knees tucked into my chest. I am so comfortable. The door opens and I open my eyes and it’s Tea Rose, bending over me, hoisting me up and over his shoulder.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I’m totally fine.”

  “I know,” he says. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  We weave through the party like a wayward float in a parade. I hear some laughter and murmurs and feel the fabric of some bodies as we brush past. Then there is a hallway and stairs and finally, the street. I remember that we’re off campus. Tea Rose asks if I can stand and puts me on my feet gently when I say I can, wrapping my big coat around me. I don’t remember where I’d left it but he did, apparently.

  “What happened?”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. He squints at me. I continue to laugh. I laugh and laugh, until my body feels incapable of gurgling up any more sound, any more anything. It feels good to act insane sometimes, to act as insane as you feel.

  “Are you okay?”

  I nod. “Are you?”

  “I am if you are.”

  I can’t decide if he’d rather be back inside, upstairs, getting thumped on by that girl. I want him to be where he wants to be.

  “I want you to be where you want to be.”

  “In general?” he says.

  I move a step closer to him. “Yes. But also right now.”

  “I want to be with you.”

  “In general?”

  “Yes. But also right now.”

  We are holding each other on a street in this depressed city. This much I know. He asks if I want to go home, and for a minute I think he means home-home, to my mostly empty home and my mostly empty father. Quickly I realize he means home-here, to his room or to mine. We are near the diner, so we walk there. A waitress tells us to sit anywhere. We take a booth in the back. We order coffees. I ask for home fries. That word seemingly everywhere. Tea Rose asks for cherry pie. It occurs to me that we somehow have never seen each other eat. It’s just not how we’ve spent time together.

  Our coffees come and he douses his with cream and sugar. I put a couple drops of cream in mine and watch them diffuse. It’s okay, us sitting here. Our food comes and I watch Tea Rose for a minute as he sips and chews, as he sits rather haplessly and indulges this business of being human. I pour salt on my home fries and eat some. He takes a forkful from my plate, casually, like we do this all the time. He offers me some pie. I decline the pie. I tire of eating and watching him eat and I turn my attention back to my coffee. The waitress comes to refill our cups. People, I realize, do this.

  As a way out of this eating situation that feels suddenly interminable, an endless sequence of forking and scraping and refilling and chewing, I tell Tea Rose, with the last of the night’s alcohol churning through me, about Simon coming to me in his—Tea Rose’s—room.

  Tea Rose’s face stops its eating for a minute. “Who is Simon?”

  The question hits me hard. How can he ever know me if he doesn’t know this?

  I take a deep breath. I have to start somewhere.

  Dear Mom,

  Last night I cracked. A little tiny fissure, but enough for my favorite memory of Simon to leak out. It pooled around us, me and Tea Rose, and it felt good to be there, in it, with him, to show him my big brother at his big brotherest, instead of at his most tragic. I was maybe seven, a couple of years into a period of nighttime terror, fear of sleep due to fear of dreams, bad dreams or good dreams that end, but mostly bad dreams, and I had fallen asleep finally after hours of rigid stillness in my twin bed, and in the dream I was looking for you and Dad, calling you, and you were nowhere. You were gone. I woke up but I was still with the dream, the dream still clung, and the house felt like a different house than the one I fell asleep in. I got out of bed and moved toward your room. The door was ajar, and through it I saw the shape of your made bed, covers pulled taut. I panicked. Where could you be, if not in your bed? I thought I was still dreaming. I treaded along the hallway, down the stairs, past the entrance of the shadowy living room, into the empty kitchen. The teakettle gleamed. The dishrag was folded neatly over the divider between the two sinks. The refrigerator gave no hum. All was mute.

  I felt nauseous because I didn’t know if I could wake up from it or not. I tried hard to remember if there was a reason for your not being home. I wanted to scream I told you so, because this was precisely why I hated sleep, because sleep takes away, it thieves. It stole my parents. It will steal everything. I must have been crying. I was so scared, Mom. Next thing I knew, Simon was lifting me up, carrying me to his room.

  “I had a dream they weren’t in their room and then I went in there and nobody was there. Where are they? Why aren’t they here?”

  Simon did the unthinkable for Simon: he tucked me in his bed, in his room where I was never allowed to go. He smoothed my hair. He told me that Mom and Dad had gone for a late drive. That Mom wanted to go and Dad didn’t want her to go alone. He told me to calm
down, that they’d be home any minute. I asked why you wanted to go for a drive, and I’ll never forget what he said: “Why do people want to do anything?” Then he pulled the covers up to my chin and kissed me lightly on the forehead, a kiss that felt motherly, brief and cool and activating the same longing. He snapped off the overhead light and sat at his desk with the small desk lamp lit, his back facing me. He put his earphones on and I can still hear the bass and tin of whatever he was listening to. From time to time he tapped his highlighter against the textbook in front of him. Slowly, because I was trying to savor the rarity of being there, of being Simon’s ward, I found my way to sleep, to fearlessness, to no-dreamland. I was disappointed to wake up in my own bed, to find that everything had been restored.

  If there were a pie graph, it would probably show that I spend the most time talking about things that mean very little to me. Avoidance. So it felt good to share something real. Tea Rose didn’t push me to say more than I said. It felt like I was alone, talking to myself or to you, but he was there, lightly around me, hemming me in. Afterward we had this tempestuous sex that seemed like the best response, I guess, to all the high emotion. I woke up before he did, before 7:00, and left him sleeping, his face and body emanating a warm tranquility.

  I’m in my room. I have to go to class soon. I don’t think Surprise came home last night either. I feel like everyone is just knocking against everyone else, spinning like the clothes in the industrial-sized dryers downstairs, all of us afraid of what will happen when we stop.

  Stopping, for now—

  Agnes

  The music building is going to close soon. The lights have been flickered, and outside my practice room I hear doors being clicked shut and locked, feet and paper shuffling down the halls. I pack my things and return my sheet music—a Mozart sonata I know well, because I felt like being good at something today—to the music library. Dreadlocked Joan Baez is standing by the main entrance, one hand on the light switch, the other holding a ring of keys. She wasn’t at the front desk when I got here. When I got here, it was also, I realize, still daytime. Now it is dark.