by Sara Polsky
Without changing out of my pajamas, I pad downstairs toward the kitchen to hunt for a bagel. My stomach is rumbling. I never ate dinner after I left James at the pizza parlor last night. By the time my brain stopped replaying his words—let me know if there’s anything I can do; your mom was always pretty cool, you know—I wasn’t hungry.
Now, just outside the kitchen doorway, I stop. Aunt Cynthia is there at the counter, chopping something on a cutting board and humming so softly I couldn’t hear it from the hall. For a moment she looks like my mother, lost in her own world, chopping and swaying to whatever song she’s half humming aloud, half hearing in her head.
The weirdness of it—the ways Aunt Cynthia is like my mother, the ways my mother can never be like her—hits me and I take a sharp breath. Aunt Cynthia must hear it, because the chopping stops abruptly.
“Sophie?” she calls. “That you?”
I step into the kitchen. “I’m sorry, I just came down to get a bagel. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Of course you’re not interrupting,” Aunt Cynthia says. But she doesn’t seem surprised that I would think so. She sounds almost sad, like she’s sorry for making me feel like I was interrupting. She turns and points her chopping knife at the bread drawer where the bagels are.
“Leila and your uncle are out,” she adds. That explains why it’s so quiet.
I take a bagel and butter it, and then, because Aunt Cynthia’s still watching me, her knife poised over her cutting board but not actually chopping, I pour a glass of juice and sit down at the table instead of going back upstairs. I hear Aunt Cynthia’s knife start up again. I eat quickly. Chew, swallow, sip.
At least a full minute later, Aunt Cynthia says, “I saw your mother yesterday.”
“I know,” I say, before I realize I’ll have to explain myself.
“I was on my way to visit her when I heard the two of you talking,” I add. “I didn’t want to barge in on your visit, so I left without going in.” I don’t tell her how long I stood outside the room, eavesdropping, before I left.
Aunt Cynthia scrapes whatever she’s been chopping into a bowl, then rinses the cutting board and knife and thuds them into the sink. I get the feeling she’s stretching out the task as long as she can. Maybe she’s stalling while she tries to figure out what to say next.
At last she dries her hands, walks over to the table, and pulls out the chair across from me. She stares down at the tabletop, still silent, and I think again of what Uncle John said about the ways she and I are alike. Is that why it’s easier for me to talk to Natalie and Zach and Trudy and Uncle John, why it used to be easier for me to talk to Leila and James, but I have so much trouble talking to Aunt Cynthia? Because, out of all of them, she’s the most like me?
Even now, it feels like there’s a wall across the middle of the table, a stone structure we can’t see the top of and that neither of us knows how to climb over. A wall like the one in my head, blocking away all the phrases about my mother that I don’t want to let out.
As we sit here in silence, staring down, I realize just how many questions I have. Questions James or Trudy or any of those other people wouldn’t be able to answer. I want to ask Aunt Cynthia why she stopped coming over when I was in middle school. Why she started telling me her daughter couldn’t come to the phone every time I called. Why they all left me alone with my mother for so many years. Whether my mother has always been the way she is now.
I think of the way Uncle John described the younger Aunt Cynthia to me, as the woman he met at my mother’s party and didn’t want to stop talking to. And then there’s the way I’ve started to imagine her: sharing my mother’s clothes, dancing with her in the kitchen the same way she and Leila and I used to do. I take that image of Aunt Cynthia and try to place it over the one I know now, like one of those books James used to have with pictures on clear plastic sheets so we could put the layers of a building together one by one.
I try to hold all of Aunt Cynthia’s layers in my mind at once. Then I take a deep breath, look over that imaginary wall in the middle of the table, and take a running leap.
Even so, when I get to the other side, what I say surprises me.
“Were you ever scared it would happen to you?” I hear myself ask. “That you would go crazy too?”
I know crazy isn’t the right term, isn’t the word I would want anyone else to use when talking about my mother. Isn’t the word I wanted Kelly to be thinking that day at the lunch table. But right now I don’t want the clinical, politically correct terms, bipolar or manic-depressive. I want to know whether Aunt Cynthia has ever been scared that she would lose her mind.
Aunt Cynthia looks up and meets my eyes.
“Yes,” she says, just like that. She drops the word onto the table the same way I explained my mother’s situation to James yesterday. Yes.
I’m oddly relieved, as if Aunt Cynthia’s answer is confirmation that I’m not crazy.
Then the next question, the flip side of that one, the thing I haven’t dared to ask Dr. Choi or any of the nurses I’ve met by my mother’s bed. “Do you think she’ll ever get better? I mean, completely better, not just for a few months or years the way she usually does?”
Aunt Cynthia smiles a small, sad smile that I recognize. It’s the same one I saw on Trudy’s face yesterday, and the one I smiled back at her. Aunt Cynthia stretches out her hand as if she wants to pat mine, but the wall is still there—maybe an inch or two shorter, but there—and she doesn’t reach all the way to my side of the table.
“I don’t know,” she says softly, and I nod.
I’m not disappointed; that’s what I expected her to say. I finish chewing and lean forward in my chair, about to push it back and get up.
“But I don’t think we should hold our breath for that to happen,” Aunt Cynthia says. Her voice is softer, and she’s looking back down at the table; I’m not sure she’s really talking to me at all.
I lean back again.
“I’m not holding my breath,” I tell her. “I know there isn’t any kind of cure right now.” I’ve talked to the doctors more recently than you have is what I mean but don’t say. How can she think she needs to be telling me this?
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Aunt Cynthia says. She shakes her head, frustrated she can’t find the right words. Even when she isn’t in court or writing a legal brief, she always chooses her words carefully. It’s something my mother used to tease her about, how long it would sometimes take her to get one of her thoughts out. “I mean we shouldn’t put everything on hold until some far-off day when she might get better. And we shouldn’t make all our decisions based on the fact that she might not either. It’s not our job to do that.”
Aunt Cynthia pushes her chair back and stands up, her palms planted on the table. I want to ask her if that’s what she was doing five years ago, when she first left my mother and me alone—choosing to stop putting what she wanted on hold. I want to ask what was so important she had to cut us off like that.
But before I can ask those questions, she’s at the counter again, back to business, mixing some kind of sauce for her vegetables. Conversation over. I get up too.
As I walk back upstairs, my feet slapping against the wood floors, I wonder whether that’s what I was doing when I told Natalie I didn’t want to hang out. Whether that’s what my mother and I have been doing all this time, reining our real selves in; my mother taking her medication to stay normal for me, me sketching on her studio floor and keeping her company when I could have been out with my own friends. Whether we’ve been putting ourselves on hold for each other.
—
I spend the rest of Sunday losing myself in math. I read the week’s textbook chapter and, one by one, finish all of the problems from class that I was too exhausted to do last week. Then I pull out a fresh sheet of graph paper and start the weekend’s problem set. I draw each graph ca
refully, as if I’m doing them in pen instead of with a pencil I can erase.
When I finish the last problem, something about the final graph, a sine function, looks familiar. I trace my fingers over the curves that curl across the page like waves, and I realize I could bring a copy to Dr. Choi for my mother’s medical file, because the graph looks like her life. She travels back and forth between 1 and -1, up and down and up. And I’m the axis, steady at zero.
I open my sketchbook, flipping the pages with my thumb until I get to the drawing I started last week of my mother lying asleep in her hospital bed, my falling-apart sneakers just poking into the corner of the picture. In small but blocky letters I start writing trigonometric equations along her blanket, parallel to her body, the way Mr. Borakov writes problems on the chalkboard in math class. I line them up, one after the other, until it’s impossible to see where each one ends.
When I get to the bottom of the blanket, I lean back in my chair and look over what I’ve done. The rows of numbers, letters, symbols, and equals signs don’t look much like math problems anymore. Even I can’t separate them all, and when they run together they’re more like a caption. They explain everything that’s going on in the picture, but only to those who know what values to plug in.
Twenty-one
In English class on Monday, Mr. Jackson has dragged an empty table to the front of the room, between his desk and ours. The group presentations start today.
I glance across the room at James and Leila. We still have a week to come up with our project, but we haven’t spoken about it since the night I stormed out of Leila’s room.
James looks back at me and grins. I selfishly hope the first group’s project isn’t good enough to make ours—whatever it ends up being—seem too terrible in comparison.
The group, three boys and a girl, sets up at the front of the room, the boys lifting a large cardboard box onto the table while the girl reviews the presentation notes she’s made on index cards. The boys take something out of the box and set it down.
A few of my classmates give each other puzzled looks as they figure out what the object on the table is: an old white microwave. There’s something typed on the front—it looks like a poem printed on clear plastic labels and stuck to the door. Whoever put the labels on did it unevenly, slapping each verse down slightly askew below the previous one.
The girl at the front of the room clears her throat.
“We decided to do our project on Sylvia Plath,” she says. “Plath was a poet, obviously, since this is the poetry unit, but she was also the author of a novel, The Bell Jar, which was first published in 1963. Plath was born in 1932, and…”
My mind wanders as the girl recites a few more dates from Plath’s life, then passes the stack of note cards to another group member, who reads one of Plath’s poems to the class. I tune back in when there’s a hollow thudding sound. The last group member has slapped his hand against the top of the microwave.
“And now for the creative part of the project,” the boy says.
Mr. Jackson chuckles from the back of the classroom, where he’s been watching with his arms crossed, leaning against another table.
“Aside from her poems and novels themselves, one of the things Sylvia Plath is most known for is the fact that after several battles with depression in her twenties, she committed suicide at age thirty…” the boy pauses to press a button on the front of the microwave, and the door opens with a pop. A few people around me laugh.
“…By sticking her head in the gas oven in her own kitchen.”
Oh God.
The boy at the front of the room is saying something about the Sylvia Plath effect and studies showing that poets are more prone to mental illness than other people, but I’m not really processing any of it. My brain is buzzing too loudly.
Taped to the back of the microwave above a layer of crusty food stains is a photo of what must be Sylvia Plath’s face.
She has dark eyes and dark hair just past her shoulders, and from the part of her outfit that’s visible, she’s wearing some kind of shirt or cardigan with extra-large buttons. She looks young, except for the expression on her face. She’s staring straight into the camera that took the photo—straight out at us—and she isn’t smiling.
I think it takes me several minutes to wrench my eyes away from hers. Once I do, I stare down at my desk, but I can’t stop seeing Sylvia Plath’s face there. I blink and it turns into my mother’s face, looking up at me with that same bold gaze. With almost the same dark eyes and hair. The two switch back and forth; Plath, my mother, Plath gazing out from the back of a grungy white microwave. I can’t think.
I wonder hazily whether I’m going to throw up right now in class, in front of everyone.
It’s definitely possible.
From somewhere in the room I hear a scraping noise, like several people are dragging their chairs out and standing up. Then I hear Leila’s voice, which sounds, oddly, like it’s coming closer to my side of the classroom. I look up and watch as she walks toward Mr. Jackson, carrying her books.
“Mr. Jackson, I’m so sorry,” she’s saying, “but I just realized James and Sophie and I promised to meet with the band director this period about a concert we’re doing this weekend at the nursing home. It’s crunch time for rehearsals, so he wanted to pull us out of the period before band today for a little extra practice.” She waves a yellow slip of paper in Mr. Jackson’s direction. It’s the same rough size as a hall pass.
“None of us have study halls we can use for practice time,” she adds, almost managing to sound sorry.
I’m not in band, and I’m pretty sure Leila and James aren’t doing a concert at a nursing home any time soon. But I don’t think Mr. Jackson knows that.
Without checking the paper, Mr. Jackson waves one hand in Leila’s direction, telling her to go. I get up, grab my bag, and follow her, not taking my eyes off the floor again until I’m out in the hallway. Somehow, I stumble and fall against the nearest wall of lockers.
Leila and James each grab one of my arms and start to steer me down the hall.
“We’re not really going to the band room, are we?” I ask. My voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else, far away from my body. I don’t play an instrument I almost add, but another part of my brain reminds me that they know that.
“Of course we’re not,” Leila says, but she doesn’t sound exasperated or annoyed the way I expect. “We’re going straight home.”
Home. I know she means Aunt Cynthia’s house, and I think of its large kitchen with the spotless stainless steel oven. I can’t turn my brain off, can’t keep myself from imagining what it would be like to walk into the kitchen and see Sylvia Plath in front of the oven, door open, head inside. Her chin would rest on the bottom metal rack, which Leila left in the perfect position for baking cookies.
“It’ll be okay,” James murmurs next to me. Leila mutters something that sounds like, “Fuck those guys.” On my other side, she’s shaking with fury.
James and Leila guide me down the steps, along the science hall, and out a side door, which locks behind us. We walk slowly across the lot to Leila’s car, and I feel a flash of relief that she always parks in the back lot, where no one from the main office could possibly see us, even if they looked out the window at exactly this moment.
James opens the passenger door, his hand gently guiding me as I climb in, and he and Leila both stand there until I’ve buckled my seat belt. I don’t have the energy to tell them not to hover.
James gets into the backseat and Leila starts the car, and for once she turns the radio down as soon as it blares on. She leaves it at a level that’s just background noise, soft enough that I could almost mistake it for the country music my mother likes to drive to.
We turn out of the parking lot before the bell rings for eighth period. The whole drive to Leila’s house there’s
only the low voices and guitar chords from the radio, the thud-whomp of Leila’s car along the otherwise empty road, and the silence of three people very carefully saying nothing at all.
—
Back at the house, I can feel James and Leila watching me as I walk slowly inside and upstairs, where I turn the corner into the guest room. I shut the door behind me, and they don’t try to follow.
I don’t hear them come upstairs until a few minutes later, and their feet move past the guest room and straight into Leila’s. Her door clicks closed, but soon she’s shouting so loudly it doesn’t matter. I can hear her through the walls, even with the bathroom between us. I make out a lot of cursing, and I guess she’s still talking about what we saw in class. Every so often James’s voice interjects, a little lower and more even, and I can’t pick out any of his words at all.
I shut my eyes, trying not to let the blank walls around me become another set of screens from which Sylvia Plath’s and my mother’s faces can flash at me, flipping back and forth. I feel distant again, fogged out, like I’m floating over myself looking down, and I wonder how Leila has the energy to be so angry. Then I think of Mr. Jackson, chuckling as the group presented the creative part of its project. Did he know what they were going to do? And just the thought that he might have is suddenly enough to make me angry too.
—
I must manage to fall asleep or lull myself into a daze, because when there’s a knock on the door sometime later, it startles me. I’m sitting on the bed with my back to the wall, and I jump a little, clunking my head.
Three soft taps at the door. A pause, then three more. The door creaks open and Leila’s head pokes around it.
“Can I come in?”
I nod.
“James had to go to work,” Leila says as she pushes the door the rest of the way open and walks in, closing it behind her. I look at the clock and am surprised to see it’s already after five. We left school early, but I’ve missed the afternoon at Uncle John’s office. “But he said he’ll come by again on his way home.”