The First True Lie

by Marina Mander

  I go up close to Mama and try to put some lipstick on her. It’s not easy to follow the outline of her lips; the red gets into the wrinkles around her puckered mouth and it smudges everywhere. I’m making a mess. I try to make it better with the sponge, adding some color to her swollen cheeks. I don’t know if she’s happy, but maybe she is.

  She looks a little ridiculous, made-up like that.

  “My beautiful celestial rose,” Grandma used to say to her, as always saying everything and just the opposite.

  I stretch out again and try to think about how it was before.

  I close my eyes, trying to remember how it was when she had her makeup done properly and her hair combed, and her nice clothes on. Inside my eyes I can see the little silver rectangles of the photo frames. Inside the photos I can see her, elegant, dressed all in white, with baby me in her arms. I’m wrapped up in a blanket embroidered with little pink flowers…were they pink or blue? Pink, yes, they were definitely pink. Maybe Mama thought I’d be a girl?

  “I told you, dear, raising a boy is war.”

  “Please don’t talk like that in front of the child.”

  I suck on the soft, warm blanket, made for someone else, like it was her tit. I almost suffocate on a wool thread that gets in my throat, goes up my nose, puts down poisonous roots that intertwine with my veins. They grow and make me explode from inside, like the trees that break through the pavement. Once again I’m in the hospital; again the nurses steal my cookies. We’re back at the beginning, like in the game of the goose we play at New Year’s.

  The goose that the flower woman ate for Christmas.

  I wake up screaming. There’s a dead body next to me! I scream louder. No one can hear me.

  Everyone’s away for the weekend.

  “Upsy-daisy, up-up-upsy-daisy!”

  Me again: teeny tiny, tossed up in the air, trapped in a girl’s blanket, the chandelier with the crystal beads coming closer and closer; terrified they’re not able to hold me tight enough. Please take pity on me, please put me down.

  “Upsy-daisy, how wonderful it is to fly through the sky!”

  I’m scared, so scared.

  I scream. I scream like I’m in a horror movie; I scream as if all the bumps I’ve ever avoided, all the times I didn’t fall, all the times I survived, happened all at once. I scream as if I were nothing but a scream.

  The scream becomes hard like a stalagmite in the frozen cave of Mama’s room.

  I run out and swear I’ll never go back in, never again.

  I run into the bathroom to wash my face and hands.

  Fear is all I feel. Again I have trouble breathing. I curl up on the armchair in the living room. I feel like I need to pee. I should get up and go back to the bathroom, but instead I stay huddled in the chair.

  I don’t want to cross the hall anymore. The hall is a Grand Canyon, a swamp infested with crocodiles pointlessly crying.

  My reservoir of tears is dry again, but plenty of pee is leaking out. At first I try to hold it. Then I can’t take it anymore. I feel hot liquid running down my legs, but at the same time I feel heat rising and rising through the rest of my body, so then I try to get the pee out more quickly. I squeeze and squeeze, wringing myself out like a dishcloth. The chair is stained all over. I know I shouldn’t do it, but I like doing it. The circle of pee gets bigger on the yellow velvet, which goes all dark brown. I learn how great it is to piss like this.

  Blue comes over. I blow in his face and he runs away.

  I’m exhausted, but I’d like to piss some more.

  From now on I want to piss everywhere, like a cat in heat. I’d like to be Blue and pee wherever I feel like it. I’d like to piss, piss, piss and never stop pissing. On doorframes, on chair legs, on tram seats next to old ladies with their shopping bags between their legs and celery stalks for their soup sticking out like surprise bursts of nature. I’d like to piss on my desk at school and hear the rain of piss drip down on the floor, drip drip drip like in some romantic poem. I’d like to piss on the heads of the parents, on the last line of the progress report, and blot out the comments from those people who can’t judge me because they don’t really know me, like when I spit out Paris with lots of Ps on my notebook. I’d like to piss on the lives of strangers who think they know everything and don’t know anything, and on my own life in which I will perhaps never see Paris.

  I’m worn out.

  I’d like to piss again.

  But I can’t.

  I’ve got nothing left inside.

  The pee reservoir is empty now too.

  I’m full of emptiness.

  It’s only three in the afternoon.

  Still in the chair, I look at the stain, which has gotten bigger and now looks like a blank map, like the ones where you’ve got to fill in the names of the countries, the cities, the mountains, and the lakes, but you can’t do it because you can’t figure out where in the world it is. My pants are warm and wet and sticking to my legs. I try to think of how everything will be when it’s all over, even if it’s just begun.

  I don’t know.

  All I know is that I don’t want to end up in an orphanage.

  I want to stay in this apartment, which is beautiful even if I don’t like Grandma’s furniture. I don’t want to have a tiny metal wardrobe to put my stuff in and I don’t want fluorescent lights that make everyone pale like they’re in the morgue and I don’t want to have to ask permission for every little thing and I don’t want to drink raw eggs every morning like the nuns made me do and I don’t want gray blankets and gray everything. I don’t want to be afraid to stretch out my legs to the far end of the bed, don’t want icy-cold sheets, don’t want to be frozen with my armpits sweating cold sweat and penguin guano between my thighs because at the far end of the bed, at the very place where feet turn into stumps gnawed on by ghosts, there’s the Antarctic. I don’t want to slip down into the glaciers, where the cold bites your ankles. I want to stay here. I don’t want to fall into the third fourth fifth world, all the way to the last page of the atlas. Into the third fourth last world where they sell children or their spare parts. At the edge of the world there’s nothing but seals and penguins, and sea lions that eat their own pups.

  And more than anything else, I don’t want to live without my incredible cat, Blue. In orphanages they bring you cat for dinner, passing it off as stewed rabbit.

  Blue jumps into my arms, as if he could read my thoughts, even though thinking about afterward, now, is very difficult. Right now there’s nothing but a big now that grows and looks like a blank map.

  At most, I can think about after afterward, which is much later in time. I can imagine how it will be when I’m a vet and taking care of cats that piss everywhere.

  I can dream about getting engaged to Antonella, and about marrying her and making her belly grow with a baby inside.

  About returning home and telling her how I treated an armadillo or a capybara, collectible card number 55, the one that’s always missing.

  About how I saved some very rare animals, including a sloth, the one that moves in slow motion like Mama, number 78.

  About Antonella saying to me: “Amore, with those glasses you look like a bespectacled bear.”

  Because it’s likely that when I grow up I’ll wear glasses.

  The kind that magnify details.

  Some detail must have escaped me about Mama. Maybe there was something that should have made me understand that she wouldn’t be waking up anymore. But even when I try hard to remember every detail, it seems as if she was the same as usual that night. Not worse than usual.

  For dinner we’d had chicken thighs and potatoes, and she’d eaten them too. She’d taken two, leaving me the ones with the crispy skin. Blue had jumped up on the table and tried to snatch a piece of chicken with his paw, and Mama had said: “Don’t give the bones to Blue, because little chicken bones can puncture a cat’s stomach.”

  “Mama, why is Blue always hungry?”

  She
hadn’t responded. She never does when I ask pointless questions. I just wanted to get a conversation started. I understand when now’s not the time, but every once in a while I keep trying. If I play the fool a little bit, I say to myself, Maybe she’ll have fun. If I make her laugh, maybe the sadness will go away.

  The other night we must not have talked much because I remember the buzz of the refrigerator and the sound of the forks being laid down on the plates and the scrape, scrape of her fingernail as she scratched off the label on the water bottle. But it’s often like that, that Mama doesn’t talk much. Mama’s never been a chatterbox.

  Actually, sometimes when she speaks she doesn’t even finish her sentences, as if the words won’t come to her, and I tell her, “Careful or flies will fly in,” because she says it to me too if I sit there with my mouth open.

  “Don’t sit there with your mouth open. You look like an imbecile.”

  And it’s not obvious that when someone is sad, it’s a mistake to take medicine. Or that when someone is sad and it is a mistake to take medicine, the medicine will make that person never wake up again.

  Mistakes happen.

  Once I made a mistake, putting a bean up my nose while Mama was chopping vegetables for the minestrone. I did it a bit on purpose because I wanted to see how far up it could go, but I was also bored sitting there watching her being so focused on cooking, with no thought of paying any attention to me.

  I realized I’d made a mistake because the bean wouldn’t come down and I could only breathe out of half of my nose. Mama tried to help me, shaking her head with a look on her face that was half worried and half depressed.

  “Do I really have to deal with a son like this, worse than his own…”

  “My who?”

  “Worse than everybody, worse than nobody, let’s just drop it, so long as you don’t get the idea to stick a bean up your nose again.”

  So after that I was more careful.

  When I looked in her drawers, that was a mistake too. But what does that even mean—every once in a while you can make a mistake and nobody should die.

  This is all not right.

  It’s not right.

  Not right not right not right.

  The soaking-wet parts of my pants are all cold, like an ice pack you put on bruises. I drag myself to my room and pull out sweatpants. Before I put them on, I dry the dampness left between my legs with my dirty Power Rangers T-shirt.

  I leave everything on the floor. Who’s going to tell me to clean it up?

  I’m the master of the house and Blue is top cat, my personal assistant.

  “Assistant! To the remote controls! The master of the house wishes to watch TV.”

  “Remote controls ready.”

  “Ready, sir. You have to say sir.”

  “Ready, sir.”

  “Tail straight?”

  “Completely straight!”

  “Very well, Blue. It’s good that you’re here.”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  “T-minus and counting: three, two, one!”

  Blue and I dive into the cosmic universe. We float like heavenly bodies, him Blue and me celestial blue, in the stratosphere of the sofa.

  “Blue, what are your antennae picking up?”

  “Exploding white dwarf stars, sir.”

  “Like popcorn?”

  “Yes, sir, very much like popcorn.”

  “Well done, Blue, I knew I could count on you. Initiate Mission Popcorn. Cross Hallway Galaxy, reach Planet Kitchen. Prepare to land, assistant, touch down!”

  I set Blue down on the table and he seems more terrified than terra-firmaed. He doesn’t like it so much when I make him fly through outer space, but he lets me do it, mostly because he hopes to get something to eat.

  “Upsy-daisy, up-up-upsy-daisy! Not so great, eh, being at the mercy of human beings?”

  There’s still half a package of popcorn left. They’re a bit squishy because it’s rained so much.

  Doesn’t matter.

  “Mission accomplished, assistant. Return immediately to the stratosphere.”

  Blue tries to run away, but I catch him. On the sofa again he purrs and spits popcorn everywhere.

  Blue is an omnivore, like a bear. Sometimes he ruminates as if he had an omasum and abomasum, like sheep. Sometimes he squeaks like a squirrel. If you pay attention, a cat is many things besides a cat.

  The day we got him, on my birthday, he looked like a mouse more than anything else. He was mangy and you could hold him in the palm of a hand.

  The first few days he holed up under the bed. I shut myself up in the wardrobe out of spite. Mama shut herself up in herself.

  Then Blue got used to us and we to him.

  Soon it will be Mama’s birthday.

  Question: When people are dead, do they still have birthdays or do they stop?

  Mama will be thirty-seven years old. I’ll bring her a bunch of flowers—flowers are good whether you’re alive or dead.

  Mama is a Pisces. Like a fish, she lives on the other side of a sheet of glass that separates her from the rest of the world. Sometimes she makes an effort: She leaps from the other side and then she’s a fish out of water. You can see right away that she’s not comfortable.

  “Horoscopes are all nonsense.”

  She always reads them, though, as if in her heart she really does hope to find something true in there: love, health, money, a new job.

  “You’re lucky to be a Gemini, the Twins, because Geminis are friendly and cheerful. Whereas Pisces have a melancholy nature and are a bit introverted.”

  In the movies, the spaceship floats in the sky, the astronauts are suspended upside down, and the stars trace horoscopes in reverse, like ours—mine and Mama’s—where what happens is always the opposite of what’s supposed to happen.

  The astronauts move their mouths like fish. They speak, but it seems like they’re mute because they’re so far away that no one can hear them. They eat colored pills that they keep in the spaceship cabinet instead of in the bathroom cabinet.

  Blue is still hungry. We’re out of dry food and he ate the last can of wet food this morning. I really don’t know what to give him to eat. I have to go out. Blue starts to chase my shoelaces, gets between my feet while I’m putting on my jacket, follows me all the way to the door.

  “Wait for me here. I’ll be right back. Don’t worry.”

  I check the money in my pockets and find only five twos, three ones, and four fifty-cent pieces. Like playing battleships.

  How long can the money last?

  In the little shop around the corner I buy a multipack of Prime Fillet cans and two bags of chips. I walk around the block to get a bit of air; I pass by the newsstand but don’t stop. I don’t have enough money for what’s not useful.

  When I open the door to our apartment, an unbelievable stench hits me right in the face. It must be Mama.

  With a scarf over my mouth, I walk toward her room, and the stink becomes stronger. It’s Mama who stinks—stinks to death like a corpse.

  I drop the bag and, holding my breath, rush to the end of the hallway. I run to her window and try to turn the handle. It sticks, but with both hands I throw the window wide open and the curtains fly against my face like spirits trying to take me away. And I feel possessed as I turn around, trip over a shoe and almost fall, and reach the bedroom door. I feel like I’m going to explode. I close Mama and her horrible stink in her room and turn the key. I’m out of breath.

  But now I have to run and open all the other windows too, all of them, as fast as I can. I feel like breathing so much, but I can’t. Finally I fill my lungs with just the air from the balcony, letting in the cold that cuts the smell like a knife.

  The stink stays stuck to me everywhere. I smell nothing but stink inside my nose, all the way down inside my belly. I sniff my hands—they stink. Everything stinks.

  Blue circles around me, eyes wide.

  “What’s the matter? Why are you opening all these
windows in the middle of winter? Why are you behaving so strangely? Why can’t we all just curl up happily next to the heater?”

  He tries to lick me, his way of kissing me, but I push him away.

  It seems to me that he doesn’t have his delicate stuffed-animal smell anymore, just an awful reek.

  I see him and then I don’t. The whole room is spinning around me. I hear a buzzing in my head, the refrigerator noise but louder, the noise of the red thing that Mama hides in her drawer but a thousand times louder. So, so loud and then, suddenly, not at all.

  Maybe I passed out. I’ve never passed out before, but I imagine this is what it’s like. Everything spins and you fall on the floor.

  As if someone threw a heavy coat on top of you.

  As if you were dead.

  But you’re not dead.

  If I touch myself I feel it. I’m not sure how long I stayed on the floor, but I’m fairly sure I’m still alive.

  Maybe I just fell asleep, like Blue does when you put the leash on him.

  The coat, I remember, is missing its sleeves, but I can still breathe through the two stumps.

  Or else I really am dead. Maybe that’s how dead people feel, as if everything is the same as before except that they can no longer change anything. They see everything going wrong, but they can’t do anything about it.

  If I’m dead, sooner or later I’ll start to smell like Mama. It’s so cold. The smell now seems less strong. The French doors are open, as if we were in the middle of summer.

  I try to slap myself, but I don’t know how hard to do it.

  It’s not easy to slap yourself on your own.

  “Take back what you said.”

  “No.”

  “Take it back right now.”

  “No, no, and for the last time, no.”

  Pow! The slap sticks to my cheek for a while, like a nasty hot stink. I spend the afternoon in the wardrobe, thinking I’ll never, ever leave.

  The stink.

  I knew that it would come sooner or later, and maybe it was there before too, just not as strong. Or maybe it’s because I went outside that it seems more disgusting, like when every day you grow a little and you don’t realize it, but if someone you haven’t seen for a while runs into you on the street, he says, “How you’ve grown!”