by Cathy Lamb
My studio loft was about two blocks off a main street downtown with restaurants and shops. It was large for a studio, with near floor-to-ceiling windows. It used to be a factory. My kitchen had white cabinets and an island with white marble and wood floors. My bed was in the corner next to the windows because I loved looking out across the buildings to the river.
My bedspread was white with painted red poppies, and I had a stack of flowered, lace, and striped pillows on it. I’d found three cool branches that had fallen on our property in Lake Joseph, and I nailed them to a wall next to dried flowers I picked on our back acre. I had a blue shelving unit filled with flowering plants and my books. On one wall I’d hung an old saddle from when I was a kid, my cowgirl hat, and two fishing poles.
I have a hummingbird collection. They are made of wood, ceramic, faux gold or silver, origami, or glass. My dad has made a bunch for me with metal. I hung six ceramic hummingbirds over my red couch and another three from my dad near the windows. The rest were on a red table.
I’d asked the owner if I could hang two chandeliers, and he’d said yes, so I hung one over my kitchen table and one over my bed. I also hung up white Christmas lights around the entire studio.
I cannot live in drab and plain, because it triggers soul-sapping memories, and so I don’t. In a drawer of my dresser I had a pile of new lingerie, all from Lace, Satin, and Baubles. I wanted to wear it for him.
After Zack hugged me, I turned away quick because my eyes filled up and went to the island and started making a salad.
“Natalie.” He was right behind me.
Why am I so emotional? Why can’t I control my tears better?
“Natalie, turn around, honey.”
Honey? Honey?
I sniffled and wiped my tears.
“What’s wrong?” He gently turned me around.
I could make something up, but Zack has bright green eyes that stare right through me, and I couldn’t lie. “I think we want different things.”
“What do you think I want?”
“I think you want to be friends with me.”
“I do.” He nodded.
“Daaannng.” I turned around to attack the salad again, but he curved an arm around my waist and pulled me back around.
“And more, Natalie.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I want a lot more than friendship, Natalie. I knew it the day I met you on the Deschutes.”
“But . . . but you haven’t even tried to kiss me.”
He bent his head and went to that place that Zack goes sometimes. It’s the place he goes alone. “Natalie, I didn’t want to rush you. I didn’t want to be too forward. I respect you. I have never met a woman like you. You run circles around me with that brain of yours. You’re fast thinking. You’re funny. I love how you live. You work hard, your career is important, but then you have this other side where you’re a total outdoorswoman. You’re honest. You’re sincere. I trust you.”
“But, Zack, something’s off here. We’ve been together more than three months. . . .”
“I want us. I want you.”
He did? “You do?”
“Yes.”
Double dang! My tears came again and rolled down my cheeks. “Thanks.”
“Thanks?” He smiled.
I laughed. He laughed.
“Yes, thanks, Zack. I want the same. I want you. I want us.”
And ol’ Zack took things from there. He reached behind me and turned off the stove, and those muscled arms pulled me close, and he gave me a kiss that swooped all through my body and lit me on fire, and we stumbled off to my bed with all the pillows.
After the second time, the moonshine glinting through my windows between the hummingbirds, the city quiet, he said, his eyes filling with tears, “I love you, Natalie,” and I said, “I love you, too, Zack.”
We smiled and kissed, and I knew it was a miracle, our love. That we would meet on the Deschutes River, the river of my life, that we would find each other, reach out, hand to hand, take a dare and a jump, and fall in love was nature giving me a gift. I did not believe in soul mates until I met Zack.
We both called in sick the next day and spent our time in bed together, my new, lacy lingerie appreciated and enjoyed. I was wiped out by the end of it, but it was the best kind of wiped out to be.
* * *
In the middle of the night, though, on the third night, Zack sleeping beside me, I knew I had missed something. There was a reason that Zack, an American male, awesome in bed, did not kiss me for three months. I didn’t buy the explanation that he didn’t want to rush me.
There was another explanation as to why he waited. It was a gut-level, instinctual knowledge. He wasn’t telling me everything. And the answer to why he didn’t kiss me for three months lay in that mystery.
But as I peered over at that sleeping he-man, I decided to let it go. I brushed a hand over his hair, touched the scar on his cheekbone, ran a hand down his chest and over the scar on his ribs.
I loved him. He loved me.
And when thoughts entered my head that Zack was hiding something, I pushed them out as hard as I could and went back to kissing him, laughing with him.
Now I know this: It is never, ever a smart idea to push warning signs out of your head when you’re dating someone.
The warning signs will come back later and bash you in the face.
* * *
I tried to put the stabbed Barbie incident and the hit-and-run out of my mind as much as I could. There was nothing I could do about it. Zack said he was handling it, and I assumed he was talking to the police. The police were handling it, and security here knew about it.
I was trying to get my brain together, and I had no room for the fear that the stabbed Barbie with my initials engraved in her stomach brought in.
* * *
“Mom.”
“You don’t have to sound so surprised, Natalie,” my mother snapped as she sat down across from me at the table in the activities room. She was wearing a light blue pantsuit and pearl earrings, necklace, and bracelets. It was Pearls Day. She patted her blond hair. Every hair in place! She did not bother to hug me.
She plopped her red designer purse on the table, right on a pile of beads I was using. The beads scattered, and she sighed impatiently but did not try to pick them up. The purse was expensive and new. Must be from Dell. My mother does not work.
“I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I have to make an appointment to see my own daughter in the hospital?” She raised her perfectly plucked and drawn-in eyebrows at me.
Yes, I think you should have made an appointment with me so I could prepare myself for this Maternal Onslaught. You should have made, and kept, your “appointments” with me when I was a kid, too. “How are you, Mom?”
I saw her eyes skitter around the room. There were people in wheelchairs and helmets. Nurses and doctors. Some people engaged in activities like trying to line up magnetic cards on a dry-erase board. Others trying to hold pencils to write. One woman was trying to put the alphabet together with flash cards. Crafts. Puzzles. Ping-pong. Varying levels of success with all of us.
“I’m exhausted.” Her eyes skidded back to mine. So much unpleasantness here! She had not driven all this way to see this! “I see you are still indulging your hippie style, despite your age.”
“It’s hippie bohemian.” I was in my purple jeans, a white T-shirt, and a beige buttoned blouse with a sequined and embroidered guitar on the left side. I was wearing dangly gold earrings with purple beads. “I like to wear what you don’t like.”
“Manners, please. Respect your mother.” She waved a hand. “I have a lot going on right now, Natalie. A lot.”
Gee. So did I. “What’s going on, Mom?”
She narrowed her eyes. Her makeup looked as if it was done by a professional. Full foundation. Powder. Several shades of eye shadow expertly blending into one another. “What is wrong with your hair?”
“
What do you mean?” I patted my hair, self-conscious, especially about the area that had been shaved, but it was growing in pretty well.... But, shoot! Dang it! Why did I still let her get me all riled up? I was a grown woman. I did not need her approval.
“It’s not brushed. Your curls are all over the place. And it’s long. Really, Natalie, you’re pushing forty, you should cut your hair. It would give a lift to your face.”
“I’m thirty-five.”
“Old enough not to go around thinking you’re a teenager. Your hair is halfway down your back.”
“I like my hair.”
She raised an eyebrow as in, “Well. I don’t like it and you shouldn’t like it.”
“Mom. I don’t care whether you like my hair or not. I am not here to fix my hair.”
“There’s never a time when a woman shouldn’t attend to her appearance, even when she’s recovering from an accident and working on her speech and how to think and control her emotions, particularly her rudeness.” This time she raised two eyebrows at me. “Your speech does sound better, dear. Not so much as if you’re talking very slowly through algae water.”
Reading this, one might think I am making it up. What mother comes to visit her daughter in rehab and criticizes her hair? My mother. She’s like Godzilla, human form. “I am trying to think again, Mom. Like right now I am thinking that you are difficult to be around.”
Her eyes widened. “Don’t speak to me like that, Natalie. Aren’t you relearning manners and social etiquette in your therapy classes?”
“There is no manners class in the Brain Bang Unit, Mom.”
“I drove all the way out after a long week to see you.”
“What did you do during your long week?” Oh, do tell, Mother.
She groaned. Life was so hard! “Dell and I are having an enormous party next weekend and I am exhausted from the planning. Exhausted.” She plucked at her two pearl bracelets.
I felt that familiar stab of pain in my chest. My own mother was having a party and I was not invited. Now, I wouldn’t go. I obviously couldn’t go. But it would have been nice for her to invite me anyhow.
She is an insensitive thing, but she caught the expression on my face. “Oh, for God’s sakes, Natalie. Don’t get all sulky with me. We can’t invite you. It’s for Dell’s family—his four kids from his previous wife, the dead one; everyone thinks she’s perfect, she died an angel. If I have to hear one more story about Saint Marisa I think I’ll puke. Anyhow, we’re also inviting all of our employees and their families and our suppliers. It’s over two hundred people and we simply can’t add more.”
I felt a second stab of pain. The stab was for the little girl I used to be, how she deserted me and I was not invited to the rest of her life. She rarely even came to my birthday parties. I would see her a few days before Christmas, not on Christmas Day, and I might see her a few days before Thanksgiving, but not on Thanksgiving Day, because she was always busy with her new husband and his family.
I was not even in the top two hundred people she would invite to a party, though Dell’s kids, her “new family,” were invited.
It was ridiculous for me to let her hurt me again, but obviously it was a huge party. She didn’t decline to invite me because I’m in the hospital, she declined because she has never invited me to her life, so why start now?
I glanced longingly at my beads, the crystals, a few charms that I was using to make a necklace for a twenty-eight-year-old patient here who crashed her motorcycle, and I wanted her to leave.
“This party has taken up all my spare time. All of it.”
I tried to put the pain aside. I’d been doing it all my life, after all. “Isn’t Dell hiring people to handle the party?”
“Yes. Glenda. She’s the director of . . . what do you call it? Human something. She directs humans. No, that’s not it.” Her Botoxed brow furrowed a tiny bit, as much as the injection would allow. “She’s a human director. Ah!” She snapped her fingers. “She’s the human director of people resources for Dell. What a name. Glenda. Like Glenda the witch? The woman even has red hair. I don’t like her, and I have informed Dell of my opinion.”
“Why don’t you like her?” But I already knew. Glenda was probably pretty, smart, friendly, normal, or all of the above, and that my mother could not have. Women like that were a direct threat, especially if the woman was anywhere near one of her husbands.
“She’s always smiling. When she sees me she’ll fake a smile. But with everyone else, she’s always smiling and laughing. Everyone loves her, friendly Glenda the witch! Dell say she’s one of his best employees. She’s been on the ranch for fifteen years. He says she’s one of the smartest people he’s ever known. And he employs her husband, too, and two of their teenagers. Personally”—she leaned toward me—“Glenda needs a makeover.”
“You think everyone needs a makeover.”
“Except me!” She chuckled, but she meant it. “I don’t. But I have told Glenda, and I’ve tried to be gentle, that she needs a makeover, and I offered to help her.”
“You didn’t. Please say you didn’t.”
She was irritated. “I said it one second ago, Natalie. You need to work on your memory problems. I noticed when you were in the other hospital that you forgot a lot. All the time! So I said to Glenda, ‘Have you ever thought of becoming a brunette?’ and she said no, and that fake smile of hers dropped off her face. And I said, ‘I think that brunette hair would complement your, interesting, coloring. And her coloring is interesting, Natalie, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.” I did. I so did. I can’t stand this part of my mother.
She waved her hand. “Glenda asked me what I meant by that comment, and I told her that brunette would simply make her face match better with her hair. That the red color did not seem to be organic to her heritage.”
“Oh no.” I felt sick for poor Glenda. “I hope you said those words only in your head.”
“I have been clear, Natalie.” My mother’s voice was impatient. “I said them out loud. I am getting frustrated with this conversation. I know you’ve had a head injury, but please listen.”
“That was incredibly rude, Mom.”
Her mouth twisted, her blue eyes narrowing. “No. It wasn’t. I was trying to help her. Help her appearance.”
“Mom, why do you think people want to know what you think about their appearance? And why do you think that you’re qualified to offer an opinion?”
“Because I have understood fashion and style my whole life. I learned from the cradle. My mother knew how to dress, and so did her mother. Fashion is practically in the DNA of our family ancestral line.” She sat up ramrod straight. “I wasn’t born white trash. I learned about elegance and proper social normalities and how it’s important to present your full beauty to the people of this earth every day as a gift to them.”
I wanted to smash my head with my fist, but I wouldn’t. Head injury! “What did Glenda do?”
My mother’s mouth tightened, despite the Botox. “She said to me, ‘Jocelyn, when I want your opinion on my hair color, and whether or not it should match with my skin color, I will ask for it. As I will never need your opinion about how I look, please refrain from telling me your opinion again.’ Honestly, Natalie. She talks to her employer’s wife like that?”
“I think you had it coming.”
“I did not!” She huffed. “I told her that I would be informing Dell about her rudeness, and do you know what she said?”
“I can hardly wait to hear.” My head was beginning to pound. I wanted to go to bed. I wanted to make my necklace. I had speech therapy in half an hour, and after that physical therapy, then a meeting with my neuropsychologist, and I needed a break from Mother Monster before then.
“She told me, ‘Go ahead, Jocelyn. Tell your husband.’” She glared at me as if I were Glenda. “And I went and told Dell, and do you know what he said?” She was so angry she twitched under her designer pantsuit.
�
��He told you never to talk to Glenda like that again, to be kind and respectful to his employees, especially Glenda, as she is supersmart and competent and friendly and he didn’t want to lose her or her husband, who have been around longer than you. And he was angry with you, which surprised you. He should have been mad at Glenda, right?”
Her blue eyes flew open. “This is unacceptable! Did Dell tell you that? He did, didn’t he?”
“No, Mom. But I know Dell and I know that’s what he would have said.”
She twitched again, her manicured nails flying. “Whatever! Anyhow! Well!”
“Mom, I have therapy, so I have to go.”
“I’m so busy right now, Natalie. So stressed out. Dealing with you and your condition has been extremely hard on me.”
She took out her mirror and studied her face, fluffed her hair, dabbed on more lipstick. “You see, Natalie, you’re not wearing lipstick and you look ghostly. Put on lipstick. I am your mother. If I have time for lipstick and blush and mascara, with my busy schedule, then you do, too.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“And, Natalie.” She stared at my chest. “Get a push-up bra. You are too young to sag like that. Look at mine.” She shoved her chest out. “As upright as a teenager’s!”
She neglected to mention that they are fake. “They’re fake, Mom.”
“Now. Before I have to run off, tell me how your father is doing. Is he single or still dating that woman with the unfortunately enormous nose, Rhonda? He compares all the women he has dated to me, and they fall short. That’s why he’s never remarried, the poor man still loves me.”
I groaned, dropped my clanging head to the table, and covered it with my arms.
I heard Soldier’s voice. “Are you hiding from the enemy, Jewelry Maker?”
“That woman looks like a mean frog,” Frog Lady said.
“I don’t think I like her,” Architect said. “And it would be okay if she didn’t like me.”
* * *
Frog Lady, Architect, and Soldier helped me pick up my beads after Mother Mayhem left. They are true friends. I made Frog Lady a necklace with silver and green beads and a leaf charm in the center. She said, “I’ll wear it today when we begin our research in the tropical forest. Genus. Species.”