What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  A skinny college boy beckons us into a dorm room, to a table stocked with Boone’s Farm wine coolers in pastel colors. I drain mine quickly. We find a room where everyone is dancing, the bunk bed and all the blond college furniture pushed to the walls. I made it through the wilderness . . . Strobe lights flash. The alcohol numbs the pain in my leg, and I find I can stand and dance a little if I move from the hips and not the feet. Laura and Courtney’s friends are pulling out some ridiculous moves, throwing their arms out horizontally and then vertically, their faces turned to the ceiling, taking themselves very seriously. Courtney catches my eye and we laugh. One by one, they are danced out of our company by pink-cheeked boys with stumbling rhythm. I scan the boys in the room and I’ve gone around twice before I realize that I’m looking for Jake. I try to shake these thoughts: his soft mouth, his hand on my hip. Laura is leaned up in a corner, talking to a guy in a porkpie hat, gesturing, her eyes wide. Like my mother, I think, watching his rapt expression and her easy body language. She has him completely.

  Courtney and I find the bathroom and stand in a line of girls combing their bangs in the mirror, waiting for the two stalls to free up. The bright fluorescent lighting is a relief.

  “I should cut my hair,” she says.

  “Your hair is amazing.” I run a hand through it.

  She lifts it up at the roots and mimes scissors with her fingers. “I’d cut a second off my fifty-yard fly.”

  There is something sad and sweet in her look as she appraises herself—that kind of honesty that bubbles up through heavy drinking, or hours of stargazing, or staring out the window of a car. Girls chatter behind us, girls say, Ohmygod I have to go so bad.

  “You’re lucky you’re an only child,” says Courtney, and I laugh out loud, which makes her laugh, too, though she doesn’t know why it is funny.

  “I’ll cut it for you,” I say.

  “Yeah?” We traipse from room to slovenly room, scavenging for scissors, and find some in a desk drawer, next to a skull key chain and a strip of condoms. We set up a chair in the bathroom, and some of the party follows us in: Something is happening! Some girl’s going to shave her head! They sit on the counters around us or against the wall as I wet down Courtney’s hair and brandish the scissors dramatically. I am in my element. I am the girl who makes something happen.

  “How short do you want it?” I ask Courtney.

  She squints solemnly at her reflection. “Short.”

  I start working the scissors, gnawing off huge chunks of her thick, gorgeous auburn hair. When the first chunk falls, everyone gasps softly, and then the party is rejuvenated, conversations rising over conversations. First I cut it chin-length and give her severe bangs, which makes her look like a librarian, and she makes a shhh face and gets somebody to take a picture.

  “Definitely still shorter,” she says, and I grip it at the roots and shear it close to her scalp.

  “Jesus Christ!” Laura pushes her way into the bathroom to stand behind us. “What are you doing? Mom is going to murder you!”

  “I know!” Courtney smiles joyfully. “I know!” Laura reaches out to touch the fuzzy stubble of her sister’s head, purses her lips, and walks back out into the hallway.

  When I am finished, Courtney has soft little bangs that stand up on their own and spike out over her short forehead. The roots of her hair are darker red, almost purple, so her whole head looks darker, the hair about an inch long, laying flat and glossy like seal fur. She looks like a new person.

  She wiggles her shoulders, delighted. “It’s so light!” We find boys to dance with, and all night people want to touch Courtney’s hair. We finally trip out of the dorm, the lights of Manhattan blurry and moving. We laugh and clutch one another in the street. Laura acts the big sister, making sure we both drink water and spritzing us with fabric deodorizer so Christie won’t sniff out what kind of a night we’ve had. We sleep at one of their friends’ apartments on a crowded futon, and in the morning, bleary, wearing borrowed clothes, we walk up the steps to the Seventy-third Street house.

  In daylight, Courtney is even more dramatically transformed. She takes a deep breath as we key open the door.

  “Hi,” calls Laura as we walk down the hallway. “Mom?” I pass through the kitchen doorway behind my cousins and stop short. There, sitting at that round wooden table with a coffee cup in her hands, her eyes red-rimmed and her hair a nest of tangles, is my mother.

  My body’s instinct is to run to her and bury my face in her neck, to cling like a koala. But that would be to concede. I stand rooted and swaying, speechless. Christie appears in the pantry doorway, holding a box of crackers, bashful in her own house.

  My mother tightens her grip around the coffee mug, her knuckles and the tendons of her hand looking oddly skeletal, her nails filed down to pink nubs. “How did you get here?” she hisses.

  SHE WANTS TO talk to me alone. Once we are out in the backyard, she looks from side to side. We are in enemy country. We sit in lawn chairs. Christie stands for a second at the glass door with her arms crossed and then ushers the girls out of the kitchen, out of view.

  Again, my mother asks, “How did you get here?”

  “The train,” I say. She throws me a shrewd, sidelong look. “I’m not a baby, I can take the train.”

  Her hair hangs in greasy clumps, and I want to shear it off clean like Courtney’s. She is wearing black pants and a belted red tunic, and her earrings are big dangling brass dandelions.

  “I missed you terribly, bunny rabbit,” she says.

  “Where were you?”

  “Visiting a friend.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “You’re right.” She sighs long.

  “You lie to me. You lie to me all the time, and then you yell at me for lying.”

  “I was in the hospital.” And there it is at last. She disappears to a hospital, not to some glamorous tryst or secret second family. I don’t know if this is good news or bad.

  “Christie says you’re a fucking nutjob.”

  “I bet she does.” My mother moves her face closer to mine and grips my knees with her hands. She says, the smolder edging back into her voice, “You know, don’t you, that there is nothing you can say to make me love you any less.”

  “What hospital?”

  “Creedmoor. Whenever I get outside myself, James drives me to Creedmoor, in Queens. They know me there.”

  “What do you mean, outside yourself?” I ask, thinking of my own moments, seeing my body from above or behind, feeling myself floating free of gravity.

  “I mean when I want to do things I know I don’t want to do.”

  “Like when the voices say to burn shit?”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “What about the talk underneath talk?”

  “What about it?” she snaps. “Can’t we be figurative anymore?”

  “So, what happens at Creedmoor?”

  She runs her fingers slowly along the curling hem of her tunic. “They give me medicine and I sleep. I play checkers. I read.”

  “Medicine that makes you sleep?”

  “No, medicine that brings me back to myself.”

  “So why do you sleep?”

  “Because I am so tired.”

  “What’s so tiring about checkers?”

  “Oh, Olivia.” She throws herself back in her chair, and her eyes are hooded and raw. “Has Christie been feeding you? You look terrible.”

  “You look terrible.”

  She chuckles joylessly in her throat.

  I stand up. “Is that it?” I walk into the house without waiting for an answer, letting the glass door snap shut behind me on its metal track. Seeing my mother here is horrifying. There is none of our familiar furniture to justify her strangeness: no future-seekers, no cluttered roof garden, no roiling mysterious ocean to make us seem small an
d sturdy, our faults diminished by closeness to such a deep unknown.

  She will assume her right to take me home, I know. I know, too, that Christie and my cousins will assume that I want to stay here. I have a choice, but this is not the Myla I imagined might arrive, cleanly laundered and apologetic, to whisk me away to an improved life. I think she has told me the truth, but it has not redeemed her; she seems more deceitful than before, and shamefully unmasked, perhaps because it was squeezed out of her by circumstance rather than volunteered. I tell myself that she is just a sad, crazy person from a life I no longer have to live. I have been rescued. I tell myself that it will get easier once she leaves.

  SHE STAYS FOR lunch. Laura and Courtney treat her with politeness, as they treated me in those first days, and I feel blithely comfortable sitting close to them, across the table from my mother, showing her what I have gained here in New York. She looks at them with unreadable distance. I feel I am declaring allegiance to Christie simply by being a brunette in a roomful of auburn. Christie spreads out cold cuts on china platters, and my mother takes hers with her fingers. Tom does not appear. He must have an escape hatch. A pod into which he leaps when conflict raps on the front door.

  When we finish eating, my mother announces abruptly, “I’m going to walk around.” We follow her from room to room awkwardly, like a tour group. She touches things: the grandfather clock in the hall, the hardwood highboy and her father’s model planes resting on its dusty top. She climbs the stairs, sliding her hand up the banister as if she does it every day. A few times she stops to glower at artwork that Christie has hung on the walls, bland impressionist mush. As she walks down the dim upstairs hallway, I can feel the process of her remembering. I glance around at Christie and my cousins to see if they are getting this shock of empathy, too, but they seem distracted, contained. They are seeing my mother move through the house, while I am seeing the house move through my mother. There is a sense of brokenness and insufficiency and then a sense of crushing loneliness. My mother turns around to look me in the eye and smiles a grim smile. She knows I’m receiving her.

  My mother’s bedroom belongs now to Laura, and it is hung with athletic medals and magazine pictures of movie-star heartthrobs. I cluster with my cousins in the doorway. “I had the bed over here,” says my mother, gesturing toward the far corner, and Laura nods. She peers at a photo of Laura sprinting, breaking the tape of a finish line. “Strong legs,” she mutters. Laura looks embarrassed.

  My mother goes to the bay window, pats the window seat cushions, and stares out at the bright city. “Remember the moon man?” she asks impulsively, and Christie moves past us to join her at the window.

  “The moon man and his green moon suit.” Christie turns to us. “Your grandfather.”

  My mother, gazing out, recites, “ ‘The moon man goes where the moon only knows, and he carries a shovel and pick. And he digs into Mars to find chocolate bars that he feeds to the moon when she’s sick.’ ”

  “Grandpa wrote that?” asks Courtney. I would have had a grandpa.

  Christie says, “Well, I don’t know if he ever actually wrote his stories down. Myla, you remember so well.”

  Laura says into the silence, “A story that rhymes is a poem,” and Christie shoots her a dark look.

  My mother turns her attention back to us, stony now. “I have a good memory.”

  “Why haven’t I ever heard that?” I ask her.

  “Because I never felt like saying it.”

  “But now you do?”

  “I did for a moment,” my mother says haughtily. Laura and Courtney share a look. They are only getting to see my mother in a low time. I wish they could see her on a better day. But it doesn’t matter.

  A door slams downstairs, and Tom’s whistling drifts up from the foyer. Christie holds up a spread-fingered warning hand to my mother. “Let me tell him you’re here,” she says, and goes out. Low mutterings rise.

  A thought moves across my mother’s face. We stand waiting until Christie pokes her head back into Laura’s room, asking if we’d mind giving the grown-ups some privacy. Laura and Courtney seem to know the drill. My mother follows Christie out of the room, and Christie closes the door behind her. We hear them go downstairs and into Tom’s study.

  Laura peels back her blue paisley rug, and the three of us press our ears flush to the damp wood floor. We look at one another’s sideways faces as we listen. What will happen now that our parents are alone together? It is like a chemistry experiment, the bonding of volatile substances.

  Sound travels in this old brownstone; the floors rest right on top of the ceilings. Still, our parents speak quietly, and most of the time, we can hear only the shape and tone of their voices. I can’t make out my mother’s voice at all, but Christie’s spikes a few times in “so long” and one anguished “Myla” and one “you think” that sounds like part of “what did you think would happen.” Tom’s voice rises and clips. Hearing this, Laura and Courtney’s eyebrows lift. Tom does not raise his voice often. At one point I hear him say, loud and clear, “I’d get her.” Then there is quiet and we sit up to rub our sore necks.

  “God,” says Courtney. “I bet Mom’s messing it up.”

  “Messing what up?” I ask.

  “She wants you to stay here.”

  “Here I am.”

  “I mean permanently. She doesn’t think your mom is, you know. Fit.” My first thought is of the three of us arm in arm on the street, wearing school uniforms, watching TV, cleaning the house. Though Laura and Courtney aren’t the ones who have to clean this house. There is a weekly maid service.

  Laura adds, “She means that our mom thinks your mom should be on lithium all the time if she’s going to keep living with you. Am I supposed to say Aunt Myla?”

  “What’s lithium?”

  “It’s a mood stabilizer.” Laura inclines her head in disbelief at my blank look. “Like, a pill.”

  “How do you know this stuff?”

  “God, Olivia, how do you not?” she says, and Courtney elbows her.

  “So what if she doesn’t want to be stabilized?”

  Laura screws up her face distastefully. “That would be unfortunate, right? That would be masochistic.”

  I don’t know what “masochistic” means, but I can see that they don’t understand about divine energies. If a pill would make her better, it would also make her someone else. That idea rankles: She could have been steady all through my childhood—no disappearances, no spinouts, no weeks passed out on the sofa—and she chose to be otherwise. She was selfish, though she would never see it that way. But how much do we really choose these things? I think. How can I blame her for her gift of sight?

  “She can tell the future. Sometimes she can tell what you’re thinking. She knew all about Jim Jones.”

  They look at me dubiously.

  “She has a chart with tides and constellations, and her psychic energy follows these patterns, like, she gets really, really psychic for a while, and then she has to wait to get psychic again and get her energy back.”

  “So,” says Laura slowly, “is she psychic right now?”

  “No, now she’s just tired.” I get up. “I gotta pee.”

  I slip into the hallway, closing the door soundlessly behind me. The floorboards creak gently beneath my socked feet. I can hear clanking in the kitchen, and as I take the three steps down to the landing at the top of the stairs, I see my mother and Tom in the foyer below. I insinuate myself into the low shadows. I watch them through the banister posts.

  My mother is standing in the middle of the foyer, facing away from me in an unusual attitude of rigidity, her hands clutched together in front of her. A foot away from her, Tom leans against the long wooden mail table with his ankles crossed, looking anywhere but at her. My mother is speaking too quietly to hear. She turns her head to the side to push her hair behind her ear, and her f
ace is full of misery. Then she steps forward, closing the gap between them, and takes hold of Tom’s arm at the elbow, her thumb in the crook and her fingers wrapped around, her freckled, slender forearm laid on top of his muscular one, his tawny arm hair, his gold watch. Her body follows her arm forward, and she arches her back to look up at him in a gesture of pleading, of submission. Her voice quavers. I am horrified.

  This is when I know, although maybe I knew when I first met Tom, or even earlier, in Christie’s oblique attentions. I have seen this gesture before, this reaching plea. I can’t piece together the specifics, but I understand: my mother and Tom. A big red circle around his brown hair, my brown hair. His attached earlobes, mine.

  Tom shakes her off and, rattled, blusters through the door to his office and closes it. This office was once my grandfather’s, and I imagine my mother as a little girl, doing puzzles on the floor while he typed on an old clacking typewriter. Now it is my father’s, and she is not welcome.

  As I creep back along the hallway, I probe my interior for some filial emotion and come up dry. Shouldn’t I feel something? Nobody knows that I know, so I don’t have to fake my way through some kind of tearful reunion, and that is a relief. What I do feel, more strongly than anything I will ever feel for Tom, is vindication. Laura and Courtney are my sisters. I was never mistaken at all.

  WHEN WE ARE allowed to come downstairs, Christie and my mother are sitting in the living room. All the furniture here is complementary-colored: soft blues and oranges. A bowl of wasabi peas on the table. Tom is gone.

  The afternoon passes in stilted efforts at conversation. I see my mother retreat inward as the minutes tick by: She hunches her shoulders, sinks into Christie’s expensive sofa, and unfocuses her eyes. We go out for pizza at a place Christie thinks my mother will remember. “Stand up straight,” my mother snaps at me on the walk over. She doesn’t know that my leg pains me, and she can’t sense it, or maybe she just isn’t trying.

  I stand with Laura in line, choosing toppings. As Christie pays, I see Courtney and my mother talking at a table. My mother is holding Courtney’s right hand cupped in her left, tracing lines across it with a bitten fingernail. I’ve always found palm reading too intimate for public places. Your hand spread and splayed, all its secret rumples stretched raw, and a stranger touching those secret places, learning things about your heart that you don’t know, yourself.