Why They Run the Way They Do

by Susan Perabo

  I touched the quivering flame to my cigarette, she turned on the television, and we settled in. After a moment she let out a long, satisfied sigh.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re just what the doctor ordered,” she said, not turning from the TV. She ground out her first cigarette and reached for another.

  A week after my sixteenth birthday, I was hit by a car and fractured my spine in three places. An old man veered off the road and struck me while I walked to the bus stop on a bone-chilling Tuesday morning. I never saw it coming. One minute I was reciting French verb tenses, and then I was in the air, twisting, twisted, flying on the edges of a joyful memory of my father flinging me into a swimming pool. I landed with a jolt that went from my toes to my teeth. The concrete sidewalk was bitter cold, and I was alone, and I looked into the bright blue sky and believed I was dead, until the old man was beside me in a panic, shouting at me to stand up, and when he took my arm and pulled, I felt things inside me fall apart, bones ripped from muscle torn from skin, and I lost consciousness.

  For a time, a very short time, only a couple of days really, there was some terror about whether I’d walk again, but the surgery to repair my spine went off without a hitch, and after two weeks in the hospital, I was sent home to recuperate, which meant sleeping in long after my father and brothers had left the house, glancing at the schoolwork that had been packaged up for me, shuffling to the car, sweating through a couple of hours of grueling physical therapy, shuffling back to the car, and then returning to the cocoon of my living room, my mother, and my pain medication.

  My mother was, had always been, a stay-at-home mom. She had raised my brothers and then me, excelled at room mothering, delivered Meals on Wheels, knitted hats and mittens for the poor, given back to the world in all the ways that mattered. But she was home, or could be home, and so during my recovery we spent every day together, playing cards and watching television, which was pretty much all I was good for during that first month after the hospital, and furthermore all I especially cared to be good for.

  It was February, and O. J. Simpson was on trial on seven different channels, so every afternoon we’d watch the trial and play lazy hands of gin rummy, and when I started smoking my brother’s cigarettes and drinking my mother’s Maxwell House coffee, she didn’t say a word, because my back was broken, and I had been knocked out of my shoes by a 1987 Buick while walking on the sidewalk—the sidewalk!—and every time I stepped outside my house, even if only for a short, therapeutic walk to retrieve the mail from the box at the end of the driveway, I was jittery as a squirrel.

  “I’ve missed cigarettes,” I said that first night. We’d each blown through an entire pack over the course of the afternoon, then ordered Chinese takeout late in the evening when we realized we’d have to put something else in our mouths. Now we were in the kitchen schlepping the food onto plates and sneaking in one more smoke before we had to take a dinner break.

  “I used to miss cigarettes between cigarettes,” my mother said. She gazed wistfully at the lo mein. “After I quit, I thought about them all the time. I didn’t go an hour without thinking of them—maybe I didn’t go ten minutes. I missed them more than I ever missed any person.” She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she looked up from the lo mein and said: “Feel free to leave that out of the obituary.”

  The smoke hung thickly in the kitchen, but it was a pleasant thickness, like being wrapped in an old, heavy blanket. If it had been only her smoking, I probably would have found it unbearable, vile. But it’s a fact of smoking that the smoke you contribute never seems as suffocating or smells as bad as the smoke of others.

  The kitchen was the smallest room in the house, which had rarely presented a problem in our family. For all her homemaker qualities, my mother had never placed a premium on cooking; the food of my childhood had been simple, with meals often eaten on the run. My brothers and I always had somewhere to be. We ate grilled cheese and soup. We ate tuna fish sandwiches. Sometimes we had spaghetti, but we were forever reheating.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “I left that pan on the burner.”

  She glanced at the stove. “What pan?”

  “The pan with the vegetable soup. You know, that time. It wasn’t Bryce. I turned it on, and then I went to take a shower, and I forgot about it and went to bed.”

  “I know,” she said. “I knew then and I told you I knew.”

  “Yeah, but now I’m telling you. I’m admitting it.” I carried my plate to the kitchen table, took a quick last drag, then crushed out my cigarette and picked up my fork. “I’m sorry I lied. And I’m sorry I blamed it on Bryce. It was a crappy thing to do.”

  “It was twenty years ago,” she said. “No one died. It was one ruined pan.”

  “But I—”

  “You want me to forgive you?” she asked. “All right, there, I forgive you.” She threw her cigarette in the sink. “Now can I eat?”

  It was not, at sixteen, that I thought smoking was cool. Who was there to be cool for anyway, in my very own living room? What I loved about smoking, after my first day as a smoker, maybe even after my first puff, was that a cigarette was a thing to reach for every single time I wanted to reach for something. It was a permanent answer to the persistent question now what? Perched awkwardly on the couch, my afternoons structureless, my brain dully cluttered—now what to do? Oh, yes—now for a cigarette! An easy answer, a familiar routine, a predictable experience.

  “Smoking is terrible,” my mother would tell me while smoking. “I don’t want you to do it for the rest of your life.”

  “Okay,” I’d say, lighting another.

  Why did my mother smoke? None of her friends did, not anymore. They’d all taken it up in college—it was a little glamorous then, still—but once they’d started families, they’d quit, one after the next—all but her. And so she’d spent much of her life excusing herself at parties, stepping outside at intermissions, ducking into doorways, sneaking a quick one in the car, creating makeshift ashtrays. She was not ashamed. But she was certainly aware.

  We had a running gin game. We were playing to ten thousand. By the beginning of March, she was up by four hundred points, but we hadn’t even reached the halfway point. We knew the names and stories of everyone involved in the O. J. trial. We knew the events of the night of the murders as if we ourselves were on trial. We talked back to the television, shouted at the prosecutors, mocked the witnesses. When my father came home at six, we’d be sitting there still—throughout the trial, we essentially lived on West Coast time—and he’d pat me on the head.

  “How’re my girls?” he’d say, and we might answer or we might not, depending on what was happening on the television.

  The next day of my visit—was it only Saturday?—we watched more television. There was no O. J. He was in jail, knee-deep in revisionist history, but luckily for my mother and me, there was no shortage of horrendous murders committed by non-celebrities, and the news networks were happy to share: a suburban mother who’d murdered her teenage sons because she’d had enough of their smart mouths; a high school English teacher who’d murdered the basketball coach because they were both in love with the same student; a man on his honeymoon who’d killed his wife, stuffed her into a large suitcase, rolled her through JFK, and was discovered when the bag went through X-ray and her bones lit up like candles on the computer screen.

  “Kevin says we love bad news,” I said. “I try to explain it to him.”

  She rolled her eyes. “If you have to explain, it’s already too late—they’ll never understand.”

  “Exactly.” I peeled open a new pack of cigarettes. It was exciting, a new pack, the promise of so many cigarettes waiting to be smoked, like a ten-day forecast with a line of sunshines. I lit the first and inhaled the smoke into every single empty space in my chest. Forget yoga—there was no better, deeper breath than this.

  “Imagine being the man who sees those bones,” my mother said. “Imagine unzipping that suitcas
e.” She shuddered, but she was smiling.

  “Mom,” I said, exhaling what little smoke had chosen not to stay behind. “You were right about that Jason Doyle. He was horrible.”

  “Who?”

  “Jason Doyle. The summer before senior year.”

  She lit her cigarette. “The one who smelled?”

  “That was just the tip of the iceberg,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “Sometimes we—”

  “And that night senior year I wasn’t at Jen’s house. I went to a party out in West County, and I ended up in a car with four guys I didn’t even know, and for a few minutes I thought they might rape me or kill me.”

  She took a drag and blew it out theatrically. “You don’t have to tell me everything,” she said. “A mother doesn’t need to know everything.”

  “And I almost got expelled in college for public drunkenness. If I hadn’t known someone on—”

  “All right,” she said. “I get it. There are secrets.”

  “I want you to know who I am,” I said. “I know it sounds stupid, but I’ve made a lot of mistakes.”

  “And I’ve made none,” she said. “Oh, thank god. Not a single one.”

  “Mom, seriously, I want you to know. Before it’s too late.”

  “I do know who you are,” she said. “I know you’re a good parent. I know you work hard. I know you care about people. That’s plenty, Christine.”

  I scoffed. “That’s practically nothing. I mean, in terms of knowing someone, your own daughter.”

  “I don’t need to know every stupid thing you’ve ever done. Some mistakes it’s fine to keep to yourself.”

  “But I—”

  She held up her cigarette and I stopped talking.

  “You shouldn’t unburden yourself entirely,” she said. “Keep some burdens, or you won’t have any company when I’m gone.”

  The accident was in early February. The second week of April, after eight weeks at home, I was given the okay to return to school. The doctor smiled when he told me, then waited for me to smile, too. I did not smile. Instead, I looked across the room at my mother, who was smiling, but upon seeing me not smiling, stopped smiling. I did not wish to return to school. I liked my life just fine the way it was. There was some pain, but there would be some pain no matter where I spent my days. And there were still waves of fear, but the waves were fewer and farther between. When they struck me, my heart roared and my feet turned to stone—it was terrible, to be sure, but now this happened only a few times a week.

  The fact was that, mostly, I just liked hanging out with my mother. I liked playing cards and smoking cigarettes and watching the news, in a kind of limbo as the world—pretty much everything that lay between our house and the Santa Monica courthouse where O. J. Simpson stood trial for murder—spun on without me. Things out there seemed of little consequence; days of drama in the halls of my high school were not my drama anymore. I had not been unhappy in high school; I had friends, and I liked most of my classes. But now I could sleep until ten. For lunch, I could split a sub sandwich and a half bag of potato chips with my mother. After lunch, I could play thirty hands of gin rummy beside an overflowing ashtray. This clearly beat the hell out of Algebra II.

  “She’s ready to go back,” I overheard my father tell my mother. “The doctors say she’s fine. It’s time for her to get back to her life.”

  “The doctors don’t know everything,” my mother said. “She doesn’t want to go back.”

  I was standing in the bathroom with a frothy mouthful of toothpaste, and they were in the hallway right outside the door, apparently thinking I’d already gone to bed.

  “I wouldn’t want to go back either,” my father said.

  “Do you think I should make things unpleasant for her here?”

  “You know that’s not what I’m saying,” my father said. “I just think you two are having an awfully good time together. She’s not recuperating anymore. She’s on vacation.”

  I’d held the toothpaste in my mouth so long that I was nearly gagging on it, but I was determined to stay quiet, so I let it dribble out of my mouth and into the sink.

  “The doctor said the sooner she gets back into the swing of things, the happier she’ll be. Her life is out there waiting for her.”

  “Then her life can wait a little longer,” my mother said. “A mother knows. Don’t look at me like I’m a fool. She had a terrible accident. She was. She nearly. She could have—”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Margie, I know,” he said.

  On Sunday—was it Sunday? The house was so fogged with smoke that it was hard to read the calendar—we played gin. My eyes stung as I looked at the cards; our cigarettes sat smoking themselves in ashtrays as we lay down our hands and added up points. She asked me about my job. I worked for the state, making public buildings more accessible for the disabled. It was important work. People depended on me. She gave me some advice on a number of personnel situations she knew nothing about, and it was all spot-on. It was like she knew the answers to my problems before I could even get out the questions.

  That night, the night before I left, I went into her room. She was lying in bed reading a magazine, and I sat on the side of her bed. When I was a child, sometimes I would come in there in the middle of the night, jolted from a frightening dream, and my father would trade beds with me, slumping down the hall to my room so I could have the safe space beside my mother. She lay the magazine down on her chest. She looked skinny in her nightgown.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m sorry I don’t call more often,” I said.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “Really?”

  I ignored her and went on. “I get busy, and it’s just a whirlwind, and suddenly it’s been two weeks and I haven’t talked to you.”

  She set her hand on my hand. We were not touchy people. I could count the number of times she’d hugged me. “I understand what’s happening,” she said. “But you don’t have to do this.”

  “I know. But I want to. I want you to know that I think about you every day, even when I don’t call.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said. “But it’s not like your father and I sit in this house all day waiting for our children to call. We do things, you know. We have lives.”

  “I know,” I said. But secretly I did not believe her. I could not imagine having a life of my own once my children were grown. I would wait by the phone. I would drive them crazy. They were nine and five, and I couldn’t conceive of a world when they would not be on my mind every second of every day. Was I pathetic?

  “You’re not pathetic,” my mother said.

  Against the wishes of my doctors, my teachers, my father, and just about anyone else who cared to weigh in, I skipped the rest of sophomore year. I did the work. My mother even hired a tutor to get me through French. But I didn’t go back to school. I stayed home, and the weather turned warm, and sometimes we sat on the front porch and smoked, and sometimes we went for short walks around the block, and no one hit me with a car. O. J. Simpson’s glove didn’t fit, my friends started coming over more, and my mother and I played fewer hands of gin. My friends, because they really were my friends, told me I reeked of smoke and that unless I wanted to join the burnouts in the smoking section (a small corner of the playground—the end of the era when this was allowed), I probably shouldn’t bring my nasty little habit back to high school with me. And so in August I quit the cigarettes. And my mother dropped me in front of the high school on the first day of my junior year and went home alone. And when O. J. Simpson was acquitted, I was sitting in European History and didn’t even know it.

  I woke up gasping in the middle of the night, certain that something—a large appliance, possibly—was resting on my chest. I lay in bed listening to the familiar sounds of my parents’ house, indulging in a bizarre fantasy in which my lungs were dirty carpets that I could h
ang on the clothesline in the backyard and beat clean with a rolling pin. I went into the kitchen for some cold water.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table. Her face was pinched as if she were in pain. The pack of cigarettes was beside her, but she wasn’t smoking.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked.

  “Check the fridge,” she said. “See if there are a couple more years in there.”

  “Mom,” I said. “One more thing. And then I promise that’s it.”

  She looked at me with slightly squinted eyes. Maybe it wasn’t pain, I thought. Maybe it was just the light. “Did you kill someone?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Treason?”

  “Seriously, okay? For one second? I just wanted to thank you.”

  “All right,” she said. She closed her eyes. She set her fingers lightly on the pack of cigarettes but did not take one. It was as if she just wanted to assure herself they were there.

  “Don’t you want to know what I’m thanking you for, specifically?”

  “For scraping peanut butter off your jelly sandwiches.”

  “For not making me go back to school that year. For letting me stay home. Everybody said it was the wrong thing to do, but somehow you knew it was right.”

  She opened her eyes. She took out a cigarette. “I didn’t know anything,” she said. She turned the cigarette in her hand, but she didn’t light it. “For all I knew, I was doing terrible damage to you, enabling you. For all I knew, you’d live at home for the rest of your life and never do anything, never make anything of yourself. I just made it up as I went along.”

  “And look where I am now,” I said. “All because of that. All because I knew that no matter what happened to me, I could always come home, and you would always let me stay as long as I needed to stay.”

  “We lucked out,” she said. “We’re a lucky lot, all of us.”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t luck, Mom. It was you.”

  “Stop,” she said. “It’s late. You’ve got to fly tomorrow.”