I know what he means. You see the man walking with a woman. He has a smile warm enough to melt chocolate but the way he has his hand leading her by the small of her back seems … off. You don’t notice it until you see her face on the national news, reporters begging the public to tip off the police if they’ve seen anything at all that seems suspicious.
“Well done, Liam.” My voice is heavy with sarcasm, which is an automatic reaction after years of trying to convince him she was strange at best and twisted on many occasions.
“What I’m really trying to tell you, Kates …” he says my name to make sure he has my attention.
I’ve bent down to kiss the top of Ella’s head. She still has the hint of baby smell, and talcum powder. I could create dreams from that scent. I tuck her under my arm, playing with her fingers. She fiddles back with me. We could be anywhere.
I look up, remembering where I am, coming out of the world with Ella. “Mmm?”
“Your mother loves attention.”
“Great observation.”
He suppresses a laugh. His face is anything but amused, though. His teeth bite at the inside of his cheek and he looks down, as if it’s too much knowing what I don’t see.
“You think if you let her rant you can walk off with your dignity and that you’ve avoided riling her up and making it worse.”
“Okay,” is all I can say. I feel myself falling, or at least drawn towards Liam.
“She won’t get enough. You keep your head down and someone like Rochelle goes and goes and goes until she wins. You do nothing and she still wins.”
“So I’m meant to fight back?”
“Kates,” Liam says. “You need to end this thing that’s going on with her. I don’t have the answers, but you do. You know why she does what she does. You know what she thinks of someone or something simply by the look in her eyes. You could draw out her thoughts simply by taking notice.”
“I can’t fight her. I’m over her games—everything. I haven’t fought her all my life and I still can’t fight. There are things that you don’t know.”
Liam hums in thought. I wait; I nod. Still no response. When that doesn’t work, I say, “And?”
“And if you give up in life, that’s your choice, but life doesn’t stop and so it will happen anyway but you’re less of a person. You’d be a chess piece that must play out. Knowing that, you realize giving up is a moot point.”
Chapter Ten
It’s Saturday yet again but Stroll Saturday is going to work differently, according to Paul.
In the corner of Ella’s closet smooshed to the wall is a bumblebee outfit she wore for Ryder’s dress up birthday party a month ago. The sleeves seem to be higher up her shoulder and the zipper is a snug fit when I stretch the outfit around her body, but it’s still perfect considering when my daughter hobbles to me she has two wings flapping behind her. I catch her, and spin her around and up to present her to Paul with a “Ta-da!”
His eyes pop when he sees her.
“Dada. Dada,” she calls.
“Look at my little girl,” he coos.
He gives her a blowfish on her neck, like he does to me. He pretends to drop her since bumblebees fly for a living, Ella squealing, “No. Dada.”
“As much as I’d like to watch our bumblebee take first flight, I need to change myself.”
Paul and Ella join me halfway through changing. She sits in the corner with her teddy, slamming his chest so Paul and my voices coo sweet nothings to her. It seems she loves those sounds more than the puree she still devours every day.
I yank Paul to my side and stare at our reflections. I’m in jean overalls and a Marilyn Monroe wig. Paul dons a beanie, and an old DaDa puff jacket, DaDa hip-hop pants and skate shoes. We are two lost nineties kids with our little bumblebee. This was his idea so that Mom couldn’t find us. He couldn’t have picked a worse day to be invisible to her since I’ve been plotting out my thoughts and exactly what to say to her about our issues.
First up as we arrive at the park, we seem to only have the company of another mother and her three kids, so we take our time on our usual walk. Ella runs ahead, her gait that of a hefty giant in miniature form with the weight behind her in those wings and ted dangling in her other hand. But she’s too cute to stop. Paul must think so too because his step has slowed with mine.
It’s Paul who sees Mom’s car first.
“Elly!” Paul calls.
She stops in the middle of the path to the play set.
“Let’s go this way. Mommy and Daddy have a surprise.” Paul jerks his thumb back over his shoulder.
“Dada,” Elly says, her voice broken by her jog.
In the middle of thinking how I’ll break it to Paul that I have something to talk to Mom about, I realize this will be much harder than saying the few words I want to.
We walk at a pace that’s almost a sprint, making it to the tree line. Paul and I look through the foliage. It seems we’re not a target as we were in the open, and who would look for Paul, Katie and Ella Anselin in two nineties teenager getups and a bumblebee outfit? I’ve gotta give it to Paul. At the least, this is hilarious.
“Is that …”
Paul tugs on my arm. I turn, seeing Mom stalking the area near the park. She’s rolling down the hill in her car, stooped over the steering wheel and scanning everywhere from through fences lining backyards to the holes in the tunnels in the park playground.
“You were born to a freak,” Paul hisses.
“And you married a freak.”
Paul kisses my temple, draping his arms over me and leading us right to the edge of the stream, where random splashes of water kick up onto our shoes, and the walls of bushes raised beside us provide more camouflage. Not far ahead, though, are the wooden stumps lining the edge of the park. From there, the sidewalk begins. Then, the road.
“Let’s sit tight,” Paul suggests.
No. “What?”
We stop. Paul points to a boulder. He brushes his hand over the top. It’s only got tufts of moss on the sides, and it’s dry. The rest are smaller, wrapped in moss or half soaked under water.
I squish my bottom on one side, and Paul takes up just over the other half of it. Ella bends and slaps the water edge, splashing the toes of her sneakers and making me fear for teddy’s life.
“M’here, Ella.”
I remove her socks and shoes, tuck in her wings under the top of her collar so they don’t drape in the water, and keep teddy with Paul.
On the other side of the stream is the plastic of a bread bag. Paul grabs me from behind and drapes me over the stream. I balance a foot on one rock and clip the edge of the bag, bring it back.
There’s the end piece and two slices of bread, only with a couple of spots of mold. I start ripping up pieces, and give a handful to Ella. Paul untucks the back of the bumblebee outfit and holds on to her, ready to yank back.
We watch Mom finally park her car, step out, look around, and then turn back.
Paul and I don’t say anything for a while. I want to catch Mom before she leaves but I still don’t know how to say it yet.
We watch Ella dump her handful of bread into the stream. At first we only point out one guppy, but then a dozen swarm to the bread. A duck even joins us and after ten minutes, we’re surrounded.
“She just won’t learn,” I say.
“Neither will you, Kates. Asking her to throw in the bread pieces one-by-one won’t be a concept she understands at a year old. It’s all or nothing at that age.”
I slap his forehead, and he blinks back surprise.
“My mother, you goosebag.”
Paul clicks his tongue. “Oh.”
“How long do you think she’ll hang around?” Paul glances over his shoulder, scrunching his nose as he takes in Mom pacing the street. “She’s done an hour of stalking before. But I don’t underestimate your mother with anything.”
“Good.”
Paul’s face freezes, mid-whatever it was he was go
ing to reply to my expected “damn”.
“Wipe off that look. I’m being serious, Pauly.”
He blinks, tearing away to reposition the back of Ella’s outfit in his grip. “In those jean overalls?”
“I need to you to be okay with me leaving you to play with Ella while I talk to her.”
“I don’t usually do this, but …” Paul pulls me to his side, finding my hip. His grip is that of a greedy child facing the prospect of handing back the toy that he found and isn’t his to keep. “Just, no. No, that’s crazy. No, don’t give that crazy woman the freak show she wants. No, to everything. There, I have the answers to all your questions covered. You’re ruining the perfect plan, Kates.”
I would have thought so a while ago too. Sitting here crouched and hiding from Mom is fun, but it won’t be if we have to continually go to these crazy lengths.
It’ll only get worse.
I laugh into Paul’s neck, kissing him tenderly, to which he doesn’t respond. Paul’s a smart man, very logical. But when I layer kisses up to behind his ear and use my breathy voice to whisper how hard I want him, he curls his neck in to me reflexively, moaning just a bit so that I know he can’t control himself anymore.
I slip out and step back so he can’t grab me before I say, “Mom wants a freak show, sure, but I’m not going there to fight a point.”
Paul has a frozen lower lip, which looks a lot like it wants to say, “Confused”.
“We might be a while, Pauly.”
I bend down, kiss his forehead and hold Ella’s shoulders to get a wet kiss on her lips. Paul is too shocked to grab me. Maybe he’s considering my statement.
I know I still am.
Turning to climb up and out of the invisibility shield of the trees, I say, “We’ll be fine. Please, please just meet me back at home.”
Chapter Eleven
“Mom!” I call, jogging up the hill. The grass is dry in the heat of summer. I get good traction on it as I clear the distance to the wooden stumps lining the park from the road.
Mom whirls around at my voice, manically searching the park until she places me. When she sees me, alone, she fits her hands across her chest and ever so slightly turns her nose up and away in wait. The look on her face tells me I could be in my natural wavy brown hair or this Marilyn Monroe wig and overalls and it wouldn’t matter.
“Will you let me buy you coffee or tea?”
“Well, yes, if you’d like to take me out. We should talk, Katie.”
The sun warms up the sidewalks just enough. The concrete doesn’t reflect the heat back to our faces, and so the soles of our rubber shoes don’t absorb stinging heat. I take her to the café nearby, which is a fifteen-minute walk, enough to show through Mom’s age. She doesn’t unleash on me yet, which may either be because a bead of sweat is streaking off concealer from the side of her face or because I’ve stated coffee is our destination and as always good confrontations happen when we sit, and pretend to enjoy our hot drinks. Before we enter I pull off my wig, shove it in my pocket—the benefit of dressing like a dork is the huge pockets—and shake out my waves over my shoulders.
I take a sweetened caramel latte and hand Mom her English breakfast tea with a side of cream.
She’s been waiting, all right. I don’t get to sip my first taste of the buttery caramel teasing my nose. Cup lifted to my mouth, she’s glaring at me. Has been for longer than I was aware.
“Are you mad?”
“I’m always mad at you, Katherine.”
Mom takes her time ripping open the sugar, hovering it over the tea, deciding not to have sugar, putting it to the side, dunking the tea bag a few more times, and mixing the cream and tea leaves long after they cloud.
“How much do you hate me?”
“A mother can’t hate her own child,” she replies, cleverly diffusing the attention.
“In context—how much do you hate me?”
“Since I’m a mother, I stand by that truth. A mother can’t hate her child.”
“What don’t you like about what I do?”
“It’s not so much what you do.”
This conversation is new. So new that I don’t respond at first. This isn’t a power struggle; I’m not trying to escape her words or taunts. I feel it, though. The need to curl up in the safety of the fetal position.
I know it too well, that when you bury your head it’s like the comfort of a teddy to a sleepless child. It’s what you do, and you think it’s the first thing you think of when it’s all too hard, but it’s not a process you control when you’re in a state of survival. It controls how you are.
Which is why I don’t allow myself to feel inferior to Mom. This isn’t a power struggle so I shouldn’t have to feel worried about what happens if I lose or she loses.
For the first time, Mom knows this isn’t going well. If her words are bait, I’m a robot—void of the lure to be trapped by such fickle temptations to prove myself.
“It’s what I don’t do,” I state.
Mom, realizing this is no moment to drink tea, pushes the cup aside.
“Correct. You don’t let me help you with Ella. You don’t appreciate when I teach you lessons to make you a better person.” Mom points a finger at me, snarling. “You don’t care that you’re a devil child. You don’t care!” She shrieks, “You don’t worry about Ella hating you for what you’ve done. You have no shame and you tell your friends the dirty things you think.”
Mom growls in frustration. Her teeth are gritted. I lean back as her saliva is bound to spit out at me with a face that is red like hers, and a fist coiled that tight. The audience of café customers and this center table prevents her from playing with my emotions, which angers her further.
She has no control now.
“You think a sorry look or … or some reflective words or how you act will undo the murders you’ve caused.”
Mom expels her breath and glares at me. “It won’t. It doesn’t.”
People have started staring. I feel their eyes flitting between my mom and me while their bodies remain in place, but their distraction betrays them. Fries dropped into laps, not mouths. Hands feeling tables for plates but not realizing they are tapping so far from it that it’s a joke.
“I love you, Mom. No matter what,” I say.
Yeah, it’s a lie. After all these years I no longer want my mom to accept me. I don’t even want love. I want the truth and I am not allowing my mother one inch of control. I want her balling up her fists by her side. I want her cursing with frustration through gritted teeth. Most of all, I want her to want to punch me square in the face with the truth and white knuckles.
This could be a sad moment. It’s not. It’s true I want nothing more than my mom to punch me in the face, but it’s liberating. No longer am I chained by skeletons of bodies from babies I am supposedly responsible for murdering. Never again will I be a trembling child slipping inside this adult body with too much space and not enough grip to latch on to who I am meant to be.
I am getting the truth and I’d rather be hurt by that than all the lies I’ve endured for years.
“Mom,” I repeat, louder. It works. People are no longer trying to pretend they haven’t seen this. Children’s hands are poised over their toys or sneaking money out of their mom’s bag under tables. Ladies’ eyes stick to our tension like feathers to super glue.
“I said I love you.”
Mom attempts a smile. It starts off tickling the corner of her lip. No, scratch that. It starts off as a tic.
You can see the expectation in the crowd. Will she say it back? Is something wrong with this lady’s voice? You don’t see anger because no one sees a woman who hates her daughter. They see polished nails, brown hair void of grays, a straight posture, a pretty face, a fitted blouse. They see a well-adjusted, if not exceptional, member of society. No one sees a monster.
No one sees the big, bad wolf in the grandma’s body.
“Well,” Mom starts. She clears her throat, and it se
ems like now is the moment the crowd suffocates her. I can see it in her unblinking eyes that the crowd is a wall of fire advancing on her. She has nowhere left to go and she needs to do something or else she’ll burn.
“Katie, thank you. That is … nice, I suppose.”
She smiles at nearby couples of young women, and children under their parents’ tables frozen between tangled legs. As usual, she expects smiles but they turn away with flat expressions, unhappy that she could be so callous as to not say “I love you” back.
After all, isn’t “thank you” the worst response to someone pouring out their love?
The only smile she gets is from me, because I’ve taken her power without a fight. Seeing my smile, her expression exudes pure rage.
I have a few responses that seem appropriate: I sound a lot like your regret in another person—I think you should think about what you’re really angry at here—you’re too afraid to admit your regret at how you let your life turn out so you deal by hating the one person who’s everything you want but don’t have.
Those responses make me think of Liam. They are witty comebacks for the final say.
“I think a mother can’t hate her child. But you don’t see me as your child,” I say. “You see me as a reflection of yourself.”
Mom’s eyes stare at me void of a question buckling behind her lips or a flinch of rage. For the first time in my life, my mother is afraid of me because I have exposed what she’s hidden all these years.
As I’m about to suggest we leave, there’s a tug on my overalls. A cute kid in a soccer shirt and a mushroom cut lump of hair, says, “Don’t worry. I love you, Miss.”
Mom tries to speak so fast, she stutters. She tries again without taking a breath. “Katie, you know I love you.”
The kid’s mom calls him back and my mom and I are left facing each other.
“I was surprised before. But, of course I love you,” she says, repeating herself.
“Mom,” I say, chuckling. “That’s funny. Now let’s go.”
Preciseness—that is all it took to figure this mess out. Mom hates herself for how her life turned out, and behind the meticulous habits and her way-of-life, she is more broken than I have ever been.
Precise (Pulling Me Under) Page 6