An Abbreviated Life

by Ariel Leve

  The waiter stares blankly.

  “What kind of soup do you have?” she asks, refusing to open the menu. “I think I should have something hot, don’t you think?”

  He tells her there is miso soup and seafood soup and soba noodle soup, but she cuts him off. “I’ll have the miso soup.” She instructs him to make sure that it’s hot. She asks if he thinks it will settle her stomach; he says yes, he thinks so. She asks how long it will take. He says not long. She nods.

  I look the waiter right in the eye. “Thank you.”

  HE WALKS AWAY and I notice my mother’s hands. She has on the same rings that she’s worn all my life. Rings that dug into me when she squeezed my hand. Will those be my hands? Will those be my rings?

  I look at her and say coldly, “You forgot to say please.”

  “Please,” she says.

  “Not to me. To the waiter.”

  She narrows her eyes. “I didn’t come here to be lectured by you.”

  I sink down in the chair. It will be a long lunch.

  THE SOUP ARRIVES and her mood improves. She is focusing on the past, reminiscing about previous holiday seasons.

  “Do you remember how much fun we had spending New Year’s in Lake Tahoe?”

  “Kind of. I remember when you got arrested.”

  She laughs. “Okay, well, except for that year.”

  When she finds humor in bad behavior, it is a relief.

  “Do you remember”—I make sure my tone is lighthearted, not threatening at all—“how Josie used to hit me with a hairbrush?”

  I am asking this to thwart her idyllic version of events.

  My mother smiles and stifles a laugh. Making fun of this amuses her, so I proceed.

  “Do you remember why?” I ask. “I mean, what did I do that was so bad?”

  She giggles. “You interrupted me all the time. When I was on the phone, when I was writing.” Her eyes become tiny moons as she laughs at the memory. “You were a horrible child.”

  “But what did I do that was so awful? What did I do,” I say without a trace of antagonism, “that was so bad I had to be hit with a hairbrush?”

  My delivery cracks her up. “Are you kidding? You would drive me crazy!” She laughs. “You were such a bratty child.”

  I force a smile. A few seconds pass.

  “What about child abuse?” I ask.

  This is the first time I have ever said this, and there is instant regret. Those words shift everything. The flame of playfulness is blown out; from now on, we are in the dark.

  “Oh, please,” she snaps. “What about mommy abuse? No one ever talks about that.”

  MY MOTHER REACHES for her purse to search for her glasses, which gives her a second to reflect, and it is in this moment that I know everything is about to change. She will take in the hostility implicit in my question. Immediately I try to change the subject—I bring the focus back to her and what she’s working on—but it’s too late.

  “Listen, you had a wonderful, beautiful childhood. You had everything a child could ask for. Do you know how many children would love to have grown up with me as their mother?”

  She locates her glasses and puts them on. They are lopsided. “Your problem is, you don’t know how lucky you are.” Her voice is fierce and intimidating. “You had everything and you never appreciated a goddamn fucking thing. Now I need to talk to you about Christmas. You’re spending it with me, I hope. We’re going to be together, right?”

  This is not a question that permits any answer other than yes. The bullying eviscerates me. She is speaking loudly. She is unaware of the volume of her voice. She leans in, over the table. “You only think of yourself. You. You. You. That’s all you care about. Can you think about anyone other than yourself? Can you think about me for once? What about me? Have you ever considered that I might be alone and that you’re my family? Did you think about that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  My mother stares at me, squinting her eyes in attack mode.

  I stare back at her. I am descending deep within myself. All she needed was a yes—an agreement to spend Christmas with her. I know her needs: to feel I am not rejecting her; that I want to spend time with her. But what I need is for her not to expect that of me.

  THE UNRAVELING BEGINS. A pyroclastic cloud of superheated, scathing words that spew out and engulf me. Until I am gone. Until I become unrecognizable.

  “I’m sorry that you’re so self-involved that you can’t give a shit about anyone else’s problems.”

  I say nothing.

  “You despise me.” She spits tiny knobs of saliva. “You’re just a selfish, ungrateful bitch.”

  I sit back, anticipating how it will go on, as it has so many times before, with no conclusion, no final word. No satisfactory end. But I sit quietly, not responding, because I brought it on myself. I look down into my bowl of cold miso soup.

  “What do you want me to say?” I ask, trying to deactivate the escalating scene.

  “I’d like you to say that you love me. That you want to be with me. I want to feel as though I have a daughter who cares about me. Who gives a fuck. I want to feel I have a friend. A family. That I’m not alone in this world. I want to see you. I want to spend time with you. I want you to act like a compassionate human being for once.”

  AS SHE SAYS these things, I know there is no reasoning with her. If I tell her I love her, it might reassure her. It might calm her down. But I can’t say it. Instead I say, “I have to go.” And I get up and attempt to leave.

  This is a mistake. It ignites an explosive fury. I am leaving her forever, writing her off, never to return.

  “Don’t you dare walk out on me!” She pushes back her chair and leaps up from the table. She thrusts her body forward to prevent me from leaving, but I am no longer someone who can tolerate the tantrum. I am a block of steel, moving robotically, blind to the stares of the other people in the restaurant who have stopped chewing their food and ceased talking. I ignore the weight of her obstructing me. She stands directly in front of me to hold me back, but I shove her off because my adrenaline is pumping in full force and I can escape. I rush out of the restaurant. She immediately follows me into the street, and in this instant I am aware that this sudden outburst has meant no one has paid the bill.

  PEOPLE ON THE sidewalk are watching. I feel their gaze on me. Their wide-eyed, openmouthed, stand-in-place-without-moving stares. Mind your own business! Haven’t you ever seen an out-of-control woman in public before?

  “Go ahead!” she screams at me. Her face has turned red, almost purple. “Call the police! Call the police on your mother!”

  She has crossed over. In this state, there’s no reaching her. No reasoning. There’s nothing I can say that will make her stop. I turn and walk briskly away, but she chases after me. She catches up to me, grabs hold of my arm, snaps me around.

  “Let go of me,” I say, staring into her eyes. My voice is concave. Is that my voice? I don’t recognize it. She is gripping me and I pry her fingers off my arm, bending them back so far, I worry they’ll break. I don’t want to harm her. This is a spectacle, and I hope no one I know will pass by. But then I don’t care. Let them see.

  I AM OLDER now, stronger; I can walk faster than she can. I have underestimated my physical strength, so I break away. There is a handprint on my arm from her trying to hold on to me. I hear her cry out, “Ariel! Wait! Don’t leave me, please. I need you! Don’t leave me. Please. I love you, don’t walk away. Don’t leave me! You’re all that I have.”

  I pretend not to know who she is calling to. She yells out my name, but I don’t turn around. I feel a piercing ache in my throat. She is winded and can’t run after me. She stands on the sidewalk, sobbing and out of breath. I turn around, worried. Is she far behind? Is she okay?

  She has given up chasing me and is leaning with one hand against a tree, panting. She looks frightened and desperate and helpless and I see her abandoned. A little girl.

  “Please, I need y
ou.” Tears roll out of her eyes. “Don’t leave me like this. I need help.”

  I pick up my pace, walking away from this person, my mother. No one has to know. I get away as fast as I can, leaving spectators to wonder.

  I AM AFRAID to go home. She could be there waiting for me. I go to a friend’s house instead. I tell her about the incident, show her the handprint on my upper arm.

  “What provoked it?” she asks.

  “She was making a scene and I tried to leave.”

  She hands me a glass of water. I take a sip.

  A few seconds pass.

  “That’s another restaurant I can’t go back to,” I say.

  My friend nods. “From now on, only meet her in places you don’t care about returning to.”

  I AM ON the subway heading back to my apartment. People have just left work. They’re everywhere. Don’t look at me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t try to sell me something. Don’t ask how it’s going. Or give me tips. Go to the gym! Volunteer! Check out the Chinese masters at the Met! It won’t help. I am simmering silently. The subway is good for that. I feel anonymous.

  When I get back to my building, the bouquet of flowers is waiting. There is also a typed note and several messages on my answering machine. How sorry she is. How horrible she feels and how she promises it will never happen again. She didn’t mean to act out, she didn’t mean to hurt me, my friendship means everything to her. She says she is behind me with all of her love and all her support. I know that she is. This is the pattern.

  SECONDS AFTER I’VE put the roses in water, my grandmother calls.

  “Talk to her, please. I can’t take her—she’s killing me.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Speak with her. She’s worried you’ll never speak to her again. Tell her that’s not true. You can’t do that to her. Talk to her—she loves you more than anyone. She’s calling me nonstop, she’s hysterical, she says she’s going to kill herself.”

  “She’s not going to kill herself,” I say.

  “She wants me to take a train into the city and be with her, but I can’t. I’m not well. But I’m afraid of what she will do. Do it for me. Please.” She begs. “Talk to her. She’s got to lay off, she’s making me sick. I’m too old. I can’t take it.”

  “All right,” I say, “I’ll call her.”

  “Call her right now.”

  “I’ll call her soon.”

  “Call her when we hang up.”

  “All right,” I snap. But then I feel bad, so I say it again softly. “All right.”

  “She loves you. You’re all she’s got in this world. She can’t stand it when you’re angry with her.”

  I can hear my grandmother crying. I don’t say a word and she blows her nose before repeating herself. Begging me to make amends. “You know she doesn’t mean it. She can’t help herself.”

  “I know.”

  WE HANG UP and I think of the three generations. I am alone in my apartment downtown imagining my mother alone in her apartment uptown waiting for my grandmother to call from her kitchen in Westchester, reassuring her that a phone call from me is on the way. And I think about how my mother must have reminded my grandmother what a rotten mother she was and how she ruined my mother’s life, and as I think about this, I pick up the phone and make the call because I don’t want my mother to suffer. I don’t want to punish her. I tell her everything is okay and I’m not upset. And when she asks if I forgive her I say yes, without thinking about if I do or not.

  I POUR SOME ginger ale into a glass. Then I sit down at the table that I always sit at in the chair that I always sit in, and stare at the glass. It is a glass I have been drinking out of for years. Will I have this glass when I’m thirty? I get up and walk into the kitchen. I cut off a slice of a pear using a knife that I bought at the hardware store because I liked the serrated edge. It’s not a good knife—there is rust near the handle and it doesn’t cut very well. I stare at the knife. Will I be using this knife to cut fruit when I’m forty? I leave the kitchen and stand in the middle of my apartment. I look around. Will this be the couch that I lie on when I’m fifty?

  41

  The girls are in the backseat, talking about making lemon juice. I am in the front seat and Mario is driving. The sun is streaming in like a laser and the windows are open. We have just been to the local supermarket and are heading home with the groceries. There is a feeling of contentment.

  Later that day, when Mario is driving the girls back to their mother, I ride my bicycle at dusk to the pool for a swim. I think about having gone food shopping with him and the girls and how we pushed the metal cart with the shaky wheels and bought harumanis mangoes and cheap pasta and I smiled when he put two jars of Smucker’s jam in the cart because he was allowing himself to enjoy something “fancy.” The girls were having fun, grabbing my hand, pulling me this way and that as I picked tiny pieces of dried grass out of their hair left over from swinging on the tree. We discovered the imported cottage cheese had come in, and I’d been waiting for weeks for this extravagance.

  “Papa!” they shout. “Cottage cheese!” Everyone smiled. I thought about how we celebrate the moments that improve our lives: going out to dinner when the Wi-Fi gets turned back on, or the fish pump is repaired, or when papaya man brings over a fresh papaya pulled from a tree in the banana field.

  How ordinary it must have seemed to anyone looking on—a family filling a shopping cart with groceries—but for me, it was extraordinary. Having lived alone for as long as I did with an empty fridge, buying single rolls of toilet paper, never purchasing more than two yogurts at a time, I would look on with envy at families in the supermarket who bought six rolls of toilet paper at once and think: that will never be me.

  I HAD NEVER envied colleagues who won awards or friends who purchased new things; and when I won awards or purchased new things, I felt a vague emptiness because it never seemed that it mattered. The material gains, the professional accomplishments—there was never a sense of this counts.

  This was confirmed when I took in the residual joy from our trip to the supermarket. I felt overwhelmed with excitement to share my appreciation of the day.

  I finished my swim and rode my bicycle home. My senses were tingling and I saw the variations of green in the trees and the shifting light in the sky. I heard the acceleration of the motorbike as it passed me by and I felt the warm tropical air on my skin. I smelled the fish that was being grilled on the side of the road.

  Later that night, I told Mario how much I had enjoyed the day. And as I spoke the word meaningful, it was bittersweet because I didn’t believe the word would accurately convey the depth of my feelings. When I open the fridge, there are mangoes. But I don’t see mangoes, I see progress.

  I HAVE NEVER been to a supermarket with my mother. Groceries were ordered over the phone from Venice Market on Lexington Avenue. The number was written in pen on the wall near the rotary phone in the kitchen, and in the mornings my mother would stand, sometimes naked, and order what she needed that night for her dinner party. She would use a chopstick to dial the number so that she didn’t break off one of her long red fingernails. Often there would be loud arguing with the manager of the market because she had neglected to pay the bill for the money she owed and they would cut her off.

  “I am your best customer!” she would shout. “This is offensive! You will get paid, just deliver the food and I’ll write you a check!” It was an ongoing drama. They would deliver the food and the check would bounce.

  She switched markets. Venice Market was replaced with Rosedale, but then the same thing would happen with them and she’d ask forgiveness and apologize to the manager at Venice. She’d go to the hair salon, and after she had her hair dyed and was dressed in a glamorous outfit, she’d hand-deliver a signed book and promise never to bounce another check. Things were back on track. The groceries would be delivered, she would be at ease, her spirits would lift, and her guests at the dinner party would have lamb chops.
I could relax and go to school.

  ONE DAY I return home from school to a catastrophe.

  “Josie,” my mother is crying, “has ruined my life.” She is standing in the kitchen, rotating the spindle on her Rolodex, desperately searching for a card.

  Josie couldn’t stand that my mother wrote phone numbers down on the wall. So she took it upon herself to use bleach to make her point. She scrubbed away all of the numbers written in ink and erased the ones written in pencil. My mother’s contacts were gone. Forever. She couldn’t replace them.

  Only she did. A week later, the phone numbers had returned. On the wall, scrawled in messy handwriting, exactly as they were before.

  MARIO SENDS ME a text message after work. “I don’t feel like talking, discussing, or answering any more questions.” I call him and he answers the phone to let me know he is eating dinner by himself.

  I don’t understand this mood—did his message of not wanting to talk mean not at all? I try to speak to him, but every sentence is a bullet.

  “I just want a rest.” His words are pointed and his tone is sharp. The more I say, the more he feels disrespected. But my need for communication is only intensified by his need for withdrawal.

  He comes home and goes to a different bungalow, closes the door, and draws the curtains. I am shut out. When I try to enter, I discover it’s locked.

  “You locked me out?” I speak this into the glass windowpane that separates us.

  “No,” he calls out from the other side of the door, “I locked myself in.”

  I LEAVE MARIO alone and return to our room, trying to tolerate the silence. I pace. I think of Gunung Agung, a volcano on the island that dominates the area and influences the climate. It is still active. There is a deep crater, and occasionally it breathes out smoke and ash. The last time it erupted was four years before I was born, and for some reason, this reminds me of my mother giving birth. Throughout my childhood I was threatened with her lava consuming me as I ran as fast as I could, trying to stay ahead of being smothered. Lava love at my heels. It would swallow me up and freeze me in time. I would never be unstuck.