After my shower, I dressed in warm clothes, changed my linens, and bleached my sheets. I checked on my mother, whose lunch sat mostly untouched. She tracked me through the room like I was going to steal something, and for a moment, an insane moment, I was tempted to tell her about the night before. But I couldn’t. Her withering stare—and if I were honest, the fear of some awful truth—clammed me up. So instead I retreated to my room. And I just sat there, staring, trying to not think about anything as the sun set. But the more I tried not to think, the more thinking I did. Sabrina’s smell was everywhere and the sweetness had turned noxious. I remembered her lying on my bed, smiling, and my stomach squeezed like a fist—shame and lust, the ghostly memory of a mouthful of tinny blood. My gorge rose.
I needed to move, I needed to be doing something. In the hallway, my eyes caught the paintings stacked along the walls. I hardly saw them anymore, passing by them hundreds of times a day. But Sabrina had seen them, and had moved some to take a closer look. I reached behind me and turned on the hallway light. The bulb cast a dusty yellow glare. I traced my fingers along Sabrina’s fingerprints in the dust at the top of one canvas, evidence that she had been there, and I nearly sobbed. Kneeling, I pulled the paintings apart and spread them out. Really looking at them this time, trying to see them from her eyes.
The one that caught my eye was a strange self-portrait. It was the same painting my mother had used on the flyers for her last art show in New York, the flyer I had stashed away in my nightstand. In the painting, my mom was both young and old, each face overlapping. The only thing that each face shared were the eyes, her eyes, painted a vibrant blue and staring out, confrontational. It was an expression I had never seen my mother make. It was so dominant, so strong. I was amazed by the amount of skill it had taken to paint those photo-realistic portraits. Each face looked like a ghost, perfectly rendered but layered transparently, superimposed on top of one another.
There was something haunting about the portrait. My mother had painted it before I was born, but it looked like even then she knew something was wrong with her. The more I studied it the more distressing it became. The oldest face was uncannily accurate compared to how she looked now.
My mother was in her bed, covered in wounds. Wounds that looked so similar . . . No. My mind closed shut like a bear trap. My mother painted pictures of her youth fading. My mother had answers that I needed. I flipped the painting forward, its back revealing a title printed in neat blocky handwriting: “The States of Being” V. DeVry. The rest of the paintings in the stack were similar in style, portraits and portraits. All of her.
I stood and wiped my dusty hands on my pants, feeling uncomfortable and unwelcome. I fought the urge to stack all the paintings again, turn off the light, and forget everything. Go back to grilled cheese sandwiches, banal TV programs on mute, being alone.
But I couldn’t go back. The night before, Sabrina had wakened something in me, something violent, and I needed to know why. The only person with answers was the architect of this sad life of ours. I needed to know my mother, about her history, about my history. These paintings didn’t answer my questions, they created more. Who was this woman I’d lived with for seventeen years? Hell, who was I?
I couldn’t ask my mother; she hadn’t truly spoken more than a few words this year, and honestly, I couldn’t bear to confess to what had happened with Sabrina. Not yet. But maybe this house, her living shrine, could help me. At least it would keep me occupied, get me out of my own head and into hers.
The bedroom next to mine was filled nearly to the ceiling with my mother’s things. Paintings of course, but also her clothes and books. I found boxes of housewares: dishes, a beautiful blue vase, some awards for art she’d won in high school. A shoebox of notes in childish bubble handwriting, filled with the crushes and drama of junior high. Peace sign earrings, a worn old bear, a pearl rosary in a blue felt box. All these years the boxes had been moldering one wall away, but I’d never once felt compelled to root around looking for my own history.
Had my mother planned to unpack, display, and incorporate all this stuff into the house? Before she gave up and sequestered herself in the attic to paint, or before she fell ill? Or perhaps she’d never intended to stay here.
Night fell. Clicking the lamp on, I rummaged through the boxes with more vigor. There was a person-shaped puzzle being pieced together, and each friendship bracelet and bookmark, each photograph and memento, contributed another piece. If only I could understand why this seemingly ordinary, albeit artsy and eccentric, girl went sick and mad. How much of this was caused by her health and how much her mind?
I rubbed some dust out of my eyes and sifted through a box of photos. They were mostly of my mother when she was young, even some of her as a baby with my grandparents. At the bottom of the box I found a newer-looking picture album with a plain black cover. Wiping the grime off the surface, I cracked it open. There was my mom, right on the first page, looking young and hopeful.
In the photo she was in her late teens, possibly early twenties. My fingertips traced her face without meaning to. Her hair was vibrantly red, curly and long. She was standing on the stoop of an apartment building, wearing a paint-smeared T-shirt hanging off one bare, pale shoulder, and very short cut-offs. She was beaming, her skin unscarred and flawless. She squinted in the sun, her hand waving at the unknown photographer. Next to her was a curvy brunette, her hair heavily feathered with a few bleach-blonde streaks. She also had a big smile and her arm was around my mother. The friend was pointing at the address plaque on the building. I flipped the photo over: Moving Day! Viv and Gina.
I couldn’t take my eyes from the photo. The two good friends, their hands paint-splotched, their smiles filled with so much hope and possibility. I felt a pinch in my chest, a deep non-specific sadness. I’d never known the woman in this photo, but I would have liked to. I dug through my memories, back as far as I could, trying to blend the image in my hand with the one barely alive in this house. When my mother was a sentient person. But even then she wasn’t this picture-woman, so happy, so bright.
In my earliest memories she was anxious, paranoid, even cruel. She didn’t want me to play with other children; she was always worried about strangers. I spent hours locked up in this house while she furiously painted in the attic, coming down only to eat at random hours. Sandwiches and canned soups, things you could buy in bulk that would keep indefinitely. My mother would only go out for supplies in spurts, stocking up as if planning for the apocalypse.
Those visits to the neighboring town’s box stores were my only memories of leaving the house growing up. Holding onto a cart, amazed at how big and bright it was, and how many people were there. But we never dawdled, just got what we needed and left. I was sent off to “play” and my mother would head back up to her attic lair. I was never allowed up into her studio. “It’s not for children, it’s Mommy’s place,” she would say when she would hear me on the stairs. In consolation, I would play at the bottom of the steps, waiting for her to come down.
Was she sick because of me? I hated to think that motherhood, and my existence, had consumed her mind, her body, her passions, and eventually would usher her into a hole in the ground.
There was a life crammed in here. If all my mother’s stuff were destroyed, no one would remember she existed at all. And with her gone, there would be no one who knew me either.
I searched for another hour or so. More photos, many, many sketchbooks, even old report cards. More puzzle pieces creating an idea of my mother, but some large and very important pieces were absent. Everything in this room projected normalcy—it all spoke to the life of a pretty red-haired girl with loving parents. She had friends and boyfriends, in-jokes and good grades; her college years, with their yellowed essays, collections of band flyers, and concert tickets. But nothing told me why my mother came back to a place she hated. And nothing told me who my father was, or what was wrong with me.
This room had been here my whole life,
unlocked. And like a lightbulb over my head it dawned on me: there was still only one place I was expressly forbidden to go—the only place that was my mother’s space and hers alone, that was literally locked. The attic studio.
It seemed silly that I hadn’t gone there first. But even now I felt that ingrained taboo. I stepped into the hall. I forced the child in me back down as I stared at the swinging pull chain to the attic stairs, and the padlock that attached the trap door to the ceiling. I was owed some answers.
I found bolt cutters in the basement. I balanced on a stool and I cut the lock off. It fell with a loud and damning clunk, releasing a plume of dust.
I pulled the chain.
VIII.
The sound of the stairs unfolding and hitting the floor triggered an explosion of memories. I’d heard it nearly every morning of my childhood when my mother went up to her sanctuary. The stairs to the attic were narrow, paint splattered, and rickety. I realized staring up into the cold dark hole in the ceiling that I was frightened. Mercifully, Tommy the cat had trotted out of the guest room and was looking up at the attic, equally curious. With the cat at my heels, I carefully climbed the stairs and popped my head in. The room was nearly black, with only the weak light from the moon through the slats in the shuttered windows to guide me. I felt along the wall for a light switch and when I couldn’t find one, wandered around flailing my arms for a pull chain, my heart hammering in my chest the longer I shuffled in the unfamiliar dark. When I felt something cord-like brush my hand, I yanked it like a lifeline.
Canvases upon canvases were stacked everywhere. The space was plastered with drawings, barely an inch of the walls visible underneath. I walked from piece to piece, surprised by how many of them were self-portraits. The painting style seemed more refined than her normally frantic, energetic brush strokes. The endless books on art appreciation Mother had foisted on me came back to me as I looked at her work. The paintings in the attic reminded me of “The State of Being” painting downstairs. But where that one had lightness in the young woman turning old, these felt much less natural.
The paintings were tortured, overworked, attempting to document the nuances of her face down to the individual pore, to capture flesh. Each successive painting depicted her wasting away more and more. What were probably the earliest, stacked closest to the walls and floor, showed her younger, like the photographs and my early memories. Serious, pretty. In one, she was pregnant, topless, holding her belly in one hand. The face looked haunted, glancing to the side, as if waiting for someone. The later paintings showed her scars, or bandages covering wrists, throat, and a menacing shadow in the background. In others, which I guessed were most recent paintings, the shadow had more form. As she withered, and became more indistinct, the shadow in the back grew more corporeal. I’d only recently read The Picture of Dorian Gray for English Lit and it was impossible not to draw the clichéd comparison.
I reached out and touched what had to be the last painting in the series. It was unfinished, still set up on the easel. In it, my mother looked almost as she did today: sallow, hunched, old, her hair thin and gray. The shadow figure at her shoulder was nearly in focus. I leaned closer to look and realized that the shadow was me. Meticulously painted, a creature made of darkness, I loomed behind her, staring directly out at the viewer, eyes like two gleaming black buttons, doll-like.
My facial expression alien and utterly cruel.
My legs turned to jelly. I stepped back, wanting to be as far from the picture as possible, yet unable to look away.
How could my mother hate me this much? My head ached. I’d been slaving to take care of her all these years. Giving her my childhood, giving away any chance to have a normal life, to be a real person. I wanted her love so much I could taste it. But I was filled again with the crushing despair of knowing that I would never have it. I was stuck living in this glorified hovel on canned soup, changing her shitty diapers. And all the while she had been up here, spending all those healthy years, all the years she could have been talking to me, teaching me, being a mother to me. But instead she had been painting.
The injustice of it was choked me. I hated her. Once the word was at the surface of my mind, it couldn’t go back down. Hate, hate, hate. She was a cruel and selfish person. My eyes burned with unshed tears, my fists tight. I could barely breathe, rage like a walnut jammed in my throat.
On shaky legs, I stood and walked to the painting and kicked the easel, knocking it down. With a cry I stomped on it. The easel snapped into kindling, the painting’s stretchers cracking, pulling the staples from the back, paint flaking off. I ripped through it with another kick. Cathartic.
I was breathing heavily as I threw the remains of the canvas aside, grinning victoriously.
I picked up a box cutter sitting in a box of tools and brushes, and went to work. I stomped and slashed, tearing the drawings from the walls, ripping them to confetti. My spree lasted until my muscles ached, eyes burning from dust. I looked around the dingy attic at the destruction, and only then, looking at my mother’s life’s work shredded and destroyed, did tiny tendrils of guilt touch me. This was all she had. And it was gone. I’d taken it. What a sad small world.
I hadn’t been a bad child. I couldn’t think of anything I could have done to have caused her so much pain. I righted a stool I’d knocked over in my fit and sat down. From this angle I could see out the small octagonal window, facing the backyard where I used to play. I would’ve liked to think my mother sat up here and kept an eye out for me, but I doubted it. I stared at my dirty hands, remembering my mother’s blood on them earlier. The strangeness of tasting it. And then Sabrina.
As my gaze trailed off, I noticed a piece of the windowsill was loose, and as I leaned in to investigate, I saw the binding of a book jammed inside the wall. The hiding spot looked intentional. I pried the book out and shook off the layer of dust to reveal a leather-bound journal.
Opening it, I saw the paint-y fingerprints on the pages and the familiar scrawl of my mother’s handwriting. I was looking at my mother’s diary. I stared at it almost reverently—this was the kind of thing I’d been searching for.
My thoughts in a jumble, I stood. Tommy finally crawled out from where he’d stashed himself during my rampage.
I turned off the light and slowly went down the ladder, clutching the journal. I wasn’t ready to open it yet—my fear of its contents was too large. Instead I tucked it into my night table drawer and went to wash up. I felt both elated and intensely guilty just thinking about the violation of going into my mother’s space, touching the last vestiges of the person she once was. Not only touching, destroying.
I brought Mother her dinner in bed. She was sitting where I’d left her hours before, bundled up, the bathroom radio keeping her company. She stared at the wall, eyes fogged, lost in thought. But I didn’t quite believe she was entirely unaware. There was a tightness to the skin around her eyes, a tremble in her lips that made me think she was a little more lucid than she was letting on.
When dinner was cleaned up and her blankets pulled up to her chin, I turned to go, but was shocked to feel my mother’s hand on my wrist. She had moved much faster than I thought she could. Her eyes were clear, intense even. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen so much of a person looking out from those eyes.
“What, Mom? What do you need?” I whispered, afraid.
She blinked a few times, eyelids fluttering as a few thick, slow-moving tears slid out. Her mouth moved as if to talk, lips shaking, dry tongue snaking out to moisten them. She took a rattling breath, and I could feel her pulse racing through her hot hand. It burned my arm, as if feverish.
“I’m listening, Mom. Please . . . what is it?”
I didn’t want to sound so desperate, but it had been years since she’d actively spoken. Years of nothing but wheezes and moans. She stared at me, another tear streaking down, and then the lights went back out behind her eyes. Her grip loosened and slid away, her eyes took on a cloudy, faraway loo
k, and she disconnected. I hadn’t realized there were tears in my eyes, until I blinked. I rubbed at them angrily as I turned her light off, and stomped out of the room. I couldn’t go on this way. I knew I was going to lose myself in this house, lose my mind, hurt her, or end up another object tucked away in a box.
By the time I got to my room, my hands itched for the journal in the drawer. I needed to read it. I bundled up in blankets, Tommy jumping up and curling himself at my side. I absently petted him while staring at the nightstand.
I had to be brave. I refused to turn into one of those pathetic adult children who ended up drowning an invalid parent in the tub or starving them to death, pushed to their breaking point.
I had to be more than that.
I took a deep breath and pulled out my mother’s journal. The leather was brittle. I traced the fingerprints of paint on the outside. I opened the book to the first page and started to read.
IX.
June 1st
Well, this is the first page of my journal. It’s been sitting on the shelf for a few weeks, taunting me. I don’t write—always found writing hard—tripping over my words. I feel like I’m never able to say what I mean. I wish writing was like painting. And I’m sure there are plenty of people who feel the exact opposite. Anyways, ramble over, and now the page has some writing on it. Gina gave me this journal as a graduation present. It’s beautiful, thoughtful. She’d wanted me to use it as a sketchbook—and I thought I would, at first. But I have hundreds of sketchbooks. The luxury of the binding, the supple leather, all of that seems too fine to sketch in—you can’t even rip out the pages. It’s too much pressure. Sketches are supposed to be spurts, exercises, nothings that sometimes become somethings. But in a book like this? Well, let’s just say I had performance anxiety.
Parasite Life Page 6