by Rica Keenum
Sym spends several days in the hospital before being transferred to a psychiatric center. When I’m allowed to visit, I bring books, colored pencils and drawing paper — the only things permitted. I wait in the lobby for a tattooed woman with a jingling set of keys to walk me down to the adolescent ward. We squeak down stretches of polished linoleum. In my footsteps I hear the word “guilty” in two syllables. Guil-ty. Guil-ty. Guil-ty. All of this is my fault somehow. Isn’t the mother always the culprit?
As if she hears my thoughts, the woman chimes in.
“Your son is a good kid,” she says as we round a corner and pass a closed lunchroom. If by some miracle I forgot where I was, I might mistake the place for a school. An ordinary high school where my son could toss his textbooks in a locker, shoot hoops in a drafty gymnasium and shove down the hallway with other teens in hoodies and ripped jeans. But we are not at school. The bell won’t be ringing at the end of the day and Sym will not be coming home.
“He’s really participating,” the woman adds as we head toward the nurse’s desk. I nod and force a smile.
Sym has a new diagnosis: ODD — oppositional defiant disorder. This is medical jargon for “stubborn,” I think. Also: bipolar disorder, and they’ve begun medicating him accordingly. This time, I consent.
If family history plays a role, he has both sides to contend with: J’s and mine. After years of psychiatric difficulties, my mother would confess she heard voices. Sometimes they told her to cram the dog into the microwave, to bake the barking bastard. But Mom fared better on medication.
A slender young nurse reaches from behind the counter. She hands me a document to sign.
“He’s over there,” she motions.
Cartoons are playing on an old wall-mounted television in the corner of the room. A glass window and a half-wall separate the space between the nurses’ station and the visiting area. Construction paper artwork hangs on another wall, streaked with watercolors and curling at the edges. Sym sits in a plastic chair wearing clothes I’ve never seen. Standard issue shorts and a T-shirt. Gone are the days when this mother can dress her son, her child.
His elbows rest on his knees. When he sees me, he hops to his feet and roars. “Get out of here. I hate you. Get out.”
I am a stray dog in an alley, a wretched, mangy mutt. Sym’s face is aflame with emotion: fury, hatred, rage. I stand there, singed by the heat of him. The tattooed woman rushes in.
“You have to leave now,” she says, reaching for my arm.
“No,” Sym begs. “No.” I watch him soften and drop into his chair. His eyes fill with tears and his three-year-old face emerges like a pearl in the oyster shell of his features. The file of him flies opens in my mind as if a storm has taken it. I watch the pages of my son flutter by: He is on my hip in the church hall, sweaty, teary, fussy. He is on his belly in the kitchen, pushing toy cars. Vroom vroom. He is on his bike in the late afternoon, pedaling, pedaling, pedaling away until the sun swallows him in a blaze. In the plastic chair, in the foreign clothes, in this place that isn’t home, I understand that while he does not want me, a bigger part of my son still desperately needs me. Years later, I read about an addict who lashed out at her mother during a visit to the treatment facility.
“We can’t stand seeing our mothers,” she said. “They remind us of everything we did wrong; they make us feel guilty.”
***
When Sym is back home, we start counseling again. Twice a month and as needed, we see a therapist whom Sym respects. She wears an Afro and pink lipstick, which is striking against her dark skin. Her high-heeled shoes clack confidently against the tiles. She issues her directives in a smooth tone in her cramped office on a Thursday.
“Let’s set some boundaries,” she says. Sunlight from the open blinds paints gold stripes around the room. I sit next to Sym wearing a silky new blouse but feeling totally naked. Can’t everyone see the me behind the threads, the mom-mess buried beneath?
“I’m a codependent parent and all of this is my fault,” I imagine saying to clear the air. But I don’t, and so we talk about limiting his gameplay and imposing some actual rules. I explain that his temper is so explosive, common-sense parenting seems impossible for me. I can assert the rules only until his anger leaps into high gear. After that, I hold on for the rough, jarring ride.
***
When medication makes him a blowfish, he feels better but doesn’t care for the pudgy boy he sees in the mirror. He is 20 pounds up and decides to make a change. For years, I’d been asking Sym to run with me. I took the path across the street and followed it until the sidewalk ended. These are my sacred, sweaty rituals in which I streak through the night, endorphins surging. The black sky arches overhead and the streetlamps stamp my passage like gold stars on a progress report.
One evening, Sym joins me. At first, he is slow and he shuffles beside me, tennis shoes dropping on the concrete like bricks. Up, down, up, down. Every step a momentous effort. But night after night, he gains speed and I am surprised he’s stuck with it. In those moments, I see glimmers of his childhood tenacity, of the time he plunked down beside me with my tennis shoes and said, “Teach me to tie them, Mom.” His own shoes had Velcro straps, but he didn’t care. We spent hours twirling the laces around, and he didn’t give up until he could fasten a bow, flaccid as it was. Then there was the time he vowed to learn cursive, though it was no longer a requirement in school. He liked the loops and curves and came to me with a sheet of lined paper and a pencil. “Teach me,” he said. And there went my afternoon.
Now he exercises regularly. He sold his video game system all on his own. He’d had enough. He does sit-ups in his bedroom and watches YouTube videos to learn the proper way to deadlift, squat, perform an overhead press. He adds morning runs to his regimen. From the window, I watch him make his way down the path in ragged gym shorts. He is upright and gliding. The sun blooms all around him, a carnation in the sky. I know it is hot and hard, and he is nearing the spot where the sidewalk slopes upward and gravity wages war with leg muscles. I remember the burning sensation as I watch him take his steps, not slowing or showing signs of strain. My son is strong now. I can’t believe how strong.
***
His shoulders are round as melons and he relishes his physical achievements. “I hit a PR at the gym today,” he tells me.
“PR?”
“Personal record, Mom.” He kneels down beside me and I set down my book. I watch his mouth move as he describes his routine, spouts off his stats. “I lifted 545 on a conventional deadlift.”
“That’s incredible,” I say. I feign amazement although I have no idea what this actually means. But I continue to ask questions, to reel him in so I can keep him close.
He demonstrates: hips forward, knees bent, grips the imaginary bar. I see the calluses on his hands, and I think of the day he stole my heart, the way it embedded in his palm like a fossil pressed to a stone. He’s held it all these years. He holds it still.
Chapter 13
One Sure Thing
I buy a colossal cake cookbook with glossy photos of cherry-topped chocolate cakes, pudding-filled layered cakes and cakes with interesting names: snow skin mooncake and rum baba. I select a new cake to bake every week, poring over photos and essential steps. Which pan will I use: rectangular, circular, Bundt? I focus on ingredients, make a list of what I need: crushed pineapple, cream of tartar, almond extract. Then come the rituals — cracking the eggs in old familiar bowls, stirring the vanilla-laced mixture until the lumps of flour break free. The oven warming, the greased pan waiting. I feel domestic in my tiny kitchen with sticky hands and a counter snowed with flour.
I am not a highly skilled baker, but this feels right somehow. It’s therapy, art, a canvas for the soul. I pour the batter, watch it spill out in gooey ribbons. It is two cups sugar, a quarter teaspoon of salt and so on. Everything measured, everything mixed. Bake at 300 degrees. I like to follow the recipe to get the outcome I expected. This is a sure thing. It’
s not like life at all, like pouring everything you had into a marriage and ending up divorced anyway, or praying for your child to be well then watching him claw through a room, enraged.
I bake because I feel something when I slide my hands into fluffy oven mitts and pull the cake from the metal rack. The hot blast of air on my skin and something else too, something maternal. I bake, therefore I am … what exactly I don’t quite know. Perhaps I am the mother I want to be, if only for a moment. I am June Cleaver, Marion Cunningham, Carol Brady. I am not a single mom struggling to make ends meet, that mom with the messy hair, that mom who forgot to sign the school forms, who never showed up for parents’ day, who cried through a box of tissues, a box of chocolates, a box of tissues again.
When I don my apron, it is a superhero’s cape. I am the mother who fills her kitchen with the aroma of warm cake, who expertly slices two pieces and slides them on glass plates. One for each boy. When I call out “cake” and they hurtle in, eyes lit and hands swooping in for their share, I am the mother who is loved. And this is a sure thing.
***
It’s 2014 and I’ve been divorced since 2005. The boys are stable, happy. They have jobs, girls, iPhones. The trifecta. When I think about all the time that’s passed since we picked up and moved to Florida, I’m astounded. What the hell have I been doing? Reading books, baking cakes, exploring my yoga mat. I sit for long stretches in front of the mirror, examining my own face, every line and pore. I’m an archaeologist who has dusted off the rock and soil of heartbreak. I’ve collected the data, excavated the woman buried beneath the wreckage.
Meeting Mani awakened my heart and aroused my desire for love. He was someone who took an interest in me, who bought the books I was reading so we could discover the same stories in unison. He wondered what I was eating at the exact time I was sitting down to a meal. He’d imagined me at the table spooning oatmeal into my mouth the way you daydream about anything ethereal. The days before I’d met Mani were mundane. I was a mediocre mom with a black-and-white life. No one stopped to look. But Mani marveled, and his fascination with me was contagious. I saw myself through him and became quite enamored. My life is colorful, I thought. I am colorful. He gave me the courage to pursue love again, the will to want it and even expect it.
I’m in the living room now, with a notepad on my lap and the end of a pen in my teeth. I don’t know if I am manifesting a good man or merely scribbling down adjectives. “You have to know what you want before you go looking,” a friend said. It made sense. So I’m making a list of important qualities in a mate, now that I’m ready to date— on the internet that is. Online dating seems my safest option. My keyboard makes the intros. One step removed is where I want to be right now, where I feel steady enough to man-shop for a guy who might want an out-of-practice woman looking for a reason to shave her legs midwinter.
When I sit down to write my list, I am optimistic albeit nervous. I write “gentle, hardworking, humorous, kind.” I’m almost opposed to pretty faces because some part of me sees this as a trap, as my past. Fool me once and you know how that went. But I realize I’m already making judgments. I should let this stuff go. I decide I’d like a friendly face. A fit type so we can hike and bike and run from the law (in theory of course). Bonnie and Clyde with real jobs.
With nervous hands, I post my photo and type up my profile. I’m 36, divorced, looking for a long-term companion. The next day, the emails hit my inbox. He’s full of it, I say about this guy and that one. I examine profiles and nothing makes my heart leap. Is there supposed to be some heart leaping? I don’t know how this is supposed to go.
“I feel like a dog with a bad nose,” I tell a friend on the phone. “I’m just sniffing at everything.”
“Go on some dates,” she says. “You’re making excuses not to get out there.”
It’s Saturday night. I’m standing in the living room, watching cars thunder down the road behind my house. Everyone is going somewhere while I scan the room for my slippers and the television remote.
A Date
Wes is one of four guys I decide to date. The best of the bunch, turns out. One smelled like booze on a Sunday morning and Mr. Law Degree wanted to know why I hadn’t gone to a better college. I really could have been somebody, apparently.
Wes is early and I’m on time, so the waitress shows me to a booth near the window, where he’s sitting with a colossal smile. There’s sunlight on my side of the booth. I set down my purse then sit. I feel like a new penny plunking myself into a fountain, wishing all the way down. But not for magic or miracles, just something good. Some laughter and fun without painful stretches of silence in which someone cracks their knuckles to release the tension.
Harry’s is a New-Orleans-style restaurant, a crusty brick building with a neon sign that lights up historic downtown like a disco ball at night. The windows are wide as walls so you can sip your beer and spy on the whole street: girlfriends teetering in stilettos, couples flashing date-night smiles. I have always enjoyed the vibe here. And the fried Oreos with chocolate sauce, which I shared with a friend on New Year’s Eve. We clinked glasses of white wine, licked our sticky fingers clean as if it were symbolic. Fresh start. Clean slate.
Now Wes and I are on our second date. Our first date was a blur. It was last week, and we sat at a different restaurant where TVs beamed from above. I watched the monitors as if I gave a damn about motorcycle racing and sports commentary. It was an easy place to put my eyes in between nervous talk about work and who knows what. I can’t recall the details, only that I didn’t spill a drink or stumble on my own feet when I stood up. I half-hugged him when we left, a one-arm deal that I found out later he didn’t care for because it made him feel like someone’s creepy uncle. When we learn each other, he will understand that my affections show up elsewhere. Not in hugs or kisses but maybe in batches of double fudge brownies and other domestic favors.
I’m less nervous now, at Harry’s. The waitress brings a basket of bread and our drinks. I watch Wes take the stack of plates and separate them. One, two. He quickly removes a wedge of warm bread and begins to slather it with butter. We’re talking about something, but I don’t know what because the bread is all I can think about. This hunk of baked dough is going to tell me more than he can say. I think about what my sister said to me when we were teens. “You’re one of the good ones.” She smiled, scooted inside and shut the car door behind her. We were in a parking lot somewhere and I was in the passenger seat. I had leaned over to pop the lock on her door so she didn’t have to fumble with her keys.
“I’m confused,” I said.
She revved the engine on the little blue Ford she’d later blow up for lack of oil. “If you pay attention, you can tell who the good ones are,” she said.
I’m paying attention now. The knife roams across the bread as he chats. He sets down the slice and clears his throat, slides the plate across the table in front of me and gets to work on a piece for himself. First me, then him —this is the order of things, and it’s never just bread and butter.
***
We’ve been texting and emailing, texting and emailing like modern-day pen pals. He sends pics of sunrises in the morning. Rise and shine. We go on dates every week. He sends me his address and I drive to his house on a Saturday. We sit for a while on the sofa. I brought lawn chairs for the drive-in theater, a package of pistachios and a bag of heart-shaped chocolates. He has a bottle of Reisling and a few plastic wine glasses.
“We should leave in about 15 minutes,” he says. I nod, look around at the white walls, black drapes and ordinary everything. When I ask, he points me to a bathroom down the hall. It’s white-tiled and sterile. There are no drippy bottles of shampoo in the shower or lumpy washcloths in a wad. No shaving cream splatter on the mirror or rumpled towels on the rack. Everything is pristine and for some reason, it’s unsettling. This is not a bachelor’s home, I think. I take a seat on the toilet lid and scan the garbage can at my side. It’s empty, lined with a plastic ba
g. If I could find a few dirty cotton swabs or maybe a clod of dried toothpaste in the sink, I’d feel better. Look, I’d say, he’s not too good to be true.
In the garage, we load up his car. The trunk is open and he’s arranging the lawn chairs inside. “Anything else we should bring? Bug spray?”
“Yes, please,” I say. “There’s something about me they love. I’m bug bait.” He chuckles and goes back inside. As I stand near the lip of the trunk, I notice red speckles on the cement near my feet. I lean in, examine it. It’s probably paint, but it could be a bloodstain. I search the garage for potential clues. Weapons. I see a storage rack against the wall, loaded with greasy rags and garden shears, dog-eared rolls of duct tape. A red toolbox, gleaming. I’m replaying CSI episodes in my head. Ten minutes ago he was Mr. Perfect and now he could be a serial killer. I don’t think he keeps a lunchbox full of panties, but perhaps he has a closet full of skulls. He enters the garage again and his green eyes are soft as summer grass. He hands me the bug spray and we’re back on track.
We don’t watch a smidge of the movie. Inside the car, we chat and laugh until we decide to step outside and set up our chairs, alternately gazing at the screen, the sky, the screen, the sky again. It’s a strange thing to see the techno glow of Hollywood faces against the dusky drape of night, the juxtaposition of technology and nature.
Wes reaches over and opens his palm. I pluck out three fat pistachios and pop them into my mouth. He tops off my wine and I hold it up, let the liquid kiss my lips before it slides down. After sitting a while, Wes stands up, shakes out and moves over to the car. I follow, lean against the hood and watch kids skip-run to the concession building, dollar bills flapping in their hands. A low-slung moon offers a pearly smile from beyond the massive screen we’re not watching. I smell popcorn and see a gaggle of kids hurtling toward a pickup truck, dropping kernels as bright as dandelion heads in the dusty gravel lot. After they pass, there is nothing but Wes and the tepid July air and I try to remember the grinning moon as I close my eyes and feel his lips press into mine. Tonight, I am a little fish, swimming in the big of everything, of the dazzling screen and sky and this date that doesn’t suck. Swept up in the tide of possibilities: of me with a man who can love without rage. Is he that man? He looks at me with eyes wet with oceans. And I swim.