This story first appeared in The Montserrat Review, Issue #5, 2001.
My mother sets the plate down in front of me, and I try to avoid her gaze, I know that she can see my puffy eyes, my drawn face. She wants to ask questions, but she can’t. She wants to know why her daughter appeared on her front porch, on a weekday, in a business suit, 500 miles from home. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I told her. Well, here it is, tomorrow, and I haven’t told her. I don’t know if I will.
I eat the scrambled eggs she’s fixed for me, even though the last time I ate scrambled eggs, I got sick (the result of a hangover, if I remember correctly). But as long as I’m eating, we won’t have to talk. And I’m content to sit here in the roominess of a pair of borrowed sweatpants and sweatshirt, retrieved from my brother’s closet. The sun shines in my eyes through a plate-glass window. For once, it is quiet in the house. No ringing phones, no brothers. It occurs to me that I might never move from this table.
If I tell her I came because I was worried about her, she wouldn’t believe me. She’s had cataract operations before, and she realizes, I think, that I don’t like to hear about them, to know about the eyepatch she has to wear, the troubles with her contact lenses. She knows that I don’t want to hear about the implant in her cornea. I suspect that she has heard me fidget over the phone.
I’ve had dreams where I have to put a contact lens in my eye, and it becomes, as I hold it, a large piece of glass, too large to fit. But if I don’t put it in, I won’t be able to see.
I don’t want to know that my mother’s eyes are dimming.
As I eat, my mother sits at her usual place at the table, eating a dry piece of toast. Allie, the cocker spaniel, sits patiently at her feet. It’s almost 11 in the morning, yet my mother is still in her black velour bathrobe, the one that I bought her for my father to give to her one Christmas. Soon, she’ll say to the dog, “Well, Allie, I guess I should take my shower before the entire day’s gone,” and then I’ll get to be alone.
She wants to ask, but she doesn’t. Instead she clears her throat and informs me from behind the newspaper, “Your friend Linda Thornton is getting married.”
This interests me. “Really,” I say. “Let me see.” Linda Thornton was the villain of my junior high school years, a skinny girl with bulging eyes whose prominent last name (her father owned the largest chain of paint stories in our town), earned her many more boyfriends than she, in my opinion, deserved.
My mother hands me the paper, watching me carefully.
“She looks the same,” I comment. “The article about me and John was bigger.”
As I had the paper back, I make a face, a fake-snotty, fake-triumphant smile. She chuckles. She is very proud that the engagement of a rich man’s daughter received fewer column inches in the local paper than that of her own daughter.
I like to make her laugh. I like it when I can make her laugh so hard that she has to wipe tears form her eyes.
I don’t have the heat to tell her what it is I’ve done. She wants to believe that my problems are over, and that I can still be the one to make her laugh.
