With Love, Mom

My mother and I have hardly spoken since that night four years ago, the one that landed her in the back of a cop car. The house smelled like sandalwood, but the sky smelled like the Sound. I could tell she was off that morning, something in her eyes. The moon shone a spotlight on her as she paced back and forth in my bedroom, jolting me awake. I linked arms with my mother and led her back to her room like she was a toddler startled by a bad dream. About an hour later, the screaming ensued, and then the sirens. My father arrived once the police did, turning on a tea kettle, hoping its whistle would revive some sense of normalcy. It felt odd seeing my father in my mother’s home, like seeing your grade school teacher at the supermarket, filling a cart with mustard and eggs.

I hesitantly met her last January at an Italian spot on the Upper East Side that I heard made great focaccia. Seated unfortunately by the revolving door of the kitchen, she spoke loudly over a cacophony of dishes banging together and Sicilian busboys joking in their native tongue. I had little to say, but I was hungry and school was slowing down and she had a dentist’s appointment in Manhattan. The blend of herbal spices that trickled from the kitchen wasn’t enough to drown out the scent of her perfume – she still smelled like pine needles and jasmine and negligence.

In a blue linen three-quarter sleeve button-down, I reached down to pick up the fork I dropped and she saw it. The initials of my family members inked in a line, hers excluded. Too saccharine, she said of it. So she succumbed to the darkness of the city sky, disappearing within urban chaos, leaving me with nothing but an overpriced check and confirmation that she hadn’t changed. I haven’t seen my mother since she saw the tattoo on my forearm.

I suppose I haven’t ever truly seen her. She was ghostly, in a way. An entity you couldn’t quite grasp but you knew was a silhouette of someone that was almost good, someone who slowed down at yellow lights, who put the shopping cart back in its proper place. I mourned who she could’ve been and the boy I could’ve been if she were better.

I lived full time with my father since that night. He and his new wife, a woman much kinder than my mother, played Scrabble and attended charity luncheons. I went to boarding school, eventually, my young-learned independence prevailing.

Once I graduated, I traveled overseas to study, making a new life for myself at Oxford. My classmates at university were fairly similar to the students at Trinity Academy, besides their posh accents. Their fathers worked in banking and their mothers drank prosecco at brunch. Half of them weren’t qualified to be here, but that was the way it worked. If you had enough money, you could make it anywhere. England wasn’t much like America, though. The faucets were odd, so were the outlets. My classmates made fun of the way I pronounced water, as if I were an extraterrestrial.

I joined the Oxford Society of Bibliophiles, learning about the production of books and binding, visiting libraries and antique stores. I lived in a dorm with two twin beds and cheap vodka stashed behind the cot’s wooden frame.

It was a Tuesday when my father called, shattering my semblance of normalcy.

“Son…” He sounded worried about something, he was awfully transparent like that.

I held my free hand over my ear, blocking out the sounds of my English roommate who developed a new hobby of blasting Scottish folk music while studying maths.

My father told me that I’d been subpoenaed to be a witness in my mother’s trial over summer break, about that night in the fall years ago. I had blocked out as much of that night as I could, standing in grotty pubs with my hands in my pocket, occasionally dabbling in ketamine in graffitied bathroom stalls. Eying the second year girls in their leather skirts was much more enjoyable to me than worrying about the mother who’d failed me. But now, faced with the specter of my past, evasion was no longer an option.

“Alright, Dad, thanks for letting me know. No, Dad, I’ll be fine. Yes.”

I hung up the phone and kicked my bin of trash over, spilling out redundant journal entries and failed midterms.

“Hey!” my roommate Arnold – endearingly known as Arnie – chided.

“Hey yourself, Arn, you’ve been blasting that crap for hours and I haven’t said anything about it.”

He shrugged in admission and kept humming along to the tunes of bagpipes and I continued angrily disassembling my room.

My mother was inescapable. She used to tell me that crying does no good, so I didn’t. With an upside down desk chair, an overturned garbage bin, Arnie finally asked me if I was okay, and I told him that I was, even though I wasn’t and I wished people would just ask me that more often and that I could say I’m not.

There was a girl in my anthropology class called Vivienne. I ran into her at a party the week prior and she told me I was cute in a nerdy way, whatever that meant, and that she’d like to see me some time. She saw me reading Kafka in class, she said. Perhaps that’s the goal of all pedants, that someone sees them reading The Castle. So I called her, asked if she wanted to grab a bite to eat, seeking respite from my maelstrom of worries. Girls like esoteric damaged boys, don’t they?

Over fish and chips, I told her about my mother and she entangled her foot with mine under the table and looked at me with sorrowful eyes. I pitied her for a moment – did she understand? I could never love her, let alone anyone. I would never memorize the crevices in her palms or find it cute the way she sounded when she had a cold. At the most, I’d kiss her on the forehead once or twice. That’s what happens when you’ve got a mother like mine.

We went back to my dorm and fooled around a bit, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother – an obvious turn off – so instead, we took solemn sips of aging whiskey that burned our throats. Eventually I asked her to leave and I watched reruns of Friends until Arnie came home and turned it off.

Holed up in a cottage in South Hampton, my mother believed that the only repercussion she’d face was having sons that would no longer answer her incessant stream of invective. I imagined what she did there, if she had friends. If she still made banana pancakes and if she still set the table for four.

In the weeks leading up to the trial, she bombarded me with phone calls begging me to change my mind about my testimony.

“Family is family,” she’d say.

“That’s funny, coming from you,” I’d respond. She hadn’t a clue about what family was supposed to be.

“How could you do this to your mother?” How could you do this to your son?

She told me that I didn’t know what really happened that night, and I knew that I did, but hoped that, in part, she was right. Maybe my mother wasn’t terrible and maybe this was all some big misunderstanding and we’d be having spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and we’d go see a movie and then she’d yell at me to clean my room.

Months have passed since our short-lived dinner, the autumn leaves now honeyed and brittle. I sit opposite to my mother, now, in a courtroom laden with heavy air that smells of aging bookshelves. My mother fusses with the lucite ring that replaced her wedding band and adjusts her fur coat. It’s the same one she wore years ago when she tipsily stumbled into my 5th grade wax museum. I was Ernest Hemingway, without the alcoholism and depression. Those came later on.

As I wait for the trial to begin, I concoct tales about the jury. The dark-skinned man is a physics teacher with a deadly seafood allergy, and the red-haired woman adjacent to him a recovering kleptomaniac, one of three triplets. A woman with graying hair and a wrinkled mouth is missing her granddaughter's dance recital to be here, so the trial better be worth her while.

However, my attention is drawn inexorably to my mother, illuminated by a shaft of light that renders her almost angelic, though I knew better. Her blonde hair settles below her ears, occasionally getting caught in the emerald-encrusted hoops she inherited from her mother. She appears unbothered but focused, like she’s smoking a Marlboro Red against the brick of our former Old Westbury mansion. That is, until, she taunts me with a sardonic glare, one with a simulacrum of sorrow. Her unrelenting eye contact begs me to confess what I saw that night, but warns me what’ll happen if I do.

Under the humming fluorescent lights, I worry that I’ll choose my delusions over the truth.

The bailiff demands that we all rise, so we do. We sit when instructed to sit.

The prosecution lawyer looks at me over the rim of his tortoise shelled glasses like he has a son of his own and sees him in me. He feels bad for me, I can tell.

I look down at the patterned carpet, its red swirls consuming one another like a game of PacMan. My ears buzz until I’m called to the witness stand. The truth I’d recited in my grandfather’s 1957 Thunderbird years ago is no longer a hopeless confession over a sputtering engine, but a testament to my loyalty to my morals, not my mother.

I avoid eye contact with Beatrice, the defendant. The hairs on my neck stick up when I remember the fear in her eyes that night, the piercing sound of her screams, the way her voice shook when she yelled my name.

I begin the monologue that I’ve practiced for years, never prepared for it to become reality.

“My mother, Doreen…” I choke.

She looks at me wistfully, hoping I’ve acquiesced to her manufactured narrative.

“That night, I’ll never forget it, no matter how hard I try. The brisk October air crept into my room through a cracked window as I called my father. I told him something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. I went to bed and dismissed the concern. And then I woke up, I saw her walking back and forth, a restless dance, whispering at the ground and I…”

She looks down and wipes her eyes, her facade crumbling under the harrowing testimony. I wonder if she still has those violet candies in her purse, the ones that tasted like soap, but in a refreshing way.

“I took my mother back to her room, I put her into bed. I fell back asleep, somehow, but then I heard Beatrice, our housekeeper who basically raised me, screaming from down the hall.. I walked into the room and… my mother was just attacking her. Blood pooled at her feet. I tried to get in between them and my mother kicked and screamed and punched me, too. But yes, I can attest to the fact that she assaulted Beatrice that night. I watched Beatrice get pulled out on a stretcher.”

“She claims self-defense,” her lawyer interjects.

I scoff. “No, sir. Beatrice wouldn’t hurt a fly. She came into the home late at night at my behest. She was a victim of my mother’s manic descent, she didn’t do anything wrong.”

My mother purses her lips together and shakes her head skeptically, as if she wasn’t there, as if she didn’t have her hands around Beatrice’s neck and leave her hospitalized for weeks.

I never saw Beatrice again, not until now, and I finally look at her. Her eyes lack the sparkle they used to have. I wonder if she hated me for being Doreen’s son. I hope not.

The court adjourns and we leave and it’s over. My stomach knots at what I’ve done, but I know I’d be a mess if I hadn’t.

I drive home in an Escalade with my lawyer, Adam Davenport. A Black Ice air freshener hangs from the mirror, filling the car with an awfully overprocessed scent. He asks me how I feel about things and I tell him I’m fine. He doesn’t really know what to say either, so he pats my back and wishes me luck.

I return to Oxford in the fall, now with a shadow of a mustache and new Sperry’s. Muddied puddles leave their mark on the hems of my khakis and I don’t feel like jumping over them out of fear of looking silly, so I let it happen. I come home to my new flat with a green sofa and a humming sound that never seems to go away. I suppose we’ll get used to it within a month or so.

My roommate CJ is making bolognese for dinner, or at least attempting to. He stands over his steaming concoction like a helpless child, idly watching the sauce teem over the sides of the pan.

CJ was always there, even when he wasn’t. His presence hangs ominously like a hovering teacher breathing coffeed air down your neck. I purposely make breakfast once he’s gone to class, just because I can’t quite stand to feign conversation with him. He tells me about the girls in the quad that won’t stop staring at him, and I nod and chew my food a little louder to tune him out.

“Graham, there’s a package for you at the door,” he tells me without looking up from the stove.

“Thanks, man,” I mumble as I dig through a field of cardboard to find the box addressed to me.

I find the package and quickly drop it like it’s a bomb. Very well could be, though, as the return address reads my mother’s name.

I’ve thought about her a lot lately. In my dreams, I press my ear against her chest listening to the song of what’s left of her beating heart, an eroding concavity sheltered by an impermeable cage. I ask her why. Why did she not love me the way she was supposed to? She tucks my hair behind my ear and tells me it wasn’t my fault, she was just a damaged person, which bothers me even more. How selfish could she be to even have kids, damn it, and how unlucky I am to be one of them?

I imagine her as a little girl with coiled curls and innocent brown eyes, her front teeth missing. She’s playing with dolls, reminiscent of the children she’ll have one day. I picture her in corduroy overalls, naive to the monster she’d inevitably become, the things she’d do.

I take a steak knife to the tape that holds the box together, carelessly ripping it open. In the box sits a Tupperware container filled with cookies. A note taped to the side reads, “Just add milk!”

They say don’t bite the hand that feeds you, but I want to. I want to gnaw on the hand until it reaches out to me with painted fingernails and caresses my face and apologizes for what it did to me.

I wince at her attempt at reconciliation, how ignorant she is that she thinks cookies will heal the wounds she created, how sanguine she could be about the whole thing – just add milk?

I leave the box on the kitchen counter. I tell CJ he can have them, and to tell our other roommates they can too. I consider sneaking down in the middle of the night and shamefully gorging myself with her confections. I don’t want to give her the satisfaction, though. If she even knew me, she’d know I don’t even like oatmeal raisin.

She calls me once a week or so. I answer very rarely. I call her by her first name now, not Mom. Mom. The word doesn’t slip off the tongue for me, perhaps it never will. It feels awfully robotic and inane.

She left me a voicemail yesterday. I listen to it on repeat, like I’m trying to decode some sort of cryptic message embedded within her phoniness.

“Hey, Graham, just checking in on you. Thinking of you. I sent you a package to school. I miss you. Why do you never call me back?”

I wanted so badly to change her, but I realized, perhaps, this is just who she is. She is oblivious to the ways she’d failed me, blind to the detriments of her selfish idiosyncrasies. I hate oatmeal raisin cookies, and I question if I truly hate my mother.

I pour myself a glass of cheap wine and sip on my bitter curiosities. The sun folds over itself as the afternoon melts into night. I want to hate her so badly, it would make this much easier. But instead, I hate myself.

I tried to be good, proper.

The void is unfillable, but I familiarize myself with it. Its emptiness and its hollowness remind me of unsigned permission slips and empty bleachers. I turn on the news as I finish off what’s left of the wine, my elixir.

The world is aflame and my heart is cold.

I am not nearly as strong as I think I am.

I call her back.

She picks up within three rings and I guess in part I just wanted to see if she would. I don’t have much to say.

I tell her how much I hate oatmeal raisin cookies.

How much I hate what she did to me.

But that I’ll always love her.

For she is my mother, I am her son.

I am the sun to her, she says, not just her son.

She doesn’t know why I feel unheard. Unseen.

But she is here, she says.

She is not here, she is miles away in a wee cottage in the dunes of New England, found guilty in a civil trial, millions poorer.

“The connection’s bad,” I tell her.

I’m not talking about the internet, really, but she thinks I am. So she tells me she loves me and she hangs up.