Mom

One morning, we woke up to the shrill ring of his cell. “It’s just Mom,” he said dismissively, letting it ring until she hung up. But she called again and again, and he rolled his eyes, switched it to silent, and rolled back over in bed.

“Aren’t you going to answer?” I asked, watching the green light of his cell phone continue to blink. He mumbled something as he fell back to sleep. But I was wide-awake, listening to the buzzing of her calls until well past noon.

His mom always does his laundry for him. She comes all the way from Selfoss to drop off his clean clothes, drives home with a dirty load. She’s obsessed with cleaning. He says that he’s hardly ever sat down to a meal without her coming running with a cloth to scrub a spot or a spill or something. She lives with her new husband in a big house. Everything is impeccable. The furniture perfectly matches the drapes, the figurines. She believes that work dignifies and enriches the soul, and she doesn’t understand why he’s so focused on education. But he’s been at the university for eight years and he’s halfway to a heap of degrees.

He says that people from the South don’t see the point of educating themselves, since they can start working at the slaughterhouse straight out of tenth grade and bring in more bread than most academics with a liberal arts education ever will. I think it’s terrible that he’s so misunderstood by his own family, but I also think it’s a shame that he doesn’t answer his mom when she’s calling so urgently.