Barbara returns from DC with a ring.
Barbara returns as I am packing my room—a task that shouldn’t take long considering I never quite unpacked. But when every item I own begs a narrative of fulfillment and of over-spending, it takes awhile to get organized.
My bedroom looks like a tornado blew through it, scattering my belongings from wall to wall. Barbara stands at the edge of a storm, extending her hand like Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel. The engagement ring is like almost touching god, I suppose. Good for her. I wish her happiness. I should, literally, wish her happiness. Say something, Starla, you broken daughter. Talk. To. Your Mother.
“We’re still discussing where we’ll live,” Barbara tells me, thronging the doorway. Is it possible her boobs got bigger over a four-day weekend? Or did Rahn take her fancy bra shopping? Why must these questions snake into my mind?
“Well, now you can have this room as a den. That’s what you wanted, right?” Oops. That was the opposite of congratulating her. Barbara doesn’t notice. She hasn’t even asked why I’m packing or where I’m going.
“He’s going to retire in a year,” she says. “I’m nowhere near retiring. So really, he should move here. But I worry.” Barbara twists the engagement ring on her finger. “I worry that this house is too small for him, too dumpy. You should see the size of his place.”
I abandon my mess on the floor, and stand to face her. The second we lock eyes, it occurs to me that this is the last time she and I will be in this room together. The emotion of it surprises me. Is there something to be done to mark the occasion? I should get my act together. I should glow over her ring. What fiancée doesn’t want a fuss? The ring is a fede—two rose gold hands clasped along a pink diamond band. I wonder if she picked it out or if Rahn researched Italian engagement traditions before proposing. Something tells me the latter.
“Rahn is a really good guy.” I don’t add, Try not to fuck it up.
“I might move to Buffalo with him just to get away. You ever wish you could live someplace where you don’t have memories?” Barbara asks.
Has she forgotten that I moved to Toronto for five-plus years? “Not anymore,” I tell her. “I’m staying in the Beach. Tamara and I are getting a place.”
Barbara blinks at the contents of my room as if she’s suddenly noticed that I’m packing. Here is the chance for her to ask me if I am gay. The chance for her to ask where I’m moving to, when I’m leaving. Was I really molested as a kid? Is she a bad mother? Can I perform miracles? Am I haunted? Will I live to see twenty-five? To ask me anything at all. “I’ll bring up a couple of Rubbermaid bins from the basement,” she says. “There’s no way you’re going to fit all this stuff back in your luggage.”
Hearing her heavy footsteps on the stairs makes me want to break something. I press my knuckles to the wall but think better of throwing a punch. These walls are so thin, I’d surely make a fist-sized hole. Instead, I imagine it—a fist-sized hole. I visualize my bedroom rife with holes. More holes in that room. Negative space. Barbara floats in the chasm. Our relationship is me imagining shit and her imagining shit. Nothing solid comes of it. I don’t have the skill to make our relationship work. Or maybe I don’t care. Both and neither are true.
She is having her own tantrum below me. Too many slams and thuds to be merely accidental. I imagine her wildly wrestling with the step ladder. Storage boxes crashing to the unfinished concrete floor. Guardedly, I walk to the top of the basement stairs. This could be another scene from my childhood, a loop in trembling time. I might be thankful, I suppose, that Barbara has always excused herself to have fits in another part of the house. And I have always listened to the “bang bang o’clock,” as Lucky would say, from my bedroom. As a child, my job was to not interrupt, and afterward to be attentive, maybe compliment her hair or the most recent meal she cooked. What if the present can be different?
“Mama,” I call, descending a few steps. “I’m coming down.”
When I was a child, maybe eight, a mother skunk and three of her kits took up residence in our basement and stank up the whole house. Barbara tried tossing ammonia-soaked towels down to scare them off. Then paper bags filled with chopped onions and Tabasco sauce. In the end, it was the buckets full of boiling water and dried pepperoncini rossi that forced the skunks to relocate. I remember her opening the basement door, chucking the homemade repellent, then slamming the door again. For months, maybe years, I was afraid of the basement. Not so much scared the skunks would return, but scared of how upset Barbara got at the top of the stairs. Far more upset than she ever was with any of her boyfriends.
Why couldn’t she have protected me the way she protected the basement?
I descend one slow step at a time. “Mama,” I say again, louder.
There aren’t any spilled boxes, no beat-up step ladder, but Barbara is frantic. She weaves around the three steel support poles as if she might outpace her unwanted tears. The English language is inadequate, I think. There should be a unique word to describe your mother’s crying. A specific idiom used to represent the tears of a mother whom you do not completely trust or feel compassion for. Seeing Barbara cry is distinct from any crying I’ve witnessed at The Point.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. A rarely asked question in our household.
“Nothing,” she says. Also, rare. We aren’t exactly WASPs. We’re second-generation Italian Catholics, which means something is always wrong. Barbara quits pacing. She holds a steel pole for support. Her body jerks with palpitating sobs and wheezes. I know that kind of crying, that overloaded, circuit-breaker crying. She paddles the concrete floor with her feet. I recognize that foot movement. For me, it means I’m drifting away, that I need to plant back into the here and now.
“Sometime I spell … a word when I’m upset,” I quietly offer. “It helps calm me down. We could spell … grazie,” I suggest, impromptu. “G-R-A-Z-I-E.” I spell again in the Italian alphabet, embellishing the accent, in fun. “Gi. Erre. A. Zeta …” Barbara doesn’t spell along with me, but she seems to be taking a deep breath in time with each letter.
“I always dreamt we would be friends,” she blurts. “That you’d get over being so fucking angry, and we’d finally be friends.”
A hundred responses, which range from “I love you” to “I wish I was raised by wolves,” parade through my thoughts. I wish I had an angel-sanctioned task to assign us. How much easier would that be?
I say, “I suppose you did better than me. I didn’t even have the dream.”
If this were a movie, an emphatically hopeful orchestral music score would play now. The camera would catch an over-the-shoulder shot of me going in for a hug, then pan out. Fade.
This isn’t a movie. I am the queen of a haunted campground and trailer park and I’m moving in with my lesbian girlfriend. A ragtag group of people I’ve only known for a few months are my closest family. My mother and I cannot settle sweet fuck-all between us. I am twenty-three years old and not a total dipstick.
From my mother’s house I take one thing and leave one thing behind.
Taken: Mr Winky, the eyeless teddy bear. Technically, he’s mine anyway.
Left behind: My copy of The Golden Cell by Sharon Olds, bookmarked with a sheet of mauve letter writing paper at the poem titled, “After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood.” Becky McPhee was good to remind me of this book. May poetry be a catalyst for more. It was not easy to write “We still have time for that friendship” on the mauve paper.
But I did.