I found myself standing in front of the mirror once more, trying to decide what to wear. I grabbed one of my only dresses and put it on. It was a plain black T-shirt dress that hung loose, to just above my knee. I turned sideways and sighed. My boobs were so big that the dress sort of hung off them like a massive tent. It made the dress shorter in the front than in the back.
“Wait!” I said as I realized my inner bully had kicked in without me even noticing. Vicki was right—I probably wasn’t aware of how many times a day I said that to myself.
“Lipstick!” I turned away from the mirror and reached into the makeup bag I seldom used. I rolled up the lipstick and spread it across my lips, careful not to go outside the lines, and then I dived back into my cupboard and grabbed a pair of red sneakers. I was a sneaker girl through and through; the idea of heels simply struck terror into my heart. Maybe for a thinner, more agile girl the idea of walking on spikes was okay, but to a girl like me, it wasn’t. I laced up my sneakers and then took one last look at myself.
Fine. I looked fine. “Fine,” I said out loud and then shot myself some half-assed thumbs-up. This was good . . . a little mist of water, or whatever.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I found my mother sitting on one of our couches, which had finally arrived from Joburg today. The room was so huge that the furniture drowned in it.
“Where are you going?” she asked. She looked like a small grain of sand in the vast room. Our house was cold and lifeless. White walls and hollow, empty rooms that echoed when we talked. I felt like I was looking into the eyes of a cold, dead fish. The kind you see lying on a bed of ice at the grocery store. White isn’t really a color, you know. It’s more a trick of light, or a trick our eyes play when it mixes all the wavelengths to see it. White is the absence of any specific color. It’s a nothing. An empty. Just like this house, and just like the woman sitting on that couch with the faraway eyes.
“Out,” I said dismissively.
“You’ve put on lipstick.” For some reason her comment made me feel self-conscious. I lifted my hand to my mouth and wondered if I should take the makeup off.
“What time will you be back?” She stood up and her heels clicked on the floor, echoing through the room.
“This house is too big. It echoes.”
She stopped walking and looked at me strangely for a moment. “One should really focus on the positives, not the negatives, Lori.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve been reading this book—”
OMG. I think I blacked out at this stage, or my ears just automatically closed. Whenever my mom started a sentence with “I’ve been reading a book,” or “I googled it,” I just knew some diatribe of strange information was about to come out, whether it was about thoughts manifesting physical things, or how waking up and meditating before the start of each day would make you a millionaire before the end of the year. I zoned out as her lips began moving at speed.
“. . . proven . . . scientific fact . . . negativity and negative words . . . water molecules . . . manifesting . . . actual electromagnetic energy . . . laws of attraction . . .”
Her lips flapped, her mouth opened and closed and she was talking at me as if she was a preprogrammed robot. I couldn’t remember the last time my mother and I’d had a real conversation. Her version of conversation was reciting to me whatever theory she was currently obsessed with. Last month it was some crystal that could remove negativity from the air and attract “wealth abundance,” whatever that meant.
“Okay, okay, I have to go.” I started to turn away from her, cutting the lecture short.
“I have to have a house like this!” she suddenly yelled. It was so abrupt and jarring that I swung around in shock. Her voice echoed around the room, and the walls repeated her words back to me twice before it was silent again.
“If I am Barbara Palmer of Palm Luxury Realty, I need to project the image of luxury at all times. I have a reputation to uphold. I have to remain true to my personal brand. Have you seen my new ad?” On closer inspection, her eyes looked red around the rims, as if she’d been crying.
“Yes,” I said flatly.
“And what is more luxurious, what says and lives and breathes luxury more than this house?” Then she turned around and walked in a small circle. She seemed very agitated tonight. More so than usual.
“Besides, have you seen what your father just bought?” She said this part almost under her breath, as if I was almost not meant to hear it. But I had. My mother swears blind that she doesn’t badmouth my dad, but she does. Not that I blame her, I guess. “That penthouse at their new development.” She lowered herself onto the couch again. “I wonder if they’ll be getting married there too. Might as well, since it started there.”
“What?” I moved closer to her.
“What?” she replied glibly.
“You just said that they might as well get married there?”
“Oh, didn’t he tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“That he and that woman are getting married.” In all the time my father had been with Maddy, my mom had never called her by her name. My brother and I used to go there every second weekend and Maddy tried so hard with us, but it always felt awkward. But Zac adored my dad; I had too. More than adored him. I’d idolized him and put him on such a pedestal that when he’d fallen off it, the ground beneath my feet had shaken. In many ways, it was still shaking, and my feet had never really found solid ground since.
“Not that I care, of course,” she said. “Why the hell would I care? You know I have a fifty-million-rand listing in Bishopscourt. That YouTube ad is paying off. It’s been viewed over a hundred thousand times, I’m basically viral. I’m a . . . what do you call it?” She looked at me and clicked her fingers. “You know what I mean, a social . . . what do they call it . . . influencer. I’m a social influencer.”
“Wait . . . ” I shook my head, trying to process this information. I was still stuck on the news that my father was engaged and hadn’t told me. “They’re getting married. When did this happen? When did he tell you?”
“Do you know what the commission on fifty million is?” She completely ignored my question.
My stomach constricted. I wanted to yell at her. I wanted to yell that she needed to snap back to reality. She’d been so far gone for so long, she needed to come back down to earth and reenter the atmosphere. I wondered if the woman that I used to know as my mother was even in there anymore. In that body that was starting to look so strange. Those lips and tight forehead and wide eyes that were starting to remind me more of a Picasso than an actual person.
I took a deep breath. “I’m going out,” I said slowly and calmly.
“Does Zac know?”
“He’s listening to music. I didn’t tell him.”
“You know how he can get when you don’t tell him things like that.”
I put my hand on my hip. “Why don’t you tell him this time,” I spat sarcastically.
“Lori Pa—”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s my name.” I cut her off abruptly; I hoped my angry tone hid what I was really feeling inside right now. Pain. We stared at each other for a minute, eyes locked, and I wished so much that she would open her mouth and actually talk to me for once. Like a real person. Like a mom. That she would say something of actual value. Something that mattered and meant something. But she didn’t.
“You have to melt Zac tonight, remember,” I said, breaking the tense silence. She looked at me blankly and I sighed. “On the Pilates ball. You have to roll him around, like the occupational therapist explained. It calms him before bed.”
Why did I remember these things and my mother didn’t?
“Sure, sure.” She flapped her hand in the air flippantly. “I know that.”
“He only likes to be melted on the blue ball, not the gray one.”
“I thought the blue one popped?” she asked.
“I ordered another one from Takealot.”
“Oh right! That’s right. I know that,” she said, sounding very far away again, and I wondered where she’d just gone. Maybe she went back to the same place inside herself over and over again. Maybe it was Dad and Maddy in the hot tub, like it was with me in the pool. Maybe that was the place she returned to? I looked at her, really looked at her. She seemed shorter tonight somehow, even though she was wearing heels, and I couldn’t help but feel just a little bit sorry for her.
“What? Do I have something on my face?” She reached up and touched her cheeks.
“No, Mom, you don’t.”
“Good. Good. I have a Zoom call with a potential client now. Investment banker. Totally loaded. Looking for a holiday home.” She fluffed her hair up and smiled at me. That Cheshire smile was back and so was Barbara Palmer and with it, my sympathy was gone again.
I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say to her. So I didn’t say anything. I walked out the door and closed it behind me.
As soon as I was alone in the car, I pulled my phone out and went to WhatsApp. I clicked on my dad’s profile and read the messages he’d sent me.
DAD: Please call me
DAD: Hey, I would really like to talk to you. I have something important to tell you
My heart sank. I went to Maddy’s Instagram profile and I couldn’t hold back the tears when I read her latest status update, complete with the photo of the glittery ring on her finger. I dropped my phone onto the passenger seat and drove without looking back at it.