W‘here are you going?’ Mum asks. She’s got that angry clenched-jaw look again. She looks so small and fragile, like all that anger might just break her apart from the inside.
I shrug my shoulders and she hits me on the arm with the scrubbing brush from the kitchen sink. I keep walking and she follows after me. I pause for a moment, ‘I’m just going to take a walk around the park or something, just need to get out.’ Then I keep going towards the door again. She hits me on the back of the head with her scrubbing brush as I go. ‘Will you stop?’ Even in a rage Mum keeps her voice down now so it comes out sounding like an angry secret.
When I get to the front door I turn around and look at her standing there shaking the sink brush at me and I’m thinking that I don’t know what to do with my face really, whether I should smile and say something like, ‘Having a bad day?’ or if I should look sad, sorry.
I’m trapped there in front of the door and she stops saying anything. She’s just pulling at all the hairs in that sink brush until they fall out in her hands and drop to the floor in a white pile around her.
I was waiting for her to begin talking again but she doesn’t and I’m trying to get together the right words but I can’t. She always looks, these days, like she is about to begin saying something but she doesn’t so I wait for what she might tell me. I wait to begin.
I can never work out the right words these days so I just say the same thing again, ‘I’m just going out for a walk Mum,’ and she pulls at the hairs of that brush for a while longer just staring at me like she doesn’t recognise me or something.
Until she says slow and quiet, ‘Suspended from school for cutting class and you think you can go off again, do whatever you want. I just want a little respect, a little rule following.’
But the sour look on Mum’s face says this is not what she really wants. She wants me to not want to leave the house in the first place, to have not been suspended for cutting school. She wants things, lots of things beyond her control.
‘Rule following,’ she says again and then she is off around the apartment outlining all the things she wants. She shows that she wants me to put away my own laundry by dumping a basketful of clothes on the floor. Looking pleased with her efforts she pushes the photograph albums off the shelf in the living room and then gets to pulling pots and pans out of the kitchen cupboards and letting them crash on the tile floor.
I watch her throwing everything around until she stops midway through dropping all the kitchen towels from the drawer to the floor, raises her head and looks at me like I’ve overstayed my welcome and says, ‘Do whatever you want anyway,’ before walking to her bedroom and slamming the door twice behind her.
When she’s gone, I pick it all up carefully so that things don’t make a sound when I put them back into the drawers. Then I slip through the front door and walk straight into the outside.