The blue pill has worn off by the time I’m walking home along Eighty-Sixth Street, back in the realm of the hissing, the eyes on my kilt, the hooks my fingers could make, should I need them to. And the fear, the inner shakes, return when I open the door to the apartment and hear the clacking of her heels on hardwood. Louder, closer.
“I couldn’t find it,” she says, her voice low and unsettlingly calm.
The cabinet doors in my bedroom are open and there are sweaters strewn on the floor.
“The blue Banana Republic sweater,” she says. “Where is it?”
Hands on hips, she presses her lips tightly together, holding back something alive inside her mouth. She knows where it is, even if I’m not 100 percent certain. I want to believe it’s at the bottom of my closet, in a trunk in my sister’s room, in the laundry basket, even in a ball in a backpack that went to Bianca’s and returned without ever being removed.
“You call her up right now and tell her to bring that sweater back,” she says. “And God help you if she doesn’t have it.”
She leaves the room and slams the door, and then returns to leave it ajar. In the kitchen, she opens cabinets and slams them closed, muttering bullshit and thwacking the tile with her feet. I rummage through the closet, toss shirts out of the armoire, take armfuls of wool from the trunk and dump them on my bed.
Please, God, let that sweater be here. Let me find that sweater and dangle it in front of her face so she can apologize that she ever doubted me, that she ever saw me as spoiled and reckless. Let her be wrong about me, even if I did give it to Bianca because it was ugly and not my style; it was her style and I’m not her and she can’t fix me. There’s no punishment in the world, no doctor who will ever hammer away what is mine. Hideously mine.
I could smash things, start a fire, go out the window.
But she is back in the doorway, surveying the explosion of fabric.
“Does she have it?” She’s had time to think a little more about how much she buys me and how I treat these things. How I treat her.
“I’m not calling her.”
“Excuse me?”
Our faces are now inches apart. One a product of the other. I’m afraid she’s going to hit me. Then I want her to.
“Fuck you,” I say, because it is the worst thing you can say to your mother, and because I’m daring her. Because when I ran away as a child, she hit me, and when I tried to hit her back, she held down my arms, and because I’m bigger now, my cavity of rage is endless, my pain threshold has been tested by knives, my muscles are shaped from swinging a racket hard enough to crack a girl’s face, and I feel nothing.
She slaps me across the cheek. It is a good burning. I’m hot now and ready to go.
“You want to hit me again? Go ahead. Hit me again.”
“Don’t make me.”
I throw my arms on her shoulders and burrow my fingernails into her skin. Her eyes dart up my forehead to my hair, the wild bun uncoiling from a rubber band’s stranglehold. She yanks at it, that familiar tangle I imagine she hates. It burns for a second, a good burning. I press down harder on her shoulders.
I want to corkscrew her into the blue-knit carpeting, into the floor beneath ours, and when she is low enough, finish her off with a stamp of my foot to her head so she drops into the neighbor’s bedroom, mortified. Missus Weiss. She is Missus Weiss to the contractors, to the doormen, to the cleaning lady, to my friends, to whoever is at the other end of the line as she paces the kitchen tiles in her boot heels roped by a phone cord. But not to me. I see her clenched teeth, the slight overlap of the bottom row. I see her fingernails opaque with the glue where her tips fell off. I smell her parched animal mouth. She tries to muscle my arms off her by forcefully twisting her shoulders, but I won’t let go.
“You little—” she shouts, her voice doubling, as if someone else inside her had studio-recorded the words first in order to thicken the sound of her voice now.
We twist in a circle, spinning into the bathroom, pulling down the shower curtain with the force of our bodies, all hands reaching for and missing an anchor. We will ache later, but there will be no marks left behind, only the overheated flush of a steady workout.
I have pinned her to the mirrored wall. Look who’s little now. I am as tall as she is. Stronger than either of us anticipated. One of my hands is holding down her arm, soft wonton skin wrapped around spunky little meat. My other hand is at her throat. Her skin is soft there, too. I squeeze a little, then a little more. I feel each cord in her neck, those delicate wires of a homemade bomb. Her eyes bulge at me. I feel electrified. In the unlit bathroom mirror, the shadow of one wild-haired creature looms over another. Is that me?
I have to tell my hands to drop, to let her go. Her eyes still bulge. My heart laps for air. I have the rapidly fading feeling I’ve just won something.