After striking out at the restaurant, I tried calling Roach on her cell, but it went directly to voicemail. Her parents probably had the family out doing volunteer work or helping out at their church. They were super strict about Roach keeping her cell off during any such goodness. A stint of retail therapy at the mall was not in the cards.
I didn’t want to go back to Monty’s and so my early morning wanderings lead me to the hospital to visit my mom.
Oh joy, I’d arrived just in time for art therapy. Long tables now took up most of the floor space, everyone seated and working diligently over masses of brown clay. I slipped further into the room, lingering by the window-lined wall and was greeted by a girl, about my age, with super long black hair and a wicked attitude.
“Get a gun and shoot me,” she said, standing in the aisle between tables, blocking my path. “Do it. I know you want to, and I can’t take anymore of your yoga, or your feng-fucking-shui. Let me tell you something for once, I never, NEVER EVER want to hear the words Say Not to Pot again!” She fired the blob of clay she’d been holding. It whizzed over my shoulder and thwacked into a window, clinging to the glass for dear life. “If you can’t show me how to voodoo this stupid shit so I can make a guy gnaws his own balls off, this session is useless.” She sat and returned to molding the clay as if nothing happened.
After witnessing her less than comforting freak out, I shifted closer to exit, thinking I’d make a hasty retreat and head back to Monty’s. But a clean getaway wasn’t my fate. A blotchy-faced instructor named Max, according to his hospital ID tag, strode toward me.
“You must be Charlie. So glad you could visit your mom today, you look just like Sara.”
The women in our family, from Grandma on down, did have similar features, coppery-blonde hair, attractive enough faces, and slim builds - I couldn’t question that, but on the day I was in to visit my mom in rehab…I didn’t need the reminder that maybe we shared more than looks. Like an addictive personality.
“She’s just over here,” Max guided me deeper into the room. “Want a slab to work with?” He shoved a cool clay brick into my hands. “Art can change your life, make you rethink your place on this planet, open your mind to new ideas.”
“Right…” I drawled and trailed after him, the clay warming under my fingers.
“I’m serious,” he said, shooting me a grin, “serious as an art attack.” Poor Max was selling sobriety, and despite the fireworks coming out of his ass, he was working a hostile crowd. I was mentally cringing at the cheese that oozed from his pores. Still, there was something about his patiently open expression, like he knew how he came across to people and laid it on super thick for his own enjoyment.
“There’s nothing like pounding this stuff into submission, right, Morgan?” he called out to the black-haired girl now shaping the window clay into a crooked penis connected to a suspiciously flat-as-a-pancake scrotum.
“Fuck you.”
Max chuckled again, unfazed by Morgan’s blunt response. “You mom’s just a few tables over.” He pointed in the direction I should take and left me standing in the middle of creative chaos. I paused for a bit, watching him glide around, cheering on the would-be-sculptors. You had to hand it to him – pretty tough to keep an if-you’re-happy-if-you-know-it face in this crowd.
I apologized my way through the tables and chairs until I found mom in a far corner. She looked small here, insignificant, a regular wallflower – the opposite of the woman I’d grown up adoring, the problem solver. The let’s get it done already mover and shaker, always calm in the face of a storm while the rest of us would only stand there, gaping at the incoming twister. Hopefully I’d see that woman again someday soon.
She molded a dark lump on the table, her hands moving stiffly over the clay. The goal? A serving plate, at least I guessed that was what she was trying to make - she kept referring to a picture taped onto the tabletop. But Mom’s embryonic creation looked more wobbly-soup-bowl than Martha Stewart platter-esque.
“Heya, Mom.” I pulled out a chair, the metal legs scraped along the tile floor. Mom glanced over at the sound, spotted me, and then focused on her project once more. Okay, last visit she wouldn’t stop babbling and laughing at nothing and now – she was mute.
I sat down across from her.
Thanks to the warmth of my fingers my clay had already become more malleable. I went to let it go, but it stuck to my skin. I shook my arm and the brick dropped onto the tabletop with a dull thud. The silence was killing me. I would have taken a trilling momma over this sad, silent one. So I began to blurt.
“See that girl over there? The one with making the world’s worst dildo?” I gestured to the penis and its creator. “She’s got serious issues.”
Mom didn’t respond. Her thumbs dug deep into the clay, forming a groove around the rim of the plate.
“Did you see what she did? Almost beheaded me with that twisted noodle.” Apparently even sex references wouldn’t net a token snicker.
Since mom wasn’t holding up her end of the conversation, and I was safely ensconced in a corner, I felt free to scan the room. On the surface, these were just regular people. Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons. You wouldn’t give them a second look if you passed them on the street. But they were real drug addicts, jonesing away. I didn’t see what my mother had in common with them. Mom wasn’t like that. She just needed some space, some down time.
I caught Max watching us from a few tables away - his eyebrows crept up into his receding hairline and he pointedly glanced at mom. I gave him a glowing smile so he’d think everything was cool.
And it was. Icy.
I talked through the chill. “That’s the second time today someone’s tried to bump me off with a good head whacking.” I laughed. Alone. This wasn’t going well. “Owen’s got a gang, did you know? He and his loser friends ambush innocent bystanders down on Main Street. Their weapon of choice? Ice balls. What are kids coming to these days, I ask you? And he’s one of the churchy folk.”
Mom ducked her head sharply, looking in panic at her clay-covered hands. “Oh God, no. A nose itch.” She rubbed her nose on her inner arm. The rub loosened her rolled-up sleeve and the cuff slipped, trailing into clay.
“Shit.” She tried pulling the material back into place with her teeth.
“Here, let me.” I took over, tucked and rolled, until the sleeve showed no immediate signs of coming loose.
“Thanks.” Mom slipped back into the pottery zone, once again tuning me out. She dipped her red-stained fingers into a water bowl and dampened the platter to keep it malleable.
We fell quiet again. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered to show. She obviously didn’t want me there, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Not yet. I drew in a deep breath. Might as well do something then. I grabbed my hunk of discarded clay and worked it into a snake, focusing on the middle. The ends grew with my efforts. Thinner and thinner I rubbed out the clay until it disintegrated under my hands and I’d halved the snake. Mom leaned over and grasped one of the chords I’d made, rolled it further down to a delicate string’s thickness and laid it around the lip of her platter in a wavy design.
“Pretty,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mom agreed. “But not really functional.”
And just like that she turned into the mom I hate, the out of control, scary mom who might just do anything.
She shifted on her feet, shaking chunks of clay off her fingers. “How many do-overs does it take to make a fucking plate?” Her voice was loud. A few people looked over at us. “Ten. Ten. I can’t leave it alone. I almost get there and then it looks so shitty, like some amateur hack piece of shit plate and I kill it and start over. Why don’t I leave it alone? Who cares if it’s not perfect?”
“Shh…it’s okay.” I kept my head down, and my voice low hoping we hadn’t attracted too much attention. “Nothing’s perfect Mom.” I thought of dad and his hoochie momma, twisted around a road sign, while we waited at home, dinner cold on the table. “You of all people should know that.”
Mom either deliberately ignored me or was obsessing too much to hear anything but her own internal critic. She rambled on, and as she did, I noticed she’d chewed off the flesh around her nails. Dry blood, but the skin was red and raw.
“How’s it going here, ladies?” Max’s cheerful voice cut into my thoughts. He shouldered in between mom and me. “Oh, this is looking good, Sara,” he said, gently lifting mom’s creation, holding it aloft like a priceless relic.
“Do you think so?” Mom asked, making praying hands, like a little girl asking for a trip to the fair.
“I sure do,” Max gushed. “And the detailing you’ve added around the edge.” He gave her a benevolent smile. “Very creative.”
“I don’t know where that idea came from,” Mom said, animated by his praise. “One minute I was making a string with the clay and the next I was swirling it around like that.”
“This is what I’m talking about. Come on, let’s show the others.” Max led Mom around from table to table. Much oohing and awing ensued. It felt good to see Mom smiling, but crazy strange to see her so needy.
I stood alone at the table, forgotten.
“It was supposed to be a snake,” I said.
No one heard me.