When I step outside to pick up a package on the front porch I think of what I must look like to the people who live on my mother’s street. My face is faded. My pink sweatpants are stained with cereal bits and coffee spills. I seldom wear a bra. I think about what would happen if Claude saw me like this. We would both be ashamed. I want him to be here but at the same time I do not. I don’t know what we would do. I don’t go on walks here like I did with my father in California. Iola is small and the houses are close together. It’s not like Santa Barbara with the boutiques and gardens and eucalyptus trees. No one walks anywhere unless they have a destination.
The floor in my mother’s house is waxed oak. It is filled with heavy dark furniture that once belonged to my grandparents, and my mattress rests in a giant, carved maple frame. My arms and legs are shrinking from lack of use. They are all bruised, and the bruises look like fingerprints. My hip bones are purple from doorways and corners.
While my mother is at work, I sit in the computer room upstairs. There is only a small desk, walls of books, and a roller chair that gets stuck in the carpet. For the first time, I do a Google search of “cavernous angioma.” What comes up scares me. On message boards, mothers write sad posts about children who have died from what I have, or who have severe brain damage from the craniotomy it takes to remove it. The Angioma Alliance puts on conferences all over the country. I imagine my family attending one, seeing hundreds of people who look just as dreary and wadded up as we do.
At my mother’s I watch a lot of TV. The O.C. and Laguna Beach. Anything about wealthy teenagers in California with boyfriend problems. My mother thinks I’m torturing myself, but watching beautiful people with petty problems helps me feel superior, somehow.
I find a stack of photo albums in the computer room and cannot resist looking through them. I hardly recognize that girl with a beer in her hand wearing a peacoat on a snowy balcony, or that one, dancing in a bright blue dress with a boy whose hands clutch her satin behind. So many pictures of me in Italy standing alone in front of some statue, some church, some ruins, grinning at nothing.
I had grown up in the typical way and had typical photos to prove it, but they were not promises for a typical life.