At first, Kali thought she couldn’t track when the change happened. She felt it had been like a slow fade from one way of being into another. She went from the dragon-like power of maternal ferocity to the walled off numbness of yearning to get out, get away, to not have the relentless responsibility and grief. But then she realized that there was, in fact, a specific day when the change started, when it distinctly occurred. It was a Monday morning and Kali was getting Marko ready for school. He was in his second month or so of McKinley and he was exhausted from all the mental activity and effort. His days were long, between the lengthy commute, the day of school, and the after-school program Kali enrolled him in. He got on the bus at 7 a.m. and she picked him up from the bus at 6 p.m.
He was grumpy and glowering that morning, refusing to eat almond butter ever again. Kali had been packing toasted AB and J’s in his lunches for as long as he’d been going to school. Organic, sprouted-grain bread, raw almond butter, and fresh apple preserves. She felt the need to feed him only organic, preferably raw and whole, clean foods. There was so little of his health she could improve or control, and it was the one domain in which she could make choices that mattered, regardless of the expense.
“I hate that shitty almond butter. It tastes like nothing,” he said. Kali’s sigh was involuntary and poorly timed, overlapping with the tail end of his complaint, accompanied by a flippant gesture of plopping the freshly bagged sandwich on the counter dejectedly. Marko wheeled forward, crashed the chair against the bottom cupboards, reached up on the counter to grab the sandwich, and threw it against the wall. Then he glared at Kali. It wasn’t the first tantrum he’d had, and she knew it wouldn’t be the last. He was ravaged by hormones, overfilled with emotions, over-stimulated mentally, challenged maybe too much, severely limited in strength and physical ability, incontinent. And now he was starting to deal with sexual desire, which threatened him and which he didn’t understand or know how to navigate. It was very understandable that he would behave that way. Still, looking at the wasted sandwich on the floor, the smear of organic raw almond butter on the wall, Kali felt contempt. One jar of that almond butter cost her $16.99. She had to work two hours at her job to make the money for one jar.
And then she felt worse than contempt: cold nothingness. Numb. The kind of numb, she thought, that prisoners must feel when they know they’ll never see the outside of their prison again for the rest of their lives. There was a time when Kali thought that Zach was her prison, and if she could find her way free of him, somehow get out of that marriage, she would be emancipated. But that was not the case. When Zach lived with them, he ate the expensive organic strawberries that Kali bought for Marko. Kali thought that was bad—and it was. They didn’t have any money. They couldn’t afford those berries and they were for Marko. They were for his son whose body was ravaged with dis-ease. Dis-ability. They were not for Zach’s strong, able body to consume like it consumed everything else. But in that moment, in the kitchen before school, Kali would have rather watched Zach eat the sandwich worth its weight in gold than see Marko not only refuse it but also throw it across the room, against the wall, on the floor.
Kali said nothing. Marko glared at her and she glared back. He must have seen it in her eyes: the coldness, the numbness. He must have registered it as rejection, as not being wanted, because he burst into sobs. He went from stone-hard anger to wet, hot anguish in one split second. He covered his face with his hands for the first minute or so, then, having received no response, reached his arms up to Kali. His red face and pleading eyes did not move her, and she did not do what she knew any half-decent mother should and would do in that situation. Instead of melting the ice around her heart, Marko’s display reinforced the sense of her imprisonment. It was the closing and locking of her cell door, the securing of shackles and chains around her ankles, the hardness of the steel bars. Her responsibilities as his mother were the terms of her sentence and there was no escaping that. No parole board. No chance of getting out early for good behavior.
Kali retrieved the sandwich from the floor and pieced it back together inside the baggie, then placed it gently into his lunch box. He wailed even louder. She walked past him, out of the kitchen, and into the bathroom, where she closed and locked the door. She turned on the faucet full blast to mute the sound of his wailing and then stepped into the dry coolness of the empty bathtub. She squatted down there, pulled her knees up to her chest, hugged them, lowered her head, and rocked gently side to side. Kali started chanting, under her breath at first, then louder as the sounds of Marko’s agony persisted to assault her ears through the rooms of the apartment, through the closed door, over the rushing water in the faucet. She plugged her ears with her fingers and chanted louder:
“ADI SHAKTI, ADI SHAKTI, ADI SHAKTI, NAMO NAMO,
SARAB SHAKTI, SARAB SHAKTI, SARAB SHAKTI, NAMO NAMO,
PRITHUM BHAGVATI, PRITHUM BHAGVATI, PRITHUM BHAGVATI, NAMO NAMO,
KUNDALINI, MATA SHAKTI, MATA SHAKTI, NAMO, NAMO . . .”
Rhythmically, Kali repeated the chant for five minutes. Then, she removed her fingers from her ears and closed her voice. She stood up from the tub, stepped out, and turned off the faucet.
Silence.
She opened the bathroom door and stepped out. From the short passageway outside the bathroom that connected their two bedrooms and the rest of the apartment, Kali saw Marko in the living room with his back to her. She approached him. He was sitting quietly, waiting. His lunchbox was in his lap and his coat was on. He was ready to go to school. Without speaking or looking him in the face, Kali retrieved her jacket from the coat closet, her keys from the kitchen counter, and pushed his chair out to the car.
She looked at his face when she leaned to lift him from his chair. His eyes were unfocused and cast down, his expression unreadable, strangely adult. He looked more like Zach than ever before.