Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

  Violet was still occasionally starstruck in the presence of her exotic and blasé friends. Imogene’s rainbow-dyed hair resembled a Neapolitan cookie. Finch had heavy blond bangs hanging over his horn-rimmed glasses. Jasper was wearing a coonskin cap and a T-shirt that bore a quote by the street artist Banksy: A lot of parents will do anything for their kids except let them be themselves. How they hadn’t realized they were too cool for Violet was beyond her.

  A full hour had gone by with no effect. Finch sat in front of his MacBook, watching a bunch of short, surrealist films by the Czech artist Jan Švankmajer.

  “Fuck botany,” Jasper said. “Those seeds are worthless.”

  “Maybe we should have fasted before we ate them,” Finch said, and Violet had felt a little trill of excitement. She had been fasting, in secret, for reasons she hadn’t shared with her friends.

  Something happened while Violet was racking her brain for the answer to 40-across (“motherless calf”), and the boys giggled over Švankmajer’s Meat Love. On-screen, two slabs of beef grunted and thrust against each other on a floured cutting board.

  “Ha!” Finch cried. “He de-floured her!”

  Jasper laughed. “Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase slapping your meat.”

  The sight of all that rare, glistening steak sent a prickling sensation spreading up Violet’s legs. Her empty stomach spasmed. She stood up to go to the bathroom and felt the room jump very close to her, almost as though she had taken five steps forward instead of just one. When she stepped backward, the same effect happened in reverse.

  “Are you okay?” Finch asked.

  “Hurst looks like she just hit a wall of fucked-up-ness,” Jasper said.

  “I’ll go with you,” Imogene told her. “I’m not feeling pitch-perfect either.”

  Violet felt like she was spinning along a slanted axis. In the bathroom, she lifted the toilet lid to puke and saw a steak, blue-rare and bloody, in the bowl. Hot on the heels of that hallucination came an auditory one. She heard shrieking laughter. Then, her mother’s voice whisper-hot in her ear: It’s the food chain, Viola. Shut up and eat it.

  Now she crept across the hospital linoleum (frigid) to the bathroom (unlockable). Inside, she was greeted by a twelve-inch shatterproof mirror. The image reflected back at her was far more Martian than girl. Voluntary starvation had yellowed her skin. Her pupils—although not the full lunar eclipses that they’d been earlier at Imogene’s house—hadn’t shrunk back down to normal, nonwasted size. She ran her palm, neck to widow’s peak, over the hedgehog bristle of her scruffy head. Even in her tolerant locale—the Hursts lived only seventeen miles from Woodstock—Violet’s peers regarded her hair and diet as a little extreme.

  There had been a couple of love interests back in freshman year, when Violet had sported a loose ponytail (not just stubble). Troy Barnes had given her a Vicks VapoRub massage the first time she took Ecstasy. Finch had kissed her in the Rosendale caves and sent her hilarious text messages for weeks after, things like, You have soiled my soul. I feel swollen and ashamed. But after Violet shaved her head, lesbian rumors swirled and those two backed off, along with the rest of the male species. Finch just wanted to be friends. Troy called her cue ball, when he called her at all. For all the social troubles that zealotry had caused Violet, she couldn’t seem to give up fasting, meditating, or reading books with lotus blossoms or cumulus clouds on the covers. After Rose ran away, Violet had needed something to disappear into too. Religion seemed as good an escape route as any, plus it was conveniently compatible with psychedelics.

  After her sister left, Violet discovered that she could no longer pray to their mother’s god—the divine bully Josephine had called upon to justify her actions, especially the way she had treated Rose.

  Violet had always sensed that Josephine wasn’t like other mothers, but in the past year, she’d finally been able to put her finger on the weird behaviors that made her different. Once Rose was gone, Josephine snatched Will and Violet from their places at the back of the family shelf. That was when Violet realized just how much Josephine had seen Rose as her favorite doll: someone to dress up, show off, and manipulate. Violet had always been more resistant to that kind of one-sided play: Violet wore what she wanted, tried to say what she felt, and mostly recognized the differences between herself and the stifling, spoiled woman she called Mom.

  Even though Violet could sympathize with Rose now, that was one of the main reasons they didn’t get along as sisters: Rose could grin and bear Josephine’s demeaning comments, and Violet couldn’t. Rose kept censoring what she did and said even when Josephine wasn’t around, and Violet swung the other way; Violet developed an almost pathological need to point out whatever the rest of the Hursts wanted to sweep under the rug and parade it around like a skull on a stick.

  Unfortunately—as Violet quickly found out—being your own person only increased Josephine’s claim on you. Josephine took credit for your good traits with her cream-of-the-crop genes. Your school or social successes were proof of her careful child-rearing. And if you veered the other way—if you became a freak and a flunky, like Violet, if you self-sabotaged so Josephine couldn’t use your achievements to build herself up—well then, the matriarch turned hate-riarch and pawned off her own evil qualities on you. She’d say you manipulated people (which she did). She’d say you were vengeful (which she, above all people, was). The game worked because the more Josephine played the victim, the more a person wanted to victimize her. The more she told you you were angry, the more pissed off it made you.

  Hazy as Violet still was on the details, she knew her outburst in the kitchen had been a last-ditch effort to tell the truth about her mom to Douglas and Will. She’d never once considered that they might hear her out and still opt to believe that Josephine was just some benign mom, packing lunches and kissing boo-boos. Of course, Violet’s delivery might have also played a part. Tripping, she was no stellar speechmaker. Her main points might well have been howls and expletives.

  Violet pictured Josephine at home, cracking a bottle of victory champagne. So she’d driven Violet to attack her own brother, proving at long last that she was invincible and Violet had terminal piece-of-shit-itis. All hail Josephine. Josephine had won.

  WILLIAM HURST

  TEA AT THE White House was drawing to a close. It was time for Will’s grand finale. He told Josephine that on April fourteenth, he’d gone to see a play called Our American Cousin.

  “During intermission, my bodyguard left the playhouse to get trashed with my driver,” Will said.

  “How do you know that word?”

  “What word? Trashed? I don’t know. Violet says it. It means you’ve drunk so much alcohol that you spin without moving.”

  When Josephine didn’t approve of something, her eyes went as slitted as Will’s old plastic dinosaur toys.

  “Anyways, while my driver was drinking alcohol, an actor-slash-spy shot me in the back of the head. Right here.”

  Will staggered to the floor. All tea parties at the White House ended this way: with Will gasping, moaning in unimaginable pain, clutching his wound, and letting his eyelids go fluttery. Like Rose before him, Will relished his acting skills. Usually he could make his mom laugh, no sweat. But this time, Josephine didn’t crack a smile or teasingly try to catch him breathing in the grave. No matter how much she claimed she wanted to return to their routine, last night hadn’t loosened its hold on her. She might have cleaned up the splattered risotto and mopped the blood off the floors, but the kitchen still had an air of something not quite right.

  Will opened his trying-hard-not-to-quiver-because-he-was-dead eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did I do a bad job?”

  “You were fine,” Josephine said. “Although you might have placed more emphasis on repealing slavery and the Gettysburg Address. Tea at the White House is a school lesson, remember? It’s not an acting exercise. We don’t just do this for the drama of it all.”

  Will was crushed. He let hi
s beard fall to his chest like a hairy necklace. “Sorry, Mom. Maybe I shouldn’t die next time?”

  “It’s all right if you die.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “William, I don’t have the energy for this today. You can die, okay? It’s fine by me. Maybe just don’t make such a big to-do about it.”

  His mom’s gaze drifted to the window. Outside, the mailman idled in his doorless truck. He had a third-trimester-sized belly and wore shorts, regardless of season or weather. Will noticed he always left the mailbox ajar.

  “People on the Internet say Abe Lincoln used marijuana.”

  “Marijuana?”

  “People said he was a homosexual too.”

  “Oh Will, don’t be ridiculous. I really don’t have the time for this today. If we don’t get in the car now we’ll be late for the hospital.”

  Ridiculous. A describing word, reserved for people and things you didn’t have to take seriously.

  What was wrong with Will? He thought about that question as he climbed into the backseat of his mother’s burnt-red sedan. Ultimately, he came back to his autism, the root of his wrongness. All the Asperger’s books his mother left lying around the house said that people like Will lacked empathy. But Will didn’t think that was his problem per se. If anything, he picked up too many signals from other people. So much like a crowded radio spectrum, he was, that it was hard to get a clear reading on any one person (including himself). Every human interaction was static-ridden. Each conversation crackled.

  In the rearview mirror, Will glanced at Josephine’s profile. He studied her hooked lashes and the perfect brushstroke of her nose. It was probably hard for her, faking a distant and controlled expression for the sake of Will’s comfort, but he saw her white knuckles on the steering wheel.

  She sighed as she reversed past the mailbox. “So he did leave it open again. Will, will you jump out and grab the mail for me?”

  The stack of mail in hand, Will noticed a seal on the back of an envelope for Violet that caught his attention. There was a musical symbol—a treble clef, he knew from his mother’s piano instruction—pressed into the dark pink wax. There was little else on the envelope, except for Violet’s name, the Hursts’ address at Old Stone Way, and a nameless New York address in the upper left-hand corner: 130 Seventh Avenue, #123.

  When she slowed for the tollbooth at the Poughkeepsie bridge, Will glanced at the passenger seat, where the mail stuck out of his mother’s boxy ostrich-skin purse. It suddenly became clear to Will why the envelope looked so familiar: Missing could be either an adjective or a verb. And the New Yorker Violet knew was his lost sister, Rose, who used to put a wax kiss on everything.

  VIOLET HURST

  THE NEXT MORNING, when the head nurse (even this seemed like a double entendre) appeared in the doorway, Violet asked her a series of questions:

  “Is it possible to get a toothbrush? Am I allowed to use the phone? Have you heard anything from my family?”

  “Later,” the nurse said. “Right now, I need you to come with me. There are some officers here who’d like to speak with you.”

  Violet trailed her down the hallway to the visitors’ lounge, where two uniformed police officers were drinking black coffee.

  So this was the moment of truth. Violet imagined the sound of handcuffs clinking around her wrists.

  The two men stood as she approached. They looked like linebackers.

  It was hard for Violet to remember a time when she’d ever associated police with safety. Faced with a blue uniform, Josephine would fall all over herself, offering to buy policemen gasstation coffee and asking them how to organize a neighborhood watch. But Violet’s fear of authority ran deep. Even when she didn’t have red-wine lips or a one-hitter pipe in her pocket, the sight of a badge made her blood run cold.

  “I have Viola for you,” the nurse told the officers.

  Viola was her real name, after the wild yellow variety Viola pubescens. But she’d insisted on going by Violet since kindergarten. “I don’t know why you’d possibly want to be a shy little Violet,” Josephine said. “That’s as bad as being a common Rose.” This dig was directed at her sister, whose Christian name was Rosette.

  Violet held her pajama pants closed with one hand and tried not to look mental. She was so nervous she barely heard the cops’ introductions. Their names went in one ear and out the other without so much as a whistle, leaving her to think of them as one beast with two heads and two guns. They were Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, only armed.

  “I should begin by saying you’re not being charged with anything at this time,” Tweedle Dee said. “I understand you’re an unemancipated minor, is that right?”

  Violet must have given a zombie stare because the other cop translated. “You’re under eighteen?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And your parents are still your legal guardians?”

  “Yeah.”

  Officer Dee crossed his rib-roast arms. “You see, Viola, we’re here in response to a domestic violence complaint. Your brother arrived last night at Kingston Hospital with serious damage to his right hand. There were other minor injuries too. Injuries your mother said he sustained from you.”

  “I’ve never hurt Will!” Violet cringed at her own ugly adolescent whine. She took a jagged breath and tried with mixed success to mellow out her tone. “I didn’t try to stab anyone. I can’t remember everything, but I know that for sure. If it’s her word against mine—”

  “You’re talking about your mother?” asked Officer Dee.

  “Yes, my mother.” Secretly, Violet preferred the term womb-donor. Convinced as she was that her mom was lying, she still wasn’t sure if she could trust her own mind’s version of events. Most of what had happened in the kitchen felt like some strange half-reality. The drugs had fragmented things and forced them back together in ways that didn’t entirely fit. Violet’s memory had kaleidoscoped. Every time she tried to examine the details, the whole scene shattered. She wanted to say something about Rose, but every time she brought up her sister’s name it seemed to get her in more trouble. When she’d mentioned Rose back in the kitchen, her family had turned against her. When she’d mentioned Rose during her intake, she’d come off like someone grasping at straws.

  “Look,” said Officer Dum. He was the one with the rounder face, the softer eyes. “We weren’t there. We didn’t see whether this was an assault or what. We’ve given your mother a notice of her rights, and she’s trying to decide whether to press criminal charges. Your mom did say she was going to pursue a protective order unless you agree to admit yourself here.”

  “Like, a restraining order?” Again, Violet hated herself for sounding so young.

  Dum cast a look at the head nurse, who had been hovering in the corner like a Crocs-clad warden. “Your mother says you’re a threat to yourself and your family. It’s in everyone’s best interest if you stay here.”

  She gritted her teeth, but figured she’d rather be in the hospital than at home. And so, without knowing her clinical diagnosis, Violet Hurst voluntarily committed herself to a facility that treated serious mental disorders with the help of psychotropic meds.

  Back in the intake office, the counselor on duty read her the riot act: “You can go home if and when the doctors agree to discharge you. If you insist on being discharged, you can write a three-day letter asking for your release from the hospital. The hospital has three working days—Monday through Friday, weekends and holidays excluded—to give you a decision. We will either release you or we will file an affidavit and you will receive a court hearing. Do you understand all that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Sign here, please.”

  Her heart pounded. The pen felt too thick in her cold fingers. The name Violet scrawled on the line began with a headstrong V but soon after collapsed into a mousy grade-school script. Her last name, Hurst, looked like a blight on her first, which, by this point, it was.

  After she signed away wh
at precious little agency a sixteen-year-old girl has, Violet took her first shower in days. She had to sign out a showerhead at the front desk—a strange procedure, born of the fact that past patients liked to unscrew them and throw them at the staff. After drying off with a rough white towel and stepping into a fresh set of the standard-issue pajamas, she wandered into the dayroom. As she walked down the hallway, Violet felt her distended stomach flip. For the first time since intake, she felt like a detainee. She had no ID, no cell phone, no clothes, no escape. A terrifying thought cut through her façade of couldn’t-care-less. What if I never get released? Relieved as she was to get away from her mother, she wasn’t eager to spend her teens and twenties in lockup. What if they gave her drugs? The antipsychotic kind that left her slurry and diabetic, grimacing at walls?

  In the dayroom, two girls brawled for control of the channel button. They looked roughly the same age as Rose. One had a tumble of dyed red hair and thin, eyeliner-drawn brows. The other was tall and angular with eyes that were almost aggressively blue, piercing through the overgrown bangs of her Mick Jagger haircut. A fresh-looking scar, pink and terrifying, curved from her earlobe to her voice box. Violet couldn’t help thinking the girl had a sad majesty. She was scrappy-beautiful. A beam of sunlight picked up the rusty highlights in her otherwise clove-brown hair.

  After the nurse broke up the squabble, the screen was smeared with fingerprints. Violet grabbed a tissue from the box on top and gave it a quick buff.

  “Thanks,” the brunette said. “And sorry. I’m Edie. This is Corinna.”

  Corinna eyed Violet like a target, then aimed her sniper gaze back toward the TV.

  “Violet.”

  “Did you just get here?”

  Violet tensed and nodded. “Last night,” she said.

  “Was it pills?” Edie asked.

  It took Violet a few beats to catch her drift. By then the girl was already elaborating.