Drastic

by Maud Casey

  For now, I’m content to watch Lindy next to me holding her bandaged hand above her to keep it from getting wet, a flag of sorts to stake out our territory. We are any age looking up at the sky from the places we’ve made in the sand with our bodies digging deeper.

  DAYS AT HOME

  HONEY, darling, sweet pooch,” my mother calls from downstairs. “Sweet darling, honey, pooch.” Her voice does not waver as she bends down to pick some discarded thing up off the floor, spot-cleaning the house though she’s meeting her date at a restaurant. “Honey, sweetie, darling.” She’s forgotten why she’s saying these words, forgotten that she wants my attention. She is thinking of the evening ahead of her, whether to wear her hair up or down.

  “What?” I call down from my old bedroom strewn with objects I used to love.

  “I’m going out,” she says, as if to say this is how you do it. I can hear her looking at herself in the mirror in the front hall, smoothing an eyebrow with an energy she hasn’t had in years. She goes out almost every night after she gets home from her job as the administrator of the obstetrics division in a hospital. She meets men through the classifieds. I’ve learned these things since I came back home during a lull in my life, here at the age of thirty-one.

  “You can recoup,” she said when she invited me home upon hearing the news of my life, as if living without love or money were an illness. “Honey, sweetie, darling, pooch,” she said, her words like outstretched arms.

  I protested, though I knew what I had to do.

  Now I come downstairs in the sweatsuit that I put on and stay in after I get home from work as a temporary in a graphics-design firm downtown. “Where are you meeting him?” I ask.

  “Well-lighted, busy, don’t worry,” she says, putting on very red lipstick. Her powder clings to the soft hair on her cheeks. She has gotten her second wind of beauty ten years after my father died.

  I step out onto the front porch with her, into the night and a neighborhood filled with houses exactly like this one, only backward on the inside. Across the street, Raymond stands in his kitchen window, pausing as he does the dishes to watch us standing on our porch.

  “I’ll call if it’s late,” my mother says, heading for her car. Her slips shows a little, but these days it’s charming.

  I wish sometimes that I were the one saying those words, that she were the one a little desperate for my attention. These days I am an actor trying to play a real person; I get all the lines confused.

  In the living room, I settle in for the night with a glass of wine and near-stale potato chips I find forgotten in the back of the kitchen pantry by the briquettes. This is how it’s been for weeks now. I don’t need the TV Guide anymore to tell me what’s on each night. Most nights I lose myself in the endless loop of half-hour shows. Lately I’m trying to limit myself to the shows I really like, the ones I think I can learn something from: a girl who comes to realize that her brother is envious rather than just plain mean, a father who learns that his goals for his daughter may be different from his daughter’s goals. My goal is to watch only the ones that I can apply to my life, though I haven’t figured out yet which ones those are.

  On the coffee table there’s an old photo album that my mother brought down from where it was folded into towels in the linen closet by the bathroom. She brought it down so that I could look at pictures of myself as a baby, pictures of me learning to walk, climbing up on the toilet, mouthing baby food from a spoon. I suspect that she wanted to show me these pictures because they are evidence that I have accomplished something and that, quite possibly, I will accomplish something again. What interests me, however, are the pictures of my mother. She is slimmer and wears sleeveless dresses that end above her knees. In one picture, five years younger than I am now, she looks coyly out from behind her wedding veil while her mother stands in the background feigning irritation. The picture that I always return to is the picture of my mother at age thirty-three in a dashing, jaunty hat. She sits on a park bench with pigeons at her feet. Her head is turned, and the profile of the long slope of her nose, like a gentle root erupting, is the center of the picture. She looks so sure of herself that it makes me wonder how she got that way.

  When I lived at home before, my mother wore a clouded face full of apology—sorry dinner is late, sorry your father is dying, sorry for always being sorry. Now she is dashing once again like the picture, dropping her keys on the way to the car, wiggling her hips playfully as she bends to pick them up. In that picture, I am an idea that she will have a year later.

  I hear a rustling on the front porch, the sound of scratchy polyester pant leg against scratchy polyester pant leg, and there is Raymond from across the street—timid, as if he weren’t a regular guest when my mother is not here. Raymond is a little bit in love with my mother. When Raymond first moved into the house across the street, she invited him to dinner. He left a small bite of each thing—carrots, mashed potatoes, chicken—on his plate at the end of the meal, an offering, and he didn’t say a word. Now when Raymond and my mother see each other from across the street or pass on the sidewalk, Raymond looks down, nods his head quickly in restrained acknowledgment of what my mother will never offer him. He likes to come over and occupy the space where my mother was or will be soon again.

  “What’s on TV tonight?” Raymond asks. He’s told me that he doesn’t have a television, but twice when I was locked out and went over to use the phone I saw the inside of his house, the exact opposite of ours, with the stairway to the left instead of to the right. Raymond’s house does not have very much furniture, but it does have a sofa and a television that remained on and unwatched both times I used the phone.

  “Come in,” I say. I am not threatened by Raymond because of his crush on my mother. He was not around when I was growing up in the neighborhood, and we don’t know much about him except what we see as the people who live across the street: he looks slightly older than my mother because he tries to hide his gray hair with a thick black formula; he washes the same set of dishes every night (this detail we guess), holding them up to the light in his window to make sure they are clean; and he checks his mail three times a day although the postman comes only once, at three in the afternoon. My mother often wonders aloud whether he is waiting for a winning sweepstakes or a letter from someone who has never written him before, because he never seems to get any mail or send any letters himself. Some days when we see him heading down his grassy slope to the mailbox with the American flag painted on it, my mother will say in a dramatic, drumroll sort of voice, “Could it be the winning sweepstakes?” She has that kind of energy.

  Even though I am not threatened by Raymond, I turn on the light in the living room where the TV has been casting patterns of light on the wall. After he fixes himself a scotch and soda, Raymond takes a seat on one end of the couch and I take my old place near the other end. When Raymond comes over, I choose what we watch randomly and for the first half hour we do not speak, not even during the commercials. Flickering images fill our eyes until, after the first family plot in which a wayward daughter does right, Raymond speaks about my mother.

  “I was thinking about telling your mother about the boy who comes to do my yard,” he says tonight. “I was thinking that she might want him to do your yard too. The boy has a nice touch.” From the table he picks up the picture of my mother looking out from behind her bridal veil. “That’s a pretty picture,” he says, crunching ice, and then we watch family plot after family plot until the ten o’clock news.

  “How’s your grandmother?” Raymond asks, a little of his drink spilling over the side of the glass as he raises it to his lips. Raymond doesn’t know my grandmother, but he asks the question as if he is a friend of the family. It seems out of the blue, but he’s looking at a picture of me, my mother, and my grandmother, standing in that order in front of a ride at the local fair. The ride is called the Twister, comprising two baskets that twirl like eggbeaters. A girl in my junior high class threw up while the ride was
going full speed. In the picture, the three of us are pretending to be dragged toward the stairs to the Twister as if by some invisible force. My grandmother has placed her panama hat on the ground several feet away, as if the invisible force has blown it off and it landed there. My mother and I have our hands above our heads, eyes bugged. Behind us all, the Twister is a mere yellow blur, people strapped to the sides of the baskets, trying to resist its pull and twist.

  “She’s been dead for years,” I say, remembering the way my mother was sorry about that too. My grandmother was unhappy with my mother in the end for losing her husband to an illness. She was upset that there was a pause in my mother’s life after my father died, as though by taking too deep a breath, my mother might have passed out.

  “Hmm,” Raymond grunts thoughtfully, not particularly regretting the question. When the news is over, Raymond rises to leave. He takes his glass into the kitchen and then stands in the living room for a minute, looking at the picture of me, my mother, and my grandmother.

  “The Twister?” he asks, pointing at the yellow blur though he is looking at my mother. “You all look alike,” he says, running his finger along the row of us.

  I slide down the couch to look, and it’s true, we do. We are variations on a theme: the same thin hair and saucer eyes, the same exaggerated poses and looks of mock astonishment. I’m not sure why I’m so suprised. I’ve looked at these pictures over and over again since I’ve been home, but Raymond’s looking at them has made me look again—the way he searches my mother’s image for the source of her magic.

  “That boy who does my lawn, he’s really good,” Raymond says. He is out the door and into a night filled with the hum of telephone wires and occasionally the sound of a faraway car carrying someone home. He walks across the street and into his backward house, and I imagine the sound of his shoes landing on the linoleum as he kicks them off, sits down on his couch, and flicks on his TV.

  I take a glass of wine upstairs with me and drink it in bed with the lights off while in my head I pick out an appropriate outfit for work the next day. Sometime later I hear a car, then a key in the door, and then my mother’s whispering voice and that of a man’s. I hear my mother in the kitchen, probably putting the kettle on the stove to boil while maybe she sizes up this man, measuring her desire for him. Since I’ve been home is the first time that I’ve really, truly imagined my mother having sexual desires, and each time I imagine it I receive a small shock, as if some foreign source is administering charges to let me know this is forbidden territory. I listen to the hushed tones of my mother and this man as I finish the wine and set the glass by my bed next to the other glasses from other nights. It is the moments when the low tones turn to carefully suppressed laughter—at a minute gesture of my mother’s or a joke told by the man that I cannot hear, something silly and quickly forgotten but shared between them—that I am most an outsider in this house. I lie in such a way as to be the smallest that I can be, heading for sleep while downstairs my mother’s life continues.

  The graphics-design firm where I work is sponsoring a benefit ball for cancer research. This is what my father died of, so I try to use this to help me feel more involved. My job as their temp is to handwrite the names of the guests on one thousand invitations. They learned from the agency that I know a little calligraphy, and they think it would be charming for a graphics-design firm to have handwritten invitations. That sometimes the pen gets away from me is all right with them—it’s that much more of a personal touch. For the past week now I’ve been sitting at a desk in the middle of the office, balancing each invitation carefully on a clutter of papers and slowly, carefully carving out a name. The other women in the office call me by the names of past temps and generally don’t notice me as they discuss seating arrangements for the dinner preceding the ball.

  “Boy, girl, boy, girl doesn’t work when there’s less boys than girls,” the tall blond with the baby-doll bangs says today. It’s been the main argument all week.

  “Wouldn’t you know, less boys than girls?” the short redhead says. She doesn’t have pictures of a family taped above her desk, though she does have several of a dachshund.

  “I just do not want to sit next to you-know-who,” says the blond, mouthing you-know-who rather than saying it out loud. I admire her drive, the way she knows where she doesn’t want to sit.

  As they discuss whether sequins are too much, I have the dangerous feeling that I often get at work. The feeling is similar to dreaming that I’m going to do something against my will, such as stay in my mother’s house forever. It’s like the invisible force dragging us toward the Twister in the picture, which I’ve always thought of as somehow real; the fact of the picture itself has brought a reality to the pose, when the pose was just something my father shouted from behind the camera.

  The blond scratches the back of her head with nails stiff and effective while she determines where she will sit. Deep down, she is acting too. I’m beginning to suspect that, deep down, all desire is faked. I imagine tearing the picture of me, my mother, and my grandmother into tiny pieces and throwing them out the window with the invitations to flutter and land randomly. Pieces of our faces pushing through the air while the sky falls away. There would be no telling where it would all end up, but it would be anything but predictable. It would be something to counter this endless process of recovery—my grandmother wanting my mother to recover from my father’s death and now me, recovering from a badly scripted life. As my mother moves toward the vacancy left by my grandmother, and I move through my mother’s cast-off ages, I wonder how one recovers from making a life.

  The blond leaves the room for a minute and then comes back to say that the Xerox machine isn’t working again. I look up because I know this has something to do with me. Within minutes I am out the door with an armful of speeches for the benefit ball that begin “Welcome ladies and gents” and “What a wonderful crowd we have gathered here tonight.”

  Despite the new braided tail down his back, I recognize the guy behind the counter at the copy place. He’s someone I went to high school with, maybe I had a crush on him. His facial features have grown with his body; they are grotesque. I make my copies quickly in a corner and hope to leave the store unnoticed, but he comes from behind.

  “I know you,” he says, “I know you,” like he’s blowing my cover. He leans against the copy machine and tells me how his band broke up a few years after college, how his girlfriend had a baby and left him a year later for his old drummer, how they all run into each other around town and it’s a bad scene. Man, he says, and even though I hardly knew him in high school, he is looking to me for comfort. I copy my hand by accident.

  “Better watch that,” he says as a black-and-white version of my palm slides out of the machine. “Stuff ’s radioactive.” I could take him home, and maybe we’d push against each other hard for a few hours, straining to find meaning in skin. We’d be new to each other but still safely anchored in the familiarity of high school. I start to count on my fingers how many years till I’m thirty-three. It’s a goal I’ve set for myself, to start to take responsibility for my life then—I’m only two fingers away.

  I pay for the copies quickly and head out of the store.

  “See you around,” he says in a way that makes me suspect he is watching me walk.

  When I get back to the office, I carve my initials into the leg of my desk with a pen. I am a crazy teenage rebel trying to leave a physical mark in this office, and on this earth.

  I call the community health center from work at my second fifteen-minute break. After the third loop of the same menu—self-esteem, assertiveness training, eating disorders, healthy relationships, body image, healing workshops—I get a real person on the other end of the line.

  “Can you describe this pain in more specific terms?” the voice asks. It is a high, female voice that sounds as if it is coming through a wind tunnel, like this is someone who has used nose spray wildly. Her nostrils are hairless and
smooth.

  I begin to try. I explain that it feels something like when the gynecologist checks my ovaries, one hand inside and one pressing from the outside, as if but for my skin, the doctor would have an ovary in her hand. I tell her it’s like that but not quite. I tell her that the pain seems to float in the abdominal area, that I’m worried it may land and become something serious, in which case what will I do?—I’m only a temp and have no health insurance. I tell her that sometimes I have delicious fantasies in which this pain does in fact turn out to be something tragic and this fatal diagnosis slices the fatty part off of my days until they are sculpted and meaningful. I begin to tell her that the pain began sometime in this last year, two years before I turn thirty-three like my mother in the picture, when my father was still alive and I was not even born, but the woman is giving me another number. It is the number of a counselor who she thinks would be better able to help me. I say this pain is my own personal damage, but the woman continues to give me the number. I pretend to take it down, saying it back to her at the speed that I would be writing it if I were actually writing it. My fifteen-minute break is over. Someday soon I will go down to the community health center and have a physical, though I worry that I might be disappointed to discover that this pain doesn’t set me apart at all.

  My mother is doing a hot-oil treatment for her hands when I get home from work. She has another date with the man from the other night.

  “He was a real gentleman,” she says, one hand in a hot pot of oil. She’s had some losers from the classifieds—young guys who wanted Mrs. Robinson types, a guy who split his pants on the dance floor—so this is a high compliment. With a wooden spoon she ladles the oil over every inch of her hand up to the wrist. As soon as she takes her hand out of the hot pot, the oil becomes a pink wax glove. She takes one of my hands and dips it. It’s burning hot at first, but then my hand starts to tingle as if it were electric.