Lying (2 page)

“You,” she said, when I came home one day, “are filthy.”

She slapped me, hard, across the cheek.

I hate to say it, but it’s true.

My cheek.

And then, she reached across the piano keys, a longing in her look now, and smudged her pinkie to my soiled face.

Looked at the dirt I’d transferred to her finger like it was chocolate. Oh, that she could sink so low. Oh, that she, like me, could sleep.

Put your finger in your mouth, Mom, go on.

This, the gift I gave her.

•  •  •

Even before the smells and sights and, later, the terrible slamming seizures, even before all this, my mother thought I was doomed, which, in her scheme of things, was much better than being mediocre. I was disobedient and careless, I climbed with boys, I ran with boys, and where, she wanted to know, where would this end? I would surely become a street girl, and wind up being shipped to a filthy brothel crawling with hairy tropical bugs in Buenos Aires. For my part, her predictions confused me, because they didn’t seem to match the facts of my mundane life—the facts, the facts, they probe at me like the problem they are—I was, I thought, it seemed, mildly curious, fond of red-eared turtles, good at reading but bad at math, with teeth a tad bit yellow. For her part, her predictions seemed to excite her, because when she spoke of them her words had a certain slinky
sound, a lush quality to the consonants,
filthy
she would say like a hungry person pronounces
chocolate, brothel
she would say, like, well, like someone longing for and scared of sex.

•  •  •

I wanted to get my mother a gift. I scratched at the ground with sticks, split the milkweed pods. Not this, no. Not that, no. I went to the store in town—Accents Unlimited—and roamed amongst vanilla-scented candles, heart-shaped pillows, but I knew none of it would do.

The year I turned ten, the year of what I called my colored hearing and my smells, my father gave her his surprise. I think he loved her, or, like me, her unhappiness was his. He partnered up with Irving Busney in the bakery business, and now we had toppling apple muffins in the mornings and a double salary from a double job—prayer man and business man—and so he announced a vacation.

We went to Barbados. We flew. We flew! I had never been on a plane before. I loved the bubble windows, and the stewardesses who wore wings on their busts.

I loved Logan Airport, in Boston, from which we departed on a snowy day, a typical New England winter day when the trees were in ice and the old slush stank and everyone was grumpy. We left early in the morning, when the air was blue and only a few lights flickered in our neighbors’ windows. We were extremely excited. On the island, we were going to stay in a place called the Princess Hotel. My mother had brought me to Decelles the week before, and
the saleslady took us to the Winter Cruise Section, and I got to buy a bikini with dots on it. I got sandles with turquoise stones studded along them. I got white gloves—
for dinners
, my mother said—and crisp white dresses and also shorts.

And we left Boston on a snowy dawn, dark airport, smell of grime and fuel, and I drank chocolate milk as the plane went up. And a wonderful, ecstatic feeling came over me, a feeling which I attributed to the plane, but which I now know happens to some epileptics when the altitude changes, like you are getting closer to God, and gold, and sweet and smells, and I saw the sun rising in the sky from a whole new vantage point. The tawny sun rose like a lazy lion, all hot fur in a pink safari sky. The plane roared, and then was quiet, and I said to my father, “Are we flying?”

And then we landed, and just like that the world was different. The ecstasy passed. Fear came, a distinct sense that something horrible would happen soon. A stewardess leaned close and said, “It’s not the jungle here, you know, it’s a lovely island,” and I said, “Yes,” but the fear, which I now know, like the ecstasy, is also a part of the preseizure state, wouldn’t pass.

We went down the plane’s steep stairs. “Please, God,” I was saying to myself, “please, God, let her like this.” If you had asked me then just why I was afraid, I would have told you,
My mother my mother please let her be pleased my mother
. I would not have told you about the epileptic’s electrical arousal in the brain’s emotional centers, how the fear and joy, the intense prismatic sharpness of things, all come from
something as small as a single cortical spark. That was not my story then, and it is not my story now, although it is the right story, the true story, not my mother but matter more basic still; or is it?

Here’s what was true. Barbados. Palm trees with leaky coconuts, the humid wind that blew in our faces as we walked across the runway. There were a lot of black people, and no snow. Outrageous flowers, redder than crayons, waved in the wind. A cab took us to our hotel. The Princess Hotel. Would this, finally, be what it was she wanted?

•  •  •

What we did. Deep-sea fishing on a glass-bottomed boat. Caves, where Basien bats hung upside down. Piña coladas, plums in sauce, raw sugar sucked straight from the cane. This is what I remember best about Barbados. The sugarcane. Everywhere we drove there were fields and fields of it, stalks harvested under hot sun by men with small machetes. Chop chop. Castles of sugar and sweat. The sun always shone, except for the squalls that scrabbled across the sky, opened up on us, and then departed, leaving the sugar mounds damp and pooled in places. I loved those hills of sugar. There, the fear went away. Wet from the ocean, wet from sweat, I rolled in the mounds and came to her like candy.

I watched her.
Please please let her be pleased
. When the captain pointed out the coral, I looked for the movements of pleasure in her mouth, but found none. I watched her like I should have watched my sinking sickening self. I watched her like I now, an amateur gardener, watch the weather when
it might be bad. Clear sky, clouds to the left? Force of the wind? Bring in the seedlings? Sudden frost? Rising heat? What?

•  •  •

Here were my clues. Her postcards home. She bought postcards every day and scripted out messages, her handwriting a series of careful curves. “Lovely time,” she wrote to a woman named Nance. “Dear Nance, lovely time. Lovely island. We’re purchasing a second home here.” Or, “Emma, I’m painting every day, the colors are magnificent.” And yet, I’d never seen her paint, and I’d heard nothing of a second home, but then again, what did I know? Did she paint in private? Was there a second home my parents might reveal to me? It could have all been fact. It could have all been fiction. I looked at the names on my mother’s postcards—Nance, Emma, Shelly, Judith, Lil, and said those names over and over to myself, like a song. Like words might make it real.

We were to leave the island on New Year’s Day. We were to celebrate on New Year’s Eve, at the hotel, where the chefs were putting on quite a feast. Three whole days before the New Year’s Eve feast, management posted the menu in all the prominent places, appetizers, sherbet to clear the palate, crusty rolls, and the main course, lobster.

My father said, “I think that’s going too far, Anita.”

She said, “We never keep kosher outside the house. We haven’t kept kosher the whole time we’ve been here.”

“But shellfish,” my father said.

“A fish with a shell,” she said. “It’s no different than fish without a shell, which God knows we eat enough of.”

“I don’t like it,” he said, but you could tell, anyone could tell, he didn’t know how to stand up to her. I hate to say it, it’s so politically incorrect, but I think if he’d been brutish, my father, she may have learned to love him.

“Lobster,” she went around saying. “Have you ever had lobster? Dipped in butter?”

She said it while staring up at my father, daring him to leap into the ring with her, but he wouldn’t. He had fair skin, freckled everywhere, and he spent a lot of time in the hotel, where the air conditioners shuddered and the sun came through the slats in bright chinks.

The morning of the feast I woke early. I often did. I liked the sugar hills best at dawn. This particular morning, though, I stopped by my parents’ hotel room door. There were no sounds coming from the room, so I don’t know why I was drawn. I never went into their bedroom at home without permission. Perhaps, here, it was the quality of the silence, silence as sharp as a shout. Their room was connected to mine, and so they hadn’t locked up. I turned the handle.

It was early, maybe 6:00
A.M
. They were lying on their separate sides of the bed. My mother was curled on her side, my father on his back in boxer shorts. What was it that gave this moment its particular horror for me? They were two people in bed, bored in bed, hardly a tragedy, nothing like Northern Ireland, or Panama. But I froze. I saw the spongy pouf of my father’s stomach, my mother’s arms where the
blue veins had an ethereal glow. The room was still dawn-dark, and bottles of gin stood sweating in the cooler. The room, despite her perfumes, had a sour smell, and the air-conditioning unit banged above them. The heavy hotel curtains moved in the false breeze. Slowly, my mother turned, opened her eyes. She seemed to be entirely awake, as though she’d been waiting for me. She seemed monstrous. She did not say a word. Just saw me standing there and stared, and stared, as if to say, “So now you see,” and I, well, I stepped back.

•  •  •

We didn’t have our lobster. It required bibs and tongs, scraping green gunk from dark places, and my mother, it turned out, couldn’t lower herself to partake. I could tell she wanted to, though, the same way I could tell she secretly longed to walk with me in the woods, to take in soil, to sleep the heavy, sweaty sleep of the rude and the relaxed. Instead she watched from the polite sidelines as men and women at other tables cracked open the casing and speared the white meat, holding it up like a tiny trophy before popping it in their mouths.

No, in the end, my mother couldn’t allow herself that lobster. We ate chicken instead. There was dancing and colored lights in all the trees, and the patio stones were freshly washed. And maybe because it was the New Year, my brain gave me not only jasmine that night but many other wonderful nameless odors, so strong I felt sick in a sweet way.
There was liquor galore. My mother had a thirst, she drank and drank. The pianist played many lovely songs, and she, elegant, waltzed from table to table, making comments. “His pianissimo’s a little off,” she said a little too loudly.

“He doesn’t have much Mozart in him,” she announced at the end of an aria.

“Anita, be quiet,” my father hissed, a chicken bone in his mouth.

I, for my part, was mortified, because she was such a big woman with a big voice, and everyone on the patio could hear her.

Including the poor pianist.

“Play ‘Gay Tarantella,’ ” she shouted out.

He did and when it was over she sighed and said, “Such heavy hands.”

A few people tittered.

“Music,” my mother announced to the patio, “is a delicate art form. It should breathe.”

“Anita, we’re going,” my father said, spitting out his chicken bone.

Everyone was listening.

“Do you play, ma’am?” the pianist said, glaring at her. “Perhaps you could do a better job?”

“Do I play?” she said, laughing. “What a sweet question. You are a sweet,” she said to the musician, who, by the by, was black. “You are a sweet man with many sweet things in you, but with no thunder. A man should have thunder,” she said, glancing at my father.

“Do you play, ma’am?” the pianist said again. He was still glaring. “Would you like to play some thunder for the crowd?”

All the waiters had stopped, and all the people had stopped eating, and the patio looked like a frozen place, a garish game of freeze tag.

“I have my own Steinway at home,” she said.

“How nice,” the pianist said.

“And I’ve played,” she said, and paused. “I’ve played in … many situations.”

“Do take a seat,” he said, standing up from the bench and gesturing to his place.

And then she went forward. I stopped being mortified and started being proud. Or, I was proud and mortified both, and my own dizziness was getting worse. She had balls, and she had vodka. She never stumbled or slurred, though: You could only tell if you knew her, from the metal smell of her breath.

She pushed out the seat and sat down to take it. She made a big show of positioning her hands and straightening her shoulders, just like she had practiced all those hours at home. The party waited, waited for a symphony. Waited for the maestro she’d claimed herself to be. I know I could not have seen her face—her back was to me—but I have such a clear memory, a clear dream of my mother’s face as she sat at the peak of a promise she’d made, stuck in a lie, three blind mice all she knew.
Just play it, Mom
, I thought.
Three blind mice, see how they run, just play it and get it over with
. I think she stared down at the ivory keys, the bared teeth, and all things
sober passed across her face, because she did not know. She must have known she did not know. Somewhere in the world, if you pressed the right keys, or the right combination of keys, there would be thunder and Mozart, and more; there would be all you’d craved but been too clenched to take, soft songs you could sleep to, chords like a hammock, maybe, and a hand to hold, the way time slows in a tub. If you knew the right notes. Which she didn’t.

You could’ve heard a pin drop. You could’ve heard the petals fall from a flower while we waited, and waited. Her hands poised over the keys. Sobering up. “I suppose not,” she finally said, and stood, and carefully, carefully walked away.

That night, I had my first seizure.

•  •  •

At the school where I later went to learn about my illness, I saw movies, so I know what it is; it is not careful. You grit your teeth, you clench, a spastic look crawls across your face, your legs thrash like a funky machine, you hit hard and spew, you grind your teeth with such a force you might wake up with a mouth full of molar dust, tooth ash, the residue of words you’ve never spoken, but should have. You bite your mouth—I do at least—chew it to pieces from the inside out, a mythical hunger, my whole self jammed into my jaw.