Dirty Read online

  “It’s your junk,” she said, like that made a difference.

  If my visit surprised or pleased her, I saw no sign of either. She drew in the smoke and let it out, squinching her eyes shut in a way that feathered wrinkles around her eyes.

  “Fine. I’ll take a look through it before I go.”

  We sipped our coffee in silence. I’d never sat at her table like this, two adults drinking coffee. I waited to feel strange about it, and then I did.

  If my mother did, she kept it to herself. “So, Ella. Where’s your friend?”

  I gave her a look. She tossed up her hands. “What? What? I shouldn’t ask?”

  “Do you really care?”

  She took another drag. “It would be good for you to have a man.”

  “You didn’t seem to think so when he was here.”

  My mother has always been good at rewriting history to suit herself. “What are you talking about? He seemed very nice for a Jew.”

  I let my head fall forward with a groan. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Not in this house,” she warned. “Don’t take the name of our Lord in vain.”

  “I’m sorry.” I drank some of her coffee, which was too strong.

  “You know I think it’s long past time you got married. Had some children. Had a real life.”

  The rant was an old one, but for the first time I allowed myself to listen not only to her words but to the meaning behind them.

  “I have a life. A real life. I don’t need to be defined by a husband or children to have a real life.”

  My mother scoffed. “You need something other than those damned numbers, Ella.”

  “Yes, because I’ve had such a good role model,” I retorted.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and crossed her arms over her ample chest. Her expertly applied makeup couldn’t hide the circles under her eyes. “I wish you weren’t so smart with me all the time. I wish you took better care of yourself. I wish you saw I was only trying to look out for you instead of jumping down my throat every time we talk.”

  I’d been holding both hands around my mug to warm them, but I put it down and spread them flat on the tabletop. I looked at her, trying hard to see myself in the curve of her jaw, the color of her eyes, the style of her hair. I tried to find myself in my mother, some thread of connection to prove I had once swum inside her womb and was not just an afterthought. That once upon a time she had looked at me with something other than disappointment.

  “I wish I was fifteen again, and I had told Andrew no when he asked me if I loved him. And I wish he’d listened to me instead of getting into my bed.”

  The color drained from her face, leaving two bright spots of blush high on her cheeks. For an instant I thought she was going to pass out. Or maybe scream.

  Instead, she slapped my face hard enough to rock me back in my chair. I put my hand over the heat the blow left behind on my cheek. Then I looked her in the eyes.

  “And I wish you would stop blaming me for it.”

  I tensed for the next slap, or the coffee in my face, or the shrieks and accusations. I was not prepared for what she did next. She started to cry.

  Real, fat tears welled in her eyes and left tracks in her foundation. They dripped off her chin and left dark marks on her navy silk blouse. She drew in a slow, hitching breath as her mouth trembled to let out a sob.

  “Who else could I blame?” my mother said, the words striking me harder than her slap. “He’s dead.”

  I wanted to get up but didn’t have the strength to do it. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “I knew.” She reached for a napkin and blew her nose, then took another to pat her eyes. Her mascara left half circles of black on the white paper.

  “You called me a liar and a whore.” The words stuck in my throat before I forced them out. They felt sharp, like they left scratches.

  I had never seen her look so bleak. So unconcerned with how her tears might have smudged her makeup and turned her nose red. My mother wiped her eyes again, removing more of the eyeliner, shadow, mascara. She looked naked without it. Vulnerable.

  “Do you think I was a liar and a whore?” I wanted to sound demanding. I only sounded pleading.

  “No, Ella. I don’t.”

  “Then why did you say it?” I wept, too, but didn’t bother wiping my face. I kept my hands anchored flat on the table. “Why?”

  “Because I thought maybe saying it would make it true!” She cried. “Because I didn’t want to believe he would do those things to you! I didn’t want to believe it, Ella, that my son could work such evil! I wanted to make you a liar because that would mean it wasn’t true. Because I would rather have a daughter who’s a liar and a whore than a son who raped his sister.”

  “Like you’d rather have a son who is gay?” I asked, more gently than I had ever thought I’d be able to. “You’d rather have one son dead by his own hand and a daughter who doesn’t have a real life than a son who’s alive and well but likes men?”

  It didn’t make me feel good to watch her flinch and crumble, shrivel like the legs of the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy took off those shoes. I had always thought confronting her would leave me more triumphant. It only left me sad.

  “You don’t understand what it’s like, to have children. How they disappoint you. You don’t understand what it’s like to give another person life and watch them throw it all away. You don’t understand what it’s like, Ella, to be me.”

  I studied her for another long, long moment in which she wept and my own tears slowed. At last I stood, not filled with triumph but with something else I had longed for. Acceptance.

  “No, Mother,” I told her kindly. “I don’t. And I guess I never will.”

  She nodded, focusing again on her coffee and her smoke, and I saw for the first time she was not a fairy queen I’d dreamed of as a child, nor the wicked witch I’d made her out to be later, but a woman. Just a woman, after all.

  I hugged her, the smoke from her cigarette burning my eyes. At first she didn’t hug me back, but after a moment she did, patting my back. Her fingers tugged my hair.

  We said nothing else, too fragile for words, and I left her there at the table. I thought maybe I would come back and see her again. I thought maybe we would talk again. But for the moment, what we had done was enough.

  I didn’t get religion, though I did attend Mass once or twice. The contemporary service was nice, though not quite the comforting, mysterious ritual of my youth. I found it lacking, in the end, though I enjoyed Father Hennessy’s sermon about the challenges facing young people today. After, when I shook his hand as I left the church and murmured, “thank you, Father,” he pressed my hand with fingers gnarled by arthritis and looked into my eyes when he answered, “You’re quite welcome.”I didn’t stop “not hating” my mother, either, and when she called I made more of an effort to pick up the phone and talk to her. Our conversations were strained, though. Distant and polite. She stopped asking me about Dan and started telling me more about her life. She’d taken up a membership in the gym and joined a reading group. If I found it odd to speak to her of such inanities, I’m sure she found it equally as strange not to rant and rave at me; but both of us were trying, at least, and I for one had accepted we might never have more than that.

  I spent my nights the way I mostly had for years, alone. I read a great deal. I knitted. I repainted my kitchen and steam cleaned my carpets. I had a lot of time that had seemed insufficient before, when faced with all the tasks I wanted to accomplish, but which now, without anyone to share them with, seemed vast and empty and bereft.

  I could have called him. I should have. Pride stopped my fingers from dialing, and fear, too. What if I called and he didn’t call back? Or worse, hung up on me?

  I’d lived a long time without a Dan in my life, and there was no good reason I couldn’t get on without one, now. No good reason other than that I missed him. He had made me laugh, if nothing else. He’d made me forget myself.