“No,” Elliot says.
He puts his arms around her and holds her the way he wants to be held. He rocks her, soothes her. And later, when she throws up, he holds her head and strokes her hair and cleans up after her and lets her kiss him sloppily on the mouth. He tastes her vomit, her cold tongue fills him, and even though she’s drunk and smells of puke, he pulls her on top of him and makes love like it’s his only desire, like it matters. When he comes, he opens his mouth and lets his cry fill the air.
“GEORGIA,” ELLIOT WHISPERS INTO the phone, to the blankness of an answering machine at the other end. “Georgia. Pick up, please. It’s me. It’s Elliot.”
As long as he keeps talking, the machine will listen; it isn’t one of those that cut you off after thirty seconds. He stands, naked, in the hallway, the phone cord stretched taut. The air smells of stale vomit and the fish from yesterday’s bouillabaisse.
“Everything here is so weird,” he whispers, realizing he has nothing to say, really. Outside the window at the end of the hallway, Elliot sees snow starting to fall, small, dizzy flakes bombarding the glass. “It’s snowing all of a sudden,” he says.
The hall light comes on, blinding him, and in it stands his mother.
“I love you,” he whispers into the phone. He doesn’t want to hang up, to end the connection, so he just stands there, clutching it to his chest the way, as a child, he’d clutched his worn and faded baby blanket.
“Elliot,” his mother says, averting her eyes.
She is wearing a long, red plaid nightshirt that makes her look, suddenly, ridiculously, young. And pregnant, Elliot realizes. Her breasts, her belly, are swollen and round. He feels embarrassed for all of them.
“Is Mindy Rickey in there?” his mother is asking him. She still looks away from him, even as she points to his room behind him.
“I don’t know,” he answers honestly. Then says, “Yes. I guess so.” He slumps down to the floor, dropping the phone, letting his back trace the wall as he slides. He imagines that the blue flowers on the wallpaper are real, imagines their thorns slicing into him.
Now that his nakedness is partially hidden, his mother advances, glaring, her nostrils flared. Elliot remembers how, when he used to get mad at her, he would mutter, “Pig nose,” and it made him feel better.
“What is it you’re trying to prove exactly?” his mother hisses. She stands over him like a balloon in the Macy’s parade, inflated, too large.
“Me?” he asks. “What am I trying to prove?”
“Do you think I’m deaf?” she says, her voice rising. “Do you think I’m blind?”
Out of the blue, he remembers something. He remembers Mrs. Rickey’s black Saab 900 sitting in her driveway last summer with a key scratch down its side. He remembers his mother shaking her head as they passed it, and saying, “What a shame. Such a nice car too.”
“Last night right outside my window. And tonight in my own house. Have you no respect at all?”
“You did it,” Elliot says, stunned, even a little awed.
“I did it?”
“You scratched Mrs. Rickey’s car last summer.” Saying it, he realizes that it all must be true. He studies his mother’s face, trying to recognize something in it.
Her mouth opens, then shuts again, several times, like a fish gasping for air.
The house has changed, turned cold. Elliot feels himself coiling, folding, trying to find warmth somehow. But he can’t. His mother moves, slightly awkwardly, down to the floor beside him.
“You don’t know the first thing about it,” she says, weary. “Someday you’ll fall in love and maybe then you’ll understand.”
“What a useless, ridiculous thing to say,” Elliot says.
They sit like this a moment more, neither of them talking. Then his mother gets up, awkward again. He watches her carefully, her pig nose, her straight bangs and blunt hair. Her lips are chapped. Her nails are square. These things are all familiar, yet he does not know her.
From the dangling telephone, a voice is screaming. “Elliot? Elliot? What the hell is going on?”
Elliot picks it up and places it, gently, back into the cradle.