And then there was my mother, who told me too little, except sometimes when she told me too much. There were the bedtime stories that scared me. And once, when I was fourteen years old, she took me for a walk around the block at sunset to talk about sex.
She was being as honest as she could, I know that now, but she was being something else, too. This was a few months before I started high school, before I met the boy who would become my husband. I was just a little sprite of a thing, but I had long blond hair that fell down to my waist in long waves. It was almost like she could see it coming before it happened and she wanted to get her digs in there first, before she lost me for good.
Our block was noisy on summer nights. There were kids all around, hollering, tweeting, screeching, and they played stickball till sunset and then raced after fireflies with nets and mason jars until their mothers called them home. Jenny was doing cartwheels for our father on the front lawn. Off in the distance, past the bowling alley and down the back roads, the cornfields washed back and forth quietly in the wind. Not that I could see them, but still I knew they were there. I had an ice cream cone in one hand and it was a sticky mess. My mother had bribed me out the door with it. Her breath was thick with cigarettes and the smell of that wine she drank out of a giant box near the kitchen sink. This was before she started drinking beer. She said she switched because she never knew how much she was drinking from that box until it was gone already. I think she just liked to crush the empty cans with her fist.
“I’m going to tell you a story, Miss Catherine,” said my mother. Her hair was up high on her head still from her day at work, her lipstick long gone, dark moons of eye makeup pooled under her eyes. She was smoking one of her Virginia Slims. I still thought she was beautiful and classy. “And I just want you to listen close. Don’t ask questions. Just listen.”
I had heard parts of the story before in my life. There were always bits and pieces of it floating around my brain but it was hard to put it all together. It hurt to put it all together. Her mother dying when she was still little, her father dying when she was in high school. Cancer everywhere, but still my mother smoked. “I know I shouldn’t,” she said, and then she took another drag from her cigarette. How she met my father at an ice cream social when they were in college, but she had put their relationship on hold. She had majored in international studies, and was supposed to move to France for a few months. That immersion program that was a disaster. She got lost on the streets of Paris. Or was it the trains? She got off the plane and turned right around and came back. She never even saw the Eiffel Tower, not even from a distance. Sometimes when she told the story she said she came back for love. (Depending on how she felt about my father that day. Or how much she had had to drink.) He had loved her, she said. Someone had wanted to take her on, take care of her. Her lonely orphan self. My mom could make us feel sorry for her any time of day or night. Maybe we did not like her very much, but we knew she had her pain.
“And now I am going to tell you my one regret in life. I held on for so long. My virginity was a precious thing. Now I know girls these days don’t see it that way anymore, but I am telling you it is important. I waited for your father forever. And then, two weeks before we got married, we just could not wait a minute longer.” She stopped walking and I stopped with her. There was a ripple in her voice. “Well, he couldn’t wait. I could have waited.”
I did not say a word. I was scared all of a sudden.
“Let me tell you what it’s like, Catherine.” She moved her face in closer to mine and leered at me. I held my breath and waited for the truth. “Imagine a wall. And imagine something pressing up against that wall as hard as possible. It’s like this brick wall, and something’s trying to break through it.” She flattened one hand in the air and punched it with her other hand. I could feel the punch deep in me. “You are that wall, Catherine. You’re the wall.”
I dropped my ice cream cone on the ground and did not stoop to pick it up. The ants were all over it in seconds.
I heard those words again in my head, for days and days, for weeks, for months, for the last ten years, forever, in my head, my mother, her fist, the struggle, the wall, and me.
I did not have sex for a few years. I was in no hurry after that. But it did not matter how long I waited. I was already ruined. Maybe I had been ruined before that. I remembered that, though. Other things she had said about sex in the past floated faintly in the back of my mind. But I remembered that walk around the block.
“YOUR MOTHER SOUNDS like a real piece of work,” said Valka.
“It does not matter what she is,” I said. “You can’t go blaming your parents for your problems forever. What happened was between me and Thomas. Between a man and his wife.”