“You don’t just say the things they said to say them. You say a lot of things but not the things they said. Not the way they said them,” she insists.
She parks in the Wendy’s lot, eats the Frosty guiltily beside me while I sway in the passenger seat, swimmy from the wine, gripping the Diet Coke like it’s a buoy. I don’t mention diabetes. I don’t ask about blood sugar. Instead, I let her eat, the mouth of the giant cup close to her lips.
She sighs into her cup, waggles it at me. “This is okay, right? Just milk and ice?”
“Right,” I say. I stare at the road ahead.
When she pulls out of the parking lot, I notice she’s driving very slowly, squinting hard at the road.
“How come you’re driving so slow?”
She’s quiet for a while, then, “I can’t feel my feet,” she says to the windshield. “Right now.”
“That’s still happening?” I turn to look at her but her profile gives nothing away. “Mom? That’s still happening? Are you going to a doctor for it?”
She’s shaking her head at the windshield. “I’ll be fine. Still be able to go dancing tomorrow night.”
“Dancing? I think we should take it easy.”
“It’s your last night here before Tom comes. We can have a quiet day on Friday. Just you and me. How does that sound?”
? ? ?
A banana yellow minidress she hasn’t worn since the Stones came out with “Satisfaction.” Thigh-high white boots. Fifteen, sixteen I was then, damn I looked good you have no idea. Matching headband sits on the counter, but I won’t put that on unless she forces me. “Paint It Black” skipping on the small stereo on her night table because We need music for this. You’re a grown woman, you have a choice in this, I remind myself in the mirror. Show me! she’s calling from the other side of the bathroom door. I’m staring at her crown dentures in the zombie glass full of food-flecked water she keeps by the sink, my hands gripping the bathroom counter. The used pumice stone in the soap dish, which she rubs hard against her heels each night. I hear the sound through the wall but try to convince myself it’s something else. How long has it been since you can’t feel your feet? is a question I can’t bring myself to ask her. Dusty baskets of untouched bath salts, gels, and crystals that smell like too-sweet sick positioned around the unwashed sink for show. The air in here is thick with masked illness and the Fendi she sprays too heavily on her neck in the morning. The smell of it smothers me now, but after she dies, if I catch what I think is even a whiff of it in the street, I’ll follow it.
Show me!
I stare at the soiled nightgowns hanging from a silver hook on the back of her bathroom door. Feel the fact of her on the other side, lying belly down on her brass bed, chin on her fists, waiting. The same bed she lay across when I first started losing, watching me turn in her vintage Yves Saint Laurent, then her vintage Dior, neither of which she’d worn since she’d had her jaw wired after giving birth to me. She did it to shed her baby weight. For a few weeks she was a sickly, smiling husk of herself, then back up forever. But she keeps them in the back of her closet still, these monochromatic suits heavy as chain mail, each smelling of a variation of the same sweat, a different discontinued perfume. Turn, she said then, watching me model them when I was fourteen. Chin on her fists then too, shaking her head then too, as I turned and turned for her, seeing the prints of Marilyn and Audrey she had bought and framed and nailed to my bedroom walls. It was years before I’d replace them all with a map of Ireland and a poster of Tori Amos holding a shotgun on a patio full of snakes.
“Show me?” My mother’s still calling and calling from the bed.
? ? ?
After, she sits with me on the balcony, as I eat my four ounces of scrod and sip at the pre-dancing cocktail she made especially for me, a French 75 she shook and strained into an ornate crystal flute from the back of her glass hutch. It’s topped with a lemon peel she knifed into an elegant twist. “Am I a good bartender or what?”
“You’re not having one?” I ask her.
“I’m good,” she says, waggling her club soda at me, which she also poured into a champagne flute to make it festive. She’s watching me eat and sip, among the vases of stargazers we keep forgetting to water, like I’m on-the-edge-of-your-seat television.
“What?” I ask her, keeping my eyes on the dusk. The sky is the color of a busted peach over the shimmer of lake.
“Nothing. How is it?”
I shrug. “Good.”
“Good.” She’s not eating or drinking, just watching. Arms folded. Refolded. Opening and closing her mouth with me. Take your time. Enjoy it. “So. Tom, huh?”
“Yup.”
“When will he be here, again?”
“Friday night.”
“Friday night. Tomorrow,” she says. “Has your father met him yet?”
“No.”
She looks pleased about this.
“How is your father?”
“Fine.”