This morning, Betty got up at 4 a.m. after looking at the clock wrong. I looked up from my work and there she was, confused, disoriented.
“Why is it still dark?” she asked. To calm her a little, I asked if she would let me comb the hair on the back of her head, which gets tangled when she lies with her head on her pillow.
Who says there are no advantages to giving birth to a homosexual?
I combed carefully, separating the strands with my fingers where her hair is matted.
“Don’t pull it,” she said. “Last time you did.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“My head is tender.”
“I’m watching out.”
“Are you going to make me wear those shitty shoes today?”
Her days are filled with little hurts. When I try to pat my mother’s back, she says, “No, no.” Her arms are as tender and reluctant: She gets angry if I take hold too tightly. When I make my most careful effort to rub some cream into her face, she winces, shakes her head, as if the tread of fingertips brings agony.
“No. No. No.”
“Let me rub this into your forehead,” I say. “It’s amazing how few wrinkles you have on your forehead for a woman your age. It’s smooth.”
“Don’t get it in my hair. Last night you got it in my hair.”
“Pretend it’s mousse.”
She bruises easily now. On the underside of one arm, there is a trail of purple tracks. Across her cheekbones and forearms, the skin is nearly transparent. Fearing I am about to tear or leave a cut, she stares at me, steeling herself. I must be gentle, attentive. A prick is a stab that makes her jump. A careless touch is sharp as a prick. Everything is an invasion.
“No. No. No.”
There is nothing that doesn’t press too hard, or seem too tight, or feel uncomfortable. She is so sensitive. The tightening around her arm during the testing of her blood pressure is much too much to bear. She yells out, kicks her feet.
“No, no, no, no.”
The space around her is all she owns, and if I come too close, she seems almost frightened, as if she fears what I might do. Yet on bad days, when things are rough inside her head, she wants me always in plain sight and follows me around, watching my every move. In the family room, there she is. “Where are you going?” If I go lie on my bed, she is right behind me, clearing her throat loudly in the doorway. “Where are you going?” If I walk into the living room to read, she is there, watching me. Even in my thoughts, where I retreat sometimes to escape, she appears, standing there with her purse in my mind’s eye, waiting and demanding: “Where are you going?”
She does not believe I will not leave her, does not fully accept that I am not about to take flight, even though I tell her over and over. “No, no, no, I will not go. I’ll just be out a few minutes. I have to refill your prescriptions.” Maybe she forgets. Or knows by now how likely people are to change their minds.
When she is especially agitated over something that has happened (a broken anything, an unexpected change in plans) or is about to (a small obligation that seems a terrible challenge, an upcoming doctor’s appointment, taxes), my mother’s noises filter through the day until I have to escape, leave the house, take the risk. Mostly I go outside, sit on the steps or walk down into the woods.
There is a bottle of Xanax in the cabinet above the stove. I have to get out of this kitchen. Now.
Standing on our back deck, I hear the whistles blowing over at the high school at summer football practice. Every day, I see the boys tramping to the field in the heat. Freshman year in high school, Betty made me go out for football; she insisted. She set her mind to it. I had never played or watched the sport on television. When my father tried to interest me in the Tiger games, I begged off. I didn’t care, though I liked the marching bands.
Betty did not see as an obstacle the fact that I had no idea of the rules. She was on a mission: to make me all right, to make me fit. I was an adolescent: She smelled sex in the house and wanted someone to pound it out of me before anything took root.
On the first day of practice at my new high school in Paris, I noticed that one of the boys was carrying a Bible in his helmet. This did not seem an option for me. Then there were the uniforms: They gave us strange long underwear things to wear under the pants and over our underwear with pockets for pads that protected body parts I did not seem to have. I couldn’t get the pads to fit in right, so I just threw them down the pants. Every time I ran, a pad fell out one of the legs.
I told the coach on the first day that I had ruptured myself. I needed a specialist, X-rays.
He grunted, unsympathetic. On the second day, I said I thought I was having a heatstroke. I could not believe how hot it was in my special underwear, even though most of my padding was strewn across the field. No response.