Motherest

When my mother caught me rummaging in her nightstand, she said, You must never look in there again. She said, Certain things are private. Do you know what private means? I did, but I told her I didn’t, which was maybe my version of what private meant. When something is private, she said, it belongs only to you. From then on, I understood my mother to be private, in how she kept herself to herself, and in how, in my mind, she belonged only to me. I really thought I was entitled to her, to the most intimate parts of her, which seemed to be in that drawer: photos, a Bible, stacks of letters held together with rubber bands, a diary. None of it helped me. Most of it probably wrecked me. But sometimes, that’s how you know something is working. The world may have been destroyed by a flood—but that doesn’t mean we don’t still need the rain.

Surprise asked me, “Is it okay if we don’t talk in the morning? Like not even ‘hey’ or ‘have a good day’?” Then she told me a story about how her dad used to drive her to school, and he’d have on talk radio, and he’d ask her little questions, and one day she sort of blew up, snapped off the radio, and told him that she wasn’t awake yet, and she just wanted it to be quiet. They drove in silence for the next two years, but she said she felt so guilt-ridden that they might as well have been talking. “It was so loud inside my head, you know?”

I know, I tell her, and leave it at that. I don’t say how silence seems to be a member of my family. I like Surprise too much to burden her. Or maybe even more than I like her, I want her to like me. In either case, I wish we slept in the same bed sometimes.

It’s late afternoon and I’m on my way to English, wondering if I should skip it, trying to remember how many I’ve skipped. I see the boy from my philosophy class coming toward me. I have an unbridled desire for him that wearies me and takes up a lot of my time. My face feels out of control. I concentrate on my shoes, the six-eye Doc Martens I bought with the money I’d saved babysitting the horrible Nolans, and remember my mother’s arched eyebrows when she saw them (“Those?”). I study the ground right before each shoe hits it.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

I keep walking. He slows down a little as if to chat, and I move faster. I want to turn around so badly that walking feels like pushing through the heaviest revolving door in the world, but I keep going. I don’t trust myself around him. When I get to the humanities building, I stop.

This boy, this thing of beauty—I call him Tea Rose.

It’s Friday night. I have to write a paper on one of the following topics: the theory of forms, Cartesian dualism, the Zeitgeist, or Kant’s categorical imperative. What I want to write about instead is physicalized loneliness, my dead brother Simon, waiting as a form of punishment and/or prayer. Or some combination thereof.

Everyone is at the bars or off-campus parties and I want to be somewhere too. I get a Coke from the vending machine in my dorm. I was hoping to find boys with whiskey hanging around but there’s not even a trace of them, no beer can tabs or baseball caps in the kitchenette. I put the Coke in my coat pocket and leave the building. Outside is chilly and has the hormonal whiff of the weekend to come.

At the start of our first philosophy class, our professor asked us for some examples of philosophical ideas in everyday life. Fortune cookies, someone said. “To be or not to be,” another person offered (but couldn’t name the play it came from). Tea Rose raised his hand. “If a tree falls in the forest,” he said. I’d been thinking the exact same thing.

Overhead, the spindly tree branches look as though they are trying and failing to hold hands in the stiff breeze. I can’t decide if my mother is the tree or the forest or if I am one or the other. And she’s just the person who’s not there.

I get a B+ on my philosophy paper. There are red checkmarks and plus signs in the margins, a couple “!”s. The note at the end says, A fascinating essay, though gravely lacking in source material and proper citations. I’m eager to see what you could do with more research. There’s fifteen minutes left of class and I’m upset that Tea Rose isn’t here today. His paper is sitting on the corner of the professor’s desk along with the other absentees’. I’m thinking about how I can get it for him, deliver it later, when a tall blond girl raises her hand and says she lives in his dorm.

“I think he’s sick today,” she says, smiling sweetly. “I’ll bring it to him.” She looks like one of those women in commercials for feminine products. I picture her itchy and rash-ridden and try to calm down. I leave class to go to the bathroom and stare at my face for a while. I have no idea what I look like, even looking at myself. Sometimes I wished for the blankness the girls in magazines had, the nothing gaze, the empty eyes, as though they’d unlocked the meaning of life, and the meaning of life was meaningless, and there was nothing left to do. But my face always seemed vaguely worried, searching, my dark eyes somehow darker than they needed to be, my thick eyebrows an additional source of shadow, my longish hair tangled by nature and heavier than they made brushes for. It just doesn’t seem like a face, I think to myself, that could ever set anyone at ease. I decide against going back to class and head to work early instead.

Mr. Figgs, the dining hall director, has asked me several times whether I want to work “front of house,” serving food or replenishing the salad bar, which I hear are the more coveted positions. I’m happy washing dishes in the back. The time goes fast, and it’s rare that anyone tells me what to do or asks to give them a hand. I wear industrial-grade latex gloves up to my elbows and keep the water scorching. Today Terrence is mopping a pool of salad dressing off the floor. There is the overwhelming smell of Caesar. Surprise, who has no scholarship or work study, often asks me about the smells. “How gross is it back there? How bad is it on taco night?”

The thing I like about this work is how uneventful it is. It’s a spill here or a shortage there, but mostly it’s predictable in ways that other things can’t be. Like if a heavily manned large-scale kitchen could just be the context for every situation, we’d all know exactly what to do with ourselves. When I get back to my room after work, Surprise is there, folding laundry.

“Your dad called. You should call him back.”

“Did he leave a specific message?”

“Well, he said that he got something about Parents’ Weekend in the mail, some hotel rates or something, and wanted to talk to you about coming.”

“Oh.” I take a piece of Juicy Fruit from the pile of packs on my dresser.

Surprise is holding a very small sock. I can’t understand why it’s so small. “That sock is tiny,” I say.

“It stretches. It’s for working out. So did you not tell your parents or dad or whatever about Parents’ Weekend?”

Even knowing that the sock can stretch out does not help me come to terms with its size. “Can you put that on right now? I can’t believe that it fits a human foot.”

“Okay, Miss Change-the-Subject. Hope you don’t mind but I told your dad that they should definitely come up. We could do a lunch on Saturday or something, if you don’t have to work. By the way, you smell like…mayonnaise?”

“Sorry.”

Surprise steps out of her fluffy slipper and pulls the sock on. Incredibly, it fit.

“Why can’t they make all clothes like that? We’d have so much more room to work with.”

She shrugs, taking off the sock and finding its mate. “It’d probably be really expensive.”

I put a few books in my bag.

“Where are you going? Call your dad.”

There are these strawberry-flavored muffins, bright pink, at the coffee shop on campus. They taste like the marshmallows in cereal. There’s also something called coffee milk, which people here are obsessed with. It’s like chocolate milk but it’s flavored with coffee instead of chocolate. I pick one of those up along with a muffin, and I’m in line when I feel a change in the air and hear the tinny clatter of music issuing from somewhere very close to me.

“Hey. Nice dinner.” His voice is loud and deliberate, his headphones neon yellow, their cord rising out of the pocket of his olive-green barn jacket. I take him in entirely, his cheeks flushed with cold, his slightly rumpled hair, the torn canvas of his sneakers. To hide my panic and excitement, I try to concentrate on paying and probably look like I don’t know how to add up money.

“Do you want a bag for this?”

I shake my head and put the stuff in the pockets of my big coat. I stand there while Tea Rose pays for his small coffee.

“Don’t you work at the dining hall?”

“Yes.”

“So can’t you get better food? Like, secret food?” He is still too loud. We move to the side.

“It doesn’t really work like that. Usually we eat before whatever meal we’re working, so I’m not very hungry, and afterward I don’t always like eating what I’ve been around for three hours.”

“Ah.” He puts his headphones around his neck. There is suddenly no sound between us. “Hey, do you know Nirvana?” He says it like we are at a party and he is our—mine and Nirvana’s—mutual friend.

“Um, yeah. Doesn’t everyone?”

He rolls his eyes. “I don’t mean like, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ I mean their early stuff.”

How could he know I had an older brother once who knew everything there was to know about music? “You mean like ‘Bleach’?”

Tea Rose lights up. “Yeah, yes. Totally. That’s exactly what I was just listening to. It’s fucking brilliant. Do you want to sit somewhere?” He looks around for a table.

“I have to go, actually. I need to get some reading done. And call my dad. And do some laundry.” I don’t know why I’m doing this. What I want is to stay with him more than anything in the world.

“Wow. One excuse and two alternates. Impressive.”

I think if I kissed Tea Rose, I would definitely keep my eyes open. I’m convinced that if I loiter too long in his presence, I will reach out and start rubbing his face. It reminds me of the polished minerals I used to covet from the gift shop of the museum of natural history. Agate. Calcite.

“I’ll see you in class.”

He raises his cup a little, as if to toast. “Okay. That’s a big coat you’ve got there.”

“Thanks,” I say, before realizing he isn’t necessarily complimenting me. “I mean, it’s my mother’s.” Now I’m practically mumbling. “I like to be prepared. You have no idea the stuff I can keep in here.”

Tea Rose laughs, an easy sound. “Maybe we can get together and listen to Nirvana sometime. Or, you know, talk about coats.”

I don’t tell him that I don’t really care about music anymore. But I would listen to whatever he wanted. And then I am extra grateful for my coat, which feels like it’s actually keeping my heart, now spinning as wildly as a piñata after the first hit, inside my body.

At the start of Parents’ Weekend, I meet my dad at the student center and we hug each other, and I have to try very hard not to let loose the ball of unexpected tears in my throat. His beard tickles my neck and he smells like Pour Homme, the drugstore cologne he’s been wearing for a thousand years.

There is a breakfast set up for students with their parents, and I don’t have to work. We go to it, the stench of powdered eggs rubbing against our faces as we walk through the door. My dad puts a lot of food on his plate, and when he runs out of room, he puts it on my plate. Eggs, French toast, sausage links, bacon, a muffin, hash browns, fruit, and a few packages of saltines from near the silverware. The saltines are part of some final, desperate act. The last grabbable, edible thing.

We sit down at the end of a long table. At the other end, a group of girls sits with their parents. All of the girls seem to be wearing some combination of pink, green, and white, with scarves tied through their belt loops or in their hair. Their mothers are aged holograms of them, incandescent in their crisp white shirts, with their crisp white skin and frosted hair. Their fathers sit in pleated and plaid button-down shirts, silent and embarrassed. We listen along with them as their wives and daughters decide on the places they want to hit and do.

“So, okay, we’ll do the museum, then,” one of them is saying.

“Yes!” says another. “The museum!”

“We’ll do the museum, and then we’ll hit the mall, and then we can squeeze in a quick run—”

“Or tennis!”

“Ooh! Tennis! Yes. Let’s totally do tennis. And then…maybe Cactus Fred’s for margaritas?”

“Yes! Totally! We should definitely hit Cactus Fred’s!”

My father and I watch the same way we watch television at home. I turn to him after a while.

“Dad.”

“Hmm?” He is hovering over his food, as if newly reminded of it.

“Should we do the museum? Or would you rather do Cactus Fred’s? Or we could, you know, do both, with a little fro-yo in between…”

My dad smiles, a bit of ground pepper between his front teeth. “What’s the museum like?”

I tear the tops off three packets of sugar at once and empty them into my coffee. “There’s a Mary Sargent collection, I think. And a few suits of armor.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

The coffee won’t get sweet. I stir it some more. “I’m kidding about wanting to go.”

“Oh. Well, whatever you want. Whatever you want to do.” He is staring at one of the mothers. He is thinking about my mother, because we are always thinking about my mother.

The girls and their parents disperse after some prolonged goodbyes and a few more rounds of schedule recitation, dumping their trays of egg-white omelets and fruit at the trash station and exiting through separate doors, linking arms with their mothers while their fathers trail behind.