Moth{er}
My first memory was of her room, white and bathed in light. I sat on the floor, trying to help Mother with the laundry, folding towels much larger than me. The walls were clean, the hardwood floor shining. A breeze carrying birdsong filtered through the forest into the open space.
Mother had studied color science at college, where she met Father. She taught me how glass prisms hung in the windows made the dancing rainbows on the wall. The clear light held all the colors within, she said. It bounced from surfaces to your eyes to show you how something truly looked. I didn’t understand, but I liked how all the towels were blue, like the sky, like our eyes.
“You look just like me,” she said, “when I was your age.” Sometimes she would pull out photos of her brothers and sisters, children lined up on a bench. I’d never met these people. Which face was ours? I pointed to a person and asked if that was her.
“No, dear, this is me.”
I searched her face hard for similarities but found none. The picture was from a really, really long time ago. People changed. Maybe I’d be able to tell when I was older.
I stopped thinking about faces and listened to the soft birdsong instead.
* * *
They tried to teach me at preschool, but the teachers weren’t as good as Mother. She’d already taught me all about color and light, so my finger-paints never turned into a brown, muddy mess. Miss Teacher told us that pink was a color but I blurted out, “No, it’s not, it’s a hue.” I was put in time-out because she wouldn’t accept I knew more than her.
“Preschool is just to learn how to get along with other kids,” Mother said. “Or for kids with bad mothers who work all day.” I had a good mother but bad teachers, I told her, so they never taught me how to make friends.
I waited for Mother to tell me how, since she knew so much. She looked down at me from her seat on the bed. There was a white wicker chest between us, which always creaked when I touched it.
“You’re supposed to figure that out yourself,” she finally said. “I can’t do everything for you.” She kept talking, and my gaze shifted to the prisms in the window. A coating of dust blocked the light from getting out, or maybe in. There weren’t any rainbows on the walls. I walked over to fix that.
“What are you doing?” Mother snapped. “I’m talking to you.” She huffed. “Maybe this is why you don’t have friends. You don’t listen.”
She had to be right. If Mother got frustrated with me, the kids who didn’t know me surely did, too. They wouldn’t give me a chance if I didn’t try harder. I’d show her I was smart, just like her, and could figure things out on my own.
* * *
Miss Teacher pulled me aside. I flinched, ready to be scolded again. “You’re going to be a big sister,” she said. But she had been wrong about things before, so maybe she was wrong about this, too. I asked how she knew. She smiled. “Grown-ups know these things.”
I was unconvinced.
Mother and Father never said anything about it, so I knew Miss Teacher was wrong. A few months later, she mentioned it again.
“I am?” It had been so long, I’d forgot the previous conversation.
She laughed. Not a real laugh, but the kind people force to pretend to be feeling something else. “When your mom goes to the hospital to have the baby, we can make her a card to celebrate.”
Mother and Father said nothing when I got home. Miss Teacher was wrong again.
One day Father picked me up. “Where’s Mother?” I asked.
“She’s in the hospital. For a little vacation.”
I knew grown-ups said things like that, to mean something else, so kids wouldn’t know what they were talking about. They wanted to surprise me with the baby! That was why they’d kept it a secret.
When Mother came home, she went straight to her room and shut the door. I waited in my room, listening for her to come out, to tell me the surprise, but she didn’t. I crept to her door and opened it.
She was lying in bed, a big quilt on top of her. It was dusty from hanging on the wall, the bright oranges dulled to yellow, the white expanses greyed and fuzzy.
“Are you sick?” I asked. People went to the hospital or stayed in bed when they were sick.
“It’s nothing,” she said. It was dim, with the blinds drawn and the curtains askew. I knew she was lying but I had no idea what was wrong. She didn’t look sick, she didn’t take medicine.
The next day at preschool, I asked Miss Teacher if we could make a “get well soon” card. Mother would like that.
Miss Teacher got down to my level and looked me right in the face. “This isn’t something a card can make better,” she said. I really wanted her to be wrong, but something told me this was the one time she was right. It gave me a bad feeling in my stomach, like butterflies trying to escape.
* * *
Mother made my lunches and drove me to elementary school. That’s what good mothers do, she said. Sometimes she helped me with my spelling. Remembering the order of the letters was hard.
“FRIday ENDS my week with FRIENDS,” she said.
Friday didn’t mean that for me. I didn’t have friends. But if I said that, I’d be arguing, and then she’d be around me longer, and I didn’t want that.
Her hair was short now and she looked lumpy in the sweatshirts and sweatpants she always wore. There were always big, beige band-aids on the backs of her hands.
Whenever I was around Mother too long, my head would get dizzy and I’d feel like I wasn’t really there. I didn’t like that feeling, so I tried to stay away from her. But she was my mother, a good mother, so why did being around her feel bad?
I asked a teacher. She got very serious.
“Is your mother hurting you?”
Where had that come from? She never hit me, she never would. I told the teacher that.
“Oh, so you’re uncomfortable around me?” Mother asked a few days later. I didn’t know how she found out.
“No,” I lied, even though it was a really bad one. There was no way I could make up a story to have her think something else. But what else could I say? The real answer would hurt her feelings and make her mad at me.
“Well, that’s fine,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t really like being around you.” The corners of her mouth kept moving, even when she ceased to speak. I wanted to run away, but I knew that would make things worse. She left first, going to her room and all the things in it so she wouldn’t need to come out, except for dinner.
“Don’t upset your mother,” Father told me when he tucked me into bed.
“I won’t.” Another lie. So many things I did upset her. Or even things I didn’t do. I couldn’t trust what I thought I knew. Things always turned out wrong when I did.
* * *
In middle school she stopped making me lunch, but she still drove me to school, since that was what good mothers did. I knew that wasn’t true, though. The other kids had divorced parents, or only their mother, or they took the bus, and they were always happy around their mothers.
I met their moms: some were fat and wore sloppy clothes or had short hair or messy houses or no jobs. Why did those things in my mother make me feel bad?
There was something wrong with me. The kids in the books I read solved their problems by trying hard. I tried and tried, but it never worked.
So I stopped trying at all.
“Can you explain why the sky is blue?” the test question asked.
“Yes, but I don’t want to,” I wrote.
“Why did this character feel this way?”
“I don’t care.”
“What happened in the year…?”
“Stuff.”
There was something wrong with me, everyone said. They took me out of class, they made me take a bunch of tests for babies. Which shape is a triangle? Which face is smiling? Draw a house, a dog, you, your family. They made me use crayons. I thought about using complementary colors, how I couldn’t blend the wax into new hues, but why bother? This was a punishment.
The man running the tests took my paper and looked at it for too long. Somehow, I got it wrong. Maybe I really was stupid and my lying fooled everyone. He asked me who each person was. Me, the shorter one, Father with the black hair, Mother with the yellow hair.
“And what are these?” He pointed to the two lines rising from the top of her head.
They were…I didn’t know what to call them. I would see them sometimes, but not always. Obviously, I shouldn’t have drawn them. “I think I colored too fast,” I said. I couldn’t tell if he believed me.
“And what about these?”
I'd drawn big blobs on either side of her stick figure. That sense of being far away came again. I said the first thing that crawled out of my mouth.
“Butterfly wings. I saw a big butterfly outside today.”
“I need you to draw reality,” the man said. “Not what’s in your imagination.”
“Okay.”
He handed me another piece of paper and I drew exactly what he wanted so this would all go away.
* * *
“………..Did you hear me?”
“Could you say it again? The TV is loud.”
A lot of things were making noises: the air conditioner, scraggly animals in cages, the rustling of papers under my feet as I shifted my weight. I didn’t want to look at them, but I didn’t want to look at Mother, either. Her face had gotten blobbier, fuzzier, her eyes darker. Bandages spread to her fingers, bare at each joint and making her hands look chunky and segmented.
“I said………..”
She was saying words, but it was nothing — white noise, swallowed up by the lumpy webs clinging to the walls. Every time I was here, there was that dizziness, that sense of things not being real. Shapes in the corner of my vision squirmed. Father never said anything about it, but then again, he barely went into her room anymore.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.” I hoped she wouldn’t ask me to repeat it, but I began to try to guess what would be the right answer.
“Good, finally.” She rearranged herself on the mattress. Puffs of dust floated into the air. I turn to leave and rushed out, but in my haste I knocked a box over, objects crashing into each other. Dust and must filled my lungs and I coughed, my eyes watering. How could she stand this?
I scuttled for the door. The hallway was still a mess of cobwebs and cramped space, but at least the walls were still white. I leaned back and stared at the ceiling light, willing my body back under control, through my eyes, not some ghost over my shoulder.
There was a moth in the light, struggling, crawling over its desiccated brethren. How did he even get in there? Did he not see the bodies? I thought to set him free, but I was too short and there was no room for a ladder or even a chair. It’s just a moth, I told myself, it can’t comprehend the situation it’s in. Maybe it’ll just fall asleep and never wake up, that’s better than being chewed up by some creature.
* * *
I knew that things weren’t normal. I knew other people’s parents left the house, they had people over and knew their children’s friends. They let them go out and have fun. I'd tried telling people before about what things were like at home, but no one believed me. I couldn’t go out because I’m grounded, everyone’s house was messy, I was exaggerating.
Of course no one believed me, I’ve lied countless times, for little things that don’t matter, for big things. Remember in third grade when I lied to the principal? I always lied about studying. Everyone said that: my classmates, the aides, Mother. I was the accumulation of every mistake I’d ever made, and no one would let me forget it.
But college...that was a fresh start. No one would know me, I’d have a dorm room, it wouldn’t come pre-loaded with stuff I wasn’t allowed to throw away.
Mother said she’d take me to visit, but she didn’t leave her room, not even to eat dinner, so I wasn’t disappointed when she didn’t. Father took me to a college that specialized in color science. The campus was open and bathed in the light of the spring sun.
“It snows a lot, though!” the tour guide said. “It gets cold!”
Insects didn’t do well in the cold. That meant they wouldn’t be squirming on your clothes or in your books. They wouldn’t find their way into your room.
But it was an expensive school and all our money went to Mother, for doctors to fix her hands, for more things to fill her room with, things that got trampled underfoot and chewed full of holes. And that, somehow, was my fault.
All my effort went into studying. After school, I used the small freedoms I had to spin into greater tales of success. Everyone embellished their college application essays, so it was okay. And it wasn’t like anyone would believe the truth.
* * *
“Show me the letter.” Her arm reaches out, fingers unfurling in a series of clicks. I can’t tell if I'm seeing dirt or tiny hairs. They waggle at me, waiting.
I hand it over. She reads, eyes unmoving. A moth lands on the back of the page and flutters, trying to find a grip. There is no way I should feel it from where I stand, but the microcurrent shakes the hanging threads, worms undulating at the disturbance. I can feel their eyes on me, scolding me for daring to disturb their peace.
“Why didn’t you get a full scholarship?” is all she can say.
“They save those for the athletes.” And the really smart kids, I leave unsaid; you can’t fib your way to better grades.
“But it’s so far away, I won’t be able to visit you whenever I want.”
“It’s the best school for color science.” Lying has gotten easier with time, and she no longer bothers to learn about my life. The only things that she cares about stay in that room.
"Aww, you want to be just like me!”
In this room it's difficult to think in words. There’s too much movement. Creatures reach for me through the bars of their cages, moths fly by, worms threaten to drop on me. The bulb and the window, both layered in dust, warp the light into a false hue that your brain thinks is orange. But, under all that, it’s still white.
A decade and a half ago I sat on that floor. It was clean. The room was full of light. I remember tiny details -- the crystal prisms, the rainbows on the wall. Mother was smiling and upright, not hunched over by the weight of her wings. Her hair was long and flowing, not twitching antennae that sensed disturbances in the air. Her hands were soft, warm, with pliable skin and fingerprints. The hands of a human. Of a mother.
How could such wretchedness share the same space as something that had been so pure, so happy? Maybe that was a lie, too, something I had made up to convince myself that I’d once had a Mother and not...this. This thing that grasps me and chews me full of holes and makes my skin crawl. This thing that no one would believe even if I told them.
“Did you hear me?”
“That’s right,” I lie. “I want to be just like you.”
Chase Anderson has stories published in The Razor, One Universe to the Left, and Another Name for Darkness.