12-06-06

“Boys are strange,” she told me. She had a particular smell and that smell was a thousand flowers dripping with honey, a tiny hint of fairy dust. She could charm me and my sister into doing anything for her one minute, and anger us into taking her lipstick and scrawling MOM, YOU’RE A SELFISH BITCH XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (we had no idea what the X’s meant but for some reason whenever we were made, we slashed X’s to emphasize how crazy raging made we were) onto her dresser mirror in the afternoon when we were alone, and then guiltily wipe it off with Fantastic minutes before she came home, hastily throwing the lipstick out the window and feigning ignorance the next morning when she got up to do her make-up for work. “Once, there was this rascal who only had a father, no mother, which was why maybe he never understand the psyche of a woman, and he would follow me home every afternoon. From the minute class was let out, to the moment I walked into my apartment he would stand five steps behind him, taunting me, calling me names, threatening to push me into the mud, making fun of the way I walked, making fun of my long neck,” and she craned her neck up and measured it with her thumb and forefinger to show me, “making fun of the color of my hair, which was really quite red when I was younger, making fun of my parents, my mom, my dad, my brother, my friend who I walked home with, and I thought for sure he hated me, but I didn’t know why. I had never talked bad about anyone behind their backs or to their face the entire time I was growing up. I don’t think I even talked to this boy in my entire life, until he started following me, and even then I never really spoke to him. I just ignored him and wondered why he hated me so much.”
“Mom,” I started to say.
“But it turned out he was in love with me. He was in love with me and the only way he could express it at that age was by teasing me, throwing things at me. Once he even threw broken glass at me and my friend ran up to a police officer to tell him to arrest the kid, but those were corrupt days. The police officer only arrested kids if they were the kid of a professor. They left the poor ones alone to terrorize the city.”
“Mom, of course he liked you. It’s so obvious. Did you really not have any idea that he liked you?”
“I had no idea,” she said. “I had no idea whatsoever. I just had no idea whatsoever. You’re better than me when I was your age. When I was your age,” and she pulled in close to me and bent her head down low, “I thought maybe if I sat close with another man, it would get your pregnant. Your father took me to sit underneath a treat in the shade one summer and my hands wouldn’t touch his hands because I was shaking and sweating with fear. I thought I had gotten pregnant just from him looking at me. Can you believe your mom?” she asked me.

In school the next day, the other kids asked me why I ran out of gym, and some kid, Sophia or something pushed me and said I made our team lose, and I pushed her back and said, “So freaking what?”
“So that’s so uncool of you Celia. If you were going to run that fast out the door, you should have at least stayed and helped out the team first.”
“Leave me alone, you’re worse than a mosquito.”

My mother was the type of beautiful that I only read about later in books, and felt a startling alliance between the stories I read on the page and the stories my mom told me. When I read a 100 Years of Solitude by Marquez, I pictured my own mother floating into the air, a halo of picked flowers, of hummingbirds humming a lovely song not too high, not too long, around my mother as she ascended, and I imagined that was the reason why sometimes I could tell she was not seeing us, my sister, me, later on, my brother. Sometimes, we were obstacles and we blocked her from the things she was interested in, whatever they were, we sometimes stood right in front of it, or our shadows cast a darkness, a sourness over the things that set her alight, glittering in the middle of winter when we were all gloomy, and she was just a sprite we all tried to catch.

What I mean, primarily, is that my mother grew up spoiled, used and inured to the idea of being a spectacle. Starting in the fourth grade, she no longer needed to do her chores. They were always done for her.