Last Resort
Excerpt from: “Last Resort”
Cousin Sandy’s driveway is marked with a heart—a piece of tin hanging off the bottom of her mailbox—painted red. You’d think a therapist would want a head hanging off her box, a big head bobbing in the wind. At least then her patients would know where to turn. But instead there’s the heart and past that only tire tracks through the bright white snow. Is this where my mother expects me to spend the winter, this nowhere place of blue mountains and bare trees and actual living deer that leap out at your car when you sail around the first blind bend? My mother got into a panic when she almost hit a deer, its white-tailed backside giving her heart palpitations for the past half hour. Now that we’re safely in the house, Cousin Sandy has made my mother a cup of tea and Cousin Larry has a hand on my mother’s arm, telling her there’s nothing to worry about, the deer got away, the deer is just fine.
“I don’t care about the deer,” my mother says. “We could have had an accident. What if we had an accident and I lost consciousness and no one was there to keep an eye on Angela?”
All three look at me. There’s my mother, hair pinned back, mouth tight. She widens her eyes, whites blazing, and holds them on me like she could keep me in my chair just by staring. That’s the look she gives me when she doesn’t want trouble. Just seeing it makes me think: Oh, yes, trouble. Then I try to come up with a good way to make her crazy.
Cousin Sandy is on the bench seat beside my mother—they look alike, but only when you squint. Sandy has my mother’s dark hair, except hers is unsprayed and unpinned, reaching the middle of her back. They have the same long-lobed ears, yet Sandy’s are pierced in at least seven places. On her big feet she wears moccasins with little bits of fringe hanging off the toes like an elf. How do her patients take her seriously in shoes like that?
Also, Sandy has my mother’s mouth. It sinks in when she closes it, like a tight silver snap. I hate that mouth. Cousin Larry, who Sandy introduced as “My Larry,” like a pet, has a ponytail and also a beard, so I can’t really see his mouth. He looks fifteen years younger than Sandy, at least. He’s nervous with his hands, touching Sandy, then my mother, then Sandy again. He has the kind of long fingers that means he was born to play the piano. I smile at him and this sets my mother off.
“How could you not have mentioned this?” my mother says to Sandy, pointing a finger at Larry. She won’t say in so many words what she means, but I know. We’re in the kitchen. The walls here are decorated with every known cooking utensil, including iron spatulas and three-pronged forks.
Where we’ve landed is upstate New York, a town at the rolling base of Overlook Mountain. What’s making my mother so upset is the existence of Larry, i.e., the fact that he’s male and that he lives here in Sandy’s house. My mother wants me to also live here, where I’ll be in therapy twenty-four hours a day and come out all smiley and shiny new. My mother told Sandy all about me. Their most recent phone conversation went like this:
“I’m at a loss. I’m on a cliff and I have to throw her off or else I’ll fall.” This was my mother talking about me on the phone in the kitchen. She thought I was in my room, but I’d snuck out to spy.
What kind of mother would throw her own flesh and blood off anything, let alone a cliff? Good thing we live in the suburbs, where the only hill is the speed bump just before our community gate. Still, it’s a pretty big bump and I could see my mother pushing me off the top, saying get out and stay out, kicking me out the gate onto the two-lane turnoff before the highway. I wonder why she hadn’t done it already.
Last week, I “pushed all her buttons.” I “went too far.” I “did this to myself, Angela.” I’m paraphrasing. There was our neighbor Bill, a pretty nice guy who could be counted on to water our plants when we were away. Bill also had a weakness for girls, but my mother didn’t know that until she went to give him a magazine that had mistakenly ended up in our mailbox and found me on his lap in his living room, his Orioles cap on my head.
“Angela!” my mother shouted. She didn’t shout, “Bill!” She didn’t say, “Get your hands off my daughter!” Her rage was all on me, always and only me, and I don’t think even Bill could have convinced her otherwise.
She made me remove the hat and then she sat me down in our kitchen. She said, “What am I going to do with you?”
“You don’t have to do anything with me,” I said.
“Yes I do. The principal won’t let you back in your own school, do you know that?”
I shrugged.
“All you have is a tenth-grade education. What are you going to do with yourself? Work in a supermarket?”
I shrugged again. It was involuntary—like blinking. I did many variations of this shrug until she let me leave the kitchen, and then, just as involuntarily, I was sneaking out the window and hitching a ride to a party near the university. It was either that or go to sleep. At the party, before it got raided and I got picked up on the Beltway by police, I had a vivid moment on Ecstasy where I saw a flash of myself as I really am—not as the principal saw me when he kicked me out or as the college student saw me when he told me to get the hell out of his room or even as my mother sees me when she acts all wounded and says, “What happened to you?”—like she wants me to be seven years old again with the two braids and the pink-checkered shirt on the swings. I saw myself and I looked fine. Chill, I thought. Who cares what they think? I love me just the way I am. . . .
(excerpt modified from the original / 2006, Small Spiral Notebook)