Mother
BY ELLIE WHELAN
It was the summer I turned seventeen that my mother and I moved into that sour New York apartment. Our two-room hovel tended to be upwards of ninety degrees, and my mother’s curls would crinkle and dance in the humidity of our cramped kitchen. I would watch her as she pulled together our usual breakfast: five scrambled eggs, four slices of toast, and seven strips of bacon (I tended most of the bacon, only to support her feeble attempt to rid her diet of meat). She swore she would learn to really cook that summer, but the heat was wild and we ate out almost every evening. The two of us spent the summer trying to make that torrid apartment into a home; my mother stumbling through the door with picture frames and old books and posters of her favorite film stars, and I cleaning the windows and trying to get the old brown spots out of our few pieces of furniture. We did what we could, but our work was mostly futile, as both of us tended to leave our building at eight in the morning and not return until far after dusk.
My mother spent her days as a receptionist in a law firm, working eight-hour shifts, and I would waitress in the afternoons at the diner two blocks south. Together we made decent money. We managed to buy ourselves a worn green couch, the first piece of furniture we could afford on our own, something my mother exclaimed “finally belonged to us.” She hung a spotted High Society poster above that couch and put her record player from college on the floor right below. I became fond of the tattered cushions, spending the little time I had in the apartment lying across the unraveling fabric and listening to Chuck Berry records from my grandfather’s collection. My thoughts would often wander to the image of a boy, one who had his own apartment with hardwood floors and delicate wallpaper, cut crisply at each Corner.
“One day I’ll meet a nice boy,” I thought out loud as I was falling asleep one evening on the fading green cushions. (It was July 3rd , I think. I remember Terry at the diner told the waitresses to put little American flags in all the pies.)
“I’ll meet him and we’ll have a nice wedding on Cape Cod and we’ll move into our own home and he’ll be rich and I’ll be rich and I’ll make sure you never see a place like this again.” She glanced at me, a slight wrinkle forming between her eyes.
“What’s wrong with a place like this?” she asked. She sat with a wine glass in hand—the same $12 Cabernet she’d been drinking since she had moved to the city twenty-three years earlier—and her rickety chair faced the television, her skin glowing blue in the light of Charlie Rose.
“This place is ours; it’s for us.”
She turned away from me, and I let her. The bottle of Cabernet sat on the table in front of her, nearly empty. I was afraid she would start up about her husband, my father; she often did when she’d had this much to drink. She missed him and she wished he would call. When she spoke of him, her voice would crack as if she were going to cry, but I don’t think she ever did, at least not to me. It seemed she drank for patched memories: with a glass in hand, she remembered only what she had loved, not what she had left. She drank for him, for glamorous fabrication.
She didn’t mention him on that July night. Instead, she stood up from her chair as
Charlie Rose’s laugh filled the hot, sticky silence of our living room. She sat next to my resting head and her fingers—somehow still cool in the dead heat of a New York summer—ran through my tangled hair. Her hand paused against the nape of my neck, and I felt that she didn’t want me to speak. If I spoke, I would only remind her that she was with me and not him, that we were alone in our monotonous days and couch-ridden nights, trapped in the smell of burnt toast and the sounds of her father’s scratched records.