Alligator - Lisa Moore [12]
She went to bed each Sunday night, for three weekends in a row, overwhelmed with anxiety about getting David’s present before Christmas morning. Once, her mother slapped her calculator against the dining-room table and shouted, Didn’t I say I’ll get you there before Christmas? What did I say?
You said you’ll get me there.
And have I ever let you down? It was a question that stumped them both for a few moments.
Later, after putting Colleen to bed, her mother hesitated, standing at the door in the bar of light from the hall. She idly turned the doorknob a few times and the tongue made a clicking noise. It was an old house in downtown St. John’s. It had previously been a boarding house and when Colleen’s parents moved in all the bedroom doors had padlocks on the outside. A few had been kicked in and the splintery holes were badly repaired with plaster. David had found enough antique doors, over the years, to replace the cheap modern ones. Doors that needed to be stripped and planed and fitted with heavy glass knobs that looked like jewels.
I’ll get you there, now stop sulking, her mother said. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a baby. Then she closed the bedroom door and left Colleen in the chilly darkness. Colleen listened to her mother’s heels on the hardwood floor and then in the kitchen until she was overtaken by sleep.
The words piece of shit uttered by the woman in the wheelchair had brought Colleen’s nausea to the surface. She felt as if she had been sliced into a thousand limp pieces and was about to fall apart. Colleen had never heard adults speak to each other quite so honestly, had never seen her mother treated with anything less than strict attention or the sort of incidental admiration glamour inspires.
Now she saw there was something spoiled about her mother. With this one profoundly dirty phrase — piece of shit — everything had been laid bare. She threw up all over the front of her coat and her new boots and the glaring tiles of Wal-Mart. Her mother was down on her knee at once, unbuttoning the soiled coat and folding it into a tight knot with the shiny black lining on the outside. She took a tissue from her purse and wiped Colleen’s mouth and then her boots and then she stood.
Okay baby, let’s get the hell out of here, she said.
I’m getting Daddy a present, you promised.
Honey, you’re sick. We’ll have to come back later.
It was abominable. Her mother had nearly knocked a woman out of a wheelchair, and now they were leaving without a single purchase.
Look at the lineups, her mother said.
Colleen had a Christmas list crunched up in her pocket — it had taken hours to write in different crayons. David had helped her, his bristly silver hair tickling her cheek, the softness of his flannel shirt. How abruptly his giant hand spilled the crayons over the table and spread them. He was short and his eyes were wolf blue and he could take her onto his lap and cover her hand with his and they wrote the list together like that, his chin resting on the top of her head. She loved David with an intensity that had nothing in common with what she felt for her mother, which was a duller, more enduring, inevitable love.
A glaze of tears came to her eyes. When she cried it generally sent her mother into a short-lived fury that resulted in Colleen getting what she wanted. She hardly ever cried, and never on purpose. She hated it as much as her mother, but she was suddenly exhausted. Then, strangely, she was swept with a fury of her own. It felt new and disorienting.
You’re nothing but a piece of shit, she said evenly.
Colleen thought, Goddamn her. Nothing hurt more than her mother’s cold shoulder, mostly because it was involuntary. It was a dry-ice, burning kind of cold that required massive amounts of energy to ignore. Colleen was terrified and compelled by her mother’s anger. She was drawn, against her will, to be in the same room with her. Everything