Dark Water - Laura McNeal [6]
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
No sign that she’d even heard me.
“Did you make gooseberry pie again?” I asked, going for humor. My mother is an impulsive overdoer who gets her feelings hurt a lot. When I was in second grade, she made me a Pilgrim’s dress for Thanksgiving complete with white cap, and then I had to wear it to school. When I was in third grade, instead of buying cupcakes at the grocery store like everyone else, she made petit fours decorated with pink French buttercream frosting—not pink because she squeezed a little bottle of red dye but because she boiled beets in water and made her own natural dye, which naturally none of the eight-year-olds appreciated. And once, she read a short story by Chekhov about this Russian guy named Ivan Ivanovitch who’d wanted all his life to eat his own gooseberries, so he bought a farm and planted the berry bushes and tended them like they were his little babies for what seemed like a century, but once he finally, finally tasted the gooseberries, they were sour—nothing could live up to his dream of the fruit. That’s the story. It’s all pointing to this moment when the fruit falls short of the memory of fruit. But my mom bought some canned gooseberries, the only kind you can get in California, and she made a gooseberry pie. (Gooseberries, if you don’t know, look like grapes, but they’re horrible.) I wouldn’t eat the pie, and neither would my father. It was a big letdown for her, even though I pointed out that this was the most Chekhovian result possible.
My mother sat dangerously still on the couch in her Talbots dress and her high-heeled shoes and didn’t answer me.
“I thought Dad was going to be here,” I said.
No movement from the couch.
“Was there a plane wreck?”
She shook her head.
“Are you sitting like that because Dad was killed?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that.
She shook her head.
“Is someone else dead or hurt?”
More head shaking.
There’s this finger game my mom made up when I was little, a variation on “Here is the church, here is the steeple” or “Where is Thumbkin?” My mom figured out that when I wouldn’t talk to her, I would talk to “Mrs. Nelson,” which was just her thumb popped up between her curved fingers. Mrs. Nelson the Living Thumb sat there like a grandma tucked into her covers and talked me through things like the extraction of a rod from my wrist and third-grade recorder concerts and throwing up on the bus during a field trip to Birch Aquarium.
Feeling pretty stupid, but also certain that something had set the world on a diagonal so steep everything in it was about to go sliding and crashing to pieces, I let my thumbnail poke up through my fist and I set the fist on her knee.
I wiggled my thumbnail like it was a friendly earthworm.
My mother looked at the thumb and said, in a very slow and controlled voice, as if she were issuing instructions for bomb-defusing, “Your dad was here. He said he doesn’t love me anymore. He hasn’t loved me for ten years. He’s going to live in Phoenix now.”
I pulled my thumb back out because I was so shocked, and Mrs. Nelson disappeared for good. I think I couldn’t stand for Mrs. Nelson to know what had happened to us.
For reasons I can’t explain to you because at the time it just seemed like our fate, my father didn’t have to keep paying the mortgage on our four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath Spanish ranch. We were what my mother called “upside down” on the house, which means you owe the bank more than it’s worth. That was because my father had refinanced the house to get the money for the project in Phoenix that was now, somehow, only in his name. So we sold things. We sold the $2,500 living room set my dad had picked out a few years earlier. We sold the extra freezer, the sofa bed, and the extra television. In each case, we were upside down. Little by little we gave away or sold or threw out everything, and I imagined it all falling through the air as our