The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [49]
“Really, I was worried sick,” she said.
I said nothing.
My mother began pacing back and forth on the braided rug.
“Look, Helen, you know it’s hard for me,” she said.
Nothing.
“There was no way I could face those men. I haven’t even been out in the yard since, well, you know, since that boy fell in the road.”
He was hit by a car! I screamed it, but only inside my head.
“Where were you?”
She looked at me, half accusing and half pleading. Her hands were shaking and reaching out about her to soothe some beast I couldn’t see, some phantom self that haunted her day by day. Mr. Forrest’s words were the only ones I heard: “mentally ill.”
“I suppose you went to Natalie’s. Don’t think I can’t smell booze when it passes by me. What did you tell that woman? Did you tell her your crazy mother was cowering in the bathroom? You won’t get very far bad-mouthing me to the neighbors, getting drunk with Natalie and her bilious mother. I can’t keep this house in order without help. Do you know where Natalie’s mother comes from? Do you? The South, just like me, but she did one of those ‘I’m moving north and losing my accent’ maneuvers like the South is some sort of trash bin she’s fleeing from. Believe me, if you think your little friend Natalie’s mother is any better than me, you’re crazy.”
I saw myself as if outside my body. I rose from my chair as my mother continued speaking, though I could not hear her anymore. Her hands were waving about her ever more wildly, and all I wanted was for it all to stop. The pink plastic glass was in my hand, and then my hand was shooting forward, and only the water hitting my mother’s face woke me to what I had done.
I wanted to tell her that I’d been hit; I wanted her to comfort me. I wanted to scream at her and rake my nails down her face. I wanted her to be sane. But instead she cowered, and I screamed, “Mr. Warner informed me that it is the consensus of the neighborhood that we should move!”
And then, just as promptly as I had stood up, I sat back down again on the lump of discarded clothes.
My mother did not make a move to dry her face. She smiled weakly at me and spoke very softly. “Mr. Warner would use a word like ‘consensus.’ He’s a . . .”
I could fill in the words—an actual Mad Lib! “Pompous ass.”
I could see that my mother was grateful for this, that I had greeted her back on the road she walked down. Water dripped off her nose and lips. Her face appeared glossy in the lamplight.
“One of the men hit me, Mom,” I said.
The more words I spoke, the more I felt my resolve, my separation, my autonomy, leaking away from me. She would own me yet.
She half turned away from me and looked down.
“Helen,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It’s just that . . .”
“Yes.”
“It’s just that I have . . . Well, you understand. You’re my daughter. I don’t fit in around here.”
I noticed my mother was toeing the edge of the carpet. The movement was obsessive and seemed to match the rhythm of her shaking hands. Somewhere she was trying to retrieve the language of apology but was struggling.
“Why don’t I brush your hair?” I said. “Like Dad does.”
I stood, and my mother brought her hands up in front of her face. She looked at me from behind them.
“I want to,” I said. “It will feel good, and then we’ll both go to sleep and things will be better in the morning.”
What I did not say was that I did not intend to speak to her again. That in the morning I would wake up and leave the house early so I wouldn’t have to see her. That I would begin to squirrel food away so I could claim I wasn’t hungry at dinnertime. That Mr. Forrest had given me a gift greater than any driving lessons or G&T. He had called my mother “mentally ill,” and I, even if my father never did, was determined to see this as our truth.
The next few weeks were exhilarating. When my father came home, I told him what happened in the yard and that Mr. Forrest had offered to teach me to drive. I didn’t need to mention that I wasn’t speaking to my mother because it was with this news that she greeted him at the door. All I knew was that in not speaking to her,