The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [73]
I heard a few students grumble about a lack of time. How they wanted the poses to be longer. There was one boy I particularly disliked, even if I knew myself to be uncharitable. When I was introducing myself in the first week and telling them about myself, describing my daughters—where they lived and what they did—the boy had said, “So you’re, like, as old as my mother.” I had answered, because my pride knew no danger, that I was forty-nine. His two-word response, I told my mother, laughing, was “Vomit city.”
“I tried to seduce Alistair Castle once,” she had said to me. I stopped and stared. Early in her eighties, she’d begun to tell me things I’d never known. How she was touched inappropriately by a friend of her father’s. How she had stopped having what she called “relations” with my father after his accident. How she didn’t care much for Emily, though she enjoyed Sarah’s failed audition stories. “Imagine having to audition to be a waitress,” she’d said, loving that in New York a restaurant job could be so competitive it involved callbacks.
With each of these unexpected revelations, I grew numb, an art I had perfected over time in order to extract the truth behind the flashes.
“And how did your seduction go?” I had asked my mother, my head spinning with the pain this must have caused my father if he’d known.
“Vomit city!” my mother responded, looking into the empty fireplace, whose bricks were painted black. “Marlene Dietrich had it right,” she said. “For about ten years, you can glue rubber bands to your head and pull your skin tight, but after that, it’s about hiding out. At least then you have mystique.”
I wanted to tell her that in terms of mystique, she’d won the lottery. From Billy Murdoch to her blanketed escapades, her mystique was bulletproof, even if it was more about being creepy and strange than unattainable.
She looked from the fireplace to me. She assessed. “You should get plastic surgery. I would if I were your age.”
“No, thanks.”
“Faye Dunaway,” she said.
“Tits, Mom,” I said. “If I get anything done, I’m going to get huge monster tits. I’ll serve dinner on them, and you can eat off the right tit and I’ll eat off the left.”
“Helen,” she said, “that’s disgusting.” But I had made her laugh.
I stood to draw the blinds before turning on her PBS shows for the evening. As I lowered the blinds all the way and then went to the television in the opposite corner, my mother landed her spear: “Besides, Manny and I were talking, and we both think it’s your face that needs work. Your body is still fine.”
What I wanted to say was “I’m glad to know Manny wants to fuck my headless body.” Instead I said, “It looks like Wall $treet Week has been preempted by Live at the Boston Pops.”
Days later, the rest of her story came out.
“Hilda Castle was in the hospital, having a hysterectomy,” my mother said. “I offered myself.”
The phrase repelled me.
“You what?”
“I tried to seduce him.”
I was holding the large bath towels I used to mask her way to the car, and she was delaying us as she always did when we had to go to the doctor.
I stood just inside the front door and unfolded the first towel, draping it across her shoulders like a shawl. This was the backup. If, for some reason, the towel that was protecting her head and face should fall, she could quickly grab the shawl towel and replace it.
She peered into my eyes, the algae green of the towel darkening her papery skin.
“Does Sarah fuck?”
I knew enough to ignore her.
“We are late for your date with the machine,” I said. My mother was scheduled for an MRI and was deathly afraid. For weeks beforehand, I had arrived to find her lying on the floor of the living room with a ticking alarm clock by her head. “What are you doing?” I’d ask her. “Practicing,” she’d say.
Going to the doctor was one thing