Authors: Matthew Quick
What is my mother’s real-life saber-toothed tiger? I’ll probably never know.
Now we have reality TV shows, memoirs, and all sorts of information and resources about hoarders, but when I was a child I didn’t even know the word for what my mother was. There was never a diagnosis, so how could there have been a solution? No one found my mother grotesquely fascinating enough back then to put her on television and make her disease part of popular culture. I can’t decide if that was a blessing or a curse. And regardless, I’ve come to believe that there is no cure for Mom now.
Her mind’s been rotting for far too long. Some people you just can’t resurrect, no matter how much you love them.
The living room is almost inaccessible, as Mom has made a mini city of out-of-date phone books and expired coupon clippings tied up with string. There are pyramids of cheap teddy bears and plastic-faced baby dolls, more cases of Diet Coke with Lime stacked and waiting to quench my mythical thirst, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton records purchased by mail order and still in the original plastic because Mom owns no record player, shoe boxes crammed with receipts older than me, endless cans of spaghetti sauce, never-been-cracked cookbooks, my grandfather’s childhood baseball card and tool collections in boxes labeled D
ADDY’S
S
TUFF
, and so many other useless items, stacked and teetering in a way that reminds me of Dr. Seuss cartoons.
“Don’t move anything,” Mom says. “Just don’t. I know where everything is!”
“Where can I sit?” I ask facetiously, because sitting anywhere but in Mom’s crumb-infested pink recliner is an impossibility.
“Your room,” she says. “That’s your space. I haven’t touched it.”
“Have you been saving the money I’ve been transferring into your account?”
“Of course! We have lots of money! I have bank statements. Every single one!”
“I bet you do.”
“I would never ever—”
“Mom, I’ve left Ken. We’re done.”
“You’ll work out your differences. Couples fight. That’s the way it—”
“No, Mom. He cheated on me. With a very young woman—among others. He’s not been nice to me. He’s been subhuman. Awful. Really shitty, Mom. I’ve completely fucked up my life.”
“Don’t curse like that, Portia! Not in my father’s house!”
“Mom, can I stay here awhile? I don’t really don’t want to live in a hotel right now. And I don’t have the energy to rekindle any of the old friendships that I failed to maintain because I’m a bitch who chose money over true connections.”
“You can stay in your room! Right here! Sure, sure, sure! I can get more Diet Coke with Lime at the Acme right across the street. Please stay. Please! I would
love
for you to stay.”
“Thanks, Mom. But we have enough soft drinks, I think. And I’m getting more and more worried we might kill each other. You did hear the part about Ken cheating on me, right? That was a pretty significant part of the story, which probably requires acknowledgment from you. I’m really leaving him.”
“Don’t rush to conclusions, Portia! Family is family.”
“We got by before Ken. We’ll get by now. Somehow. I’m starting over. I’m kind of in pain. My heart is broken. As high school as that sounds. I should warn you that I’ve been drinking a lot, and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.”
“I haven’t touched your room. That’s
your
space. The Diet Cokes too. With lime. Drink those! Those are for you. Just don’t touch anything else in the house. Okay? Everything will be fine. Everything has a place. Everything. Even you. On the walls of the dining room and in your bedroom upstairs. That will always be your space. It’s so good to have you home!”
“I can’t live like this again,” I say to the ceiling.
“Would you like another Diet Coke with Lime?”
“Why not?”
Mom waddles around her mountain of
National Geographic
s and returns with a fresh Diet Coke with Lime. I hand her my old one, which is still full.
“This new one is much colder,” she says.
I nod.
I sip.
It
is
colder.
I look around the house at all of the various collected shit piled high and the many dust bunnies. Then I look deep into the sick kind doughy eyes of my mother, the only person to ever love me unconditionally, maybe because she’s absolutely bonkers.
But she does love me.
That’s my one absolute.
She would bring me a new Diet Coke with Lime every ten minutes for the next six months if I asked—hell, the next six years, without sleeping more than nine minutes at a time—and she’d do it with boundless joy in her heart, completely satisfied to offer what she thinks I desire.
I wrap my arms around my mom and bury my face in her plump shoulder, feeling her bra’s thick shoulder strap cut into my chin.
“Portia—why are you hugging me so hard?” she says.
“Just because.”
“I love hugs!”
“I know, Mom. I love you. I really do. But I fucked up my life.”
“Please don’t use profanity in my father’s home, Portia. I raised you better. Your grandfather didn’t allow cursing in this house, and neither do I.”
“You
did
raise me better.” I start to sob. “It’s true.”
Mom rubs my back and offers me another Diet Coke with Lime, but I just cry into her shoulder and think about how I can’t quite get my arms all the way around her and wonder how many inches separate my two middle fingers that are resting on her shockingly thick bra strap.
I guess five inches, and then—in my mind—tell myself to stop crying.
“Can I take you to breakfast?” I ask.
“Why are you crying, Portia?”
“Let’s have breakfast at the diner.”
“Now?”
“Yeah. Right now.”
“Can I go like this? Where are we going? Which diner? Who will be there? How can we even know? Is it a safe time to go? Maybe we should wait until there are less people there. I don’t know, Portia. I just don’t know.”
She’s in the pink sweat suit she wears every day, brown stains floating like continents in a pastel sea of cheap, worn cotton. She has at least fifty different pink sweat suits stacked in her bedroom, which she purchases whenever she gets up enough courage to take the bus to Walmart and finds a pink sweat suit on sale for less than $9.99, which is the maximum she will pay. All of her extra pink sweat suits still have the tags attached, because she wears the same damn one over and over again, and wants to have the option of taking the extra ones back should she ever run low on money. She has receipts for pink sweat suits from the Clinton administration. And yes, she and the entire house reek.
Mother goes to the Acme across the street once a week at 9:43 on Tuesday night, because that’s when the fewest cars are in the parking lot. She counts the cars from the living room window obsessively and keeps a chart. Tuesdays at 9:43 has been the best time to go shopping for some time now, unless it’s changed since the last time we spoke on the phone. She always diligently reports the number of cars in the Acme parking lot, whether I ask or not, and I never do. She has a record going back several decades. It’s a shame there isn’t a market for this sort of data. She’d be the Bill Gates of food-store parking statistics.
“If you really love me,” I say, making a preemptive strike to
her Achilles heel, “you’ll go to breakfast with me right down the street at the Crystal Lake Diner. We’ll have waffles maybe. You could use a walk. We need to get you outside more. You look sort of pasty.”
“A walk! In the daylight! They’ll see me! They have small planes now with cameras. Drones, they’re called! I saw this on TV. The drones can shoot you dead too! Anywhere in the world!”
“The government is not watching you, Mom. They could care less about you, believe me. The US government only cares about rich people! Last time I checked you’ve never lived in Faddonfield.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Mom taps the soft flesh of her right palm against her forehead. “I don’t know. I don’t know.
I didn’t vote for Obama
. And
not
because he’s black either. But they have records! And now that we have a black president—it’s hard to trust anything these days.”
“You haven’t voted for anyone in three decades, white or black.”
“They’ll shoot me for being unpatriotic then!”
“Listen, Mom.” I lift her chin with my index finger until our eyes meet. “I promise it’ll be okay if you eat breakfast with me at the diner. I promise.”
“We could eat here!”
“We can leave the house and be okay. I swear. Do this for me, and I won’t throw anything away for at least a week. You can rest easy for seven entire days. And a week is long. I might lose interest in cleaning the house by the end of it. I won’t touch a thing. You’ll have my word.”
“This is
my
house!
My
father gave it to
me
!”
“Mom. Focus. Breakfast. At. The. Diner,” I say, karate-chopping the periods into the air between us, thinking about how Ken and I have paid her taxes and debt for the last seven years just so she won’t lose this wonderful little shithole. We’ve actually prepaid ev
erything for the next few years too—taxes, cable, water, electricity, everything. Less than Ken spends on his monthly cigar and scotch supply.
“I don’t know,” she says, but she’s nodding in a way that lets me know we have a deal.
After she’s wrapped everything but her eyes up in a pink scarf, covering enough of her face to appease the strictest and most sexist Taliban members, we walk down the street holding hands, just like we did when I was a little girl, only now it’s my mother who waits at corners looking in my eyes for permission to cross and flinching whenever cars roar past and begging me not to let go of her.
She’s shaking the whole time.
Leaf-in-a-hurricane shaking.
“Can I just wait outside?” she asks when we arrive at the Crystal Lake Diner. “I can stay right here until you are finished eating, yes? I’ll be good.”
“No,” I say, and drag her inside by the arm.
It looks like every diner in South Jersey—booths, a bar with permanently fixed-to-the-floor stools, old people nursing cups of coffee, overweight people enjoying heaping portions of greasy heart-attack-inducing delights, kids in high chairs at the ends of tabletops, solo men reading old-fashioned newspapers.
In other words, this is home.
We don’t have to wait, but we’re seated in the back room.
“I don’t like this. I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit,” Mom says several dozen times. Her scarf is still covering her forehead and chin, making her look like a cross between a fat ninja and a wounded earless Easter bunny, but she’s uncovered her nose and mouth. To be more precise, she looks like a homeless person, like someone to pick up off the streets and lock up for her own protection. “This isn’t enjoyable for me,” she says. “Not in the least!”
“You’re doing this because you love me, and mothers and daughters who love each other go out to breakfast from time to time. In South Jersey, they go to the diner. That’s normal. Obama actually passed a law stating that mothers have to eat breakfast out at a restaurant with their daughters two times a month or else they will be fined a lot of money and people will come and straighten their houses for them. Congress is thinking about using the drones to enforce the law and—”
“Stop teasing! I hate this! How much is the fine? I’ll pay it. Just no drones!”
“Mom, I swear to God, if you complain one more time, I’ll clean out the house today.”
“No! No! No! No! No! No!” she shrieks loud enough to make people turn and look.
I’ve pushed her too far already.
Yes, I remember you, old friend, Mr. Guilt.
“Shhhh, Mom. Relax.
I’m sorry
.”
“I don’t—”
“Coffee?” a woman says.
“Please. For both of us,” I say, because my mother is looking at her lap and pretending to be invisible, which she does often in situations like this. I study our waitress’s face and red dye job and then say, “Hey, aren’t you Danielle Bass?”
“Yeah,” Danielle says as she finishes filling Mom’s cup with coffee. “That’s what it says on my name tag. . . . Wait.” She looks at my face and then says, “Oh, my god! Portia Kane? Is that really you?”
“Just add a few dozen wrinkles to your memory,” I say.
“I haven’t seen you for— What are you doing here? I heard you escaped to Florida. Married some . . . is he a movie maker?”
She’s being polite here. Ken owns a company that makes ex
tremely popular porno flicks specializing in spring-break college-girl fantasies. I guess word got around.
I should add that meeting people you know but haven’t seen for decades is quite common in South Jersey diners—they are like time machines that way—but you have to have attended kindergarten through high school in the diner’s school district for the magic to work.
South Jersey diners also have secret homing calls that they send out around the globe, summoning you back to eat unhealthy food.
“Came home to visit my mom,” I say, lying for no apparent reason. “And for a trip to the old Crystal Lake hangover cure.”
“Hi, Mrs. Kane,” Danielle says, but gets no response.
“My mom’s not very talkative,” I say and give Danielle a wink, hoping she’ll just move on.
She nods. “Yeah, well, I’m waitressing here. Straight out of ‘Livin’ on a Prayer.’ I bring home my pay for love. Only my name’s not Gina. And I ain’t got a man. Just a boy. He’s five. Guess what his name is?
Tommy
. Swear to God. That’s his name. He doesn’t work on the docks. Obviously, because he’s only in kindergarten over at Oaklyn. And I didn’t name him after the guy in the song. I wasn’t working the diner by day when Tommy was born either. Just a stupid coincidence. You must think I’m a moron. But we sing the song together anyway, often during bathtime. Tommy and me. He likes it. My little man. And Bon Jovi—never gets old, right? Classic. Especially for us Jersey girls.”
“Congrats.” I raise my coffee mug to her. “On Tommy and all the rest.”
“Yeah, big winner me.”
Danielle looks so ashamed of her situation that I blurt out mine before I can think better of it. “I just caught my husband screwing a teenager, so maybe you’re doing better than I am. I’ve left him.”