I decided I would clean in the morning. I would get up early, bright-eyed and invigorated, and get the town house back in shape long before Jimmy and Haylie came home. By eight o’clock, I had already misted the plants and changed into my pajamas. I sat on the couch, my legs stretched out, with the leftover potato and my chemistry book. I was still a good student. I was not a completely different person.
Focus.
I looked back at the benzene diagram. I reread the equation. I closed my eyes. I opened them. I looked up at the clock. A single shelf, lined with books, sprouted from the wall behind the couch, fanged gargoyles guarding either side.
The Collected Works of Shakespeare
was prominently displayed. Apparently, Jimmy hadn’t sold his copy back at the end of the semester, which was interesting, given that he hadn’t seemed to have read any of the plays as we were studying them. But he did have a nice little library, right there within reaching distance of the couch. Vonnegut. Plato. Emily Brontë. Ginsberg and Burroughs. Plath. The bindings for the hard-backs cracked upon opening, the pages inside pristine. There were four books by Toni Morrison, a slim volume of Cliffs Notes tucked inside
The Bluest Eye
. Looking down at the other end of the shelf, I saw
Jane Eyre
. I had read it for freshman lit, which had been taught by a graduate student with flaming red hair and wire-rimmed glasses who told us on the first day that the freshman reading list had been put together by the English Department, and that the books were not what she would have chosen to have us read at all, and that she was at least going to frame them for us in alternately Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial perspectives. She had frightened me on that first day, but I had come to like her as a teacher, though she and I reached a temporary impasse when the class started reading
Jane Eyre
. I adored the book. Jane was a great heroine, I thought, with all her spirit and courage, and I believed the love story that unfolded between her and Rochester. The graduate student, however, firmly believed that
Jane Eyre
wasn’t a love story at all; she presented us with a published article that argued that at the end of the book, when Jane is the young wife to the old, blind Rochester, she is no more than his Seeing Eye dog, an underling hired to maintain the colonial, patriarchal status quo. I didn’t believe it for a second, and I was so indignant that I risked my English grade—my one dependable A for that semester—to argue on Jane’s behalf in my midterm paper. I wrote that Jane was not his Seeing Eye dog, but his equal companion. Society may have cast them as master and servant, but in their minds, they were equals, because he loved her, and she loved him—there was ample evidence for this in the text.
The graduate student was fairer than I’d expected. She returned our papers a month later, and on mine, across the top, was written:
I woke the next morning stretched out on the couch,
Jane Eyre
fallen to the floor. Sunlight streamed in through the living room’s sheer curtains. In the dorm, mornings were loud. There was always a door opening, a door closing, someone laughing in the hallway, a stereo blasting, or an alarm clock going off in an empty room. But the town house was peaceful. I was happy when I wandered into the kitchen, even with the suds-stained counters and mud-tracked floors, but then I saw the little digital clock by the oven. It was almost eleven. Jimmy and Haylie would be home by four.
Once again, I was stranded.
I tried calling Gretchen. No answer. My mother had called again, and left a message. I listened as I dug cigarette butts out of an aloe vera plant by the sink.
“If this is the only way I can communicate with you, I at least want you to know two things. One, you are not the only person in the world with problems. As your mother, I think it’s my job to let you know that. Two, I am, again, very sorry I let you down. But, Veronica, I guarantee that, in the future
,
if you are in a crisis, and you need me, I will be there for you. You can call me, and I will be there. The other morning was an isolated incident. I think if you look at my entire record as a mother, you’ll have to agree with that.”
I emptied the cigarette butts into the garbage. I debated with myself for only a moment. She answered on the first ring.
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s Veronica.”
“I know.” Her voice was breathy, distracted. I heard Bowzer’s wizened bark in the background. I waited. She didn’t say anything more. She was waiting for me to speak.
I kept my eyes on the plant. “You know how you just said I could call you the next time, you know, the next time I have a problem?”
“Yes?”
“I’m actually having one today.”
“What?” She paused to tell Bowzer to be quiet. She did this politely. She said “please.” To Bowzer. She came back to the phone. “What? Where are you? What happened?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not a crisis like…” I reconsidered making an out-and-out reference to the other morning. “It’s not really an emergency. It’s more of a little problem. But I could use your help.” I paused. I felt suddenly shy, repentant.
You are not the only person in the world with problems.
“If you’re not working, I mean. I don’t know if you have to work today.”
She laughed then, which surprised me. It wasn’t her normal laugh. It was lower, a little gravelly, like Bowzer’s bark. “I’m not working,” she said. Her laugh faded into a tired sigh. “I’m at your service. What is it, honey? Tell me what you need.”
She eyed the bloodstain from different angles. She turned the curtain over and held it up to the light. She looked a little rabbitlike when she wasn’t wearing makeup, her eyelashes thin and hard to see. “You know what might do it?” she asked. “Meat tenderizer. Go check and see if they have any.”
“It’s the best thing for getting out blood. Remember Elise used to get those nosebleeds? No, you were too young.” She turned and sneezed into the sleeve of her coat. “Poor Elise. She’d just be sitting there, at the dinner table, on the school bus, on someone else’s white couch, and then out it would gush, all this blood out of that little nose. The doctor said it would pass, and not to worry, but try telling that to a six-year-old. She’d get scared, and get her hands in it, and then it would just be everywhere.” She held up her finger and sneezed again.
“Bless you,” I said.
She looked at me. She appeared annoyed that I was just standing there. “Meat tenderizer.” She snapped her fingers. “The kitchen. Go check. I thought we were in a hurry.”
Jimmy and Haylie did not have any meat tenderizer.
“I’ll pick some up.” She was already moving back to the front door. She’d never even taken off her coat. “Is there a grocery store close by?” She stood with one hand on the knob of the open front door, her other hand jangling her car keys. “I want to pick up some microfiber cloths for the kitchen.” She shook her head, mild disapproval in her voice. “They’re the only thing to use on stainless steel. Don’t spray any more chemicals on it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I went to rub my eyes, forgetting I was still wearing her gloves. “About the grocery store, I mean. This isn’t really my part of town.”
Her eyes met mine, and I looked away. I had told her I didn’t want to talk about the town house, why I was there, who owned it, and why I needed to clean it very quickly. I had told her I didn’t want to have to explain anything. I just needed help. On a normal day, this request would not have been honored.
I am your mother,
she would have said.
I need to know what’s going on with you!
But today, at least, we both understood that she was still on probation, and that if I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have to say a word.
But before she left, she reached up to cup my cheek. Her hand—it was the one that had been on the doorknob—was cold to the touch. I leaned away, wiping my gloved hands against each other over the open bag of empty cups by the door. I could hear the tiny clinking of glass shards as they fell. When the clinking stopped, I took off the gloves and handed them to her. “Thanks,” I said. I kept my eyes away from hers. “You should put them on. It’s cold.”
She returned a half hour later with a bag of cleaning supplies, two chicken salads in plastic containers, and Bowzer. He appeared to have lost weight since the last time I saw him. A year ago, I would have had trouble carrying him in two arms, and now my mother held him easily in one. He peered up at me from under a mass of tangled graying fur.
He heard my voice and wagged his spindly tail. She handed me the bag of salads and tried to wave me aside. “Don’t be a jerk, Veronica. It’s too cold to leave him in the car.”
“Then you should have left him at home. I can’t have him in here. What if he pees? Or what if they’re allergic or something? I’ve got enough mess to clean.” I covered my nose, my mouth. “Mom. He smells.”
She looked at me. She looked at Bowzer. The bag of cleaning supplies hung from her wrist, swinging back and forth.
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “I’m not leaving him outside. It’s too cold, and he’s having a hard time.”
Bowzer gazed up at me with patient, cloudy eyes. He did not appear especially distressed. My mother, on the other hand, was breathing heavily, her nostrils flared. She was chewing gum. She never did that.
“I’ll put plastic bags underneath him. But if you want my help, he’s coming in.”
I took a small step to the side. She rolled her eyes and carried him into the town house. “Here you go, sweetie,” she said, setting him down in the entryway. He sniffed the air around him and took a hesitant step forward, claws tapping on the hardwood floor.
“He’s going to pee,” I said.
“No, he isn’t.”
“He’s going to shed. And they don’t have a vacuum.”
“What? How can they not have a vacuum?”
“They don’t. I looked all over.” I shrugged. “They have a maid.”
Her gaze moved up to a painting on the wall, one of Jimmy’s. The lines were vague, the colors blurred together, but I had decided that if you looked at it long enough, you could make out a decomposing head.
“Who are these people, honey?” She’d stopped chewing the gum. All at once, she appeared very familiar, her old self, her eyes full of worry for me. “Who are they, and how do you know them?”
I leaned down to scratch Bowzer on his sweet spot, the little indentation between his ears. He turned, sniffing the air between us, and wagged his tail again. “Hey, Bowz,” I whispered. “Remember me?” His collar hung loose from his neck.
“Of course he does,” my mother said. “He always loved you best. I just do all the work.” She took off her coat. It was her nice coat, the long black one that she only wore when she was dressed up, over skirts or dresses with boots. But today, underneath it, she was wearing her flannel nightgown tucked into khaki pants, no belt, and her gray cable cardigan hanging open. I didn’t read too much into it. She had come to help clean on her day off, a Sunday morning, and so it made sense she’d not bothered with her clothes. But then she went to hug me, suddenly, no warning at all, and there was a musty, almost salty smell about her. Her hair was unwashed, shiny at the roots, and pulled back in a tight ponytail. She caught me looking at her, and she seemed embarrassed.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said quickly. “I’ve got my vacuum in the van.” She pulled her coat back on. On her way out, she glanced back over her shoulder with a smile. “Don’t just stand there, honey. I’m going to help. But I’m not going to do it all for you.”