I got back to the dorm just past midnight. When I first saw my mother sitting outside my room, I assumed she had come back for her phone. I walked toward her, shaking my head. I had asked for her phone again when I’d dropped Jimmy and Haylie at the town house. Jimmy said that he wasn’t sure where it was, but that he would look for it, and that he would probably find it around the time his car was fixed. I tried to think of how I would explain all this to my mother, and I tried to calculate how long this conversation might take. Half an hour. Maybe more. She would have all kinds of questions and concerns. I needed to read at least a chapter of chemistry before I went to bed.
“Hi,” I said.
She started to stand. The bottom of her coat caught under her boot, and she almost lost her balance. I held out my hand, and she took it, righting herself with a smile.
“Hi,” she said. “I met one of the girls on your floor.” Her voice was hoarse, quiet. “Marley? She plays the French horn?”
The bass drum of reggae music hovered overhead. I took off my mittens and put them in my pockets. I waited, my eyes on hers.
She held up one finger. She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose. “I’m here because…” She looked at the wall behind me. “Veronica. I’m here because I need a place to stay.”
My mind moved quickly to the acceptable. Her van had broken down. She had lost her keys, but she could get a spare from the office in the morning. The unacceptable—that she had had a fight with the boyfriend I imagined she was moving in with—hovered in the back of my mind.
She nodded, patient with my slowness, my steady refusal to understand.
I looked down. She had been sitting on a stack of folded sheets and blankets. I recognized the chenille throw that she used to keep on our living room couch, and the flower-print fitted sheet for the twin bed I had slept on for years. All at once, the floor seemed far away, and not at all dependable.
“I need to stay with you for just a while,” she said. She reached over with her ungloved hand to touch my shoulder. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry. It’s too cold to sleep in the van. You don’t know this? You don’t know this already? Honey. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
S
HE WAS TOO TIRED
to get into the whole story. In a nutshell, she said, she’d been evicted from her apartment because of the dog. Yes, she was having some financial troubles, which she was certain she could work out shortly. But she hoped I would understand if right now, she just wanted to go to bed. Her socks had gotten wet. She needed to borrow some dry ones before she went back down to the van to get the rest of her things and Bowzer.
I didn’t really have the chance. As soon as she put on my socks, she left to go get Bowzer. She was worried about him, even with his blankets, being down in the van for so long. “I’ll be right back,” she told me, pulling on her hat. Her cream scarf had gotten stained with something, maybe ketchup, since I’d last seen her. “I’ll have him with me, so don’t lock your door.” She stepped into the hallway and glanced back and forth before peeking back at me. “I’ll come up the back stairway. No one will see him. Don’t worry. And he’s all peed and pooped out for the night. I’m sure of it.”
I stood still after she left, staring at my closed door and listening to the vibrating pipes above. I blinked. I shook my head. I tried to come up with a sensible course of action—I would only have a few minutes before she returned. I could call Elise. But there was nothing she could do in San Diego, not tonight, not right now. I could call my father and insist that he help her. I could remind him that though they were no longer married, I was still his daughter, and she was still my mother, and that if he cared for me at all, he must still care for her a little. But that would be a long, loud conversation. My father could, and no doubt would, counter that the divorce—which she had caused—had put a financial strain on him as well, and that he was not responsible for her poor decision-making or whatever it was that had sucked up all her money. He was living simply, he would say. He hadn’t gotten himself into a jam. Any concern for me would be overwhelmed by his refusal to be concerned for her.
And anyway, she would see my calling him as a betrayal. “He wants to see me poor,” she had sniffed to me once, early on. “He wants to punish me. He wants to see me without anything at all.”
I looked at my watch. She’d already been gone two minutes. I searched my room for anything I might not want her to see, as if I were fourteen again, locking my diary out of fear that her obsessive curiosity might get the best of her while she was putting my laundry away. I considered that her priorities were different now, and that she might be just a little too preoccupied with her own troubles to worry about my every thought or decision. Still, I picked up the note Tim had left for me, folded it carefully, and tucked it inside my desk drawer.
When I heard the door to the stairway open, I hurried across the room and peeked out into the hallway. She was jogging toward me, her boots heavy on the carpet, her gait awkward. She had both straps of a duffel bag looped around her neck, and her hands cradled her belly. It was Bowzer, of course, hidden inside her buttoned-up coat; but as she panted toward me, she just looked pregnant. A girl stepped out of her room with a dried green face mask, headed toward the bathroom; she passed my mother with nothing more than a friendly hello.
Once we were in my room again, the door shut safely behind us, she eased Bowzer out from under her coat and set him gently on the spare bed. “There you go,” she whispered. He looked like a little black and gray lamb; his legs were so thin compared to his body. He whimpered, watching her take off her coat. She reached into the duffel bag and pulled out two Cool Whip containers, one full of dry dog food, the other empty. “We can put his water in this one,” she said, handing it to me. “It’s probably better if you get it, right?” Her tone was overly careful, polite.
I pointed out that she would have to use the bathroom eventually. It wouldn’t be a problem, I said. We were allowed to have overnight guests for up to two nights in a row.
“But you should probably keep a low profile,” I added breezily, as if I were just offering a friendly tip, something to make her stay more enjoyable. I wasn’t sure how many nights she thought she would need to stay.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll just do it all now.” She reached into the duffel bag and got out a ziplock bag that contained a toothbrush and toothpaste and several bottles and creams. “Can you stay with him while I’m gone? If we leave him alone, he might whine.”
She was almost out the door before she stopped and turned back. “One thing,” she said. She looked nervous. “I don’t want you to tell Elise about this. Or your father. I’d rather this stay between you and me.”
I rubbed my eyes. I shook my head, not so much refusing her as showing her my frustration. I had already planned on calling Elise in the morning, as soon as it was late enough in California. She would know what to do. She and her husband had a one-bedroom apartment, with no room for another person, much less a person with a dog. They were both just out of law school and, Elise had told me, still very much in debt. But I knew she would think of some way to help. Elise, more than anyone I could think of, always knew what to do.
“I don’t know why you can’t tell her but you can tell me,” I started.
Her eyes narrowed, as if she suspected I was being stupid on purpose. When she saw that my question was sincere, she sighed. “Yes, you do,” she said. She scratched her forehead with the hand that held the plastic bag, obscuring her face for a moment. When she brought it back down, to my surprise, she was almost smiling.
Bowzer whined anyway, as soon as she left, even with me standing right there. I moved him to my bed, scolded him, and then petted him lightly on the head, which probably only confused him. I
had
been his favorite while I was growing up—he’d follow me around the house, and sit by the door when I went to school But in my absence, his obsessive love had clearly been transferred to my mother. He was silent while I made up the spare bed with the blankets and rose-print sheets she had brought with her. I held them up to my nose and breathed in. They smelled clean. They smelled like the detergent she’d always used.
“Do you need anything?” I asked. “Are you…are you hungry?”
She shook her head, her eyes on the dark window, the orange streetlights bright over the parking lot. “I just met another nice girl,” she said. “Just now in the bathroom. Inez? From Albuquerque? Do you know her?”
I frowned. “You’re supposed to be keeping a low profile.” I did not know Inez. I looked at my chemistry book, waiting for me on my desk. I would not be able to study tonight, not unless I wanted to leave, and then wake her when I came in.
“I just said hello, honey.” She put the ziplock bag back in the duffel, her free hand moving down Bowzer’s back. “I didn’t want to be rude. You don’t know her? She lives right down the hall. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from Albuquerque in my entire life.”
I got out my little bucket and headed for the bathroom, hoping that she would take a cue from me and change into her pajamas while I was gone. I had not seen her undressed since eleventh grade, when she and I joined a gym together. The joint membership had been my idea: I’d wanted to take yoga, but I knew that she might not be thrilled with the idea of me signing up for one more class or hobby, so she could spend two more afternoons a week driving me there and back. So I’d pitched the yoga class as something we could do together. I didn’t just want to take yoga, I said. I wanted to take it with her!
My motives were not purely selfish. I really did think it would be good for her. Both of the grandmothers were still alive then, and my mother was spending a lot of time driving to the two different nursing homes, checking in on them and running their errands. She’d put on weight that year, not a lot, but enough to make her frown at herself when she passed the hallway mirror. Still, she would pick me up from driver’s ed and tell me that she was too tired to cook or even fix a salad, and more often than not we would go through a drive-thru, switching seats after we ordered so I could practice driving home. She usually got a chocolate sundae, and she would start in on it right there in the car, mumbling driving tips and stayed suprisingly calm as I carefully steered and shifted. I couldn’t wait until I had my license and I could drive by myself, but in the meantime, driving with my mother wasn’t so bad; I much preferred her company to my humorless driver’s ed teacher or my very excitable father. She let me choose the radio station, as long as I kept the volume low enough so I could hear her instructions and warnings.
And then one evening, as we were about to pull up our steep driveway, I asked her if we could keep going, if I could circle the neighborhood just one more time. She shrugged, digging her plastic spoon into her cup. “Fine with me,” she mumbled. “This is the best part of my day.”
That night, I looked up “depression” on the Internet. Experts suggested exercise, rest, and time with loved ones. I decided that yoga, and more time with me, might help.
But as it turned out, she wasn’t interested, at least not in yoga. She said she wanted something more intense—she’d recently had a dream about lifting something immense far over her head, and in the dream, she had been amazed both by how heavy the object was and also that she was able to lift it. And if the last two years had taught her anything, it was that she didn’t want osteoporosis. She looked at the schedule and saw that the gym offered a weight-lifting class called “STRENGTH CAMP” at the same time as the yoga class I wanted to take. What a coincidence, she said. What a sign. She said I was thoughtful to think of her. We could get some together time in in the car.
When she first started, she was miserable. She was too self-conscious to wear anything but baggy black sweats and a big shirt, and she came out of class red-faced and clammy with sweat. At home, she moved stiffly, wincing when she vacuumed, when she bent over to put on Bowzer’s leash. But then little bulges appeared in her arms. In the grocery store one day, without warning, she raised her hand, squeezed her fist, and made me feel her biceps. She started doing push-ups on the living room floor while my father watched the news. In late spring, she told my grandmothers and their attendants that she couldn’t help with any appointments before ten in the morning, and she signed up for a.m. Taebo. She modeled the punches and swipes for me in the kitchen, moving like a shadowboxer, sometimes laughing at herself, sometimes not. Her legs grew lean and muscular. She bought tank tops in different colors.
By June, it was too hot out to get in the car when we were still sweaty from class, and so we brought towels and shampoo and fresh clothes for the drive home. In the locker room, she did not exactly parade around naked. She wrapped a towel around her before she stepped out of the shower stall. But I would occasionally look up at the wrong time and catch a glimpse of her body, and it always made me uncomfortable. I didn’t know why. I had grown up seeing her naked, walking in on her while she was in the shower, on the toilet, and once—horribly, when I was nine—straddled on top of my father as he sat in his office chair. I was familiar with her full breasts and their dark, downward pointing nipples; the paleness of her belly marked by the crisscrossed scars from two Cesarean sections; the dark patch of pubic hair that had mystified and frightened me as a child; the tiny, snaky, blue veins on her outer thighs. This was all familiar. What was strange, and strangely disturbing to me, was the new leanness, the pronounced curve between her hips and her waist, the enviable tautness of her belly.
She stopped going to the gym sometime after the divorce. She was still thin, but it just looked like a tired skinniness, even a frailty—the muscles were gone from her arms. I didn’t want to see her like this, either. Tonight, especially tonight, I did not want to see her even a little unclothed. I needed the illusion of order, of distance. We were not friends or even roommates. She was still my mother, just staying in my room for a short time.