Kara McMullen
1.
The first woman stood at the window watching a crow lift its wings and clean them, feather by black feather. The tree in front of the house was past yellow, dropping its leaves. The house had been toilet-papered the night before but most of the white furls were gone. Now there were only spots, here and there, woven among the branches, of the tissue that would become sodden and then calcify into hard crusts of inert and lumpen matter over the next several months. Matter, as in something with physical substance in the world, as in distinct from mind and spirit. Her own matter, her own flesh, her own distinctness from mind and spirit, was up for debate. But more on that later.
She thought of herself in the third person sometimes—as the woman. It had started as a joke. She was, in their way of telling stories to each other that sought to educate but also to entertain, “the woman of the house.” The phrase was invoked with a mock formality, often when she had done something regrettable. Broken a dish, ignored the child.
They were looking for a new house anyway. The last bits of toilet paper weren’t important. Or they were, because they reminded her of something dead, but they weren’t, because she herself wouldn’t be cleaning them up. She turned from the window and went downstairs, hand lightly tracing the wall as she walked, brushing over picture frames of ancestors she could no longer accurately name. Down here the erratic piano playing was louder, the child practicing. She was no natural, the child, no Glenn Gould. Fur Elise was still a heavy lift, never mind contrapuntal Beethoven. The woman passed the door to the living room, hoping the child would not see her. The TV was on, scenes of war in Bosnia. Concrete filled with bullets like stars, buildings torn in half. It was 1993.
The kitchen was humid. The man was bent over the stove, cooking pasta. At one point his height and thinness had been rakish. A nineteenth century poet, perhaps, or that was what she had thought at the time. Now it had prematurely aged him, his body brittle and stooping, body, if not mind or spirit, exhibiting an elemental weakness. He was not really weak but the impression stuck. The kettle whined and he turned off the burner and looked up at her. Tea? he asked. She did not truly believe herself to be unhappy, but instead of answering him she went to the cupboard and removed the bottle of whiskey. She did not truly believe that one needed to drink alcohol to signify one’s unhappiness, but here she was. The liquid she poured into the glass was tea-colored and brackish, like river water. She drank it down and poured another, but that was all she would have. Two glasses. The windows looking onto the street were fogged and the plants by the window were reaching their green and blind leaves towards the windows, seeking.
They ate dinner then, plates of spaghetti, sauce almost crimson in the low light. The child fussed about her day and drank milk. It appeared that some other child had shunned her and she, new to the despotic nature of friendship, was hurt. The woman was never good in these moments. She wanted the child to be more empowered than she had been when she was young. She wanted the child to feel full and valuable, her existence as natural and easy as the existence of the crows settling down to roost in the tree outside. But it also seemed to her that accepting disappointment, understanding that some people in the world were terrible vacuums of need and squalor, was also a good thing to know how to do. As a kind of middle ground, she murmured comforting sounds and squeezed the child’s shoulder before she went back to eating her pasta. Mind and spirit could wait.
This is not to say there was no happiness, although the rustle of that particular day did have a tone of defeat to it. For example, after they all did dishes together, they went out to the yard and lay on their backs in the grass, moist now in the dark, and looked up at the stars. The man belonged to an amateur astronomical society and the woman liked to hear him talk about those distant balls of gas. The child chattered on about horses, her traitorous friend already or temporarily forgotten.
After the others had gone to bed the woman changed into a tight teal dress and put on a maroon lipstick that looked against her features slightly occult. She went downstairs and through the house, past the piano, past the spread of books gathering dust, past the hunched and unblinking TV.
In the car she drove toward the city. The news on the radio was not good—it was never good but the not goodness of it now felt amplified and specific, each shard of information angled to provide difficulty upon extraction. She turned the dial to music and then turned it off completely. The sulphur lights of the highway were something to follow. She followed them.
In the city now, the woman drove to a hotel bar that she liked. She came here often on nights like this. She didn’t come to drink, although she did that. She came to listen to the piano and to feel loose and easy. It wasn’t about the sex with strangers, although that also happened on occasion. It was more that here was where she slipped off her collar. She had not created a life she didn’t want to escape from. But she always returned. When she got home she would ease into bed and the smell would settle around her like a too-warm blanket.
There was no reason for her to have made herself small except that the world around her expected it. There was no need for her to be opaque to herself except that it was a way to survive. She hoped for more for the child without knowing how to enact that hope. Perhaps things would change. Perhaps in the future there would not always be the sense of a thunderstorm on the horizon. Or perhaps it would feel different in the body, or mind, or spirit, to sit and watch the lightning.
2.
That woman could have been my mother. I remember things about her as though she were: the ridges on her teeth like corrugated iron, her lower than usual center of gravity, her earlobes that were somehow grim. Her appetite for pickles, her ability to dissemble her thoughts.
She wasn’t raped or murdered on one of her nights away, nor did those nights of hers teach me how to more fully inhabit myself. All of those lessons would be too easy, like how it’s too easy to picture her in that hotel bar, mouth a moue of dissatisfaction. She had a way of calling things she didn’t like terrible, emphasis on the r’s, each syllable a tight fit against dry teeth.
Yesterday I packed up my apartment. All of the things I own into boxes, ill-advised hairsprays advertising varied technologies in the trash. I’ve been living alone for a year and it has been the year of the plague. Each day something new happens to be upset about and each day time feels more tangled, a low-lying forest of scrub I cannot find my way through. While I was sorting books to sell, I found a picture of my mother wearing that lipstick. I think she’d like it, the way I’m examining her she-ness, my I-ness. She read Barthes, after all. Today that invocation feels too overdone, too signifying of a certain kind of person, an easy out, a lazily abstract gesture towards a genre of the unreal. But Barthes perhaps would have enjoyed it, the signifier and the examination of it, and I play along with her, my mother, her mouth a fetid red. Where there is no body there is still, sometimes, mind. Spirit.
The moving truck comes later and then I will be off to a new life. Things can be categorized as good for me—I have many friends on Zoom and a cat who has her own Instagram account. On the sidewalk plants push up through the concrete amidst discarded pizza crusts. I wonder if I will miss the smell of this apartment, the way the smells of cooking not my own merge and accumulate in the corners. Along with the books all of my records are to be sold, the Ravels and Debussys and, yes, Beethovens. These no longer have anything to do with me. I am unburdened by my mother’s burdens and that perhaps was her goal all along, to remain distant so as to avoid transferring anything of weight or heft to me.
3.
The woman with the cat could have been me; her reality is tangential to mine and we have the same long second toe. But instead of the moving truck, outside my window a river runs high with spring runoff. There is a cold smell in the air, the plush look of new green leaves. Tiny oranges sit in their plastic net on the counter. My I is now my own, or as near to it as is possible, and I am someone whose mother did not do any of those things—the descending of stairs, the driving in silence, the hotel bar—because she could not walk. She could not stand. She had multiple sclerosis, and the version of her in a wheelchair is the only version I knew.
As a child I spent a lot of time wondering what it would have been like to have grown up with a different mother, one whose body interacted fluidly with the world, whose mind was undamaged by neural degeneration. The mothers of friends I watched closely, the way they cooked and danced and swept floors, the movement of their muscles underneath their clothes. Perhaps in order to extend the fiction I moved to LA, a place where it felt easier and then harder to pretend. Every time I came back I would feed her, my mother. She liked trail mix and guacamole and goldfish crackers and Chips Ahoy cookies, not the soft ones but the hard ones, and squares of Dove chocolate and cottage cheese and tortilla chips and Maxwell House International Suisse Mocha Cafe. She did not like ceviche but she tolerated tofu.
There is a picture of my mother in the early 1970’s, before children (there were supposed to have been three of us, but one died), before the wheelchair. She sits on a boulder, her long legs jutting away from her at odd angles. Her head rests in the heel of her hand and her sunglasses obscure her eyes. Although the aspens behind her are the flat gold of October, when I look at the picture I think of things blooming, planes arching through the clean spring sky. I think of her hands, long and supple and fine, the hands of a marble sculpture, and the way they became increasingly useless—calcified, almost, into contracted fists—with the passage of time. In the present of this picture, on that fall day in 1974, anything is possible. The matter is still in perfect accordance with the mind.
Kara McMullen is a writer and research scientist living in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been featured in Diagram, Quarterly West, and elsewhere, and was nominated for Best American Short Stories 2022.