the mother

I call her. I don’t want to, but I do it. I have to psych myself up, though. Practice things to say. Think of good questions. Clever segues. Try out greetings: “Hi, Mom!” “Heey, Mom.” “What’s up, Mom?” I rule out that last one — it’s too breezy, she’ll hate it — while telling myself Maybe it’ll be all right. Maybe she’ll seem normal today. Maybe it’ll be short and sweet. I tell myself that every time I call. For 23 years, I tell myself that, loudly, in my head, trying to shout down what I know is true: Something is wrong with her. She’s in pain. Says she’s burning, her whole body feels on fire all the time. Doctors say nothing is wrong. But I have Lyme disease, she says. No, you don’t, they counter. But I know I have it, she insists. You don’t, they say. And she is left with no proof of what she believes is true. She is sick with something, I believe that. Something has irretrievably altered my mom, stolen an entire woman and replaced her with symptoms and manipulations and bitterness. I have my theory, but it’s of no consequence. She has Lyme disease, do you hear? She has Lyme disease. And that is the only truth that can be spoken by anyone in our family.

And you, too, for that matter.

She has Lyme disease, do you hear?

*******

It’s one of those perfect lemony days, years ago — I don’t know how many anymore — and I am driving like a madwoman to this cheesy place where she is apparently holed up. My dad has just called, weary, matter of fact, “Mom’s at a motel. She says there are bugs in her clothes and bugs in her skin and that they’re poisoning her.”

“Okay. Tell me where she is,” I sigh. There’s no “What?” or “What are you talking about?” or “Oh, my God!” I don’t even remember when those reactions stopped. I barely remember ever having them. Now it just is what it is.

Ten minutes later, I stand before a pale peach motel door, take a deep breath, start pounding. “Mom? It’s me. Let me in. Mom? Mom?” I don’t want the door to open, but I call out nonetheless.

I hear movement. A thudding. Then there’s a crack, the door opens, showing a slash of deep teal carpet. But it’s just shadow in there and I still can’t see her.

“Tray?!” Her voice quavers with near-hysteria. I hear that and feel my insides shrink, sink, as if from somewhere deep inside they’re trying one last desperate trick to pull me away. They always do that when she sounds like this.

“Yeah, mom. It’s me.”

She starts sobbing in the darkness.

I’m tired already.

“Mom, I’m coming in.”

I push the door open and finally, I can see her, standing a few feet away, shaking in white underwear and a white bra. Her skin looks bleached and clammy and livid with red stripes. She’s been scratching or something, probably clawing at her hair too, which is a mass of crooked blonde tufts. Her legs bow out awkwardly and her torso floats above them like some kind of white flesh buoy. She looks weird, simian, and the full effect of her feels like an affront. Too much intimacy. It embarrasses me. I shouldn’t be thinking that now, probably, but I don’t know this mom, this blatant in-her-underwear mom. I know some people grew up with radical carefree moms who lollygagged around their homes in their underwear and stuff. I mean, my friend Hedy Hanson’s mom was that kind of mom — free-wheeling like that. I know because Hedy told me that once on the swings in the park and I was thoroughly horrified and also relieved that I never had to witness that, living in a respectable home myself. Shame on her, rang the thought in my scandalized, eight-year-old head. Who walked around like that? Not my mom. She was not free-wheeling; she was not nonchalant; she was above all that, striding around fully clothed, calling Hedy Hanson’s mom these big strange-sounding words I didn’t understand in this tight strange-sounding tone I didn’t like. In our home, the definition of underwear was taken quite literally and those little personal items always remained reliably under. The house could have caught fire in the dead of night with black smoke slapping us down to the floor and we still would have been expected to cover our underwear before running for our very lives. That’s just how it was. I mean, there was modesty and there were boundaries and what’s wrong with that, you know? So from the time I was very little, I’d placed my faith in my mom’s perpetually prim nature and here she was, failing me in that, failing miserably.

My eyes drag over her again. She’s still half-naked, still shaking, still weeping. I want to leave, but I promised my dad I’d talk to her. Not that I’m likely to think of anything helpful to say to her. I should do something mature or say something mature, but I’ve got nothing here. She clutches shakily at my arm and drags me in farther. I just want to throw clothes at her. Cover her with a towel. Something. Her voice warbles, “Oh, thank God! Thank God you’re here! Quick. Come over here. You gotta help me with the bugs! They’re poisoning me.”

“What are you talking about, Mom?”

I don’t mention what Dad already told me, what I already know. I play dumb. I don’t know why, really. Maybe I just want to make her say it. Maybe I don’t want to validate her reality by saying, Oh, yeah. Dad told me all about the bugs. Or maybe I’m just selfish with what I think is real.

“Traaacey!” Her voice curls around in irritation. She’s annoyed that I don’t get it, that I’m outside of where she is. “Come ON. The bugs! Okay, look. Co’mere. Look.” She opens the bathroom door and points indignantly at the counter. “Look! Look at that,” she insists. I lean down and look. Streaked across the white tile counter is a brown smear — a brown smear ending in a tiny brown ball. “See that? It’s one of the bugs! It was on the counter — and I saw it — and I smushed it! See? See?” She speaks in little puffs of words.

I lean in closer, so close that the cool of the tile feels almost like a breeze on my face. The smudge actually looks like it could be a dead bug. I mean, look closely: there’s a streak of bug blood here and a clump of dead bug there, right? So maybe it is. Maybe for once, there is sense to this. Maybe it’s real. I’m close to the clump now, studying, sniffing. There’s a vague scent coming from the smear. What? I sniff again.

Oh.

“Mom …. uh …” I hesitate, “this is chocolate. It’s chocolate.” I pause and look at her. “Have you been eating chocolate?”

“No.” She looks back at me, blank.

Glancing down, I see the trash can, dotted with tell-tale brown and orange wrappers. Reese’s. My mom loves Reese’s.

“Mom, there’s some Reese’s wrappers in the trash can.”

She just sobs. Control is slipping right out of my grasp here. There’s the truth of that trash can and there’s the hysteria of my half-naked mom and I cannot mesh the two. They don’t jibe. I feel myself cracking in the face of opposites. I want to believe her because she’s my mom and I am, at least superficially, the dutiful daughter. But I also want her to be the mom, the way it’s supposed to be. I want her to be normal. I want her to stop. I want to leave. I want to be absolved. I want to smack her.

Mom sidesteps. “But … that’s not chocolate!” she wails. “It’s the bugs! She pumps her arm frantically for me to follow, “Come here! Come over here!” I hesitate and she pumps her arm at me again as she toddles over to the tacky peach- and teal-colored bed. So I follow, surrendering all thought to the woman in the white underwear because, right now, it’s easier to follow than to think. Groaning with the effort, she rolls onto the bed, onto her stomach, and starts bossing me, in a muffled voice, “Okay. Any red dot you see on my back has a bug in it, all right? You need to squeeze it to get it out. Your father won’t do it. Do you see any red spots?”

“Yeah, Mom, but they’re real small. I have some of those, too. I don’t really think …”

“Squeeze one!” Her voice is brittle, crackling. Crushed leaves.

“But, Mom, they’re not …”

“Tracey, you’ve gotta do it. That’s the only way to get rid of them.” Her hands clutch and unclutch at the bedspread, psyching herself up for this longed-for purging. I sit there like a lump. She buries her whole face in pillow, exhaling leaden breaths that sink the mattress underneath us. My hands suddenly itch. The synthetic of the peach and teal bedspread scrapes the inside of my palms. I rub them hard and repeatedly over the surface, partly to scratch the itch, but mostly because I don’t know what else to do. Scratching my palms feels like something.

Because I literally do not know what to do.

My mind wanders while I scratch my palms. I am floating in the middle of a tacky teal sea on a scratchy ugly life raft with my companion begging and begging for sea water to live. The more she begs, the less human I feel. Less thinking. Less feeling. Less present. I am nothing in the face of all this need, this swirling black hole that will surely sink us all. Still, she is pleading for me to be something, do something, do the thing that repulses me, the thing that’s utterly ridiculous, the thing that means I’ve abandoned my reality and entered hers, the thing that means I don’t know what’s real anymore, either. I am paralyzed. Drifting. Blank. I can’t look at the fleshiness of her. The raggedness of her. The prudish underwear that I always suspected but had never seen, never should have seen. I stare down at her back, at the white-red embarrassment of everything. Shame on her, rings the thought in my panicked, 20-something head. I can’t unsee it all. I can’t unhear it all. I can’t go back to an hour ago before my dad called me. I want to — more than anything — but I can’t. I am in a cheap motel room with my half-naked mom begging me to squeeze imaginary bugs out of red spots on her back. So I just stare at the carpet with a thudding heart and shallow breaths and stinging eyes — the only things on me even moving at all.

“Tracey ….. DO it.” She’s hoarse by now.

But still I sit. She whimpers. The whole room seems to be whimpering. Could you please just shut up? I’m trying to think. I need to think. I can’t think because you won’t shut the hell up. Shut up. Shut UP.

And, suddenly, in a split second, I choose. I choose between realities, straddle my mom, and squeeze. Nothing happens, except that she sobs even more. Then she howls and I’m sure the people in the rooms next to us who are doing God knows what in this cheesy motel, but probably not trying to squeeze killer bugs out of red flesh dots can hear her — “Well?! WELL?! Did it work?? Did something come out? Do you see it? What happened??”

And it is just so stupid, so utterly insane that I almost start laughing. I can feel the wave rising from my stomach and stifle it, pronto. But, for God’s sake, I am straddling my mom’s back, staring down at the glaring red dents I’ve just made from trying to squeeze some imaginary bugs out of her body.

The crazy phantom bugs that have driven her from her own lovely home to this scratchy ugly life raft floating on a tacky teal sea.

But she has Lyme disease, do you hear?