Page 44 - WTP Vol. XI #2

Mother, Other (continued from preceding page)
manicured nail over Rose’s forehead, she knew that a third of the life of the ten-dollar bill she had given the CVS cashier was already gone—slipping out of cash registers, carted in wallets to new cities, twisting away on the cold, gleeful wind.
~
A couple years ago, right after Alicia, Paul had begun shaving daily again, running through razors like he’d run through cigarettes in college—always approach- ing her in the library with one dangling from his lips with Danny Zuko-like swagger.
“Taking the trash out.” Paul nodded at her as she placed bottles of breast milk into a bowl of warm water.
“Don’t forget the kitchen trash.”
“I think it can go for a couple more days.” he called over his shoulder.
“You’re just taking out the bathroom trash?”
“It’s pretty full, babe. Lots of Q-tips, cotton pads, ra- zors in here.”
“But I’ve been throwing all of Alicia’s diapers in the nursery trash, and usually that’s what fills it up the most—”
“It’s just full.” Paul kicked the door closed, a wall of frozen November wind, scented with rotting leaves and bland anticipation, rising behind him. “What, you’re mad that it’s full with my trash instead of Alicia’s?”
“No—” Milk splattered onto her shirt. “I mean, I guess it’s been a while since we filled up our bathroom trash.”
He kissed the top of her head. “Yeah. I’m gonna call it a night. Big presentation tomorrow.”
“I know what I feel,” she told her mother a week later, Alicia fussing in her arms and trying to yank her ear- rings out.
“You don’t know anything. You’re probably sleep deprived from having another baby, though you barely pay attention to Alicia as it is.”
“I know what I feel.”
“Know it, feel it, doesn’t matter. Did you know your father scratched the car last week? I don’t know
what I’m going to do with that man. You’d think that after thirty years he would know that I like to sit in the back right, but he insists on pulling up
to me on the curb on the left side, and I have no choice but to get in. Well, I’m waiting on the right side of the parking lot and what does he do? He pulls up on the opposite side of the street, and not only that, he scratches the car—right up against a telephone pole, that idiot. How am I going to get to the garage this week, while I’m looking after Rose while you’re at Alicia’s appointment and while
I’m scheduling a haircut for your father? I’m not
a nanny, for God’s sake. That phase of my life is over—do you hear that?”
Her mother tilted her head towards the windows, freckled light peeking through the loosely knit poly- ester curtains: “The ice cream truck.” Her thin lips twitched, and for a moment she looked too young to exist, with all the brilliance of the medical student who had gone out to the bar after her cadaver lab, not knowing that there she would meet a round- faced sophomore who held her future in his paper- cut palms.
The jingle faded. Her mother’s cheeks stiffened back into military pertness. “I never let you buy ice cream from the truck because they were asking outrageous prices for a single push pop. My god, how you used
to cry. Remember that time you plopped down in
the sandbox in your new white skirt and screamed because I wouldn’t buy you the Spongebob popsicle?” Mother and daughter exhaled sharply, a nostalgia for youth—the infinitude of the future before the cement hardened, before they knew what it would be— leaving fingerprints across their thoughts. “I hope you’re not thinking about indulging Rose and Alicia that way, what with so-called inflation letting these people triple their prices.”
Later that night the exhilaration of that afternoon had faded. She crept to their bathroom after Paul fell asleep, his soft breaths fluttering the hole in his pil- lowcase. The trash was full again, domed with a layer of the tissues she’d used to clean Alicia’s spit up. But beneath that lay a graveyard of razors and the clump of Paul’s hair she’d fished out of the sink two days ago. At the very bottom, there was a cluster of torn receipts, stitched together into a ball with snot and phlegm.
Toothpa—torn. Razors. Nature Valley ba—torn. Twenty-seven dollars at Walmart.
14K 1CT NECK. Two thousand dollars at Tiff—torn.
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