I finally met your mother but not in the way I had always imagined it. She had taken me for her point of contact in a drug deal she was attempting to make. She was just asking for a joint or two so I guess it could have been worse.
I tried to help by pointing out the laundromat by the train tracks, what we had always assumed and maybe even heard was a front for that kind of thing.
This was not the mother that corresponded with you. I pictured a mother who dressed you in sailor suits and Hush Puppies, found the newest and shiniest pennies to display in your loafers.
But this woman. She was even a cliché. Her name was Candy and I just couldn’t get a hold of the reality of that. She had the hardened look of an ex-smoker and everything. Well-lined eyes filled with abjection to the point of total withdrawal, a surrendered numbness. If people still get their hair frosted, then hers was frosted.
This was the kind of mom I would have assigned to Ferris, a kid in my second grade class. The one who may never have lived down peeing his pants in art class. The one who lived with his grandparents and it was not exactly clear to anyone why. He had a Legal Guardian rather than a Mom, even if it was his Mom’s Mom. Ferris’ grandparents ran a farm on the hill beside that same laundromat and he must have clopped around in a lot of manure trying to help out, but those of us in his class didn’t know about all that, we just knew he smelled like poop.
Anyway, this Candy did have your nose. And it led me to think, to piece a few things together. I ended up talking to Dave and he confirmed.
When we met, you were still photographing strangely shaped pools. There’s one in Austria that’s yin-yang-shaped, you explained, a wine decanter pool in Portugal, a guitar-shaped pool at a motel in downtown Nashville. You were hesitant to show me your work but you sure liked talking about it. I did get a glimpse of a classic heart-shaped hot tub from somewhere, and one of a pool within a pool, which was just meta enough to make me think you were on to something.
Meta like when I made props for the school play that was set in a kitchen in my own kitchen. The props looked wrong, excessive, two-dimensional, inchoate. The tinfoil “butcher knife” kept unraveling. This is for the children’s safety, I reminded myself, for their artistic expression.
But it wasn’t just your photography that drew me in, it was also your severed pinky finger. It made me want to get into a series of entanglements with you. It made me want to experience a total upheaval of the way things were. It made me want to spy on you. But I swear the discovery of your mother was purely accidental and in fact remorseful.
That’s why I couldn’t tell you about it. Me, the person who over-explained constantly. Who told you completely inconsequential stories from my childhood with little to no connection to the present circumstances. It was compulsive. I only paused when I heard you say “oh” in the way that indicated you had stopped listening. You always standing there like the relentless calm that you are.
Pittsburgh girls are ever-engaging their emergency brakes. We are trained to pull up the lever after shifting gears into park. We are used to hills, even ones we can’t see. We are used to the idea of things slipping away from us.
People always say that so-and-so is “already gone” like they’re there but they’ve mentally moved on to the next place. But what if you stay, remain in all the ways you can, and a place leaves you behind? A city rejects you like a transplanted organ. Where exactly do you go from there?
Especially when this happens in a state that is so blatantly a state for people who only feel obligated to be here for one reason or another. The state that is unapologetic in its holding of apologetic people. You don’t choose a place like this. I just happened to move here from Pennsylvania upon acceptance to a PhD program that I had already abandoned years before meeting you. All of this just made the doors closing in my face that much more brutal.
Trying to become a teacher instead of the developmental psychologist I was supposed to be and then settling into a teacher’s aide position at an elementary school when all the other roles were filled, this was just one example. I said I was taking some time off from my dissertation and getting some real world experience because those were ideas trite enough to be acceptable.
These things, these painful things, I was able to explain to you. It felt like something at the time.
The day I ran into your mother was also the day I had herded a child through the hallway past the science room as the teacher went through what might have been a lesson on molecules. He said that if someone were to gently rest a finger on your forehead for about one year it would leave a permanent dent.
It was also the day I was supposed to meet with an old professor to discuss my future but she was not there as planned. The meeting was scheduled during her office hours but she had not been there or at least hadn’t answered my knocks. Though I’ve tried before, it seems you can’t seek revenge on a vanished entity.
As I turned away from her door, I ended up staring at the desk in the hall. On the desk, there was a lockbox that was the color that’s created when you mix too many different paints together. I had a lockbox as a kid with a little handle and a baby key. The metal box was coated in thick, bright-pink paint but not enough to smother the clanks it made when it was moved around. I didn’t have anything important to store in it so I filled it with those pencil topper erasers and a few Polly Pocket accessories. I taped the key to the inside of a Babysitters Club book. Sometimes I would fill it with coins from the car and feel it get heavier in my hands.
You liked to claim that I was too restless. I was determined to prove you wrong, constantly making opposite choices until I noticed just how often I had to do this, how it proved you were exactly right.
But there’s only so much waiting a person can take.
And I’m beginning to see that just like the stages of development (motor skills, executive functioning, language acquisition, all of it), that maybe there’s an equal regression or deconstruction of sorts to match it as life continues. And that maybe your mother is living it and that I’m just starting to experience it and that is exactly what’s been going on.
I can never remember the endings to things. Even my favorite movies and books. Let’s just pray there’s enough neuroplasticity left for me to remember our ending, our beginning, and now, this new place that might let me in and keep me there.
Claire Hopple is the author of “TOO MUCH OF THE WRONG THING” (Truth Serum Press, 2017). Her fiction has appeared in Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Bluestem, Jellyfish Review, Timber, Heavy Feather Review and others. More at clairehopple.com.