“Not really.”
I picture Mom in her kitchen. She’s animated, waving her arms as much as the constraints of having to hold the phone to her ear will allow. This is how she talks to Lola. When I come into the room, her body stiffens, her voice goes formal. I don’t know her, and she doesn’t know me.
“Is it so wrong?” Mom asks. “That when the three of you were finally asleep for the night, I’d make myself a drink? Maybe a Cosmo, or a martini, or a margarita—and pretend that I had something to celebrate too?”
It’s then that I hear the tinkle of ice in a glass from the other side of the phone line. I think about my photography portfolio under the couch and my sister Lola’s artwork hanging in the gallery downtown, and I think my mother and I are more alike than either of us want to admit—except for the drinking.
“Mom,” I say, but am unable to follow it up with any sort of chastising comment that isn’t really my place to make.
I can’t ask her to be careful. I can’t preach to her about self-medication with alcohol. I know she knows that she shouldn’t open that door again, but Dad is dead. Thursday is the funeral.
I lift another bite of cake to my mouth, but I’ve suddenly lost the desire for cream cheese icing and fluffy, sweetened flour.
“Who knows,” Mom says, and I feel the end of the conversation coming. “Maybe in this day and age, I wouldn’t have felt so out of touch. People have their texting and tweeting—whatever that is—and their Spacebook to let the whole world know that they just did a thousand sit-ups or that their cat just ate a crayon or that little Emily has a fever of a hundred and one.”
“Facebook,” I say.
“What?” she says but keeps talking.
I hear her voice, but my attention wanders. She might be right. Maybe if she had had some connection to the multitude of people she once knew and all the people they once knew, then perhaps she could have posted on her wall My youngest child, Lola, was just in a horrible accident, and if she lives, she may never walk again. And btw, she has some kind of brain damage that the doctor called the “Swiss Cheese Effect” and I could just punch him in the face.
And people could reply Oh, Cecilia, how awful.
Hang in there.
We love you.
Or perhaps people could “like” her statement, thus validating her outrage and letting her know that they had at least taken the time out of their beautiful life to read her message to the cosmos and click on the little thumb before hopping to a YouTube video of a dog barking “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
I think about posting My father has died. I don’t know what symbols you would put in to create the appropriate little face—there must be one. Something worse than the little frown. The little face that would say I’ve seen it happen to other people, and in theory I knew it would happen to me, but I didn’t really believe it until now. There is no series of punctuation marks to make up such a face.
Mom is still talking, and I realize I’m several sentences behind.
“Sorry, Mom, you were saying?” I ask.
“That woman,” Mom says. “Back then, I was that young woman who other young women felt sorry for because I’d lost my sense of feminine power and had to stay home with the kids. Now I’m that woman that all those women fear again.”
“What woman is that?”
“A widow,” she says and more ice tinkles. “The poor woman who put everything into her family and now she’s all alone. And they’re afraid to look me in the eye, because in the end, they all did it too, and now they see me as a trailblazer. But I’m burning down the brush of somewhere they don’t want to go.”
Mom is very dramatic.
I want to say something, but I’m not Lola, and I won’t come up with the perfect thing that Mom needs to hear the way that Lola can. So I listen to the ice clinking in Mom’s glass and know she’s thinking of calling Lola again.
“I didn’t think that, by the way,” Mom says, startling me.
“Think what?”
“That I lost my sense of feminine power by having children,” she says. “I actually felt sorry for the women who thought they should feel sorry for me. I think they were jealous. You always want the thing you don’t have.”
Yes, you do. I wanted a marriage and then I got one. I wanted a career and then we had a child. I wanted a child and then I got lonely. I got everything I wanted and then I was unhappy.
“I just meant that I loved having kids,” Mom says, her voice pulling me out of my own head. “I just lost myself. I didn’t start drinking because you guys made life tough. You made it wonderful. I just wasn’t very good at it sometimes, and when things got hard, I fell down.”
That’s a confession she can’t say to Lola. Mom is talking to me now, referencing an inside joke that isn’t funny. Lola doesn’t know our mother used to drink—she doesn’t remember. Just Dad, my brother, Ray, and I remember the mother that Mom used to be.
“Is Cassie still at Lola’s house?” Mom asks to change the subject,
