“What? There is nothing wrong with that. Don’t push your issues with your father off on me. We are both women.”
Girl thought about it. She couldn’t put into words this feeling that her lesbian stepmother was more like a man than a woman. She thought about how she herself talked to her friends—they complimented the outfit, not the body. “That swimsuit is so cute on you,” she had said to her best friend’s teenaged daughter. Not “you have a beautiful body.” She opened her mouth, and closed it again. There wasn’t anything she could say that would make sense to Stepmother. Girl put on her shirt and walked inside.
defective
Mother went out of town for a few days. “She can never handle it if I go anywhere without her,” Mother confided in Girl. “Yet, if she goes out of town without me, she’s totally fine. She doesn’t even always remember to call.” Girl promised Mother that she would “keep an eye” on Stepmother while mother went on the writing workshop or whatever it was that she was so looking forward to, wherever it was that she couldn’t bring Stepmother along.
Stepmother called first thing Saturday morning. Girl had agreed to help her replace a mini-blind in their rental condominium.
“Well, I had a bad night,” Stepmother said. “I couldn’t sleep, and at two a.m. I realized I had forgotten to give the cat his medicine. So I gave him his pills, but then I got confused, and the print on the bottle was small that I couldn’t read it, and I thought I had given him the dog’s pills, and I thought it would kill him, so there I was, crying, completely naked, holding the cat in my arms and trying to call the vet.”
Girl had seen Stepmother naked often enough to be able to picture this clearly. In her head she saw Stepmother hugging that orange tabby to her massive, lumpy body. The cat was himself the fattest cat Girl had ever seen—so fat that even the stump of his tail was fat, and his stomach dragged a hairsbreadth off the ground. He had surpassed Garfield-fat and was in the realm of Jabba-the-Hutt-fat, all except his tiny yellow-eyed head. Girl imagined Stepmother hugging him against his will, so that the skin of his eyes pulled back at the corners and his arms stood stiffly out in front of him like Frankencat.
Girl started to say, “You should have called me,” but shut her mouth quickly. She did not actually want Stepmother to call when she was naked and crying at two in the morning. “Did you get through to the vet?” she asked instead.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she answered. “He was very nice, and explained that even if I had given the cat the dog’s pills it wouldn’t kill him. But he must think I’m a total lunatic.”
“Of course he doesn’t,” Girl lied. “I’m sure he gets calls like that all the time. They’d rather you call and be safe than to not call and accidentally kill the cat.”
They agreed that Stepmother would come pick up Girl, and they would measure the window of the condo, buy a new mini-blind, then go back to the condo and put it up. There was no part of Girl that wanted to do this, but she had promised Mother, and she had no valid reason not to help out. She owed them so much.
When Stepmother picked Girl up, Stepmother was sobbing, and they did the awkward front-seat-of-the-car-hug thing. It was the sort of crying that allowed no breath left over for words: shoulder-heaving, low moaning, tears and snot dripping onto her T-shirt. Girl made useless soothing noises. The day quickly fell into a pattern: they drove to a store while Stepmother cried the whole way. When they reached a store, she instantly stopped crying, wiped her face, and blew her nose. Stepmother and Girl entered the store, but for one reason or another, they never could find the exact mini-blind Stepmother wanted, so they got back in the car, Stepmother started crying again, and they drove to the next store and repeated the process. No mini-blind was purchased, although Stepmother did buy some sandwiches that they ate on a dock while looking at seagulls. Girl didn’t know how Mother did it, but she could finally see why Mother could never leave Stepmother. Girl always thought that Mother’s attraction to Stepmother was her abject neediness—Stepmother was her emotionally defective child that would never leave home, and Mother had been left too many times by people she loved.
Girl knew that she should be more understanding. Although she acted gentle with Stepmother, inside Girl was emotionally removed, like she was observing a case study. When the roles had been reversed and Girl was the one who could not pull herself out of the river of sadness, Stepmother always tried everything she could to help, but unlike Girl, she acted out of love, not obligation. She really wanted Girl to escape the hold of despair, not because she was a burden, but because Stepmother knew how terrible sadness could be, and she loved Girl deeply. But Girl looked at her from inside a shell, and she could not feel the love Stepmother thrust on her. She dodged it, tried to end the conversation or get out of the room.
Girl knew that feeling of the blackness lapping at the edge like waves, and that it was sometimes soothing to let go and the sadness crash over her—to give in to the cold bleakness that pierced her chest and settled into all of her bones. Girl’s hips would hurt from the terrible sadness; her face felt like a mask that didn’t move into proper expressions easily. And she knew that there was an intimacy in the blackness, and although she had long breaks from it, sooner or later it always returned. No matter how long it had been, her body remembered, like riding a bicycle.
