“Well, not everyone.” It sits uncomfortably in the air as we both know her own mother was not. I wonder how often she was chasing her own mother’s affection while I was chasing hers. I picture us both running on a circular track with no beginning and no end. “You used to call me on your dog walks. About this time of day. And then you stopped.”
I watch Lily sniff around for red ball, even though I placed it right in front of her face. “We don’t go on as many walks anymore.”
“Why?”
The octopus looks up at me, grinning. “Yeah. Why?” he repeats.
I clench my fist and take a step forward, drawing back for the punch. “You stay out of this.”
“Excuse me?” my mother says.
“Not you. Not you,” I assure her. I want to kill the octopus, now more than ever.
“Ted, is there someone else there?”
“Lily went blind, Mom.”
“What?”
“She lost her eyesight.” The explanation sounds dumb to me, like maybe she just misplaced it.
“How?”
I glare at the octopus. How much of this do I want to get into? “It’s just, she’s getting old.”
The octopus looks up at me and rolls his eyes. “Pussy.”
I swat at a stack of magazines on the coffee table, and a Travel + Leisure and Entertainment Weekly sail onto the floor. “She’s getting older and I don’t really like to talk about it. But we don’t go for as many walks anymore.”
“I think you should come home.”
“No. Mom. It’s fine.”
“Not because of . . .” My mother trails off and I finish her sentence silently with Lily. “Meredith is coming up with the family next month; it’s been a long time since we’ve seen you. You should think about coming home.”
I tell her I will think about it without making any promises, and when I hang up the phone I wonder how long it has been since I have been home. Jeffrey and I used to travel to Maine every summer. We would go to the beach and eat lobster and fried clams and I would kayak with my mother while he would read on the riverbank, and then we would all sit on the deck of my mother’s house and drink rosé. It all seems like someone else’s life now.
But when was the last time my mother came to visit me here? I remember a trip she made, soon after Jeffrey and I broke up. She came for the weekend, almost spontaneously. Very unlike her. I don’t know if I’ve actively pushed this visit from my memory, or it just got lost in the fog of that time. But my mother’s last words on the phone just now ring familiar: “I know you think I don’t worry about you, but I do.”
I glance over at Lily and the octopus is laughing at me. He’s still amused by Lily humping my leg. “Jungian. You’re such an asshole,” I gripe.
“We were just conversing.”
“We are never just conversing. You converse, I plot your death.”
The octopus chuckles. “How’s that going?”
“Give me back my dog!”
Red ball rolls into the dining room and Lily ambles after it, taking the octopus with her. I think about what the octopus was getting at, float through Freudian ideas like free association, transference, and libido, until I land on Oedipal complex. But why does he think Lily suddenly suffers from a desire to sexually possess an opposite-sex parent, at least strongly enough to hump my leg? And what of the call from my own mother—whose love I pursue—right in the middle of the discussion? Coincidence? I sink back onto the couch. It has to be because Lily is blind. Oedipus blinded himself; the octopus blinded Lily. But am I blind to something, too? What is it I cannot see?
I need to accelerate my transformation.
6.
The guy in line in front of me has the hottest tattoos I’ve ever seen on a man. There’s a half sleeve of Japanese water imagery in the style of Hokusai that I imagine extends over his shoulder, as well as the most beautiful tiger on his opposite forearm that’s almost serpentine in the graceful way it drips from his elbow to his wrist. It’s hard to describe; you’d really have to see it to get the full effect.
“Can I ask you a question?”
The man turns around with a smile. If there was ever anyone’s word I was going to take on a tattoo artist, it would be this guy’s. Even though he’s just some guy in front of me at the supermarket buying Soyrizo, mangoes, lighter fluid, and craft beer.
“I’m going to grill the mangoes,” he says, his smile turning wry.
“No, no, no,” I stammer. “Who does your ink?” I wonder if calling it ink makes me sound cool or ridiculously stupid.
“Are you thinking of getting marked up? You’ve got to see Kal. He has a real philosophical approach.”
Philosophical approach to what? That would be a natural follow-up question, but instead I just say, “Thanks, man,” when he gives me the name of Kal’s parlor, and we go about our grocery transactions in silence while I try to imagine him shirtless.
I’m still not sure what a philosophical approach means in this context—philosophical approach to the whole thing? The artistic process? Pain management? I really have no idea. I don’t know why it’s appealing, or even why I would want this. But I do. So I take the mango griller’s recommendation and call and make an appointment, and now here I am, parked on the street in front of a window with imposing designs, afraid to get out of the car.
What I’m doing at a tattoo parlor is a little unclear even to me, even to someone determined enough to ask for a recommendation from a stranger. Since the octopus blinded Lily with ink, I’ve harbored a growing obsession with getting marked by ink myself, creating
