“… Cannie!”
“… and the wicked stepmother, to the obsessive-compulsive co- dependent ex-girlfriend.”
“Ack,” said my mother. “Jeez.”
“She might want to consider some therapy,” I said.
“She goes. Believe me, she goes. She’s been going for years.”
“And she still hasn’t figured out that you don’t go blurting your whole life story to a complete stranger the first time you speak to them?”
My mother sighed. “I guess not,” she said.
I waited. I waited for an apology, an explanation, something that could make sense of this. Nothing came. After a moment of awkward silence, my mother changed the subject, and I went along, hoping this was a phase, a fling, a bad dream, even. No such luck. Tanya had arrived for good.
What does a lesbian bring on a second date? goes the joke. A U-Haul. What does a gay guy bring on a second date? What second date?
An old joke, true, but there’s a certain amount of truth to it. After they started dating, Tanya did in fact move out of the basement of her codependent obsessive-compulsive ex- girlfriend’s condominium and into an apartment of her own.
But for all intents and purposes, she’d moved in on the second date. I realized this when I came home six weeks after what my siblings and I were referring to as Mom’s Outage, and saw the writing on the wall.
Well, the poster on the wall. “Inspiration,” it read, above a picture of a cresting wave, “is believing we can all pull together.”
“Mom?” I called, dropping my bags on the floor. Nifkin, meanwhile, was whining and cringing by my legs in a most un-Nifkin-like manner.
“In here, honey,” yelled my mother.
Honey? I wondered, and walked into the family room with Nifkin cowering behind me. This time, the new poster was of frolicking dolphins. “Teamwork,” it said. And beneath the dolphin poster were my mother and a woman who could only be Tanya, in matching purple sweatsuits.
“Hey!” said Tanya.
“Hey,” my mother repeated.
A large tangerine-colored cat leapt off of the windowsill, stalked insolently up to Nifkin, and stretched out a paw, claws extended. Nifkin gave a shrill yip and fled.
“Gertrude! Bad cat!” called Tanya. The cat ignored her and curled up in a patch of sunlight in the center of the room.
“Nifkin!” I called. From upstairs I heard a faint whine of protest – Nifkin-speak for no way, no day.
“Do we have employees that we’re trying to motivate?” I asked, pointing at the teamwork dolphins.
“Huh?” said Tanya.
“What?” said my mother.
“The posters,” I said. “We’ve got the exact same ones in the printing plant at work. Right next to the “27 Days Injury Free” sign. They’re, like, motivational artwork.”
Tanya shrugged. I’d been expecting a standard-issue gym teacher, with sinewy calves and ropy biceps and a no-nonsense haircut. Evidently I’d been expecting wrong. Tanya was a tiny boiled pea of a woman, barely five feet tall, with an aureole of frizzy reddish hair and skin tanned the color and consistency of old leather. No chest or hips to speak of. She looked like a little kid, right down to the scabby knees and the Band-Aid wrapped around one finger. “I just like dolphins,” she said shyly.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I see.”
And those were just the most obvious of the changes. There was a collection of dolphin figurines above the fireplace where the family pictures had been. Plastic magazine racks were bolted to the walls, giving our family room the look of a doctor’s office – the better to display Tanya’s copies of Rehabilitation magazine. And when I went to drop my bags in my room, the door wouldn’t open.
“Mom!” I called, “there’s something wrong up here!”
I heard a whispered consultation going on in the kitchen: my mother’s voice calm and soothing, Tanya’s bass grumble rising toward hysteria. Every once in a while I could make out words. “Therapist” and “privacy” seemed to comprise a dominant theme. Finally my mother walked up the stairs, looking troubled.
“Um, actually, I was going to talk to you about this.”
“About what? The door being stuck?”
“Well, the door’s locked, actually.”
I just stared.
“Tanya’s kind of been… keeping some of her things in there.”
“Tanya,” I pointed out, “has an apartment. Can’t she keep her things there?”
My mother shrugged. “Well, it’s a very small apartment. An effi-ciency, really. And it just kind of made sense… maybe you can sleep in Josh’s room tonight.”
At this point I was getting impatient. “Ma, it’s my room. I’d like to sleep in my room. What’s the big deal?”
“Well, Cannie, you don’t… you don’t live here anymore.”
“Of course I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to sleep there when I come home.”
My mother sighed. “We made some changes,” she murmured.
“Yeah, I noticed. So what’s the big deal?”
“We, um… well. We kind of got rid of your bed.”
I was speechless. “You got rid of…”
“Tanya needed the space for her loom.”
“There’s a loom in there?”
Indeed there was. Tanya stomped up the stairs, unbolted the door, and stomped back downstairs, looking sullen. I entered my room and saw the loom, a computer, a battered futon, a few ugly pressboard bookshelves covered with plastic walnut veneer, containing volumes with titles like Smart Women, Foolish Choices, and Courage to Heal, and It’s Not What You’re Eating, It’s What’s Eating You. There was a rainbow-triangle suncatcher hanging in the window and, worst of all, an ashtray on the desk.
“She smokes?”
My mother bit her lip. “She’s trying to quit.”
I inhaled. Sure enough, Marlboro Lights and incense. Yuck. Why did she have to plant her self-help guides and her cigarette smells in my room? And where was my stuff?
I turned toward my mother. “You know, you really could have told me about this. I could have come down and taken my things with me.”
“Oh, we didn’t get rid of anything, Cannie. It’s all in boxes in the basement.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, that makes me feel a lot better.”
“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to balance things here”
“No, no,” I said. “ ‘Balance’ involves taking different things into account. This,” I said, sweeping my hand to indicate the loom, the ashtray, the stuffed dolphin perched upon the futon, “is taking what one person wants into account, and completely screwing the other person. This is completely selfish. This is absolutely ridiculous. This is…”
“Cannie,” said Tanya. She’d somehow come up the stairs without my hearing.
“Excuse us, please,” I said, and slammed the door in her face. I took a
