‘What made you like this?’ I asked, my voice soft with genuine wonder. ‘Who did this to you?’
The question must have taken her by surprise. Her shoulders relaxed a little as a surprised breath escaped and I could see the muscles in her face fighting for control in the rippled reflection of the kitchen window.
‘You can’t be this mad at me, Mom. I’m a good person, a good daughter. I’m sorry I stole Woody’s pretzel and ended up in a coma and can’t remember half the stupid things I’ve done in the last while but …’
Actually, I wasn’t being honest with her. In truth, I was sick to death of making apologies that were never accepted for things I had not done. ‘No,’ I said, changing tack so loudly I gave myself a fright. ‘You know what? I am not sorry. It is horrible what has happened to me, Mom. I nearly died, I’ve lost my memory, I can’t taste anything, which means the only part of my life I really cared anything for is meaningless. I should not have to feel guilt just because you expect me to. For God’s sake, your son is a good-for-nothing pot-smoking who-knows-what-shooting bum who has spent his lifetime sponging off of you; your husband is probably going to spend the next 20 years watching medieval sword-making documentaries; even your dog is a sex pervert. Why should I get all your disappointment?’
This thought riled me, big-time, once it was out there in the open. Why should I get all the disappointment?
‘Has it ever occurred to you that in this family I might actually be your best bet? Have you ever considered that? Me. I may only have half a brain and no job or husband or fiancé or best friend or taste; I may have given up the biggest walk-in closet and floor-to-ceiling matching lingerie — but I am still your best bet. So why do you always dump on me, Mom? Why not dump on Emmet? Or, better still, nobody? You’re always so mad with me and I never know why. I’ve always been too busy just trying to get on with it, get around it, get over it but I am sick of it. I am so fucking sick of it.’ I was crying, of course. ‘Jesus, you heard me, Jesus! What is the matter with you?’
Her back to me still, she turned and opened the refrigerator, pulling out the remains of her heinous mac and cheese, the sight of which only fuelled my anger.
‘Put that back, it’s disgusting,’ I wept. ‘Your cooking sucks. It’s inedible. You shouldn’t do it. It’s a crime against produce. Are you listening to me, Mom? Are you even listening to me?’
I could hardly believe the words as they spewed out of my mouth. In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure it was me saying them. Instead I felt as though I was somewhere up above us, looking down, just watching the whole scene unfold. This is quite common among those who have suffered head injuries, this looking-down-on-yourself sensation, although I didn’t know it then. All part of that now-it’s-a-dream-now-it’s-not stuff. Anyway, while I was up there floating around I suspended my fury and noticed, first of all, how many flies had died and were buried in the light fitting in the ceiling and then how small my mother was. In my anger I had moved closer to her and I was enormous, despite the thin thighs. I loomed threateningly over her, my fists clenched at my own sides, my chin jutting out in my own anger, my face puce with fury. I didn’t look one little bit like the embattled broken hard-done-by figure I imagined myself to be. But you know what I did look like? A bully.
The wind left my sails at that moment and I returned to my body, which buckled and deflated with me back in it.
‘Mom,’ I whispered, choked and panicked. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry.’
But if I had deflated, she had caved in. She had collapsed against the refrigerator, her body curved around the leftovers like a tiny comma, her rage evaporated.
‘Mom?’ My own fury had turned back into fear. ‘Please. I said I’m sorry.’
She did not move a muscle and when she started to speak, her voice was almost unrecognisable without its trademark anger. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are, Mary-Constance,’ she said. ‘You’ve never known how lucky you are. I never hurt you. I never raised my hand to you. I never punished you. Not once.’
‘Never punished me? Mom, you’ve spent my whole life punishing me.’
‘Oh, you don’t know the meaning of the word,’ she said. She put the leftovers on the counter but didn’t let go of them, didn’t move away. ‘The things I could tell you.’
The way she said it sent a shiver up my spine and the sounds of the city disappeared, leaving nothing in the room but what lay between the two of us.
‘So tell me,’ I said softly. ‘I want to know.’
‘Why would I tell you? Why would I tell anyone? But the trademark sarcasm that would usually ring around my ears with such words was missing.
‘Because secrets rot and fester and turn into … something else,’ I said. And I guessed a woman who had been estranged from her own mother for nearly 40 years and never so much as spoke her name had more than a few secrets.
‘Who do you think you are? Dr Phil? Some things just belong in the past. You people never seem to realise that.’
‘But it might help us understand each other, Mom.’
‘What’s to understand?’
‘You say I’ve never been punished, Mom, but there are other ways of hurting the people you love, you know. You always put me down. You’re never happy with me. Everything I do is wrong. I don’t look right. I don’t sound right. I don’t sit right. My hair sucks. You don’t think that is punishment?’
‘Estelle?’ It was my dad, standing in the doorway in his pyjamas, what little hair he had bunched up on one side of his head, his face crumpled with worry as he looked at my mom. ‘Is everything okay, Estelle?’
She looked at him in such a way that in a moment of extraordinary clarity I suddenly understood why we all were the way we were. And I loved him so much in that instant that I forgave him any shortcomings as a father. I had never thought of my parents as the love match of the century: mainly, I had considered my father a saint to put up with my mother and I guess at times I had wondered what she saw in him. For a woman who oozed disappointment she had always been strangely content with his little life at the shoe store, his mediocre income, his small circle of friends, his lack of ambition. But now I saw that when she needed him to, he rescued her and she was a woman in need of rescuing. She let him love her and she loved him. She really loved him. She was really capable of that sort of love and it was written all over her face.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Go back to bed, Patrick. I’ll be there in a minute.’ She watched him shuffle back towards the bedroom then took the plastic wrap off the mac and cheese, straightened it out, put it back on again, and put the bowl back in the fridge.
‘Your father asked me to marry him one Sunday afternoon at 3.15,’ she said, without looking at me. ‘We were in the elevator about to go for a walk but instead I went right back upstairs and packed my bags. By 3.55 I was sitting right here in this apartment and I never spoke to that woman again.’
That was it. My explanation. The most I was ever going to get. It occurred to me that maybe I should ring Ty and get Dr Foster’s number. I suddenly felt like a person in need of a whole lot of therapy.
But there was something else. A tingly feeling had started in my toes and was travelling its way up my body, rattling my bones and giving me the shivers as it made its way to my brain where it knocked on the door, begging to be let in. A realisation was trying to dawn on me. I knew that. I just couldn’t quite work out what the realisation was.
My mother gave a dry little cough. ‘Anyway, you’ve got no business dragging up all this old dirt,’ she said, the nastiness creeping back into her tone. ‘It would never have happened if you hadn’t come back mean. If I catch pneumonia and die from being up in the middle of the night, well, let that be a lesson to you Mary-Constance. Some things are better left unsaid. Did you ever stop to consider that?’
The bathroom door flew open and we heard Emmet go crashing down the hall and into my bedroom where the bed springs bounced as he hit the mattress. Clea
rly, it was me who would be spending the night on the sofa.
‘No, Mom,’ I said. ‘I never did stop to consider that. And if you catch pneumonia and die, I promise I will learn from it.’
She narrowed her eyes, rearranged the yellow quilted satin bathrobe, summonsed Frankie who had fallen asleep post-coitally on my foot, and without another word headed back to her bedroom. The dog gave my big toe a warm disgusting parting lick and in a flash I thought of Wild Swans, a book I had read (most of) a few years before. I’d been outraged by how in pre-revolution China women bound their daughters’ feet to stunt their growth, to keep them tiny and neat just the way men liked them. It was such a gross thing for a mother to do to her daughter, I had thought at the time, yet they did it because their mothers had done it to them too. It was just the way things were. It was history.
And in a way, that was what had happened to me. I saw that then as I wiped Frankie’s slobber off my toe with some kitchen paper. It wasn’t anything I had done that made my mom so mad. It was the way things were. It was history. She had bound and stunted not my feet (although I bet she’d wanted to) but me, the inner me, no doubt because that’s what had been done to her.
And I could be bitter and hateful too, if I chose to be. I could follow the family tradition. But I could also stage a revolution of my own: that was the realisation battering at my brain. I could forgive my mother if I wanted to, I could take off my inner bandages, wriggle my toes, and start growing any which way I pleased. What freedom there was in that thought. What relief! I didn’t have to be anything because of her; I could just be me.
What’s more, I thought with a jolt, I would never have come to that liberating conclusion if I hadn’t come back mean, or more accurately if I hadn’t been nearly killed by that pretzel in the first place.
It was a moment of brightness in what felt like a lifetime of gloom.
Fourteen
When I woke up the next morning Frankie was lying across my chest like a moth-eaten stole and there was something slimy on my neck that was so gross I couldn’t begin to contemplate its origins. Emmet was sitting at the table eating some toxic-looking pink and orange breakfast cereal. Pop was already in his chair fondling the remote control as Mom vacuumed the very sofa cushions on which I lay.
‘What the hell is that?’ I asked groggily, wiping at the mess on my throat.
‘Well, I’ve been watching his head and nothing came out of there,’ Emmet said with a slurp. He looked remarkably chipper for someone who had been mainlining cleaning products the night before, something we were all no doubt supposed to ignore.
‘Get off me, you disgusting animal,’ I said, pushing Frankie onto the floor and lifting up my legs so that my mother could Hoover beneath them. I watched her as she cleaned, her features knitted together in concentration, her eyes careful to avoid mine. Our little tête à tête in the night had obviously not changed anything for her but as I looked at my feet, still aloft in the air, a smile crept across my face. I wriggled my toes.
‘I am revolting,’ I told my mother as I pushed away the Hoover hose and got off the couch. ‘I am a Chinese girl’s feet.’
‘What is it with this family and history?’ Emmet grumbled. ‘Haven’t you guys heard of the E! Channel?’
‘Do you think they fixed up all of Mary-Constance’s brain?’ my mom asked no one in particular. ‘I hope they didn’t make a mistake and leave something in there by mistake like the lady with the scissors. You know the one, Patrick. Or was it a sponge? She died, anyway. Or did she just end up in a wheelchair?’
I needed to get out of the house for a while. That much was clear. It was going to be too hard to wriggle my toes when the bandages were still so close at hand. The problem was, where could I go?
I was pondering this question in the bathroom after showering Frankie’s dubious emissions from various parts of my body when I found the St Jude medal that Mom had given me in the hospital, which had caused so much eye-narrowing on the part of Signora Marinello. It was caught in the lining of my toilet bag. When I rubbed it between my fingers, all I could think of was sinking into that big fleshy bosom of hers. I needed to be held tight and comforted a little. I needed someone to help me, to guide me; hadn’t she said that she would always be there, that if I needed her I just had to go find her?
‘You just missed her,’ the droopy-eyed fisherman from my coma told me when I arrived at St Vincent’s. ‘She finished her shift. She left aready.’
The neurological ward, my home for all those weeks, bustled and throbbed around me. If anyone remembered me from my weeks of lying there then they did a good job of not showing it. Unconscious I had been the centre of attention but standing on my own two feet I felt like an insignificant spinning top being knocked from one side of the stark white hallway to the other. I lost my balance avoiding a paramedic who I am pretty sure was the water-taxi driver who took me to the Hotel Gritti Palace. (‘Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?’ It all made perfect sense now.) Then I regained my equilibrium only to be knocked off course again by a nurse running along the corridor with an armful of IV bags. I ducked into a doorway to avoid a collision, only to ram an elderly teary-eyed couple grey with grief. I jumped backwards, panicked, and spun around, looking for the elevator, fighting back tears. Then I felt two strong hands steadying me from behind, turning me slowly around. And there was the delectable Marco.
Good grief, but that man did things to me I didn’t remember any other man ever doing. If I could have pushed him into the linen closet and performed disgusting acts on him right then and there, I would have — not that I could see a linen closet and believe me, I looked. I could just tell he knew that was what I was thinking too because there was laughter, slightly mocking, in his eyes. This, as you can imagine, transformed me into a silver-tongued devil of staggering proportions.
‘I am a Chinese girl’s feet,’ I blurted out. ‘I wriggle.’
‘Never been much of a poetry fan myself,’ Marco said smoothly. ‘So, how’s life on the outside?’
‘Oh, I didn’t mean that about the feet,’ I blathered. ‘I meant the binding. The unbinding. I was just thinking about Chinese girls. You know what? It’s kind of hard to explain. You’re probably thinking of calling security or getting the psych team down to examine me but actually I am just here looking for Signora Marinello and I was thinking about Chinese girls’ feet and I’m making it sound much worse than it is. But if you don’t bind the feet they can grow. That’s my point. But actually my other point is that I’m good, yes, I’m good.’ He seemed slightly taken aback but I felt I was getting a handle on it. ‘And you?’ I inquired politely. ‘How’re you doing?’
‘Same old same old,’ he answered. ‘Saving the world, bringing back the dead. I have a documentary team from Canada coming in to film me this afternoon. My 11-hour stint in surgery last Thursday was reported on CNN, I’ve already been asked to present a paper on it next year at a conference in San Diego. And I just got a call to say my new Porsche has arrived so you could say all is well.’
I nodded my head in what I hoped was an extremely sane and appropriately interested way while he scanned me up and down.
‘You look good, Connie,’ he said. ‘In fact, you look great.’
I tried desperately to think of something intelligent to say to keep him in my thrall. ‘Can I colour my hair?’ I settled on. ‘I’m worried the chemicals might seep into my brain and mess things up.’
‘I’ve never heard of that happening before,’ he answered. ‘So I think you should be okay. And it would be good to see you blonde again.’
I blushed. Oh for a gondola and a darkened basement, I thought to myself.
There was an awkward silence.
‘I didn’t just say that, did I?’ I asked him.
‘Say what?’
‘The thing about the gondola?’
It was his turn to laugh. ‘No, there was something about a Chinese girl’s feet a while back but no mention of any gondola.’
My relief was enormous.
‘Look, anyway, I should go,’ he said. ‘It was good to see you, Connie, it really was. Take it easy. Go blonde.’
I nodded dumbly and watched him as he strode up the corridor away from me. Those hips. Those shoulders. That neck. If I’d been a cartoon character I’m pretty sure there would have been throbbing marks emanating from my groin right then. I could near as damn it feel that man between my thighs and it was so intensely almost satisfying that I guess I may have started drooling a little.
‘Hey, if it isn’t missus fancy-food snob.’ My Pucci mushroom-seller interrupted my lustfulness, clanking past with a multi-layered trolley full of food that I was grateful I could not smell. ‘Come back for more, huh?’
I switched as quickly and politely as I could back into the real world. ‘I’m looking for Signora Marinello, actually,’ I answered her. ‘I don’t suppose you know where she lives?’
‘Do I look like a telephone book?’
‘No, you look like someone who would rather pee in the soup than taste it and who on occasion probably has.’
That sure stopped her short. I eyed up a plate of donkey-coloured meatballs, wondering what it would feel like to wear them.
‘You’re a smart ass, you know that?’
‘It’s the new me,’ I told her unapologetically.
‘I like it,’ she said. ‘Marinello’s gone to Nick’s over on 14th and Ninth for breakfast. Says she don’t like my food either. No taste, the pair of you.’
Well, I could only speak for myself on that matter, I thought. Nick’s it was.
I had just stepped into the elevator when I heard someone calling my name, or a variation on it. ‘Costanza Conlan! Costanza Conlan!’ A woman was shuffling towards me on high-heeled slides, a folded-over piece of paper in her hand and a pissed-off look on her face.