Thank you so much, subscribers who financially support my writing. Here are some vignettes from my upcoming book. Sending you all love.
When Mamma finally left Dad, what remained was a husk of a woman threshed over a public square. She didn’t know where to go or who to trust. Friends had taken sides against her, vultures shredding roadkill. Astonishing, how tidy on the surface is a minister’s family; but when it inevitably explodes, the whole town takes greedy turns in the blood.
It wasn’t until Mamma had exhausted every angle of her beauty to stop him riding into the sunset with his mistress that she stopped eating. She lost so much weight she could have been crepe paper breezing over cracked dirt. In a final confrontation, Dad slapped her across the face. Then, that little body I called Mamma packed a trailer with whatever she could fit and left East Texas.
She borrowed money from Granny and Papa to buy a double-wide trailer in San Marcos, parking a few miles from my apartment. It was either there or Hamilton, but Mamma was in no shape to face anybody who’d witnessed her ascension from the Alabama dust. Granny and Papa were quick to remind: they never did like him anyway. And don’t worry about the money; it was gonna be Mamma’s anyway when they died. But what they’d never planned for was their daughter’s bones in a jumble of skin; no house, no future. Mamma’s phone was an umbilical cord, Granny coaxing her to take each breath between breakdowns. Always, Mamma was mid-sob.
For days, the trailer smelled like plastic packing materials as if it had been shipped via UPS, pulled right out of a box of styrofoam. PVC pipes and laminate cabinets, jungle green carpet strangling every room. Walls like cardboard sheets divided the chasm of floor space into rooms of identical color. She left the windows open to air it out, went about cleaning, cleaning. A mess doing best to clean everything else, what more to do in an empty trailer?
The furniture, she’d left in Texas because getting out alive was imperative. What remained were the scarce centimeters of her body and a handful of necessities: a bedroom set as old as me in fifth grade; a custom kitchen table that’d been plugged with wood glue between fifteen-year-old scrapes on the finish; matching chairs that creaked; a handful of dishes; hundreds of dresses; a few stacks of trashy novels; her shiny .38 Special revolver; a Bible that had irrevocably lost its authority; and a Golden Retriever named Norton. She’d bought the dog as an unlikely surprise for my father’s most recent birthday (but secretly for herself, because Dad only loved horses).
Immediately, Mamma adopted two kittens who scraped fibers from the new carpet, grassy tufts like uprooted weeds. They scratched the particle board doors and climbed the refrigerator. Raced through the savanna of vacant rooms. “Your father will bring the furniture when he comes,” she believed out loud, eyes like dewdrops on scorched ground. This, her mantra, whenever the room felt like a black hole eating everything.
Mamma tended bouquets of dead flowers on the table and kitchen counters. They burst from crystal vases encircled with crumbling petals. Passing by, she’d gather up their scattered corollas, hastening them into the trash. To make your way through an empty trailer of dead flowers is to be deluged with a cancer of grief.
Months ticked by, nothing changing, an arrhythmic grandfather clock. Between intrusions of sunrise and sunset, Mamma withered, counted time by fallen petals. She’d sip some water, then tidy something on a desolate kitchen counter. Didn’t we know better than to leave a glass? We could pull our own weight, couldn’t we?
To scratch for something living among dead flowers, you could forget whole days. All around us, that pasture of green carpet, baseboards misted in kitten piss, beige vinyl, a shroud of plastic. For a few bucks on Craigslist, Mamma found a gigantic wheaten sofa with overstuffed Aztec printed cushions. It grimaced in the bare living room. On it, she’d plop down, exclaiming how comfortable it was, her feet barely touching the ground. Our tiny Mamma sinking into the center like a pebble.
My sister and I painted her bathroom and kitchen canary yellow. Then, for texture, we wadded up trash sacks, dipping them in white paint. We thoroughly splotched the walls like fuzzy mold on old lemons; clouds failing an impossibly bright day. In one of those creaky chairs, Mamma sipped coffee at the kitchen table, telling us how happy she felt, that hue just within reach.
I’d just graduated ministry school and had gone back to college, ricocheting between my apartment, school, and Mamma’s trailer. My sister was a freshman on the same campus, a short walk away; unreachable, even when eye-to-eye. She didn’t need advice from me, she hissed. I wasn’t her daddy. Still, I nagged her about alcohol, drugs, and the tangle of guys who thought she was pretty.
My brother was just finishing high school. He drove himself to class, cooked his own dinners, watched Mamma coming and going as she looked for work. Heavy metal music rattled his bedroom walls; always, Mamma ordering him to turn it down, or off, it was his choice. Instead, he ordered her to back off. Once, he tossed a Tupperware container across the room at her head. It bounced off her crown and onto the floor. “Fucker!” He screamed, slamming his bedroom door in her face.
“You’re grounded!” Mamma shouted back, whatever that meant.
***
It was my second semester in art school. I painted makeup on women and posed them: exquisite, motionless, interpreted. Beneath streaks of minerals—jet black, lavender, charcoal, turquoise, cobalt, chestnut, antique gold—they are always child-eyes, trying.
For a project, I made photographs of my sister in a bar bathroom. Over smokey eyes, she raised a brow like Dad before he’d chased one of us into a corner. Against a stainless steel wall, she leaned her head, a quilt of graffiti smeared over every square inch. Honey blonde hair drizzling over her shoulders, she bloomed. The air around us was thick with disinfectant, a faint scent of urine radiating from the concrete floor. I’d known her for almost twenty years, but through the lens, my camera made her a distant galaxy; lightyears away, she glittered on the edge of nothingness.
In another project, I made up my friend, Vanessa, and photographed her provocatively in a dirty parking garage stairwell. Her shirt split to the sternum over skin-tight black jeans and boots. I took closeups of her heels crushing beer cans and condom wrappers. Desire and decay, oblivion and filth, she crossed her legs, then opened them. A warm pit in her center, a look on her face like she’d just gotten caught. When the shutter clicked, she’d move a step or two, tossing her hair. Repeatedly, she climbed those stairs, camera documenting each whisk of her lashes.
My sister and I begged Mamma to get ahold of herself. We wanted to see her put together again, feeling beautiful, to see proof of it in print. We cinched her into my sister’s jeans and a velvet peasant shirt the color of Bordeaux in candlelight; breasts parted proudly like they’d been when she was queen of Hamilton High. I tinted her eyelids like sunset, rouged her cheekbones, glossed her lips to catch the parting light of day.
The sun set on Mamma’s face like a heap of live embers. Astonishing as ever, she perched over a shabby wood rail fence, stilettos gripping the rotten structure. She kissed the open air, cast incantations from side-glancing eyes. The dying light, like amber honey, coated the pasture behind her; made her face sparkle and forget. Against dilapidated planks of barn wood, she leaned like a luxurious nap, sliding effortlessly into frame. She configured then disassembled with little prompting. Her autonomous, bewitching geometry, she configured and disassembled with little prompting. Feverishly, I snapped dozens of images. Every facet, my mother, a spell.
She nudged, “Your mamma can still turn heads, you know.”
I’d never doubted. She could snatch the breath from any man; make him wish.
Mamma answered the phone and it was Norma. Whenever she’d talk on the phone—especially with Norma—it was only a matter of minutes before she’d puddle on the floor next to the kitchen counter.
Since Dad’s affair, everything was hazy; we still didn’t know what happened, not exactly. We’d heard so many versions of the “truth,” which, depending on who told the tale, it became impossible to discern facts from rumors. A forensic perspective: Our good Christian family had been obliterated, everyone around us maimed in slivers of gossip.
A side note: A minister is, first and foremost, an excellent liar. I know, because I, too, am now a minister: exquisite, motionless, interpreted.
Plumes of scripture, he swore up and down, “We were not having sex…We were reading the Bible.” But at two o’clock in the morning, on a dirt road, in a truck? A police scanner had alerted one of the church members that the minister and secretary had been found out on Stagecoach Road, lips locked, hands in places Jesus would never go.
“That’s not true.” He protested. “We were praying.” And this had gone on for several years, Mamma pacing the boundaries between lunacy and freedom—even after she’d moved to San Marcos.
Then, in the mail, Mamma received Norma’s envelope stuffed with a stack of pictures digitally timestamped in the bottom right corner, proving recent history. A sequential series of Dad’s truck in the secretary’s open garage on different nights at ungodly hours. A whole roll of them, even while Mamma’d been waiting for him to follow with the furniture.
Mamma called Dad to confront him with Norma’s evidence, but he still refused to give her the dignity of a proper confession. To square everything, Norma went public with the photos, bringing down the church; its 450 attendees downsized, economizing into three camps: those who’d always wanted Dad gone, those who’d never accept facts, and those who’d been looking all along for a reason to stop going to church. Mamma’s supporters lionized her, started a new congregation across town, and informed the local newspaper.
But none of us saw it coming—not until Norma’s last phone call—how a script could be flipped. That day, what Mamma heard in the receiver turned her the color of pus, her miniature body dripping onto the floor like an open cut.
Norma had heard it downtown. All over the place, Dad and his group had been spreading a real nail-biter: that Mamma was, and had always been a whore; that she’d fucked a string of guys since day one.
That night, Mamma wept from the inside out. Her body, a thirteen-thousand-day-old cavern. I wrapped my arms around the waif of her as she choked on snot and tears. Her head thrashed, hot and damp against my chest.
“I just want someone to love me,” she wailed into the dark living room; it was the first time I’d heard her say it exactly that way, to nobody in particular. I tried to look away, her seeping like a rancid gunshot wound all over the Craigslist sofa. I would have bandaged her up with my own skin, would have transfused her with blood that still had life in it. But all I could manage was a pitiful “Mamma, I’m so sorry.”
I shuddered, a cry rumbling up from some unknown place, out of my face into the mess of our muddled bodies. There was my diamond of a mamma, torn open like a paper bird, her frail heart flapping like wet tissue in vicious air. Terrified to move, I didn’t want to frighten her away, my throat clamping like iron jaws on a verging scream.
“I just want someone to love me,” she cried again, louder, demanding an answer from the cavity in front of us. I couldn’t bring myself to echo back, “I love you,” because it wasn’t enough, never would be.
So I said nothing, awkwardly fumbling her back and forth, tightening my grip around her until she could barely move. Teardrops like Texas rain, gritty and bloated, splattered from my chin across her forehead, into her hair. I crushed her in my arms; I couldn’t help it. I was only trying to wring out all the sadness.
***
A block away from my apartment, an adult video arcade sat like a bruise on the edge of the freeway. Next door to an abandoned gas station, it was a cinderblock building with no windows; only a single, tinted glass door. Out front, I’d pace, glancing over my shoulder, scanning my periphery. Flinging it open, I’d bolt through the crack, a clamoring string of bells announcing my arrival on that secret planet tucked inside another, a cosmos spun inside out. Sure, you could rent porn to take home—but the real reason people came was the back room: the beating heart. Behind a crimson velvet curtain at the far end of the store, it thumped blood onto the tile, currents chasing themselves around your ankles wading deeper into the surge. It pulsed through the aisles, a stockpile of dead plastic DVD cases reflecting artificial light.
To vanish behind that curtain, you had to exchange at least five dollars for quarters. Hands shaking, I’d pull out some wadded bills. I’d not make eye contact with the clerk who’d smoke cigarettes in front of a blaring TV poised on the counter. I’d look at anything but him.
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