Dirty Secret (14 page)

And now here I was taking another risk. One even more frightening than a snake.

“What's the surprise?” my mom asked as we walked up the stairs to my apartment. She was usually the one—always the one—who said she had a surprise for me. It had never been the other way before.

“You'll see,” I said and unlocked the door. As we walked in, I called my roommate Christine's name, but she didn't appear to be home. We'd lived together only a few months and weren't close, though we got along fine. I recognized a steamy, burning smell: The radiators had come on that day.

“This is the living room,” I said, holding my arm out toward the bare white walls and the curved couch that fit into one corner with a scratched-up coffee table in front of it.

“And that's the kitchen,” I said, pointing toward an almost empty room with a warped linoleum floor. It was big enough for a table and chairs but we didn't have them.

“I'd say you and your roommate are minimalists,” my mom said.

“More like broke,” I said, though she was right. We took a
few steps down the hallway and I pointed to a closed door. “This is my room.”

I reached for the doorknob and that's when I remembered where the snake's aquarium had been that morning when I'd left for school: on top of the radiator. I flung the door open and ran to the glass rectangle, my mother following closely behind asking, “What is it? What is it, Jessie?”

The snake was dead. Lying on its back, its mouth was wide open, as if it had died screaming. And then I saw the mealworms. I'd left the mealworms in the cage for the snake to eat and now they were crawling into the snake's mouth, possibly trying to save themselves from the literal cooking going on inside those four glass walls. Horrified, I moved the aquarium from the heat source and set it on the floor. My hands were shaking. Because of my stupidity, I had killed an animal. How could I have been such an idiot? At first my mom didn't say a word, choosing instead to scrutinize my bookshelf, but finally she turned to me.

She was laughing. “Why would anyone have a pet snake, anyway?”

“I bought it to get over my fear.”

She stopped laughing, but was still smiling. “What fear?”

“Are you serious?”

She didn't answer. I wanted her to comfort me, to acknowledge that I'd been brave or even that my snake fear was a direct result of her teasing—but all she did was stand there with a smile on her face as if she could start laughing again at any second.

I'd been a fool to think things could be different.

Things would never be different.

I thought of the last time she'd ever pulled my hair: I was twelve and had reached her same height. We were in her kitchen. Her hand lashed out, but I was faster: I caught her forearm. Our eyes locked. My hand gripped her arm, holding it up in the air.

“Those days are over,” I said. “You will never do that again.”

She tried to laugh, but couldn't. She knew I was right.

And there we were, in my apartment after what I'd thought had been one of our best days. Our eyes were locked once again. Between us, on the floor, was the aquarium with the dead snake inside.

And like my erstwhile pet, the hope I'd allowed myself that day was gone. My mother didn't know how to comfort me. She only knew how to laugh at me. I should have known better, and a part of me must have, because I wasn't entirely surprised. I had come to expect disappointment from her. For the day I'd temporarily tamped down that expectation, pressed down on it as if it were snow I could harden and climb over, but it hadn't melted away. It never would.

My mother made some excuse about needing to leave. I walked her to the door and then I listened as her car rumbled to life below my window, waiting to take a breath until she was gone.

AT MY MOM'S, I'VE GOTTEN TO THE DIFFICULT PART OF cleaning. Shoveling garbage into bags, sweeping up the remains, and emptying and scouring a refrigerator is easy, but trying to decide what to keep and what to toss among three-foot-high stacks of old bills and baskets of papers with scribbled phone numbers and addresses is much harder. And since this is my penultimate day of cleaning, I'm going fast. At one point I'm about to toss what looks like a piece of junk mail when my mother snatches it from my hands.

“Jessie! That's about a class I have to take to keep my nursing license.”

I set it on a shelf, with the edge sticking out so she can find it. I'm hoping she'll go back to work, just to give herself something to do, though she says she's enjoying being unemployed and is still obsessed with suing her former employer. I've never
worried about her money situation—no matter how loony and quirky she can be, my mother has always been able to take care of herself financially. Except now she won't give me a straight answer about how much money she has, and I've realized, by the state of her kitchen, that she eats every single meal out. And then there are those Savers bags with the receipts stapled to the top. If I added them up I'm sure they'd equal thousands of dollars. All wasted.

Finally, in a stack of papers on top of a dresser, I find a bank statement.

It's for $35,000. I was expecting it to be for ten times that amount, at least.

“Mom, please tell me you've got another account. This can't be all the money you've got.”

She grabs it from my hand and examines it. “It's not. I've got way more than that.”

“Good. How much and where is it?”

“It's around here somewhere . . .”

“But do you have any idea how much you actually have saved? We need to make you a budget. I need to know that you have enough money to live on.”

“I've got plenty! And besides, I'll have a lot more once I sue those motherfuckers.”

The nest egg I assumed she had was one way I tried to make myself feel better about her hoarding; I always figured that someday I'd be able to convince her to sell her house and buy a condo. And this seems like the perfect time to do it. The problem is, I'm beginning to wonder if she could afford to buy one, even if I could convince her.

And it's partly my fault.

We were speaking again, but still not in regular contact, when I found out from my dad, who'd heard from my brother,
that my mom's boyfriend Roger had died. Since Roger had been sick the whole time they were together, I knew this day would come and I'd always dreaded it.

When I found out Roger had died, I tried calling, but she didn't answer. I called again and again. She'd turned her answering machine off. The next day I sent flowers and kept trying to call; a few days after that I received a rambling, unsigned letter from her with words that ran to the edge of the paper and trailed right off the page. Finally, after a week, I reached her. She cried and cried—who wouldn't?—as I sat on the other end of the phone line and listened. I wished I could do more.

We began talking on the phone almost every evening. (Or, rather, she talked, and I listened.) It was the spring of 1999, and I was living in Brooklyn with a roommate and working as an editor at an online magazine in Manhattan. I didn't have much of a social life. I'd broken up with a boyfriend a few months before, and because many of my friends had been his pals first, I found myself invitation-less in the evenings and on weekends. I didn't really mind though; I was good friends with the people at work, and often that “work” consisted of playing laser tag or staying up all night watching bad wrestling movies in the name of research.

I used the weekends to work on a novel. The evenings were for my mother. Over the weeks, then months, she began to cry less during our phone calls. She began talking about things further in the past than Roger. And she began apologizing. “I know I was terrible to you. I feel so bad about it. I just had no preparation,” she'd say. “My parents were both so sick. I didn't know how to take care of you kids. I'm so sorry.”

I'd always say it was fine, that I forgave her. My feelings were more complex and I was more confused than I let on, but I had no idea what else to say. I didn't know what I wanted from her.
Was I supposed to forget the hair-pulling and all the other chaos because she said she was sorry? I wished I could. I wanted it to be that easy. “I turned out fine,” I'd say, and she'd usually respond, “It must be because of your dad and Sandy.”

Whenever my mother asked about my life, I was wary of giving her any personal information. I feared that she'd use it against me. She'd done it before: diagnosing me with the “trait that ran in the family” of failing to maintain friendships because when she asked about a friend from elementary school, I hadn't a clue what had become of her. And then there were the snakes: She latched onto that fear of mine—which she'd created, no less—and wouldn't let go.

So I was hesitant. I tried to keep things at a superficial level: what I was reading at the time, the stories I was editing at the online magazine, that I loved sushi and Ethiopian food. Small things. One night I happened to mention the student loans I was paying off and she said, “That's excellent news!” sounding more excited than I'd heard since Roger's death.

“It's excellent news that I'm in so much debt?” I owed more than $30,000.

“Jessie, this will give me something to live for!”

“You're kidding, right?” I asked, but I already knew she wasn't.

“I'm going to help you pay off your loans . . . I'll send you money each month. It'll give me a goal. That's what I need.”

At the online magazine, I was making the most money I'd ever made—$40,000 a year. My loan payments were high, though, around $500 a month; each month I paid as much as I could afford over the amount because I hated the idea of being in debt. Since I thought she had more-than-ample riches squirreled away, letting my mother help with my payments didn't seem like a bad idea, especially if it gave her a goal, but there was
something about it that made me uncomfortable. It smacked of exploiting her grief. Also, I suspected that giving money was the only way my mother knew how to express love, and worse, that she saw it as her only value. Plus, declaring my student loan payments “something to live for” was just beyond sad.

“I'm not sure,” I said.

“I'll send some every month. And little by little, we'll chip away at it.”

Other than showing up for work on time when she had a job (an amazing feat for her, when I think about it), my mother had never kept to a schedule in her life. She was always forgetting appointments, and when I was a kid, she often forgot to pick me up from places when she was supposed to. So I knew she wouldn't keep to her self-imposed schedule of sending me money, and frankly, I didn't want her to.

“How about this,” I said. “You can send it when you want,
if
you want to. But no pressure.”

I told myself that if she sent money, I'd accept it, but I'd never ask.

Around this time I decided to fly to Europe with an airline voucher I'd received for getting bumped from a flight. One of my friends was touring with a band called the Residents, and I made plans to meet her in Prague and then continue on to Paris, where I'd attend a week-long writing workshop. I told my mom about the trip, and she sent me money even though I hadn't asked. I cashed her check, convinced that her bank account was bursting.

My friend's band played three shows in Prague, and on the last night, I happened to sit next to a very cute guy who scribbled things in a tiny notebook throughout the first part of the set. I knew he was American because when I'd asked if the seat next to him was free (praying that he spoke English because I
could only say “please” and “cheers” in Czech) he'd replied, “It is. It's all yours.”

Between songs, we started chatting. He was probably gay, I decided, because of his perfect posture, stylish haircut, and fashionable hipster clothes. Plus, he wasn't flirtatious or sleazy in any way. His name was David and he was in Prague for the summer, but lived in San Francisco where he was getting a master's degree in history. When he asked what I was doing at a Residents show in Prague, I told him I was there with someone in the band.

“Oh, really? Who?” he asked.

The Residents are secretive about their identities, disguising themselves in oversized tuxedoes with giant papier-mâché eyeballs covering their faces. Over their thirty-year career, there's been speculation that members include everyone from David Bowie to Lou Reed to Iggy Pop. The nonpermanent members like my friend aren't as clandestine, but she'd sworn me to secrecy about the others.

“I can't really say who I'm with.”

“You can't remember?” David asked, the hint of a smile on his lips.

“No,” I said, “it's just that, you know, they're incognito.”

He looked surprised. “I just had lunch with the drummer today. His name is Mark.”

Oh. “Were you interviewing him?”

He looked confused. I pointed to his notebook.

“Oh, no, I'm not writing about them. I was just jotting down random things—poetry type stuff, but don't tell anyone.” He smiled.

It turned out that he couldn't have cared less about the band but had met the drummer earlier that day at a mutual friend's apartment; in fact, he'd sat at the end of the row of seats in case he wanted to leave early.

“Okay.” I said. “I'm here with the female singer. The one in the chicken mask.”

When the show ended, I asked David if he knew of any good dance clubs—my friend and I had already decided that was how we wanted to spend our last night in Prague. David not only knew of some (more proof that he was gay), but while I waited for my friend to come out from backstage, he spent five minutes drawing me a map of all the best places on a napkin. On a whim I asked if he wanted to join us—he was sweet, and besides, I knew my worse-than-nonexistent sense of direction would render the map useless.