Dead Letters(22)
“I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll take you home, we’ll have some lunch, and I’ll do your nails after.” I stare blankly at the yellow lines on the road.
5
Eating a haphazard lunch of vegetables and sandwiches made from ingredients unearthed in the fridge, we sit around the table. I don’t eat much, and Nadine seems mainly to push food around on her plate with her shaky hands. I find myself unable to watch her as she trembles her way through the meal.
Marlon is quiet and avoids eye contact with me, and my mother chatters cheerfully about something she’s been watching on Netflix. Apparently, Zelda allows Nadine a generous ration of drugs and props her in front of an old laptop that belonged to one of us years ago, and Mom binges on whatever television piques her interest for most of the day, just like your average equally stoned college kid. She spruces up for her evening allotment of wine, which Zelda doles out according to how well she’s behaved that day. Peace for Zelda, and unconsciousness for Nadine. I’m fascinated and horrified. It’s almost exactly like periods of our childhood, when Nadine administered snacks and TV privileges to whichever girl had been the prettiest, or nicest, or most cooperative, depending on what trait Nadine was feeling preferential toward that day. Predictably, Zelda and I each thought the other received more snacks. I wonder if Mom will start to tally which of her daughters lavishes more alcohol on her.
Marlon looks glazed and sleepy, and I speculate about whether he really took only two of Mom’s pills. He doesn’t contribute much to the conversation, and I let him nod along without demanding much. When I get up to clear our plates, I cluck at my mother’s nearly full one.
“Mom, you have to eat. You’ve barely touched any of the grilled cheese.”
“I’m not hungry, Zelda. Those damn pills.”
I frown. “You didn’t get your pills today, Mom.”
“Oh. Well, I have to stay trim. I just sit in bed all day—I can’t be gorging myself on fried cheese.” She waves her hand flippantly.
“Mom, you didn’t eat any breakfast, and I’ll be busy the rest of the afternoon. I won’t be able to drop everything and make you a snack whenever you realize you’ve made a mistake.” Marlon jerks his head up to look at me, and I realize in horror that I’ve repeated verbatim something Nadine used to say to me and Zelda. Marlon’s disoriented expression mirrors the way I feel. “Never mind,” I add. “It’s okay. You should only eat when you’re really hungry.” This is a toned-down paraphrase of another of her sayings, which she started to crack out more frequently during our high school years, when eating became inextricably linked with dress size and thinness. I clear the table, flustered.
I dismiss Marlon, telling him to go sleep it off. As I help Mom up the stairs, her hands shake and her neck wobbles. I grab her thin arms and steady her as she trudges up the steps. The sound of her footsteps on the stairs used to be a deeply ingrained pattern, one I could recognize anywhere: the fourth step, which creaked more than the others, the solid sound her foot made striking the top landing. But now, with her tentative steps, her gnarled feet encased in terry-cloth ballet slippers, the kind of thing my mother once would never have consented to wear, the sound is distorted, uncanny. I look down at her pink-clad feet and feel a moment of spiteful enjoyment. I wonder what happened to her beautiful soft leather Moroccan slippers that used to whisper up this staircase.
I tuck her into bed and give her an extra sedative, just to ensure peace. I’ll end up destroying her liver if I don’t get a better way of guaranteeing that she’ll stay quiet for a few hours, but that’s a long-term concern (I hope), and right now I can only deal with short-term problems. As she’s beginning to sink deeper into her pillows, I tug off her department-store slippers and find a drawer filled with nail polish. Azure, she said. Well, I’m not Zelda. I pick a bright magenta and set to work on her toenails. Even though I’m rushing and anxious, my paint job will be significantly better than the one done by Zelda, who never had the patience for this kind of thing. Zelda’s makeup always has the same dramatic unkempt swath of black eyeliner; she gets frustrated with neatness. I tidy up the pink streaks that have bled over Nadine’s cuticles from Zelda’s last attempt and paint two coats of obnoxious purply-pink on top. The result is a bit textured. Nadine’s asleep by the time I leave, and I wonder if doing her toes was a wasted gesture. She won’t remember it, and I won’t get any good-daughter credit. It occurs to me that maybe this was how she thought about parenting us: as an unbalanced checkbook where she never got the sum she had earned.
When Zelda and I were young, maybe eight or nine, we uncovered a fetid nest of mewling baby mice beneath the hood of the old tractor. It was the beginning of summer, and we had been illicitly fooling around on the tractor, in contravention to one of Marlon’s very few rules. When the engine heated up, a few rodents scampered frantically from beneath the front end, making a harried beeline for the back field. We flipped open the hood to find the escaped parents’ helpless progeny ensconced near the radiator, about to be baked into tiny, unappetizing kebabs. They were hairless, pink, and unpleasant to look at, but we were nevertheless frantic, manically concerned for the little critters’ well-being. Certain that their forebears had abandoned them to their toasty end, we resolved to become their ersatz parents, to raise them to healthy, independent mousehood. We scraped the wads of cotton shreds (possibly a masticated remnant of one of my T-shirts) and straw from the nook within the tractor and transferred the whole bundle, babies and all, to a shoe box. There were four of them, moist and shut-eyed. We hid them beneath Zelda’s bed (she insisted) and pilfered one of Marlon’s numerous bottles of eyedrops, stashed furtively in his flannel shirt pockets to combat the perpetual red-eye that betrayed his various vices. Nadine was always furiously pulling them out of the dryer, half-melted and frequently having left strange saline stains on shirts, railing against Marlon’s carelessness and antipathy.