Still Life with Tornado(23)

DAD: Too hot. She may hate it.

MOM: Tacos, then. Kids love tacos.

DAD: (silence)

MOM: I don’t think you pushing Sarah to go back to school is helping.

DAD: She’s rebelling. She needs boundaries.

MOM: She’s never had a problem before. Maybe she just needs someone to talk to.

DAD: You’re better at talking.

MOM: (silence)

Dad goes back to his room. I stand in my bedroom by my open window. It’s Sunday late afternoon in the city. Not much traffic. No one talking. No dogs barking. No kids playing next door. Nothing to hear.

? ? ?

I stand at the front door and say good-bye to Mom at six thirty as she heads out in her scrubs. Mom is strictly a solid-color scrubs kind of nurse. She says all those flowers and prints are for the day nurses.

“Think about school tomorrow,” she says to me.

“I will,” I say, but I’m lying.

“And we’re going to have your friend over for dinner!” she says. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I just nod.

“Why don’t you pull out your sketchbook tonight and draw me a comic or something?” she says. “Something about you and me having fun.”

I want to tell her that she now sounds like the mother of a six-year-old, but I know she’s trying, so I say, “I’ll try,” even though I never drew a comic in my life.

When she gives me a hug, she whispers, “Maybe this week you can take me to the museum or something. We can go out to lunch. Fun, right?”

“Okay,” I say.

As she turns to leave, she misses my eyes filling up with tears, and I’m glad because I don’t know why it’s happening. I think it’s because she has to say things like this now—about having fun.

My skipping school is throwing off her plans, but she rolls with it because she’s a solid-color-scrubs kind of nurse. She’s going into the ER tonight and she doesn’t know what to expect. She has mastered the art of the unexpected.

Sometimes it’s college students who have a cold. Sometimes it’s an unexplained seizure or some Jane Doe who’s all slashed up. Sometimes it’s little kids who broke a leg or broke a collarbone or got shot by accident by one of their cousins. Mom has put her hands in a man’s chest and pumped his heart back to life. Mom has had to strap down drunk people who spit at her. Mom doesn’t really care about plans because Mom sees people’s plans change all the time at three o’clock in the morning.





Your Mother and Me



Dad is sitting on the couch watching a baseball game on the TV. My triangles are still drawn on the screen. The sliver of tissue I stuck to the smallest triangle is still there. It blocks right field if the camera is behind the batter. Dad doesn’t seem to care. I wonder how many tissue slivers I’d have to stick on the TV before he’d care. I decide the number is probably five.

I sit down on the couch and draw a blank comic on a stray piece of paper. It’s five panels long. I decide to draw whatever comes to me in each panel. No thinking first, no planning. I just rough sketch right there on the couch next to Dad.

The first panel is a tornado.

The second panel is my family—all of us—Bruce included.

The third panel is the tornado hitting my family.

The fourth panel is just a tornado again, but like in Carmen’s tornadoes I can see many things in the tornado. Miss Smith, my art teacher, is in there. Alleged Earl is in there. Oregon is in there. Two lawyers and a judge are in there.

The fifth panel is me and Mom at three o’clock in the morning. The clock is in the foreground. Mom and me are tiny in the background and we are changing plans.

I have no idea what this comic means. I don’t plan on showing it to Mom, that’s for sure.

A commercial comes on. It’s one of those louder-than-life commercials, as if boosting the volume would make us buy the thing they’re selling.

Dad talks over the commercial rather than muting it.

He says, “You’re making a big mistake.”

He says, “You’re too smart to make such a bad decision.”

He says, “I really think you should listen to your mother and I.”

I say, “Me.”

He says, “What?”

I say, “Your mother and me.”

He says, “Don’t be a smart-ass.”

“I only got to be a smart-ass because you’re a smart-ass.”

“Touché, my creative little clone.”

Dad and his creativity. Time to make the art! He must be so disappointed after all those trips to the museums and all those summer art classes and all those birthday gifts. I am, too. I’m disappointed. I just drew a comic, so why can’t I draw a pear? My hand? A vase of spring flowers?

I mute the commercial. I say, “Do you ever wonder about Bruce?”

Dad says, “No.”

I say, “That’s kinda cold, isn’t it?”

Dad says, never taking his eye off the screen, “Bruce decided to leave our family. There isn’t much I can do about it.”

I say, “You could call.”

“Don’t have his number.”

“You could find it.”

The game comes back on TV, and Dad puts the sound back on and talks loudly. “He doesn’t want to hear from us. He made that quite clear.”