The Animators(51)

It’s her practice to take in what you tell her rapidly, then give a response that makes you wish you hadn’t told her anything in the first place. A rift between you and a friend, a breakup, the details of a fender bender. For your trouble, you’ll likely get an irritated (and humiliating) “All right. Good God.” This isn’t a biased opinion. This shit could go on her headstone. Anyone in the family will tell you the same.

“I’m here,” I tell her.

She chokes. I picture her clawing at her nose with a Kleenex. The TV, a new flat-screen since the old oak tube set blew up, on mute in the background. “When you called me, I shoulda—I shoulda gone down there to that hospital that instant.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “You were.” Blank. Fuck. She was what. “Busy?”

“A mother should never be too busy to visit her sick child in the hospital,” she wails. “I saw Dr. Ingram this morning and he said what happened to you was real serious. He said you’re lucky to be alive.”

“That’s nice of him.”

“Sharon.”

“I didn’t die,” I say. “I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure I’m not dead.”

“You don’t sound right. I thought you didn’t sound right when you called.”

“That’s because I just had a stroke.”

“Here I am tryin to talk to you,” she says, “and you keep gettin smart with me.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I am getting better. I have speech therapy and physical therapy. It’s work, but it’s better.”

“I been prayin over you,” she warbles.

I have to stop and think about what’s making me angry about all of this. The word finally occurs to me: sentimentality.

“I been prayin over it, and I made lots of mistakes. I know that now. Specially with you, and you turned out so good.”

“Thank you?”

“We didn’t even go up when you graduated from colletch. What’s wrong with me?”

“I don’t know.”

I hear a snort at the other end.

“It’s fine,” I say quickly. “Graduation’s not…not a big deal.”

“You coulda died,” she whispers.

“But I didn’t. Fuck.”

“You watch your mouth.”

This sets off a new gale of moans and sniffles. I put my head on the counter. Reach out and try to pull the spoon in with my foot. Oatmeal’s gonna be cold now. Shit.

“Are you alone?” she manages. “You got your friend with you?”

“Her name is Mel, Mom.”

“I know that.”

“Then why do you keep calling her my friend?”

“I don’t know.”

I sigh. “She is here. We rented a house. We’ve been working on a project.”

“How long you gonna stay down there?”

“Until the docs say it’s okay to travel. Then we’ll go back to New York, I guess.”

“You’ll stop here on your way back, won’t you? You ain’t been back in a while. You didn’t even come home last Christmas.”

True. Mel and I went to Montreal for work last December and just decided to stay through the holidays, ordering room service and getting drunk and watching the CBC. We rang in the new year at a bar called the Velvet Hammer, hepped up on absinthe and Ritalin, surrounded by transvestites who kept pinching our bottoms and screaming, “Girls’ club! Girls’ club!”

“Y’all come down here,” Mom says. “I need to see you’re alive.”

I pinch my lips, too dumb and full-feeling around the ears to say anything but “Okay.”

—

That night Mel says, “I want to show you something.”

I groan inwardly. Another appearance from our fuzzy, plodding nonproject.

“Come on,” she says, and drags me into the living room.

There are two sketches on Mel’s drafting table. She’s taken an old lamp found at Goodwill and turned it on its side, training its light directly on the table surface. The rest of the room falls into shadow.

I linger in the doorway, not sure I want to see what she’s done. She prods me. “Come on. It’s not that bad. And if it is, then you say so, and I’ll chuck it.”

I sit at the table, look at the first sketch. It’s a soft pastel sketch of a little girl, back turned, sitting in the light of a television set next to an empty La-Z-Boy recliner. The TV glow outlines the girl’s silvery form, tapering to darkness at the edges. At the bottom, Mel has scrawled, Sharon, 1994.

The second sketch is a mock-up of a Warner Bros. sign-off, the hot red circle that surrounds Bugs Bunny with the cursive “That’s all Folks!” above his head. But instead of Bugs Bunny, Mel has drawn Stroke Sharon—what I looked like when I begged her for a mirror. One side of my face is slack, the left eye dead, my head bald. My lips are drawn back into a crooked snarl, my mouth dark and sinister. It’s grotesque. It’s amazing.

In her best Mel Blanc impression, Mel reads what’s she written above my head: “Yeh-yeh yeh yeh you’re fucked!”

There’s a deep well of silence before I start giggling. Mel follows. We sit there, cracking up. When one of us starts to calm down, we look at the picture and it starts all over again.