Mothered (12)
She left the bathroom door open as she primped, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t crossed paths with her mother all day. When Grace first retreated to her room late morning (with a hefty traveler’s mug of coffee), Jackie’s door had been closed. Later, she’d occasionally heard Jackie moving around, up and down the stairs. Grace hadn’t been sure, before Jackie’s arrival, if the stairs would be too much for her. As a full-time working mom, Jackie used to function at a pace one might have described as impatient, her movements swift and robotic, her focus a step ahead to the next item on her to-do list. Except for her slower, more cautious footing and a slouch in her shoulders, Jackie seemed quite physically capable, which was a relief.
No ass wiping for the foreseeable future.
Her mom had a slight tremor in one hand, and her eyes were growing milky, but several nights of good sleep had put the color back in her cheeks. After Jackie arranged her bedroom just the way she wanted it, she hadn’t behaved in a helpless or needy way. It dawned on Grace that her mother had possibly never lived alone, not for any appreciable time (unlike Grace), and that may have been a worry much greater than her health.
Grace’s flip-flops slapped against the floor as she strode through the dining room. She noted the dust bunnies clustered under the table and the ghostly remains of shoe prints and added a quick mopping to her mental to-do list. The dining room hadn’t been used yet—she ate in front of the TV or at her desk—but proper sit-down meals with Miguel were part of what she’d envisioned when becoming a homeowner. That might have led to them planning dinner parties or game nights and who knew what else. Her apartment life had never allowed enough space for entertaining, but most people were congregating more cautiously now—if they were congregating at all. And when she’d imagined chatting half the night away with Miguel or laughing around her table with friends, her mother hadn’t been part of that picture.
“Hey,” Grace said, taking a quick scan of the kitchen. It was clean enough, but somewhat to her surprise her mother was at the stove, stirring something soupy.
“Hey hon, did you get a lot of work done?”
Jackie had no idea about Grace’s hobby, but Grace had explained that sometimes she needed to be alone in her room To Work. That was set up as a preemptive boundary so they could establish some rules for private time. The reality of that, now so casually uttered, made Grace fear that her mother might’ve thought she’d been holed up in her room masturbating all day. No, wait . . . Jackie wouldn’t think about masturbating. Oh God, Grace was thinking about her mother thinking about masturbating.
“Miguel’s coming for dinner,” Grace said, quickly changing the topic.
“I know, that’s why I’m making a puttanesca sauce,” Jackie chirped. “Well, it’s almost a puttanesca sauce—you didn’t have any anchovies. But that’s okay—it’s less scandalous this way.”
Jackie laughed at her own incomprehensible joke. Grace’s hand froze on the unopened cabinet door and she gazed, bewildered, at the woman at the stove. The pixie cut Grace had given her looked as good as she’d promised: Jackie appeared both more distinguished and more youthful. There was a pep in her step as she gave her sauce a stir and sidestepped to the refrigerator to hunt for more ingredients. Grace had planned to heat up a frozen pizza, garnished with kalamata olives and mushrooms, and accompanied by a quick salad of plum tomatoes. Cleverly, her mother had turned it all into a homemade pasta sauce.
As familiar as the dream had felt, this seemed utterly foreign. This was a mother Grace didn’t know. Mommy had never cooked, except for the occasional tuna casserole or Hamburger Helper. By the time Grace was eight, she’d practically managed the household alone. Young Grace had mastered the casseroles and many other favorites, like hot dogs with baked beans, and french toast, and various things she put on english muffins (usually smothered with cheese) and baked in the toaster oven. This person, determined to prepare a better supper than Grace would’ve made, seemed nothing like the desperate woman who’d practically wept on the phone a month ago. On the surface these were all good things, but Grace couldn’t keep up with the strange feelings, the topsy-turvy, shaken-not-stirred sensations that came with her new daily encounters with her mother.
Water. Grace had subsisted most of the day on caffeine and needed to purge some of the jitters from her system. That’s what had launched her migration to the kitchen, a glass of water. Still mesmerized by Jackie, Grace reached for a glass. Her hand struck . . . a can of peaches.
Had she opened the wrong cabinet door? No.
She scrutinized the contents in front of her. Her tumblers and wineglasses and mugs and reusable water bottles weren’t there. Nor were there any bowls—for cereal or ramen or anything else. Instead there were tidy stacks—alphabetized?—of canned goods on the lower shelf and boxes of pasta and rice mixes and crackers on the upper shelf.
As Jackie went about chopping and humming and pretending like all was right with the world, Grace tried the next cabinet over, which used to house her plates and Pyrex and storage containers. There she found all her cereal, neatly lined up, and above that, her chips and popcorn and snack bars.
Her throat suddenly parched, her body on the verge of dehydration, Grace felt her temperature rising. Where the first cabinet had triggered a momentary disorientation, an apprehension that the kitchen was as it had always been and her memory was (again) on the fritz, by the time she got to the cereal—arranged by size rather than favorites—she knew with certainty what had happened.