My Evil Mother: A Short Story(2)

“Nobody actually likes you,” I’d thrown at her during one of our standoffs. “The neighbors think you’re a loony.” I’d made this up, while suspecting it was probably true.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Don’t you care what they say about you?”

“Why would I care about the tittle-tattle of the uninformed? Ignorant gossip.”

“But doesn’t it hurt your feelings?” My own feelings were frequently hurt, especially when overhearing jokes about my mother in the high school girls’ washroom. Girls of that age can be quite sadistic.

“Hurt, fiddlesticks! I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction,” she’d said with a lift of her chin. “They may not like me, but they respect me. Respect is better than like.”

I disagreed. I didn’t care about being respected—that was a schoolteacher thing, like black lace-up shoes—but I very much wanted to be liked. My mother frequently said I’d have to give up that frivolous desire if I was going to amount to anything. She said that wanting to be liked was a weakness of character.



Now—now being the day of our fight over Brian—she finished grinding and scraped the contents of her mortar into a bowl. She stuck her finger into the mixture, licked it—so, not deadly poison after all—then wiped her hands on her flowered apron. She had a stash of such aprons, each with a seasonal theme—pumpkins, snowflakes—and at least five crisp, striped shirtwaist dresses.

Where had she acquired those flowered aprons and shirtwaist dresses and the string of real pearls? She wasn’t known to go shopping, not like other mothers. I never knew how she got anything. I’d learned to be careful what I myself wished for, because whatever it was might materialize, and not in a form that fulfilled my hopes. I already regretted the pink angora sweater with the rabbit-fur collar and pom-poms I’d received on my last birthday, despite having mooned over its image in a magazine for months. It made me look like a stuffed toy.

She covered the bowl of mushed-up garlic and parsley mixture with a little red plastic hat and set it aside. “Now,” she said, “you have my full attention. Who gets to say what’s good? I do. At the present moment, good is good for you, my treasure. Have you tidied your room?”

“No,” I said sulkily. “Why don’t you like Brian?”

“I have no objection to him as such. But the Universe doesn’t like him,” she said serenely. “She must have her reasons. Would you like a cookie, my pet?”

“The Universe isn’t a person!” I fumed. “It’s an it!” This had come up before.

“You’ll know better when you grow up,” she said. “And a glass of milk, for solid bones.”

I still believed that my mother had some influence over the Universe. I’d been brought up to believe it, and it’s hard to shake such ingrained mental patterns. “You’re so mean!” I said. I was, however, eating the cookie: oatmeal raisin, baked yesterday, one of her staples.

“The opposite of ‘mean’ is ‘doormat,’” she said. “When you’re tidying your room, don’t forget to collect the hair from your hairbrush and burn it. We wouldn’t want anyone malignant getting their claws on that.”

“Like who would bother?” I asked, in what I hoped was a contemptuous tone.

“Your gym teacher,” she said. “Miss Scace. She’s a mushroom collector, among other things—or she was in the old days. Some disguise! Gym teacher! As if I’d be fooled by that!” My mother wrinkled her nose. “It takes so much energy to keep her at bay. She flies around at night and looks in your window, though she can’t get in, I’ve seen to that. But she’s been poaching my mushrooms.”

I wasn’t in love with my gym teacher, a stringy woman with a chicken neck who was given to hectoring, but I couldn’t picture her gathering toxic mushrooms by the light of the full moon, as I knew they ought to be gathered. She definitely had an evil eye—the left one, which wasn’t entirely in sync with the right—but she lacked the heft of my mother. As for flying, that was bonkers. “Miss Scace! That old biddy! She’s not even . . . She couldn’t even . . . You’re so crazy!” I said. It was something I’d overheard at school: Her mother’s so crazy.

“Crazy is as crazy does,” she replied, unperturbed. “Let’s not duck the subject. Brian must go. If not off the planet, out of your life.”

“But I like him,” I said plaintively. The truth: I was besotted with him. I had his picture in my wallet, taken in a train-station photo booth, with a lipstick kiss covering his tiny, surly black-and-white face.

“I dare say,” said my mother. “But the Universe doesn’t care who we like. He was dealt the Tower. You know what that means: catastrophe!” My mother had read Brian’s tarot cards, though not with him present, of course. She’d made one of her pressure-cooker pot roasts and invited him to dinner—a suspect act in itself, which he must have known since he frowned the whole time and answered her perky inquiries in monosyllables—and saved an uneaten corner of his apple pie crust as the link between him and the Invisible World. The pie-crust corner was placed beneath an overturned tray; she’d laid out the cards on the tray bottom. “He’s going to be in a car accident, and I don’t want you in the death seat at the time. You need to cut him off.”