My Evil Mother: A Short Story(4)

I could hardly tell him that my mother had consulted some old cards with weird pictures on them and predicted he would die in a car crash if he went out with me. I didn’t need to fuel any more school rumors about her; there were more than enough as it was. “I just can’t go out with you,” I said. “I need us to break up.”

“Is there another guy?” he asked in a menacing tone. “I’ll punch his face in!”

“No,” I said. I started to cry. “I really like you. I can’t explain. It’s for your own good.”

“I bet it’s your crazy mother,” he said. I cried harder.

That night I crept out into our backyard, buried Brian’s picture under a lilac bush, and made a wish. My wish was that I would somehow get him back. But wishes made out of earshot of my mother did not come true. According to her, I lacked the talent. Perhaps I might develop it later—grow into it, as it were—but it could skip a generation, or even two. I hadn’t been born with a caul, unlike her. Luck of the draw.

The next day at school there were whisperings. I tried to ignore them, though I couldn’t help hearing the odd phrase: Cuckoo as a clock. Addled as an egg. Crazy as a box of hair. Mad as a sack of hammers. And the worst: No man in the house, so what can you expect? Within a week, Brian was going out with a girl called Suzie, though he still shot reproachful glances in my direction. I comforted myself with versions of my own saintly unselfishness: because of me, Brian’s heart was still beating. I’m not saying I didn’t suffer.

Several years later, Brian became a drug dealer and ended up on a sidewalk with nine bullets in him. So maybe my mother had got the main event right, but the time and the method wrong. She said that could happen. It was like a radio: nothing amiss with the broadcast end, but the reception could be faulty.



No man in the house described our situation. Of course, everyone has a father—or, as they would say nowadays, a sperm provider, fatherhood in the old sense of paternity having fallen into disrepute—and I had one, too, though at that date I wasn’t sure this father was still what you’d call “alive.” When I was four or five, my mother told me she’d changed him into the garden gnome that sat beside our front steps; he was happier that way, she said. As a garden gnome he didn’t need to do anything, such as mow the lawn—he was bad at it anyway—or make any decisions, a thing he hated. He could just enjoy the weather.

When I was wheedling her over something she’d initially denied me, she’d say, “Ask your father,” and I’d trot out and hunker down beside the garden gnome—hunker just a little, as he wasn’t much shorter than me—and stare into his jovial stone face. He appeared to be winking.

“Can I have an ice cream cone?” I’d plead. I was sure that he and I had a pact of sorts—that he would always be on my side, as opposed to my mother, who was on her own side. It gave me a warm feeling to be with him. It was comforting.

“What did he say?” my mother would ask when I went back in.

“He said I can.” I was almost sure I’d heard a gruff voice mumbling from within his grinning, bearded stone face.

“Very well, then. Did you give him a hug?”

“Yes.” I always hugged my father when he’d allowed something marginally forbidden.

“Well done. It’s nice to say thank you.”

This fantasy had to be given up, naturally. Well before the time I was fifteen, I’d heard the other, supposedly real version: my father had deserted us. According to my mother he’d had urgent business elsewhere, though at school they said he’d run away, unable to tolerate my mother’s craziness, and who could blame him? I was jeered at for his absence; it wasn’t usual in that decade for fathers to be missing, not unless they’d been killed in the war. “Where’s your father?” was annoying, but “Who’s your father?” was insulting. It implied my mother had generated me with someone she didn’t even know.

I brooded. Why had my father abandoned me? If he was still alive, why didn’t he at least write to me? Hadn’t he loved me even a little?

Though I no longer believed that my father was a garden gnome, I did suspect my mother of having transformed him in some other way. I’m ashamed to say that I went through a period of wondering if she’d done him in—with mushrooms or something ground in a mortar—and had buried him in the cellar. I could almost see her lugging his inert body down the stairs, digging the hole—she’d have had to use a jackhammer to get through the cement—then dumping him in and plastering him over.

I inspected the cellar floor for clues and found none. But that proved nothing. My mother was very clever: she’d have taken care to leave no traces.



Then, when I was twenty-three, my father suddenly turned up. By that time, I’d finished university and left my mother’s house. My departure was not amicable: she was bossy, she was spying on me, she was treating me like a child! Those were my parting words.

“Suit yourself, my pet,” she’d said. “When you need help, I’ll be here. Shall I donate your old stuffed animals to charity?”

A pang shot through me. “No!” I cried. In our clashes I inevitably lost my cool, and a shard of dignity along with it.

I was determined not to need help. I’d found a job at an insurance company, on a low rung, and was sharing a cheap rented house west of the university with two roommates who had similar peasant-level jobs.