Our Wives Under the Sea (29)

When my mother used to smile, a rarity, the skin at the sides of her mouth rippled back like a stone thrown into water. In physical terms, there is nothing to a smile: twelve to thirteen muscles, give or take. Teeth only optional. I read somewhere, probably online, that a Duchenne smile denotes contraction of the zygomatic major muscle in conjunction with the orbicularis oculi, otherwise known as smiling with the eyes. A smile is voluntary and typically brief, lightning split across the face. It costs you almost nothing, but my mother nonetheless trained herself almost entirely out of it, believing it puckered the skin and loosened the facial muscles. Frowning, too, and raising the eyebrows were both things that she avoided, citing magazines that advised against yawning too widely, ironing her index fingers over the places where undue emotion had caused the skin of her forehead to crease. What remained was an impassivity—white lines about the underside of her lip that she smoothed away with cold cream. She spoke from the center of her mouth, patched the creases that formed around her eyes with concealer the color of crafting glue. When she swal lowed, her throat moved as if in protest at her face’s immobility, swelling and contracting with such force that her head was not infrequently thrown back.

When she became ill, much of this self-imposed rigidity was lost, my mother’s face untethered but suddenly uncontrolled. She became prone to involuntary facial and bodily spasms, struggled to regulate her body’s speed, its movement through space, its sudden dislocating stops. It became crueler, unwatchable. She ceased to obey herself, her jaw hanging loose and then tightening, skin buckling up in ways she could no longer prevent. I saw it and felt sick. When I went to visit her, I found it increasingly difficult not to imagine the two of us breaking down and turning to dust, just at slightly different paces. Her first and then me. Don’t you dare, she said to me once, though her speech was caught up in the back of her throat as if somehow half-digested, don’t you dare look at me that way. I didn’t know how I was looking, so I looked at the floor and shortly after that I went home.

Things I remember: my mother, eating honey on toast, commenting on the number of fat people she had seen at the supermarket; her juicing machine, its blades fanned upward; the way she wrote my name on the insides of my school shoes; the tight white trick of her hair, at once blond and gray and silver; the first frightened slip of her memory, before we knew what was wrong, and she called her neighbor’s cat Cassandra, though the neighbor’s cat had no name and Cassandra was the name my mother had once thought of giving me; her wrists, her hands, and the way she drew them into her sleeves as though insulted; her Tae Bo videos; the strange sleepwalking manner in which she occasionally stood at the kitchen counter and stirred her index finger around the peanut-butter jar; the sound of her opening up a crab at the breakfast table, the gills and digestive organs strewn between the plates; the fact that she was always thinner than me and worked at it; her feet; the gentle grasp and then drop of a hug that I’d initiated; the sun hat she kept on the phrenology head in the hall; her blue eyes and smell like eiderdown; the fact she died during the two-minute silence in November, the lack of care she gave to the plans of others extending even to the Armistice; her contradictory stance on almost everything; the time when I was seven and she leaned out of the window of her car to shout at a boy who’d called me a bitch on the playground; the fact of her face behind my face; the way she asked about Leah only twice and then stopped asking; her fingernails embedded in me, far past the point of safe removal.



* * *



The phone rings too late to be good news, though when I pick it up the news is nothing and no one is speaking at all. This has happened a couple of times in recent weeks and each time the call is from a private number. In the morning, I call Carmen and ask whether she was trying to get in touch with me the night before.

“Not me,” she says. “And anyway, you have my number—if it was me calling, you’d know.”

“Well, were you maybe calling from a private number and you just didn’t notice?”

“No, definitely not.”

“But are you absolutely sure?”

“I didn’t call you last night, Miri, I was watching the pottery show. Then I went to bed.”

Carmen is obsessed with a television show where a group of contestants construct clay and pottery likenesses of different celebrity guests and are judged in terms of accuracy, artistic merit, and level of offense caused to the celebrity in question. I’ve never watched it, although I have occasionally heard my neighbors watching it. I couldn’t say, on the strength of this, whether it’s a show I’d recommend.

“I’m worried about you, Miri,” Carmen is saying now, “you’re beginning to sound a bit Joan Crawford.”

I tell her I’m fine, that last night’s call was probably just from an insurance company, or someone jerking off. Carmen asks if I want to come around and watch reruns of the pottery show with her but I tell her I have to look after Leah and hang up.

“Did you know,” Leah says, when I turn to look at her, “that seabirds eat more plastic relative to their size than any other animal in the ocean.”

She is sitting on the sofa, face tilted toward the windows, and when I ask what she’s talking about she doesn’t answer. I come over and sit beside her on the sofa, wonder about trying to take her hand. She is swaddled in her floor-length dressing gown, hunkered down, the wishbone span of her shoulders beneath the terry cloth. I find I want to measure her, get up and fetch a length of measuring tape from the kitchen, bring it back and kneel on the sofa at Leah’s side.