This is a fragment, not an excerpt.
One of my earliest memories is the thought that I am the main character of life. Not just mine, but everyone’s. I came home from school one day, put my chin on the kitchen counter, and watched my mother write something down on a notepad. She is always making lists. Later I will wish I walked around after her collecting them because it probably would give me a clearer image of what preoccupied her mind.
On this particular day my mother is making a list of what we will eat for dinner that week. I look at her hand and notice she presses down hard on the pen, almost pushing through the paper.
“Mom, am I the main character?” I ask.
She does not look up when she says, “Of what?”
I say, “Of life.”
“No,” she says, never looking up once.
This makes no sense to me. How could I not be, when the only perspective I have is my own?
•
Another shard of life.
I am six years old and in the kitchen. It must be two or three in the morning and all the lights are off in the house. Looking outside the sliding glass door, I can see the snow falling heavy and slow. Pushing all my body weight against the heavy door I open it and step onto the deck where the snow covers my feet like a delicate blanket. Standing still I listen to the wind rustle the trees and the cold creeping up my body numbing all sensations except my brain which is whirring a million miles a minute. I am the only one in the world at that moment. I love being the center of everything.
•
A small scrape.
I take my bike out and decide to ride downhill without hitting my breaks. There is a voice in the back of my brain that tells me even without stopping, I will make it out of this alive. This moment will not be how everything ends even if it does not end well. On the way down the hill I hit loose gravel and my seat slips out from under me, and my body flies forward over the handlebars. The helmet breaks my fall, splitting open like a ripe melon. I taste blood on my lips; it is coppery and thick, sort of like jelly. When I open the front door to our house holding my cracked helmet, my mother sees my face and she smacks my back so hard it stings, then hugs me so tightly I can’t breathe.
•
A peek behind the curtain.
My mother thinks she lost my grandmother’s wedding ring. The truth is I borrowed it to wear while playing dress-up with a friend. The single diamond is a luxury I cannot fathom but I want to feel it on my hand, though the ring slides up and down my finger.
I see the fury in my mother’s face when she first accuses me of borrowing it. Because I deny taking it so vehemently I can never tell her the truth. I am hurt that the idea of me using it is so horrible. This piece of metal symbolizes the (failed) union of two people that eventually produced me. Is it not also partly mine because of this? I think so. I spend the rest of the day watching my mother look around the house berating herself for losing the ring. There is a clenching feeling in my gut that persists from that day forward whenever the ring is mentioned.
•
Shift.
One night my chest hurts. I think I’m dying. In the morning there is the beginning of swollen mounds of tissue where flat terrain used to be. I’m becoming a woman and everything that entails hits me and makes me cry.
My mother says she will take me bra shopping and in the car on the way to the mall I sit quietly and watch my mother’s face as she drives. I want to ask her when she first got a bra but the words will not come out of my mouth. This instance is just one in a collection of wasted opportunities to know my mother.
•
A moment of realization.
It is so cold outside that his eyes are filling with tears, one of which falls down the right side of his face. In order to look into his eyes I need to stand on tiptoes, which I like. For three months we have hung out, in groups with friends and alone. Three months of phone calls, movies, grabbing lunches, sitting tucked in the back of dark bars with cheap beer and our bodies facing each other with electric waves of sexual tension between us so strong I swear I could actually see them.
Here he is standing on the front steps of my apartment on a sub-zero winter night and he has not walked away after saying goodbye. The sound of a siren wails in the distance.
“Your hands are so cold,” he says holding them in his.
“What are we doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Kiss me.”
“If I do we’re no longer just friends.”
“That sounds perfect.”
He pauses momentarily, which later I return to in my head and shuffle through all the different meanings, but in the moment I barely notice. His lips are impossibly soft and I detect a faint whiff of tequila from our margaritas. For the rest of my life the smell of tequila reminds me of how it feels to be young, in love, and completely adverse to responsibility.
•
Momentous.
My husband who first kissed me outside my small walk-up apartment in Uptown is holding my hand while I give birth to our son. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so wet in my life between the sweat, the tears, and the heat radiating from the city night outside. The air conditioning in the hospital cannot keep the humidity from seeping through the windows.
After my son is born and I’m holding him, I realize now my mother and I have one really momentous thing in common. Maybe this is why she always looked worried; as I hold my child the all-consuming feeling that I cannot live up to motherly expectations makes me cry. My husband cries too, but his tears are one hundred percent from joy.
•
A sad truth.
I have not left the house in three days and am surrounded by used burping cloths. My mother-in-law is coming to stay with me while my husband is away on business, though I only like her in small doses. The last time she came to stay she rearranged the kitchen cabinets and we had a huge fight. My mother and I never fought, only exchanged sharp words. The truth is, I now feel like I have a motherly figure to talk to and confide in, even though she drives me crazy. I wish it could have been my mother.
I have learned loneliness feels like holding your breath while being in the dark. The desire to burst forth into the light and be with people, like I used to, is all-consuming. Was this how my mother felt after I was born? She has only come to visit once and the baby is five months old. Our relationship, which was never extremely close, has grown sparser since I married my husband.
My mother sits quietly holding the baby, never really speaking to anyone else, except for him. The two of them have a bond I never had with my mother, which makes me jealous of my own child. Multiple times throughout her stay, my husband tries to start a conversation with my mother, or offer her a drink, or ask her about her life, to which she gives a simple reply and nothing more. Then she looks at me if I’m in the room as if I should be able to understand her reluctance to speak.
•
Brief interlude.
Somehow I have settled into myself. It is as though I was holding my breath and sucking in my stomach for years and then let all the air out. My body and my limbs feel more inhabitable.
After having my second child, I found myself again. My husband and I grew away from each other and then came back together. Both my children are teenagers and astonishingly like neither my husband nor myself. An effort has always been made on my behalf to know my children but more importantly than that, have them know me.
My mother has been dead five years and when I went to her funeral I realized all the missed opportunities equaled one big question mark about her life. I thought back again to all the lists she made; when I cleaned out her house I searched fruitlessly for them. My mother knew all the pieces that made up my life, but her being was a mystery. It was as though she spontaneously came to being at the same moment I did. I never knew who my father was, but I never had questions about him. Yet my mother who I spent a lifetime with in many ways was just as indefinable as my father.
My grandmother’s wedding ring is hidden in my underwear drawer. Everywhere I have moved since childhood I carry it with me as well as the old and worn feeling of guilt. At my mother’s funeral I thought of leaving it in her grave but felt that it would have disappointed her even more than my keeping it hidden all these years. I did not want that to be how our relationship ended.
•
A Change.
There are ten grey hairs on my head at last count. When I look at my stomach it seems like I’m having an out-of-body experience. The skin, loose and with faint stretch marks from childbirth, does not match the image I have of myself. I work part-time and contrary to my previously held beliefs I don’t feel guilty about it. When my husband and children are out of the house and I’m entirely alone I like to watch a movie that makes me cry or perhaps read naked on the couch. Everything is the opposite of what I thought it would be. I wonder if that is how my mother felt.
•
The Closing Stages.
My first experience outside of the country is at age sixty-three. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I just never got around to it while the rest of my life was moving forward. It seems a million years since the beginning of it all. My husband and I went to Prague and we took pictures of buildings and beautiful alleys and ate and drank like we were twenty. None of these photos make it into albums when we come home because I know I am the only one who will ever look at them.
I think about what I’d like done with my ashes when I’m cremated; having them scattered in Prague seems like a nice idea. My children would probably object, but there are plenty of years left to have that argument and many others. This makes me happy.
•
Finale.
At seventy-eight I’m a widow; I wear the color red all the time and still feel like I am the main character. My grandmother’s wedding ring is now worn proudly around my neck on a slim chain. Twice a week I drive to a friend’s house and we drink whiskey and look through photo albums of both of our lives. Two years after my husband’s death I decided to put every photo I ever took into albums. Now there is evidence of my life, which makes me relax a little as though everything will not be in vain.
One afternoon I sit down in an armchair I have by the window looking out onto my backyard and feel extremely tired. I close my eyes and think of my mother and wonder if this is how she felt when she died. Dots of light dance before my eyes, as if I pressed my hands hard against my eyelids. I am overwhelmed by an ache deep in my stomach that shoots up to my throat and miss my mother so acutely I cannot breathe. At the end of everything I want to end up where it all began, within my mother. I imagine what it must have felt like to be a part of someone else, warm and safe with no sound except perhaps a distant heartbeat.
Rachel Henry is originally from the Boston area but has happily settled (for now) in Chicago. She received her BA in Advertising and Public Relations from Loyola University Chicago and currently works in marketing for a tech company. To see some of her other short stories and experiments with words, visit her blog at www.windylit.com.