“I don’t have to go to this, you know,” Billy said, his hand wrapped around the doorknob.
“You should.” I kissed him on the cheek. “Enjoy yourself.”
Billy left, promising not to drink since he was driving home, he would be back before midnight. Mom and I stood next to each other, staring at the shut door.
I realized this was the first night Mom and I had been alone together in months, maybe longer. In general, I didn’t have a lot of memories of Mom without another person in them. Before Dad died, we were either with him because he was in a good mood or, more often, he was in a bad mood and we were separate—me alone in my room, headphones on, her alone, wherever, doing whatever it was she did in those moments.
She turned to me and reached out suddenly, grabbed an end of my hair. I flinched and felt bad that I flinched, tried to relax. “You have a lot of split ends,” she said.
Soon, we were in the bathroom. I sat on the floor, my back against the bathtub rim, Mom crouching behind me in the tub with a pair of scissors. She grabbed my hair, seemingly at random, and snipped. I watched pieces of my hair fall away, dark and sharp against the pure-white porcelain.
“My hair also got dry when I was pregnant with you,” she said. “It drove me crazy every time I looked in the mirror, seeing how limp and frizzy it was.”
I hadn’t noticed anything different about my hair. My mirror avoidance had been working. I never caught more than a glimpse of myself in storefront windows as I passed, or my fuzzy reflection on the shed TV before I turned it on. When I ate cereal, I used a plastic spoon, no chance of even seeing my nose reflected in the metal. It was impossible not to see the top of my head in the rearview mirror when I drove, but I made sure to look quickly when I had to, focusing only on the road behind me.
“When you’re in the shower after you put in conditioner, you should get a wide-toothed comb and run it through your hair before you rinse. It helps strengthen your hair. I read that in some article.”
“I don’t use conditioner.”
Mom stopped. “What? Why not?”
“I don’t know. It makes showers longer, it feels gross in my hair, I don’t know.”
“You should always use conditioner.”
I wanted to turn around, grab both her hands, thrust them in the air with mine, scissors up, and scream, Yes, yes, this is what I want! Teach me, please. Guide me, move me if I’m headed in the wrong direction. Tell me how to do things. There’s so much I don’t know. “Thanks.” I kept still, stared right ahead. “I’ll start doing that.”
She cut a few more pieces and brushed off my shoulders. “There. All done.”
I stood up and headed for the door, thinking it might be nice to sit on the couch, just the two of us, and watch TV together, something light and funny. I had always enjoyed hearing Mom laugh. She grabbed my arm and stopped me before I reached the door. “Wait, look in the mirror. See how much better you look.”
Her grip was insistent and I couldn’t explain, tell her that staring into mirrors left me feeling weak, my insides scooped out, I hated seeing my own eyes staring back at me. I let her pull me to the mirror, and when I no longer could avoid it, I looked up.
In the mothers’ support-group meeting, several pregnant women had complained about the distortion of their bodies. They moaned about how they couldn’t recognize themselves anymore, so much extra skin and fat, their faces puffy and foreign. One woman had gotten up from her seat and lifted up her shirt, grabbed a chunk of her side, and waved it at everyone, shouting, “This is not my body.”
In the mirror I saw the same girl I’d always seen. Her face was slightly rounded and there were bags under her eyes that seemed darker and deeper than before, but everything else was the same. Same nose, ears, forehead, mouth, the chin Dad always said was from his side of the family, a strong chin that had been passed down for generations and proved I was destined for greatness. Those women talked about how terrible it was to feel like they’d lost themselves, that they felt unrecognizable. None of that sounded too bad to me, being someone new, looking in a mirror and not recognizing the person staring back at you.
“Much better,” Mom said. She stood behind me; her chin was softer than mine, and she barely reached my shoulder. “I couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful daughter.”
Are there other things you would’ve asked for? If you had the chance, if there was a way to go back, to be that girl in the convenience store knowing everything you know now, would you still greet Dad with a smile? Would you still say yes when he asked you to share a forty with him out in the parking lot? Yes to Los Angeles? Yes to me? What would I be like if you could’ve asked for everything you would’ve wanted for me? Do I look like him? Do you miss him at night? What is it like sleeping in a bed without him in it?
There were also questions I had about how she felt about me. I was so mad at her, and mostly I wondered why wasn’t she mad at me when I told her I was pregnant. Why did she cry tears of joy when I told her I was pregnant and not tell me that I was making a mistake, tell me I should’ve used a condom, and I was too young to be having a child? Did she think that I couldn’t be anything but a mother? That I was too stupid, too dull, to have a life for myself without a lovely man like Billy to provide for me? What would she think of Jenny?
I kept my eyes on my reflection. “Mom, I don’t feel good. I haven’t felt good for a really long time.”
She turned me around to face her, mercifully pulling me away from my reflection. “Oh, honey.” She stroked my face. I leaned into her palm, her warmth. “Are you having stomach pains? Or just body aches in general? Pregnancy really is rough on the body.”
“No, I’m fine. I mean—”
“Do you want some tea?” She moved her hands from my face to my stomach. “Dad used to make me tea at night during the pregnancy whenever I was feeling sick.”
“Really?” I removed her hands from my stomach. “He did that?”
“Yup. He even bought me a bunch of different flavors so I wouldn’t get bored with any of them. He’d bring me a steaming cup in bed and tell me to close my eyes, see if I could guess the flavor.”
It was hard to picture this. Him putting water in a pot, boiling it, steeping a mug with Earl Grey, English Breakfast, chamomile. I couldn’t even picture him in the checkout lane at the grocery store with anything other than Miller Lite and jelly beans. That man bringing tea to his pregnant wife wasn’t the same as the one who once picked me up from school two hours late, with crushed Miller Lite cans and gum wrappers covering the floor of his car, the front of his gray gym shorts soaked in piss, shouting over and over, “Get in, we’re going to Disneyland.”