“In India, I saw a baby cobra,” she said. “It was blocking the path, rearing its head up.” She made an aspirated noise at the back of her throat. “They’re the worst. They don’t know their power yet; they release the venom all at once.” I did not picture my mother in her stories. Instead, I saw her stories from her perspective, as if I had been the one in India with the baby cobra.
On the hill above us was a green cactus with bright red fruit. “Prickly pears,” my mother said. “I’ve been wanting to try one.”
She began to climb, setting off little avalanches of dirt with her feet.
“Mom, stop,” I said.
“I’m glad you’re not my mother,” she said.
“Let’s do it later,” I said.
“Come on, Lisa. I’ve always wanted this.”
“There’s spines,” I said.
“I wasn’t born with yesterday’s rain,” she said, still climbing. She said this when I acted like a know-it-all. Rain was what we needed—we were in a drought, the worst one in a long time. We weren’t supposed to flush after we peed. The hillside was yellow, the sound of the grass crackly under her feet.
She made it up to a higher point on the far side of the plant so she was reaching down from above it. The plant didn’t look real, but whimsical, jointed like a plastic doll.
“Red is a dangerous color in nature,” she said, near the bright-red fruit. “It’s a warning color: ‘Poison—don’t eat me.’“
She covered her hand with the edge of her shirt, sucked in her stomach, reached, and grabbed the top of the fruit and pulled. It did not snap off as she thought it would.
She began to rotate it. “It’s fibrous,” she grunted. “It won’t come off.”
I wanted to make her stop; she was acting crazy and I hated her. I knew everything. I was full of premonitions. The grasses hissed.
Finally, she pried it off and brought it down to the path, where I stood.
I said, “Let’s take it home and boil it.”
“I want it now,” she said. “If I can just get the skin off.” She used her shirt to guard her hand while she peeled the skin down and then nibbled the flesh at the center, trying to avoid the skin. “Mmm. It’s good. Interesting. Want some?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
On the drive home, she began to moan.
“My throat,” she said. “It hurts to swallow.”
At a stoplight she pulled herself up in her seat, looked at her open mouth in the rearview mirror. Despite my resolve not to pity her, I was terrified.
“I told you to wait,” I said.
“I know. I can’t talk, Lisa, it hurts too much.” Small, transparent spines on the skin of the fruit must have lodged themselves along her throat.
When we got home, her throat on fire, she went to get her clothes out of the dryer and found that she had accidentally shrunk her favorite angora sweater.
“Damn,” she said. It had a row of mother-of-pearl buttons down the placket. “You can have it.”
It fit me exactly, hitting just below my belly button, the sleeves at my wrists, the soft fabric and flower pattern in a sea of pink, as if it were made to be my size.
In the few days leading up to the next excursion with Debbie, I was careful not to wear the shrunken sweater, which seemed to be something I had taken from my mother, part of the tide of good luck that flowed out to me, leaving her behind.
A few days later she sat in her bedroom throwing three pennies at the carpet beside a book, a pen, and a piece of paper, consulting the I Ching. She sat in the corner, the lights off. It was daytime but it was dim in her bedroom. She leaned, her elbow on her knee and her brow in her hand. Strands of hair stuck along her cheek and fell over her ear.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I lost my twenties,” she said.
She threw the pennies again, looked, jotted down ticks as thin as insect legs in a stack that ran down the page, riffled through a small book.
“But you did have them,” I said.
“You have it good,” she said. “You get to go out with Debbie and have fun. I don’t have anyone.”
“You can come with us,” I said, although I knew this wasn’t what she wanted.
“I want my own friends, my own life.” On the word life, she threw down three pennies. We could not both be happy at once. Her eagerness—for more life, for fun, the prickly pear—felt to me like danger. My happiness had been pulled from the reserve of hers, a limited string we had to share. If she has it, I must not; if I have it, she must wilt. As if the emotional thrift of the world meant there was never enough for both of us at any one time.
“You have friends,” I said.
This made her sob. “I don’t have a man, a husband, a boyfriend, a relationship. Nothing.”
The air in the bedroom was stale. “But I love you and I’m here for you.”
“I try, but nothing works out for me,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I used to have these beautiful, strong hands.” She was crying so hard there was spit between her lips and she could hardly get the words out. “And do you know what Faye bought me for Christmas?” she said of her stepmother; it was Jim and Faye whom I called my grandparents because I’d seen Virginia only a couple of times.
“She bought me an iron,” she said. “And do you know what she bought Linda?” Linda was her younger sister, the pretty one who’d gotten the paint set. Now Linda was managing several branches of Supercuts and dating a NASA physicist with a mustache and a hot tub.
“A champagne bucket!” she said.
I knew it was not the utility of the gifts—we used the iron and the ironing board that came with it for years, and later Linda would say it was not a champagne bucket but an ice bucket, and that she’d specifically asked for it, as my mother had asked for the iron—but the symbolism that made this gift so awful. But still I wanted her to tell Faye about the mistake and make Faye take it back and give her what she wanted.
She got up, walked out of her bedroom, grabbed a pair of fabric scissors off her desk in the living room, went to her closet, and began jolting the hangers across the rail, pulling different shirts off hangers and throwing them into a pile.
“Don’t do it.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. I have nothing to wear. Nothing.” She snipped the corner of an old gray shirt and then ripped it open, revealing a selvedge edge.
“It’s the neckline. It’s terrible. I hate my clothes.” She sobbed, then growled. She cut a notch in the bottom of a T-shirt and then took it with both hands and ripped it across, bellowing with rage.
She’d done the same with other clothes when she was angry, cut necklines, shortened shirts and sleeves, then never worn them again. Later, she would have to throw these clothes away, reducing further her already small collection.
Around this time, my father threw a large and lavish thirtieth birthday party for himself. He invited my mother, and she planned to go, inviting Debbie to come along, but as the date approached, she began to waver. She couldn’t afford to buy a new dress. She would be ashamed to be there in rags, beside people in finery, celebrating him. She canceled at the last minute, leaving Debbie, who had pinned her hopes of finding a husband on the event, in the lurch. I was not aware of the party at the time, only of my mother’s shift into melancholy, and her increasing preoccupation with her wardrobe and her feeling of having lost her youth.