At the beginning of these mounting arguments, I would try to reason with her, in case I could calm her down. Later, when it was clear she wouldn’t stop, when it was clear that the fight would go on and on, I stood very still and stopped speaking.
A few times before, the phone had rung at the beginning of a fight, interrupting it; she took the call in her room, where I could hear muffled noises. Her friend Michael or Terry had called. Later, when she came to say goodnight, she was no longer upset. I was innocent, I thought, her unhappiness nothing to do with me—she was lonely. This is what I believed and told myself when she started screaming, and it was one of my excuses for being lazy with the dishes, and unhelpful around the house, and contemptuous of her.
“Do you think I’m your maid?” She said it through her teeth, snarling.
“Mom, call a friend,” I said. “Please.”
Besides me, the people my mother yelled about during our fights were Jeff Howson, my father’s accountant, who sent the monthly child-support checks that I was acutely aware were lifelines and, increasingly those days, Kobun. (Compared with how much she mentioned these two men, she rarely brought up my father.)
“Kobun said he’d take care of us, then left me to rot.” Her voice was almost gone. “That crook,” she said, wrinkling up her face.
I didn’t know what she meant. As far as I knew, Kobun didn’t have much to do with us. He was just a Zen Buddhist monk my parents had once known, who’d officiated at the wedding, and who hardly spoke.
Only later would I learn that because her own mother was mentally ill and my father was unresponsive, it had been Kobun my mother had turned to when she got pregnant, asking him what he thought she should do.
“Have the child,” Kobun had advised. “If you need help, I’ll help you.” But in the intervening years he had not offered any help. No one had promised as much as Kobun or had seemed, to my mother at the time, as trustworthy. At the time, my young father had also trusted Kobun, who told him that if I turned out to be a boy, I would be part of a spiritual patrimony, and in that case my father should claim me and support me. When it turned out I was a girl, my mother later found out from others in the community, Kobun had told my father he had no obligation to care for my mother and me.
The next evening, we had the same fight.
“Oh, poor me, poor me,” she said in the mimicking baby voice. And then, yelling, “You have no idea what I’ve done for you.”
“I promise I’ll do a better job,” I said. “I’ll do the dishes and I won’t complain at all. And I’ll do the counters right.” She wanted me to wipe hard, and hold my hand underneath the spot the sponge swiped to catch the crumbs.
“It’s not the counters, you ignorant little shit. It’s this fucking life.” She began to sob, taking in big breaths like gusts of wind.
I stood very still and tall and kept my face the same. I couldn’t feel anything below my head. I was standing like a house I saw in Barron Park, knocked down with the exception of the facade: viewed from any angle other than straight-on, there was nothing to it. No rooms, walls, substance.
“I’m very sorry,” I said again. “I mean it.”
“Sorry means nothing!” she screamed. “You have to prove it. You have to change the behavior now.”
She hit her flat palm against the kitchen cupboards, against the counter—slap, slap. She took another long, deep breath through a closed throat as if she had asthma, as if she could hardly breathe.
“You know what I am?” she screamed. “I’m the black sheep. I’m the one who has done everything for you. But nobody gives a shit.” She extended the “shit,” at full volume, for a long time, gravelly, so I was sure the neighbors, the whole quiet street, would hear.
“I’m the Nothing,” she yelled, starting to cry. “First with my family, now with you and Steve. That’s what I am. The Nothing.”
She turned on a lamp in the kitchen, a gesture remarkable for how ordinary it was in the midst of this. On nights we weren’t fighting we turned on lights in other rooms, and the house glowed on the dark street beside other glowing houses.
“No you aren’t,” I said, deadpan. My feet hurt.
“Fuck you, universe. Fuck you, world.” She stuck out her middle fingers on both hands, pointed at the ceiling.
She went and stood by the screen door, her back up against it, sliding down it so that she was squatting with her head in her arms, the way she did when the fight was nearing an end.
“I don’t want to go on,” she said, crying softly.
She made it sound like it could just happen, not going on, the way my ankle sometimes gave out and curled under when I was walking and I fell.
Without her I would cease to exist; there would be only emptiness.
I crouched down beside her and put my hand on her arm. “What do you mean, you don’t want to go on?” I asked.
“This life,” she sobbed. “I can’t do it any longer. You have no idea what I’ve been through. You have no idea how it’s been, raising you, with no help from anybody. I’m trying so much, but I don’t have enough support. It’s too hard.”
Every denouement felt like the end of a long, tiring journey, disorienting, gravityless. Sounds around us returned. Smells. By that time I could no longer feel the outline of my body.
She stayed on the floor in front of the screen. The fight was over. She wasn’t angry anymore, only sad, and I couldn’t imagine, now that the storm had raged through and left her weak and defeated, how I had ever wanted anything but good for her.
As my mother foundered, I fantasized about living at my father’s house. To traipse around the clean white rooms—still with hardly any furniture—and to sample from the bowls of unlimited fruit. Laurene was starting a business called TerraVera with a petite man from business school, making vegan wrap sandwiches on whole wheat lavash bread. She was chipper when I asked how her day was when she walked in before dinner, with the mane of blonde hair, a leather satchel she carried with papers. Her jeans were cut unevenly on each side, a frayed line at different heights above her ankles, which stuck out below, like the tongues of bells.
Around that time I also began to walk with my toes facing out. My feet, on their own, pointed straight. I was different when I walked this way, more in charge, more promising, more deliberate.
The fights continued for months, becoming more frequent, so that soon they happened almost every night for several hours. When we were together but not fighting, I watched her face for when her mood might turn.
I would tell my teachers, Lee and Steve, of particularly bad fights. This worried my mother, who was mortified if others were talking poorly about her, and who then started bringing Lee up in our fights, mocking me for running, always, to complain to Lee.
She hit the wall, hurt her hand, yelled so that blood vessels rose around her face, her neck turned into sinews. Doors slamming, charcoal half-moons below her eyes. A couple of times she grabbed the top of my arm and shook it hard.
“I shouldn’t have had you,” she said one Saturday afternoon, toward the end of a fight. “It was a mistake to have a child.” She wept, not looking at me, then got up, went to her room, and shut the door.