Nights before church, Mother winds my hair on pink foam rollers. Mornings, she says, Aren’t you pretty, as the locks recoil from her release. We arrive at the breakfast table, all yellow grapefruit and Special K, and she tells my father, Get a shotgun, Honey—you’ll have to scare those boys away.
She keeps an immaculate fan of magazines on the coffee table, but I prefer reading what my parents leave creased on the bathroom counter. Newsweek, Time, Reader’s Digest’s Drama in Real Life. One month there’s a photo of a handsome man, blue eyes in a sad, solemn face. Newborn in one arm, photo of his dead wife in the other.
We drive nine hours for my cousin’s graduation, fly to Maui for my grandparents’ 50th anniversary. Mother finds a typo in my aunt’s wedding invitation, wrinkles her nose. Well, it’s not like we’ll go anyway, she says. When I ask why, she says, Because he’s—because it’s in Jamaica. The look Dad gives her.
Dad takes me for ice cream on Saturdays and we work our way through all 31 Baskin-Robbins flavors. Jamoca Almond Fudge (160 cal/serving) is my favorite, but I tell Mother it’s Daiquiri Ice (90 cal/serving).
A boy asks me out in seventh grade. Your virginity is a gift for your future husband, Mother reminds me. I break up with him after our first kiss, trying to quash the devil licking at my insides.
She has me punch down the lock on my door on the exit off-ramp. The man with the cardboard sign sees, all Jesus beard and stringy hair, weary eyes in a face like a crumpled paper bag.
In ninth grade I buy baggy men’s Levi’s and steal my father’s cardigan because it reminds me of Kurt Cobain, the fraying cuffs curling like pubic hairs. Mother says, It’s a phase, and orders me a silky nightie from the JCPenney catalog.
We get Internet a few months before graduation and in the dank Yahoo! chatrooms I partake of the knowledge of good and evil, one hand always clean and ready to close the browser window if my mother’s shadow appears on the stairs.
My roommate comes home with me one weekend and we order burgers from a waitress I knew. She’s six or seven months along. Such a shame, my mother says when I tell her at breakfast. Such a slut, I say. My roommate goes quiet, stays cold for a week until I buy her peach schnapps and we spend the night drinking and eating fat-free devil’s food cookie cakes discussing all the things girls want but aren’t supposed to talk about.
Mother is ill. At least I’m down 15 pounds, her skeleton jokes after the second round of chemo.
At college I learn darkrooms and pasteup and film splicing even as the world around us begins to write itself in ones and zeroes. We read about joblessness and CEO salaries, about pharmaceuticals and opioids, underfunded schools and pregnant dogs made to fight even after their teats are bitten off. We read about oil spills and plastic islands and floodplain maps and a planet that wasn’t meant to be used this way. I tell Mother this and she tells me to join the Biology Club where all the pre-med majors are, desperation in the dark holes of her skull.
At the service, Jesus stands in the windows, weary eyes in a glassy face. The pastor says Mother’s in heaven. But she’s with me every day.
My advisor sends me abroad and I meet a French guy named Théo who studies translation and introduces me to cunnilingus and Simone de Beauvoir and an aching hurt my mother says will pass.
Friends take off for grad school. I pack the silky nighty and my father’s cardigan and my books, rent a tiny room in a big city, type up obituaries and classifieds as the months bleed away. Mother reminds me that she was married by age 23, pregnant by 25. Go haunt your own house, I tell her, but the liminality of ghostliness affords her a presence in the home of every life she’s touched.
A coworker takes me to a reading where one poet corrects the pronunciation of another poet during the Q&A, and my mother whispers during the awkward audience silence, You know, that is how you’re supposed to say it.
Out of the shower, the lower lip of my stomach pouts over my pubis. I find beige underwear that squeezes my rib cage and rolls back down if I sit. Spend the whole day hitching it back up under my father’s cardigan.
A cat behind the 7/11 purrs and licks my hand, so I take him home, name him Théo.
I get a promotion and hear Mother’s voice in my first drafts: a Black man who should have put his hands up, a body in the reedy underbrush shouldn’t have been a prostitute. A boy who should have stayed in school, a woman who should have left the first time, a bachelor who should have had kids to check on him so his corpse didn’t stink up the building. I revise until I can’t hear her.
My colleague walks me home and Mother watches us undress. I can’t orgasm, but I like to think she’s never seen tongues venturing into these places.
Mother counts the calories in my quesadilla at Taco Bell. I go home and ball up the silky nighty and throw it in the trash, cover it in coffee grounds and cat litter like something I might dig back up and eat.
The paper downsizes and I take a part-time job writing listicles. My new editor is handsome, or maybe just British. Mother speculates he’s single, but I’m too busy cobbling gigs together to listen.
On Instagram, my old roommate celebrates her Ph.D., head half shaved under her Tudor bonnet. Mother runs her fingers through my long hair, twirls it into an updo, then a French twist, tries to yank out the grays. I don’t let her. Instead, I grab scissors and cut bangs, the first in a series of reductions.
Mother accompanies me to my first mammogram, stands in the corner while the tech tightens the plates until I’m weeping and I don’t know if it’s pain or that I never talked to Mother about what killed her.
At a bar, I run into the old colleague and this time we go back to his apartment. Mother can’t climb into his lofted bed. We take turns coming until the room smells like salt and sweat and we run out of condoms.
Seven weeks later I go to the clinic, pushing past my mother in the crowd of protestors brandishing photos of dead fetuses but not of dead women.
I walk home sober from the election watch party. Mother starts to say, Look on the bright side, but I cannot hear her through the tears darkening my white pantsuit, some perverse inversion of the night’s unbreakable salted sky.
The stylist rubber-bands my hair into a ponytail, tells me where to send it for donation. The undercut makes my ears go cold. I walk quickly, and Mother can’t keep up.
Baggy jeans come back in style and I buy three pairs.
A friend’s child announces their pronouns in red lipstick. Mother says it’s just a phase, but I buy them nail polish and hoop earrings.
I go back to the stylist and ask for a mullet. Afterward, Mother shows me a memory of my father in 1983, so I take a selfie and send it to Dad.
Is this what you looked like when I was born
LOL.
Yes.
Love you.
Love you too
MyChart sends me a note that I need a follow-up mammogram. The oncologist’s paperwork asks about having children before age 30, about breastfeeding, exercise, alcohol intake. My mother reads each question, her voice accented with unspoken I-told-you-sos. I remind her that she did all those things right and the disease still killed her. At least they’ve caught mine early.
A month after my last chemo, my friends and I celebrate at a tapas restaurant. Mother turns up on the walk home. Go away, I say, I loved you, but I hate the thoughts you make me think.
I’m dead, she says. I only got to evolve this far.
Well, I’m still here, I say. I’m not done.
Above us, faint cirrus capillaries bruise the evening sky.
At my flat, Théo mewls himself into a circle at my ankles when I open the door.
You can’t come in, I tell my mother, gently nudging the cat out of his ouroboros. Not ever again.
The next time I see her, she’s a proper ghost, coming to me on a dark night when streetlamps wear gauzy skirts of light.
Why are you here? I ask.
She tucks a wisp of new hair behind my ear and gestures for me to keep on. Doesn’t say a word. Just doesn’t want me walking home alone.
Chelsey Waters grew up in Idaho, lives in southeast Washington, and earned her MFA in environmental fiction in Eastern Oregon University’s Landscape, Ecology, and Conservation program. She has worked as a whitewater rafting guide and a college writing instructor, and her recent work has been published in Deep Wild and The Hopper. Currently, she is finishing her first novel about rural feminism and abortion, set in the whitewater canyons of Idaho.