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Fiction Alexis Wiggins What if I told you my
mother slapped me once when I was a child. Let’s say that she had just come
from the hardware store, where – unbeknownst to me – she had waited for
nearly half an hour in the line, smelling the cardboard smell of the store,
while some idiot ahead of her counted out 436 pairs of nuts and bolts for a
project his twelve-year-old was doing at school. Let’s assume that my mother
was annoyed, at the end of her tether, with the man and his nuts and bolts,
and the middle-aged cashier who nodded politely and hmm-hmmed
as the man boasted about his son’s last project, a blue-ribbon winner at the
fair. My mother, finally having reached the cashier herself, pays in a cold,
unfriendly way and leaves without a thank you, huffing and grumbling to
herself with her small paper bag full of nails and a small hammer with a
wooden handle as shiny as resin, gets in the car, and angrily pulls the door
shut. There I am: eight years
old. I have been waiting in the car, keys in the ignition, with the radio and
the heat on, for half an hour. I complain, ask her
why her errands always have to take so long and why she couldn’t have just
dropped me at Naomi’s house instead of dragging me along with her. My mother
isn’t looking at me, and she isn’t paying attention; she is rifling through
her wallet – a bulging, leather contraption the size of a romance novel; she
is digging through slips of white paper and old green bills, looking for the
receipt. “Goddamit,”
she says to no one in particular. “I need this fucking receipt to get
reimbursed at work.” I can see the tension and frustration, and I can smell
the old leather and the dusty odor of money as she rifles through the bills
and papers, anger even in her fingers. I whine again because at
eight I don’t really know how else to express my frustration with being stuck
in the car while my mom spins around town all afternoon from the grocery
store to the post office to the hardware store. I just want to be home, doing
anything else. I ask: “Why do I always
have to come with you for your damn errands?” I try out the word damn as if I
have always used it, as if it were a natural, daily part of my vocabulary, as
if it were the most normal thing for an annoyed eight-year-old to say to her
mom. I look at my mom with an annoyed face, a face I am imitating from TV
sitcoms. And she meets my gaze
for a second, looking up with her eyes only, her head still facing the open
wallet and its papery contents. Her face hardens, her lips press in on themselves, and the back of her left hand has struck the
side of my face before I realize it. I am stunned for only an instant, and
then I shrink into myself, hot with shame and anger, burning there in the front
passenger seat as I turn my face away from her out the window. I watch a
father and small son walking down the sidewalk on the edge of the hardware
store parking lot, holding hands. The son pulls away, running ahead of his
father a bit, and leaves a small, blue mitten in the father’s hand. The
father laughs. “You’re a spoiled little
shit,” my mother says, turning the rings on her fingers that have shifted
from her hitting me. She goes back to her wallet and grumbles “Here it is,”
as she extracts the thin slip of receipt between her thumb and forefinger.
She pushes it into the paper bag and reaches behind her seat to drop the bag
on the floor. She moves to start the
car, but it is already on, and the engine sneers and chokes in protest. “Goddammit!”
She yells to no one, really mad now, and I can tell that she blames me. I
continue to stare out the window at nothing in particular; the laughing man
and his small son have disappeared from my view. I hope that her hand has
left a loud, red mark on my face, hope that someone will see it from the
street or another car and feel sorry for me. My mother jerks the car
into reverse and pulls out of the parking space quickly. She shoves the gear
into drive, and we zoom to the edge of the parking lot, stop briefly, and
zoom into the street as my mother takes her frustration out on the gas pedal. Four or five minutes
later, as the roads become more suburban, longer spaces between stop lights
and intersections, she begins to calm down. I can sense it, in the air, like a
dog that smells fear. She starts to relax as I am watching the pines, heavy
with February doldrums, slide by. “I didn’t mean to hit
you,” she says to me in a rational voice. “But you just can’t expect to get
everything you want all the time.” I don’t say anything,
because there isn’t much to say to that. I watch the pines whir by in a haze
of dull green, punctured by the occasional white house with shutters. I turn
the heat down without looking at her. I am beginning to sweat under my coat. Several minutes later,
she speaks again: “Lex, I didn’t mean to hurt you.
Are you alright? I’m sorry, I was just worried about the receipt and it’s
been a long day.” She sighs, and I can hear how long a day it’s been in her
sigh. She wants me to say something, so I turn to her and nod my head, my
eyes bright and shiny, and I mumble, “It’s OK.” As we pull into the
driveway, I can smell it coming as if it were a fire. She parks the car in
the steep driveway, facing downward into the small garage, and pulls the
emergency brake on so that we stop in one final jerk. She turns off the car
and stares ahead at nothing as the engine under the hood pings. She begins to
cry. “I’m sorry I am such a
bad mother,” she says, turning to me. “I’m sorry I am so terrible to you.”
Her whole face is contorted now by sadness, and she bites her lip as a few
tears skim down her cheeks. “It’s OK, Mom,” I say,
my hand moving to cover hers, which is gripping the black steering wheel
tightly. She seems surprised by my touch, and she melts a little, breaks
down, begins to really cry, puts her face in my lap, apologizing and crying
there on my thin, cotton pants. My pants get wet where her face is, where her
tears are absorbed, and the wet spot feels both hot and cool at the same
time. I wonder how long she will cry this time, and I reach to touch her soft
hair that is still beautiful and without a streak of gray. Now, let’s say this is
more or less true. Let’s say that at least the part about my mother hitting
me is true. The hardware store, the man with the blue mitten, the house with
the steep driveway, they all aren’t so much true as made up. They help create
the scene that fits the mood so I can tell a story. The real truth is, I
can’t remember when or why my mother ever hit me, I just remember the half
dozen times she did. I don’t remember her buying a shiny hammer and nails,
but I remember being young and being dragged around on errands all the time
and feeling that I would die from the boredom. I remember the white flashes
of my mother’s anger, her fierce hands striking my face, my butt, my arm and
head, and then her inevitable apologies, the guilt that she felt and passed
on to me. So let’s just say the
pine trees were there, witness to a sad February evening for me when I was eight
years old, shrugging their boughs as if to say: What can we do, kid? Let’s
say she hit me that day in the parking lot of the hardware store in Because if I told you the
truth, if I wrote it down in all its sadness and honesty, I might not
be able to muster up the details, the colors or the weather or the sound
of the engine pinging away in the winter silence of the driveway. Or
the forgiveness. |
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