The Push
Violet picked up my phone one Sunday morning not long after you moved out and found the video on YouTube. She took the seat right next to me on the couch, in the beam of warm weekend sun. I’d been reading. She held the phone up.
“Have you seen this?”
I watched it. She stared at me intently for the entire sixty seconds.
“The mom saves her kid every time,” she said.
“So she does.” I put my book down and reached for my tea. My hand trembled holding the cup. I wanted to smack her. I wanted to knock her head back into the couch and make her mouth bleed.
You stupid fucking little girl. You killer.
Instead I left the room and cried quietly over the kitchen sink as the water ran. I was so sad. I missed him desperately. It was almost his fourth birthday.
62
I stared at the empty space you left in our bedroom. You’d taken Sam’s painting when you moved out. I sat on the floor and visualized it there, the mother, the cupped hand on her chin, her grasp on the baby’s thigh. The warmth of their skin.
“I’m hungry.” Violet was watching me from the doorway, still dressed in what she had worn to school. “What are you looking at?”
“We’ll order in.”
“I don’t want takeout.”
“I’ll make spaghetti.”
That worked—she left me alone. I didn’t want her there. I couldn’t lift my eyes from the nail hole in the wall.
* * *
? ? ?
I cooked while she finished her homework at the table. She had the same habit you did, putting her nose so close to the paper it nearly touched it as she wrote. I saw the hunch in her back and smiled without thinking. And then remembered you were gone. That you weren’t a person I should smile about anymore.
“You want to have ice cream after dinner and watch a show?”
“We don’t have a television anymore.”
“Right. We could play a game?”
She didn’t need to answer that one.
“What time is it? We could probably still make a movie, a later show.”
“It’s a school night.” She vigorously erased something and brushed the flakes of rubber on the floor.
“Well, I was going to make an exception.”
I slipped an apron on while I stirred the sauce. I’d gone shopping for new clothes while you moved out of our house. I wore one of the sweaters, a cream-colored cashmere wrap, straight home from the dressing room at the department store. I never did this sort of thing, buy piles of expensive new clothes at once, but I had wanted to feel reckless that day and it was the best thing I could think of. You were still paying the Visa bill.
“She has that sweater you’re wearing.”
She. I stopped stirring, as though if I were still enough, I wouldn’t spook the animal. In the periphery I saw Violet retreat back to her work, nose inches from the page. I wanted her to say more.
“That’s nice,” I said.
She looked up at me—was it?
“I guess she has great taste, then.” I winked and put her spaghetti on the table. She let it cool while she finished up and I leaned on the stove, wondering what else she might tell me.
“So, you’re going to Dad’s tomorrow. Are you excited to see his new place?”
“It’s their place.”
I didn’t know if she was lying to me or not—she seemed to know more than I did. I assumed you were living on your own, but I never made a point of asking. I wondered if you’d talked to Violet about our separation much earlier than you and I had discussed it. I took the apron off and looked at the sweater, wondering if it was too late to return it. But there was a splatter of sauce on the sleeve now.
“Okay, well, their place. Are you excited?”
“There’s something you should know about her.” She spoke sharply. I held my own dish of spaghetti, about to sit down with her. I found myself nearly out of breath all of a sudden—maybe it was the fear of what she’d say next.
“What?”
She shook her head and looked down again and I could tell she’d never intended to tell me. Or maybe there was nothing to tell.
“We don’t need to talk about her. That’s your dad’s business, not mine.” I smiled. I twirled the noodles and stuffed them in my mouth.
63
My mother reinvented herself when she left me, although perhaps reinvention is being generous. I learned this when I was twelve and saw her at a diner just outside the city. She was standing between two stools at the milkshake bar asking for a clean fork in a voice I had not heard her use before. But I would have recognized the back of her anywhere—the round of her shoulders, the curve of her hips. When she was given the fork, she said thank you in a voice that sounded different than it had when she was my mother. Her words, with their superiority, had come out of her mouth as she spun on her black heels. She handed the new fork to the man she was with and he said, “Thanks, Annie, honey.” Anne was her middle name.
Later, I’d come to find out the bulky man was Richard. I’d known another man existed, the one on the phone before she left, the one who I suspected had something to do with the blood in the toilet. But I hadn’t pictured him looking this way—he was handsome but slippery, with wet hair and shiny skin, and he wore a huge gold watch. His face looked tanned from the sun although it was only March. He was nothing like my father, nothing like the life I imagined she had left me for.