I'm on the phone with my mother. Halfway through the
conversation I'm horrified to realize that I've run out of things to
say. This constitutes a real crisis because by some unwritten rule
based on arcane calculations the origin and justification of which she alone
knows, my mother has determined that all our phone calls should last at least forty
minutes.
Forty minutes is the proper length of a mother-daughter call
and outside of natural disasters and sudden health emergencies requiring nothing
short of immediate ambulance transport with lights and screaming siren
there are to be absolutely no exceptions to this rule.
Whether she's actually looking at the clock while we
talk or has some kind of internal timer that tells her when we've hit the quota
I don't know, but she has the time down to the second and I don't have the
nerve to ask how. There's no way I could pose the question that wouldn't sound
alternately suspicious, displeased, accusatory, disappointed, and condemning;
in other words, sounding an awful lot like her. But I am curious.
Usually I make it to the end of the allotted time with
no more than two or three uncomfortably unscripted moments to suffer
through. Tonight, however, we somehow managed to cover all the usual topics in
record time. These topics, always following the same order, are: What I've been
doing with myself lately. What's new on the job front. What's going on in my
social life,, specifically, who am I dating. The answers to these questions,
even embellished, hardly require more than two or three hundred carefully
chosen words. After that, it's a desperate attempt to perform CPR on a
brain-dead conversation about the weather, television, and current affairs,
which drives me into even deeper despair as our opinions on all of these topics
are invariably diametrically opposed.
Finally, we lob the question "So what's new with
you" back and forth at each other with various types of tricky spin until
we're too exhausted to continue and we agree to call it a draw until next week.
That's where we are now, except there's twenty minutes left on the clock,
not just two or three.
Suddenly I feel like I'm six again, sprawled on my belly
across my mother's enormous bed, reading a chapter book. I've come to a strange
word, a word all twisted up like a tight black knot.
"Sound it out, honey," my mother suggests. I try
and try but just can't get it out; it's at the back of my throat, practically
strangling me. "Bring your book up here, sweetheart," she says.
"Show me."
My mother is propped up against the pillows where she sleeps
alone since Daddy left, except, sometimes, when she lets me join her, wandering
lost into her room after a nightmare. Now the bed seems more like a desert, a
wasteland of sheets like sand shifting beneath me as I wade and flail
hopelessly toward the horizon, like the only survivor of a doomed caravan.
My mother has slipped over the edge of the world; in her
place only immense distances on every side. I'm so alone on this great empty
bed I want to weep but who would hear me? Then I look down at the forgotten
phone in my hand; it might as well be a mirage.
"Oh mother," I cry. "Oh mother."
"Tell me darling," her disembodied voice says
calmly, nearly inaudible over the terrible wind that will eventually smooth
everything over. "Tell me all about it."
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