Model Home

by Rivers Solomon

Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.

One day soon, I’ll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.

My ability to dredge up love from the paltry reserves is one that comes and goes. Let tonight be enough to undo all my sins.

If I make Elijah too many snacks, it’s because food-making is effortless compared to the real task of child-rearing: emotional presence. I don’t give my daughter too much because I have nothing to give.

The answer to all these questions, of course, is that human beings are not very good. I say this not misanthropically but with the realization that we, through apparent dominance over other animals, have crowned ourselves kings, when in reality we are ill equipped to handle the basic demands of life on this scale. We are forest creatures who’ve wandered into the man-made road, eyes frozen and wide.

The palatial suburban new-build of my youth had been a rotting thing, too, only it was a rot no one but my family was ever allowed to see.

At Saturday’s WeightWatchers meeting, we discuss the importance of understanding the root of our weight-loss goals. It’s not enough to want to disappear; one needs a good reason for wanting to disappear.

I return home because it’s the siblingly thing to do. This is how I manage in a crisis. I refer to abstract models of good people in my head and do what they’d do.

These chores have needed doing for weeks, and now I do them with ease. I whistle while I work. I sing “Heigh-Ho” from Snow White. This Ezri, joyful to do and to make and to work, is so different from the Ezri who can’t answer their daughter when she asks for money for food.

Is she worried? Should I be worried? I tell her no, but she knows better. I wonder which of my lies she’ll remember, which she’ll cry about to her therapist, a decade or two from now.

She’s responsible, sensible. Sometimes I think this is enough to make her turn out okay. The kids who grow up fine do so because of us, or despite us.

I’m sure he’s as useless as his predecessors. What’s the point of a job like this? To keep the bad people out? Every guard will fail at that because the bad people are already inside. This is their fort.

Mike had laughed at the question, and Dad, ever good-natured, smiled. He was a sports fan, an occasional card player. Knew games. Knew when to call or fold. With white people, you always fold.

When his wife finds out—and in the fantasy she does find out because the sex will have been good enough to disorient him—he’ll show up like a sorry sinner to my door, begging for my love, but I’ll be long gone because I’m not interested in people once the spark of newness has faded.

Someone like me, more imagination than can fit into one body, you can die inside a fantasy of yourself.

I don’t blame Emmanuelle. She wants her pain acknowledged. She still thinks the truth carries weight.

Can the cellar that a kidnapper throws a child into be guilty or innocent? The lake that a killer drowns his women in? I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.

She’s going places. I’m going to die.

She is five and chronicles all. We are old and weathered and have stopped keeping track of all the serpents that live in our garden.

It’s stupid to run from pain instead of to it because pain always comes, and if I could just accept that, life would not be a constant fluctuation between numbness and fear.

Even when you fight with everything you have to escape the house, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because outside the house is just as bad as inside the house.

God, is that all life is, checking the facts, finding yourself wrong, then doing the opposite of what it’s your nature to do?

I could never know how Mama was going to react to anything, though. I hated tossing the coin. I preferred to keep secrets. If I didn’t show her who I was, she couldn’t disapprove.

The only easy intimacy I’ve ever had in this life is with my sisters. Only when I’m touching them can I convince myself my hands are not blades.

Jarring, the different versions of events we all have.

And what of my father? Where is my ire for him? Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

She required excellence, demanded it. In her mind, this was because she wanted a good life for her children, but it was also because parents atone for their personal lacks by punishing their offspring.

Of course, everyone says these things about their families, and that’s what I mean about kinship, kindred, kin. The comfort of a particular history no matter how horrid it might be. It’s ours. A magic that only we can weave.

There are those who dread the company of kin. Jerry Seinfeld said, There’s no such thing as fun for the whole family. A family hurts. It does. We are born in its noose. But for me, it is—okay, it’s like in a horror film. When the group separates, does the audience not always scream out, why the fuck would you do that, you dumb-ass bitches?

My body is a wad of sticky chewed gum, drawing every madness to it.

History repeats and repeats because history is people, and we can reproduce only what we know, and we get what we know from our elders. The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain.

Emotions are little curses, spells. They come over us and take us away, outside ourselves. There is no predictability. At times, one spell trumps another, or multiple spells war at once, and the body becomes a shell in those moments, a shell that does not belong to you.

Eve and I understand, though, that at its heart, a house is no more than what is inside of it, and what protects it, and who’s built it, and who lives in it or has lived in it. We all had our part. Mama had her part. Of course she did.

We have a tendency at times to exonerate fathers, seemingly blameless because of their absence or their ambivalence.

Healing, in its most traditional sense, describes the post-trauma process of a physical wound. How can it apply to something so dynamic as a whole life? A whole person? A brain? Can you look at a group of people and tell who among them is “healed” and who is “wounded”?

Anything anyone describes as a family matter, a private matter, rarely is. It is a phrase used to protect abuse.

Next, Emmanuelle and I hug, then we are all three embracing, leaning upon one another, hands together, fingers intertwined. We are rope, plaited fibers woven into one.

The ghosts inside me tremble, frightened as they reckon with being forgotten and unknown, discarded and left out of the familial hold. They know that none of this is theirs.

Mother is God, I’m her baby Job. She has let a devil ruin me—and for no reason but to remind me, nothing in this world is ours.

So much of what we speak is our attempt to make our fantasies real.

I should’ve packed snacks, a Bible, water, the hair of a lover in a locket, a letter to God. I’ve brought with me only fear.

Mother is God, and Mother is just a woman.

I don’t understand her objection. Isn’t everything a story we tell ourselves?

“What the fuck is going on?” asks Emmanuelle, poor, left-out Emmanuelle. She can’t understand that there are some things that are good to be left out of.

No one could live down the shame that is me. Not me, certainly not her.

I would’ve forgiven Mama everything had she said it, the only thing I ever longed to hear from her: I am sorry for the abundance of pain.

I couldn’t save her. I can still save her. We will all save each other. Or maybe we won’t. Maybe there is no saving, only salvaging. Maybe every breath is the triumph, and we must learn to take the win.

There is as much love as there is unlove.