Wreck

by Catherine Newman

It’s embarrassing enough to have a body erupting in pustules—a body at all, honestly—but it’s even worse to have one that you manage poorly. That you treat less like a temple and more like a kiosk selling novelty candy corn at the mall.

us all by using it. I could send her a photograph and say, Mom, what is this? and she would write back immediately that it was mallow or bird’s-foot trefoil or a serviceberry or oyster mushrooms. What is this? What is this? Tell me everything! I wish I’d asked more.

Find me a mother whose heart is not carved into the likeness of her children.

I’ve never heard that story before,” I say, and suddenly I miss my mom so much it’s like I’m swimming too quickly to the surface, bubbles of oxygen exploding in my heart, my brain. The bends, but grief:

mean. Back then, every molecule in her body recoiled, in horror, from every molecule in my own. I exhaled carbon dioxide that she was then forced to inhale! I manifested odors and opinions and existence, and all of it was unspeakable, intolerable. I felt, for a year or two, like I was kneeling soundlessly with a palmful of birdseed, hand extended, waiting for the wild animal of my daughter to approach me.

“You are the keeper of her secrets,” Nick said to me once, in the interest of consolation. “Her closest, most trusted person. She has to hate you sometimes.”

I could only beam my enormous love out to her in silent waves. I was a lighthouse for one ship, but that ship was sightless and, I feared, already tossed up on the rocks.

She was the most passionate person I had ever met: she sobbed when she couldn’t pull her own fingers off like they were gloves; she lay down on her back on the sidewalk like a bag of furious gravel when I scolded her for running out into the street; she pressed her forehead affectionately to mine, but so forcefully she

Specifically, the radiologist has noted multifocal subsegmental intrahepatic biliary ductal dilatation of uncertain etiology. Anyone who cut and pasted that repulsive set of words into Google would stop drinking in a cold-turkey fright. A follow-up

Diagnosis was more like decorators holding up a paint swatch and eyeballing a match than like researchers squinting through a microscope and making objective determinations.

You can visit with the fear, but don’t hire a van and move there.”