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“Oh, Louise,” her mother said in a thick voice, and Louise prepared herself for the worst. “I’m so happy. You’re going to be the mother I wasn’t.”
“Dad,” Louise said, “you don’t have to come right now.” “Of course we do,” he said. “You’re our Louise.”
“I love you,” her mom said without opening her eyes. Louise froze. “I know,” she said after a moment. “No,” her mom said, “you don’t.”
Her mom was always “up,” she was always “on,” and while Louise didn’t see anything wrong with being happy, her mom’s enforced happiness seemed pathological. She avoided hard conversations about painful subjects.
She suspected all the things that annoyed her about her mom were exactly the things that would make her an incredible grandmother.
The entire world went black except for a single spotlight shining down on Louise, standing in her living room, gripping her phone.
Louise wanted to swoop down, gather her up, bury her face in the sweet smell of her, but that was the kind of grand theatrical gesture her mom favored. Her mom would never think that it might scare Poppy or make her feel unsafe.
Louise held Poppy’s feverish, limp body for hours, wishing harder than she’d ever wished before that for just sixty seconds someone would hold her, but no one holds moms.
Whenever Louise got anxious, her dad always said, You know, Louise, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times.
She drew her head up, pretending to be annoyed so she didn’t feel scared, and walked toward the living room fast, the TV getting louder with every step.
“This is my house,” Aunt Honey said, “and I don’t want anyone calling anyone else an ‘a-hole’ when what they mean to say is ‘asshole.’ That includes you, Gail. Say what you mean, or get out.” “Mark’s a total asshole,” Constance revised.
“I know what drugs are,” Aunt Gail said, skinny and angular, perched on the edge of her chair like a large heron, hands folded in her lap, wearing a black turtleneck with the words Praise Him bedazzled in gold on the front. “Mama’s on drugs?” Constance asked in mock horror. “If you’ve got drugs, share,” Aunt Honey barked.
“Mark!” Aunt Honey shouted. “That’s right, you’d better pick up when I call . . . Don’t you sweet-talk me. Listen . . . Listen! Your sister is sitting across . . . I don’t care . . . I don’t care. You’re going to get in your truck and drive over here because we have to plan their service . . . You have not planned their service . . . You do that and you’ll need to toss my dead body in the water first . . . Mark? Mark. Mark! Get your fanny over here now.” She hung up. “He’s on his way,” she said.
They began to talk about flowers and obituaries and who needed to be called and Louise felt small and safe, sipping her wine, surrounded by these loud women doing everything for her. She marveled at how easy they were with each other, how they got along so unselfconsciously, how different they were from her and Mark.
Their mom didn’t have a feel for food. She approached her kitchen the way a bomb squad approached a ticking paper bag. She needed a timer to cook pasta, her rice was always mushy or burned, sometimes both at the same time, and her casseroles never came together, but the cult of Southern motherhood insisted she provide meals for her family, so she distracted everyone from her shortcomings by embracing exotic recipes she tore out of magazines.
“I don’t need your pity chore,” he said, incapable of lowering his guard. “You’ll do it better than I would,” she said. “Good night.” Mark didn’t know how to fight someone who wouldn’t fight back. Louise felt serene.
You never knew your grandparents. They may have died young, but they cast a long shadow. Sometimes it gets the better of her.”
“A puppeteer has passed, dear woman,” a literal clown in oversize shoes and a rainbow wig said as he slapped past them. “The puppets gather hither to bid her bon voyage.” “See?” Mercy said. “It sounds nice.” “If any of them tries to hug me I’m going to get my gun and shoot them dead,” Aunt Honey growled.
Every single person in this room, every story, every song, every memory, it all started on the floor of a house without enough furniture, with her mom desperately trying to entertain two little kids with nothing but a threadbare glove puppet she’d had all her life and whatever she could find in the trash.
Louise took a deep breath. People jostled her from behind as they pushed past. She made herself look Mark in the eyes. He acted however he wanted. It didn’t mean she had to respond.
Louise’s tears took her by surprise. She was crying, she was finally crying, but not over her parents. She was crying because there was no one left in her family except Mark, and he hated her so much.
You know, Louise, her dad said, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times.
Louise wanted to yell things that weren’t words, just enormous angry sounds.
“You two don’t like him,” her mom said, “but I’ve known this little guy for a long time. You and your brother grew up and went off to school. Your dad goes to work. But Pupkin is always here.”
Louise didn’t want to sound mean, but what her mom did wasn’t art as far as she understood the definition. It was busywork. The excess energy she had now that Mark and Louise were older got channeled into framed cross-stitch samplers that lined the living room walls, an enormous crewelwork Tree of Life that hung over the sofa, string art that hung over the dining room table, watercolors of sunsets and the downtown Market that hung in the halls, little owls made of seashells with googly eyes that lined every windowsill.
Her mom turned their house into the Nancy Joyner Gallery of Crap with constantly rotating exhibits; a museum of herself, crammed full of art projects and craft projects and paint-by-numbers self-expression. Louise grew blind to it over the years, just like she had to the dolls, but now she thought of all the framed pieces that hung in the house, all the pieces stacked up in the garage, probably more hidden in the attic, so much of it everywhere—her mom’s art collection.
Louise looked behind the portraits and saw another white bag of her mom’s needlepoint throw pillows and five cardboard boxes labeled Christmas, which she knew was only one stockpile of handmade ornaments.
The point was that her mom had a whole tough-love thing for Louise and let Mark do whatever he wanted and never face any consequences. The point was that she was supposed to look after him and give him everything and never complain, but no one was looking after her. That was the point.
“It looks—” she started, but Mark finished for her. “Wrong,” he said. “I feel like we’re doing something wrong. Like any minute Mom and Dad are going to come through the front door and Mom’s going to flip that we moved her dolls.”
That’s what she wanted to smell right now. Something comforting and alive. She wanted to smell her dad. She didn’t want to smell Yankee Candle and carpet cleaner and dust anymore.
Everything always had an explanation. She’d learned that from her dad. The other things, the dangerous things, the dolls getting angry and squirrels attacking her by themselves and bad vibes, all of that had been her mom. And Mark had been so close to their mom. Louise made her shoulders unclench.
“Look what you’re doing!” Louise said. “When you don’t like the way a conversation is going you deflect with personal attacks. You’re like some kind of emotionally abusive octopus entangling everyone in your word tentacles.”
“So how do we know if Mom and Dad’s souls move on tonight?” Louise asked. “What’s our metric for success?” Mark picked barbecued chicken strips off his piece of pizza. “A haunting doesn’t necessarily indicate the survival of the human soul after bodily death,” he said, chewing. “There’s the stone tape theory of hauntings, which says that powerful emotional experiences leave permanent traces behind. There’s basic thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed. So what happens to the energy generated by intense emotional experiences? It has to go somewhere. That’s just science.” Louise
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She didn’t listen. She knew what she had to do and she turned off her feelings and made herself do it. Tears
“Do you even hear yourself?” Louise asked, making her disbelief as large as possible. “You recovered your traumatic repressed memories on a ski trip and they gave you permission to act out? That’s your explanation for being such a dick: I did it first?”
Something inside Louise’s brain went ping and Louise saw herself split into two girls, standing in two identical bedrooms, both wearing the same denim ladybug dress.
She left the other girl behind, standing all alone in her parents’ bedroom. And she closed the door on that little girl and never thought about her again. Until tonight. After that day in first grade, Louise had stopped being interested in her mom’s stories about puppets. She wanted to be around real things that everyone saw and agreed on like numbers and math and dump trucks and cranes. She only drew things that existed, like schematics and blueprints and elevations and plans. In college, she didn’t take mushrooms or microdose acid and only kind of enjoyed the occasional glass of wine,
He couldn’t touch her, she’d die if he touched her, she couldn’t let him touch her, her heart trip-hammered against her ribs, she saw the top of his little pointed hood rise over the side of her bed like when she was a little girl, and Louise made a whimper in her throat like a little girl i am not a little girl The thought shot lightning up her spine. She leapt for the open door.
I saw him. You saw him. So now that everything’s all safe, don’t pretend you didn’t see it, too.” “There’s always an explanation,” she said. “That’s what Dad always said.”
I knew Dad would give in eventually because he hates conflict. I just had to be willing to fight longer than him.
He didn’t want to interrogate language or turn Death of a Salesman into a slapstick comedy. To him, theater was an office job that just happened to take place onstage. The sad thing was, everyone in the program wanted to grow up to be like him.
Sadie came around the corner in a big old yellow tank of a station wagon and I don’t want to be inappropriate but sexy girls in big beater cars is the most beautiful sight created by God.
The kids loved being Victims, though. They loved hiding behind those masks, hunched over and walking like their legs were broken and they’d lost everything that mattered to them in the world. They loved wailing and crying and rolling on the ground, given total freedom to play sad by the anonymity of the masks.
Everyone realizes that at some point, right? It’s part of growing up. You realize you’re not going to be the star of the show. You realize you’re going to be lucky to scrape by and pay the rent.
I had to do something while I was still myself because right at that moment “myself” felt like chasing a slippery bar of soap around the tub and as much as I wanted to run away and hide, in that one moment, in that cold basement, I knew I might never be Mark again.
I told her I had mono. I told her I wanted to come home. I think she knew it was more than that, but she didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell. Both of us were more comfortable that way.
Mom was the only person who knew anything had happened, but she never asked me about it. I was ashamed and I was scared.
I live in constant fear and I’m too much of a coward to do something as simple as Google them to find out the truth.” “How’ve you ignored it for so long?” Louise asked. “It’s what we do,” Mark said. “Our whole family functions on secrets.”
a high-pitched squeal that never seemed to stop, but that was just inside her head. She could ignore what was inside her head.
Scream after scream echoed inside her skull. She should have closed the lid. But she didn’t. She made herself stand there and watch him burn.
