It made no sense to me then and makes no sense to me now, but I try to avoid asking my mother to explain herself.
For a time, I thought the boxes and the bags might contain mementos of my sister—photos, old toys, old clothes. But, no. There are books and magazines, old drawings, bits and pieces of model airplanes and HO scale trains. I have a vague, flickering memory of a Christmas tree scraping the ceiling and a model train platform that took up half the living room floor, the chug and click of the train cars in unison with sparks that delighted me. One engine almost politely burped puffs of smoke. The smell of pine, the stab-crunch of needles underfoot through winter-thick socks. A giggle-laugh that must have been mine.
A broken chunk of old memory, adrift in a pool of blood.
I don’t want to remember it. Memories go into the memory hole. That’s where they belong. Dr. Kennedy thought that if I could remember the shooting, I could move on from it. I told him I didn’t want that in my head, just like I don’t want my father’s trains and the smell of pine.
Our Christmas tree for the past few years has been a four-foot-tall plastic and aluminum facsimile of a fir that Mom has me haul out of the attic shortly after each Thanksgiving. It looks as fresh each year as the year before. My sister’s room is not frozen in time, but the Christmas tree is. It’s still not symbolic, though—it’s just crappy Chinese plastic. It’s chemistry class, not English.
There may be symbols and symbolism in books and movies—sometimes it’s even fun to find them—but in real life, we only have boxes and bags, old sagging shelves, and attics with fake Christmas trees. And none of it means anything. It’s all just the detritus of life, our own jetsam, heaved overboard, then washed back to us by the waves and the tides.
Coming around and around again. And the water disgorges the same sights, same house, same me, same Mom.
My Mom
My mom is forty-one years old. She does not necessarily look older than that, but the fact is that forty-one is usually people’s second or third guess after two higher numbers. Not substantially higher—they guess forty-three, maybe, then wince at the flicker in her eyes that says too high and drop to forty-one.
When people get older, they develop fine crenellations around their eyes, typically called crow’s feet or, more popularly, smile lines.
In my mother’s case, I don’t believe they were caused by smiling.
She conceals her sadness as well as could be expected, ten years later. She laughs at silly sitcoms and she grins at funny comments her friends leave on Facebook, but there is always a veil between her mirth and the world, a sheer scrim that mutes her reaction. It is as though she is a half second behind the world and can never catch up. And has given up trying.
I try to stay out of her way. This is just something I do. I avoid her. I began doing this early on. Some of my earliest memories. Six or seven years old and I was trying not to spend time around my own mother.
I don’t want her to see me too often, to encounter me, to deal with me. Me, this walking, talking, living, breathing, eating, shitting, farting reminder of what she’s had and what she’s lost. During the school year, it’s easy—I’m out the door after she leaves for work and most days I’ve eaten dinner and ensconced myself in my bedroom by the time she’s home.
Summer, it’s harder. With no ready-made excuse for being absent, I look for ways to get out. I don’t linger in the house. I sleep in late, stay out late, keep my bedroom door closed when I’m home.
I make myself invisible, intangible.
It’s easier for her, easier for me, just easier, period.
According to Dr. Kennedy, my mother is the surviving member of the family dealing with my sister’s death the best. Let that tell you something.
There are ingredients in the refrigerator for pizza. This is Mom’s unspoken, unspeaking way of telling me that I should make pizza for dinner. I typically make something for myself before she comes home, but some days she requests homemade pizza. It’s what we have that passes for tradition.
I assembled my first homemade pizza three years ago, when I was eleven. In a mandatory home ec class in middle school, we made French bread pizzas, twenty-one eleven-and twelve-year-olds slopping sauce onto bread, sprinkling plasticky shredded mozzarella over it, then shoving the whole dripping mess into the school’s ovens.
Somehow, this fascinated me. The too-browned, soggy results of the culinary experiment resembled actual pizza closely enough that I was captivated, stunned that something hitherto conjured only from a cardboard delivery box could be brought into existence with my own two hands. It was all I talked about for days, until Mom finally bowed to my insistence and allowed me to make pizza for lunch one Saturday.
The results were less impressive than in home ec, as impossible as that seemed, and Mom declared that we would henceforth “do this right.” She downloaded a guide to making homemade pizza, and my obsession was born. I wanted to go back to the beginning, to the raw ingredients. I learned how to use the big stand mixer and make my own dough. I sliced the slightly gelatinous bulbs of mozzarella. While at first I used store-bought sauce, I eventually unearthed a good and not-too-difficult recipe online and began making my own. I wanted to smoke my own meats for sausage and pepperoni, but Mom drew the line there.
From the ingredients she’s assembled, tonight looks like pesto and chicken pizza, one of my favorites. The dough ball is already thawed in the fridge; I like the sensation of kneading it, its elasticity, its pliability. I flour the counter and roll out a crust measuring about fourteen inches across. Just enough for two people. I crimp the edges with my fingers.
I slice mozzarella into discs. Shredding it gives a more even coverage, but I like the look of the slices after they’ve melted. I chop the chicken and scrounge in the fridge for the remains of an onion. Mom always forgets the onion. “You can just use onion powder,” she likes to say, but it’s not the same. Not at all.
I sauté the chicken and onion together in some olive oil, toss in some fresh grated pepper, and preheat the oven as high as it can go.
The pesto—not homemade, I regret; Mom still hasn’t bought a food processor—gets spooned onto the crust first. A little goes a long way. I want just a glistening sheen of green and black, not a sludge. Then I add the slices of mozzarella, aiming for maximum coverage without any sort of noticeable pattern.
The chicken and onions go on last. Almost last. After they’re distributed across the pie, something looks off, so I grate some parmesan and sprinkle it over the whole thing.
That works.