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(Continued)
If my mother is a serial
killer, then I am her only victim. She kills me again and again,
on her dining room table, for my passing friend to see. She
gathers and dissects images of me as if I am some rare, freakish
bird in flight.
***
On the first day of tenth
grade I notice Jimmie in the locker corridor. I catch him looking
at me in chemistry class. He tells Jala that he thinks I’m
pretty.
A few days later, he saunters
up and asks if he can call me. I laugh too high and write my
number on his binder in even script. He calls me that very night,
full of questions:
How do you feel?
What do you want?
What is your family like?
One night on the telephone
he tells me, in a low conspiring whisper, that he hates his own
mother, and the news thrills me like being on top of a Ferris
wheel.
“Come over to my house,”
I blurt into the receiver. “Come over as soon as you can.”
Jimmie does eventually come
over. He even encourages my mother to take a picture of us
together, him holding my hand sweetly at the landing near the
door. At first my mother is ecstatic. Sweet Sixteen, she
muses, No--Puppy Love. She struggles to get the both of us
on the frame. She drops the camera off at the drive thru at the
pharmacy and rushes back an hour later to pick up the prints.
Those images, in doubles, must have disappointed her. “The
sunlight in the doorway just turned you two into shadows,” she
told me. “I threw all of the pictures of you and Jimmie away.”
At school, Jimmie stands
over me in the atrium, his hands snug in my back pockets. My jeans
are low and tight so that he had to work to get his hands there. I’ve
started changing into Jala’s clothes in her car on the way to
school.
“Come over again today?”
I beg.
“You know I’m supposed
to help my mom today.”
“Come anyway.”
I look over at Jala, who
stands beside us, her back against her locker.
“Yeah, Carlie’s house is
really fun,” she says.
***
Jimmie does come over, at
4:00 instead of 3:00, so I greet him at the door scowling. My
mother comes up behind, her mouth curved into a sharp smile. Her
dress matches the curtains, the same forest green. Jimmie asks her
to show him the scrapbooks I’d mentioned.
As the two of them sit,
side-by-side, I realize that no one ever comes over. No one else
looks at the scrapbooks my mother has made. My eyes dart nervously
over their shoulders as my mother entrusts heavy binders to Jimmie’s
lap. He turns each page slowly, at her prompting. “And what is
going on in this picture, Mrs. Jackson?” he asks. There is no
need to ask, not really. The What and Where
and How is laid out on the page in words and pictures and
stencils. The who is always me.
I grow impatient as minutes
turn into an hour. “Come oooon,” I cry, daring my mother to
scare Jimmie away too. I want Jimmie safe in my room, where my
teddy bears now live permanently in a box in the closet.
Every moment I spend with
Jimmie seems super real. Not like time watching TV that ticks away
and is lost forever, or those aimless hours at Maymont High
School. Not like life in my house, alone with my mother, life
edited, enclosed.
“Come upstairs,” I moan,
jostling back and forth against the banister in the looser clothes
I have changed back into for my mother’s benefit. And he finally
does.
Jimmie accepts my duplicity
without question, how I am both tight and loose. Upstairs in my
room he unwraps me and discovers my core. His lovely, brutal
pushing, neither too hard nor too gentle, breaches my half-hearted
defenses.
My mother stays away from my
bedroom. Downstairs in her favorite chair, she cradles a new
scrapbook in her arms. “Nothing’s too small,” she coos to
it, as if it is an infant, precious and small and shocked by the
expansiveness of the world.
“I really care about
Jimmie,” I tell her after Jimmie has gone home.
“You’re just a girl,”
she says.
“No. I’m in love, real
love, Mother.” She doesn’t even look at me.
She stays sitting on the
couch late into the evening, even after the falling light paints
the room in shadow.
***
What do you want to be when
you grow up? My
mother asks, not for me, but for the scrapbooks. I am 17 years
old, and she is 47. She has recently left her fulltime job after
so many years. Those irregular shifts are interfering with her
home life, she tells them. “More time with you, Carlie,” she
tells me. Now she works half days at the clinic.
I guess she still has money
enough to pay for those specialty papers from places we’ve never
been and will probably never go. Cold pressed with flowers, dyed
with saffron, all praises to me, she says. The cupboards are
barer. Creditors sometimes call. And I refuse to have my picture
taken by anyone. Not even a senior portrait. Still, somehow my
mother’s books continue to come.
(Turn
the page)
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