Lisa Unger - Fragile

“Tell me,” Maggie said. She watched her mother and thought how delicate she seemed suddenly. This titan, this woman full of confidence and attitude, was getting old. Maggie felt a little shock of fear. The child in her still thought of Elizabeth as immortal.

Elizabeth took a sip of her tea.

“It was nothing,” she said. She put down the cup, touched the rim. “I just, you know, lost my balance when I was trying to load that damn dishwasher. I should have washed the dishes by hand-like I always do-but Jones made such a damn fuss the last time he was here about how expensive it was and how much time and trouble it would save me.” She paused to take a breath. “Anyway, I’m fine. Just sore. Too sore to stand and do the dishes, or to sweep.”

“You have to tell me these things,” Maggie said. She felt a rush of sympathy and sadness for her mother. “We’ll go see the doctor tomorrow, have an X-ray.”

“Look, if I’m still sore tomorrow, I’ll let you know. You have enough on your plate, Maggie. Too much.”

“Mom-”

Elizabeth lifted a hand to indicate the end of the discussion. “I promise, I was going to call tomorrow anyway if it still hurt. I swear.”

Maggie knew the impossibility of arguing with her mother, so she just got up, went into the small bathroom down the hall, and got some Advil. She noticed that the bathroom was so clean it made her own seem like something you’d find in a youth hostel. So she figured Elizabeth was being honest about the timing, that she’d felt bad for only a couple of days. Her mother scrubbed the bathrooms religiously once a week; it was a chore Maggie had always dreaded in childhood. But now she did the same at her own house.

Maggie brought a glass of water and the Advil to her mother. Elizabeth took the pills and downed them with the water, gave her daughter a smile.

“I promise,” she said, reading Maggie’s worried frown. “See? I feel better already.”

Maggie rested her hand on her mother’s; it felt tiny and fragile until Elizabeth turned her hand to squeeze Maggie’s, and then she felt her mother’s strength. Maggie smiled back.

“Ah,” said Elizabeth suddenly, looking up at the ceiling. “There they are! Do you hear it?”

“What? No, I don’t hear anything.”

“Listen!”

Maggie listened and heard only the silence of the old house.

“They stopped,” Elizabeth said, looking disappointed. “You didn’t hear?”

“No,” said Maggie. “I’m sorry. I didn’t.” She felt a slight tingle of worry for her mother.

Elizabeth glanced over the table at Maggie, then down at her fingernails. “Well,” she said, draining her cup and standing up. “That boy is supposed to come back and check his traps again tomorrow. Never mind.”

Her mother moved stiffly back to the kitchen sink, and Maggie wondered when Jones had come by and why he had given her mother a hard time about the dishwasher, but she stayed focused on the matter at hand. “If they’re a nuisance,” she said casually, “why don’t you come sleep at our place?”

“No,” Elizabeth answered with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’m not going to let critters run me from my home.”

“We’d love to have you, Mom. Just a visit until the problem is gone.”

When Elizabeth had hurt herself earlier in the year and Maggie had suggested that her mother move in with her, the old woman had coolly informed her that she would never consider that as an option. “I’ll have my own home until the day I die, Maggie,” she’d said. “Don’t imagine me any other way.”

Elizabeth’s harshness on the matter had hurt Maggie. She was annoyed by her mother’s lack of consideration for the rest of the family, not to mention her lack of foresight about the future. Elizabeth was unwilling to talk about alternatives to living alone in a gigantic old house that she might not be able to manage one day, the care of which would fall to Maggie and Jones. But Maggie was in no mood for a battle, so she backed off even on this small matter. The time for battles would come soon enough. She got up and took her cup to the sink, rinsed it, and put it in the rack.

“Okay, Mom. I’d better get back to Ricky. Do you need anything before I go?”

“I’m fine,” her mother said stiffly.

Why did she have to be like this? So brittle and uncompromising? This was a question Maggie had been asking about her mother for as long as she could remember. She was beginning to think that there wouldn’t be an answer in either of their lifetimes.

Even though he was only seventeen, Rick Cooper knew that love could exist even though it was starving and unrequited. It didn’t need love in return to survive. In fact, maybe he loved Charlene more, harder, because he knew she didn’t, couldn’t, love him back. Charlene could never love something that stood at her doorstep; she could only love something far away and hard to get, something that didn’t want her. Somehow he’d known this about her from the beginning, but it didn’t keep him from falling for her.

“We’re just friends,” she’d tell him as they lay in the backseat of his car together, as he kissed her neck and felt her body beneath his.

“Okay,” he’d say as she wrapped her arms around him, put her warm mouth to his.

“You’re not my boyfriend,” she’d tell him. “I don’t want that.” But she’d hold his hand and whisper in his ear that she loved him. And he knew she meant it, in a sweet way, in a true way. She’d touch him all over, make him feel things inside and out that gave him a fever. His hands had roamed her body, the soft swell of her breasts, her heart-shaped bottom. But still, she’d held herself from him. For all her sexy cool, she’d seemed childlike, innocent. He barely thought of anything else.

She wasn’t like the other girls, the girls his mother would like to see him dating. She wasn’t frivolous and bubbly, wearing pink bubble gum lip gloss and carrying Hello Kitty notebooks. She didn’t have the coyness of Britney, that look that said she knew a little about prettiness and power but not quite enough to wield it well. Charlene wasn’t the kind of girl who teased, then got scared of the reaction she invited. She wasn’t pampered or sheltered. She already knew the hard edges of the world, knew that life disappointed and that most people’s dreams never did come true.

She was hungry and melodramatic, impossible to predict or control. She did things that made people angry, like smashing Slash’s guitar at practice. It was wrong. It was silly. But it was in moments like those that he loved her the most, when he was almost crazy with the desire to shelter and protect her.

He pulled the car into the garage and sat, toying for a moment with the idea of closing the door and sitting there with the engine running until he fell asleep. He imagined his father finding him, roaring with grief. He fantasized about Charlene hearing about his death. The dark romance of it would appeal to her. She’d use the pain to write a song about him.

But it was just a moment, a childish indulgence. He wasn’t suicidal; if he were, he thought, Charlene would probably like him better. If anything, at the moment he was numb. He’d felt something that he imagined was close to grief last night, an aching hollow in his center, a trapped and quiet raging in his chest. Most of the day had been spent in a state of controlled panic, making phone calls, trying to connect with the people he knew in New York. After he learned that no one there had seen or heard from her-or so they were saying-something inside just powered down. His neck and shoulders ached. The new tattoo on his arm-Charlene’s idea-burned.