Jessica Chiarella - And Again

Finally, after the third fitful week, I decide that the only way to resolve my psychic imbalance is to go to the source, so I rent a car and drive north on I-94. Within minutes, Chicago’s buildings give way to corporate offices and hotels, then car dealerships and the occasional restaurant. By the time I exit, thick walls of greenery line the highway. It’s all fast-food and auto shops and dollar stores, everything dingy with age. Compared to my silver city, it may as well be a different country.

It’s cool and rainy when I arrive, pulling my rental car through the overgrown driveway at the trailer park’s entrance. The place feels deserted, with all of its inhabitants tucked away and not strewn around their yards and porches, calling to one another over the din of their children. I pull up to my mother’s trailer, though it takes me a moment to figure out which one it is because this place feels smaller now and the trailer hasn’t held up very well. Its paint is peeling and the screen in the front door is torn, a piece of it dangling like a pennant within its wooden frame. My mother’s lawn chairs are still out, though brackish water collects in their seats and their metal joints show a red dusting of rust.

I pull open the screen to knock on the door, and as I do my thumb catches on a sharp splinter of raw wood, which imbeds itself in my skin. I curse and am in the middle of prying the splinter out with my fingernails when my mother opens the door. For the briefest of moments, I think I have the wrong trailer. The woman standing there looks much too old to be my mother. Her mouth is puckered with lines, and her eyes seem to have grown smaller, surrounded as they are by skin that droops down from her eyebrows and pools underneath, hanging in bags above her cheekbones. She looks like a wax figure that’s beginning to melt in the sun. Her dark-blonde hair has thickened with gray, becoming wiry and coarse, hanging around her face in an uneven bob. For a moment I think that this can’t be her. This can’t be the woman who taught me to worship beauty the way ancient tribes worshipped the sun. But then her saggy eyes widen. And I remember that she worships something else now, especially when I see the little gold cross nestled in the rumpled skin of her throat.

“What in the heck,” she says, and her voice is the same, that’s how I know it’s her. “Connie?”

“I couldn’t explain over the phone,” I say, all of the words I’d practiced during the drive up seeming to slip away from my grasp, like shimmering minnows in shallow water. “I wanted to come here. To show you that I’m better now.” That things can go back to the way they were, I think, looking at the cross again.

“Better?” she says, and then she must realize she’s still holding the door open, as if I’m a salesman who must be kept at bay, because she steps back and ushers me inside. The inside of the trailer hasn’t fared much better than my mother has. It’s dingy, with a strong smell of must or wet animal or both. The cloudy sunlight doesn’t seem to make it through the windows with any force, and the effect is like walking into the dim dampness of a cave. “You want some lemonade?” my mother asks, and I nod without thinking. I sit down at the card table in our little kitchen, which is covered by a cheap-looking white tablecloth with embroidered edges. My mother sets a glass in front of me, and when I take a sip the lemonade is cloyingly sweet, with a tinge of the foul sulfur taste of well-water. I try not to grimace as my mother sits across from me with her own glass. I decide maybe talking will keep me from having to drink more.

“There’s this new treatment,” I say. “It’s experimental. They’re only testing it on a few people. But it works.”

“What sort of treatment?” my mother asks, her face awash with something that looks like horror. “Stem cells?”

“Does it matter?” I reply. “I’m better, Maureen. Does it really matter to you what saved my life?”

“Of course it matters,” she says in a hiss. I lean back in my seat and take a long breath.

“Do you have anything else to drink around here?” I ask. There were always bottles of vodka in our freezer while I was growing up.

“Drink your lemonade,” she says, motioning toward my glass. There’s no air conditioning in the trailer, and the glasses are sweating rings into the tablecloth.

“I was thinking of something a little stronger,” I say, but she ignores me.

“You can’t buy your health through sin, Connie,” she says, fishing into the pocket of her sweater and pulling out something. She sets it in front of me, and I realize it’s a small prayer book with a gold-embossed cross stamped into the leather of its cover. “You can’t buy salvation through unnatural means.”

“So, you’d have me what, pray the AIDS away?” She winces when I mention the name of my disease, and it reminds me of the way my grandmother would whisper the word cancer , as if saying it out loud would tempt an angry twist of fate. I think of all the words that will lose their power, now that SUBlife has begun.

“Maybe if you’d been right with the Lord you’d never have had that pestilence to begin with,” she says. I bang my way up from the table.

“Maybe if you’d been worth a damn as a mother, I wouldn’t have been shooting up in a bathroom somewhere to begin with,” I say, yelling now. She looks at me, a hard look, and I can almost glimpse the diamond-brightness of the woman who raised me within this simpering exterior. “Maybe if I had valued anything but being beautiful, and what that could buy me, maybe I could have avoided a lot of the shit that’s happened to me.”

She moves then, toward me, pulling me to her. I’m so surprised by it that I wrap my arms around her on reflex alone. I can probably count on one hand the number of times my mother embraced me when I was a child. It happened so infrequently that I stopped wanting it after a while. So this sudden motherly affection leaves me a little stunned.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers into the hair above my ear. “I’m so sorry.” She pulls back, cupping my face in her hands, and suddenly I want to cry, to sob into her shirt like a child. But her next words stop me, freezing everything in me that is still soft and tender and in need of a mother. “I’m so sorry I didn’t raise you with the Lord.”

The rain has stopped, but the temperature outside is dropping when I leave the trailer, or perhaps it just feels that way after the stifling heat of my mother’s kitchen. Instead of heading back to the car, I turn and walk to the chain link fence that separates the trailer park from the apartment building next to it. I jump the fence, which is a bit more intimidating a maneuver than I remember, despite the fact that my body is as youthful and supple as it was then. It’s my mind that has aged, grown more afraid. But I do it, scraping the heel of my hand on the top of the fence as I drop down, and I wonder absently if a tetanus shot was included with all of those vaccinations I had after the transfer.

But then I’m at the edge of the pool, and my mind clears of everything else. It’s full of water, rippling a bit as droplets fall from the surrounding trees. I’ve never seen this pool full, not in all the years I lived here. The apartment building has a fresh coat of paint on it. The windows look new. Progress, I think. They probably charge extortionist rates to live here now. I imagine the children who probably swim here, the mothers in their bulging one-pieces, the lenses of their sunglasses flecked with droplets. Teenage babysitters. Little boys doing cannon balls. None of them could probably guess what happened there. It’s been too long since the pool was neglected; no one who lives here could probably imagine the sorts of things that went on inside of it, when it was all moldering leaves and empty bottles. None of them could guess what might have happened to a girl who went there alone one night to escape the sound of her mother and her mother’s plumber friend fucking through the thin walls of their trailer. Or what happened when a man followed her in.