Katrina Prado - The Whore of Babylon, A Memoir

I want so badly to excise this necrotic wound that is poisoning our lives, but I have no idea how to find it, much less remove it.

I trudge to my bedroom and strip off my work clothes, dumping them into the hamper, donning my favorite pair of old sweats and a T-shirt, wondering on the whereabouts of Robyn. I tug vaguely at the various food stains on my T-shirt idly wondering about the last time it was laundered. It smells of my body lotion, Jean Nate, combined with the odor of deep fried hash browns, though I haven’t actually made hash browns in years.

Rob said he didn’t expect to get home until after nine or later. And then there’s always the chance that he made a pit stop. I can’t remember the name of the bar he likes, though he has told me several times.

When we first moved to California, he told me he knew he needed to stop drinking. And, in fact, the first couple of months we were here, I began to allow myself to believe that he’d turned over a new leaf. But it didn’t last. One night he called about eleven thirty and said he and some of the guys from work had decided to get together. That was before I knew about his friend Dusty’s penchant for, as he calls them, “tittie bars”.

The microwave pings. Time to turn the potatoes. I sigh and plod to the kitchen.

The can opener resentfully grumbles to life as I open a can of cheese soup. It falls, in arsenic yellow colored globs, into the small pot. I realize, belatedly, that I forgot to spray the pot with Pam.

I tell myself not to mind the clock, but even before I’ve finished that thought my wrist has appeared magically in front of my face and my eyes fasten onto the tiny hands of my watch. Eight-thirty. I pour a can full of water on top of the cheese blobs, giving the whole mess a half-hearted stir before turning to my address book to look up Jenny’s phone number.

“Your daughter isn’t here,” Mrs. Kammish says.

Her curtness catches me off guard. I feel, by the tenor of her voice, that she does not approve of my daughter or me.

“Thank you anyway,” I say.

“I hope you find her,” Mrs. Kammish says.

I listen to the click as Mrs. Kammish hangs up the phone.

The microwave pings again. The potatoes are done. Not much of a birthday dinner, baked potatoes covered by cheddar cheese soup, but it’s the best I can do tonight. The kitchen reeks of hot, processed cheese that reminds me of a dirty factory.

I sit in front of my potato, soaking in the greasy, orange concoction but can’t make myself pick up my spoon. I wipe the sheen of sweat from my forehead and my eyes drift to the left. On the table are the magazines I bought at lunch. These women’s magazines seem the only thing that keeps me grounded in reality at times. The only things that tell me what’s real and what’s not.

I scan the headlines: “Look Twenty Years Younger Without Plastic Surgery”, “Stress Could Be Killing Your Teen”, “The Frightening Truth About Ketchup ”.

I flip to the article about teen stress. Your child is stressed out, the article says, because she is involved in too many activities. Swim team, ballet, student body offices, cheerleading practice, and the copious hours involved in doing homework to keep up that straight A grade average will all take its toll on the young teenage girl these days.

I shove the magazine away from me. This article is not about my daughter. I have always wondered about parents of children whose lives seem so perfect. I know, at least on an intellectual level, that these families have problems too. These teenagers struggle to find themselves too. Yet I imagine that from these mothers there resonates a certain satisfaction in the job they have done raising their young. A pleasure is derived in lingering over the good grades, the sports leagues and group activities.

I sit and stare, thoughts of Robyn cloud my mind leaving a smudge of despair. Somehow, without meaning to, I have raised a broken child. Within her psyche is a fissure of defeat. I have affixed that fissure there, as skillfully as a surgeon implants a pacemaker. I brush away angry tears because reparation seems as vague and blurred as a dream.

The phone rings. I snatch up the receiver thinking it might be Robyn.

“Hello?”

“There you are, darlin’,” Gladys, my mother says.

My shoulders collapse in exasperation. Why didn’t I look at the caller ID? I mentally kick myself.

“I was just getting ready to call you,” I lie.

“Well, I wanted to be the first to give you the good news,” she says.

“Oh?” I say, already trying to think of an excuse to get off the phone.

“Remember last time I told you that Petra was thinking of putting the baby into that baby contest?”

“Mmm,” I try, unsuccessfully to recall that conversation.

“Anyway, she won!”

“That’s great,” I say, doing my best to inject a little enthusiasm into my voice.

“Gerber called and they want Petra and the baby to fly to New York to film the commercial!”

“That’s great,” I say again.

She goes into painstaking detail about the “grueling” selection process, the “exhausting” day spent at the photographer’s studio, and the “fatiguing” effort required to complete all the paperwork. Next is the mind-numbing description of attire that Petra had to consider to adorn The Baby, until I just want to puke.

“I mean, I know that the baby is the cutest little darlin’ on the face of the planet; we all do. Now the world will see too!” Gladys exclaims.

Though The Baby is eight months old, I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother use the child’s actual name. I’m not sure I even remember her name myself.

“That’s really great,” I try varying my response so my mother won’t think I’m just reading from a single cue card.

“How’s that little angel Robyn doing?” she asks. “Still captain of the cheerleading team?”

I have made it a practice of lying to my mother about my daughter since we left Aztec. Gladys was so certain that uprooting Robyn from everything she knew would be the worst possible thing for her. To admit to my mother that she was right requires something that I just don’t have within me at the moment.

Also, it hardly seems fair, between my nephew little Billy The Little League Phenom, and niece Cynthia, Flute Prodigy Extraordinaire, and now The Baby’s imminent ascendancy to movie stardom, that Robyn shouldn’t also have her own shining attributes. And now that we’re a thousand miles away it’s possible.

“Yes,” I lie again. “She’s really doing well. And she made Honor Roll again.”

“My, my. It’s plainer than a cow pissin’ on a flat rock; there must be something in that California water that agrees with that little girl.”

I cringe at my mother’s Southern euphemism. She hasn’t lived in Tennessee in over a quarter century, yet she still talks as if she just got off the plane from Nashville.

“Well-” I begin, trying to get off the phone.

“Before you go, I just wanted to tell you not to worry; not one single, little, itty-bitty bit.”

Here it comes: the health report.

“Worry about what Mom?” I say, playing the game.

“You know I been going to see that Dr. Dickenson, don’t ya?”

“Um-hm.”

“Well, I had to switch me doctors. Dickenson’s an idiot. If brains was grease, he couldn’t slick the head of a pin.”

“Oh?” I ask.

“You remember I had that cyst on my arm?”

“I think so.”

“You know; the one where every time I mash down on it, all kinds of puss come out of it?”

I shut my eyes and cringe as my mother goes on to describe the excruciating particulars about the cyst and its deviant behavior.

“Yesterday the thing got all speckled looking, like some kind of mutant bird egg or something.”