Steve Tem - Onion Songs

Her son’s building was shabby, but not as bad as she had expected. A sharp odor of urine in the lobby made her clasp a tissue over her nose and mouth. She was relieved to find that the odor did not follow her up the stairs. She stood outside her son’s door, sniffing self-consciously, then made herself stop. She rapped the door. It wasn’t a very loud knock, but it was the best she could manage.

He didn’t say anything when he first opened the door and looked down at her. He was wearing the kind of baggy shorts he’d always liked, except much bigger, of course, man-sized. And a T-shirt—it had always been hard to get him to wear anything but T-shirts. This one had some logo she did not recognize, whose jagged lines and garish colors made her uneasy. When she looked away from it she found herself following his long, sturdy legs down to the floor, to the huge, dirty gray, and almost disintegrated tennis shoes. She stopped there, staring, somewhat sickened by the look of the rotting canvas and rubber, and wondering if the tennis shoes were exaggerated, or if his feet were actually that big.

“Hi, Mom.” His voice had a phlegmy sound. She looked up into his expansive face, the tall forehead, the soft doughy cheeks and chin. The eyes buried inside that face appeared tiny, dark, and feverish. “I didn’t know you were coming.” His oversized head bobbed unsteadily on the thin neck when he talked.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes tearing. “I should have come before.”

His eyes blinked rapidly before focusing. “Do you want to come in?”

“Oh. Of course, honey.” The honey was meant, and deliberate, and caused her pain.

He stood aside awkwardly to let her by. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands, like he didn’t know how to invite someone into his apartment—he didn’t know how it was done. So he raised them above his head and allowed them to hang and flutter there. Then, before she had a chance to step inside, he asked, “Are you coming to the wedding?”

She stared up at him, feeling very much a small woman. It seemed to her she had always been a small woman alongside her son, even when he was a little boy. She did not say anything for a time, but watched his face intently.

“I will be there,” she said finally, “because I think that’s the right thing for me to do. But you must not get married, Charles. You really mustn’t.”

He blinked and looked away, and she thought about how raw and sore his tiny eyes appeared. When he was small he’d get these terrible colds and eye infections, and it just seemed like they would never go away. “Mom, my name is Charlie . I want to be called Charlie now.”

“I apologize, Charlie. That’s a very nice name and I will call you that from now on. But Charlie, you just can’t get married. That’s something you must not do.”

“I’m old enough.”

“Yes, you are old enough, but that’s not the point.”

“She says she loves me, and I told her I love her, too. I promised. So did she.”

“Oh, Charlie, I’m so glad someone said that to you. Really, I am. But you can’t do something like this.”

“We have to, now. Everything’s all ready. There’s a party after, but you can’t come if you keep saying things like that.”

“I have to be honest with you, Charlie. I loved you when you were a little boy and I love you still. I have always loved you and I will always love you. You will always be my son. Forever. But you just can’t get married.”

“Why?” He said it looking around the room, looking everywhere but at her. She looked down at his feet wrapped in those terrible tennis shoes. He was rocking back and forth on those two huge feet, lifting one and then the other.

“You can’t marry, honey, because you passed away. You died when you were just six years old.”

He blinked his eyes a couple of times and then started rubbing them with the swollen mitts of his hands. Soon he was rubbing them so hard she was afraid he might hurt himself—a genuine, but ridiculous fear. She thought she knew now why his eyes were so raw, so red, so small. He let his hands flutter up above his head, stretched, and yawned deeply, with all his body, like someone awakening from a long and extraordinarily deep sleep, unable as yet to muster the power of speech. He stared at her, frowning. Finally she looked away, not knowing how to interpret the look in his eyes.

“We never talk about that,” he finally said. “It’s just too silly.”

“Charlie,” she said with a sad smile, “that’s my fault. At first, well, of course I wanted it that way—I wanted to pretend. The alternative was just unacceptable. But then when I couldn’t pretend anymore I still couldn’t talk to you about it. How could I? I suppose I thought if we didn’t talk about it, it would, well, take its own course, and that things would evolve as they were intended, in a more natural way, if natural means anything at all in your case. Charles, oh Charlie, do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

He looked vague, or bored, or perhaps he was trying to pretend he was bored. “You think I’m stupid.” His lips contorted in an ugly way. “A lot of people think I’m stupid. But I’m not.”

“No, of course you’re not, honey. It’s all my fault, this whole thing. I’m your mother—it was my obligation to help you… adjust to this in some way. I just thought that, I always assumed that, you did not know you were dead.”

He scratched his belly absently. He wasn’t skinny, he had a bit of a bulge there, and she wondered how that could be when, as far as she knew, Charles did not eat. And if he was eating now, she did not want to think about what he might be eating. “I dream sometimes I’m dead, I think. Or maybe I just remember it. And sometimes when I want to care about something, I can’t. It’s like some things I think about are just movies, and I’m not in the movie, I’m just watching it. Sometimes I lean on one side when I walk, and I think I’m going to fall over, but I don’t, and I always think about that, but I don’t want to. It makes me scared and mad.”

“When you were six years old we were having the downstairs re-carpeted. I was in the kitchen and you had wandered away from me.” Her face felt suddenly wet, but she didn’t try to wipe away her tears. “We had a conversation pit, they called them that back then. They were somewhat popular in the seventies. They had put the huge roll of carpet down on the edge of it and gone back to the truck for something or other. We never found out exactly what happened, but when we found you, you were at the bottom of the pit, the end of the carpet roll on top of you.”

All through his mother’s explanation Charlie felt around his head, his fingers finally settling into a particular spot three inches above his left ear. “I have this place here.”

“Yes, Charlie. That was one of the results of…”

“Couldn’t you have gotten it fixed? I don’t like it at all. My cap never fits right, and my hair grows funny.”

“Charlie, you were dead . There seemed no reason .”

“It’s not your head, Mom. You don’t have to comb your hair over and over again until it looks right.” His mouth suddenly seemed like this uncontrollable thing. He turned his head to the mirror just inside the apartment, and she watched as a sneer spread across his face in the glass. He turned back and frowned at her. “You should have watched me better. When Ellie and I have kids you better bet we’re going to watch them better than you did me.”

His mother trembled. “I made a mistake!” she cried. “And I have paid for it every day since then. You have been a constant reminder and a knife in my heart! But I never complained—I never even told you. I have only loved you.”