Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“Jesus, Beale,” Fowler said, rolling her eyes and laughing. “He’d fucking love it over here, wouldn’t he?”

“You’re saying to me that you think this is a fair and equitable system?”

“Hey, it’s family, Pulowski. You know this. Rules are rules. Traditions are traditions. If Aunt Carla was having the dinner at her house, she’d be the one who did the shopping. She’d have coals ready. I’m head of the household.”

“That’s terrible logic.” Pulowski was surprised at the decisiveness in his voice, at the vehemence of his anger. “But fine: You follow your rules. I’ll make mine.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, if anybody complains about having beer-can chicken for dinner — without coming out here to help you cook — I get to kick their ass.”

Pulowski yanked the chickens around the grill barehanded, imagining a very unlikely scenario in which he was tough enough to kick Aunt Carla’s ass. Imagining some better version of himself, one that would actually get mad at the people who deserved it, instead of yelling at a woman who didn’t. When he turned, expecting Fowler to have disappeared, to have run inside, he nearly trampled her. She was standing close to him, close enough that he could feel her breasts against his elbows. He tried to walk around her but she stepped, slyly, in front of him. Her chin was up and he could smell her shampoo. “You, Pulowski,” she reminded him. “You’d be the person who complained.”

What would happen if he met a woman who did not require him to be polite? Or even want it? At a loss, he leaned down to kiss her, his hands covered in grease.

This, apparently.

Fowler’s mother had picked her up from school early, the day she left. The feeling Fowler remembered was one of derangement. Not mental derangement (though her mother, on that particular day, probably qualified), but deranged as in rearranged, out-of-phase; Deirdre Fowler was not dressed in her usual khaki pants and a belt and an oxford shirt, but instead had shimmied into a dress, an actual evening dress, short-cut in turquoise blue, which seemed a strange choice for the middle of the day. And also she could not, or would not, engage with her daughter directly; only when Fowler stopped asking questions about their destination—“Can we go to the pet store?” “Are we going to a movie?” “Don’t we have to get Harris?”—and instead mooned out the window quietly did she feel her mother’s abstracted, fluttering caress. Even these touches were ill-timed, somehow off-beat, arriving when her mother was busy making a turn so that the wheel slipped and she had to quickly grab after it, and when Fowler turned to try to catch her mother’s eyes, to get an actual answer, she would find instead her mother’s face quickly averted, as if the only circumstance in which she felt comfortable looking at Fowler was when her daughter wasn’t looking back.

“Why are you all dressed up, Mama?”

That had been her last question. She’d asked it again as they were heading down the corridor at the White Haven Motel. She had never forgotten that motel, the strange time warp of that specific corridor, the ceiling whose plaster had been teased into swirls, the stained, nearly black woodwork that, despite the darkness of the dye, still seemed light, insubstantial, the doors hollow-core, the frames a cheap white pine. Their flimsiness lacked the compensating familiarity of a Motel 6 or a Days Inn, and the rooms she glimpsed as they strode along had seemed oddly old-fashioned, out of time. They had dressers made out of gray carved wood; they had faded, embroidered chairs.

If one thing haunted her thinking during her first few months with her platoon, it was this last encounter with her mother. Not that she made the connection immediately: the actual conversation itself, which she had never spoken about to anyone, had long ago become an event she’d “dealt with” but rarely thought about consciously. A man had been sharing her mother’s room at the White Haven Motel. He wasn’t there when Fowler arrived, but his things were, commonplace objects that, set amid her mother’s things, stuck out with unnatural clarity. The T-shirt draped over a chair’s back, a line of yellow around its neck. The smell of spice, a different, fruitier smell than her father’s, that leaked out when her mother bustled her past the bathroom. And in the bathroom, a leather dopp kit on the toilet’s back, a rusty pair of barber’s scissors, a shoe tree, upended, with its carved wooden sole facing her way. She could sense that her mother didn’t care at all what the room looked like. That it would feel shameful; that its shame would be legible to Fowler in such a clear way. She was talking confidently now, unzipping and zipping bags of makeup, knuckles close to her teeth. “I just want you to promise me, Emma, that you are capable of handling your brother. Of, uh, well, basically giving him some structure”—her eyes darkened here, as if the word “structure” stood for some deep emotional event (or, as Fowler thought later, because the word seemed so cheap)—“because Harris is a lot more fragile than you. He’s more like me.”

“How do you know that?” Fowler had asked. It was not really a question. Everybody knew this about Harris. But her mother’s claim left her flushed, marked, her right leg bent and sliding up against her left beneath her skirt, as if she wanted to strip herself naked there. To show her mother everything.

“Harris?” This at least caused her mother to laugh. “Oh, my God, honey — it doesn’t take a world of observation to see that you two are different.”

“But why aren’t I like you?” she demanded.

Her mother’s eyes were compressed into slits by the pressure of her hands and then snapped back to their almond shape. “Trust me, honey,” she said, “you really should be thankful for that.”

“How do you know I’m not like you?” Fowler said. She was propped against the desk, a pad of White Haven stationery under her left hand, which she was crumpling, crumpling, crumpling. “You’re my mother. Aren’t I supposed to be?”

Did her mother know that she imagined, right now, this clump of stationery bursting into flames in her fist? She imagined showing her mother this: See? See? But as she squeezed, the stationery only grew soggy with sweat.

“Honey — okay, look. Could you hand Mama a Kleenex?”

“No,” Fowler said. Though she did. It was an excuse to stand beside her mother, right between her knees, squeezing that ball of stationery until it burst into flames.

“I’m leaving,” her mother said. “Surely you see that. Here’s the thing. You know I’m different, and you’re only eight. Your father knows it, everybody knows this. I want to do things I’m not supposed to do, which is why it was a mistake for me to get married to your father in the first place. A mistake, okay? And do you know what else? I make mistakes. I think too much. I don’t know what I want. I’m not organized — or I’m too organized. Or I organize the wrong things. All of these things that your father says are true, exactly true. It isn’t that hard to be happy. It shouldn’t be hard, but I’m not happy, and it isn’t fair for me to take it out on you and your brother. Or your father.”

These were exactly the things that her father had said. Fowler had been hearing them over dinner and down the hallways of their house for over a year.

“But what if that’s like me?” she asked.

“But it isn’t, honey,” her mother said. She wanted her mother to grab her, to crush her to death, but instead she stood and unlocked her suitcase, her skirt trailing away against Fowler’s wrist. “It isn’t, honey, because, see, you are a good girl, and your mother — I am — well, really basically when you get down to it, I have violated all the rules. I don’t keep rules, I break rules. That’s not what you do.”