Karolina Waclawiak: The Invaders

“I heard you the first time,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll be hungry when he wakes up. Do we have anything?”

I pointed to the freezer so that Jeffrey would get the picture and he did because he said maybe the club was a better idea. He climbed the stairs to go greet Teddy and I ripped open the letter with shaking hands, expecting to find something besides what I had sent to her myself — a personal check for one thousand dollars, just like every month. She had told me about a reverse mortgage gone wrong before we stopped speaking. I didn’t want her to be kicked out of the only place she still had. It was as much as I could squirrel away each month to send to her from what Jeffrey gave me. I stared at the check and the abrupt line on a grocery note: Hope you are well. Not even my name signed on the note because it was on the check, and why be redundant?

What was she trying to tell me? To stay out of her business? I was doing what I thought a daughter should do, a gentle nudge to let her know someone was still looking out for her. When I first got together with Jeffrey, she started almost immediately. Her windows needed to be replaced. The water heater was twenty years old and also needed to be replaced. My sisters were next — their children needed so many things. At first Jeffrey was kind, but it was always embarrassing. I half expected them to move in with us, tell him we were a package deal. I went to my mother’s house to give her money and found that the windows still had their rotten wooden frames. Nothing had been fixed. She wouldn’t tell me what she was doing with the money we gave her. She said I owed her for all the years she had given up for me. My mistake had been to tell Jeffrey, who said he was done bankrolling all of them. I had to let go of the burden or I would lose him. Who would choose the sad trap of where they came from over the dream life that was close enough to touch?

I started sending my mother checks last year, as if that would somehow make up for the years of neglect. This one was the first returned. I thought that fixed incomes made it difficult to get the necessities in life. I was trying, but she didn’t want to see me. She wouldn’t answer the phone when I called. She said I had always been ungrateful. I stared at the envelope and wondered if she had even touched it. She hadn’t cashed the last check and I thought it might have been some kind of message: Stop. She didn’t need me at all.

I could hear Jeffrey and Teddy arguing upstairs.

Teddy with his eye rolls and sudden bursts of anger that later morphed into bored indifference toward us. We were morons to him, a bank that dispensed money when necessary and answered the phone to midnight-nervous calls about vague troubles. I told Jeffrey to stop giving him money, let him learn what it means to be a grown-up, but Jeffrey would not consider it until Teddy was finished with school. He had to be supported because he was Jeffrey’s son. How would it look if Jeffrey didn’t give him everything? It wasn’t as if I had a say, anyway. It didn’t matter that I had been around for almost ten years; I was still a bystander in their lives together.

I heard the rumble of footsteps and looked up. Jeffrey was staring down at me and told me to get ready to go. I told him that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I told him I could run out and get something for us to eat. Steamers and lobsters. Or something celebratory.

“To celebrate what?” Jeffrey asked.

“I don’t mean celebrate. I mean, he doesn’t seem to be in the right headspace to handle a meal.”

“He’s just tired.”

Teddy had been consistently tired or out of sorts or under the weather since we found him on the beach at age twelve, drunk and stoned. Jeffrey had many variations of ailment choices for Teddy, but the symptoms were always the same.

“I’ll be ready in a few,” I said. Upstairs, I passed the bathroom and heard Teddy retching in the toilet. I listened through the door and it seemed like he might have even been crying. I heard the flush and quickly made my way to the bedroom, quietly closing the door behind me. I didn’t want him to know I was there and make the indignity worse.

I went to my closet and stared in. I was at a loss. The sherbet tops made me wince, but my navy dresses seemed too dour. Red was calling attention unnecessarily. What did shorts say about a person?

All of a sudden I felt like everything was coded. What did big, obnoxious polka dots say? It was too exhausting to think about. I picked a pink top with a yellow pony on it, my go-to, because it would set off my tan nicely. It also said happy and youth. Pick me next time. I had stockpiled clothes from the outlets that would last me and Jeffrey for years. I looked at myself holding the shirt up, making sure it was okay, and didn’t like what I saw.

I didn’t need to be picked. I grabbed a melon top that I saw buried deep and put it on. Screw Mary Ann and her anti-citrus rule.

“Cheryl, are you wearing that?” Jeffrey asked me when I went downstairs.

“Yes,” I said with hesitation.

I looked down at myself. I thought the melon looked great. I applied pink lipstick with a small mirror in my purse and tried to keep busy while we waited for Teddy to come down. As I stared at my lips in the mirror, I thought that if my mother had moved, there was no way to find out where she had gone. The women in my family were all so stubborn. There would be no call to say she was relocating. No notice from my sisters. We all had run from the same home and away from one another. The only contact I’d had with my mother had been seeing the monthly withdraws from my checking account.

“Should I go check on him?” I asked.

Jeffrey screamed Teddy’s name louder than I had ever heard and asked, “Was that so hard?”

“My voice doesn’t carry like yours,” I said. I felt like playing up my sense of fear during this afternoon’s debacle with Lori. Perhaps if he felt like I was somehow fragile it would make him be nicer to me.

“Do I look okay?” I asked.

“You look fine.”

“That’s it? I know I’m not a model, but still.”

“What is it you’d like me to say?” Jeffrey asked.

I thought for a moment and then shrugged my shoulders. “How about something a little more exciting than ‘fine’?”

“All right, I liked it better when you looked vulnerable,” he said. “How does that sound?”

“I think I don’t like what you mean.”

“If you don’t, be sure about it,” he said.

I looked at him as he shook his head at me, bored. He was still slim, tanned. Almost slight. He liked it better when I looked vulnerable. I let the words roll around in my head. It was hard not to count the number of days since we had last had sex or the other long pauses before. He hadn’t wanted me vulnerable in all that time, but that’s how he liked me best. Jeffrey looked old. I knew that. But men could be without the necessity for any nips or tucks. My mother had told me that twenty years would seem further and further apart the older we got, but I hadn’t listened. She had always said that one day I would feel that certain kind of loss, of someone not needing you anymore. Once, I saw her entwined with an old man from down the street, whispering in his ear. It was a sense of intimacy that I had always strived to achieve. The way a man’s face looked when my mother leaned into him. That’s what I wanted. I learned the allure of secretive intimacy from her and it’s what sustained me and Jeffrey in the beginning. We loved each other and couldn’t keep away from each other. How could it have just floated away? I couldn’t reconcile now with then, when everything seemed possible. I thought I would always feel Jeffrey’s need, his want. My mother would just smirk at me as if I were more foolish than anyone she had ever known.