| WORLD VOICES DANCING FOR MY MOTHER
BY DUFF BRENNA |
Contents World
Voices Home |
goes
back to the
other bedroom. Where your mother is sound asleep and never knows a
thing. A
common theme. Comes
a night when her piercing wails
wake you. Mama crying? You toddle down the hall and open the door to
her room.
She is naked and hanging over Allison’s lap and he is spanking her.
With every
slap of his bare hand she cries out pitifully. You are in shock. A
grownup
spanking a grownup? You stand in the doorway for a long time before
Allison
notices you. He smiles and says, Mommy’s been bad. You know what
happens when
you’re bad, Duffy? You nod and reply, Spanking. He says, Good boy. Go
back to
bed now. Mommy will be all right. She buries her face in a pillow.
Never looks
at you. There
is an old woman whose name you
don’t know. This old woman has a house, a fenced yard, a garden, plants
in pots
galore, which she tends with loving care. Your mother takes you and
sister
there, gives you to the old woman, leaves you with her for so long that
you
start calling her Mama. She encourages it. She tries to get Carol Marie
to call
her Mama, but Carol Marie won’t. The old woman makes you stay away from
her
potted plants. She screams at you if you even bend down to smell a pot
full of
inviting flowers. Don’t touch that! she will say. Get away from that!
she will
say. Stay away from that, you brat! Carol
Marie and you sleep in bunk
beds, Carol Marie on top. The woman comes in every morning to check to
see if
you have wet the bed again. The nights when you don’t are very rare.
This
woman’s punishment for such a dirty habit is unique. She rubs your face
in the
wet sheet and tells you that you are a bad dog. Bad dog, bad dog, she
will say.
The pee stings your eyes, makes them water. You reek. You stink. But
you’d
rather smell like urine than take a bath. You really do hate baths and
avoid
them if you can. You especially hate soap. You were born with
ichthyosis
(fish-skin), a disease that causes the skin to be rough, dry, scaly.
Often the
skin will crack in certain places, especially your knuckles, which will
split
open in winter and bleed. Bits of blanket fuzz will get in the cracks
and stick
to the blood. Tugging the fuzz out is as fun as picking a scab. Your
body is
always flaky, flakes of skin raining from your arms like dandruff.
Soapy baths
make your skin itch as if you’ve rolled in poison ivy. You scratch
yourself so
much you leave lesions and lacerations all over your body. One of the
reasons
you like mud baths is because the mud coats you and stops the itching
for a
while. For a few minutes, you won’t claw your skin quite so much. The
mud is
just a stopgap measure, a moment of relief. Bed-wetting continues
boiling the
skin around your thighs, up to your waist, all of it lobster red. All
of it
raw. Your
mother is gone for what seems
months, but might be only days or a few weeks. The time moves slowly.
It must
be summer because you don’t go to school. Daily life becomes a blur,
but one
day your mother is there telling you to pack your things. She gets in
an
argument with the woman who has been watching you. It’s about money,
the
expense of keeping you was far more than the woman had expected. While
the
grownups are working it out, your sister comes in from the back yard
and tells
you to come see what she’s done. You go out with her and there in a
prized pot
is a turd. It is folded like a fat, brown snake in the middle of a
plant whose
tiny leaves spread out like a nest. There is a gleefully sinister look
on your
sister’s face. Got her! she says. Where
did George Allison go? Why did
your mother replace him with Nick Pappas? In your mind they are as
alike as
kidney beans. Allison blends into Pappas and nothing really changes.
But it
doesn’t seem like it is going to be that way, not at first, not when
she brings
Pappas home. He is in a sailor suit. He takes his cap off and puts it
on your
head, hoists you to the ceiling, chuckles and says now you are a sailor
boy
too. He flips you onto his back, carries you around, your mother 3
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