She brought me milk cloudy with water for my breakfast, first claiming it was a diet tonic but, once pressed, admitted she only had the dregs of a carton left in her house and no other food at all. Worse, as she sat and watched me drink it, I spied a wet bit of fried egg trembling in her hair. She jerked back when I tried to pick it out, and so I took hold of her shirtsleeve and told her to let me smell it on her breath, at which point she called me an occultist and left the house with the door unlocked. It took a great effort for me to drag the tank and stop and lean on it and drag the tank again and finally reach and bolt the door, because I was not well and I remain not well. The tank leaned me solicitous toward the floor, but I knew that it would be the end of me if I fell, and so I dragged it back to my chair, where I drifted in and out of a sad doze. My tank whirred to an eventual halt and my child did not return for some time, during which I resorted to scraping and licking dishes within reach, gasping like a fish. I like to keep my feet in a tub, but even the water gave me no comfort once it turned gray and cold. I had no strength to change it and so I kicked it over like a mule and wept.
She returned the following Saturday without explanation or apology, bearing a plate of beef jerky, which she balanced ceremoniously in my lap.
“I want to take you to my lover,” she said.
“It is not possible.”
“But you’ll be so proud.”
I was breathing easier since she hooked in a new tank but I was still very weak. The ribbed fabric of my short nightgown had branded my legs and I tried to rub the pattern away with my thumb. A knob of jerky landed in the mess of wet newspaper at my feet. She reached down and retrieved the meat, drying it on her jeans and placing it before me, brushing away a fly.
“I take you to your meetings,” she said. “I brought you a new tank.”
“There’s no effort in it.”
“You should come with me to meet my lover.”
Leaving the house requires a week’s worth of strength and still she makes this request.
“A man came by. I heard him knocking on your door and then he came up and knocked on mine. I saw him through the peephole.”
“And then you let him in? You invited him to sit with you and watch television? Your hands inched across the couch toward each other in the heady first days of love?”
“I didn’t take the chain off the door and he left. There was a pan of cornbread on your mat. It was fine.” She made an idiotic little half smile and shrugged.
“Certainly all of it was fine.”
“Mother, you are on a diet.”
“Certainly!”
“You should get on your feet and take a little exercise. Come with me to see my lover.”
“You certainly are doing just fine.”
It took me a few hours after she was gone to calm down, but I eventually decided that her happiness, though fleeting and confused, and alienated from the love and comfort of others, is still happiness, and I should be glad and grateful. Her old raffia beach bag had sprinkled stray gravel when she lifted it to go and I saw enough of it studding the rug to ruin the vacuum.
I’ve earned the right to sit after years on my feet. I started in my teen years as a cashier at the sporting goods store, feeling the blood struggle to work its circuit back up my system. It was more of the same at the chalkboard, incanting grammatical clauses, ankles swollen so thick that they looked ready to give birth to a pair of screaming children that would match the ones I served. Whole afternoons were lost tracing the edge of the road from home to school and from school back home, shivering against the trucks, toddling in stupid shoes that inspired knots, my flask warm all the while against my thigh. I leaned like a pack beast against walls and doorframes, waiting for the day to end. I stood beside my man at the altar, stood to save our child from the fire, and stood to hold her while she fussed and puked, whispering in her ear that the sitter was stealing from us. Sleep was a horizontal version of the same; I braced my feet against a pillow, standing in my dreams. And so, yes, when the work was over and with it the requirement of mobility, I sat immediately and with satisfaction. I wore out folding chairs and sofa cushions and then I found my velveteen rose, my reinless ride, and I did take my throne and fuse its plush to my own and from it for the remainder of my days I will Ride.
Angela returned the next morning, refilled the tub for my feet, and fed me pieces of ham. When I was through, she wiped up the mess of magazines and soiled clothing, working without complaint. I was suspicious.
“Would you like a ride to the early meeting?” she asked.
“That would be so kind.”
“I value you truly.”
“And I you, darling.” We were a mother and daughter in a stage play. I took her wrists, which limped in my grasp. She twitched and she made a chuffing sound. I thought she was angry with me, but she was gentle with my tubes as she loaded me into the car.
At meeting, the young man who had caught me before smiled and sat on the far end of the room. I waited patiently until it was my time to share.
“My child should be grateful for the life she has been afforded through my sacrifice and work,” I said. “She should be thankful for my loving control, optimistic for the years ahead. There are cultures in which the daughter is tied to the mother for her entire adult life, physically bound with a rope, released only for the carnal act, and then the two are bound together again. You’ll find a maternal lineage of women going through the streets like that, and when one slows to observe a basket of peaches, they all stop and make a group decision on the merits of the greengrocer. Compared to that, we seem so distant as to be almost strangers.”
A young woman applauded, laughing. I pitied her, forced to dry out in a lonesome apartment, opening tinned food for cats, slicing a peach for her own dinner and eating it over a sink facing the wall. She makes much of her own bravery but has no one to be brave for, and when she dies, her old cat will pluck out her eye. She will be found by a landlord collecting his rent.
At night I think of my child above me, my husband above her, and my old smiling Higher Power above them both, and I say: Keep this girl hidden out of the light so that her eyes may become wide dark voids that might better reflect me.
Angela came bearing a box of doughnuts and handed me one on a plate. A fly had been troubling my legs all morning and this was a happy departure. She talked of a memorable television program, digging into her bag as she went on, the snapped straw at its corners ripping her stockings when it grazed her leg. Her lovely dark hair was matted and her right knee was roseate with a blooming bruise. The contents of her bag threatened to emerge: a pilled sweater; three or four notebooks; disposable chopsticks in their paper; the parched nub of a carrot. Surely there was a wallet in there, some identification, her old first-aid card. A package of gum, stale and somehow rumpled. She extracted a fork and set it on my plate as the fly landed on the doughnut, plunging its sucker mouth.
“Eat your breakfast,” she said, glancing up from her bag for only a moment. The skin around her eyes was cracked at the edges like she was carved from clay. I would keep her under glass if I could. She found a dried mass of facial tissue, honked into it, and examined the evidence. The fly rubbed its spindled legs together and placed them on the doughnut, a chocolate-frosted variety.