“Miss?” The cab driver was waiting for me to collect my luggage or pay him or something.
“Sorry. Here.” My mother put a bright yellow plastic, Australian fifty-dollar bill in his hand and waved her thank-you at him as he pulled away. She turned to face me as a tram rattled down the busy main road just past the iron gate of our driveway. Several cars sped past in both directions, and the noise and speed of the background made my mother’s stillness and silence in the foreground quite surreal. She became aware that she was looking at me strangely and for too long and so she averted her gaze; she wanted to look at me and yet she knew that she shouldn’t, as if she were passing a roadside accident. She stood there in silence looking like a little child, her arms dangling limply by her side.
It was clear to me then that she was very worried. I was no longer irritated or angry or disappointed. I was shocked. Did I look emaciated? There had been times when I looked in the mirror and thought I was too thin, but most times all I could see were the inches I still had to lose. If I still had fat on my thighs and hips, surely there was nothing to be concerned about. But her reaction did make me wonder because worry was something that I had rarely felt from her. While I was sure she had a lot of it while raising two kids as a single parent, she never wanted my brother and me to see it. When our dad died and left us in chaos, she rebuilt order with a stiff upper lip. She told me that I was smart and that she had nothing to worry about with me. I made sure I didn’t do anything to make her worry. When I was a teenager and all my friends were smoking pot and sneaking out of their bedroom windows to go to nightclubs, I told her that I tried pot, hated it, and in which club she could find me. I was never the kid that gave her trouble. I was the mature and independent one who aced the test and won the race. I was the entertainer, the one who made things exciting with my modeling jobs and my acting and my overseas adventures.
Now, at twenty-five years old, I had made her worry. I took a deep breath, and my eyes welled up with tears. I hated seeing her so uncomfortable, not knowing where to look or what to say, and yet simultaneously, it felt good. I had traveled thousands of miles in search of the opposite reaction, yet I suddenly felt myself preferring the one I’d received. Her concern felt warm, comforting. It seemed as though she was afraid of losing something very precious, and that something was me. Because I’d always been so strong and independent, her concern about me prior to this moment mainly seemed to be about the things I could produce, like a modeling job or a beauty contract. I felt so happy I wondered if I had deliberately lost this much weight in search of that reaction. All of a sudden, I felt worthy of care. I was the one to worry about. Caring for a weak, sick child required a different kind of love. And in that moment in the driveway, I discovered that that was the kind of love I preferred.
I love you too, Mom.
I didn’t say that. I really wanted to, but it was too abstract, too heavy and emotional.
Sometimes it’s better to keep things happy and superficial.
She obviously thought the same thing because she straightened up and put a smile back on her face as if the incident had never happened.
“Bubbles, you’re home!” She’d been looking forward to my return for weeks, getting her petunias in the garden ready for the holiday. Christmas was a special time for her since my brother and I moved to LA. She wanted to dismiss her worry so she could enjoy her daughter’s homecoming.
“Let’s go inside and see Gran. She’s been looking forward to seeing you for weeks.” I walked up the back steps and into the house, putting my bags down on the checkered green linoleum floor of the kitchen. I ran over to the rocking chair in the living room to hug my Gran.
“Now, then.” My mother glanced at me and then walked away, as if attempting to downplay the importance of whatever she was about to tell me. Not one for confrontation, she chose an upbeat, clipped voice and delivered her message in a tone that enabled me to choose whether to dismiss it or take it seriously.
“What’s all this silly business with being skinny? Stop all this silly rot, all this carrying on and eat normally like everyone else, girl!”
A surge of anger bitter like acid flooded my empty body.
Silly? She calls your hard work “silly?” She doesn’t care about you. She thinks you did it for attention. You’re exhausting to her. You’re pathetic for trying to get sympathy. She’s not concerned about you, she’s sick of you.
“I’m going for a run.”
And with that I exploded out the door. I ran down the busy main street of Camberwell, narrowly avoiding cars as they were pulling out of their driveways. I picked up my pace and charged up the hill, past the old people’s home and the church and held my stomach tight and twisted from side to side as I ran down the hill toward the shops at Camberwell junction. If my Pilates instructor likened this movement to wringing water out of a towel, then I was wringing out all the acidic anger from my organs that became flooded with it when my mother dismissively called my hard work silly. I waited for the walk signal at the busy intersection and jogged in place to keep my muscles warm, to keep my brain from thinking I was done with my workout or done with the anger that fueled it, since I could use the anger to propel me forward. I sprinted up the busy shopping street, past people walking in and out of the bakery, past the sidewalk café, dodging dogs tied to outdoor tables. I ran past my favorite bookstore, past deathly still people who were standing and reading blurbs of books that promised to help them, entertain them, teach them who they were. It seemed that all the people shopping on that street turned to look at the fool who was sprinting in jeans and platform heels. But I didn’t let their obvious disapproval of my running slow me down. I ran fast, right by all of them. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore.
I stopped at the train station opposite the doctor’s office where my mother used to work. I stood at the corner of Stanhope Grove and watched the trains as they exploded into the station and heaved their way back out once they’d stopped to deliver people and receive people. I watched a green tram putter up the hill. I watched teenagers walk in and out of McDonald’s. I was watching my memories. I sat down on the wooden bench next to the taxicab rank and imagined myself in a navy blue school uniform with permed hair, walking out of the train station and across the street to my mother’s work, where I would wait for her to take me home. I smiled at that thought. Why I would wait for an hour for my mother to take me home when home was only one more train stop away was something my adult brain couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was because I could use the time to sneak off to McDonald’s and eat fries and a vanilla milk shake, pretending I was waiting for someone to disguise my embarrassment of being in there alone when all the other tables were full of kids from other schools. I was a model and so I could never go to McDonald’s with my friends. I couldn’t go with anyone, not only because I thought models shouldn’t eat McDonald’s but also because I constantly complained about being overweight. I could never eat in front of anyone because it would be evidence. It would confirm suspicions that I wasn’t helping myself and was unworthy of their sympathy. Only a crazy person would console someone for being distressed about her weight and then take her out for McDonald’s fries to cheer her up.