We undid each other’s buttons and zippers under the covers. Neither of us said a word. We stomped our clothes down to the bottom of the bed in a panic of embarrassment and desire, a kind of prone peasant dancing—trampling the grapes, mashing the potatoes. I rolled onto my back, and wondered what I would know next that I’d never known before. Sin? Ecstasy? My own mortality? A glimpse of the cosmos as he entered me?
But when Phil rolled on top of me, what I had was a sudden knowledge of skin.
How much of it there is.
How, like an elastic sock, it’s slipped over all the mystery and liquid that make us live. I could feel Phil’s heart thumping in it, bobbing like a plastic boat in a warm and salty bath, and I could hear that ocean, too, sloshing between his lungs. When he started going faster, getting ready to come, rocking the bed, turning red, he pushed my thighs farther apart with his arms, grimaced horrifically, and the two of us sounded like wet rags being furiously slapped together—
If it hadn’t been for skin, we would have spilled.
So, this was what was on my mind that spring and summer and fall into the bitter beginning of this winter—taking up all my time, occupying all my thoughts—as my mother was preparing herself to vanish, buying miniskirts and birds, talking to herself in the kitchen, hissing at me as I passed her in the hall, making confessions I didn’t want to hear. Just as my mother’s body was turning to glass, cracking all along the spine. Just as my mother was about to become nothing but invisible particles of brightness and air, I was becoming nothing but my body.
Even in the middle of U.S. History, I could smell myself—blood and semen and spit and sweat—between my legs. I’d see him turn a corner in the hallway of our high school, and I would nearly groan with it, imagining the arc of him—hairless and hard, and all that skin—over me in my bed. I’d close my eyes in Psychology and picture my own legs spread, seeing myself from the sky, my nipples pointed up at me, and that teary pinkness waiting for Phil, or God, or something to fill it up.
Desiring him had made me suddenly desire everything. Some nights I’d dream I was lying on a table in a restaurant—maybe Bob’s Chop House—naked, a sprig of parsley near my feet, maybe even an apple in my mouth, and every boy at my high school, maybe even the men—the principal, the janitors, all of them—were lined up, all of them with hard-ons, looking at me hungrily, with Phil at the end of the line, the longest and hardest and hungriest of them all.
This was a whole new planet I suddenly found myself living on, wading every day through a sexual river on fire, and the last thing on my mind was my mother—who was slipping out of the physical world just as I slipped in.
THE FIRST NIGHT MY MOTHER’S GONE I DREAM MY SHEETS have turned to snow, and their cold white wraps me in winter like a stillborn baby. The light, the bed, the sheets—it’s as if a pale angel, enormous, is kneeling over me, a colossus of pure marble, as if she is pressing me with her bare-fingered wings back into the womb of January in Ohio—
I am the small o slipping into the other O, the large empty O that swallows everything whole.
Maybe it would be sweet there, but I’m not ready to go.
The walls begin to throb—electric, frozen. They are frost-furred, and contracting. I realize that if I can’t swim to the surface, these walls will embrace me to death—inevitably, but with affection. I struggle for a long time against them.
When I wake up, my father’s sitting at the edge of my bed.
“That was your mother who called,” he says, though I haven’t heard the phone ring. “She said she’s never coming back.”
I raise myself up on my elbows, “What?”
I ask it without expression.
He doesn’t answer.
He hides his face in his hands. “Oh, Kat,” he sobs, “what are we going to do?”
SHE NAMED ME KATRINA BECAUSE SHE WANTED TO CALL ME Kat. She wanted to call me Kat because I was to be her pet. “Here, Kat. Here, kitty kitty kitty,” she’d call, and I’d come. Sometimes she’d even pat my head, scratch behind my ears.
Katrina. A kind of fancy cat. A Russian breed, perhaps. The kind of cat that decorates the couch just by sleeping on it.
So, for a while I thought I was my mother’s pet, and nothing but. When I got old enough to get the joke, I’d even purr for her, crawl to wherever she was sitting and rub against her legs.
But when I got even older, I’d glare at her in silence when she called me, and stand my ground. She’d hiss through her teeth, swat in my direction with her claws, and laugh. After a while, I couldn’t stand her. The sound of her crossing the living room in slippers made my head ache. And after I fell in love with Phil, just as I wanted less of her, she wanted more and more of me. I would sit across the kitchen table from her in the morning while she drank coffee and stared at me, and I thought, If I look up, this woman will swallow me whole.
But I was her pet for a long time, despite how quickly the time went by. I remember the sound of her voice, naming everything, when I still knew the names for nothing. Woof, she said, pointing at the neighbor’s dog scratching in our garden. It was big and blond, fur like polished straw, and wore a collar with tags that made silvery music under our kitchen window. It dug and dug. “Let it,” my mother said, even though it was ruining her petunias. “Let it figure out for itself there’s nothing there.”
Snake, she said as she held me up to the terrarium at the back of the pet store where the air smelled of piss and vinegar and wood chips. The snake was asleep, coiled and breathing, like my father’s garden hose in the garage. I remember there were smudged fingerprints on the glass—round, human designs, perfectly reproduced, lines spiraling into tiny, receding eyes—as if someone had wanted to leave some evidence behind.
Bird, she said as we were walking out of the pet store and one smashed itself against the bars of its cage in our direction—a pretty fist, white and screeching, something an old lady might wear on her hat to church on Sunday.
And I remember lying beside her in my parents’ bed one morning after my father had gone to work.
Frost had scribbled the windows, but I couldn’t read what it said. I couldn’t read at all yet. Whenever my mother opened a book, I had to trust that the story she told me was the one that was written there. And later, of course, when I could read, I’d find out that, more often than not, it wasn’t.
My mother had a sense of humor.
For instance, at the end of “Rumpelstiltskin,” the queen does not have to give her baby up to the manic, miniature man who demands it. The reason she’s wearing that beatific cookie-cutter smile is because she’s tricked him, learned his name, and gets to keep her firstborn, not because she’s just given the baby away.
She has black hair.
We are laughing.
It is a nest of feathered pillows here, both of us in white gowns. Silly, she pulls the bedsheet over our heads, and with the morning light streaming in, the sheet is a whole heaven above us, blinding me with brightness, and for a moment I’ve lost her in it. “Mama” I call, and the syllables rise from my mouth like small and cold balloons.
“Kat,” she says, “here’s Mama,” from somewhere beside me inside the nothing.
“Mama’s here,” she says, but I am lost in all that white, and have no idea where here is.