And I remember how, when Phil and I had been dating for only a few months, my mother came downstairs one night while we were making out on the couch.
Back then, our bodies were like two plants growing everywhere at once, getting closer and closer, twining and choking and groping—writhing in the night, unfurling enormous leaves in the dark, thorns and flowers and birds’ nests—swiftly, but in slow motion. I suppose she could smell us from her bed above us, the panting and rustling, the sound of pores expanding, oozing hormones, drooling into each other’s hair.
When we noticed she was standing on the stairs, looking down on us, we panicked, and sat up fast. I pulled my sweater back down around me. Phil zipped up his pants. But my lips were engorged, obscene, a sexual organ.
“Mom,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “C’est moi.”
She wasn’t wearing a robe, just a nightgown, and she came downstairs slowly and stood before us. The only light that was on was behind her, and her body was outlined—a solid, dark silhouette of hips and breasts—under the thin silk. I noticed Phil look up, then look away, too fast.
“Listen,” she said. “Do what you have to do down here, kids, but don’t spot my couch, okay?”
I looked down.
Phil flinched.
Maybe, back in bed above us, she lay awake and listened to the dark.
The whole house was breathing hard. The furnace, snoring dust. That freezer in the basement—like agitation, frozen stiff. Water slowly rising in the toilet tank. The humming of the fuse box. The tight, silent whine of the telephone line stretching into the night.
My father slept restlessly beside her, and she could hear his toes rustle under the covers.
She hated those toes.
Then, the darkness under her seemed to expand:
She could tell we were at it again. Clawing, clutching—
Maybe she remembered seeing Phil that first time, the day she went to introduce herself to his mother. How he’d descended the stairs shirtless, just a feather ridge of hair along his breastbone. Naturally muscled. The muscles of a boy, not a bodybuilder. Maybe she saw herself wearing a long-lost and forgotten dress—gauzy, embroidered with pale glue pearls. Now where did I wear that? she thought, and then it all came back: the Kleenex and lotion in her purse, the sentimental music, some boy’s big hands moving over her like the flu. She had been sick with kisses.
And the darkness below her seemed to rise like dough—flour and yeast and water mixed up with night.
We were down there in that darkness, that darkness that might rise and rise, and push everything out of its way as it rose, as it pushed its way out of the living room, swelling up the stairs. It might smother her in her sleep with its sprawling, domestic flesh. Maybe she was thinking about that, and couldn’t possibly sleep with us below her, doing that.
When we heard her descending the stairs again, we pulled our clothes together, and Phil fled.
“Go to bed,” she hissed at me between her teeth as I passed her on the stairs.
“It’s why she left,” I say to Dr. Phaler just as my time runs out.
“I BOUGHT A BIRD,” MY MOTHER TOLD MY FATHER WHEN she got home one Saturday from the mall. “It’s in the car.”
“What?” he asked, then asked again, “What?”
“I said,” she said, pronouncing each world carefully, “I bought a bird.”
Phil and I came down the stairs then. Perhaps we looked tousled, mutually pawed. At that point, my father was still naive, and he let us stay up there all day with the door closed. He must have thought we were playing an intensive game of chess, one that left us sweaty and short of breath.
“Go get it for me, would you?” my mother said to Phil, who was used to taking orders from women. His blind mother issued them from her armchair all day, and that was why he spent so much time at our house—nosing through our kitchen for cheese and cold meat.
And every night, he stayed for dinner, and liked to eat—complimenting my mother’s cooking with every bite he took, mmm-ing and nodding. She liked that, and started making dishes she’d never made for my father and me—mignon Alfonse, beef medallions l’orange, chicken in wine, letting the chicken stew a long time in a whole bottle of burgundy until the soaked meat shed like wet feathers from the bones—slippery, tinged with purple—and the kitchen smelled like a shelter for drunks, humid with booze, warm and debauched.
Phil’s mother was a terrible cook—couldn’t measure, couldn’t see the color or the texture of the food she made, so that, even with Phil’s help in the kitchen, her tuna casserole might turn out as green and soupy as a meal made of swamp, her chicken breasts burnt black in a pan—and Phil ate everything my mother made as if he’d never eaten.
My father, of course, couldn’t tell Hamburger Helper from mignon Alfonse, and I had gotten so used to dieting, back when I was fat, that what I saw when I looked at a plate of food was a graph of calories, a calculation of ounces and grams, how many laps around the neighborhood such a meal would cost.
We were never the eaters she wanted us to be. Too stupid, too selfish, or too afraid. So my mother finally had in Phil the audience she’d always wanted. At these last suppers, which were clearly prepared in Phil’s honor, my father would look down at his plate, confused, fork poised over an inebriated wing, as if he’d just been deported to a foreign country. But Phil would shovel it in, leaning over intently, as if he were washing his face in my mother’s meal.
Once, my mother told me to invite Phil’s mother over, too. But when I did, Mrs. Hillman just shook her head and made the comers of her mouth into little, irritable pyramids. “No,” she said, “I don’t like your mother.”
“The bird’s in a cage in the backseat,” my mother said to Phil. “Be careful carrying it in.”
Phil shrugged and said, “Sure.”
He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. His hair was bright, and little slivers of blond shimmered on his chin and upper lip. He hadn’t shaved for a day or two.
“What kind of bird?” I asked.
She said, “You’ll see.”
The bird was a canary. Simple and white. It had quivered in my mother’s palm at the pet store in the mall like a mouse, like a milkweed pod splitting with silk, or a feathered change purse full of blood and hollow bones. Its eyes were black beads, and they darted around the pet store while that bird sat scratch-scratching its wire feet in my mother’s hand, scanning the place for cats, or planning its escape, thinking, Now’s my big chance.
But it couldn’t fly away. The pet store girl had shown my mother how to hold it. “Here,” she said, “like this,” placing my mother’s palm over its wings, “so you can’t cut off his breath.”
The girl was young, wearing a tight dress. Her hair was black, and she had a little, clipped nose.
My mother held the bird the way the pet store girl had shown her, and she could feel its heart against her lifeline, quivering like a little finger in its sleek chest. She popped it back into the cage and said to the pet store girl, “I’ll take it.”
That canary snapped its head mechanically, like a wind-up toy, taking this new information in.
“And a cage?” the girl asked. “Do you have a cage?”
“No. I need a cage, and food, a bird-care book, all that.”
My mother took her credit card out of her purse, and the girl started pulling things off the shelves for her. Rape seed. Millet. Bath dish. Perching stick. It made my mother happy. She gave the girl her credit card with a smile as she rang up the purchases. And as the bird chirped nervously near the cash register in its cage, my mother wandered into the back of the store and watched an aquarium full of small silver fish dart in and out of the ceramic mouth of a shark. She’d let the girl pick out the cage, and it was the most expensive one—the size and shape of a hatbox, a high one, a hatbox made for a hat with feathers and fruit and lilacs on top.