Mother with baby at her breast, and child in landscape by Paula Modersohn-Becker
Betty’s looking for rolling papers in her dead son’s desk, when she discovers his last story. The one he wrote before she killed him. It’s about mothers and sons, abandoning each other. She wonders why Nicky wrote this. The others too. She wonders if they’re fictitious, or if there’s a shadow of truth hidden in the dells of worlds and characters.
Betty can’t blame Nicky. She raised him on her own, after all. She taught him to fight for what he wanted, taught him that morality wore many faces. It wasn’t ample.
Nick wanted love.
Surely he’d known love was a given. She was never fluent, talking about love. It required giving up too much. She didn’t know how. Every time Nick said, “I love you, Mama”, she’d laugh. Tell him she needed to grade papers. Ignore it and turn up her Tchaikovsky, as though love would return to the shadows.
She’d taken Nick drinking on his twenty-first birthday, wanting to expose him to the people he wanted to write about. Bitter divorcees. Lonely singles. She’d dared him to play chicken with a train, five beers later. Betty recalls the pleading look in his eye, as though pleasing her was the most important thing. The way his face was flushed with pleasure and drink, as the train approached, light beaming like a searchlight into her soul.
Betty reads further. This mother and son make peace, go to a party. They set old photographs and papers on fire. She weeps, leaning over his oak desk. This blue-walled room still wears a hint of annoying cheer. She thinks of Nick’s life, the possibilities. She places him, in her mind, as a big-name writer.
Drifting between ideas and beers, in hidden apartments.
She opens a drawer. No rolling papers.
Betty needs a joint. She’s smoked since Nick died. It’s the only way to stare into an audience of tenth-graders, with their two-parent families, full of starched smiles and barbeques. Smoking lifts her into this chalkboard of consciousness, a sort of nothingness. When she’s high, she’s a ghost, drifting outside the world.
She sees Nick again. He’s eight, stealing downstairs, to watch her grade. She felt irritated and honored by the idea that grading papers held some deep mystery about her.
Betty closes the other desk drawer. She crumples the story, smiling. She rolls it methodically, into a joint. She lights it, blows a cloud. Smoke mingles with the lavender shadows and the rising moon, a smiling silver disc.
“I love you,” she whispers.
|