as you were (ii)

part two

Nov 11, 2024

I was a soft-skulled pup when they took off, but now I’m a man (or at the very least an approximation of a man)—a man with no interest in them or (quite frankly) anything happening west of the Mississippi. The second I turned eighteen, I fled Oregon for New York, and, you know, those hoppers don’t mess with us Easterners, so why bother thinking about them?

I recognized the number immediately; she could never give up that ancient landline—the one with the eggshell plastic coil cord I used to teethe on. My phone displays maybe: Oregon above her number in a drab yet sanguine font.

Mom and dad split when I was seven and I haven’t seen much of her since. It wasn’t the type of deal where she faded into the familial ether with each passing year; it was more like the sudden drawing of a curtain or an amputation. It was never clear why she embraced such severe aloofness or why such a clean amputation was warranted. It never really bothered me, though. I’ve always thought there was something kind, noble even, about her exile, some familiarity laced in her silence making it feel mutual.

I let her go to voicemail.

My desert landscape home screen returns briefly before she redials and floods the screen again with maybe: Oregon.

After they split, I moved a couple towns over with Dad, started at a fresh school, and, for the first time in my life, made some real friends. We were normal. We were happy on our own. A year into our new lives, dad re-entered the dating pool. Those were some weird, awkward years, but luckily, it didn’t take him too long to find Inez. Like father like son, I took to Inez immediately; she’s a beautiful soul encased in espresso skin with an artful port wine stain that leaks down into the cradle of her neck—a mother who never once asked me to call her “mom” and gave me two half-brothers to build furniture forts with.

Mom stayed in the house and never remarried. According to dad, she’s become a semi-agoraphobe. She leaves home once a month to stock up on food and topsoil, but other than that, she spends the whole of her existence in that yard, weeding its beds, harvesting its veggies, and knitting in its sun when she gets tired.

I let her go to voicemail and call dad.

Dad always invites her to Christmas at his place, but she rarely shows. She’ll always say absolutely! and ask (in great detail) what Inez will be cooking, and start brainstorming what sort of hors d’oeuvres and desserts and wines would pair best, but, in the end, it’s all talk. I can count on one hand the number of times she’s shown up over the past twenty-odd years.

When she does show, we’ll hug and exchange the expected how’s life? work? pleasantries while slurping egg nog; we’ll choke on cinnamon and say, “It’s been a while,” nodding in violent agreement, “Yes, yes, too long…too long,” as our eyes dart around the living room.

She gets along well with Inez and the young half-family; she’ll tousle their hair and ask them what Santa brought, but when we all gather around the table, she’ll clam up.

She’ll sit there, chewing her ham with High Victorian posture, ensuring her birdish head is trained on whomever’s holding court, offering the occasional my goodness! where applicable, mhms when warranted, and the rare laugh if required (when she does laugh, it isn’t really a laugh… it’s more of a nasal cleansing, a whatever puff of air—the mechanical purging of excess gas through a tired sphincter having nothing to do with the Christmas spirit or the warm soup feeling of proximal kin.)

Halfway through dinner, she’ll go pale and dead-eyed and perform her Irish goodbye—standing without word to nestle her plate in the sink. As the rest of us chew and gossip about politics or the neighbors, she’ll slither to her geriatric Honda and sputter back to her yard.

The phone trills.

I imagine him putting on his glasses and letting out a cartoonish sigh of exertion as he fishes the phone from his jeans.

He still has some pictures from those days displayed on shelves in his hallway. When I walk by them, they seem sharp—like they’ve sprouted teeth and sit there, waiting for me, jonesing to spring forth and bite chunks from my face.

There is one that I tolerate; on some days, I may even say I like it.

It’s the one of me, dad, and mom hanging out at Lake Wenatchee. I must be three—four at the most. We’re standing in Wenatchee’s shallows with the sun behind us, gavaging itself down the camera’s throat, turning us into fuzzy cut-outs (a fuzziness compounded by dad when he blew up the print at CVS.) There are dark mountains holding the water in an obsidian cereal bowl. I’m shirtless, wearing neon orange swimmies and robin egg trunks stamped with cartoon jellyfish. My little muffin pudge emerges lip-like over my waistband, pouting as I bend to splash in the water. Little wormy strands escape my tawny bowl cut, clinging to my forehead like eye veins—my eyes bulging with the unique raptness of toddlerhood. Dad’s rail thin and sunkissed, his too-short trunks match the loud hue of my swimmies. He has his arm around mom. His eyes are squinty, his mouth curled up in a goofy way (you could tell he was over annunciating the “ee” in “cheeeeeeeese” with his typical class clown pomp.) Mom looks young. Healthy. Different. Chubby. She’s wearing a black one-piece. Her strawberry hair is a wet, shapeless mess (it’s the only time I’ve seen it in anything other than that dusty Thatcher coif she condemns it to.) One half is dry, frizzed like peach fuzz, while the other is wet-dark, hanging in lazy cow tail dreads. On her face is the biggest shit-eater I’ve ever seen.

He answers.

My gut was right—after a thirty-year slumber, the hoppers are back, “…yup, the buggers are back, but we ain’t worried about ’em; it’s less mowing and leaf blowing for me, easier on the old back, haha…so what’s up, tiger?”

“Mom’s trying to call, what’s going on?”

He sighs.

A few days ago, he drove down to check in on her—to make sure she had enough non-perishables and clean water to weather the invasion.

“I ain’t exaggerating when I tell you she’s lost her damned mind,” he says. “She’s gone all eggy and shit.”

When she answered the door, she was hysterical, dirt wedged deep under her nails, crying and fumbling for his belt buckle, screaming, “DO IT AGAIN!” “GIVE ME A BABY!” over and over. Dad peeked over her shoulders to see frozen, pink cubes of what smelled like placenta—my placenta (she must have snuck it into the freezer after the night in the bathtub)—thawing next to her NutriBullet, hot boxing the house with tricennial birth musk.

“I nearly hurled in the bushes,” he says, laughing a bit before coughing in my ear. “I threw up my hands and hightailed it after that, left the box of cans and batteries and all that shit on her porch and took off…I don’t have time for her crazy anymore…anyway, we’re all set out here, tiger, no need to worry.”

Silence returns after we hang up. The freezer hums as it rustles up some fresh cubes and someone’s dog barks.

My thumb hovers over the phone like deli meat, blindly swiping through screens to find her number, then pausing, opening random apps and spam emails, hoping to distract.

I take control. I wrestle my clammy thumb above the maybe: Oregon leading to the eggshell phone that helped my teeth come in.

I click and bring the phone to my ear in a quick salute, nearly taking my eye out.

The phone trills.

I think about how I’ll greet her. She hasn’t been “mom” for twenty years. On the rare Christmas she shows up, I always prefix our ritual cheek-pecking with “Hello, Diane.”

This feels natural for both of us…I think. It’s not that adolescent thumbing-the-nose-at-the-parent-by-using-their-first-name type of deal. Certainly not. It just kinda happened; “mom,” with time, simply evaporated.

Dr. Horn agrees; apparently, something similar happened to her. After she defended her dissertation and earned her PhD, all her mail was addressed to Dr. Horn often with the “Dr.” stylized as DR. for added ompf.

Years passed, and time weaseled between the hooray of yesterday and the ho-hum of now, and her title simply slipped people’s minds. Sure, to her patients, she’s Dr. Horn, but to everyone else, she’s just “Edith” or “Mrs. Horn,” and to her kids, “mom.”

The “Dr.” is still there, of course, but it’s latent—no longer perched on tongue tips. These things have nothing to do with malice, disrepute, or punishment for something someone did or said; the title was not wrested from her out of spite— some things go extinct simply because their novelty wore off.

The connection clicks.

There’s frantic breathing and rustling— the rustling of papers or the thumping of a restless leg in nylon.

“Diane?”

I hear her sniffle.

“Diane?”

The rustling increases, then stops. There’s the crunchy plosives of hands fumbling with the landline receiver.

“Diane, it’s Brand—”

“DID YOU GET ANYONE PREGNANT?” She sounds rushed, her voice slurring and drunk-slow (despite, according to Dad, being sober for the better part of a decade.)

I’m not sure what to do with this question. Does she really not think about me, her only son? Her only child? Has she forgotten me? Forgotten how unlikely it is for me to impregnate someone?

There’s a wet plop, something hard dropped into standing liquid.

“No, Diane, you know I’m—”

“DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO’S PREGNANT?”

She’s screaming now. I pull the phone from my ear until she falls silent. I bring it back in time to catch another plop.

“Are you o—”

“ANYONE?!”

She goes silent again, sniffling loudly and wiping snot on her wrist, mumbling under her breath.

“Diane…are—are you okay?”

“WHAT?”

I go to repeat, but she starts up a blender, and I find myself shouting:

“ARE YOU O-”

She cuts in, also shouting over the blur: “CAN YOU GET ANYONE PREGNANT?”

Dad was right; she’s gone nuts, hysterical to the point of incomprehension. But she doesn’t need to be comprehensible; I know what she’s going to ask. I know she’s convinced her pregnancy—me—was what kept them at bay thirty years ago, and because I did it once, my pores could surely muster the meiotic stench one more time; it would come back easy—like riding a bike. I know, right now, her mind’s eye is watching toddler-me patrolling her yard, her personal St. Patrick, my face meat jiggling in the deep purr of wings, as my stench forces them to behave behind property lines, emplores them to engorge elsewhere and leave her babies green.

The blender powers down, revealing guttural sobbing. She sounds like she’d suffered a gut punch; she’s on the ground at my feet, staring up, gulping air like a dumb carp. I think of Lake Wenatchee and the little trout swirling around my feet in the shallows.

My hands squeeze the phone hard; I’m expecting to hear it snap—hoping it will snap.

She stops sobbing and takes a slurp of something frothy. I hear it slither down her throat. She spews out the liquid and wretches deep before panting loudly and fumbling for the receiver.

“I need you to come home.”

Her sudden calmness is disarming. I stay quiet.

“...can you come home?”

I can’t feel my hand.

There’s the fricative fire plough hiss of her trembling hand rubbing the receiver against her hair.

“just—”

She coughs and hacks up a loogie.

“just—just for a few days, that’s all; I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t crucial, absolutely important; when have I really asked for anything? Anything at all? It would just be a few days...only a fe—”

“Okay.”

The words escape my lips, unfolding like a stranger in the room. I feel like I’ve taken a gargantuan shit; the room reeks, but there’s a relieving emptiness in my gut.

I take a deep breath and close my eyes.

I didn’t mean to say it; it was just a reflex. But now that the utterance exists in the world, my shoulders drop, my knuckles relax, I can breathe again…

I take control of my lips and say it again, “Okay, mom.”

continue…