Jessica Kimmel

“HELLO MY DARLIN, HELLO MY BABY, HELLO MY RAGTIME GIRL”

    I have learnt many things since living on my own. Don’t answer the phone if it rings till the answer machine picks up, and then rings back immediately a second and third time. Don’t be fooled—this is not your boyfriend, or your ex-boyfriend. It is your mother. Or at least my mother (be wary, she may get ahold of your number too.) She can’t help it. She tries not to, but the kids are not home from school yet. She is waiting for something to happen (like her life for example, but don’t point that out) and there it is, on the refrigerator door, conveniently, she thinks (even though she was the one that put it there), the number. So she calls, of course she calls! A number of times.
    Now don’t get me wrong, I appreciate these calls, really I do. In fact there was a time when I couldn’t live without her calls. Say think back to my first day in my college room, with my mother all the way over in another house, another little town, and me with my roommate and her weird accent and her two story-fridge on my side of the dorm room. I loved it when my mother called. Telling me she loved me, she understood me, she knew what a garage and a fridge were, she knew what loo and lift meant. She’d tell me it’s ok, it’s going to get better, things will change (they didn’t change, I did) and most importantly that she’s proud of me. Ahh, what lovely words.
    Recently things haven’t been so cheery; things have gone a little more like this:
    “Hi it’s me.”
    Silence (I know it’s her. What other twit calls and says that).
    “Hello?”
    “Hi mum.”
    “How are you?”
    Again this is not what it seems, it is not a question, this is an opener, she has taken those, ‘Tools for Public Speaking’ classes she gave me for Christmas last year.
    I turn on TV, and settle in for the long haul. I know she has made to-do lists from here to Africa of things she plans to conquer today, but somehow calling me is so much more rewarding. It feels familiar, and right. When I was young she’d come home from dinner parties where she hadn’t had a word to stay, stumble up the stairs fighting the white wine off, crack my door and sit beside my bed, stroking my hair. She needs to be a good mother, and more importantly she needs us to be around, we are her life’s work, her life’s frustration and her sticky plaster to put over any other failures she might have committed.
    “What are you doing?” She chirps, always up, always perky. She is Maria from The Sound of Music.
    I’m on the phone, but feel to point it out would be a little abrasive, so say:
    “Nothing much.”
    “Oh come on, you must have been doing something.”
    I avoid at all costs discussing my life; she will address it later anyway from a number of angles so why start now. Instead I say:
    “What have you been doing?”
    “Well you know how I told you this morning we were going to pick Granny up from the hospital?”
    Yes, she does live 100,000 miles away. Yet, she finds important reasons to call anyhow, a couple of times a day.
    “Well, we did.”
    “How did that go?” I answer. I have learnt to master the technique of sounding interested while channel surfing.
    ‘Well you know Gran’s ok, it’s just that well, she’s got it…. you know…. I have to be honest with you sweetheart (She doesn’t need prompting anymore, so I go to the bathroom, take a magazine and sit down on the toilet.) She’s got it.”
    “What?”
    “She’s got…thingy.” She begins to sound exasperated; I can hear her barking out directions to my stepfather in the background telling him to change his shirt. He’s colorblind, and makes the same mistake every day of walking past her before leaving the house.
    “Mum, what are you trying to say?”
    “She’s got the thing, you know. The thing, the thing! That thing you get when you’re sick, come on think!”
    “I don’t know mum,” I squeak.
    “Look, it’s very difficult to try and do everything.”
She wrestles around with the phone and my stepfather’s tie. She has word association problems. This is not her fault. This is my fault, really, what an idiot for not knowing what a thingy is. With all the huffing and puffing going on in the background (she’s trying to pack up Granny’s house as we speak) what else is there to say but:
    “Sure.”
    “Anyway, come on, you know. God I can’t do it, I can’t do it for everyone.” More rustling, I pour myself a drink, and wait for her to continue. “Alex would you like Granny’s china if she dies?” Then a brainwave hits. “That’s it! Cancer! She’s got cancer, thank god for that.” She bursts it out and then takes a deep breath.
    I walk over to the picture of Granny, Mum, and me at the fat camp, my 21st birthday present. It was supposed to be a spa, a real treat but it turned out to be a boot camp for big-bottomed people. I’m not so sure that part was a mistake. In the picture my squishy grandmother and I are sitting still looking up at my mother, red faced, with windswept hair and a stringy body she is smiling like a banshee. We walked 10 miles that day straight up the hill. Later, before bed, we had a good laugh. She told us that the only thing that kept her going was staring at my behind, willing it to get smaller with every step.
    “Alex? Darling? Are you OK, because I’m ok and like I said to Granny, we’re going to do everything we can to help her, I’ve checked out all the doctors and I’ve made a list of the best places. Look, she’s old you know, it was going to happen sometime. It means we can take that holiday at the end of the year now, if she, well you know, if she passes away. “
    “Mum.” I scold.
    “If she’s alive she can come too.”
    “That’s not very nice.”
    “What, I’m just being realistic.”
    “Well it’s a bit harsh isn’t it?”
    “I’m just being realistic.”
    It’s true annoyingly, she is very realistic, she is good at that. The last holiday we took was to Hawaii, Mum whipped Granny off to be tested as she wasn’t being quick enough on the up take during their daily telephone calls. My grandmother was diagnosed with dementia, and so our trip to Hawaii was supposed to be the last holiday before granny drifted into senile oblivion.
    We weren’t at the fat camp this time, but my mother set about establishing a series of tests of her own. Grilling Granny on the family lineage over slices of pineapple at breakfast. Whipping away the Reader’s Digest and handing her Time magazine at the pool. Marching her over to the life-size chest board as I ordered another piña colada, curled up my toes, and hoped I wouldn’t be enlisted as well. My mother had read somewhere (her own Reader’s Digest perhaps?) that involving one’s mind in games such as chess helped quench the decay. It was “pop up here” and “jump up there.” Granny had never had such an exhausting holiday. Every day my mother would drag us down to the ocean, with my grandmother digging in her heels at the water’s edge. My mother, despite her slipped disc, would lift Granny and wade into the water.
    “Just a little bit further Gran.”
    She’d swim up to me, with mascara running in little rivers down her cheeks, her lipstick still intact. She’d hold onto me panting desperately in my ear.
    “Don’t let me get like that, got to keep going, keep active… Come on Gran! A bit more! It’s yoga Alex, we’ve got to do it when we get back, I’ll not be like her.”
    We had fun too, long dinners where, despite the daily exercise, we were allowed all the butter and cream we wanted. After all, this could be her last crème brûlée. We toasted Granny at every turn and took far too many pictures. At the table my mother would flip from talking about her flailing relationship with my stepfather to trying to include Granny in the conversation, and so asked about her cats, and then back to the co-dependency problems. She charmed every maitre d’ in all three hotel restaurants. We were seated at the best tables and sent bottles of champagne from admiring men (when my mother puts on a show, in this case supposedly for Granny’s last holiday, everyone gets a whiff of it). It’s as if my mother is 19 again, an exchange student in Louisiana. She’s pretty, she’s different, she’s special, she loves it.She’s telling everyone about my grandmother, about me, she’s talking and no one’s listening not even whoever she’s roped in, we’re all just swimming in the yellowy glow, the glitz and glory of it all.
    We all had our toenails painted a shade of racy red; I have a picture on my mantel, three generations of toes pointing together in unison. What the picture doesn’t tell is about my mother chanting in the background, mai tai in hand,
    “Come on girls, what fun!”
    I hold the picture, and listen to my mother go on about the cancer, of course she knows more than anyone, the doctors even.
    “She’s been smoking a pack a day for the last 60 years, it was bound to happen someday.”
    Silence, we both care for Gran after all, then I say:
    “But I thought she was healthy, I mean, not healthy but I thought her lungs were at least kinda clear. That’s what the doctor said the first time, that smoking hadn’t affected her and that it would be a…”
    “A shock for her to stop…. Yes that’s what we all thought, but I guess we were wrong, you know you just can’t do those things and get away with it.”
Silence, this must mean something.
    “Alex, huh?”
    “What?”
    “Have you stopped smoking?”
    What to do! What to do! She’s not here after all, she can’t do the death-look and nod her head that way which means: “I will know if you are lying to me.” But on the other hand she might still know somehow. The guilt. The terror.
    “Huh?”
    “How’s the smoking going”
    “OK.”
    I exhale with my hand over the phone.
    “OK good or OK bad. How many have you had today?”
    Silence. What to say! What to say!
    “I’m kind of finding it hard to... Ah quit.” Pause. “I had about 20. Give or take.”
    “You know you’ve just got to change it, change your mind—” I go back to the living room, switch on the TV.  I start watching re-runs of anything.     “—because if someone in your family has had lung cancer your chances of getting it leap up to about… I’m not sure, but a hell of a lot. You know who told me that—” I switch to Oprah, she is visiting homes of the rich and famous. “—your sister Francie. It’s just irresponsible, you can’t go on doing this with your life, and I will not be there to pick up the pieces.  Francie’s stopped and I’ve stopped, Sarah has too, we all just wake up every morning and say to ourselves I am not a smoker today!”
    I try to picture my aunt, with her mortgage payments, and her three screaming children, and her wise psychologist’s brain, waking every morning to chirp ‘I am not a smoker today!’
    “I think I am going to get a patch, or something.”
    “I’ll pay for it. I will. Send the bill to me, those things are important. Send it to your father.”
    “It’s OK I can pay for it.”
    I hear barking in the background, she is feeding our two fat gorgeous dogs, their new diet doggie food. Nobody can escape her clutches, and as far as she’s concerned we are all in need of a good overhaul.
    The dogs are fed, but we are on the phone as well, remembering that this does cost money, she hurries back.
    “I’m back, hi, Al?”
    She didn’t really go anywhere, but that’s OK because I did, I went to the fridge and made myself a sandwich and now I’m sitting on the couch about to eat it.
    “Yeah, I’m here.”
    “Are you alright?”
    “Yeah, I’m fine.”
    ‘You sound sort of distant.”
    “No, I’m just a bit tired.”
    Oprah is taking me through Paulina Poriskova’s wardrobe.
    “Mum Paulina Porsikovia has a 500-foot wardrobe.”
    “Who?”
    “Paulina Poroskovia, the model.”
    “That’s ridiculous, that’s bananas. What a waste. I mean I have a lot of clothes but I sell them, don’t I?”
    “Oh yeah Mum, by the way, Dad was wondering what happens to all that stuff of ours you take off to the consignment shop.”
    “Why?”
    “Well I guess he feels like he pays for the majority of our stuff and...” I try to begin.
    “I pay for a good amount too, God he’s just made of the stuff. Besides he never gave me that swimming pool.”
    “OK I dunno talk to him about it, I’m sure it’s no big deal.”
    “He did though, you know, you know that, don’t you.”
    “What?”
    “He promised me the Christmas before he left me for her, that he’d buy me a swimming pool. I still have the Christmas card he wrote it in.”
    “I’m sure you do. You never throw anything away.”
    “Alex …. Stop it, stop chewing in my ear!”
    Silence. My mouth is full.
    “Are you chewing, what are you chewing?”
    “I’m sorry, I’m hafffing dinna.”
    “Oh, what are you having?”
    “Just some stuff in the fridge.”
    “How’s the diet going?”
    “Fine.” I quickly reply.
    I still have a couple of months before I see her next. After the fat camp I went back to college, didn’t make any new friends and spent a lot of time at the cafeteria. I was painfully aware of being alone, of not knowing anyone, of having nothing in common with the boy who asked what I was doing that weekend. I pretended I had friends and things to do. Truthfully, I spent weekends walking down to the little movie theatre and sitting in the back row guzzling foreign American candies. Hot Tamales and Reese’s Pieces were my new best friends. Eventually things did change, I made friends, joined the theatre group, went to the local joint The Spinning Wheel and drank cheap beer and sang “Brown Eyed Girl” at the top of my lungs with my new pretty friend.
    It was too late though, those first few months and the cheese toasted sandwiches consumed between the sheets, hurriedly before my roommate got home, had done their damage. Actually I didn’t notice just how much of an effect they’d had on my hips until I arrived home. One look at my mother’s face at the airport, flowers in hand, practically wilting as I came closer, and she saw all her hard work (and images of my shrinking derrière) disappear. She sobbed at the top of the driveway, all that money, all that time, look how skinny she had become trying to make me thin.
All my Christmas presents that particular year had to go back to the stores and be exchanged for larger ones in more flattering styles. It was amazing, opening those gifts, star-spangled bikinis, mini skirts, low-cut wrap tops. Apparently skinny girls get to dress like the cheap tarts she’d always warned me about. The most amazing part was her belief in me, what faith she’d had, what hopes for a whole new Alex. Her perseverance was to be admired, three years after that fateful Christmas and she was still going strong.
    “Did you get that article I sent you?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Did you see how Lady Di just used to eat fish and vegetables and that was it?”
    “Yup, she was also bulimic.”
    “It’s all about wheat. Just cut it out, wheat’s the enemy. Just learn that, say it to yourself. When people offer you some just say, no thanks I’m allergic to wheat.”
    “Sure.”
    “It must be about 11 o’clock now. That’s very late to be having dinner, your food won’t get to digest.”
    “OK Mum. God! Would you just leave it alone.”
    “I’m just trying to help. I don’t care what you look like, I’m doing it for you, remember how depressed you were when Francie lost all that weight and you couldn’t fit into your dress. You wouldn’t stand in any of our family Christmas photos, you ruined it, you ruined Christmas.”
    “Alright! I know! It’s late, Mum, I have to go to bed.”
    “OK sweetheart, call me soon.”
    “OK”
    “When? “
    “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
    “Promise?”
    “Yup.”
    “Night.”
    “Goodnight.”
    I put the phone down, and sit and think of my grandmother in her little bed in the country hospital, with the doctors that are more suited to birthing sheep than looking after sick old ladies, and smile. Granny wouldn’t have it any other way. My mother will have made the trip at least ten times, and called a dozen more to convince her to drive up to the city to be tested up there. She will eventually, but she is holding out for now. Everyone holds out for a little bit with Mum. You have to if you want to have any self-respect. That’s something she finds both confusing and frustrating. After all she only wants to help. She cares. She wants to help and fix you, she does, because she never had that in her life. Her colored pencils were always missing from their packet, and her socks were always mismatched when she was a little girl. A beautiful little girl. (It is true, I have seen the pictures. A wispy wee girl with fields of wheat hair and a confused sunny look.)
    She will drive across town to pick up your homework you forgot. She will bring your lunch to school and secretly leave it in your bag in the locker room. She will run the piggyback race with you at sports day, in the father-daughter division because your father can’t make it, and win, regardless of her slipped disc. She will bring the cleaning lady and the next-door neighbor to the speech competition because your father can’t make that either. She will bring the dogs. She will call the principle’s assistant and order front-row seats for every night of the play you’re in. You don’t dare look at her, although she’s made you memorize her seat number, because she’s sitting right there mouthing the words clinging to the front of her seat, her eyes shining. She is trying to make it perfect, to make up for all the failures in the world. To make up for every past Christmas.
    She has read all the books, she knows it can be done. She has gleaned the success stories. Steven Covey is her idol, Tennessee Williams’ Amanda Wingfield is her predecessor. I know she’s read all the books, because I get them all for Christmas, underlined and highlighted. I am the only working girl I know to receive care packages, with Pam nonfat cooking spray (because of course I haven’t learnt how to navigate my way around the supermarket), and fitness and time-management articles. Highlighted.
She cares, she does. And she’ll lie with you and stroke your hair when you come home from school, and nobody calls you. She tells you you’re brilliant when you can’t get a job. And she’ll say all the things you really wanted her to, even on the phone, when you cry for the first time about your life and what you’ll do with it.
    We owe it all to her, the speech my mother wrote that made my sister win the competition that catapulted her to instant stardom and out of her shell. My brother’s science project and the scar with the three-inch stitches that she selflessly bears. A mere flesh wound inflicted at 4:30 am while finishing the display. My mother has been through high school three times. She has designed and purchased most of my Aunt’s new wardrobe when her husband died and she needed to make a new impression. She has taught us all to accessorize. She has given us gifts that we never wanted and now could never live without. She has continually, year after year, cleaned out the Filofax that is supposed to change my life, replacing last year’s unused calendar with a present one. She is forever hopeful. She has made our lives so wonderful. Like a carnival with all the rides that make you sick and the lights that are ugly and garish, but the undercurrent of joy so sweet and strange you don’t ever want to leave.
    She just can’t help checking when you’re away, that’s all. It’s just when you’re away, that she can’t help trying to reel you back in. It is so very hard for her, and once she told me she found herself crying in the shower for no apparent reason, she realized she was lonely. She had nothing to do.
I turn out the light. And watch the sky turn a pinky black, like it does only in America, I wish that she would slow down to see it. I remember that she is a million miles away, in a different land, under a different sky. It is funny when she had seemed so close just a moment ago.
    Then she calls.
    “Hi Al, it’s me”
    “Hi mum”
    “Are you in bed?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m sorry I was so bossy before. I’m just tired.”
    “I know.”
    “And I’m concerned about you.”
    “I know.”
    “I know I annoy you,” she says.
    This must be the mother’s intuition she’s always telling me about.
    “That’s OK mum.”
    “Have you been to see your therapist?”
    “Not lately.”
    “Why, Alex? I pay good money for that, you should do these things I set up for you… I’m sure you talk about me.”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Oh.”
    She pauses, then she says:
    “Well, she must think I’m crazy. I am a bit crazy.”
She likes to be crazy, it makes her endearing, or at least interesting. Too many glasses of wine at last New Year’s dinner and she’s dancing on the table, to the amazement of myself and the horror of my brother, sister. She’s a card, a grand old dame, and she’ll sing all the way home from the party, leaning out the window, barking through the loud speaker her sister gave her as a joke for her birthday.
    “YOO HOO EVERYONE, HAPPY NEW YEAR’S.” And then louder, although my stepfather is trying to pull her inside.” YOO HOO YOU OLD FARTS HAPPY NEW YEAR!!”
    She’d plopped back into her seat, flicked down the mirror partly to check her lipstick but mostly to see our faces in the back seat. Fabulous right?     She’s wondering if we agree, I’m right aren’t I, hmmm, I’m fab?

    Right now, it’s clear she’s not feeling fabulous.
    “Mum? Are you alright?” No answer, finally someone asked. “Are you alright Mum?”
    All I hear is a small sob.
    “I’m OK I guess.”
    “Oh Mum, it’s alright, it’s OK.” More sobbing, it’s true not many people check on her. “I love you.”
    “Yes, that’s just what I was calling to say.”
    “I know.”
    “Because I didn’t get to before, and what if you got run over by a bus or something. Be careful OK don’t take the subway or anything, catch a cab, your father can pay for it. He should pay for those things. I love you, go to sleep now, goodnight.”
    “Good night.”
    I turn out the light and think about the sun going down on her side of the world, as it wakes up on mine. Think about my mother, racing around town in her station wagon, picking up the kids, picking up the dinner, picking up everything. Cleaning everyone’s lunchboxes out. She will find herself in the empty wrapper, once filled with the sandwich she made and the kids enjoyed. Think about my mother, holding my grandmother’s hand in the hospital waiting room, as she whispers to her daughter, “I couldn’t do this without you.”
    I know that she will be singing somewhere. I know that she is a Saint. I know she’s giving the finger with a neatly-manicured hand to anyone in her way. I know she probably can’t work out how to turn off the car radio.

* * * * *

Biography

Jessica Kimmel, was raised in New Zealand. She lived in the United States for 10 years, primarily New York and Virginia. The former where she attended Sarah Lawrence College for her Bachelor's in theatre and writing. She now resides in London with her young family.

jbkimmel@gmail.com