Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (37 page)

It occurred to me that I’d never paid Victoria for the lessons I’d been to; I wondered if I should call her. I could drop off an envelope, but that didn’t seem appropriate. Would I ever ever ever see her again?

I set and reset the table. I ironed the tablecloth and napkins. I made napkin rings out of old covers of
Food & Wine.
I pretty much taught myself origami by noon. I put white votives on beds of kosher salt in Mason jars and tied sprigs of rosemary to the outsides with cooking twine. I wrote our names—mine and my mother’s—on little cards that I’d cut into the shape of fish but that looked more like balloons than fish because I’d forgotten the fins. I redid them, though, until they couldn’t be anything other than fish.

My mother was walking around the house, not grumpy but unsure of what to do with herself. She kept peering over my shoulder and then walking away like she didn’t really care. She was barefoot, and the floor didn’t creak beneath her. If she’d asked, I would have told her that she couldn’t help. But she didn’t ask. She just kept shrugging and saying, “Interesting.” She wanted to see what I was capable of too.

When she saw the votives, she picked them up, turned them around, and gave a smirk. “Thank you,” I said and she laughed. It was the best when she knew how tough she could be.

Finally, she plopped down on the couch and stared at me.

“Yes?” I said, not being unpolite.

“What?” she said. “I’m not allowed to watch my daughter being lovely?”

I looked up. “Me?” I said, choking on my own spit. This was too much.

“You know what I love about you?” she said. I didn’t, but she wasn’t waiting for an answer. She reached above her head in a lion stretch and yawned. She rubbed her eyes and crossed her lady feet.

I was waiting.

“You’re a fighter,” she said. “My little fighter.”

I’d always wanted to believe I was strong.
More,
I thought.
Tell me more.

“So determined to make me happy,” she said.

I looked right at her, wondering if maybe she was joking. She was examining her toes: point and flex and point and so on. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been disappointed. Something collapsed inside of me now like a flower tricked by the light.

“That’s what I fight for?” I asked. “Is that what you mean?”

She closed her eyes. She made her hands into fists.

“Impossible,” she said. “I can’t say a single nice thing.”

She went into Lou’s room and closed the door.

“Thank you,” I whispered, relieved. For a moment, with the door closed, it was just that: a closed door. It wasn’t as if she’d reinvented this room by going into another. It wasn’t as if she’d abandoned me again, like always, with yet another chunk of the universe to make sense of in her wake.

I was a fighter, I thought. But not in the way she meant.

I butterflied four English cucumbers before I even touched the fish, just to get the hang of it, like I had with Victoria. Smooth, smooth. It had to be smooth. I was nervous, not at all confident in myself, though I’d read about it, practiced, and watched a video clip that made the whole thing look like a cinch. I got out the fish.

One.

Two.

Three.

“Lorca!” my mother shouted, and the knife skidded straight into my hand. She came out of nowhere. The door had been closed. She’d been quiet in Lou’s room. I dropped the knife. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It hurt. It hurt.

“Ouch,” I said. The blood sprang like a sudden rose bloom in my palm. If I held it open, it made the most perfect circle you’ve ever seen.

“Lorca!” she screamed. “Don’t do that.”

“What?” I said. I hadn’t
done
it. She had. She’d scared me, appearing out of nowhere like she did. The blood was coming faster now, and I leaned against the counter. My ears rang like tin bells.

“I didn’t,” I said, but my voice was weak. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

She came over to me.

“You did,” she said. “I just saw you. I can’t believe you.”

She opened the drawer, took out a dishtowel, and passed it to me. I wrapped it around my hand as tightly as I could. The red burst through instantly. I watched her, waited for something motherly, neighborly even. I hadn’t done it on purpose. I hadn’t.

“Yuck,” she said. “But I’ve seen worse.”

She tossed the knife into the sink. Blood and skin stuck to the tip like wings. She took another knife from the block and finished butterflying the fish in one perfect stroke.

“You’ll be fine in a minute,” she said. And then, her hands gliding as if she were playing the violin: “Like this. You do it in a single clean move or you don’t do it at all. Don’t butcher the thing.”

“What if I won’t be fine?” I asked her, meaning it. “What if I won’t be fine?” Ever. Again.

“Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “You’re not dying. It’s a little nothing.”

Maybe the most amazing part about my mother was how tidy her thoughts were, so much like a perfect recipe that would suffer from even the slightest excess of salt. Years ago, she had decided not to indulge me, and she hadn’t. Not for a second. To give in, she’d decided, would ruin everything. Except that it wouldn’t have been indulging, I realized. And the masgouf, of course, was hopeless. The recipe was something she created for herself in order to survive. A place where happiness lived and died, and against which everything else paled in comparison, which was why even she, with her most discerning taste buds in the world, could never replicate it. And much less could I. I hated myself for even trying.

When she was done filleting, she poured herself a vodka, removed a seed from one of my lemon rounds, and dropped it into her glass.

“Thanks,” she said. And then, like we were making plans for later, “Now do you understand why I have to send you away?”

“I’m not fine and won’t be,” I said to her. “And sending me away won’t fix that.”

“You have two legs,” she said. “Two arms, two eyes, two ears. Everything works. What’s the issue?”

“What if I’m just not okay?” I asked her. “I’m not.”

“Then it’s your problem,” she said, pointing to my head. “You get in your own way.”

I closed my eyes. Words bounced off her like rubber balls. They kept hitting me in the gut. She stood so tall, like an emperor, and her words were so deliberate that I wondered if she’d known all along what I was going to say. If she’d been planning this discussion for years.

“I’ve lost my appetite,” she said. “Let’s rain-check.”

“Right,” I said.

I was too dizzy to fight her on it and I wouldn’t have anyway. My body was heavy, like wet cardboard.

She went into Lou’s room. She closed the door, like she’d always done in one way or another. Or another. And me, I stood there, the towel getting thicker and redder around my hand, like a small carcass, my pulse swinging like a pendulum against my palm.

Later, in my room, I took out the photo of my mother. I hadn’t ever looked at it. It had been in my hat, at Victoria’s, and here again. It said something, I thought, that it hadn’t been priority number one. And yet here I was, holding the photo close to my face.

She was a cold war, my mother. It occurred to me that I didn’t know that kind of self-sufficient feeling that she had and the slipperiness that grew around her because of it. She daunted. I was daunted. She asked to be challenged. I asked to be forgiven. Her chest dashed forward with pride. Mine sidestepped. Sorry. She would never have sat here like this, I thought, feeling sorry for herself.

But then I looked more closely. I rotated the photo again and again. I squinted and moved to find a patch of light. What I’d thought were her fingers fanned in front of her mouth was actually two fingers and a cigarette, lit and long and drooping with ash. Her bottom lip curled down. She was maybe eleven years old.

I choked on my own breath.

At first, they looked like smudges, maybe, plays of the lens, shadows of clouds, even dust perhaps, the marks up and down the inside of my mother’s left arm. The photo was old, I told myself. Not everyone was like me.

But she was.

Seven perfect burns marked my mother’s little-girl skin. They were round like buttons, dark and furious like tornadoes under the skin. Four on her upper arm, three on her lower, at equal distances apart. At first I wondered if someone had done that to her, but that would have been a source of pride for my mother, something she’d wear like a badge of honor—a testament to all she’d been through. I would have heard about it, I thought, if the story had gone that way.

But it hadn’t. It was clear from how she held her arm with the cigarette that she was hiding something, hiding the inside of it, as she had it folded into herself like a broken wing across her chest. And the other arm, the giveaway, was in motion. You could see from the cocked intention of her wrist. She was about to move it, turn it around, hide. About to. She hadn’t been fast enough. She hadn’t meant to be caught. Someone like me could identify something like that easily.

My mother was like me. There’d never been an inkling of it as far as I could remember. But it made terrible, perfect sense. And for once, instead of worrying about her, I was filled with rage. All the things she could have said, all the ways she could have comforted me, had bored an enormous hole in my life, just waiting to be filled. It was a parent’s job, I thought, to give. Again and again and again until a child had grown-up hands and muscles. A grown-up heart. Even Victoria, I thought, who’d planned to give her child up, tried to give something, tried to give her child a better life. Even my mother’s real mother knew how to give. Now I hoped for a second that my mother would find me here, seeing her like that in the photo—and for once she did what I wanted.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

Then: “Lorca, what the hell are you doing?” she shouted. She grabbed the photo out of my hands. She had spit on her lips. A vein in the center of her forehead quivered like a branch in a storm.

“Where did you find this?” She was shaking it at me.

I just looked at her. I looked at her. And I looked at her. And I looked at her while she said nothing. There was everything to say.

I imagined the blood coming out of my mother like it came out of the polar bears, the horses. I imagined what she was like weakened. If her chest would ever deflate. I didn’t want to hurt her.

And yet, I went over to my bed. I knew what I was doing. I felt like I was watching myself in a dream having nothing and everything to do with myself. I took a lighter out of my pillowcase. I knew just where it was, between the zipper and the seam. It was clear purple and full of fluid; like a plastic liver, I thought. I sat down. I lit it. I held it up in front of me and saw my mother next to it. When it flickered, it cast her out. In one swift maneuver, I stuck it to the inside of my arm. It licked me like a dog.

Soon, I lifted the lighter and moved it, an inch closer to my elbow. I did it again. It felt like being pulled under by hungry waves. I did it again.

My mother staggered back.

I tried to keep watching her but could keep my eyes open for only a second before the pressure closed them. Still, in that second when I couldn’t see her, I saw her. It was as if she’d been struck from behind. Her neck was pushed a little bit forward, her face a little lifted, like she was about to cry out. And yet she didn’t. Her mouth was open in the tiniest
o.
If she’d let her voice burst, it would have made the sound of something huge crashing into an unfilled pool. Something unfamiliar, a little bit absurd.

But the thing was, there was dead silence. She should have screamed. She should have held me. She should have told me that everything would be all right. She should have raced for an ice cube. She should have cursed herself. She should have shared the story of why my name was Lorca, and that it was a beautiful name for someone like me. She should have. She should have. She should have. And yet, as I should have known by now, her doing any of that would have been the most unlikely, most alarming thing that could have happened. She never ever would.

She covered her face. “I see you,” she whispered. “Okay? Enough now.”

“Enough?” I said.

“I won’t stand here and watch you,” she said. “I won’t condone this kind of thing. So just stop. I don’t know what you want me to do.”

She reached for the doorknob and left, closing the door behind her silently, like she’d just put a child to sleep.

“Anything,” I said and the word ricocheted off the door.

I stayed in my room for hours. She didn’t come back in. I heard her turn on the TV, turn it off, put on her coat, drop her keys, and then pick them up. Go.

After that, I really couldn’t stop.

It’s impossible to know when enough is enough until it’s too much.

W
HAT HAPPENED NEXT
was that I felt feverishly sorry for myself—and it didn’t end there. With every moment, I felt more entitled to feel sorry for myself, and so I did, until I couldn’t remember what I’d felt sorry about, and then it started all over again. I did dramatic things like huff and shake my head, cry out. I tossed and turned in bed and shoved my face into a pillow, sitting up only when I was left gasping for air. I listened to sad songs on the radio and wept until something cheerful came on and I felt embarrassed and inappropriate. I ordered in, didn’t wash dishes or change my socks. I had Joseph’s ashes delivered—they came in a giant cardboard box surrounded by lots of bubble wrap—and had the man put them into Joseph’s closet directly. I tipped him generously, as though it were hush money for my strange behavior. I locked the door so Dottie couldn’t even attempt to pop in. I did not think of Dottie and Joseph as a couple. I did not. I did not. I did not think of all the lies that grew between Joseph and myself, like mold under a house. I watched the snow from the kitchen window. I rested my head on the glass. Every once in a while, I thought of how dismissive I’d been to Lorca, how I might never see her again because of it. But rather than punish myself or—God forbid—actually do something about it, I felt sorrier still.