Why They Run the Way They Do (22 page)

My mother was, had always been, a stay-at-home mom. She had raised my brothers and then me, excelled at room mothering, delivered Meals on Wheels, knitted hats and mittens for the poor, given back to the world in all the ways that mattered. But she was home, or
could
be home, and so during my recovery we spent every day together, playing cards and watching television, which was pretty much all I was good for during that first month after the hospital, and furthermore all I especially
cared
to be good for.

It was February, and O. J. Simpson was on trial on seven different channels, so every afternoon we'd watch the trial and play lazy hands of gin rummy, and when I started smoking my brother's cigarettes and drinking my mother's Maxwell House coffee, she didn't say a word, because my back was broken, and I had been knocked out of my shoes by a 1987 Buick while walking on the sidewalk—the sidewalk!—and every time I stepped outside my house, even if only for a short, therapeutic walk to retrieve the mail from the box at the end of the driveway, I was jittery as a squirrel.

“I've missed cigarettes,” I said that first night. We'd each blown through an entire pack over the course of the afternoon, then ordered Chinese takeout late in the evening when we realized we'd have to put something else in our mouths. Now we were in the kitchen schlepping the food onto plates and sneaking in one more smoke before we had to take a dinner break.

“I used to miss cigarettes
between
cigarettes,” my mother said. She gazed wistfully at the lo mein. “After I quit, I thought about them all the time. I didn't go an hour without thinking of them—maybe I didn't go ten minutes. I missed them more than I ever missed any person.” She didn't say anything for a moment. Then she looked up from the lo mein and said: “Feel free to leave that out of the obituary.”

The smoke hung thickly in the kitchen, but it was a pleasant thickness, like being wrapped in an old, heavy blanket. If it had been only her smoking, I probably would have found it unbearable, vile. But it's a fact of smoking that the smoke you contribute never seems as suffocating or smells as bad as the smoke of others.

The kitchen was the smallest room in the house, which had rarely presented a problem in our family. For all her homemaker qualities, my mother had never placed a premium on cooking; the food of my childhood had been simple, with meals often eaten on the run. My brothers and I always had somewhere to be. We ate grilled cheese and soup. We ate tuna fish sandwiches. Sometimes we had spaghetti, but we were forever reheating.

“Hey, Mom,” I said. “I left that pan on the burner.”

She glanced at the stove. “What pan?”

“The pan with the vegetable soup. You know, that time. It wasn't Bryce. I turned it on, and then I went to take a shower, and I forgot about it and went to bed.”

“I know,” she said. “I knew then and I told you I knew.”

“Yeah, but now I'm telling
you
. I'm admitting it.” I carried my plate to the kitchen table, took a quick last drag, then crushed out my cigarette and picked up my fork. “I'm sorry I lied. And I'm sorry I blamed it on Bryce. It was a crappy thing to do.”

“It was twenty years ago,” she said. “No one died. It was one ruined pan.”

“But I—”

“You want me to forgive you?” she asked. “All right, there, I forgive you.” She threw her cigarette in the sink. “Now can I eat?”

It was not, at sixteen, that I thought smoking was cool. Who was there to be cool for anyway, in my very own living room? What I loved about smoking, after my first day as a smoker, maybe even after my first puff, was that a cigarette was a thing to reach for every single time I wanted to reach for something. It was a permanent answer to the persistent question
now what?
Perched awkwardly on the couch, my afternoons structureless, my brain dully cluttered—now what to do? Oh, yes—now for a cigarette! An easy answer, a familiar routine, a predictable experience.

“Smoking is terrible,” my mother would tell me while smoking. “I don't want you to do it for the rest of your life.”

“Okay,” I'd say, lighting another.

Why did my mother smoke? None of her friends did, not anymore. They'd all taken it up in college—it was a little glamorous then, still—but once they'd started families, they'd quit, one after the next—all but her. And so she'd spent much of her life excusing herself at parties, stepping outside at intermissions, ducking into doorways, sneaking a quick one in the car, creating makeshift ashtrays. She was not ashamed. But she was certainly aware.

We had a running gin game. We were playing to ten thousand. By the beginning of March, she was up by four hundred points, but we hadn't even reached the halfway point. We knew the names and stories of everyone involved in the O. J. trial. We knew the events of the night of the murders as if we ourselves were on trial. We talked back to the television, shouted at the prosecutors, mocked the witnesses. When my father came home at six, we'd be sitting there still—throughout the trial, we essentially lived on West Coast time—and he'd pat me on the head.

“How're my girls?” he'd say, and we might answer or we might not, depending on what was happening on the television.

The next day of my visit—was it only Saturday?—we watched more television. There was no O. J. He was in jail, knee-deep in revisionist history, but luckily for my mother and me, there was no shortage of horrendous murders committed by non-celebrities, and the news networks were happy to share: a suburban mother who'd murdered her teenage sons because she'd had enough of their smart mouths; a high school English teacher who'd murdered the basketball coach because they were both in love with the same student; a man on his honeymoon who'd killed his wife, stuffed her into a large suitcase, rolled her through JFK, and was discovered when the bag went through X-ray and her bones lit up like candles on the computer screen.

“Kevin says we love bad news,” I said. “I try to explain it to him.”

She rolled her eyes. “If you have to explain, it's already too late—they'll never understand.”

“Exactly.” I peeled open a new pack of cigarettes. It was exciting, a new pack, the promise of so many cigarettes waiting to be smoked, like a ten-day forecast with a line of sunshines. I lit the first and inhaled the smoke into every single empty space in my chest. Forget yoga—there was no better, deeper breath than this.

“Imagine being the man who sees those bones,” my mother said. “Imagine unzipping that suitcase.” She shuddered, but she was smiling.

“Mom,” I said, exhaling what little smoke had chosen not to stay behind. “You were right about that Jason Doyle. He was horrible.”

“Who?”

“Jason Doyle. The summer before senior year.”

She lit her cigarette. “The one who smelled?”

“That was just the tip of the iceberg,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Sometimes we—”

“And that night senior year I wasn't at Jen's house. I went to a party out in West County, and I ended up in a car with four guys I didn't even know, and for a few minutes I thought they might rape me or kill me.”

She took a drag and blew it out theatrically. “You don't have to tell me everything,” she said. “A mother doesn't need to know everything.”

“And I almost got expelled in college for public drunkenness. If I hadn't known someone on—”

“All right,” she said. “I get it. There are
secrets
.”

“I want you to know who I am,” I said. “I know it sounds stupid, but I've made a lot of mistakes.”

“And I've made none,” she said. “Oh, thank god. Not a single one.”

“Mom, seriously, I want you to know. Before it's too late.”

“I do know who you are,” she said. “I know you're a good parent. I know you work hard. I know you care about people. That's plenty, Christine.”

I scoffed. “That's practically
nothing
. I mean, in terms of knowing someone, your own daughter.”

“I don't need to know every stupid thing you've ever done. Some mistakes it's fine to keep to yourself.”

“But I—”

She held up her cigarette and I stopped talking.

“You shouldn't unburden yourself entirely,” she said. “Keep some burdens, or you won't have any company when I'm gone.”

The accident was in early February. The second week of April, after eight weeks at home, I was given the okay to return to school. The doctor smiled when he told me, then waited for me to smile, too. I did not smile. Instead, I looked across the room at my mother, who was smiling, but upon seeing me not smiling, stopped smiling. I did not wish to return to school. I liked my life just fine the way it was. There was some pain, but there would be some pain no matter where I spent my days. And there were still waves of fear, but the waves were fewer and farther between. When they struck me, my heart roared and my feet turned to stone—it was terrible, to be sure, but now this happened only a few times a week.

The fact was that, mostly, I just liked hanging out with my mother. I liked playing cards and smoking cigarettes and watching the news, in a kind of limbo as the world—pretty much everything that lay between our house and the Santa Monica courthouse where O. J. Simpson stood trial for murder—spun on without me. Things
out there
seemed of little consequence; days of drama in the halls of my high school were not my drama anymore. I had not been unhappy in high school; I had friends, and I liked most of my classes. But now I could sleep until ten. For lunch, I could split a sub sandwich and a half bag of potato chips with my mother. After lunch, I could play thirty hands of gin rummy beside an overflowing ashtray. This clearly beat the hell out of Algebra II.

“She's ready to go back,” I overheard my father tell my mother. “The doctors say she's fine. It's time for her to get back to her life.”

“The doctors don't know everything,” my mother said. “She doesn't want to go back.”