I am familiar with this book: The rabbit mother who loves her child so much she stalks him, who fishes him from the river, and blows him home on the wind she puffs from her cheeks. I know that mother. She and I, truth be told, are very much alike.
"What do we have you on?" the doctor says as the tears roll out of my eyes and down my face. He flicks, piqued, through the papers in his folder.
“Are you a mother, sir?" I say, momentarily relieved by the spluttered laugh that comes suddenly, out of nowhere. "Do you know this book?"
"What book’s that?" He glances up at the story I grip to my chest. "We can try you on twenty. Yes, twenty might be better. Have you had any visitors?"
“What?” I say.
He, this specialist of madness, is embarrassed by my state, this peculiar crying I do. He thinks it might help to have some friends drop by, and he’ll punch some new numbers into the Skittles machine. That should do it – tea and cake in the Day Room; a few more Milk Duds to staunch these tears.
I ask the man if it would help to know that one of the things I suffer from is Homesickness Disorder. I was born with it; it’s always been that way. I know, too well, the terribleness of a telephone with its units ticking down, the torture of seeing my mother on some curb, her waving hand obscured by the bilge of exhaust as a bus pulls away.
How silly to imagine that once I was grown, I would be past all this – the sickness in the guts for home before I had even left it. And to think that my children, in their turn, would be the ones to miss me, and I – delivered at last from my childish affliction – would be the one to soothe. "But I'll be home soon. Before you know it, I'll be back."
“Do you have kids?” I say to the doctor. "No," he says with a quick pump of his jaw muscles. He looks at his watch. "I don't."
My husband ponies over my slippers. This is a double bind. I want them but I don’t. I’ve had it with non-slip socks. But the having of my slippers will be the first step down the slippery slope toward Gehenna – permanence here.
By the time my friend – the pony – arrives, the visiting hour is over. But a kind nurse says the slippers can be passed through the door. She even holds it open a few inches. As we complete the hand-off and say goodbye, I see something tucked into the fluff. I wonder at first if it’s a letter but realize then that it isn’t. It’s a photograph, curled like a brandy snap. Then, as if I’d just come across a spider in my Froot Loops box, or dusted a 10,000-volt fence, I bolt back. Nope. Arms out ahead of me, I hotfoot the slipper down the hall and bury it under pillows. Yeah, thanks. Nice idea, but no can do.
Although I sucked at sums, I was a mathematician of days, a reducer of minutes and hours. If Saturday was the day she was coming, I wouldn't count it. I wouldn't include Friday either. Friday was the See-you-tomorrow-day. And I might not count Thursday. On that Not-tomorrow-but-the-next-day-day, home was basically in sight; it was the day to firm up plans. Would my mother be coming in morning or afternoon? When exactly should I pack my case? When to have it waiting by the door?
Usually, I wouldn’t have even unpacked. What was the point when I was leaving so soon? I prepared for my departure on arrival – the dress I'd wear, the shoes. My going-home clothes were the things that kept me attached when the only other cords were the phone that sat mostly mum in the cubbyhole and the letters which dropped through the door.
Because when I was away from her, my mother wrote me poems. Odes to missing me. Love poems that talked about tears and counting days. Sometimes she drew little pictures in the margins. “I've done you a poem,” she'd say through the telephone, and she might as well have been telling me the moon was in the post – in a bit of pink tissue, a few stars thrown in.
So I think I knew she would come. When the day arrived, I’d sit on my grandmother’s wall and I’d tell myself she would come in eight cars' time. I bet myself that eight cars from then she’d be there, plunking the car down to second and forcing up the short hill to the house. It would be her I’d see coming up, her car that climbed with that certain grind and came to a stop right in front of where I sat.
“Hello, love,” she’d say. “Did you miss me?”
I had planned for that moment. I had counted the days. I had bitten my lip from trying not to cry, I had lain in bed and told myself that the moon I saw through the chink in the curtains was the same moon that shone on her. We had the same moon. We were not so very far apart.
AB - 29.12.22
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