Summer in the Land of Skin

I open my eyes and the world is filled with white tile, glass, and my mother’s face hanging over me, gaunt and transparent, like a ghost. The shower is on full blast, shooting ice-cold water at my solar plexus.

“Did you take something?”

I raise my head enough to view my hands, both of which look very distant. They are lying like dead fish in the shallow water of the tub.

“Sleeping pills, Valium? What?” she demands, pushing my hair back from my forehead.

“Nothing,” I say.

“You’re sure?”

“God, Mom, I don’t want to die,” I say, sitting up and reaching over to turn the shower off. “I just didn’t want to go to work.”

I watch as she pulls herself out of her crouching position, brushes imaginary lint off her pant legs and sits on the toilet. She rummages in her pocket and produces a pack of Virginia Slims.

“After Hours fired you. Did you get that message?”

I shrug. “You’ve been working on me to quit since I started there.”

She exhales impatiently. “I want you to use your degree.”

“Yeah. Big demand for anthropology majors.”

“I want you to use your mind, is what I mean. Data entry for a condom company is just not you, sweetheart. But this way you can’t even use them as a reference—that doesn’t help you move forward.”

Move forward. My mother is the queen of forward movement—with her sporty silver Fiat and her Silicon Valley life, where she drinks double espressos like water and occasionally sleeps with programmers visiting from Boston or Berlin. She hurls herself forward with the streamlined perseverance of a bullet train, but in her eyes there is a panic that is pure animal.

She smiles knowingly now and tells me, “Derek called yesterday. He said he was worried about your ‘stunted spiritual evolution.’”

I roll my eyes. “Derek. Jesus.”

“I told him, ‘It sounds like you’ve been dumped, buddy.’”

I’ve been with Derek for five years, and until recently I’d never asked myself why. He is thirty-six years old. He has an early-morning paper route to supplement the paltry cash he earns teaching meditation at a grubby little Buddhist center in Corte Madera. Now that we’ve broken up, I cannot even summon enough pathos to cry.

“Maybe it’s good,” my mother says. “A blessing in disguise.”

I can tell the cigarette cheered her up some.

“Maybe what’s good?”

“This little nervous breakdown you’re having,” she says. “Or whatever it is.”

“That’s great, Mother,” I say, pulling on some jeans. “Maintain your condescension, even in crisis.”

“Sometimes the only way to heaven is straight through hell.”

I stare at her. “What did you say?”

She looks up at me, startled. “What? What’s wrong now?”

“What did you just say?”

“About your nervous breakdown?”

“No. The other part.”

I watch her as she realizes her mistake.

My mother hasn’t spoken my father’s name even once in the fourteen years since he died. Very rarely, though, she will slip up and use an expression of his. My father had his own idioms—quirky phrases he repeatedly tirelessly. These words are buried in us, my mother and me, like tiny scraps of shrapnel.

She looks like a frightened child, now, caught in a lie. “Isn’t that funny,” she says. “I really don’t remember.” She flashes the precise, practiced smile that does not show her gold tooth. “I’m dying for some good coffee. How about you?”

Although my mother consumes on a daily basis the most exotic, trendy foods money can buy, when we’re together, she invariably insists on Josie’s, where the entrées jiggle under pools of grease and the espresso tastes like battery acid.

“Why do you like this place so much?” I ask. We’re standing in line to order, studying the menu, which is written in bubble letters with Day-Glo chalk on huge blackboards.

She glances around. “Some places just feel like home.”

Why my mother would feel at home here is a mystery. The place is filled with pierced faces and torn clothing, magenta shocks of hair and prominently displayed tattoos. My mother, sunny and fresh in her silk pantsuit, looks like Martha Stewart in a mosh pit.

We give our order to the girl behind the counter, a sullen, ungroomed thing with lots of beads knotted into her hair. Then we take our laminated number and find a table near the windows, where we wait in awkward silence for our food. I can tell my mother is aching for a cigarette. She keeps scraping at her cuticles like a nervous insect. They bring us our shots of espresso, and after she knocks hers back her face visibly relaxes. For me, though, the bitter brown syrup is a shock to my system; my mouth explodes with sensation. Five straight days without food or sleep have left me clean and high and empty; the world has a surreal pallor. The people and shapes of Josie’s move around me like an animated collage.

When our food arrives my mother orders another shot of espresso and digs into her ham-and-cheese omelette with embarrassing fervor. I raise a fork and touch the porous skin of my crepe. It gives under the blade of my knife much too easily, and something in my belly flips upside down.

“I know!” my mother says, talking out of the side of her mouth as she chews. “Suppose you took a class in computer programming?” She delivers this with a semblance of fresh energy, leaning forward like it’s an idea she’s just now hit upon, not the same suggestion she’s been making weekly for the past three years.

“Mother,” I say, my voice low with warning.

“But, no, I suppose you like data entry. I guess that’s your calling?”

“That’s over, now.”

“Oh, you’ll go groveling back there—”

“Don’t tell me what I’m going to do!”

We’re both surprised at how loud this comes out. A girl at a table near us glances over; she looks like a Rocky Horror Picture Show die-hard, and I resent her white face turning in our direction. I shoot her a dirty look and she averts her eyes. All at once I feel strangely powerful. I still haven’t even nibbled at my crepe, and I am floating on that weird, food-and-sleep-deprived hollowness that tastes like enlightenment.

“All right, Anna,” she says. “So you tell me. What are you going to do?”

“Sometimes the only way to heaven is straight through hell.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” she chides, as if I have just cursed.

“What’s wrong with quoting my own—”

“I can’t,” she says, looking around helplessly. “I can’t do this.”