Mom, Having Died

D. Ellis Dickerson

Reynard says, “Mom is getting fat. By which I mean morbidly obese.”
    This causes concern in the rest of us at our nice maple supper table. “Oh no!” says Paul. “Do you think she needs more room?” What an idiot Paul is! Of course she needs more room. Of course Reynard will answer him this way.
    I ask the better question. “Isn’t this going to slow her down? Isn’t this going to alter the schedule?” Father glances to the living room, hoping perhaps to see something.
    “I’m looking into that,” says Reynard. “Naturally that’s not your bailiwick.”
    Rita jumps in. “I could widen the space between the recliner and the sofa, maybe take out one of the lamps.” And then, “And you know, we can eliminate the ottoman too. Because we hardly use it anymore.”
    “That would be good,” says Reynard.
    Reynard was closest to Mom, is closest to her, and we have to trust his judgment. It is he who first noticed her moving around invisibly; he who worked out her schedule through careful observation and analysis, factoring in seasons, weather, possibility of sickness, need to experience cleanliness, and other patterns of behavior she had in life; he who remembered and speculated, extrapolated and charted, working it out to a very specific schedule. He is also the oldest and was expected to be asked to become a full partner in his law firm, until Mother’s passing led him from such sublunar work.
    Reynard’s schedule actually explained a lot: the cold spots in certain rooms at certain times; the ineluctable sense of “being watched” when there was no one extant nearby; the light poltergeist activity Paul reported (“A bar of soap shifted in its dish! I recognized her handiwork immediately!”). I for one was disinclined to doubt him in this experience, which seemed as likely to be valid as anyone’s at the time. Someone—Was it Father? Could he have said such a cruel thing?—suggested an exorcism, but we decided swiftly that we did not want her to leave, could not ever bear to have her leave again. If she was lingering here, then welcome and linger away, was the way Rita put it. So Reynard worked out the schedule, and we work around her. We don’t want to upset her. We try to stay out of her way so she doesn’t know what’s happened to her and can still possess a form of belonging. After all she did for us, it’s the least that we can do, vis-à-vis repayment.
    I mostly look after the baby, her murderer. It was Mom’s last wish that we call it Martin, but none of us can bring ourselves to do it yet. Not only did the baby kill our mother, but the baby is female, and she was born with a caul and seems (already) to be left-handed. What name would suffice to explain all this in one word? At the meeting everyone fell silent. So we call it the baby. No doubt this will have to change eventually. No doubt the name Martin will come to be applied to the baby, however inappropriately, in order to keep Mom happy, to keep her from leaving for good. I am not fond of the baby, however. I just sit with it because I’m the only one who knows how dangerous it is.
    It is time to clean off the table. Mother will theoretically shuffle downstairs and into the dining room in a few minutes, swiping vainly at her belongings with a spectral feather duster, the way she used to. She loved cleaning and always got dressed up to do it—high heels and her best dress, sometimes with pearls. She rinsed with breathtaking posture. It is best at this time of night to be as far from the dining room as possible. Nobody likes to hear the china quivering in the cabinet, even if it’s just a passing truck after all. We would rather remember her in peace than see her, suddenly and by miracle.
    So I stand and gather the plates, bundle the sullied forks against piled bowls, and take everything to the sink. The rule is: pour hot water and fill the sink, but don’t wash anything. Leave it waiting for Mother. If it’s done without her, she will wail, and we will hear it without hearing it, be terrified without pinpointing why. When she moves on from the undone dishes, after trying and failing and losing interest, when she has slipped through the back door and is moving among the oleander bushes she planted, that is when we can clean.
    The water is so hot that the tap belches steam and makes my eyes blink. It’s funny. I hardly even notice temperature anymore. What purpose would such judgmental feeling serve?

The funeral banquet: strangers in our house, wheeling ravens. The temperature was sixty-four degrees, humid. That’s the last temperature I remember, because I was standing next to the thermostat. I wanted to adjust it but couldn’t muster the wherewithal. I wanted to raise a sandwich to my lips, but my hands were weighted as if with massive metal tonnage. I just stood in the corner of the living room feeling like an ugly ornamental gong that would never be sounded.
    Mom had no friends that we’re sure about, but we each invited workplace acquaintances who saw the interior of our house for the first time. Rita’s friend Steve (from her photo developing job at the mall) admired the welcome mat. “It’s too beautiful to step on,” he said, hopping nimbly.
    “It’s never been used,” said Rita. “Dirt made her sad.”
    “I bought it for her!” Paul chimed in. “Anyone want more celery? I’m cutting it myself.”
    The priest who performed the ceremony saw me and walked over. “Are you okay?”
    “Okay,” I said. I would have preferred a word like temperate, mild, unthrowable. But okay was adequate.
    “If you need to talk . . . “ he said, professionally tender.
    “I’m fine,” I said. At the time I could feel something moving deep inside me that had the potential for unseemly joy. It was in a place that was easy to keep corked up, but I was always aware of it, not so much emotionally as logically: a lid I could maintain forever on whatever this feeling was or remove with a single determined thought. Like Adam’s apple.
    “Look at everyone,” I said. “We’re devastated. Normally we never hang out like this without doing chores.”
    “She was very beautiful.”
    “You don’t know the half. She died before she had the chance to lose the weight. Pregnancy always made her puffy.”
    My Amway superior came over and eyed me sadly. “It was a beautiful service,” he said.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “Thanks,” said the priest.
    “So are you okay? I mean financially?” he said. “If you’d called earlier I could have gotten a lot of this stuff for . . . “He ventured a low number. I tried to remember his name: Bri. Short for Brian, Bryce, or maybe Bryson.
    “We’re fine,” I said. “I presume. I’m glad you came too. I’m going to have to quit working for you now.”
    Bri paled. “What?”
    “We’re all quitting our jobs. Togetherness is important. When we get past this, we’ll move on and go back to the working world. But for now . . . ”
    “All of you? Does this mean Paul is quitting college?”
    When had I told him about Paul? “Sure. Hotel management can wait. This whole party is a big farewell to everyone we know.” I handed the priest a memorial program from the end table. “Thanks again.”
    Reynard came over, and suddenly, with three people there, I felt beleaguered and weary. The notion in my chest wanted me to blurt something rude. I tightened my lips.
    “Where is Father?” said Reynard. “His absence has been a point of observations.”
    “He’s with the baby. It was, uh, making powerful odors that . . . that could have thrown off everyone’s appetite.” My eyelids blinked themselves.
    “Is the baby all right?” asked someone. I didn’t pay attention to who.
    “Jesus,” I said. “I think I need to lie down here.” So I slid down the wall and curled into a fetus-shaped ball under the thermostat for the rest of the party. No one bothered me. I slept on and off.
    Everyone brought food. They all said they were sorry, then finally they left.

The food is still here, taking up space where I want to set the clean dishes. Most of the leftovers are little ham sandwiches with mayo, cut diagonally to form cunning crustless triangles. We originally left them out for Mom to eat—they were brought in her honor, after all. But the sandwiches haven’t been touched in weeks. Paul keeps cutting her new sandwiches and stacking them on the old ones. I told him I didn’t think Mom could eat nowadays, and if she did eat, I didn’t think she liked ham sandwiches. He said, “Maybe she’ll like them this time, or the time after that. Maybe one day we’ll get it right and all the trouble will be worth it!” Already the pile of sandwiches is so high that they’re blocking the cabinets. The meat and mayo at the bottom have turned. The smell is rude, but it seems such a small thing to complain about, next to Paul’s hope.
    After the funeral none of us talked, and we wandered the empty house for days after, silently sniffling in our rooms or running obscure errands to keep busy, returning furtive and empty-handed. The next time anyone spoke was one morning when we had all wandered hungrily into the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty save for a single box of baking soda, and we all stared at it, with Rita holding the door open and Father in front of the rest of us, blocking much of the light. That was when Paul mentioned the soap miracle, Rita the coldness, and consequently Reynard introduced his charts, the schedule. I knew then that I wasn’t getting away any time soon. We were about to adopt endless new responsibilities.
    The baby is squalling upstairs where I think I left her. I stand with my wrists in the numbingly hot water, fingers draping the immersed plates, and I wonder if I should move. Yes, perhaps this is Mother’s way of telling me to go on: speaking through her assassinatress. Mom was most forgiving. I’m tired, and I don’t want to go, but I know I should. Mom would’ve.

The baby has grown into a round fat blob. Father sits next to Paul, who has Martin on his lap, but Father will not look in its direction. He maintains a stricken silence. We know he feels responsible for everything. Martin was almost certainly his doing.
    “The good news is, Mom is slowing down,” says Reynard. “We can now bathe for twenty-two minutes instead of twenty before she comes in to check if the hot water’s being wasted. I predict this number will rise.” He slaps his pointer flat against the chart, and the easel quivers. “I still recommend as much modesty as possible. If you feel you may overstep this time limit, wash yourselves in your bathing suits. You know how she is about body parts.
    “The unfortunate news is, either the supper table has to go, or these chairs do. Mom cannot squeeze by them both. She is as wide as a hallway now. We must needs be sensitive.”
    After a silence, Rita frowns in decisive concern. “Well, you know, I guess if we keep the chairs, we can maybe move them around more freely. So let’s get rid of the table, okay?” All anyone would have to do is disagree. But we are united, alas, in our stoic survival. Besides, by now we’ve already given up the ottoman, the coffee table, one of the larger lamps. The table will be a sizable loss but one with ample precedent. The thing inside me stirs again. My legs twitch, antsy.
    “Has anyone noticed,” I interject, “the connection between Mother and the baby?” The sentence practically releases itself. My lips feel freed.
    “You mean Martin!” says Paul, dandling protectively. “She’s our sister. You should say the name.”
    “You mean telepathy?” says Father, without looking to his left where she bounces.
    “I mean that as the child eats, Mother grows fatter. And the larger Mother grows . . . ”
    “Oh!” says Rita. “You mean you don’t want to give up the table! Mother is dead, and she’s miserable, and all you can think of is yourself !” Her voice shrills a little. No doubt she’s nervous that she might wind up like Mom someday, haunting uncontrollably.
    “Telepathy, though. That would be nice,” says Father to himself. He doesn’t sound committed either way.
    “You mean you want to starve the baby!” Martin gets shielded in a cross made of Paul’s forearms.
    “I mean that we should think of the consequences before we get rid of more things. We’re casting off memories and furniture, and we won’t get them back if we want them later.”
    “We don’t need memories,” says Father. “We have her.”
    “The vacuum cleaner, too,” says Reynard. “Mom’s been tripping over the cord.”

In the living room, we sit on the edges of our seats, eating off tray tables. At any moment Mother may march through, and we have to get out of her way, things and all.
    The baby and I agree in our hatred of baby food. Every spoonful is a battle. The eyes roll. The legs kick. The fat little body jiggles. And then she produces horrid little miracles of consumption, swallowing the entire head of the spoon and refusing to relinquish it. I feel warmth on my knee, and I know the child has defecated, presumably out of spite. Yet the child grows ever fatter and fatter. The child is now the size of some vast pumpkin and has a frightfully powerful grip. We all carry red marks from where she has squeezed us.
    If Mother ever passed through one of us, the theory goes, if she ever walked through a wall or a piece of furniture, she would know that she is dead. We want her to believe herself alive, and the family just the way it always was, like a living creche or a Christmas photo. My rear end hurts from being clenched in a posture not-quite-sitting and not-quite-ready-to-bolt, hovering a stitch’s width above the seat cushion. It is hard to focus on my TV dinner, now with no TV.
    The child spits baby food against my cheek and mouth. She squeezes my wrist and something grinds painfully. “God damn it!” I say, rising involuntarily. The baby should spill to the floor, but it clings like Tarzan and drags my arm into a plumb line. “Jesus!” The rest of the family looks up, horrified but showing it quietly. Mother never allowed swearing. If she should get upset, after all we’ve done already, if she should leave . . .
    Paul reaches over and grabs the bottom half of the baby, who still won’t relinquish my wrist, which has gone shuddery-warm. Rita clears her throat. Reynard glances at the grandfather clock, where he claims to have seen Mother’s reflection once at midnight. Father continues eating. Some men are coming to pick up the clock tomorrow.
    “Don’t you all see the connection?” I say.
    “Selfish!” says Rita.
    “We’re not starving anybody,” says Father reasonably. “Don’t talk nonsense.”
    “But the baby’s the problem! If we stopped feeding it, both it and Mother would shrink! We could keep the grandfather clock! We could get the TV back. We could—”
    “Selling the clock is going to help us pay the heating bills,” says Reynard pointedly. “Moreover we have to buy some dollies.”
    “I don’t like where this is going,” I announce.
    Rita gives me that disappointed look. Paul says, “Well, no one asked you if—”
    “Hist!” says Reynard. “Here she comes! Someone get the tray tables!”
    Paul runs off, and I follow with the baby hanging like a streetlight between us, a vise of togetherness. I manage to pull a tray table along as we lurch for the sandwich-smelling kitchen.
    I should stumble. I should knock something into her path. I should mess up our entire concept of Mom-as-she-is-these-days. But I can’t do it. If Mom were to dissolve because of me, everyone would know it. What would we have left to share?

A man my age has come to take away the china cabinet. “Nice,” he says, eyeing it from the doorway. He has a tan from being outside a lot.
    “We have dollies if you—”
    “Got a hand truck,” he says pointing behind him. “Thanks, though.”
    “Wipe your feet.”
    The man sniffs behind me. The hand truck softly creaks. Mom once bought me a wagon and pulled me very deliberately around the tree in the backyard fifty times. I didn’t even get dizzy. She was in jeans and a T-shirt and looked uncomfortable having fun. It was the only time I remember seeing her outside. Her tennies kept perfect time, one footfall a second.
    “Jesus! What’s that smell?”
    “Um, mayonnaise, mostly. We’re sentimental about our sandwiches.” What a thing to say! And it hits me that everyone is off in other rooms. I am alone with a stranger. I could say dreadful things, right now, in the house! But for how long?
    “We’re insane,” I say.
    He looks around, his mustache twitching. “I’ve seen worse. There was this one place—”
    “We’re helpless. We can’t do anything without her, and we’ve all given up.”
    “Uh huh.” The man grunts and swings the china cabinet so the back faces him.
    “Hey, this is light.”
    “It’s supposed to be apple.”
    “Well it’s not. Maple and particle board. Mmf.” The hand truck sings as he drops the cabinet’s back against the handle. He pulls a coil of bungee cord from his waist. He’s not meeting my gaze.
    “I wish she were dead.” Wow! I do wish she were dead!
    “Well congratulations,” he says, putting cord across the face. “I hear she is.”
    I hear someone coming down the stairs from the second floor. A voice up there says, “Hey!” It’s Paul, talking to the baby.
    “Yours is a minority opinion,” I say.
    “Not where I’m from.” The moving man grabs the handles, swivels around, and starts pushing the cabinet outside.
    There is a weird creak upstairs and a gasp from Paul. The baby squalls like murder—a vast, shrill keening that you couldn’t outrun if you tried. “Oh my God!” cries Paul. “The baby! Jeez!”
    A thunder of feet from all over the house. I sidestep the hand truck and race upstairs, my heart full of hope. Is it ending?
    Paul and Rita each have a bowling-pin-sized leg, held loosely in indecisive hands. The baby’s head is wedged between two poles of the banister. Of all the poles, it has chosen a slightly broken one, with a jagged fang of wood at the baby’s throat and a protruding nail right by its ear, from where Paul tried to fix it once.
    The baby’s shriek resonates throughout the house along the vents. You’d think it was being cut to ribbons instead of just scraped with wood and metal.
    “Get his head out! Someone get his head out!” shrieks Rita, as if she can’t let go of the baby’s fat leg. I hear Father coming in from the backyard.
    “She just wedged herself in there!” wails Paul. “Oh, I’m bad at management!” The child’s fists pound on either side of its trapped head. Flakes of old paint tumble in tiny leaves. I notice a bit of blood at the child’s trapped neck.
    Reynard arrives last from the attic, frowning down at all of us from the top stair. “Someone do something!” he says. But this problem can’t be solved by moving us out of the way. He stands flummoxed for a moment. “Perhaps a prying tool! From the kitchen!” He looks at me and doesn’t move. “Go! You’re closest! That would be the most efficient!”
    Fine! I bolt downstairs past the cabinet, past Dad, who’s coming to see what’s wrong, past the erstwhile dining room and into the barren kitchen. I plunge my hands blindly into the utility drawer—anything thin and hard will do; time is of the essence; etcetera—and I run back in a haze thinking, This is my life; this is why we wait around all the time: so that if someone needs help, we’re all there. It is worth all the waiting if we have insurance against emergencies. It is bad to think terrible things. I need to stifle my blurting impulse, come to terms with my restless selfish—
    Cheers bellow before I reach the first stair. The moving man has leaped to the rescue with a crowbar and a knowledge of pressure points. Rita hugs him desperately. Reynard shakes his hand. Father invites him to stay and have some iced tea, but he declines. In its anxiety, the baby has defecated profusely. Paul cradles the thing as if her existence is the good kind of miracle.
    The moving man looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “You won’t need those,” he says in a voice that wishes to change the subject. Rita looks at me and gasps, pointing. In my hands I see three carving knives and a skewer. I drop them in horror. They jingle mockingly from the floor.
    Dad sniffs. “You shouldn’t run in the house with that stuff.” For the next five days, none of my siblings will speak to me.

We still have the refrigerator, at least. We will never get rid of it as long as we’re storing up long-term baby food.
    My deeply held theory: Somewhere there is probably slumber and vacation. Somewhere television shows blare charmingly canned laughter into well-lit, heavily furnished living rooms. Somewhere there is assurance of life after death. From my angle where I look out the window, all I can see is up into a hard caliche sky with a tone so smooth it’s impossible to tell if the world is even still moving or if it stopped long ago.
    It is hard to concentrate on feeding the baby. The baby is strong, and it takes all my strength to stop her from crawling away. I have the baby half in midair, my fingers clutching her fleshy waist and hips, sinking into them like meringue. Rita and Paul are battering the doorways downstairs with sledgehammers. Mom grows ever wider, at least in theory.
    I am sitting on the floor in my bedroom because my bed is gone, and my sleeping bag is folded in the corner where it presents no obstacle. We got a good price for the bed, and we now have three cupboardsful of baby food in tiny glass jars. Rita takes the empty ones and puts candles in them to burn at Mother’s attic shrine.
    Mother has still not touched the sandwiches, and the entire kitchen floor is fouled with them, damp and noisome and tidily cut. No one goes in there anymore. Not even (I suspect, but Reynard authoritatively demurs) Mother.
    Dad wanders in, looking away as soon as he sees Martin. “This place needs cleaning,” he says. “She always took such good care of it.”
    “Remember her changing my sheets? Washing our clothes? Preparing regular meals, with an eye toward nutrition?”
    “Sacrifices all.” Father nods.
    “I remember her laughing once. Something on TV.”
    Father’s eyes shine briefly. “Ah yes. That one episode of M*A*S*H. Hawkeye and the nurse and their hijinks in the shower. But of course it’s been canceled.” He peers around. “I was looking for a book to read,” he says, “but I guess you’ve been cleaned out too. Such a shame, our dwindled environs. And with Christmas coming on.”
    I have a photo of Mom at Christmas. She smiles in a red dress, kneeling before a just-unwrapped space heater. A baby’s leg—I was once told it was mine—is crawling just out of the frame. She was amazingly thin.
    Wham, goes the downstairs work. Wham whammity wham. The ceiling shrugs plaster near my head. We both watch it fall.
    “How much longer are we going to do this?” I ask, whispering so it can’t hear.
    “That’s not even a sensible question,” Father says. “For as long as we have her.” I have told no one about the photo. I’m afraid it might be thought to take up space.
    Something comes lumbering up the stairs, wood creaking slowly. If it were her, if it were a single appearance, I would know it was worth it. Sometimes I still hope to see her for myself. Sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps me here.
    It is Reynard. He has news. I shut my eyes and ears against his opening mouth as the baby lets out a sudden brutal wail devoid of reason, sense, or hope for negotiation.

And now we stand in the darkened living room, eating baby food with our own individual spoons. There is nowhere to sit, but it’s perhaps just as well since we may have to move soon at a sign from Reynard—a left-eye wink means upstairs, and right-eye wink means off to the backyard. We poke like scavengers. Rita has the obscenely swollen Martin.
    Our mother’s remembered warmth.
    Father will not look at it.
    I prefer the backyard, where the dying sun provides a little light. Upstairs means a deeper depth of darkness and wet smells and empty jars of baby food underfoot.
    “It’s so nice,” says Paul, “that we’re all still together after everything that’s happened. A lot of families would have just gone to pieces, a lot of them. Not us, though.”
    Reynard stiffens and winks his left eye. We march like refugees; I just want to rest.
    What if something happened to the baby? What if a great wind came and sucked the baby away? What if zoo-escaping wolves galloped off with her, their wet mouths around her marshmallow-y throat? Or what if they were snakes, poison ones? What if the baby got sick with leprosy or some flesh-eating and unmentionable virus that turned her blue or covered her with pustules? What if something fell on the baby? Something heavy.

“Mom, Having Died” appears in our Spring 2004 issue.