by Molly Giles
Recently, instead of just walking into a room, Robert has started to think: “He walked into a room.” This kind of thinking is new for him and Robert doesn’t like it. What does it mean? Does it mean he is turning into a writer? His mother was a writer and he hopes to God he is not like her. She would have written, “I walked into a room.” All Meme’s stories were about herself; she never wrote about anyone else. And those rooms she wrote herself walking into? God. Bedrooms. Always bedrooms. Bedrooms of people she should never have slept with, other people’s husbands, her parole officers, Robert’s best friend in high school, for Christ’s sake. The night that Robert heard her with Torre, he threw his gym clothes into a paper bag, slammed out the front door, and biked across town to move in with his swim coach.
His brothers should have left then too, maybe that would have saved them, but they stayed. Jay is dead now and Charlie might as well be dead, sleeping on the streets in LA somewhere. The stepfathers are dead, Uncle Ricky is dead, Torre is dead. So that leaves Robert. The survivor. The one with the college degree, the steady job, the wife, the twins, the swimming pool, the bird feeder, the two car garage.
Meme survived too, of course, for a while at least. After that last rehab she joined AA, fell in love with two of her sponsors, married one of them, took up yoga, studied astronomy, taught ESL in night school and continued to write. It took a long time for the emphysema, heart disease, diabetes and cirrhosis to get her and when it did it was Robert who nursed her, paid off her debts, buried her, and brought home her damn cats. And then what? Suddenly, out of nowhere, a New York editor “discovers” Meme’s old stories and Meme becomes famous. Her book is on the best seller list right now, there is talk it may be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It has already been translated into fourteen languages. Fourteen!
Which means that in fourteen different languages people know that Robert’s father was a schizophrenic and Jay’s father was a heroin addict and Charlie’s father was married to Uncle Ricky’s mother and Uncle Ricky had AIDS and Grandma was a psychopath and Grandpa was an embezzler. Meme didn’t leave anything out. See page 98 for how Uncle Ricky hung himself. See page 99 for how Robert found him. See page 117 for Robert wetting his bed, see page 230 for Robert caught shoplifting. Meme didn’t even change his name! Sometimes she assigned deeds to him one of his brothers had done; sometimes she got their names mixed up; he has had to read every story in the book carefully, sometimes twice, looking for himself. Not everything is recorded. Torre’s motorcycle accident is missing, and Jay’s death, choking in vomit, that’s gone. But Meme being pushed to the edge of the roof with a knife at her throat at that crack house in Goleta, her affair with the court psychiatrist—those “stories” she kept, those are in the book.
Why did she have to tell everyone everything? What made her do it? Sitting at the kitchen table between shifts at the diner with the Jim Beam beside her, typing on the IBM she got from a pawn shop. Or scribbling at the welfare office with a spiral notebook on her knee. Or crouched in the front seat of her car, waiting for some cop to come up and ticket her, penciling words onto the blank back of a utility bill. She published the stories here, there, little magazines, literary magazines that no one read, none of Robert’s friends anyway; he’d deny she was his mother if they asked. He wasn’t proud of her; he never bragged about her. Why would he? She embarrassed him. She betrayed him and yet now that her stories have been collected all the reviewers are saying, How brave.
How true. What a heroine.
Heroine? Meme was an alcoholic. She had the shakes every morning. She couldn’t put on lipstick without smearing it half over her face. Her breath reeked. She had hairy arms; sometimes she singed the hairs off with a match and the kitchen stank for hours after. Her periods went on for weeks. She wore torn hose with sandals. Snorted so hard when she laughed snot shot out. Cried so hard when she cried more snot shot out. Stole table tips from other waitresses, stole library books by the armful. Bummed cigarettes from bums, dealt drugs with dealers. She killed Torre with her crazy love for him, she killed Uncle Ricky with her crazy hate for him, she tried to kill herself with a bottle of Tylenol. Tylenol! That’s who Meme was.
If Robert is in fact turning into a writer, he should set the record straight, write about his mother from the perspective of someone who truly knew her. Not one of the besotted reviewers, not one of her new foreign fans. But how? His brothers had talent—Jay’s one-act play won scholarships to colleges he never made it to and Charlie’s rap songs rang through the metro. Like Meme, his brothers spun gold from the straw of their lives. Robert has actual gold—he earns a six figure salary and will take his family to Europe next year—but when he writes his words die on the page.
And that’s okay. That’s for the best. Meme’s book money keeps rolling in, one royalty check after another, all of which Robert banks for Charlie, if Charlie ever shows up. He doesn’t want a cent for himself. He wants nothing of Meme’s, he wants to put her behind him. And yet. He keeps seeing their old kitchen in their old apartment where Meme used to sit, tap tap tapping on those typewriter keys. He smells her perfume and hears the inhale, exhale of her cigarette, hears her murmur a word or two under her breath as she types, sees her swivel on her chair, turn to him, blank eyed at first, then suddenly breaking into that warm, loving, lipstick smeared smile, so glad to see him. She holds out her arms.
And someone wants to walk through the door. Not Robert. Him. The other one. The mouth breather, the bed wetter, the bad loser, the skinny kid who studied, who stuttered, who prayed. And that kid can’t speak up for himself. He doesn’t, as Meme joked when she explained why she never used the rope she kept looped over the garage rafters, have the hang of it. All he wants to do is crawl into Meme’s lap and pet her and protect her and put his hands around her throat and squeeze the living shit out of her and how can anyone write about that?
Molly Giles is the author of four award winning short story collections and a novel. Her stories appear in Story/Houston, Two Sisters Writing, Short-Form Creative Writing (Bloomsbury), The Slow Release (University of Georgia Press), and Why I Like This Story (Boydell & Brewer). Her honors include the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, an O. Henry Award, and two Pushcart Prizes.