by Heather Hobbs
When Dar passes the phone to her mother, the video is already playing, slow beat turned tinny by the built-in speaker. Her screen is cracked, but something underneath holds the intersecting webs in place. Like little scabs, they catch the skin of Dar’s finger as she starts it over.
Beside her, her mother reaches for her glasses. “Is that you?”
“Yeah. This is that gym I go to.”
Her mother rests the phone on the kitchen table, Dar leaning in close enough over the seat back to smell the baby powder her mother uses like perfume. Through the cracks in the screen, the image of Dar holds herself steady. Her arms shake with effort, and she pinpoints a moment where she should have tensed her core, the slight dip of her body disturbing the line. Her roommate Stacy first recommended the pole dancing class to get her out of the apartment again after her father’s death, saying she needed something dumb to look forward to. For a moment, Dar’s mother doesn’t say anything. Then, she presses play again.
“What are you wearing?” her mother says, though the outfit still covers more than her bathing suit.
Dar watches her body but it’s like reading a journal she wrote in a decade earlier and discovering someone else in the pages. In the past year, she’s spent a disproportionate amount of her income on things to wear to class and on a tripod for her cellphone so she can film herself like the others do. At night, she reviews the footage with a notebook in hand, the way she imagines actors or musicians doing, searching for spots in the routine to work on. “It’s empowering. The comments on the videos, even the ones—”
“The comments?”
“On Instagram.”
“You post these for anyone to see?”
“That’s not the point. The ones where I fall—”
“I can’t believe you’re sharing these videos on the Internet.”
Dar takes her phone back, turns the screen off, and sets it face down on the table. “Who cares.”
“You will when you sit down to an interview with a man who’s seen you in your underwear.”
“Wouldn’t he be more likely to give me the job then?” Dar says, but her mother is not amused.
Dar pushes the cup of chamomile tea closer to her mother, who grimaces after taking a mouthful. Her mother prefers hot chocolate topped with Cool Whip or drip coffee left so long in its carafe that it is both burned and lukewarm. But the tea is on the doctor’s list of recommendations. Her mother shuffles to the cabinet, brings the honey back to the table, and squeezes so that it curls around itself catlike in the bottom of the mug.
Dar leans in her seat, balancing her weight on the chair’s back legs. For the past half-hour, her mother has outlined the litany of ailments that drove Dar to meet her at the hospital early that morning: chest pain, heart palpitations, numbness down her left side. Her mother has known for years how to Google symptoms, how to pull up a list of their worst possible causes and repeat them with authority to medical personnel. She is convinced that these symptoms are a harbinger of things to come. Tumor cells duplicating in record time. Heart valves weakening under pressure. Red blood cells suctioning together to form a plug. She wants to catch them early. When the doctor in the ER told them it was a panic attack, Dar’s mother didn’t buy it.
“You know that woman senator? A dancing video’s going to ruin her career,” her mother says. It’s October, and all around the kitchen, her mother has set out the same plastic pumpkins she’s had since Dar was a child. The same tablecloth decorated with autumn leaves bunching up in the center of the table. A few orange candles burned to various lengths sitting in a row. “You’re going to break that chair.”
“I’m not going to be a politician.”
“Not anymore you aren’t, but it’s a shame because you’re so good at talking to people.”
“I work in customer service. Bullshit is my second language.”
Her mother makes the tsking sound she makes whenever someone—in real life or on TV—swears in her home. “What about deceive?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
Dar’s job for a national cable provider involves troubleshooting for customers who can’t understand the foreign accents of the company’s overseas help technicians. She is the manager unhappy customers are transferred to. But the only difference between Dar and her counterparts in Calcutta is that her voice is blissfully accent-free. She offers placating words about summer storms disrupting their service. She schedules technicians and credits the accounts back for interruptions even when the reason why is out of anyone’s control.
For this, she earns slightly over minimum wage. Enough to scrape together rent for an apartment near the University of Chicago with two roommates, a pediatric nurse at Rush named Mallory who spends at least one night a week crying in the shower, and Stacy, a bartender who works three blocks from the apartment and drives Uber for extra cash.
Her mother goes to the sink and begins scouring the pan Dar used earlier at lunch for fried eggs. The water sings as it hits the surface.
“You did so good on the speech team, I thought you would have a career with that.”
“Maybe if you gave birth to me five years earlier, and I didn’t graduate during the collapse.”
“You’re always so dramatic.”
Dar’s phone vibrates against the table. In the group chat, her roommates ask about her mom, ask when Dar’s coming back. They have a movie night planned—the first time in two months their schedules have aligned on a Saturday. Dar even bought beer and microwave popcorn.
She sends the face with its mouth pulled into a straight line. Not sure.
In the two years since Dar’s father died, her mother has changed. She calls Dar frequently to come to the house, to miss work, to take her to appointments, to watch her for symptoms she doesn’t have. Sometimes, she makes Dar go with her to visit the large cemetery off First Avenue where there are always flowers leaning against her father’s headstone. She doesn’t know how often her mother goes but she knows it is probably too often. For Dar, it is still strange having her father buried in a place her friends used to dare each other to enter.
When she was a kid, their town broke a record for having more dead bodies than alive ones, and Dar thinks about how with each year it will only get harder and harder to outnumber the dead. They add up, underground, in urns, scattered over parks and bodies of water—fish food, dust and ash, the whole world through. She thinks of what it will be like, that endless oblivion, the way it was before she was born, an endless blink for all history to come, and feels sick in the pit of her stomach.
There’s silence in the kitchen once the water stops and her mother sets the frying pan on the drying rack. She dumps the rest of the tea down the drain, the softened clump of honey dropping into the sink along with the tea bag.
“You seem better now,” Dar says.
“My left side is numb.”
“That’s because you’re thinking about it.”
“This arm is heavier. It doesn’t respond right.”
“I have plans tonight,” Dar tells her, but her voice is soft and hesitant.
“It could be a stroke. The signs are there. Do you want to stay the night just in case?” As her mother says this, she eases herself back into the kitchen chair.
Dar lets it go the way she always does. Forgives her these small transgressions. She has begun to see signs of aging in her mother. Just a caution in her movements up and down the stairs that wasn’t there before, a change in her gait earlier when they walked through the grocery store. Dar believes the doctor, but she can’t afford to be wrong.
Dar remembers leaning forward as her father’s casket lowered into the February earth and peering at her mother’s face, her stunted breaths giving off steam in the chill. She simultaneously wanted to look away from her father and also memorize the casket where he lay inside, arms crossed in unnatural sleep. He used to fall asleep sitting on the couch, snoring with his head thrown back. Tabitha, the cocker spaniel they used to have, would sleep beside him, nuzzling in as old movies from his youth blared on the television. He turned the volume so high she could hear it from her bedroom with the door closed, voices speaking in that transatlantic dialect native to no one. But if she turned the sound off, her father would pop awake and say, “I was watching that,” before going back to snoring, quick to prove he was paying attention, that he hadn’t yet gone off into the fog of sleep.
Dar moves into the living room and her mother follows.
“That’s new,” Dar says, noticing the photo on the credenza. It’s a candid shot of them perched on an outdoor sofa at a cousin’s barbecue, her nephew squirming in her lap as her mother holds out a teething ring. They are both smiling, pulled out of themselves for a moment.
“Jamie sent it over.” Dar’s mother leans over and adjusts the frame’s position. All the surrounding photos are the familiar ones that have lined the cabinet for years: past versions of herself and her parents pinioned in time. The rest of the house has moved on in a gradual way from her father’s death. All but his most trademark clothes—the World Series Cubs jersey, the flannel he wore every winter, and the soft t-shirts Dar and her mother adopted as pajamas—were donated over time.
Dar sits on the couch and stares at the muted TV while her mother schedules appointments with three cardiologists in the area and then calls back to cancel all but the one with the earliest time. She books a follow-up with her general practitioner, answering the receptionist’s questions about her health but carefully avoiding the outcome of the ER visit, as if it will bias the doctor against her. Dar comes up with the words to tell Stacy and Mallory she probably won’t be back tonight.
Afterward, her mother lays on the couch and turns to the local news. The night before, a college student was stabbed in Bucktown. A guy shot in Portage Park driving down the street just after midnight. The body of a missing twelve-year old found in a South Side alley. Even without stories like that, there are so many ways to go.
Sometimes, Dar wakes in the night unable to convince herself that her father is gone. This silly human way of thinking of the dead as still here somehow, able to see the messages left on their Facebook walls and hear the little prayers whispered to them in the moments before sleep. As if they were less animal than every other thing on the planet. As if there were a plane of existence big enough for everything that ever lived and didn’t want to give living up—a kingdom for all the cows from the slaughterhouses and the ones from the pastures, for all the birds that commit unintentional suicide rather than divert their course around tall buildings, for starving people in India and Bolivia and Iran, for the Silicon Valley bigwigs who make more money in a day than Dar has held in her hands her entire life.
“Do we have to watch this?” she asks.
“You have to know what’s going on in the world, and they’re going to do the weather in a second.”
Eventually, Tom Skilling warns them about unseasonably cold temperatures on the way. He predicts snow on the ground before Halloween. “What a shame,” her mother says. “They’ll have to wear their coats over their costumes.”
“Are you hungry?” her mother asks a while later, when Dar has almost exhausted her phone battery looking at things she can hardly remember looking at. A made-for-TV movie rolls its ending credits in the background.
“I could eat. There’s that sushi place down the street. I used to eat there all the time.”
“Have I had sushi?”
“It’s good. You’d like it.”
Her mother shrugs, so Dar orders the food online and takes her mother’s car to pick it up. When she arrives home and opens up the container, her mother has on another weather report.
“Snow for sure on Tuesday. I hope Andre comes to bag the leaves before then.”
Dar takes out a couple California rolls, one of the spicy tuna rolls, and a tail-less shrimp tempura with chopsticks and sets them on a plate. She gets a fork from the drawer and passes it to her mother, who hesitates.
“I don’t know,” her mother says.
“Just try it.”
“It’s not really my thing.”
“You eat fish.”
“Is it safe?”
“Of course it’s safe.”
“I think I had it once and it didn’t sit right. It could have been e-coli.”
“You probably had grocery store sushi. This is fresh. You won’t get sick. The shrimp is deep-fried anyway.” Dar slots an eel roll into her mouth and chews.
“It was a sit-down restaurant your father and I went to. We wanted to see what all the fuss was about, but we didn’t care for it.”
“Dad liked sushi. We went to this place for the all you can eat when you had that work Christmas party. Remember? We saved you those hard candies.”
But her mother is suddenly resolute. She microwaves a plastic bowl of minestrone from the freezer and Dar eats the sushi by herself. When she’s finished, she returns the leftovers to their container.
If she’s doing fine, why can’t you leave? Stacy texts.
Can we drink one of these? Mallory asks, sending a photo of the refrigerator’s interior, which shows three large growlers of beer.
Just one, Dar responds.
The night before, her coworker Michael invited her to a local brewery for a release party. Not having anything else to do, Dar wound her hands into her pockets and waited in the chilly autumn air with him for the doors to open. They discussed the newly announced reunion tour for a band they both liked as teenagers—whether it would be fun or sad to see them fifteen years later, and as they tasted samples, Michael explained the difference between ales and lagers. He knew too much about basically everything, and unlike some of the others in the office, Dar liked his enthusiasm for obscure topics. She paid $50 for four oversized bottles at his recommendation. When her mother called that morning, Dar fit one into her backpack in case she ended up trapped at the house all night.
It is finally late enough that her mother won’t criticize her for drinking it. When she places her leftovers in the refrigerator, she pulls out the bottle and sets it down on the table.
“What’s that?” her mother asks.
“Beer.”
“I like the packaging,” her mother says. “Did you get that at the grocery store?”
“A brewery.” The building had an open warehouse shape where she and Michael stood at a railing and looked down at the barrels of beer as they fermented. Dar removes a single glass from the cabinet and fills it halfway, leaving the rest in the bottle.
“Can I have some?”
Dar takes down another glass, fills it, and passes it to her mother to taste.
“It’s different.” Her mother looks out the window at the back patio, the rounded concrete slab where the deck chairs sit around the glass-topped table. “Tom Skilling said tonight’s the last nice night for a while.”
Dar can’t understand her mother’s unflinching trust in the weatherman, but still she opens the back door and they step out. She holds the bottle steady against her ribcage. Her long sleeve t-shirt is barely warm enough, but she sits down on the lawn chair anyway. In the setting sun, Dar can make out the leaves congealing into a paste in the gaps between the wicker table and its glass top.
“What is this again?”
“It’s a sour.”
“I like it,” her mother says, taking a long gulp. “It tastes kind of like bread. I didn’t think I would like it after smelling it, but it’s not bad. Are all their beers like this?”
She tells her mother about the flavors she sampled at the brewery. An ale flavored with dill, something called a raspberry milkshake beer, a coffee stout so dark it looked like roadside sludge. She doesn’t mention the coworker and her mother doesn’t ask who she was with. Dar wants to know if its because she assumes it was Stacy and Mallory or because her mother has gotten so used to seeing her alone, that going to a new place for a new experience on her own fits with her picture of her daughter. Dar still can’t imagine her mother that way.
“I usually skip beer because it’s too heavy,” her mother says. “But this is like a breadbasket. You can just keep eating till it’s gone. Your father would have hated it.”
“Too weird for him?”
“Not bitter enough.”
Before her father died, she didn’t even like beer. She didn’t like the yeast smell of it on his breath, though she enjoyed the recklessness it lent him. She can remember him like that. He wasn’t around to see her tastes change. He would have gone to breweries with her—but would she have taken him? Why does it suddenly matter?
By the time they discovered the cancer, his death came quick. Treatments that stranded him between nausea and exhaustion. Hardly enough time to come to terms with it, to share the kinds of stories that would show Dar the way he saw himself. Definitely not enough to see the coastal town in Sicily where his grandparents were from or to witness Dar make something of her life. In the end, he wasn’t even able to show them which boxes of baseball cards in his closet were worth selling, or to share his password so her mother could file the taxes, or to explain the complex system he developed for organizing the attic.
But even with more time, there would still be this stretching out after. This same struggle to reconcile her father as all past, no longer a man but a haze of memories. The knowledge that one day she would be no different.
“Do you ever think about talking to someone?” she asks her mother.
“I’m talking to you.”
“A therapist. About all this.”
Her mother sighs. “Your generation is the therapy generation. I don’t feel like talking to a stranger about my life.”
She’s heard about widows for whom losing their partner was a call to action, something that sent them jetsetting to east Asia, or got them to take up guitar lessons and grow their hair long, or launch a baking channel on YouTube. What difference does it make? What else is there to lose? But her mother’s life is a quest for normalcy in the face of upheaval. The fear of anything that might disrupt it again. The slightest shiver of change.
“I know your insurance doesn’t cover all these appointments and tests,” Dar says. She tilts the last mouthful of beer around, absorbing the foam clinging to the sides of the glass. Dar sets it down on the table and it clinks against the surface. “I already used all my vacation days and sick days for the year. I can’t lose my job.”
Her mother is quiet. Dar uses a nail to scrape grit from the edge of the table onto the cement below, waiting, but no response comes.
“What if therapy would make things easier?” Dar says. What if it would make things easier for me, she wants to say. Instead, she looks out into the yard beside theirs. Bags of leaves sit rolled down beside the trash cans, a rake leaning against the house.
“It might,” her mother finally says.
A dog barks a few yards over—the beagle whose honking call sounds to Dar like suffering—and a minute later, it is greeted by a screen door scraping open and a voice calling out, “Come inside then,” before it clacks closed again. Dar takes another drink and her mother’s hand cradles an imaginary cigarette.
“You ever smoke?” she asks Dar, who shakes her head. Half her mother’s face is shadowed, but Dar can still see her grin. “Good girl.
After a while, her mother reaches over for the bottle and divides the rest between their glasses.
A beater drives down Dar’s mother’s street, Springsteen’s voice reaching them through its open windows for the time it takes to round the block. Their neighbor turns out the light on his back porch, leaving Dar and her mother in shadow. When her mother doesn’t move to turn on their own light, Dar does.
“Leave it,” her mother says. “This is better.”
Heather Hobbs’ work has appeared in the Southeast Review, Chicago Reader, and Luminarts Review. She has received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train and is a Luminarts Creative Writing Fellow. She lives just outside Chicago.