Small Change Read Free

time for herself. But when I expressed anger on her behalf she defended him …
    Similarly with the stomach pains. An ulcer, she suggested, then made light of the possibility when I took it seriously.
    She would ask, “Is this all? Is this going to be my contribution?” She was referring to her brilliant past and her sorry present: her pedestrian job, the poor neighbourhood, her high-maintenance husband when there were any number of men she could have married, any number she said. Motherhood gave her something to excel at. She did everything for her son – dressed him, fed him, directed every moment of play. “Is this all right, sweetie? Is this? What about this? Then, sweetie pie, what do you want?”
    Sweetie pie wanted what he got. His mother all to himself for a passionately abusive hour, then peace, affection. During a tantrum she would hold him in her lap behind a closed door, then emerge half an hour later with a small smile. “That was a short one. You should see what they’re like sometimes.”
    Even when Danny offered to look after him, even when he urged her to take a long walk, she refused. Walked, but briefly, back and forth on the same sidewalk, or up and down the same driveway. Then returned out of a sense of responsibility to the child. But the child was fine.
    At two years he still nursed four or five times a night and her nipples were covered with scabs. “But the skin there heals so quickly,” she said.
    We moved to the other side of the city and the full force of it hit me. I remember bending down under the sink of our new apartment, still swallowing a mouthful of peanut butter, tocram s.o.s pads into the hole – against the mouse, taste of it, peanut butter in the trap. Feel of it, dry and coarse under my fingers. Look of it, out of the corner of my eye a small dark slipper. Her hair always in her face, and the way I was ratting on her.
    It got to the point where I knew the phone was going to ring before it rang. Instead of answering, I stood there counting. Thirty rings. Forty. Once I told her I thought she had called earlier, I was in the bathroom and the phone rang forever. Oh, she said, I’m sorry, I wasn’t even paying attention. Then I saw the two of us: Maureen mesmerized by the act of picking up a phone and holding it for a time; and me, frantic with resentment at being swallowed whole.
    “Why is she so exhausting?” I asked my husband. Then answered my own question. “She never stops talking and she always talks about the same thing.”
    But I wasn’t satisfied with my answer. “She doesn’t want solutions to her problems. That’s what is so exhausting.”
    And yet that old wish – a real wish – to get along. I went to bed thinking about her, woke up thinking about her and something different, yet related, the two mixed together in a single emotion. I had taken my daughter to play with her friend Joyce, another girl was already there and they didn’t want Annie to join them. I woke up thinking of my daughter’s rejection, my own various rejections, and Maureen.
    It seemed inevitable that he would leave her – clear that he was gay and therefore inevitable that he would leave her. He was an artist. To further his art he would pursue his sexuality.But I was wrong; he didn’t leave her. And neither did I.
    Every six months he had another gay attack and talked, thought, drew penises. Every six months she reacted predictably and never tired of her reactions, her persistence taking on huge, saintly proportions. As for me, I never initiated a visit or a call, but I didn’t make a break. As yielding as she was, and she seemed to be all give, Danny and I were even more so.
    Tensions accumulated – the panic as she continued to call and I continued to come when called, though each visit became more abrasive, more insulting, as though staged to show who cared least: You haven’t called me, you never call me, you think you can make up for your inattention with this visit but I’ll