Me & My Mom by Marianne Hauser

Author:Marianne Hauser [Hauser, Marianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781557131751
Amazon: 1557131759
Publisher: Sun & Moon Press
Published: 2000-04-01T13:00:00+00:00

And while mom struggles in vain to stay awake, he illustrates how it is done if you have the gift. Inhale real deep to charge the abdomen I call my bellows. Exhale real slow via the rectum I call my pipe and—presto!—the music blows from my second mouth. You name whatever instrument you like to hear, brass, woodwinds . . . Am I going too fast for you?

Mom wakes up and stares at him.

In gay Paree they know their art, he pipes through crinkled lips. In gay Paree before the Great War, a talent like mine would have packed the music halls and made me a rich man. I coulda been the first American wind breaker.

A windbreaker? But that is a parka, says mom. Is it not?

§

My left sneaker gets stuck in a pot-hole and I stumble over a character who is lying under a trashed quilt, strung out or dead. I don’t lift the quilt to look. A potential druggie or corpse in the street is one mini-frame of a video scene reeling past on my trip to mom’s.

Seems life is turning fast into a nonstop TV show or vice versa. It saves me from getting involved. But it keeps me confused. What’s real? What’s hype? The pot-holes are no hype. The city is falling apart, and Jack, fugitive from the heartland, is beginning to feel homesick for the Midwest—a great place for kids to grow up in, he says.

It sure beats the city. Maybe the time has come to make a move, honey? The countryside is wholesome and green, with plenty of wide open spaces to be your own man.

Perhaps. But I am a woman and I reserve judgment.

§

I sit down on a crumbling stoop. Clearly, this isn’t my day. At the supermarket this morning, while waiting in line for the new cashier to dig the workings of the computerized cash register, I gleaned such gruesome items from the scandal sheets, I nearly threw up.

Of course it’s close to my period. I’m prone to mood swings. But today I am so fighting mad at the world including me, I can barely contain myself.

Gotta keep myself in check. Am on my way to mom’s—always too early and via the same old detours. Outside the Dairy Queen a manhole has blown its lid. And in my little vest-pocket park the benches have been taken out to spite the homeless and leave me no place to sit. None of which is likely to lift my spirits.

Watch your step! I warn myself as I pass through the security gate of the Bide-a-Wee. Be good to your mom, I warn, even as I tear through the dining hall and burst in on her solitude to start a fight.

Would she kindly explain why she has always rejected me? Always! Throughout my entire life!

An impromptu curtain raiser. She glances up from her book, perplexed. What happened, my child?

Ignored! Shut out! Rejected! That’s what happened to your child. You made her into a non-person—why? Why did you do this to me!

Do what? Fingers, lips begin to quiver.

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