Motherland by Elissa Altman

Author:Elissa Altman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

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I LIVED IN HER APARTMENT for two years, amid the Lucite and the Baccarat, the nightly performances and the weekend Bloody Marys, until a series of ruptured ocular vessels began to regularly flood my eyes with blood, and my doctor made moving out a medical necessity.

“You’ll have a stroke by the time you’re twenty-five if you stay,” he said.

When I finally left, I moved into a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in a seedy section of the city that I knew she’d never visit. She wouldn’t climb the stairs; she wouldn’t step over the vagrant living in the vestibule with his spent crack vials. She hated my roommate and the piles of smoky quartz crystals and incense holders and Creative Visualization tapes that Julie brought to the apartment with her.

“Come over and have brunch with us,” I said, inviting my mother to visit shortly after I moved in. I had set up my first kitchen with my father’s help, and we filled it with heavy French copper pots, a long butcher block island on wheels, a wall of cookbooks, and small Duralex glasses out of which one might drink wine or eat chocolate pots de crème. I wanted to cook for my mother in my own home, as though the act of feeding and nurturing her would unravel our rage like a kinked phone cord.

“I don’t need to see that girl,” my mother snarled. “There’s something about her I just don’t like. But you can come here. I’ll order a chicken. I have a little surprise for you—”

That Saturday afternoon, I crossed Central Park and arrived at my mother’s before noon. She opened the door and there she stood, smiling broadly, dressed in an outfit identical to what had become my late-eighties uniform, which I had worn practically every day since moving out of her apartment: narrow khakis, a white Gap T-shirt, a strand of fake pearls, a stack of black rubber gasket bracelets on my wrist, a cropped black leather Schott motorcycle jacket. I was looking at a full-length fun house version of myself, living and breathing, tall and narrow as a blade.

“See?” she beamed, her eyes wide with delight. “If you won’t dress like me, then I will dress like you.”

She backed up, sucked in her cheeks, sank her hands deep into her pockets, and spun around on one heel, exactly the way she did in the showroom.

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