Lies My Mother Never Told Me by Kaylie Jones

Author:Kaylie Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

“I Wasn’t on the List”

After I’d stabilized and gained some sober time, it was not quite as difficult for me to be around my mother, and once in a while, on the nights I taught my class in the MFA Program at Southampton College, I would sleep in my old bedroom in the Sagaponack house.

On this particular late-winter night, my mother had set the table elegantly, with wineglasses and her good silver, and waited for me to come home. It was around nine when I walked in, exhausted from the long day. As she sautéed shad roe, I picked up the New York Times TV guide from the top of the television, folded to today’s date. She’d checked off certain programs in ink. I turned the pages and saw that she’d done the same for every night of the week, almost like an appointment book, and I suddenly noticed how quiet and empty the house felt around us.

She’d prepared steamed broccoli and boiled new potatoes smothered in salt, pepper, and olive oil. She sat at her usual place at the head of the long antique table, with me on her immediate left, the same table that had made the journey from Paris some twenty years ago. I didn’t know what to talk about. I never knew what to talk about with her. Dinners at this table seemed to me more like a hostage negotiation than a time for relaxing conversation.

My mother, sipping inexpensive white wine poured from one of those magnum bottles, launched into the latest news. At least now she’d stopped pouring me wine. A famous writer friend, she told me, was “back in the booby hatch.”

“What kind of booby hatch?” I wanted to know, because with Gloria, this could mean anything.

“I don’t know what kind of booby hatch,” she said, exasperated. She was never a detail person. She said that the writer had developed an addiction to sleeping pills.

He had been calling my mother weekly from the place to update her on his progress—why he called her, she had no idea, but she thought maybe it was because she could still make him laugh. Last week he told her he’d thrown the finger paints at the finger-painting therapist. “Don’t you know who I am?” he’d shouted at her.

Most recently he had called Gloria to tell her that his doctor had talked him into making an amends list, and on a piece of paper, he’d written down the names of all the women he had slept with. He then presented this to his long-suffering wife, when she came to visit on Family Day.

“What a stupid thing to do,” my mother said with dismay. “Now she’s furious at me.” She knocked back her wine and refilled her glass.

“You slept with him?” I cried, aghast.

“No, you dope. She’s mad at me because now she thinks I’ve got something over her. I’m the only one of all her friends who wasn’t on the list.”

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