Vertigo by Joanna Walsh

Author:Joanna Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9897607-6-8
Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

MINUS 3 YEARS

Returning, the house is still full of useful things she does not use: an antique hairbrush (that hair in it is probably Grandma’s). What have we bought her, we, her children, her grandchildren? She has no more use for most things, but she likes the presents’ outsides and, momentarily, what is inside.

There she is (the picture of my mother, young): what’s to fault her? Me without the wide nose, without the unwieldy female fat. When I lived with her, I was fat, both times: as a teen, and then later. That way, she knew I could not move.

Upstairs my mother has hundreds of outfits. She has bought some new for the occasion. But will she wear them?

“You should wear what you want, Mom.”

“It’s different if you have to go out with him saying ‘that old thing again.’”

My father’s pills are on his bedside table. Round, brown, shiny. At first I think: a jar of chocolate buttons, delicious in their sugar shells. I eat a square of chocolate just to keep from feeling hungry later. Here even for a weekend, I am getting fatter. I can feel it in my legs.

My father’s pajamas are on the bed, himself flattened, a steamroller joke. The scented sticks on the nightstand breathe urine and candy. The ceilings are low. If I take a breath, the air will be solid. My mother’s magazines are on her nightstand. In them are women who had cancer but did not die. Now they are wearing sparkly dresses and frosted lipstick. They are interviewed, their faces shining. It is Christmas (although it is not Christmas).

“I was just saying,” my mother says, though what she says is something I do not remember her having said before, or not to me.

But, Mother, you’re copying me: you got that new pair of shoes didn’t you? Here you are on your eightieth birthday, shelling again your former self. Don’t you know how hard I worked not to be the same as you?

Why do I sit here, paralyzed on your made bed? I could walk. This is the country, and that’s what you do in it. But there are no pavements on the bare road, no footpaths across the fields, just ragged unofficial tracks past signs for trespass. In the village, the fruit dropping from the trees in every garden, the summer owners no longer in residence. My mother doesn’t notice, lives inside, double-glazed, while outside everything is dying for our pleasure: the wheat, the birds, the lambs—and new birds, and wheat, and lambs will replace them soon for our delight. But not the trees, which live longer. Maybe we are their entertainment.

The night before the party, I cannot sleep in the house. Not being able to breathe is to do with a room where there are no corners. It happens at night when I wake up again in the white room in the white bed with the memory-foam mattress and white shutters over the window, if there is a window, for, if there is, it is too far away.

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