For you, mother
In elementary school, I was the boy who had a zombie for a mother. Not a brain eating, movie monster. No. Just the all too real kind.
The other kids, my grotesque peers, hurled names and insults at me every chance they got, which was very often. Sixth grade English was the worst. Our teacher loved torturing us with poetry. I cannot remember her name, though I see her upturned mouth and blue curls well in my mind’s eye. She would read her poems and block out the world. The kids would take turns punching me right in front of her.
I hated the poetry, remember almost nothing beyond being terrified to enter her room. I do remember something about measuring life in coffee spoons from a poem -- Pruffrock something or other. At home, we never had much cause for coffee spoons. The caffeine in coffee makes Mother unbearable. But I know what it is to measure life in arbitrary objects. I've measured mine in funeral processions.
According to the city, we live on Providence Street, Mother and I. But everybody calls it the "The Last Hooray," because it dead-ends where the cemetery begins. The cemetery’s entrance is marked with a wrought iron gate. 'Woodlawn' is written across the top of the arch. Every spring they paint the fence black (and consequently the grass that lies at the base) and the letters gold. No matter how hard Death's custodians try to stop Mother Nature, or at least hide her work, the iron oxidizes, the gold peels and flakes off, and the rust appears underneath.
**
When I am five, mother can walk. (She stops being able to walk by the time I am seven.) She takes me to play in the cemetery, which seems like a strange and boring park. Where are the swings and slide?
Mother says, "Don't step on the graves. Zombies live in them."
"Zombies?"
"Living dead people. If you step on a grave, they'll reach up..." She grabs me, not in a friendly motherly way, but an all too real way. Her voice drops. "And get you."
When I am six, I make a game of running between headstones and jumping over the graves. Mostly, I play in the steep-banked creek that divides the cemetery in two halves, catching crawdads while Mother watches from above. Then, it is time to work.
"Bring me the big rock," she says, pointing to the one she wants.
It's almost as heavy as I am. I clamber up the bank and she sends me back for others, shouting, "No, not that one, idiot!" When I don't pick up the ones she wants. We take home a wagon full and she parks it in the front yard, with a sign taped on it.
River rocks for your garden
5 for $10.00
People leave money in the can and take the rocks. We sell the most after the day's funeral. The next day we go back to the cemetery and I "play" with more rocks.
**
I think she was even a zombie then, but my memories of that time are convoluted because my father started drinking.
**
When I am nine, my father leaves. I think it is my fault and I cry. But there is mother. She's hungry and now I'm her sole provider. Because I am a kid, I go to the grocery store on the corner. It's called Food City and a lot smaller than the name implies. I shop with food stamps. I buy some eggs, bread and rice. Cheap food. Even so, by the end of the week, I am out of both food and food stamps. So, I haul up the stones and tape a sign to the wagon.
River rocks for your garden
4 for $10.00
The rock money helps, but even that isn't enough. Mother's appetite is ravenous and to make sure she is satiated, at least in part, I don't eat much that year.
**
When I am ten, I go to food City to buy some eggs, bread and rice. The store owner can't seem to make up his mind and is forever switching between paper and plastic. Today it's paper. It crackles as I enter the house and mother moans from the bedroom. She's a hungry, I think as I set the bag on the kitchen counter. Through the window I see the cemetery.
She squeals at the sound of the skillet clinking against the burner. Her moans grow more impatient once the butter starts to sizzle. She positively howls after I crack the first egg. I crack twenty-four in all and mix them up in the pot. When I was nine, I used to take them to her one at a time, but now I am too old. Ten going on fifty. The effort is too much. I go to get a fork out of the silverware drawer, and see an old plastic straw. It's mean, but I put it on her tray instead.
While the eggs cook, I put on the minute rice and lay out the bread on the oven sheet. I toast the whole loaf in the oven. We have little need for a refrigerator. She eats so much and there are never any leftovers.
By the time breakfast is cooked, she's screeching, "Give me my breakfast" at the top of her lungs. I set aside some of the rice for myself, just a bowl and a slice of toast. I pause, almost add a little egg, but change my mind. After feeding mother, I never have much of an appetite.
I heft the tray and carry it down the hall to her room. The sound of her voice hammers my eardrums. Before I reach her door, the smell of her unwashed body, perspiration, and adult diaper slap me across the face. I keep her door closed, otherwise the whole house would smell like her. It probably does anyway, and I'm just used to it. I enter, tray in hand, and there she is, one lumpy mound rolled into another, 600 hundred pounds of fat. She sees me and there is a light in her eye, the rare moment of intelligence, always a vicious thing. I shudder and brace myself.
"Where have you been, you little bastard?" Her voice turns lachrymose and self-pitying. Tears splash down her cheeks. "Jacking off while your momma, the woman who gave birth to your sorry ass, starves to death."
And that's the extent of her intelligence. While she was speaking, her eyes had strayed to the food. Mother is pure zombie now. She takes the tray and pushes me away with one of her beefy arms. She pauses when she sees there is only a straw, no fork. I brace for more hateful words. But I want her to demand a fork, need her to. She starts eating with her fingers.
"Slurp, slurp, gargle, smack, smack."
While she eats, I change her diaper. It's a task, lifting folds of fat big enough to swallow my whole body. Consequently, by high school I will be rather well muscled. No, that is an understatement. My arms will belong to the kind of guy who spends his evenings lifting weights to impress girls and I will have an anorexic six-pack. This is what will come of pushing and pulling all that fat.
I don't get her clean. Never entirely. There are bed sores too. I wash those as best I can. While I work, she talks over a mouthful of eggs and toast. "Slurp, smack, smack, gargle, loser, smack, smack, slurp." Zombie speak at its finest.
Beside the bed, she keeps a case of warm Coke. She washes her breakfast down with that. She is done eating long before I am done cleaning her up. Maybe twelve minutes have passed. Maybe. She wants her chips now. I keep cleaning her and she howls, "Give me my chips! Give me my chips!"
I stand it for ten more minutes before I gather my mother's dishes, licked clean so there isn't even a crumb of bread left, and her dirty diaper. I return to the kitchen. Waiting on the counter is my breakfast of rice and toast. I'm repulsed by it. I take her a bag of chips and my breakfast, and then go to school, where the kids make fun of me. Tell me I smell bad. I probably do.
**
I think I started to hate her when I was twelve. Yes, that seems about right. Everything about her, from the way drool ran down her chin to her unwashed scent. I almost killed her when I was thirteen... and again at fourteen. I would have gone to prison for killing her.
I missed that bullet by the skin of my teeth, but sometimes I wonder if that wouldn't have been better. When I wasn't thinking about killing her, I would consider telling a teacher or the school counselor. I would think about running away too. Just taking a week's worth of rock money, buying a bus ticket, and riding it as far is it would go.
**
When I am sixteen, I say to myself, "Today is the day. I'm going walk away from the house with its never ending funeral processions. And her."
I get a plastic Food City bag from the kitchen. She hears the plastic rattle and starts howling for food. It's like Pavlov and his dogs. I ignore it. I go back to my room and fill the bag with clothes. By the time I'm done, Mother has stopped screaming.
"I'm so hungry," she weeps. "So hungry."
I sit down on my bed.
She keeps me.
Mother and her need.
If I go who will feed her?
I turn on the TV, up the volume so I can't hear her weeping, and become a zombie myself.
**
I stopped telling myself stories about leaving when I turned eighteen. By then, Mother was over eight-hundred pounds. Such a zombie there never was. But of course that wasn't true. I had watched TV specials about the super-obese. I knew that there was a special hospital in Ohio for people like her. I could have called and put her on the waiting list. But I didn't. There is an abyss. It's called Life Beyond the Zombie. I never admitted this was what stopped me. Instead, I pretended I hated her. I wasn't really even pretending. I figured time was short. She was so fat that a simple shift of one of her body pillows could cause her to suffocate. I started going into her room after she had fallen asleep. I would creep close to her bed to watch and wait. My hands would open and close, open and close, itching to help nature. All I had to do was move one pillow, goodnight, lights out Mother.
Later, I'd lay in my bed, loathing myself for being this way. But the next day I'd do it again. And I'd watch the funeral processions slide by our house with envy.
**
At twenty-six, I make mother her breakfast, still twenty-four eggs with a loaf of bread and a pot of rice. It's not because she can't eat more. We simply can't afford more. Several of the food banks found out about mother. They said they were in the business of feeding hungry people. There was no point in explaining she is always hungry. Skinny people hate fat people, and fat people hate fatter people. The hate grows exponentially like my mother's waistline. They hate her, and while there's plenty to hate, they do it for the wrong reasons.
Losing the food bank hurt us, but I don't eat much anyway. So I make the eggs, rice, and toast and carry it to her. She no longer shouts. The effort takes her breath away. She just grumbles. Usually, I can't hear her until I nudge the door open. Today, I hear silence.
**
I stand there with the tray in my hand and stare at her glassy, unseeing eyes. What I thought would breathe life into my being has sucked all the air out of my lungs. Sometimes we can't help who we love, even if they don't deserve it. She's the only relationship I've had since dad left.
Her death is my Apocalypse.
She's my only friend and even though all she did was abuse me, I love her. I hate her too, God knows, but in the end, the hate does nothing but worsen my grief. I feel a pain so deep and acute, it knocks me to my knees. Her breakfast goes down with me, scattering across the floor. I can't breathe, and maybe that's why I don't cry.
**
There is the issue of burying her. I go on with it because I must. Undertakers treat death as such an orderly business, but trying to bury a fourteen-hundred-pound woman is closer to chaos. The fire department must knock out a wall before they can remove her body. The cemetery loans them the front-loader they used to dig graves with. It's lucky we live so close to Woodlawn, they say. Yeah, lucky.
And then, there she is, a giant breast slipped out of her sweat-stained nightgown, one arm and one leg and a lot of fat dangling over the rim of the tractor's bucket. All the neighbors are gawking at her. While sun warms and bloats her corpse. While the firemen decide what to do next. Finally, someone covers her with a large blue plastic tarp. I feel ashamed. I think, it can't get worse.
**
Her picture appears in the paper the next morning. My apocalypse headlines as "The World's Fattest Woman Dies." The reporter, generous guy that he is, stops by to give me a copy.
And ask about the logistics of burying a woman so large.
Our story makes the paper for many days to come with wonderful facts, like, my mother is too big for the crematory they have for horses over in Chesterfield.
I have no money, and without asking me, some of the guys at the fire department take up a collection. This makes the papers too. She is buried in a coffin and a plot big enough for three people, paid for by strangers. I want a closed funeral, but the strangers who donated the money seem to think they were really buying tickets. They show up in droves to gawk at size of her coffin and the crater that is her grave.
**
When all is said and done, and the last condolence given, I return to our house-- my house-- alone. I go into the kitchen. Piled on the counter are casseroles, lasagnas and pies. Gifts from strangers. I think of mother, imagine how happy all this food would have made her. From the kitchen window, I can see the outline of her headstone. For reasons I don't understand, this makes me cry. I cry because she is gone, and I weep for tomorrow. It looms on the horizon, dark and meaningless. I have nothing to do. There is no food to make, no groceries to buy, no diapers to change or sores to clean. Freedom feels more like prison.
I stack a lasagna, casserole and pie, and take them to her bedroom. It smells like her, not so strongly as before, but I find comfort in it. A tarp covers the hole they took her body through. I stare at the hole, feeling the weight of the food in my arms. Then, I turn on the TV, sit on the floor and set to work eating it all.
"For you, Mother."
The other kids, my grotesque peers, hurled names and insults at me every chance they got, which was very often. Sixth grade English was the worst. Our teacher loved torturing us with poetry. I cannot remember her name, though I see her upturned mouth and blue curls well in my mind’s eye. She would read her poems and block out the world. The kids would take turns punching me right in front of her.
I hated the poetry, remember almost nothing beyond being terrified to enter her room. I do remember something about measuring life in coffee spoons from a poem -- Pruffrock something or other. At home, we never had much cause for coffee spoons. The caffeine in coffee makes Mother unbearable. But I know what it is to measure life in arbitrary objects. I've measured mine in funeral processions.
According to the city, we live on Providence Street, Mother and I. But everybody calls it the "The Last Hooray," because it dead-ends where the cemetery begins. The cemetery’s entrance is marked with a wrought iron gate. 'Woodlawn' is written across the top of the arch. Every spring they paint the fence black (and consequently the grass that lies at the base) and the letters gold. No matter how hard Death's custodians try to stop Mother Nature, or at least hide her work, the iron oxidizes, the gold peels and flakes off, and the rust appears underneath.
**
When I am five, mother can walk. (She stops being able to walk by the time I am seven.) She takes me to play in the cemetery, which seems like a strange and boring park. Where are the swings and slide?
Mother says, "Don't step on the graves. Zombies live in them."
"Zombies?"
"Living dead people. If you step on a grave, they'll reach up..." She grabs me, not in a friendly motherly way, but an all too real way. Her voice drops. "And get you."
When I am six, I make a game of running between headstones and jumping over the graves. Mostly, I play in the steep-banked creek that divides the cemetery in two halves, catching crawdads while Mother watches from above. Then, it is time to work.
"Bring me the big rock," she says, pointing to the one she wants.
It's almost as heavy as I am. I clamber up the bank and she sends me back for others, shouting, "No, not that one, idiot!" When I don't pick up the ones she wants. We take home a wagon full and she parks it in the front yard, with a sign taped on it.
River rocks for your garden
5 for $10.00
People leave money in the can and take the rocks. We sell the most after the day's funeral. The next day we go back to the cemetery and I "play" with more rocks.
**
I think she was even a zombie then, but my memories of that time are convoluted because my father started drinking.
**
When I am nine, my father leaves. I think it is my fault and I cry. But there is mother. She's hungry and now I'm her sole provider. Because I am a kid, I go to the grocery store on the corner. It's called Food City and a lot smaller than the name implies. I shop with food stamps. I buy some eggs, bread and rice. Cheap food. Even so, by the end of the week, I am out of both food and food stamps. So, I haul up the stones and tape a sign to the wagon.
River rocks for your garden
4 for $10.00
The rock money helps, but even that isn't enough. Mother's appetite is ravenous and to make sure she is satiated, at least in part, I don't eat much that year.
**
When I am ten, I go to food City to buy some eggs, bread and rice. The store owner can't seem to make up his mind and is forever switching between paper and plastic. Today it's paper. It crackles as I enter the house and mother moans from the bedroom. She's a hungry, I think as I set the bag on the kitchen counter. Through the window I see the cemetery.
She squeals at the sound of the skillet clinking against the burner. Her moans grow more impatient once the butter starts to sizzle. She positively howls after I crack the first egg. I crack twenty-four in all and mix them up in the pot. When I was nine, I used to take them to her one at a time, but now I am too old. Ten going on fifty. The effort is too much. I go to get a fork out of the silverware drawer, and see an old plastic straw. It's mean, but I put it on her tray instead.
While the eggs cook, I put on the minute rice and lay out the bread on the oven sheet. I toast the whole loaf in the oven. We have little need for a refrigerator. She eats so much and there are never any leftovers.
By the time breakfast is cooked, she's screeching, "Give me my breakfast" at the top of her lungs. I set aside some of the rice for myself, just a bowl and a slice of toast. I pause, almost add a little egg, but change my mind. After feeding mother, I never have much of an appetite.
I heft the tray and carry it down the hall to her room. The sound of her voice hammers my eardrums. Before I reach her door, the smell of her unwashed body, perspiration, and adult diaper slap me across the face. I keep her door closed, otherwise the whole house would smell like her. It probably does anyway, and I'm just used to it. I enter, tray in hand, and there she is, one lumpy mound rolled into another, 600 hundred pounds of fat. She sees me and there is a light in her eye, the rare moment of intelligence, always a vicious thing. I shudder and brace myself.
"Where have you been, you little bastard?" Her voice turns lachrymose and self-pitying. Tears splash down her cheeks. "Jacking off while your momma, the woman who gave birth to your sorry ass, starves to death."
And that's the extent of her intelligence. While she was speaking, her eyes had strayed to the food. Mother is pure zombie now. She takes the tray and pushes me away with one of her beefy arms. She pauses when she sees there is only a straw, no fork. I brace for more hateful words. But I want her to demand a fork, need her to. She starts eating with her fingers.
"Slurp, slurp, gargle, smack, smack."
While she eats, I change her diaper. It's a task, lifting folds of fat big enough to swallow my whole body. Consequently, by high school I will be rather well muscled. No, that is an understatement. My arms will belong to the kind of guy who spends his evenings lifting weights to impress girls and I will have an anorexic six-pack. This is what will come of pushing and pulling all that fat.
I don't get her clean. Never entirely. There are bed sores too. I wash those as best I can. While I work, she talks over a mouthful of eggs and toast. "Slurp, smack, smack, gargle, loser, smack, smack, slurp." Zombie speak at its finest.
Beside the bed, she keeps a case of warm Coke. She washes her breakfast down with that. She is done eating long before I am done cleaning her up. Maybe twelve minutes have passed. Maybe. She wants her chips now. I keep cleaning her and she howls, "Give me my chips! Give me my chips!"
I stand it for ten more minutes before I gather my mother's dishes, licked clean so there isn't even a crumb of bread left, and her dirty diaper. I return to the kitchen. Waiting on the counter is my breakfast of rice and toast. I'm repulsed by it. I take her a bag of chips and my breakfast, and then go to school, where the kids make fun of me. Tell me I smell bad. I probably do.
**
I think I started to hate her when I was twelve. Yes, that seems about right. Everything about her, from the way drool ran down her chin to her unwashed scent. I almost killed her when I was thirteen... and again at fourteen. I would have gone to prison for killing her.
I missed that bullet by the skin of my teeth, but sometimes I wonder if that wouldn't have been better. When I wasn't thinking about killing her, I would consider telling a teacher or the school counselor. I would think about running away too. Just taking a week's worth of rock money, buying a bus ticket, and riding it as far is it would go.
**
When I am sixteen, I say to myself, "Today is the day. I'm going walk away from the house with its never ending funeral processions. And her."
I get a plastic Food City bag from the kitchen. She hears the plastic rattle and starts howling for food. It's like Pavlov and his dogs. I ignore it. I go back to my room and fill the bag with clothes. By the time I'm done, Mother has stopped screaming.
"I'm so hungry," she weeps. "So hungry."
I sit down on my bed.
She keeps me.
Mother and her need.
If I go who will feed her?
I turn on the TV, up the volume so I can't hear her weeping, and become a zombie myself.
**
I stopped telling myself stories about leaving when I turned eighteen. By then, Mother was over eight-hundred pounds. Such a zombie there never was. But of course that wasn't true. I had watched TV specials about the super-obese. I knew that there was a special hospital in Ohio for people like her. I could have called and put her on the waiting list. But I didn't. There is an abyss. It's called Life Beyond the Zombie. I never admitted this was what stopped me. Instead, I pretended I hated her. I wasn't really even pretending. I figured time was short. She was so fat that a simple shift of one of her body pillows could cause her to suffocate. I started going into her room after she had fallen asleep. I would creep close to her bed to watch and wait. My hands would open and close, open and close, itching to help nature. All I had to do was move one pillow, goodnight, lights out Mother.
Later, I'd lay in my bed, loathing myself for being this way. But the next day I'd do it again. And I'd watch the funeral processions slide by our house with envy.
**
At twenty-six, I make mother her breakfast, still twenty-four eggs with a loaf of bread and a pot of rice. It's not because she can't eat more. We simply can't afford more. Several of the food banks found out about mother. They said they were in the business of feeding hungry people. There was no point in explaining she is always hungry. Skinny people hate fat people, and fat people hate fatter people. The hate grows exponentially like my mother's waistline. They hate her, and while there's plenty to hate, they do it for the wrong reasons.
Losing the food bank hurt us, but I don't eat much anyway. So I make the eggs, rice, and toast and carry it to her. She no longer shouts. The effort takes her breath away. She just grumbles. Usually, I can't hear her until I nudge the door open. Today, I hear silence.
**
I stand there with the tray in my hand and stare at her glassy, unseeing eyes. What I thought would breathe life into my being has sucked all the air out of my lungs. Sometimes we can't help who we love, even if they don't deserve it. She's the only relationship I've had since dad left.
Her death is my Apocalypse.
She's my only friend and even though all she did was abuse me, I love her. I hate her too, God knows, but in the end, the hate does nothing but worsen my grief. I feel a pain so deep and acute, it knocks me to my knees. Her breakfast goes down with me, scattering across the floor. I can't breathe, and maybe that's why I don't cry.
**
There is the issue of burying her. I go on with it because I must. Undertakers treat death as such an orderly business, but trying to bury a fourteen-hundred-pound woman is closer to chaos. The fire department must knock out a wall before they can remove her body. The cemetery loans them the front-loader they used to dig graves with. It's lucky we live so close to Woodlawn, they say. Yeah, lucky.
And then, there she is, a giant breast slipped out of her sweat-stained nightgown, one arm and one leg and a lot of fat dangling over the rim of the tractor's bucket. All the neighbors are gawking at her. While sun warms and bloats her corpse. While the firemen decide what to do next. Finally, someone covers her with a large blue plastic tarp. I feel ashamed. I think, it can't get worse.
**
Her picture appears in the paper the next morning. My apocalypse headlines as "The World's Fattest Woman Dies." The reporter, generous guy that he is, stops by to give me a copy.
And ask about the logistics of burying a woman so large.
Our story makes the paper for many days to come with wonderful facts, like, my mother is too big for the crematory they have for horses over in Chesterfield.
I have no money, and without asking me, some of the guys at the fire department take up a collection. This makes the papers too. She is buried in a coffin and a plot big enough for three people, paid for by strangers. I want a closed funeral, but the strangers who donated the money seem to think they were really buying tickets. They show up in droves to gawk at size of her coffin and the crater that is her grave.
**
When all is said and done, and the last condolence given, I return to our house-- my house-- alone. I go into the kitchen. Piled on the counter are casseroles, lasagnas and pies. Gifts from strangers. I think of mother, imagine how happy all this food would have made her. From the kitchen window, I can see the outline of her headstone. For reasons I don't understand, this makes me cry. I cry because she is gone, and I weep for tomorrow. It looms on the horizon, dark and meaningless. I have nothing to do. There is no food to make, no groceries to buy, no diapers to change or sores to clean. Freedom feels more like prison.
I stack a lasagna, casserole and pie, and take them to her bedroom. It smells like her, not so strongly as before, but I find comfort in it. A tarp covers the hole they took her body through. I stare at the hole, feeling the weight of the food in my arms. Then, I turn on the TV, sit on the floor and set to work eating it all.
"For you, Mother."