—LIKE A TRAIN FULL OF GASOLINE

  

 

 

Patterson

 

 

It’s July and the spiders are back, half a dozen of the walnut-sized things dangling from my office window, their broken webs scattered across the panes like shredded wedding veils.

Mother’s face slides over the glass, a bobbing hologram looking for purchase, huffing and puffing theatrically, blowing raspberries, anything to catch my attention.

Don’t you have better things to do? I think but don’t say, though mother picks this up telepathically, answering, “Take a peek, Patterson. I’m deader than a doornail. I don’t have a fucking thing going on.”

“Living Mom” would never drop an F bomb, but “Ghost Mother” has the vocab of a crusty barfly, not to mention the same dead-end ennui.

“Can’t you see I’m working?” I say aloud, tapping out nonsense on my keyboard that might as well be Russian or Farsi.

“Yeah? Well, your last three stories sucked ass,” Mom says, her cheeks plump as two scoops of pistachio gelato. “Get out of your own goddamn head and write something true and brilliant for once.”

“Don’t you think that’s what I’m trying to do?”

“Maybe start by dropping the fucking adverbs already,” Mom says. “They’re all over your writing, like suppositories languishing in that cramped part of the colon that hurts.”

Mother started visiting me a few months after my wife left, taking along the bulk of our nicked-up, inflatable IKEA furniture, but thankfully leaving behind Stevie Nicks, the mutt I’d rescued some years ago. Stevie’s barking has become incessant every time Mom shows up and when I explain this to my therapist, all he does is sigh into his sleeve and write me a note for another script.

“Okay, what is it?” I say to Mom’s moon-face, which is decidedly wider than when she was alive, like a Denny’s Deluxe pancake or personal pan pizza.

Mother spits air. “Can’t you tell? I’m bored to death.”

Dead or not, that’s as close as Mom comes to humor, or explaining herself.

“Why don’t you go haunt Oscar (my brother) or Cheryl (my younger sister with the too-short left elbow and eating disorder) or Uncle Leeroy (my uncle), or what about that school bus driver who ran over the cat in second grade and just kept going?”

“Please. You always hated cats. Plus, you never loved me. Just admit it.”

“We’ve been through this. My love for you was timestamped and dutiful, documented by my presence at your funeral, as well as all of these idiotic conversations we’ve had since you’ve died.”

I never asked Mom why she killed herself. Maybe I was too afraid of the answer, thinking it might have been because of me—

“It wasn’t you.”

--or something I did or didn’t do.

“If I’d kept track of all of your fuckups, I’d probably be in a different level of Hell right now.”

I’m tapped for things to say, so I spew, sing-songy, “You were always a drama queen.”

“Blame the drama, not your Momma.”

“You’re not funny. Not even a bit,” I say, chewing my inside lip so I don’t chuckle.

“Why won’t you ever ask me something serious? Huh?  The Dead know things you guys don’t,” Mom says, shimming fingers across her cheeks while attempting a ghoulish falsetto. 

I don’t know why, but I stare at her facsimile as if it’s the real thing, my mother’s face, wobbly, swaying uncertainly among the panes where the creepy spiders drop, weave and confirm their reputations as industrious fellows.

“Okay, okay,” I say, inhaling until I’m almost hollow again. “Soo, why did Lisa leave me?”

(Lisa was my wife of 34 years. Sex to her was as important as drinking half your bodyweight in water, eating fatty fish once a week, planking and Kegels.)

“You already know that answer.”

A latent, bottled-up fear burps into my conscientiousness. “Wait, you didn’t, like, ever watch Lisa and I have sex, did you?” 

“Sex?” Mom says, her face waxed and dusty, like a rubbed-out coin. “Well, you never had any. Not towards the end,” Mother says, fanning the air above her dead head while straightening her bangs. “Isn’t that why she scrabbled off?”

When I was a kid, we played Scrabble, RISK, Go Shit, and Parcheesi. Afterward, I would always shadowbox myself in the garage and lift weights until I puked. 

 “Mom, I’m tired already. Say something useful, or just go away.”

Mother plucks a gray hair, holds it up to the window glare before saying, “Um, okay, but well, you know, maybe, it’s not something you really want to hear.”

“All you did was protect me as a kid. Bandage me when I got a scrape. Plug my ears during scary movies. Change my name from Peter to Patterson after all of the dopey kids in grade school realized Peter was a euphemism for penis—”

“But I wasn’t there, not when I should have been. I didn’t believe you.”

The shift in Mother’s tenor has me arching my back, bending over in my office chair. Ghost Mom’s shown up plenty before, but never like this, with such moxie.

“Your father, what he did to you—”

“No, Mom.”

“—I needed to believe you, and I didn’t.”

“No more.”

“That’s been all on me, all this time.”

I slap the keyboard like Ta-Dum, as if it’s finally over now, which it never is, of course.

“Let’s switch subjects,” I say.

“No child deserves that.”

“Mother!”

“They don’t. No way in hell they do.”

Hearing her say the words, even if they’re ghost words, sinks a blade.

“That was a long time ago,” I say, stupidly.

 “Don’t be so fucking stupid,” Mom says. “Before Wife, Life, you have to find a therapist, and do the work.”

“So, like you?” 

Mother chortles, really guffaws, shattering the supposed-to-be-already-shattered. 

“I’d just start at the beginning,” Mom says, steadfast and dutiful some kind of instructor now. ”If I were you, I’d be honest. I’d write honestly and know people would believe me.”