When I got to a certain age, though I was unaware of its certainty, my mother, with concern, took me aside and said, You are going to have to learn what I do, and have done, to know how to appreciate women in all of their habits and performances. It was too much for her to be a wife and a mother. I was only a son. We could split the load. She led me into the bed and coaxed me into that crevice of a place beside my father, and instructed: caress him, finger the hair of his chest, wipe the sweat off his shoulders, synchronize your breathing. He was a sound sleeper. The things I did to him, the things I did for her, were expressions of love.
My father required constant upkeep. His machines had to be cleaned at the filters and tubes. His food had to be cut and chewed in such a precisely sanitary way. His sheets had to be changed daily; filth he helplessly expunged sullied the puritanical pillow-whites. There were two gears in the hoisting device that always got stuck whenever mother set him down. He’d moan for help, the sound echoing through the ventilation. I’d quickly sprint from the laundry to the bedroom, rubbers to my elbows, to respond to his worldly discomforts and lull him into calm.
He was an important man once. Gold watches and cufflinks remained by his bedside. You don’t get to be served in your bodily squalor without having once been something of charm and perfume. My mother had memories of these times she would relay to me to remind me of why we acted: hope for his recovery. She thought this was the most valuable education I could receive. At least the insurance company provided us with measly compensation if we didn’t delegate the work to hired help. Family moves the process along quicker, their scripture explained.
My mother felt it appropriate for us to obey them. She came from a long line of mothers and believed it destiny that I, her only child, should live it on. She instructed to me in all the possible ways of making eye contact communicate. I was a slow learner. My mornings were spent practicing suppleness and moisture. I didn’t have the right material, but I became more elastic from her warmth. Eventually, she began to view us as sisters. She’d give me her barrettes for my curls and adjust my garters for tightness. She smothered me with kisses for compliance to her whims. I can tell you anything, she’d say. You’re perfect for this life. She never expected me to reply.
There were only moments of hope in those stagnant years. Once, when he was in the middle of a drooling dream, my hand correcting his airway, he mumbled, Ribeye. I knew it was the word; I felt it in my fingers. She stayed up the next night, listening, struggling to parse any semblance of semantics beneath the beeping of the devices. This caused us to save for silent machines; we ate rice and beans for months. When we finally had them installed, he had regressed. Mother couldn’t admit how close to death he was. Age played him loose, skin hung off his frame like a Christmas sweater. She insisted their best years were yet to come. But she had withered into the winter of her life. I wasn’t young myself anymore. I had become a man despite my daily habits. She saw more of him in me, deep under the foundation and the mascara. She now wanted me to comb my hair back. To flaunt where I was receding. I still saw life in her eyes, stomped dull by crows’ feet. There was arrested youth beneath her forehead creases.
She had a request for me. She knew she couldn’t keep me for much longer. She wanted one night: Hire a sitter and take her out to their old spots. She missed the parts of town her resettled countrymen inhabited. They were so far from the basement apartment we lived in. We stopped at every historic cloth-napkinned meat-and-sauce shop. The driver complimented both of us. He said that we looked from another time. I wore that of my progenitor, generous portions of black wool, slack, leaving room in the waist for the wine and the meals. In the rear-view mirror, I looked just like him. She told me I was a fine piece, too good to waste on others. Her life’s work was spent that evening, on rare beef, French pinot, and chocolate as dark as sin. She slipped me the money to pay the bill, keeping it a secret from herself. I tipped as if I hadn’t eaten in decades.
When it came time for the night to end, she got frantic. I can’t go back, she said. My life is blooming into the new. You understand. You’re just like me.
But me? I haven’t known anything else. This is my pedigree. There isn’t a time I wasn’t under the influence of benevolent authority, encouraged to do what was best for the greater good. And it has brought me more than what my mother intended. I’ve subsisted on spareness. I have catered to endless needs, making hors d’oeuvres out of my emotional excesses. I know what it is to be consumed with responsibility.
And I know how to wait.
Because all I have is time.
Jack Donnelly is a writer from Toronto. His work has been featured in journals across Canada, including echolocation, longcon, CV2, and others. He is currently working on his first novel.
Born Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 1996, to a Basque Seperatist and a Minnesotan hockey player, Jon Iñaki’s work expands a lifelong practice in cartooning into performance and video, dealing in formalist questions of pattern, disconnection, and delusion both personal and societal. They studied at the Yukon School of Visual Arts before completing OCADu’s Bachelors of Design in Illustration. They were a recipient of a BMO Premiere Œuvres award and a semifinalist for an Adobe Design Achievement Award. Their forthcoming book Strange Attractor is a meditation on paranoia and objects through the fringe community of “alternative archaeology”. Their work is online at www.AdequateWebsite.com