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For my children, and all children
ONE.
Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her.
Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.
I’m Chava in the garden, freshly aware of my nakedness. Can’t let Mother see what lowly thing I’ve become.
* * *
One day soon, I’ll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.
Tonight, she can’t sleep. She wants me to strap her fourteen-year-old body to my chest with a sling, the way I did when she was a baby. Her need is heavy, like a secret.
“Yoyo?” she calls quietly. “You awake?”
I conjure up a fake snore, but when she turns to leave, I flick on the bedside lamp. At least Mama owned up to her cruelty, would say it straight: I don’t want nothing to do with you right now.
“What’s up?” I ask Elijah, and she shrugs. “Want some company?” She shrugs again, her hands obscured in the sleeves of her too-big sweatshirt.
My ability to dredge up love from the paltry reserves is one that comes and goes. Let tonight be enough to undo all my sins.
I give Elijah a scalp massage. I warm her up a mug of oat milk steeped with lavender. I run her a bath. I make her a snack. I make her another snack when she doesn’t eat the first one because it’s too wet, which means I put too much sugar-free blueberry jam on it. If I’d put on less, she might have accused it of being too dry, and once it’s too dry, it’s impossi ble to add more jam later, because “that’s just wrong.” In the end, I make her a bowl of ramen with crispy chopped mushrooms and kimchi.
A mother from shul says I do too much for Elijah, that if I keep coddling her she’ll never learn to stand on her own. My mother made me pack my own lunch from the age of four—and any time I woke in the night to ask her for a cup of water, she’d say, Ezri, you know where the tap is. Teddy bear in tow, I’d army-crawl to the kitchen, low to the ground so the ghost wouldn’t find me. She always did.
Despite all the coddling denied me as a child, I never became the independent island of my mother’s dreams. I’m a baby bird, chirping for anyone at all to spit food into my mouth.
If I make Elijah too many snacks, it’s because food-making is effortless compared to the real task of child-rearing: emotional presence. I don’t give my daughter too much because I have nothing to give.
I’m not even her parent, some days. Too many times Elijah has squeezed my shoulder, shaken me, and said, Yoyo, I need some money to get food from the shops. I ignore her, no longer her yoyo in those moments, but instead a vessel of ghosts.
Used to my dissociative episodes, Elijah knows when to reach into my wallet and get my debit card herself.
After midnight, when Elijah still can’t sleep, I watch TV with her in her bed. True crime. Something grisly about a dead teenager or several. We both find solace in the inevitability of broken girls. Something to count on.
My youngest sister, Emmanuelle, asks how my daughter and I can stomach such ugliness. I tell her we watch the sensationalized breakdowns of people’s lives in the same spirit we do puzzles. By the end, we hope to piece it all together. We cling to the promise inherent in the genre’s title, that we will find something true here.
Not that any of these series ever deliver. This isn’t because they lack in true things to say but because we already know the true things they have to say. What we are actually hoping for is a different truth, a different answer to the question: Why did he do it? How did the wife not know? Why did the mother allow this? Why weren’t they watching more closely? How, in such a crowded café, did no one see, did no one stop this untethering of blood from body?
The answer to all these questions, of course, is that human beings are not very good. I say this not misanthropically but with the realization that we, through apparent dominance over other animals, have crowned ourselves kings, when in reality we are ill equipped to handle the basic demands of life on this scale. We are forest creatures who’ve wandered into the man-made road, eyes frozen and wide.
My mother had a print of Jenny Holzer’s 1982 Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise on the wall of her study. I comment on it for the first time when I am thirteen, shoulder pressed up against the doorframe.
Abuse of power surprises me every time, actually, I say, full of bravado.
Really? she says, and her reading glasses slip down her nose. She sees through my attempt at teenage indifference, knows my earnest heart.
You telling me you don’t know by now to expect pain? says Mama.
I lived in a house devoted to my breaking apart, but I refused to be wrong in front of Mama.
I guess I hope every time it will be different.
I wait for Mama to mock my confession. A woman dedicated to relentless self-reliance, she’s built her three children to be invulnerable.
Instead, she returns her attention to her computer screen, types an email, or an editorial letter, or her book. When I go to leave, she calls my name.
Yeah, I say. I mean, yes, ma’am.
Don’t forget to take the chicken out the freezer.
TWO.
I haven’t heard from my real mother in months, not since an email she sent last October asking to talk, but Nightmare Mother, Ghost Mother—always there in Mama’s absence—texts me now. Children, the message reads, I miss your screams. Come play.
Never satisfied bringing ruin once or even twice, Nightmare Mother sends the message several more times. The text bubbles stack one on top of the next like blocks in a toddler’s tower.
After vomiting, I upload a screencap of Nightmare Mother’s threat to my and my sisters’ group chat.
What tf am I looking at, asks Eve.
These texts just got sent to me from Mama’s number.
Okay. But Mama didn’t send those, says Emmanuelle.
I know.
Neither of my sisters says anything more. I shove my phone into my pocket, and the tiny hole in my joggers becomes a big hole. My sisters and I speak daily—we are close— but it’s a closeness that dissolves quickly into loathing on my part.
I run the tap and stick my mouth underneath, gulp down water till I’m half choking. Seconds later, I have to run to the kitchen bin to let the water back out, and with it, a glut of fresh, green bile. It’s the same color as the Goosebumps logo.
I wish Emmanuelle was dead and I wish Eve was dead. They might as well be if they’re not going to answer me.
My phone dings, finally, and I slide it out of my torn pocket, ready to receive whatever comfort, whatever regurgitated worm flesh, my sisters have to feed me in this moment of obvious catastrophe. Their words will be derisory and remind me only that I am alone, but they will provide fuel for my self-pity, which is its own comfort.
But it’s not my sisters who make my phone buzz and buzz. I scan the screen to find more Nightmare Mother. She has evolved, become technologically adept like one of the digital monstrosities in those late-nineties, early-2000s horror films. Pulse. feardotcom. In a first-season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow’s anonymous new chat pal turns out to be a demon.
I was a child on the internet in 1999, so this plot barely feels made up. Willow’s internet friend, Malcolm, manifests himself, kidnaps her, and declares his love. A version of this has happened to me at least twice.
Being well versed in the specific tropes of a genre should save me from worry, but knowledge has never saved anyone.
My phone dings and dings and dings again. I turn it si lent, afraid the noise will wake Elijah in this house of tissue-paper walls.
* * *
I need a cup of tea—something black and smoky to jerk me into action, competency—but I pinch rosehip and hardy hibiscus into a mug instead because that’s what’s in front of me.
Max, my therapist, once had me make a list of five activities that could ground me when I’m feeling away and unreal, like the world is a film set and I’m the animatronic baby being fake-sung to sleep by a C-list actress, my electronic eyelids clicking, malfunctioning, until one of the film crew sets me to the side and replaces me with a double.
I am bad at homework and wrote only one item out of the assigned five. Make tea, loose.
I turn on the kettle, startling at the turbulence of its process. It whirs too loudly for how new it is, like something dead has nested inside and is trying to heave itself out. It wants a proper burial, to go home.
This house lures in animals with a death wish. Last spring, a skylark made her nest in the crawl space beneath the ground floor, where slugs ate her hatchlings. I witnessed the tiny slaughter live when damp-rotted floorboards gave way beneath me and I sank into the under-house den.
It’s not so far off, then, to think something dead lives in my kettle. The water that I pour from it has tasted off for months. Metallic, like blood. Every day, minuscule flakes of what could be dried skin appear in my morning brew. Online, they say it’s limescale, but I’m not reassured.
I pour water over the leaves and the tea darkens red-purple. Ribbons of steam warm my stirring hand. My spoon clinks against the ceramic. The sour-sweet fragrance of dried buds and flowers slithers inside me.
Moments like this, only ever moments, I pretend I’m in a little cottage in the English countryside. The stove is the hearth. The unfinished concrete floors are stone. The dead, devoured skylarks from last year aren’t dead at all, but chickens I raise in the back garden.
My house does not let me linger in this fantasy long. I open the back door to let in some fresh air and the knob half comes off. A light drizzle wets the world outside, and I fear that even this meager shower will do my putrescent shack in.
Eighteen Heathcock Way is sinking, God help her, in that invisible way all things do. Rusted pails catch her leaks, but in the end, nothing will prevent her subsumption into Earth’s mud belly. Land is not dirt. It is esophagus, stomach, bowels. A mid-terrace Victorian in bad repair does not fare well on top of the chomping mouth of Leviathan, nor do any of us.
The first time my sister Eve visited here, she clocked the significance of my housing choice right away. Lips tightly drawn, she eyed the peeling wallpaper lining the decayed walls of the vestibule, beneath which lay a different peeling wallpaper.
So. Running away to England wasn’t enough. You had to disavow all Mama and Pop’s bullshit, Eve said. She looked impeccable, her Afro-textured hair slicked into a top bun that, despite the English weather, had not managed to frizz at the edges.
Though she’s technically younger than me as the middle-born child, Eve slid into the role of wise, bossy eldest years ago when it became clear I could not do the part justice.
I get it, Ezri. Fuck Mama. Fuck Pop. Fuck the Oak Creek Estates. Fuck gated communities. Fuck bullshit elitist private schools. Fuck capitalism. But here? This isn’t cute. You’re going to get asbestos. You’re gonna die of pneumonia like Brittany Murphy, God rest her.
Eighteen Heathcock Way is the opposite in every way from the house my sisters and I grew up in. Narrow, wet, rotting, and old, 18 flaunted its failings. The palatial suburban new-build of my youth had been a rotting thing, too, only it was a rot no one but my family was ever allowed to see.
The tangible failures of 18 are a relief compared to my childhood home’s invisible tyrannies. Mold blackens her walls, fixtures, and tiles. Mice nibble at her wiring. Nothing like the cursed McMansion my sisters and I fled.
Mama and Pop have a brand. That brand is Black Excellence. It’s the Talented Tenth. It is perfectly coiffed kids in a giant house no cracker ever thought a family “like this” could afford. Perfect lawn. Perfect children.
There is nothing Black or excellent about 18 Heathcock Way. Poor Mama and her disappointed dreams. To think of her eldest wunderkind jobless, sick, genderbroken, surviving off disability benefits, and living here of all places. My God, what would the neighbors think?
Upstairs, a door slams—the wind, I’m sure. In this house, it’s always the wind, but my phone jolts at the same time in a way that feels cosmic, the past reaching out to me to say you can take the faggot out the house but this house has legs and will find you.
I pick up my phone and read the new message, this time from Eve. You need to come home, she says. We’ve booked you a flight for tomorrow.
THREE.
Mother is God, I’m her whim made from clay. Mother is God, I’m Earth’s broken rib. Over and over again, she says: Child, this is paradise. I say, Mother, I’ve never heard of a paradise with a talking serpent, nor one where I must daily encounter food I’m forbidden to eat. I may be newly made, but even I know apples are to be consumed. They’re on the list of WeightWatchers foods worth one point.
It’s 9:00 p.m. Today I’ve eaten a bowl of Special K with skim milk and nothing else. I could devour fifteen apples before midnight and still burn away my body.
Mother. Mother. I promise I am learning. I am learning not to eat. I am learning to become a sliver.
* * *
When my sisters and I were children, our games of hide-and-seek could last hours. Once, Eve lost me for the space of a day. When she found me in the attic, a room I couldn’t have entered on my own—I was too short to reach the pull string that opened the hatch in the ceiling—she knew not to ask how I found my way up there. I would say, I just did. Or, I don’t know. Or, the woman without a face reached her arm down and pulled me up, up, up, like I was a weed being plucked from her otherwise perfect garden.
Or: I didn’t hide in the attic at all. I hid in the closet by the front door, but then I was in the attic anyway, inside a suitcase, and I awoke screaming, and then you finally came for me.
Mother is God and our house, our strange house, is the Garden, big and teeming with things that I’ve been tasked with naming but cannot. There are words for walls and tiles and banisters but not words for what it means when walls, tiles, and banisters savor the taste of your collapse.
The world unfolds according to a logic most strange when you’re a child, and it wouldn’t do any good to try to parse it. If a house has claws, a house has claws. This is another fact in your database of facts: oatmeal is sticky and worms are the same pink-gray color of Grandmother’s tongue and winged insects fly unless you clap one between your palms as hard as you can and then it’s still, still as a girlboy under xer blankets hiding from the figure watching in xer room.
* * *
At Saturday’s WeightWatchers meeting, we discuss the importance of understanding the root of our weight-loss goals. It’s not enough to want to disappear; one needs a good reason for wanting to disappear. At eleven years old, I write that I need to be a sliver because slivers fit between cracks and if I could fit inside a crack, troubles would never find me.
People love slivers. If a sliver were to happen in a life that looked like mine, that life would change its ways for the itty-bitty sliver. It would look at the sliver and think, my Lord, what a beautiful sliver. What a charming, funny, smart sliver! Something about this sliver is just! Irresistible! Nothing like that other child, that non-sliver child.
The mothers of slivers aren’t always sighing, always wondering, What to do, what to do, what to do.
A sliver is so small and so convenient that it is no trouble to carry it with you everywhere you go. No one need ever set the sliver down to relieve the burden of carrying it, and then, while rushing off to the next thing, forget to pick it back up.
When I was six, I lay down for a nap on the couch and woke up inside the oven. Mother is God. I’m Sodom and Gomorrah. No ounce of good left in me. Run.
FOUR.
I return home because it’s the siblingly thing to do. This is how I manage in a crisis. I refer to abstract models of good people in my head and do what they’d do. I become these people. Sometimes these people become me. When I’m no longer fit for purpose, they say, Shhh, Ezri, go to sleep, then live my life for me.
Good Sibling is not a part I take on willingly, but I’ve been backed into a corner by my sisters. Out of duty, I hush the outcry from the most tender parts of me who would rather drink lye than go to Mama and Pop’s house, to Nightmare Mother’s house.
Another faction, less savory, roves my insides, too. Desper ate husks, they run toward ghosts, not away, creeping from their crevices in the night for a chance to be with Nightmare Mother. If I could, I’d hang every one, snap their necks with rope. I have tried.
Elijah and I don’t have long before we need to leave for the airport. I take out the rubbish and wash the dishes. I empty the leak buckets and return them to their places. There are clothes moldering in the laundry machine, way past saving, so I bin them. Next comes emptying the fridge of perishables, half of them already gone to rot.
