I would rather roll my dice with Greta.
As I tell her no, I do not want to leave, a prevailing sense of helplessness comes over me. I do not want to be here, no. But there’s no home I want to be at, either. And no matter the school I attend or the bully in my class, I will still have my head attached at the top of my spine. I will still take my illness with me wherever I go. There’s no relocation that can solve what is wrong with me.
Other than that of the grave variety.
“Do you want to talk to Dr. Warten?”
“No,” I tell her. “And you really didn’t have to come.”
She drops my hand and sits back a little. I can’t tell what she is thinking, but I’m not surprised by what she does. She reaches for her purse, catching one of its straps and dragging it across the floor not because it weighs much, but because I suspect she feels the same kind of helplessness I do and impotence does tire a person right out. That she lights a cigarette in this apartment that isn’t her own will likely be forgiven considering the circumstances of her daughter, but I wonder if it would have occurred to her for even a second to ask permission. I wonder if Nick will resent the smoke. I wonder all kinds of things that are hardly relevant to my situation because I am overwhelmed by the issues at hand.
Still, no is the only answer I will give her right now. No, I don’t want to go home. No, I don’t want to go to a hospital. No, I don’t want to leave this dorm.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” she says on an exhale of smoke.
The secondhand intrusion of what she expels from her lungs makes my eyes water and my nose itch. I sneeze and sit up higher, no longer slouching.
“You don’t have to do anything with me.” I shake my head, as if that will dismiss everything: Phil the Pharmacist’s phone call to the school clinic, the nurse’s call here to the dorm and elsewhere on campus, the administrator’s call to my mother at work. “This is all a lot of nonsense.”
I try to sound adult. I try to sound secure. I create a repeating ticker tape of thoughts in my head that I am adult, I am secure, I know me better than everyone else. I tell myself to fucking concentrate on these statements and make them real, goddamn it. Otherwise, I’m going to lose my shot at talking with Strots as well as my exit stage left in the basement, which remains my ultimate goal.
“I’m taking my medicine.” I shrug. “I’m going to class. I’m happy here.”
I have not been taking my medicine, I missed class this morning because I fell into the Big Bang while sitting on my bed, I am unhappy here.
“You are?” she asks, covering all three lies at once.
“I am.”
She lets herself fall back so she is nearly lying down on Nick’s sofa. As she smokes and stares at me, I know she is reviewing old tapes in her head, the home movies not pleasant in the slightest. I regret this. I wish she had more of what she had no doubt hoped and dreamed for out of a daughter. Instead, she got me.
“Sarah,” she says softly, “you’re so much more than that shitty little town we live in.”
My mother does not swear. Ever. It’s the cheapest and easiest way for her to deny how cheap and easy she can sometimes be. And just as shocking, she’s used my given name twice now.
She exhales smoke from her un-lipsticked lips. “I know you got angry at me for sending that essay I found in your room to the admissions committee here. I get it. And I’ll tell you I’m honestly sorry for the invasion into your privacy. But I won’t apologize for the opportunity it got you. This place. These people…” She looks around and then sits forward again so she can pick up a book that’s lying on Nick’s coffee table. Turning the spine toward herself, she frowns. “An Artist of the Floating World. Ka-kazuo Ishi… who is this author? What’s it about?”
“Ishiguro,” I say. “And it’s an examination of postwar Japan and intergenerational conflict.”
“And how do you know all this?”
“I read it.”
“See?” she says as she tosses the book back on the table, the bang it lands with like the period at the end of her statement of proof. “You belong around people like this. You belong around books like that. Your mind is something else, Sarah.”
This is a conclusion I have heard before, usually from teachers, and always spoken in the same awe-tinged tone, as if I’ve done something remarkable to earn the IQ I happen to have been born with. As if that IQ in some way makes up for all problems that come along with the intelligence. Not for the first time, I want to tell someone who’s passing that pablum off on me that I would trade those high numbers for normal functioning ones in a heartbeat if I had the choice.
“And you even know what the book is about.” She exhales up to the ceiling this time. “Not just the plot, but what it means.”
I have to give her credit. There’s no undercurrent of envy or jealousy. I suspect this is because, given that she birthed me, she has a claim to fame on my brain: Even though I didn’t get this intelligence from her, I wouldn’t be here without her.
Or maybe that’s an unkind conclusion. She doesn’t look grasping in any way right now. She just looks exhausted. Confused, exhausted… and scared.
“It’s about an unreliable narrator,” I say as a way to apologize for thoughts she’s unaware I’m having. “And how an artist translates his life and actions into a present where he has culpability, but no accountability.”
“Huh?”
I nod to the coffee table. “The book.”
“Is it any good?”
“Some people consider it one of the great novels, so yes, it is.”
“See. I told you.”
My mother is seemingly unaware of possible parallels, and I’m not surprised when she doesn’t ask anything further about the novel. Though she will explore all manner of details concerning Hollywood’s elite and their revolving bedroom doors, she is uninterested in any literature whatsoever. This pick-and-choose is a little incongruous, given her upwardly mobile aspirations. You’d figure she’d prefer the binding of a hardcover over the flimsy staples down the center crease of an Us Weekly magazine, but this is a reminder to me that people are incongruous. None of us are all one thing or another, and sometimes our incompatibilities are at fundamental levels.
Except for Greta, of course. She seems very solid on what she is.
My mother looks around for an ashtray, as if everyone smokes so there must be one here. When she doesn’t find what she seeks, at least she doesn’t ash on Ishiguro’s masterpiece. She gets up and goes over to the sink in the galley kitchen, leaning her hip on the counter and tapping her cigarette into the drain.
“You’re better than I am,” she says in a small voice. “I wish I were like you, but I’m not and I never will be. What I can do, however, is get you where you need to be, where the education is, where the opportunities are. And that is here.”
I blink. There has never been any hint of her thinking like this, and I am not referencing the education part.
“I’m not better than you,” I tell her. Because I know what she just said is true, and she has suddenly become incredibly vulnerable to me. I will never abuse an underbelly. Not when it comes to my mother, not when it comes to anybody. I’m vulnerable all the time, everywhere, because of the way my brain malfunctions. I’m too familiar with how an exposed weakness gets kicked.