Little Things

My mother is washing her face in the bathroom. The door’s ajar. Between the framework, I see her brown face, and its reflection in the mirror. Water clings to her sun-worked skin. A childhood spent in Hawaii gave her empty hours after school and a patchwork complexion.

I think: I could walk out the door, through the living room strewn with trash and broken bottles, out onto the street, and never look back. I would take my red backpack, the one with the chocolate stains. Pack some books, paper and pen. While walking along the city streets, among the diffuse, and the barbed-wire fences with plastic bags tangled in the spikes, fighting against the wind — like enslaved birds — I would commit to memory everything I have seen. I’d fashion the collected memories into a rope, a strong cord to secure my past to my present.

My mother’s face is red in the morning, the color of an electric burner. Her house is filled with the things she loves; broken picture frames, mason jars, used ketchup bottles with grime stuck to the insides. Furniture found abandoned on other people’s curbsides, bags and bags of emergency food that she gets for free from Craigslist. Her possessions restore the life she never had, fill the cracks left by a childhood of neglect.

As a kid, stepping over all the garbage for a glass of water in the middle of the night, I once found her throwing items into two bins. A red bin and a white bin. Watching from within a hood of darkness, holding onto the wall for support, I watched the creature work. Tediously, unassuming. Her eyes stretched into slits, liquid piercing the underarms of her long-sleeve nightgown.

“Mother,” I ventured, voice sparse as clouds. “What are you doing?”

The woman’s hands stopped. She kept her back to me. Her shoulders forced her weight forward, contorting her body.

“I’m organizing,” she said, shaking me off, getting back to work.

I went back to bed with a dry mouth. She never looked at me, so she never saw the tears springing from my eyes.

When my mother is sleeping during the day, I walk from room to room in tennis shoes, avoiding the jagged crumbs and glass shards that peg my toes, make me bleed. I close every door, cabinet and window. My mother’s mother, a woman with fine gray hair and eyes to match, likes to whisper just above the smoke of her cigarettes, “something’s wrong with everyone in the family. Your mother and her things, her brother and his drinking, you,” she stares at me, her eyes dividing me into pieces, “and your need for confinement.”

Some kids make their bed, I make my room into a box. Shut the desk drawer so tight that I have trouble opening it in the morning. Firmly place the lid to the old card box that holds my special things, birthday cards, jewelry found on the street — I need to hear the click of wood against wood — repeatedly. After slipping beneath the covers, I’ll get up two or three more times, eliminating any roundness evident in the room by shutting everything resembling a door.

Outside, the snow crumbles beneath my feet, pulling at the rubber soles of my shoes and sending chills through me. The sun is spilt paint streaking the sky, lending warmth to arbitrary stretches of street. I shiver, the water in my eyes threatening to freeze over.

People, each their own cubicle, rush past, building up a rustling wind. No one meets my eyes. Their numb faces stare into space, build sculptures out of the air.

I turn at the bodega, past the rack of newspapers and magazines advertising porn stars. I walk up to a small red townhouse. The steps are salted, swept clean. After a short knock, a boy appears, the surprise cracking his warm face. Residue clings to his cheekbones. Flames are probably brewing in the fireplace.

His surprise is underwhelming. “Chloe? Come, come.”

We sit in the kitchen. He puts on the kettle. I take off my coat and lay it across the counter. For a moment, he busies himself at the sink, in the pantry. Would I like anything to eat? How about some water? No? Alright, then.

At last, he comes and sits with me. It would have been enough, him just sitting besides me in the warm kitchen, the light half heartedly dripping through the window, making our skin dewy. But he breaks the moment.

“You can stay awhile, but not like last time. Mom doesn’t understand why you stayed so long. And really, you should go home and work things out.”

The kettle sings quietly. He jumps up and pours out two mugs of tea. Setting it down in front of me, I wrap my hands around the blue china. The ceramic burns me. It fills me up, like the balloons given out as favors at children’s parties.

He peels away my hand with his fingers. I try and act normal, put my hands on my knees and smile a little. The corners of my lips don’t quite break into an arch.

“I just wanted to go somewhere warm. The heat’s off at my house. You know how my mom is? She just wears her coats and sleeps all day. I’d go crazy if I did that.”

He nods, and his silence breaks me.

We finish our tea. The light changes. Shadows emerge. I pull my coat on, take time fumbling with the zipper. As I walk out the door, he grabs hold of my shoulder.

“Want to come by after school on Monday? Study sesh?” I nod, the picture of complacency.

The snow is dirtied on the way home, melted. The outline of bootprints turn the sidewalk into a checkerboard.

Outside my house, I see a box overflowing with kitchen appliances. I rub my eyes, trying to dislodge the numbing stillness that overtakes me. Before I can slide my key into the lock, Mother opens the door.

“Come, help me bring the stuff inside.”

I turn around, grab the box, and hurry in. It’s no warmer inside than out in the wintry streets. I place the box besides the piles and piles of junk. Ignoring my mother’s rummaging, I pick out a candle from a mountain of various jars of used wax. I light it on the stove, hold the candle at an angle and patiently wait for the wick to catch.

I sit cross-legged, in my coat and shoes, huddled over the puff of light I placed on the floor. I count to three, resisting the urge to close all the doors. As the urgency bottled inside me increases, I stick my thumb just above the flame, allow the fire to lap at my flesh. I can’t even feel it.

“Chloe! Help me organize!” My mother’s voice barely penetrates me. Sunken in my neediness to shape the world exactly how I need it, with no openness, with no room to fall through.

The underside of my thumb turns black as my foot, by itself, as though its own entity, separate from my desires, kicks over the candle. The flame claps out.

My mother’s voice calls out again. In a minute, I will go to her. And together, we will organize her things, compose the world in the particular way that will enable her to breathe for another day.

And I will close all the doors.