Mothered (7)

And something had been added to the strip of wall on the other side of the television.

Grace dropped her purse atop the entry table and kicked her shoes under it. She caught herself in the mirror mounted above the table and frowned. After lunch she’d gone back to work and voiced her interest in making some changes in her life (neglecting to mention the part about looking for a better salon). Freya, a friendly wisp of a thing, barely out of her teens, had quickly offered to do her hair. (Grace had used the same strategy herself on occasion, encouraging a new look to women who were bored of their lives.)

She hadn’t been able to stand in front of the mirror at the salon and scrutinize what Freya had done. Grace had always considered herself a modestly classy person; she liked nice things but not too nice. She dressed well but not too well. In many ways she was average—average height, average weight, average looks. Average intelligence, average ambitions. Grace found safety in her averageness; the assumptions people would make about her would be benign. That’s how she liked it. She was neither stuck up nor stupid. She could blend in almost anywhere, from a low-end cocktail party to a cookout. Never too frumpy and not too high maintenance. She was under the impression that she came off as an ordinary person who had her shit moderately together. Did this hairstyle still portray that?

Her former shoulder-length bob was now trimmed and angled so perfectly she might have thought Freya had used a protractor. Gone was her near-natural color with its ashy-blonde highlights. An alien head had been attached to her body, with ghostly hair as fair as a rodent’s, the bottom inch of it the scary pink of sightless eyes.

There was no question Freya had done a good job, but it was a style meant for someone else. The girls in the salon had gushed, but Grace was already thinking she’d redo it herself in a week or two. She sighed, wishing she didn’t have to step into her living room to confront the changes that had been made there too.

Directly opposite the front door were the stairs to the second level. To the right, the square dining room with its dark wood-like floor opened into a cramped kitchen; to the left was the rectangular living room, just wide enough to accommodate a sofa on one wall and a giant TV on the other. The archway at the far end made a loop of the first floor, passing the back door into the kitchen proper. The previous owner had blown out the living room’s back wall to double the size of the window that looked over the backyard. Even at dusk, it provided enough natural light to illuminate the additions to Grace’s decor.

She marched between the sofa and TV. “Did you hang these?”

It was a dumb question, but it was better than “Why the fuck did you consider it okay to put nails in my pristine wall without asking me?”

While Grace inspected the photographs—as if she’d never seen them and couldn’t understand what they depicted—her mother turned away from the screen long enough to say, “You didn’t have any pictures up.”

Not true. The wall above Grace’s sofa was adorned with a triptych of Miguel’s colorful, abstract paintings; his talents extended beyond his ability to delight little old ladies with his curling iron and blow-dryer. But she knew what her mother meant. Grace wasn’t one to hang family photographs, and her mother had taken it upon herself to rectify that.

“Why didn’t you just put these in your room?” Grace asked. There, she’d let Jackie hang whatever she wanted. This felt like a trespass.

Her show over, Jackie changed the channel. “What’s the problem? You can’t possibly object, she’s your sister.”

Grace shut her eyes for a moment, exhausted. She wanted to snatch the salty, buttery snack from her mother’s hands. She wanted her regular spot on the couch. She wanted Netflix or Hulu and not whatever crap Jackie was watching. “The problem isn’t that it’s my sister—it’s my wall.”

Her mother sniffled, studying her. She picked popcorn hulls out of her teeth. “What did you do to your hair?”

Neither issue was worth an argument. Grace gave up. “Are you hungry? Do you want some supper?”

“No thanks, I ate.”

Grace escaped to the kitchen, where, with Jackie out of sight, she felt a tiny bit less morose. Since she didn’t need to cook for two, she grabbed a Stouffer’s dinner from the freezer and shoved it in the microwave. She was still all sorts of crabby and didn’t fully know why. Everything. Nothing. And the photographs bothered her just as much as the nail holes. She loved her sister, but it was complicated. To keep life simpler, Grace endeavored not to think about Hope very often—which was easier to do without having her likeness hammered onto the wall.

As if to compete with, or balance, the three paintings, Jackie had hung three photos. They were in the other room, but Grace couldn’t stop seeing them. She was in one of the pictures, an enlarged snapshot where she was partially behind her sister and slightly out of focus (running away). The other two were professional portraits of Hope, with her trademark open-mouthed grin. Hope’s cerebral palsy had been severe, affecting nearly every part of her body. She used a motorized wheelchair to get around, and her tight jaw made it difficult for her to articulate words. But the spasms and poor muscle control didn’t affect her intellect; Young Grace believed her sister was a genius. Hope was mainstreamed (Grace accompanied her to school on the short bus), with an aide to help during her school day. She got straight As; Grace was lucky to get Bs.