Mothered (8)

Everyone who saw Hope in photos remarked on how happy she looked. She appeared to be grinning almost all the time, though Grace knew the darker side of her sister’s personality. The smile on Hope’s face was an unavoidable contortion, not constant happiness. And when her glee was intentional, it had usually meant trouble.





6


“Do you mind if I switch over to Netflix?” Grace asked as she carried in her steaming dinner.

“No, go ahead.” Jackie handed her the remote and moved her feet to make more room on the sofa.

Grace sat at the other end, a foreign place where the cushion was noticeably firmer. She brought up the next episode of Schitt’s Creek, which she’d been rewatching, and ate with her eyes glued to the screen. The combination of TV and food tended to make her spacey, but Jackie’s laughter interrupted her trance. Realizing her mom was enjoying the show, Grace took a second to catch her up on the characters. They ended up watching two episodes before Grace got up to take her dirty fork and empty dish to the kitchen.

“Need anything?”

“Refill my water?” Jackie held out her glass. “Thanks, hon.”

Hon? Whatever. Grace felt better. Maybe it was the starchy goodness of the fettuccini Alfredo, one of her favorite comfort foods. Or that her mother had not, in fact, hogged the TV or made Grace feel out of place in her own living room. Quite the opposite, it had been nice—really, genuinely nice—to sit together, relaxed, laughing. Had they ever done that?

Grace was starting to see her mother through new eyes. It was easier to conclude now, after years of self-sufficiency, that much of her mom’s snapping and impatience had been a result of exhaustion or stress. Jackie was supposed to have been a stay-at-home mom with twin girls—that’s what her fiancé had promised. At thirty-three, she’d been working for most of her life and machinist Paul No-Last-Name wanted to be the Man of the House. Everyone had a fantasy, and his might have come to fruition if Grace and Hope hadn’t arrived before their scheduled C-section.

In those days, cerebral palsy was still often attributed to a birth injury rather than brain maldevelopment, so Jackie had lugged around a heavy handbag of sin, as “birth injury” was somehow always the mother’s fault. Many times Grace had heard her mom mutter—to relatives, to gawking strangers at the park—“Is it my fault my vagina got the one out too quickly and the other too slowly?” Daddy Dearest apparently thought so. Or maybe Paul No-Last-Name just couldn’t handle the reality of being told his second daughter would never walk. Whatever his excuse, he reneged on his promises and left when Grace and Hope were a few months old.

Jackie went back to her job as a certified nursing assistant, working all kinds of crazy hours in a nursing home, while a neighbor babysat. Hope was fairly easy to manage when she was little and easy to pick up; as she got older, it got harder. The neighbor ladies never openly accused Hope of spitting up food or peeing on them on purpose (Grace knew her sister thought such antics were hilarious). But when they stopped being available, Jackie had to accept cheap babysitting help from a trio of questionably acceptable girls. Grace hadn’t thought much about it then, but leaving Hope’s safety in the hands of possibly stoned teenagers was probably stressful (although their bad attitudes were a better match for Hope’s bullshit). And after caring for old people who had become as needy as babies, Jackie would come home where there was always more caretaking to be done. She never had Netflix and chill.

Grace remembered the eye rolls and clenched teeth of her mother’s perpetual annoyance. And she remembered her own resentment, all the laundry and cleaning Grace had been expected to do, the endless hours she, herself a child, put into entertaining or helping her sister. (At best the rotating babysitters were on the phone; at worst they made sure Hope and Grace got home from school okay, and then hung out on someone’s stoop and smoked with their friends.) Grace had never given a lot of thought to the quantity of Jackie’s work, her waking hours consumed by changing diapers and feeding people. No wonder she’d sought a change of scenery—populated by moderately well-off gentlemen—the first chance she got.

For so many years Grace had misdiagnosed her mother’s despair and taken it personally. But it seemed possible now—likely—that Jackie hadn’t been tired of being a mother; she had simply been tired. And maybe it wasn’t completely her mom’s fault that she and Grace had never had a chance to fully bond. And maybe it wasn’t too late. That, in Grace’s mind, was a more important thing to rectify than an absence of family photos. If the pandemic had taught her nothing else, she knew that life—a life, or even normal existence—could disappear with little warning.

“Another episode?” Grace asked as she returned to the living room with her mom’s topped-off water glass. It was time to check on her damsels, but Grace resisted. “Or I could trim your hair?”

“Does it look that bad?” Jackie touched it gingerly, like it was made of brittle glass.

Grace laughed. “No, but I could give it a little more shape. Something sophisticated.”

The stylist in her couldn’t help it; Grace started fingering her mom’s hair, getting a feel for its texture, thickness, the way it grew out from the crown of her head.

“It won’t look like yours, will it?”

Before Grace could get insulted, she saw the smile tugging on her mom’s lips. “No, I promise.”