the mamas
by Aliza Wyman
Cousin, you with the tapered waist, long legs, flat stomach, the envy of my youth. All the genes that had done me dirty came out to look good on you. Until you opened your mouth and then it sounded just as if you had marshmallows jammed up your nose. Your voice, always, even when you were screaming sounding like a snuffed fire. We were thirteen. A blue butterfly jewel glinted in the dimple of your nose because your mama had let you get it done, even though you needed special permission. You fiddled with it constant, sitting at your grandmother’s anniversary party with your fingers plugged up your nostril, still somehow glamourous with your Hepburn legs poking out the bottom of your cut-off shorts. And me, in my sundress, potato-pale and round, always, wishing we were small again, back when I didn’t know where you ended and I started.
Your mama got excommunicated before you ever met her. She doesn’t look like you, even though you came from her body. Her with her wide face, thick arms, all you have in common is that same slow way of speaking, that same propensity for misspelling words in all your Facebook rants. Your mama looks stalwart, that’s the word for it. Always did, even in her Princess Diana veil, walking down the aisle of a stranger’s church. Your daddy was a divorcé. The Catholics, our people, wouldn’t have her anymore. Your grandma almost didn’t go to the wedding. She clucked around the house the week before, my mama said, praying for your mama’s redemption, like your mama was sitting on the edge of purgatory, just dipping her toes in the hellfire and we all had to pitch in to drag her back.
Your daddy is a rich man, a banker with slicked back hair and an ironic paunch to his stomach that makes him look pregnant just about all the time. He has declared bankruptcy twice. I have only seen him just as many times. He is never home. You grow up without him.
My daddy wrinkles his nose, calls your father a yes man, whipped, when your mama installs a pool in the backyard. When she buys three dogs, three kayaks, three of everything. Your mama, once an overlooked daughter, wants everything split straight down the middle for you and your siblings.
“You have to put your woman in her place,” my daddy says. “You can’t let her run the show.”
But you seem happy. And my mama brings me and my brother over to your house while my daddy is at work to go swimming in the above ground pool. Your house is castle big and I lay on my back in the deep end counting all the windows, until you pinch my toes, tell me not to stare anymore. Our mamas chat on the white lawn chairs. My mama with her back stiff in her ankle length jeans in hot weather, never fully relaxed. And your mama sprawled with a twisted tea in a tall glass, ice clinking, lemon rinds bobbing, her knees like elephant heads, large and dented, brutal but bare beneath her swimsuit. She is at home.
Your mama put a chemical in the pool. When my brother pees himself his butt turns purple, staining his trunks and everyone knows it was him. We run, screaming, me and you out of the water, towards the playscape, through the woodchips in our bare feet, you holding my hand. And my mama on the steps of the deck, blushing red, uncomfortable like she’d been the one to have the accident all along. Your mama laughing, the sound echoing off the trees, sounding like god, slapping her ugly knees.
Your grandmother had arthritis so bad, she couldn’t get up out of her chair without a little help and a walker. Fingers bent back, tree root swollen, knees like dinner plates. Her jaw a grinding stone, spitting out words, careful and labored, only ever rarely in English. We lived in fear of her as children, hid under tables, between chair legs, afraid she would look at us or touch us and what she had would rub off on us and become the world’s largest game of freeze tag, our feet turning gnarled, stuck to the carpet too. But at twelve, your mama drops you off for the afternoon and you help the old woman to and from the bathroom. Your long, tapered arms lift her on and off the toilet. The crucifix eyes you from the wall, the Price is Right cheers in loop on the TV to the tune of her French records, scratched on the victrola in the kitchen.
Non, je ne regrette rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
Your dust rag runs over framed pictures of when your grandmother was young and looked like you, in her little bridal suit. For the first time in your life, you feel like something might be chasing you, something with long teeth, and hot breath on the back of your neck. You sprint to my house after, throwing rocks at my window, just so I’ll stop studying and come down to look at you. You drag me under the back porch, to our secret place, where the light slats across our skin in sharp prison bars. This is our confessional, where we go when you have something profound and itching to say that we don’t want anyone else to overhear.
“What?” I ask.
And you don’t look at me, but at your shoes, the sunbaked dog shit stuck between the gravel. Your bottom lip quivers. I’ve never known you to be left speechless.
“What?”
“It’s coming,” you say. “It’s gonna get all of us.”
“What is?”
But now you’re crouching, hands on your knees, gasping for breath, like you are drowning. Scaring me.
“I don’t want anybody to wipe my ass okay?” you say, standing up, snapping.
You could see the future and it didn’t mean anything to you, but a sharp decline, a quick drop to losing everything, even your body, every sip of freedom.
“Let’s not talk about it,” I say. “It happens to other people.”
“We’re never going to get old,” you say, holding out your pinky finger. “Swear it.”
I hook my finger through yours, your palm sweating, hands shaking.
“Promise.”
You teach me what it means to be angry. Eminem CD cases on the floor of your room, his voice spitting out your stereo and you laying on your stomach on your mattress, thumping your foot in time.
“Doesn’t he get it just right?”
I don’t know what to say. We are thirteen. I am not allowed to listen to music with swears in it. I have been dragged to no less than three Carrie Underwood concerts and sat in the audience, bored, while she sang about babies and cheating boyfriends. But none of those songs sparked this, delved down to the molten river I kept wrapped up under my skin.
“We have to keep the volume down,” I say.
“What’s your mama gonna do about it?”
Sudden panic clenches around my throat, hands gripping the bedspread because you didn’t know, she could take you away from me. They, my parents, did it all the time, cut relatives off, like the family tree was thing that needed pruning, like there wasn’t enough sun for all of us to grow in. It would be quiet too, with no dramatic break, no catharsis or closure, just a silent drifting and the muffled sound of my screams.
“Don’t you like it?” you ask me.
Your lips flipped his misogyny, turned it into testimony. Everything Em said about a woman, you made it sound like it happened to you, or it would, soon. Your rapping was a tight-tooth prophecy and it scared me.
“It’s just noise.”
Summer, now and we’re running down the sidewalk of your cul de sac, manicured neighborhood on Razor scooters. No helmets. We’re still planning on dying young, long before we ever start looking anything like either of our mamas. You’d had me spit shake on that, saliva glistening on the inside of your palm. The sun warm on our shoulders, the houses one after another exactly alike except for the numbers on the mailboxes. We stop at seventeen, where the grass grows up green and a statue of a tiny man in a jockey uniform stands holding a shattered lantern by the front stoop. A boy lives here, a basketball hoop in the driveway, a nerf gun threaded in the lawn, mud splattered and forgotten.
You sigh real heavy, say, “This is it.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that we were running towards something.
I don’t have a chance to ask you what, before you raise both your fists in the air, your middle fingers extended. I try to catch you by the wrist. Cars passing in the street, anyone can see us.
“What are you doing?”
And you looking like, you want to bite my outstretched hand, but still not putting your arm down, instead your voice real dead saying. “Do you know what that boy did to me?”
I shake my head, tugging on your shoulder. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go home.”
I turn my back before you get the chance to tell me.
I am at college, we are twenty when you post your first maternity photo. You, in a sports bra, standing in your mama’s bathroom mirror. My heart stops and I want to call you up to ask you if you remember the way our shins were bruised always that summer, where the Razor scooters caught us on the inside of our legs. I want to ask you if you remember the spit on your hand, our fingers intertwined, promising--no we would never grow old.
But I haven’t spoken to you in years. I took our vow too serious and left so you wouldn’t have to see me grow up. I don’t speak to anyone from the old days now. I did not even go to your grandmother’s funeral, to see her shriveled hands laid down in a box for the last time. I keep my promises by keeping my distance.
I call my mama instead. She spills everything about you.
“I don’t know for sure but I think she did this on purpose,” she says. “Birth control doesn’t work while you’re on antibiotics, remember that.”
It stings. This will follow me, the idea that pregnancy can only ever be a martyred type of accident, to be endured, not a flame you can light with intent along the purpose of your own skin. My mama has spent my entire adult life listing reasons why my body does not belong to me.
“Is she happy?” I ask.
“And they’re not married, still living at her mom’s house.”
“Is he good to her?”
“He looks trashy,” she says. “Buzz cut, no real job.”
I let her talk, with my face away from the receiver, I don’t want to hear anymore.
Cousin, our babies would have been born under the same sign. If things had been different, we would have pressed our stomachs together and their hands would have reached out for each other beneath our skin. Somewhere in a parallel universe, we are sitting in the lawn chairs in your backyard, watching near identical girl children bob in your pool. Somewhere we are the mamas together.
But I tell my mama first, not you. She whispers to tell no one, says she will be there in a few hours. She says this is still something I can fix.
“Can’t I graduate and do this too?” I ask, but it’s not a road we go down, not something we discuss.
She cuts me off swift with a, “But what will people say?”
She sleeps on my floor that night, in a sleeping bag, across the doorway, so I can’t leave. She sets three alarms. She makes the appointment impossible to miss.
I bet your mama was the type to ask you what you wanted.
I cry in the passenger seat and my mama tries to dredge up the argument.
“This is what all those feminist ladies you are always talking about fought for…” she says.
But I don’t answer because she is wrong. They were fighting for choice. And I’ve never felt like I’ve had a choice in anything. But you, you….
When your baby girl comes out screaming, her tiny fists already poised into boxing gloves, I cannot go see her.
I cannot even bear to learn her name.
Aliza Wyman is a recent graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program. She is the author of The Newly Tattooed's Guide to Aftercare (Running Wild Press, 2020) and the winner of the Maine Writer and Publishers 2024 chapbook award for fiction.