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by Jennifer Chung The stale smell of cigarette smoke lingers on my sheets, in the curtains, in the walls themselves. I open the window. On the nightstand is a little spherical bronze ashtray with a hinged lid. It’s open and I can see the butts of several cigarettes that Daniel never quite stamps out all the way, so that they’re left smoking a bit. How many times have I castigated him for leaving cigarettes burning in the ashtray? There’s a hole in my carpet beneath the table, a black cavity of his carelessness. It always feels something empty when he leaves, not just because the suitcase and dirty clothes are gone, not just because of the silence. I feel his absence most sharply in the uncertainty that always succeeds his departure. I’m never quite sure where he is, whether in Palm Springs or San Diego or wandering somewhere between heaven and hell. I try not to fret; that’s the realm of the Mabu and I’ve vowed not to emulate her and become her replacement figure. Too late? Daniel’s mom is this titanic, colossally neurotic and emotionally distraught woman. She can’t be taller than 5’10” but her mannerisms make her even more imposing. She nags. She coddles and controls Daniel. She makes him feel powerless and out of control, possessed like a trinket. But I’ve realized that we have a certain similitude of bearing, especially in regards to Daniel. This gives me the freaky fantods, but I think he is drawn to me because of these similarities. Once I went with Daniel to the Mabu’s house for one of their infrequent family events, which involves snacks and board games, furtive looks, spiteful asides, and a general undertone of unease. We cleared the dining room table and played a game where everyone answers one question, and the person taking the turn advances by matching the players to their respective responses. A difficult game for me, not knowing his mother very well, and being even less acquainted with his brother and sister-in-law. It’s intended to be a get-to-know you type of game. The questions are revealing and force intimacy. I shouldn’t have been there. I felt like I was playing Truth or Dare, only there was no Dare and you had to just keep exposing more and more of yourself to the point of psychological and emotional undress. Worse yet was witnessing the verbal squirm of this family trying to both veil and reveal their own secrets, in front of someone as yet unacquainted with the details of their collective drama. I was at least relieved when the Mabu asserted matriarchal sovereignty by throwing out especially uncomfortable questions, the ones that might have alluded to the dark events of last year, the theft, the abortion, the drugs, the failed suicide, the lies. The stuff secrets are made of. Daniel’s mom and I were almost always able to pick out each other’s answers. In this certain type of reverse play, players guess how the person taking the turn will answer. The question to the Mabs was something like, what’s the one characteristic you disdain most in others? Jon and I surmised correctly that it was dishonesty, which you’d like think that Daniel would’ve gotten right. Then there was the question about your worst nightmare and the Mabu’s answer was, “Walking down a long, dark corridor and then falling into a deep chasm,” only she asked me, out loud, in front of everyone, how do you spell “chasm”? I watched her pen move as I spelled it out. Sure enough, she had used it in her answer, and so as I read it aloud I changed it to “falling into a deep pit,” only it was obviously the Mabu’s answer. But so the point is that we seem to have this affinity, even though she thoroughly creeps me out and has frequent bouts of vapidity. Sometimes I think it’s an act. She seems to get incrementally more stupid as the number of men in her presence increases, even if those men are her sons. I can’t explain this behavior except to remark that she is a product of the 1950s. I’ve seen her with her boyfriend, who’s a little bit older than she is. She played schoolgirl naïvete and helplessness very well; but I saw that this was how she manipulated people, certainly men in particular. This was her modus operandi, the way she got things done, put food on the table, paid the rent. I guess it runs in the family. I flop down on the bed with the ashtray and a cigarette and casually flip through the latest edition of Details. I love men’s magazines. Sometimes I go through and mentally point out all the men that Daniel resembles. He has great bone structure, piercing eyes, and charming boyish features that could easily get him into any of these magazines. Of course I enjoy the photo spreads of gorgeous men. Occasionally there are redeeming or even enlightening articles. But there’s also some kind of masochistic pleasure I get out of reading misogynistic columns about how to get rid of/deal with/sex up/appease/screw around on your latest gyno-plaything. Treat a lady like a whore and a whore like a lady... I saw a picture of the Mabu before I had met her. I was immediately drawn to her. I caught my breath and told Daniel, “I knew she would be beautiful.” And she was. She was like this fair-skinned Amazon woman, tall and strong, with a firmness in her jaw called Obduracy. She had wild yellow-gray hair and a certain light in her eyes. Call it Insanity. I knew she was an artist, her work was scattered throughout the house in Vista. She made visceral, almost violent pieces in mixed media. On a dressmaker’s form, the wedding dress hangs limply, a disfigured symbol of love, purity, and innocence in a piece called “The Nest.” It's painted in dark patches, surreal vignettes of domestic life. Wrapped with thorns. In place of a head is a rumpled and empty bird’s nest. She is apparently still bitter about her marriage to Daniel’s father, and the way he left her five years ago for the new young wife. These days Daniel seems to be living out of a suitcase. He is supposed to be in Palm Springs, taking care of an elderly grandmother. But he always seems to be driving out to San Diego, always seems to be in my bed. And so I let him stay, he has no where else to go. The Mabs doesn’t want him in her house. Why do I trust him if his own mother does not? Secrets and lies. To lie to someone is to take away their choice. It clouds and manipulates the decision-making process. Daniel has not been employed in 2 months, and he has not gone back to school since he withdrew last semester. This is a point of contention between us. But each time I ask about job searches and resumés or enrollment, I get the distinct feeling of playing the mother figure. I remind myself that he must make his own decisions, right or wrong. What does he do all day while I am at work? Secrets and lies. An uncle of Mabu’s already steeped in senility made her a chair once, as in constructed it with his own hands, and inscribed “Mabu” on the back. Why? It’s the subject of family folklore. No one ever got a straight answer out of him before he died. The thought of a senile octogenarian working with power tools is a bit unsettling to me but the old guy never lost any digits and lived to be like a hundred and three so I guess he was alright. The chair has long since been discarded or lost, but Daniel and Jon still call her Mabu. Only it’s usually preceded by “the,” as in, “the Mabs” or “the Mabu,” as if she were a thing, a force to be reckoned with, disassociated from the role of mother. And now that role is me. The lover becomes the mother, the father, the person who raised you, usually the parent of the opposite sex. Sophocles was on to this. All the lingering problems of noncommunication, of sleights and injustices, of guilt and innocence, of lies and remorse, these resurface in intimate relationships. There is a wall around certain issues that we have never been able to scale. They washed us and changed our diapers, they cared for us when we were sick and yet, on some level still we do not connect. It’s not that the desire is not there, it is. We want settlement, we want closure; we want to work this out but we can’t. Freud knew about this. We seek out mates that resemble the parent in order to continue working out the old issues that simply will not die, the lover as the substitute for the parent. The lover acquiesces and fulfills the need. I have fits of controlling, nagging, fretting, neurotic behavior. Prone to overreaction; prone to melodrama. Daniel both hates and loves me most in these moments. This is not who I am. This is who I have become, and as I toss the magazine aside and stretch out across my bed, I feel a calm come over me, the pieces of me obscured when I am with Daniel cautiously returning. Some mates are closer in likeness to the object of disdain and affection than others. Daniel is nothing like my father. I have abandonment issues. Why am I still with Daniel, embracing the deception, the uncertainty, putting up with the Mabs, vainly trying to quell the apprehension I feel from the D.H. Lawrencean sons and lovers dynamic of this triangle. Is it because I know he is someone that needs me so desperately that he will never leave? The question perhaps more to the point is to my father. Why did you leave? Copyright 7/99 Jennifer Chung. All rights reserved. I'm considering making this one piece of a much longer text. What do you think? Email me. |