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The Trouble with Alysoun's Mother

Standing in the corner of the hospital room I watch Alysoun hold her mother’s hand and try to talk to her from time to time. Her mother is semi-conscious and lucid, attached to her arms and neck are tubes and monitors, several pouches of clear room temperature liquids drip slowly through intravenous feed. A breathing apparatus stands idly beside the metal arms of the narrow bed frame. A television is tuned to Oprah but the sound is turned down. I flick apple seeds I find in my shirt pocket at the wall. Al, visibly anxious, releases her mother’s hand and pulls her hair through a scrunchie and then slides it off, pulls it through again, slides it off. She looks at me.

‘Do you think you could look at this remote and try to figure out how to get the sound to work?’ she asks, tugging at the cord attaching it to the wall.

I don’t say anything. She stares at me harshly until I walk over and try to position myself near enough to the bed to reach the remote without disturbing anything. Al’s mother’s eyes are closed. She looks incredibly pale and her skin is a thin translucent.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, pressing a couple of buttons labeled only with pictures, not getting anywhere.

‘Forget about it,’ she says sternly as I walk back to the corner.

‘What’s wrong?’ Al’s mother says softly.

I continue to flick apple seeds across the room, watching some miss the wall and hit the floor, others bouncing away once they reach the painted bricks.

‘Nothing,’ Alysoun says, embarrassed.

‘I’m so very glad you brought Brian,’ her mother says, eyes still closed, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly.

‘It’s Martin,’ I say politely.

‘It’s Martin,’ Alysoun repeats, leaning towards her mother.

‘Oh,’ her mother says, lifting her hand, which is shaking, with what seems to be a considerable effort to her face and inspects it.

‘Yeah,’ Al says, distracted by something she’s reading on an instruction card pasted to the wall.

‘How is... he... doing?’ her mother asks carefully.

‘He’s great, Mom,’ Al whines. ‘Now can we change the subject?’

‘Did you bring the postcards I asked for?’

‘I did,’ she says, reaching for the small bag we picked up in the gift shop. She pulls out several colorful postcards and hands two of them to her mother.

‘These are...’ her mother starts right away. ‘These aren’t... I wanted pictures of the skyline, of the zoo,’ she says softly.

I lean in and inspect the cards that Al and her mother are holding. These aren’t cards from the carousel in the gift shopwhich I thought she had purchased when we were down there, but instead they’re free ones from the Max Racks in the lobby. One is an ad for a play opening, the other for Beefeater. Alysoun apologetically smiles at the one she’s holding, a Max Racks card with a big smiling dog pointing at what looks like a slice of cheese.

‘Sorry,’ she says, trying to suppress laughter, but her face contorts, and when she can’t hold it back any longer, she starts cracking up.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say to no one.

Her mother fades into another moment of lucidity in which she glances over the Max Racks postcards that Alysoun placed in her hands. She touches the front of one of them, the ad for Beefeater which shows a woman in a tight red dress with long flowing hair hovering over a pool table, cueing up. Al and I await a reaction. Her mother finally lets the cards fall from her hands and they drop to the floor. Al looks away. Neither of us attempt to pick them up.

‘I could never get her to do anything for me,’ her mother says weakly, after we’ve paged the nurses’ station for orderlies who arrive shortly after and get the remote control to work. Sound comes from the television but it’s soft and the din of machines and the air conditioner quickly drown it out. Al stares at the screen regardless.

‘Oh yeah?’ I say, cautiously intrigued.

‘When Alysoun was in high school,’ her mother starts, running her hand along the edge of her blanket, shivering. It’s probably forty degrees in the hospital room, the air conditioning on a slow blast, the small tightly sealed windows covered in mist. ‘She would come home so very late-’

Alysoun cuts her mother off. ‘Mom, please,’ she begs.

I smile, moving closer to the bed. Her mother takes this as a cue to continue.

‘She would go out with all these older guys, she would never introduce them to me.’

‘Jesus,’ Alysoun mutters, turning behind her to a pitcher of water and small paper cups stacked next to it. She takes a cup and begins to fill it carefully.

‘She would sleep over a lot of the times,’ her mother says, as if to clarify.

‘Some of the times,’ she attempts to correct.

‘A lot of the times.’

‘Wow,’ I say. ‘This is like a side of you I wasn’t aware of,’ I tease, approaching Alysoun, touching her head and playfully grabbing a handful of her hair, letting it fall through my fingers.

She pushes me away. ‘I can’t believe you’re listening to this,’ she says, aggravated.

‘What?’ her mother and I say in unison.

‘So what else did she do?’ I ask.

“Why are you contributing to this?” Alysoun asks me. I gesture I don’t know with my hands raised up and a baffled look on my face and she rolls her eyes and gives me the finger subtly.

‘Well, at the prom-’

‘Mother, please, could we just drop it?’ she asks abruptly, her voice rising.

Her mother ignores her completely. ‘Alysoun and her date doubled with her best friend Michelle and the gentleman who accompanied her.’

‘God, Mother, nobody is interested in this,’ Alysoun says firmly, her voice unwavering, full of evenly dispensed hatred.

‘And they went to the restaurant on the top of the Hancock-’

‘The 95th,’ I add.

Alysoun, in a vain attempt to show that she’s not interested in the conversation, picks up a copy of Newsweek and begins to flip through it from the last page back through the magazine.

‘But all through the dinner, Alysoun had her eye on Michelle’s date.’

‘Sneaky,’ I say in a low voice.

‘Right,’ her mother says, visibly amused, becoming more animated, wiggling around in her bed, trying to sit up a little. ‘I believe they played footsy under the table.’

‘He started it,’ Alysoun mutters to herself, still staring at the Newsweek.

‘They may have also been holding hands covertly in the limo on the way to the prom,’ her mother hypothesizes. ‘But once they got there-’

‘I really don’t think Martin is interested in this,’ Al says.

‘No, no, go ahead,’ I say.

‘Well, once they got to the prom -- which was being held at the Palmer House -- they, well, Alysoun and Michelle’s date-’

‘Had sex,’ Alysoun blurts out loudly. ‘Had sex in the bathroom.’ She turns towards her mother, slapping the Newsweek down against the swinging table attached to the side of the bed. ‘I sucked his dick and then he fucked me.’ She stops to breathe deeply and pulls at a rubberband on her wrist. ‘Are you satisfied?’

A look of total shock washes over her face. ‘Oh,’ she says meekly. ‘Oh,’ she repeats.

‘What?’ Alysoun asks viciously, shaking her head. ‘That’s what you wanted, right?’

‘I did not know about that,’ her mother says. ‘I thought that the two of you spent the night... you told me that the two of you spent the night talking while Michelle got high in the basement.’

‘Well, I...’ she starts. ‘I guess I lied.’ Pause. ‘Why does it even matter now?’ Another pause. ‘That was like six years ago.’

‘Well, my prom sucked too,’ I say, in all seriousness.

Later, standing beside the vending machines, Alysoun deposits coins and selects a cup of coffee, extra sweet, extra light, and the cup drops down and as it begins to fill, she turns towards me, puts her arms around me.

‘Can you believe her?’ she asks tiredly. Her head falls to my shoulder.

‘She’s very interesting,’ I say, swaying gently, her hair smelling vaguely of pineapples. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t introduced us before,’ I say.

‘I hate her,’ she says, not smiling. ‘I really do.’

‘I think that’s normal,’ I say. I break away from our hug to take the coffee out of the machine and I hand the cup to her. She looks at it appreciatively and then blows the coffee inside. ‘I think everybody’s supposed to hate their parents, a little bit anyway.’

‘She is just so vindictive,’ she says. ‘She’s such an evil hypocrite.’

‘Don’t let her get to you.’

‘I try,’ she mumbles, sniffing, her eyes welling up with tears. ‘But I just can’t. I’ve tried but I just can’t.’

‘You need to,’ I say softly, taking the cup from her hands and placing it on a round table behind us.

‘I know,’ she whispers. ‘I just haven’t figured out how,’ she says, a little louder.

I’m munching on a Kit Kat and I offer her a bar when I notice she’s staring at me but she nods it away. She’s picking at a turkey sandwich and we’re in the cafeteria that is totally empty except for a couple of scattered Japanese doctors, some in green scrubs. REM’s ‘Man On The Moon’ plays in soft Musak on through speakers overhead.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘You haven’t talked about Sarah in awhile,’ she says.

‘What do you mean... ‘talked about’?’ I ask, measuring my words.

‘I mean you haven’t brought her up, mentioned that she’d been calling or wanting to see you, e-mailing, or anything like that lately.’

‘Well, she’s been staying... out of my way,’ I offer.

‘Did you guys have a fight?’ she asks, patronizing, giggling.

‘No,’ I say angrily. ‘No, we did not have a fight. Maybe she’s moved on?’

‘Oh, that’s likely,’ she returns with a sigh.

‘She’s getting out of the way,’ I say. ‘Why does it matter?’

‘I just wonder how come I’ve been able to get at you so freely. That’s all,’ she says, her voice rising and falling octaves. ‘I’ve always felt like I’ve only had half of your attention.’

And then for a minute, sitting in the hospital cafeteria across from Alysoun, my sort of girlfriend, holding half a Kit Kat, I debate telling her the truth, getting it over with. I stare at her contemplating this and she looks at me like she’s ready, like she’s daring me to tell her, anticipating. But then I sink back in my chair, and she leans back too.

‘What?’ she asks.

‘What what?’ I ask back.

‘Nothing,’ she says, setting aside the turkey sandwich and pushing away the tray in front of her. ‘You just looked like you wanted to say something, that’s all.’

‘Well,’ I start.

‘Well do you?’ she asks slowly, like she knows something already and is anticipating what I’m going to say.

‘No, I don’t,’ I say, snatching the turkey sandwich and beginning to eat what’s left of it. I do this not because I’m hungry but so I have something to do with my hands, the existence of which I’m all of a sudden totally aware of.

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