There was a woman without a world.
She knew she must drink water, and the family must too. She stocked bubbletop cans so her family would not be thirsty. She knew she must eat, and their son must eat better, so she found the recipes and the resources to feed him. She was afraid to know how much more she could do. She stopped knowing the could-dos so that she would not implode. She remembered the musts, she remembered the to-dos, and she remembered the nothings.
She got up from her sleep-deprived bed in the mornings; she found dishes to wash that took a long number of comforting hours, and tiles to clean. Lunches to pack, clothes to sort into dark and light, smiles to dispense into their son's world. Dust she did not care about for there was no one to see it; no one who cared about dust was invited anymore. Still she dusted sometimes, when she remembered their son must not fall sick. She did not remember why she cleaned, or dressed. She tried to revive the memory of why she bought clothes or looked in mirrors. Glimmers of remembrances like ice picks tried to lodge in her veins. She removed them and cooked on. Her memory was her bane, so she let it go sometimes without remembering.
She had watched desultorily her Chinese-made phone crash and be stamped upon by the man who had fathered her children. Picked up and thrown again. A phone her children had had delivered for one of her birthdays.
+++++
Eight years ago, on another birthday, a computer was delivered to their home. And she began her career online.
The phone and the computer were windows to worlds he resented her having. He reviled both till she plucked out of herself any desires for worlds he did not want for her. But she learnt new skills when he was not looking.
++++++
She had watched other phones being flung for other reasons.
Like, for being left plugged into the charger after it was done charging.
It was the eve of yet another of her birthdays, and the phone belonged to the other woman in her family, their pre-teen daughter who was then a day scholar at the same school as their ten-year-old son.
It was a night when their son held her tight in the dark, while his older sister and his father sparred with each other over the girl's phone left plugged into the charger.
She pretended she was the mother protecting the son, knowing all the while that it was the son trying to comfort the mother.
Perhaps he was holding for her a birthday wish without his father's knowledge, clutching his mother in the darkness while his sister's phone flew toward the wall and landed softly on the carpet without breaking.
The carpet was an advantage of circumstance that her own Chinese-made phone did not have six years later.
The girl loudly protested the flinging of her phone. That led to one more unsuccessful flinging.
The next morning, the girl and the boy and their mother woke up to paternal frost. It was made more pronounced because it was a ritual to be cheerful, even if you were not, on family birthdays. Still, she chirped at every dark face merrily, in an attempt to sweep the night under the carpet.
Together the four of them got into the car to mark their attendance at a lunch. Her chirps fell into a void, and at one unintelligent moment, she took resort to sentiment. It's my birthday, she suggested. Could we all talk to each other and forget hate?
The car screeched sharply towards the median. I will kill us all, he told her, while the children continued to sit unmoved and morose in the rear. She checked on their seat belts, turned her eyes to the trees whistling by, and willed that her memories of feeling would dry up a little quicker.
Together they had lunch at her friend's new home with men and women who moved naturally among each other. She sat in an inner room with her children and their friends, unable to be an adult with the adults that afternoon.
+++
They drove in silence everywhere they had to go the rest of that day, the car a dreaded family reunion.
+++
The evening was Easter Eve, and together they dressed for church. In the years past, a group of them went to dinner after every Easter Mass. It was the same this Easter, and she put on last year's wifely facade. She found her fingers and toes clenching for fear that the friends would remember it was her birthday and rile him about a "treat" or a gift.
Someone did at last ask for a birthday treat while they discussed which restaurant to go to. He directed the conversation deftly away while the women admired his witty comeback. No one that night knew that he had threatened to kill his family that morning.
The bill they split equally. The friends did not mention her birthday again. She restrained herself from agonizing over whether they had sensed his anger at his family. She wiped her birthday from his memory by ignoring it herself.
+++
Then one year when her children grew up a bit and he had pinned her down with her hands and feet together, their son told them that he was moving out with his mother. He apologized tenderly: "like a princess" he said she was. And she trod on fewer eggshells. "I regained a non-violent world," she said to her friend.
But it returned, and then it was the turn of her Chinese-made phone to die under his duress. It was a moment when unintelligent sentiment again took her down, so the moment does not deserve a pity party or story. It only meant a new SIM card had to be bought and inserted in an old-gen phone she found in their storeroom, so that she could make calls and order bubbletops and prawns and lamb and gas cylinder refills. She remembered some numbers; some essential ones she found on his phone; some service numbers she found on the Internet.
For he had thrown away, into the garbage collector's van, the SIM card and all the bits of her world outside of himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment