Call From Home | DESCENT Issue #4

MEGAN DANG

The first thing Dad says on the phone is, “What’s gotten into you?”

It’s startling how quickly Erin slips into defense mode, like an animal: palms clamming up, stomach twisting, ice pricks all the way down her spine. Even three thousand miles away, her body knows to fear the tone of her father’s voice. This, she thinks dimly through the fog of panic, is what criminals must feel like when they’re caught at gun point. Only then does it occur to her that she hasn’t actually committed a crime—at least not that she’s aware of.

“Nice to hear from you too, Dad,” Erin says, attempting to sound light-hearted. “What did I do this time?”

Usually she can afford to crack jokes with her dad, knowing he’ll return it with a jab of his own. It’s why Erin generally gets along with him, unlike with Mom, who can never seem to tell when Erin is being sarcastic or genuine. But today Dad clearly isn’t in a joking mood. “Erin, you’ve been at college for three weeks now.”

“Yeah.”

“You haven’t called your mother once.”

Erin goes still for a moment. Then she says, “I’ve been busy.”

It’s only half true. Many days Erin finds herself drowning in schoolwork and test anxiety, but just as many days Erin finds herself roaming around on campus by herself, staring at the school buildings and wondering what she’s doing. People always told her that she would have all the free time in the world when she got to college. Erin thought it might be liberating: all the free time in the world. Instead she feels like she’s drowning in it sometimes.

Dad, who knows her too well, calls her bluff: “You text me all the time.”

“That’s because you text me first.”

“She’s not very happy with you,” Dad sighs. “It’s putting her in a terrible mood.”

Judging by the weighty, disappointed tone in her father’s voice, this is where she’s supposed to feel guilty. The horrible, ungrateful wayward daughter who hasn’t even bothered to call her mother once. Erin’s pretty sure her dad is expecting her to start begging for forgiveness at once. But the only emotion Erin can conjure at the moment is a prickly annoyance. When she was younger Erin would wonder, constantly, whether there was any version of herself that Mom could be pleased with. Now Erin knows there isn’t. She’s not even at home and she man aged to piss off her mother. Mom would find a way to resent Erin even if she was on her deathbed. Now, if you’d just listened to me and eaten better like I told you to…

Erin can’t keep the frustration out of her voice when she bites out, “Well, I can’t do anything about that.”

“Just call her, Erin. It’s not hard.”

“So why doesn’t she just call me herself?”

Dad goes quiet for a few moments. Then he says, “You know how your mother is. Sometimes she can have too much pride for her own good.”

Erin knows the truth. If Mom actually cared, she would call Erin herself. But Mom hasn’t bothered to call, either, because it’s not about that; she just wants something to be angry about.

A few nights before Erin left for college, she and her mother got into a big, explosive argument—something about Erin not being packed yet, or about the disarrayed state of Erin’s bedroom. After Erin stormed upstairs, she lingered by the banister and listened to her parents’ hushed whispers in the kitchen. That girl can’t get out of this house fast enough, Mom had muttered.

It should’ve hurt, but Erin just found herself agreeing. She and her mother frequently butted heads, but it had been unbearable in those last few months at home, as if the impending knowledge that Erin would be leaving made her mother even more bothered by her presence. Erin had endured all of the nagging, all of the nitpicking, all of the criticism by telling herself that things wouldn’t be like this forever. Soon, she would be on the other side of the country. Soon, she’d have her own life away from home, away from the crushing judgment and expectations from her parents; soon she would be free of her mother. Soon, soon, soon.

Now, though, she’s here, and Mom is still trying to dig her claws into Erin. It’s all too much at once.

“Her pride isn’t my problem,” Erin snaps. “She’s mad at me? Great. She doesn’t have to hear my voice.”

She hangs up before Dad can respond. Only now does she become aware of her roommate, Jenn’s, imploring gaze from the corner of the room. Erin offers a sheepish smile and waves her hand awkwardly. “Sorry about that,” she says.

Jenn just stares. “Was that your dad?” “Yeah. Apparently my mom is freaking out over me and now they’re both pissed.” Erin shakes her head. “They’re driving me up the goddamn wall.”

“You can always just block their numbers.”

Erin laughs. It takes her a moment to realize that Jenn isn’t laughing with her. “I don’t think I could do that,” Erin says sheepishly.

Jenn shrugs. “I have plenty of friends who have awful parents,” she tells Erin. “Some times it’s easier to just go no-contact.”

“My parents aren’t…”

Erin stops herself, unsure what she was about to say. That her parents aren’t awful? She doesn’t know if that’s true, at least not of her mother. She thinks about all the times Mom has pointed out swimsuits that don’t fit the same on her anymore, new blemishes on her face, and how her psychology major is never going to get her a job. Before she can finish her sentence, though, her phone pings, notifying her that her clothes are done drying in the laundry room. Jenn has already moved on from the conversation, scrolling idly on her phone. Erin, however, can’t stop replaying Jenn’s words in her head as she shuffles to the laundry room. Jenn has a point; it would be so easy to just press a button and let her parents drift out of her college life. Erin is an adult now, after all. Nobody can force her to be a good daughter. She can do anything she wants to. Shave her head. Get a tongue piercing. Block her parents’ phone numbers.

For some reason, though, the idea feels alien to her, unthinkable and absurd. It crosses Erin’s mind that maybe she’s not as grown up as she likes to think she is. Erin thinks back to her first weekend at college, when Jenn took her to some frat party. While Jenn and all of her friends danced and screamed and threw back seltzers, Erin felt like she was watching herself from far, far away. I’m supposed to be having fun right now, she kept thinking to herself mechanically, like if she thought it enough times she could convince herself it was real. Then Jenn grabbed Erin by the arm and dragged her over to the drinks table, shouted at Erin to do shots with her.

After the first shot Erin allowed herself to feel, for just a moment, that she was enjoying herself, that she was living the college life like everyone else here. But then Erin did a second shot, and suddenly she found herself imagining Mom standing in the corner of the room: eyes narrowed, lips pressed into a thin line as she shook her head disbelievingly. What are you doing? You look ridiculous. And that top is way too small for you. You’re spilling out of it.

When Jenn handed her a third shot, Erin just smiled and said no, thank you, she was alright. She didn’t drink any more for the rest of the night and she asked to go home early.

Jenn hasn’t invited her to another party since that night.

Erin bends down and starts moving her dry clothes into her basket by the armful. All of the clothes are still warm to the touch, and when Erin holds one of her sweaters against her face she can smell the detergent: the same fresh-linen scent that Mom uses back home. As she sorts through the clothes she stops when she finds her favorite top half-destroyed.

It is—or, was—a baby pink corset top, with the hems adorned with a delicate lace that is now crumpled and littered with holes. When Erin first stepped out of the dressing room with it on, Mom told her the color washed her out, and Erin decided she wasn’t leaving the store without it.

There’s some irony in it, Erin supposes. That even in re bellion, she circles her mother like a moon in orbit. Did she ever even really like the top, or did she just like that her mom hated it?

There’s no such thing as darkness, she recalls distantly, only the absence of light. Times like these she wonders if she is merely the absence of her mother.

And now, living by herself in a college dorm with nobody to cook her hot meals or make her bed with hospital corners or carefully sort through her laundry, that absence feels larger than ever. For the first time it dawns on Erin that perhaps this is the reason she hasn’t called, after all. Because she doesn’t know what she’d do with herself if Mom knew that her daughter is a vacuous, sweeping black hole instead of a person.

Erin turns her corset top over in her hands, gingerly loops her fingers through the newly-torn holes in the lace. She’s not surprised she ruined it. She hadn’t been sure if it was machine-washable or not, but she had taken the risk and tossed it into the laundry machine anyway.

Mom would have known, she thinks. Mom would have told her. If Erin had called her. Guilt starts to creep in at the edges of her heart, dark and ugly. Tomorrow, Erin tells herself firmly, even if it’s more to comfort herself than anything. She will call tomorrow. She will suck up her pride so that Mom can preserve her own; she will lose the battle, as she has many times before, because maybe that’s all being a daughter is, really, a constant losing battle to keep the peace.

But just when she has decided this, her phone starts to vibrate against the top of the laundry machine like a digitized heartbeat. Erin picks it up. As she brings it to her ear, she realizes that, somehow, she already knows who it is.

And sure enough—“Erin,” Mom says. Her name, nothing else.

Erin’s fingers tighten around her cell. “Hi, Mom,” she responds. Mom is quiet for just a moment. Then she says, “How are you? How have you been?”

There’s a split-second where Erin thinks Mom said “who”, instead of “how”, and it terrifies her. Who are you? Who have you been? Questions Erin has been afraid to ask herself lately.

“Good,” Erin says, and hopes it’s true. “I’ve been good.”

“What have you been up to?”

“Just, you know. Homework, classes, nothing too interesting.”

“Been to any parties?”

“A frat, a few weekends ago.”

“...Did you have a good time?” There’s dread in the pause.

“Eh.” Erin leans back against the laundry machine, looks up at the ceiling. “Not really. I didn’t drink or anything. I think I bummed every one out with how boring I was.”

“Oh, no,” Mom says, but Erin can hear the thinly-veiled joy in her voice. “That’s too bad.”

“Try to sound a little less excited about it,” Erin jokes.

To her surprise, Mom actually laughs, and before Erin knows it she’s laughing too. Their laughter echoes off the empty laundry room walls, the sounds fusing into each other.

Mom’s voice sounds an awful lot like Erin’s over the phone.

After their laughter has died down, Mom says, “People are always going to think being responsible is boring, Erin. You don’t let it get to you.”

“I won’t.”

“Have you been taking care of your self?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you been making your bed?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Have you been doing your laundry?”

“I actually just finished a load,” Erin says. She glances down at her shirt, and before she can think better of it she finds herself confessing: “I ruined my corset top. The one with the lace. I didn’t know it was hand-wash only.”

“It’s not,” Mom says. “It’s dry-clean only.”

Erin blinks. “Really? I didn’t know that.”

“I always took it to the dry cleaner by myself.”

“Oh,” Erin hears herself say. She’s qui et for a moment. Then she says lightly, “And I thought you hated this top.”

“Well, it was your favorite top, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” says Erin. “It was.”

Erin considers the argument she had with Mom just before leaving for college. Before, the important part seemed to be that they’d fought. Now, Erin thinks the important part is that she can’t even remember what the fight was about.

Neither of them speak for a while, searching for the right words to say to each other, realizing at the same time that the right words might never exist. Finally Mom just asks, “Are you eating well?”

“Mom,” Erin starts, and then stops. She wants to say I miss you, but that would feel wrong, hokey somehow. It would be inauthentic—an imitation of the lives in TV sitcoms, where parents and kids always say what they mean and the conflict is always resolved in the third act.

What she really wants to say, she supposes, is that she misses Mom so much it aches. That when she’s eating canned chicken noodle soup in the dining hall, she can only think about her mother’s miyeokguk. Or that the other day, she heard somebody in a rehearsal room playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on piano—or maybe it was just the alphabet—and she realized for the first time that that was why the music from Mom’s rice cooker always sounded so familiar.

If they were in a sitcom, this is what Erin would tell her mother now to make up for all of the horrible things she’s done. And her mother would have things to tell her, too: that she still makes enough food for three every night, that every day she goes into Erin’s bedroom to keep the pillows fluffed, that she wonders constantly how Erin is doing, who Erin is becoming.

And then? The two of them would forgive each other. The audience would say awww, and the lights would dim on the set, and the credits would roll.

But in the end, Erin can’t say any of this. This is not television, and they are only themselves.

What Erin does say is, “I’m eating well, Mom.”

There’s a pause, which is how she knows that her mother is rolling her eyes, and Erin has to choke back a laugh.

“You better be,” says Mom.