BERGERON’S BOY Courtney Couch
“Please come back inside, Mom! Please get out of the street!” Mom was waddling down the street in most of a gorilla suit, and I only say “most” because the head of the costume was tucked haphazardly under her right arm. I had watched in half-horror/halfamusement as she hid her red purse in the folds of the gorilla suit and loudly exclaimed, “Allistair, Allistair, I’m just gonna run to the store. I won’t be long. Just want to pick up some ‘get well soon’ balloons for Hilary’s boy.” Our neighbor’s son, Jeremy, had somehow broken his arm, and Mom thought it would be hilarious to visit him in the hospital in a gorilla suit because I let him come over and watch Planet of the Apes once when he was younger. I didn’t fight her too hard because I know how much Mom loves to mess with Hilary. I could almost picture Hil’s horror. Mom’s stringy hair, too-tanned skin, overall gauntness, and ridiculous behavior made her look anything but sane, and sometimes I worried it was hereditary. Mom came back later that afternoon and told me that everyone in the hospital acted like everything was normal, which, she said, “Really got away with me!” Of course it did. Hilary was at Jeremy’s bedside asleep, and Jeremy was out cold, too, so Mom got a nurse to take a picture of her in the gorilla suit and balloons giving the camera a thumbs up next to Jeremy. Mom printed off the picture and slipped it through the mailbox slip at Hil’s house. At one point, Mom had been the darling of our little town. I found an old scrapbook under her bed once that had newspaper clippings, yellowing polaroids, and pressed flowers from her pageant days. Her escort in every photograph is the same boy, so I assume he’s my father, but there’s no way to be sure because Mom can never talk to me about him without bursting into peals of hollow laughter. Even when she catches her breath, she can’t quite breathe enough to say anything, so I just stopped asking after a while. Mom’s senior picture in her high school yearbook makes her skin look porcelain, as if she doesn’t have pores. Every photo is black and white, but anyone can tell her lips were as red as a rose when that photo was taken. This particular page has smudges and crinkles on the edges, more than any other. Now, she looks like the ‘After’ picture on billboards that advertise against smoking, except it wasn’t smoking that did it. Or alcohol. I can’t really explain it in a way that makes sense, but her spirit is gone. Not her liveliness, because trust me, Bergeron Love will find a way to be the life of any party. But her soul, the part of her that truly cares for other people, comes and goes on a whim. Mom’s spirit had a way of distancing itself from her liveliness. No matter what she should have been feeling, her outrageousness wouldn’t take a hit. Mom and Boyd first met during one of her more outrageous bursts of kleptomania in the Mall of America. Mom and I drove all the way to Minnesota because she was tired of harassing Kim’s Boutique downtown. Boyd was a mall cop, and a sluggish one at that. He chased us all the way to the parking lot that day. We got away only because he had an asthma attack. By the time Boyd got out of the hospital a few hours later, Mom’s conscience had returned to her, so he found a heap of stolen items on the hood of his car and a note that read: “Why don’t you invest in cardio?”