F I C T I O N patted her lap, as if I were to sit there and listen to a story. I sat next to her, pressed against her bony hip and sharp rib cage and listened as she asked me how school was and then told me what was for dinner: pot roast, mashed potatoes, pan gravy, green beans. For dessert, banana cake with white frosting. “Your father will be home soon.” She patted my cheek. “Best to change out of your school clothes and set the table.” For an instant, I forgot that I was fifty-two, mother of three sons, and, just recently, a grandmother of twins. But in that moment, I was her little girl, wearing a red plaid jumper and black Mary Janes with white ankle socks, sitting near her mother who smelled like Palmolive dishwashing liquid and Dial shampoo. I was the little girl whose best moments were these, glowing in her mother’s full shining attention. But then like the old switch of a TV channel—the turn of the yellowing plastic dial, the gray fuzz, the next program—my mother moved on in time, back to the part where all things—or no things—happened at once. She turned and walked back to the table and her game. “Oh, Mr. Wong,” my mother says now, putting down her cards. “You’ve beaten me again.” I move closer. When I was a teenager, she would lament over her plump arms, her round white thighs. Even her feet had been rounded white pillows. “Everyone’s so impossibly slim!” she would say as my friends paraded by in their jeans and t-shirts, showing off their flat belly-buttons. Mr. Wang smiles and looks up at me, eyebrows up again. Since she moved into the facility and met him right here at the window table, my mother has called Mr. Jeffrey Wang, Mr. Wong. Never his first name or his correct last name. Mr. Wong stuck. At this point, she calls me “you,” as in “Oh, it’s you.” “One hundred and two to eighty-nine,” he says. “Mark it down,” my mother says in the same voice she used to call out “Clean your room.” Mr. Wang tallies the hands, pulls the cards toward him to do a shuffle of sorts. As he paws the cards together, my mother suddenly turns around, her eyes on me. I freeze, try to swallow, and then soften. “Hi,” I say. I take a step closer, put my purse on a chair. Maybe today, I’ll be able to sit down and watch them play for a while. But my mother is rigid, cutting me a raw, angry glance. She bites her lower lip and then lets out a big sigh. “Where are the hamburgers?” She turns back to Mr. Wang who is now dealing the next hand. “They never bring us the hamburgers.” “They sure don’t,” Mr. Wang says, the cards a one, two, one, two on the table. “And I like mine medium-rare. Won’t give me anything but extra well-done.” He winks at me. “And that organic ketchup!” My mother snatches up her hand, guarding it against her chest.
138
WEBER
THE CONTEMPORARY WEST
FALL 2014