Flesh Wounds (excerpt)
My mother, with a side of fish...
From the next aquarium window over, I watched my mother’s face while she watched stingrays swim past, her face lit only by the light that filtered down through the water. Her lips were slightly pursed, for what reason I had no clue, but her eyes followed a spotted eagle ray as it came near. There weren’t many people in the National Aquarium’s carpet-covered underwater viewing gallery, just one or two standing in front of each of the large windows that opened onto a gently swirling vista of rays. Several of them wore gentle, distant expressions as they watched fish slowly flying through water to the sound of the kind of soft tuneless music that’s supposed to help people relax.
I hoped it would work on my mother. She was visiting me in Baltimore over Thanksgiving. So far she’d driven a stake through Thanksgiving dinner by being sullen and refusing to engage in any conversation that wasn’t immediately about her, leaving my other guests confused and fidgety as we sat at a silent table. She’d also very nearly caused an incident by rolling down her window for a better look at the corner boys as I idled at a stop light, loudly asking “Those men over there, are they selling drugs?” as I instantly rolled her window back up and prayed for the light to change. Nothing about the place I lived, my friends, my home, or my household met her exacting standards. The charming renovated 1840s mill cottage I lived in with my then-partner? These stone walls are impossible to get clean. Does it just not bother you that you’re living in filth all the time? The robust hedge of heirloom roses I’d grown along the fenceline that was filled with the bright orange and red rosehips of winter? Roses are fine when they’re blooming but now all you have is thorns. No one wants to look at that. Even the fresh, bright-yolked eggs I bought from the farmers’ market were unacceptable. These aren’t inspected like the ones at the grocery store, you know, you’re going to give everyone salmonella. Do what you like, but don’t cook any for me.
I can’t say that her behavior had come as a surprise, except somehow it always did. This was absolutely my fault for thinking that perhaps this time, as somehow opposed to all the other times, she would behave around her own family the way she did around outsiders whose good opinion she desired. Somehow, too, the specifics of her criticism always managed to catch me off guard. This was a woman whose kitchen was decorated in sunflowers, from the wallpaper border at the top of the sunflower-yellow walls to the cafe curtains on the window above the breakfast table. Every surface that wasn’t adorned with a shaggy carpet of stern instructions and inspirational sayings written on bits of yellow legal pad, which is to say everything that wasn’t the front of a cabinet or the door of the fridge, was adorned with acres of sunflowers. When I pointed out the bouquet of sunflowers I’d put on the deep windowsill of the room she was staying in, though, she looked disappointedly at them, then me. “That’s nice,” she said without smiling. There was a pause. “They don’t make a very good cut flower, do they?”
It was hard to know what might please her, and there was a fair chance that nothing would. Nevertheless, she was in town for several days and I had to find something to do to pass the time. I decided to take her to the National Aquarium, a big modern building right on the harbor, full of wonders from the huge open traylike tank of rays criss-crossed by concrete catwalks on the ground floor all the way to the huge pyramidal greenhouse full of rainforest on the roof. Tickets were expensive, but so far as I knew she had no abiding dislike of sea creatures, which made the aquarium a significantly better choice for her visit than the scrappy little community-based Great Blacks in Wax Museum to which I otherwise often took my out-of-town guests. The aquarium had the additional benefit of being across the street from a fancy seafood restaurant, or at least a seafood restaurant my mother liked because she thought it was fancy, which as everyone knows is every bit as good. We would go see some fish, and then we would eat some. Even my mother seemed to like the idea.
Strangely and gratifyingly, it seemed as though she actually did like the aquarium. I’d taken a lot of care to make sure to book our tickets for a time where there shouldn’t be too many noisy kids, and I’d bought tickets to one of the dolphin shows so she’d have a chance to sit and rest but still be entertained. In an attempt to forestall critique, I’d dressed appropriately for a fancy lunch with my mother, which meant a a plain navy blue mid-calf-length dress in a cut that she had deemed “slimming” and a pair of sedate low-heeled shoes. My only concessions to having a personality were a pair of dangly silver earrings, a mossy-green scarf, and my signature swipe of red lipstick. My mother couldn’t possibly object to either scarf or the earrings; she’d given me both. In fact, at one point as we made our way through the aquarium, she’d even looked me up and down, told me my dress was flattering, and congratulated herself on having known that the earrings would look good on me.
Things had, in other words, been going very well. My mother had been willing to be amused by the dolphin show, and expressed actual enthusiasm at the lush tangles of greenery in the rooftop rainforest. As we descended the long spiraling ramps that took us around and through an enormous coral reef exhibit, she paused several times to watch particularly colorful or active fish, and even talked about a few she liked. Now I watched her watching the rays, feeling cautiously optimistic that the outing would be one I could tuck away in the mental file folder marked “Pleasant Outings I Have Had.”
