Breadcrumb #576
MARYANN AITA
My mother is a lightning storm. She is there without warning; a flash, a rupture. She fits herself into other people’s worlds, like a chameleon with only a palette of pinks. She spews details she doesn’t own as an entry-point to empathy—her son’s cancer a conversation-starter, her daughter’s NYU degree her own accolade.
She spent most of her time in the house. When she stepped out, it was like the bottle of her exploded, leaving glass shards and liquid in a pool on the ground. My mother chats with store clerks, gathers fatty details about wait staff, and stands up for what she deems just. She wrote letters to the city council asking for four-way stop signs along our block. The city installed them. A few weeks later she set out to remove them—stopping every few feet was a public inconvenience.
**
As a kid, I liked storms. They were time I could spend inside, alone in the dark. I’d count the seconds between the flash and the clap—one, one thousand—to determine how many miles the storm was away. My mother always felt thousands of seconds away from me, but only an instant would pass between her flash and clap. I lived in the gap between them, fighting my way out of her electricity.
**
I learned to yell in the woods. My Girl Scout leader stood me at the bottom of a hill and made me shout to her. The first call was meek, but with each prod I growled louder and louder until I was screaming. Until I cried myself into existence.
Once I’d discovered my guttural agency, I exploded: a first line of defense against my mother’s expanding storm of extroversion. Word after word my tongue raced, my hands jogged in tandem, squeezing more and more of myself into every sentence. Every class, my arms launched themselves into the air. Pick me. I know the answer.
“Word after word my tongue raced, my hands jogged in tandem, squeezing more and more of myself into every sentence.”
Silence was like an oven: I couldn’t sit in it for more than a second. I acted in plays. I ran for Student Council Vice President. I sang in choir. I joined the speech team. I spat language and scribbled in gestures.
The small meek me was ash in the forest. I’d made myself outgoing.
**
“You can make friends in a Starbucks,” my mother said, comparing me to her other daughter. “Valerie isn’t good at that.”
My sister wants to be small. She tried for many years to make herself disappear. In her adolescence, she developed an eating disorder. By the time she was 24, she weighed 60 pounds. But like a light post uplifted in the wind, she hit the ground again somewhere. She landed—healthier—in Arizona, with a husband and baby, a thirty-minute drive from our mother.
I can make friends in a Starbucks. I learned from her: say something witty; complain about the wait; revel in your mutual confusion. It’s automatic now: pick me.
**
In line to get a book signed by a favorite author, I started chatting with the woman behind me. Out of habit, words spewed.
Conversation is volcanic in me. I gave fire to man and like Prometheus I felt the violent pecking at my body that followed.
At the table with the author, I melted into the small shy girl in the woods. He asked me a question—one I had an answer to—but I was nervous to respond. I needed a moment. I know the answer. The woman behind me was suddenly a magnetic friend, closer and closer, so near to me, a part of me, pecking at me.
She answered for me.
We had a banter, one I didn’t want, but initiated anyway, programmed from years of observing my mother.
**
In Arizona, my mom’s friends call her “the mayor.” Everyone knows who she is. Everyone has a strong opinion about her. She teaches water aerobics, tempesting pool waves while she hovers above the water. She and my father throw parties and play trivia and go to karaoke.
I am terrified of Karaoke.
I am afraid of my voice. I threw it out into the wilderness once and it wasn’t mine when it came back.
I am not the extrovert, my mother thinks. I am not like her. She can’t see what isn’t like her.
There is only an instant between the flash and the clap. I live between them. It’s not enough room to separate us.
***
I like it there, in the dark. I like it in the interior. I like the alone.
But, like my mother, my culture does not value the introspective. We want the CEOs and salesmen. Workspace walls have fallen. We televise the awards for actors and directors—for the human interactors—but we stamp sound designers’ names in silent text.
I want to be small.
But if you walk into the wind, you must lean forward. I learned from my mother how to be assertive, how to monsoon a conversation. I know how to put on a face. She taught me to test lipstick on my skin and leave a gentle blot on a tissue. It always left an imprint, a little part of my body left behind, a piece of myself gone. I learned to cloak myself in the world of the extroverted.
Pick me. Pick me. I am the life of every party I don’t want to attend.
I prefer to live in the gap between thunder and clap, but I learned to inhabit the flash of lightning.
I was such an astute performer; I believed I liked it there, on my mother’s stage. I liked the smiles and the shaking hands; I thought my electricity originated there.
But I draw my power from solitude while staying inside during a storm. That is where I trace my thoughts, in the calm where the rain beats down on the rock outside and I am whole. Where fire belongs to the sky and thunder is my heartbeat.