Poodle PJ's
A Mercy Short Story
Kayla remembered the May when she was 14 as the date when she became older than her mother. She didn’t know why--nothing remarkable happened. The hard things had happened before that, years before. All of her grandparents had died, but when Grandpa Lew died, when she was eight, her heart wouldn’t stop grabbing at her chest. Somebody might have said that he wasn’t always nice to her, somebody else might have seen how he gruffly talked over her little chatter, how he moved her aside roughly when she inconvenienced him. But what she saw were the golden times, when he would hold her on his lap, rough whiskers on her smooth face, and they’d watch The Shining together, or some other old movie, eating ice cream on salty crackers, falling asleep until her mom would pick her up after work at 1 am. Grandpa Lew had been an architect, she thought. Something like that. When they drove through town in his truck, he would point to the buildings he’d made and she was proud that her own Grandpa had built this town.
Photo by Ashlyn Ciara on Unsplash
And then he died one day, a regular day, not a day for anything important to happen on. A normal school day. And when she got home, her mom was sitting on the front steps, staring, and when Kayla stood in front of her, Mumma said, “Honey, Grandpa Lew died today.” Just like that. And Mumma reached out her arms, but she didn’t pull Kayla into them. And later, much later, when she was all grown-up, Kayla would make a rule that you never tell news like that without your arms around someone, so they know for sure that love is there to catch them. Because sometimes you can’t step forward into their arms. Sometimes the thing that stops one person from embracing stops the other person, too, the little lost person whose heart just froze. And somebody’s got to be reckless and break through that barrier. It would always be her, Kayla thought. She would never leave the little lost person alone in the May breeze that felt so cold, so cold, just inches from her mother’s warm touch.
And Mumma wasn’t crying, and why wasn’t she crying? Kayla had been little then, she didn’t understand that sometimes grown-ups get broken and they don’t cry when they should, that they can’t cry when they want to even, sometimes. She didn’t think that maybe Mumma had cried all afternoon and the well had run dry. Kayla thought that maybe Mumma didn’t love Grandpa Lew enough, her own daddy. She didn’t know then that maybe Mumma was a lost little girl, too. It would be a long, long time before that could occur to her.
“He was so young, he was too young,” everyone said at the funeral, and even though she thought Grandpa Lew was an old, old man, Kayla began to realize that there were other people even older, much older.
The first time Kayla forgot to think about Grandpa Lew hurt her almost as much as when he died. She had put things up all around her room to remind her of him. And then one day she grabbed the silver hair band that he’d given her (it came in a set with a hot pink one and a black one), and she put it on and she looked at her face and puckered her lips and she forgot to remember that the hair band was a sacred object. And as much as she wanted to keep the hurt forever, for Grandpa Lew’s sake, her grief faded like construction paper in the sun and her heart didn’t grab as often, and there was nothing she could do about it.
And she didn’t know that when she was 26, she would dream about him as if he’d come back to life.
She didn’t know that when she was 31, she’d write down every single story that anyone could remember about him.
She didn’t know that when she was 49, the age that he’d been when he died, she’d still feel so very young.
And when she was 28, the age that Mumma had been when Grandpa Lew died, she felt like life had just started, that she hadn’t even started to settle down, was still looking for a path, was still just experimenting.
But she didn’t know any of that when she was 8 or 9 or 12 or 14. She just knew that it hurt to not hurt quite as much anymore.
The Christmas when she was 13 was still a real Christmas, a right Christmas. She and her little brother had come down the stairs and opened stockings and poured cereal and torn into the gifts. Mumma got new pjs. Kayla had bought them for her with babysitting money, and maybe that meant that a little part of her was not little anymore, though Kayla didn’t know it yet. Everyday, Mumma wore her sweatpants and t-shirt to bed, and Kayla didn’t think that was right, wearing your day clothes in bed, and she’d bought her pretty pink pjs with pictures of poodles wearing nighties and hair curlers. Mumma laughed and laughed at those poodles, and she put on the pjs right away. She tiptoed across the living room like a clumsy ballerina, scattered cereal crunching underneath her, and the crumbs of last night’s taco bell, and the remnants of last week’s toasted cheese sandwiches. “They’re cozy,” she said, and she sat in the big chair with her legs pulled up and smiled. She wore them all day and it was the best Christmas.
And it was somehow the happiness of that day that hurt Kayla in May, when the bus pulled up and she saw Mum on the front steps in her pjs, faded now from wearing them night and day and washing too often. The sight of the pjs hurt Kayla, because they were special, and the memory of Christmas was special, and Mum in them at 3:30 in the afternoon, wearing little holes in them on the concrete steps, made a mockery of happiness, and maybe mockery was what happiness deserved if it was just a set-up for this pain.
There had been voices in Kayla’s head for weeks, the made-up whispers of classmates on the bus; they muttered that her mama’s butt was fat from sitting on the steps all day, they sneered that her mom didn’t wear a bra in the middle of the day, that Mum was no good, was no good, was no good. And if Mum was no good, then Kayla was no good, because she made Kayla. And on that May day, the imagined words all came out, shouted loud in the street, but they came out of Kayla’s own mouth, in her own voice.
Her face was sullen, frozen in anger as she brushed passed Mum and into the apartment while Mum cracked to another waiting mom something about teenagers, and Kayla heard it trail behind her and it was just another foolish thing from her mother’s lips, another crime to hold against her.
She threw her backpack on the couch and went to the kitchen and started washing dishes angrily. She scrubbed and scrubbed at the crusted food with all her frustration.
“What’s got into you?” Mum said, leaning her chubby arm against the doorsill.
“It shouldn’t be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. What the hell do you do all day? Do you just sit on your fat ass all day?” She scanned the apartment, her eyes shining spotlights on every crusty food spill not wiped up, every pile of unwashed laundry, every bargain brought home in a yellow bag and left piled on the counter or the floor. “I don’t want to be seen with you! I hate you! I don’t want anyone to know I belong to you! And I’m not going to be like you, not ever.” Mum looked at Kayla hard and walked away, shutting the bedroom door behind her.
Kayla’s little brother watched wide-eyed while she cleaned all the dishes and cleaned the floor and threw all the cheap dollar store garbage in the trash without caring. She knocked on the neighbor's door and asked to borrow a vacuum cleaner and she vacuumed several year’s worth of crumbs out of the horrible carpet and then she brought the vacuum back. She wet a washcloth and she scrubbed the carpet with water until the washcloth was grey, and she soaped it with dish soap and scrubbed again and dumped bucket after bucket of grey water down the drain. The carpet went stiff, but she felt it was cleaner.
The laundry was a problem. She put it all together, but she didn’t have money for the laundromat, and she didn’t have a ride. She made supper for little brother and sat on the couch, chewing and staring at the mountain of clothes.
She did her homework and started her little brother on his. She stared at Mumma’s closed door. She took the trash out to the dumpster. Finally she knocked, and when there was no answer, she went in, heart pounding a little, feeling sick, the silence ominous.
She didn’t know what she feared, but when she saw Mum laying flat and blank faced on the bed, blue light of the TV flickering across her face, she knew that this was fearful enough and her fear roared into anger as she shouted, “What the hell are you doing?”
Mum slowly moved her eyes to her face and then back to the screen. Kayla turned off the TV. Part of her wished that Mumma would get angry, but she didn’t. She didn’t move.
“What exactly is it that you are doing?” She asked again. Mumma muttered something. “What?”
“Self-care,” Mum said a little louder.
“Self. Care. Are you kidding me? That’s not your job. Do your freaking job! We’re your job, Ma. Are you self-caring all day? You sure as hell don’t look like you’re taking care of yourself.”
Mum rolled over to face the wall, curled up tight and started to quietly cry. Later, when Kayla had her own children, she would know the urge to shield yourself, she would discover that the constant assaults of both false guilt and real failings come back to hurt you again and again, lobbed at you by your own children and by yourself, the force that no fortress can keep out, the noise that no sitcom can drown out. But in that moment, she felt only the undiluted disgust that had been building up towards her mother.
She wanted Mum to rise up, suddenly filled with new vigor, new motivation. She wanted her to say, “Yes! Things will be different! This is the moment when it all changes!” She wanted her to take a shower, do her hair, put on fresh clothes. She believed it could happen. And it didn’t, not that day, and not the next, and not the next. But the carpet was never crunchy again, and the counter was wiped clean every night, and Kayla didn’t care if she had to do it, at least it was done. And Mum never thanked her. Mum only emerged to eye her suspiciously if she heard one of her yellow plastic bags of treasures rustling. Kayla didn’t think to herself until much later, “I wish that we were your treasure”, but the idea was there, in the back of her mind, motivating her. And this was the tempering that made her strong and inflexible and hard. It would take many of her own failings until any part of her became soft again.
Until she could see that 26 and three children come long before you feel ready for them, even if you err on the prepared side. 37 comes and you’re so tired, so tired, too tired to be everything that you once wanted to be. 41 comes while you’re still waiting to be a grown-up.
Mum’s face in a picture from that Christmas is so smooth and unlined, her hair in two long pig tails, her smile genuine.
When Kayla visits her mom’s house, she does the dishes first and vacuums, while Mum waits for her at the cluttered table, reconfiguring piles so that they can play Uno, glad that she raised a helpful daughter but wishing she would come hug her first.
The winter when Kayla was 39, her mom said “thank you” when she sat down with a sigh and picked up her Uno cards. Mum didn’t know why Kayla started to cry, but she hugged her, wet cheek to wet cheek.
There is now a podcast version of this story.