When I heard that my mother was dead, I laughed so hard I pissed my pants. Donald, my mother's stupidly loyal husband of fifteen years, called with the news. His voice was raw from hours of crying. I hung up on him so he wouldn't hear me laugh.
Paula, my basket-case girlfriend, looked up at me curiously. The joint we had been sharing smoldered in her hand. "What is it?"
"My mother's dead," I stated, then let loose a gale of laughter. Paula, I'm sure, managed to convince herself that my hysterics were from grief.
"Oh my God, Emma," she said. "How?"
"Fuckin' shark ate her," I managed, then lost it. There could be no doubt now that it was hilarity I was gripped with. I laughed so hard I fell to the floor and rolled around gripping my sides. The tears were falling now, to be sure, but they had nothing to do with grief. The laughing gave way to coughing, my lungs still a little tender from the pot. That's when it happened. Hot liquid erupted between my legs.
"Oh no," I coughed. "Oh shit."
Paula looked with horror upon the dark wet spot on the crotch of my jeans.
"Are you all right?" she said, dainty nose wrinkling in disgust.
I shook my head violently, still laughing. I was helpless. Two full minutes went by before I got myself under control.
"God," I said when I could finally breathe again. "I thought that cunt was going to live forever."
"Emma!" Paula said, aghast.
I glared up at her. "Fuck you, Paula. Like
you
don't have mother issues."
When I was eight I entered into one of the periodic war of the wills which defined my relationship with my mother. This was after she divorced my father, but before she married Donald. It was just the two of us living in the house. The object of conflict, this time, was my messy room. Mother would be damned, she told me, if she was going to clean it. I was a big girl now and could clean my own room. I'm sure this was true, but I had chosen this arena to test the boundaries of parental authority in my new father-less world. Normal childhood behavior, I have been assured. Only there was nothing normal about my dealings with Mother. The conflict had been going on for weeks with neither side willing to compromise her position. My bedroom attained dizzying levels of slovenliness. This made me curious as to how bad it could get, and drove my mother into paroxysms of rage. I was screamed at, slapped, and grounded until college, but I would not concede.
Eventually, I was locked in the room and told I could not come out until it was clean. I sullenly rearranged the mess, shoved half the crap under my bed, and broadcast my displeasure by slamming things around as loudly as possible. When this didn't satisfy my mother's white-glove criteria, the door was again locked. So I snuck out my bedroom window and spent two days hiding out in the toolshed behind my friend Stacy Barnum's house.
I eventually got tired of eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Stacy smuggled out to me and came home, only to be locked in the room again. This time Mother took all my clothes so I couldn't run away. Undefeated, I slipped out the window naked and ran screaming down the street until the neighbors called the police.
That should have broken my mother. I fully expected it would. Embarrassment was her greatest fear, and her daughter running stark raving naked down the street should have been enough to kill the woman. But I underestimated her. After I was returned home, wrapped in a policeman's blanket, Mother sat me down at the kitchen table. On the table was a bowl containing the goldfish I had kept for over a year. His name was Jaws, of course.
"I want you to watch very carefully," Mother stated. Then she grabbed the green fish net and scooped Jaws out onto the table.
My pet flopped around, drowning in the air. I tried to rescue him, but was slapped back into my seat.
"Watch, you little bitch," Mother hissed.
She grabbed my arm and held me fast. I watched the fish die.
"You're going to go upstairs now and clean your room," Mother then stated with certainty. "Or I'm going to kill Fluffy, too."
Fluffy was the kitten my father had given me just a few weeks before. I looked into her cruelly smiling eyes and knew she was telling the truth. Sobbing with acknowledged defeat, I sulked upstairs and cleaned my room. It was spotless when I was finished.
Now, years later, sweet karma balances the score. While swimming in the ocean by the beach house of some of her good rich friends, Mother was attacked by a hungry hammerhead. Bit off her leg in one bite, then came back for a good chunk of her side. She died of either shock or blood loss before any of her swimming companions even realized she was in trouble. The revenge of Jaws? If the universe is just, it must be so.
Two days later and I was on a plane bound for Miami and the funeral. I was traveling by myself. Paula had wanted to come, but I had insisted on going it alone. This, of course, had prompted a huge screaming battle. I swear, sometimes I wish I'm straight. Any boy would be silently grateful that he was being let off the hook, but of course a girl takes it as a mortal insult that you don't invite her along to your mother's funeral.
It's not like I was ashamed of her. Actually, I would have rather enjoyed the mortification I would have caused my family by showing up at the funeral with my girlfriend. They were all such uptight, repressed WASPs. The only thing that could have possibly offended them more would be a black guy. Knowing that my mother would be the most humiliated was almost enough to make me change my mind. I told her that I was gay once, years before I had actually slept with a girl.
"Don't come crying to me when you get AIDS!" she had shrieked.
I laughed at the memory as I leaned back in my narrow airplane seat. At least I had a halfway decent buzz. I had flirted with the male flight attendant, and was rewarded with double the usual allotment of plastic-cup gin-and-tonics. I wasn't anywhere near drunk, but was far enough along not to mind either the indignities of air travel or the knowledge of what awaited me on the other end of the journey.
