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.
I decided then that it probably
was
embarrassment, after all, that made me want to keep Paula away from this experience. But it was my family I was ashamed of. I had lived in Chicago for four years and had carefully cultivated a bohemian air of art school lesbian chic. That's all Paula knew of me. I didn't want her to see what I come from. The gossip harpy aunts and golf club dentist uncles. So goddamn dreary.
The only person I was at all looking forward to seeing was Donald. My hapless stepfather was almost as out of place in my mother's world as I was. He was a high school Biology teacher, for God's sake. The only reason he lasted with my mother as long as he did was because he was so spineless. He was probably the one man in the world who could have put up with Mother's shit for as long as he did.
I always liked Donald, even if I never really respected him. He was warm and friendly, as opposed to my mother's cold-cunt cruelty. He had a dry, offbeat sense of humor that I came to appreciate more and more the older I got. But Jesus, he flinched like a puppy when my mother snapped her fingers. This made his occasional stabs at exerting parental authority simply pathetic. I guess we had our share of conflict during my stormy adolescence, but I always felt bad about it later, whereas I took pleasure from battles with Mother.
Donald also played an important, if inadvertent, part in my sexual development. Once, when I was eleven, I walked in on him masturbating in the bathroom. Talk about an embarrassing moment. I withdrew silently, and he came out red-faced a few minutes later, apologizing, terrified that he had somehow scarred me. I guess in a way he did. His was the first adult penis I had ever seen outside of forbidden magazines. That sight was the basis of nearly every sexual fantasy I had until I actually had sex. All the boys in my dreams wore Donald's cock. My memory swelled it to grotesque proportions. None of my male lovers have ever been able to live up to the imagined glory of my stepfather's prick.
I thought of this memory when I stepped off the plane and found him waiting for me. Nobody else in my family had thought to meet me at the airport, but there was poor, grief-stricken Donald; unshaven and disheveled, eyes puffy and red. He wore the same look of flinching guilt that I remembered so well, like he was afraid that any minute Mother would start yelling at him to quit being such a fucking cry-baby. I compared this to how he looked when I walked in on him, in the instant before he had seen me. He had smiled with the modest victory of his secret pleasure, a thrilling power not even my Mother could take away from him.
"Emma," he said warmly. "I'm so glad you came."
He hugged me. It was as asexual a hug as you could hope for from a meek step-father like Donald, but without thinking I pressed myself close and felt his body through his clothes and my clothes. I wondered if I could make him smile like that again.
When he released me, he only blinked. If he had noticed the pressure, he gave no sign.
"How was your flight?" he asked innocently.
The two of us went down to find my luggage, Donald catching up on my life and relating details about Mother's death in his usual halting, disjointed way. I quickly saw him again as the middle-aged dork he was. I discounted that crazy flash of whatever it was as just part of the weird trip that death works on your head.
The funeral was the next day. Closed casket, of course. What they had found of Mother wasn't very attractive, I'm sure. For most of the wake, I sat near the back of the room staring at the expensive box that contained her remains, unable to shake the belief that she was in there staring back at me.
I was wearing a black dress carefully calculated to provoke the whispers of my bitch aunts. Just a little too short and a little too tight to be respectful, but not bad enough to be outrageous. On a last minute impulse before leaving the hotel that morning, I had taken off my panties. Kind of a final fuck-you to Mother. I remember once, on a dare, me and a few girlfriends had gone to the mall in short skirts with nothing underneath. Through her powerful sixth sense for impropriety, Mother had known. She confronted me when I came home, lifted my skirt to confirm her suspicions, and asked me in all seriousness if I was trying to get raped. Well, Mother, here it is, your last big social function, and again your flighty daughter has forgotten her drawers. Once, very quickly, I opened my legs and flashed the coffin.
