Losing It. Emma Rathbone

pleasant, polite phone conversations in the weeks leading up to my arrival, and I wouldn’t have thought it would be like this, like it was fifteen minutes later when we sat quietly across from each other at a long table in the red dining room under a badly tilting brass chandelier. She chewed quickly. Her hair was parted down the middle and tied back. She had changed clothes—she was wearing a shirt with pastel handprints on it. Her nails were painted red and she looked abrasively clean.

      “Wow, this all looks great,” I said.

      “Good,” said Aunt Viv. She arranged a napkin in her lap. She smiled. I smiled. I took a sip of my water.

      “I really like my room,” I said.

      “Good, good,” she said. She nodded expectantly, like I was supposed to say more. Like something more was supposed to happen in that moment.

      “I was looking at that poster,” I said. “Do you like jazz?”

      “You do?” she said politely.

      “No, I mean, do you? I was asking if you do.”

      “If I …”

      “Like jazz. Jazz music. Are you a fan?”

      It dawned on her. She tried to shimmy herself into the conversation. “Oh, oh of course,” she said, waving her fork, squinting. “I’ve tried, you know?”

      “Sure, yeah,” I said.

      She nodded and went back to her food.

      “Dad says you paint plates?” I said.

      “Yes,” she said, dabbing the side of her mouth with a napkin. “‘My little hobby,’ right?”

      “Oh, no, no,” I said. “He didn’t say it like that.”

      She shrugged, and sawed at her chicken.

      “But so, you do?” I said. “You do do that?”

      “I do, yes,” she said. “I do.” I had a flash of her cracking up with my dad on the sidewalk outside our house as they tried to hold on to whipping and wheeling sheets of poster board in the wind. There are gray clouds in the background. She’s laughing helplessly, her eyes shining, their efforts futile against the forces.

      “Do you sell them?”

      “More and more,” she said. “I do series, themes, you know. Different things each time. I’m trying to get it off the ground. But for now, for my day job, I still do hospice work.”

      “Oh, okay,” I said. “What’s that like?”

      She shrugged. “Tiring.” She looked around. She had ramrod posture and a large forehead and a feminine, voluptuous face, but there was a shiny hardness there, too, as if there were steel rods beneath her skin.

      I turned my napkin over in my lap, took a sip of wine, flicked something off the table. I glanced up at the brass chandelier and wondered about the likelihood of it crashing to the table. The seconds ticked by.

      She seemed to remember I was there. She smiled brightly. “What do you think you’ll be doing here,” she said, “for the summer?”

      “Well, I have to get a job. But I’m also planning on writing an essay,” I said, surprising myself, the idea having only occurred to me right then.

      “Really?”

      “Yes,” I said, “about swimming. About swimming culture. What it’s like. I don’t think there’s much out there—or at least I haven’t read much—about what it’s like. And I have that firsthand experience.”

      “Of course,” she said. She stared thoughtfully into the distance. “I remember that period of time. Hilary always talked about that. How driven you were. She was really impressed.”

      I shrugged and nodded.

      “She’d talk about how you’d wake her up, drag her out of bed. You were all ready to go. You just wanted to get there. How you begged them to let you sign up at the swim team.”

      “She said that?”

      Viv nodded.

      “That I begged them to sign up?”

      “Yes.”

      “But”—I shook my head—“that’s … They were the ones who wanted me to do it.”

      She shrugged, chewed.

      “I thought, because of Mom’s failed horse-riding career. I mean, she was the one who signed me up, you know, initially.”

      I thought of my mom watching me from the bleachers at practice, biting her thumbnail, her face knitted with inner calculations. I thought of the subtle way she’d let me know if she thought I’d done a good job or not: if I could watch television in the living room when we got home, the meted-out dessert portions after dinner, the grade of affection in her voice when she said good night. Had I imagined all that? Everything tilted ominously as I considered that a huge portion of my life may have been based on a misunderstanding.

      “Anyway,” I said, trying to figure out how to change the subject.

      “Wasn’t there talk of you going to the Olympics?” she said.

      “I went to the Olympic trials in Tallahassee,” I said.

      She nodded, and I was annoyed by the way she gingerly avoided probing any further, as if it was something I was sensitive about, some huge failure that I hadn’t made it to the actual Olympics. People didn’t know. They didn’t know how good you had to be to even get to the trials. I wrenched apart a roll.

      “Do you do a lot of crafts?” I said. “I noticed a few knickknacks around the house. Like that frame, in the living room?” I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me. She was methodically pulling something apart on her plate. “With the seashells on it? Or is that from— Do you travel a lot?” I said desperately.

      Viv cleared her throat and looked up. “I took a class,” she said.

      “Oh, okay.”

      “On frame decoration.”

      “I see.” I waved my fork around. “So, they said you could do pretty much whatever you wanted? With the frames?”

      She glanced up at me. She straightened her shoulders. “Yes,” she said primly. She repositioned a piece of chicken with her knife and fork. I mashed a pea on my plate.

      I looked up at the chandelier and said a little prayer that it actually would come crashing down.

      “I did used to travel, quite a bit,” she said. “In fact, I recently went to Orlando.”

      “Florida? What was that like?”

      “Very lively.” She finished chewing and again dabbed the sides of her mouth. “I stayed with a friend there. A very nice apartment complex. It had balconies with”—she shaped the air with her hands—“flower boxes. And”—she continued shaping the air—“all different colors, as if to get the effect of a village. One evening a young man, he turned out to be divorced, invited us into the courtyard and we had teriyaki, all together there.”

      She looked at me expectantly.

      I nodded frantically. “Great,” I said. “Cool—so, he was a chef?”

      “Yes,” she said. I felt as if I had disappointed her in some fundamental way. “More or less.”

      “Great.”

      The rest of dinner, we couldn’t find a toehold. I gave her an update about how Mom and Dad were doing. I talked blandly about my old job at Quartz. She perfunctorily told me about her duties at the hospice where she worked, talking to families and dealing with patients. I worked hard to keep her going about this, pumping her with questions, because it seemed like safe territory—work. And it distracted us from what I think she must have been feeling, too.