Where to Look

“Martins 1” by Breanna Martins

My mother asks if I will call her Bea. Is that so wrong, she says. She says she doesn’t want for much.

Some help with the dishes, this new name to know.

A few hours, she says to me in the morning. Will you, she says, just this once?

My mother has been called many things before. She is fifty, fifty-five, drawing checks off of disability and living in a two story split-level. I am twenty-six years old and living there, too.

The windows in our house are painted shut. There is little air getting through them, nothing going out. When I make complaints on the matter, my mother says that they came this way, that it was a condition of the sale. She says something else about insulation, how the previous owner had battled drafts, freezing cold winters.

I have been online about the issue. I have worked at the wood with putty knives, tried hours of direct heat, washes in vinegar-based solutions, but there is no breaking through it all, no cracks to be made in the seal. The layers of paint are painted on more paint. It has a suffocating effect. 

Last week, my mother bought herself a new pair of shoes. Now she tries them on. See, she says, one foot strapped in a black leather heel, the other flattened on the carpet. Like this, she says, her ankle twisted toward me, the calf muscle flexing. Wouldn’t you like something like this? Wouldn’t you call it pretty?

My mother’s feet are the oldest part of her body. Each Monday, she tries to make them new. She lays a fresh coat of polish over the old one, more piling on, and always the wrong color, a deep maroon, some purple shade, dark and darker still, all the sort to make it look like blood pooled beneath the nails.

The guys at work want to know who’s been getting what. Extra days off, overtime hours, laid on the weekends. There is a break room where we eat, talk, tell each other stories, lies, that which we've heard and done.

I say normal things—that I’ve got a few on the line, a history like the rest. I tell about the girl that morning in the hardware aisle. She had come in needing help.

Screws, I say, a couple of drill bits. Yeah, I say. I got her number.

Two nights ago, I tried it out again with Sarah Kirby. I picked her up just before eight o’clock, ironed wrinkles out of my jeans, ordered the fish tacos. We asked for a small table near the back. We each had one drink. We didn’t leave room for dessert, no kissing at her place, either. She shut the door quickly behind her. I heard the lock slide into place.

My mother says, I think your first mistake was the seafood.

And after this, she says more. Acceptable conversations, bad posture.

My mother is interested in the ways I act with women. She has opinions, wants details, demonstrations, recaps. The day before my Senior Prom she taught me how to dance, showed me where my hands should go.

Of my father, I try to remember bad things, loud noises, blood. There is the time he flipped his eyelids inside out and chased me through the street, that orange underskin of his shocking to be seen, but he has played the man missing from soon after, and has stayed that way ever since. He has never had to live in this house with the windows painted shut.

My mother came up with claims against him, in the courts, told to me. She spoke of a father who had showed his back and more. She was in the habit of twirling her wrist to provide a where whenever asked by a younger me. Out there, she would say, flicking, pointing, general directions. East, she’d say. West. Your father goes places.

I pass entire afternoons at the windows alone. I follow the sun down through the sky, watch my eyes grow fuller in the reflection. There is water somewhere close beyond this house, or an open field maybe, acres, miles, a blankness waiting to be covered.

I have thrown rocks into that distance, quarters, sharp-shaped things, and listened for a sound, some response. There is, I believe, something more for me to see.

My mother gets dressed for dates she doesn't go on. She dusts the furniture in skirts, patterned blouses, vacuums the floors wearing the same. She finds her way in to the same rooms I am standing in, looking in, and claps her hands in a fit. Oh, oh, oh, she says. Wait, she says. I’ll put something on.

She says, We can dance.

I have heard my mother’s wedding song often, nightly. She liked Sinatra then, and still does, his jazz standards especially. She beats time on her thighs, hums out the trumpet player’s parts, and pushes saxophone notes through pursed lips. She goes until her face is flushed. She bows her head, shyly, turned away. I have held onto her hips, made the steps in time. She says, Hey, you’re getting better.

The girl I take out next is dyed bleach-blonde. My mother has said no to more brunettes; we’ve had bad luck with brown hair. Red-heads are on the fence still, she says. She says, We can’t be sure yet.

The blonde girl holds my hand when we leave the restaurant and again on the car ride home. I lace my fingers between my mother’s on the couch, showing her how, squeezing the way she did, that extra bit of pressure. My mother is seated next to me. She is sitting up straight, the eleven o’clock news is running out. She says, Now I’ll be her and you be you. She says, Or you be her and I’ll be you. She has inched herself closer. Her hands are slick with sweat.

What else, she says. What’s next?

A good deal of this comes down to direction, what to say, how to live, where to look.

We will have been in this house for six years next fall and I have not stepped one foot in the yard out back. The grass when we moved in was overgrown, and it has only gotten worse, knee-high now, thick, tangled patches folding over themselves, a sickly shade of rotting green.

I have listened to the insects in there at night, restless movers, noise-makers, the animals, too; things that shouldn’t be, I think. I think there is a way to be watched back through these windows. There are no curtains here.

My mother’s last boyfriend was three years ago now, and always shirtless. He talked about money from a business he’d sold prior, an auto-repair shop. He was the one who told me the easiest way was to break the window clean, replace the whole piece. A couple hundred bucks, he said, then you could finally breathe in here.

Before he left for good he cursed us both, called my mother shut-in, tired-looking, a freak show. She stayed up in tears on the couch that night.

She said, You should hold a girl when she cries.

She said, Did I teach you that yet?

She said, That’s what you should do.

There are days I don’t leave work. After I get off, I wait in the parking lot, the car running, pointed, ready. I keep maps folded in my glovebox with destinations circled in red. Routes drawn across, by land, by sea. My life has become a series of questions. I am often asking for permission, forgiveness, some help with the answers.

Arizona, I’d told my mother when she asked. Oregon, Wyoming. These were places to see. The frontier of something unknown. New, provincial, possible.

My mother said, Waco, in response. The Donner Party. She said, Bad things happen when people are left to their own devices.

The blonde girl doesn’t call back. Two weeks, no word, no next time out. When my mother hears this news, she is in the tub, has been for hours. I am speaking to her from the other side of a cracked open door. There is steam, fog on the bathroom mirror. I hear the sloshing water every time she turns.

Tell me again, she says. I can’t understand you from out there.

A trickle of water slips off her body into the tub. I know where she is inside, through the door, scrubbing herself clean. I can’t help but think of that raw skin, the redness, a pressure. I say, There is somewhere else I need to be.

My mother has been many times walked out on. For a while, she took to calling herself a widow, and I have caught her introducing herself this way to strangers still, as if it were a title to wear. She will give her story out anyplace, in line at the supermarket, the doctor’s office waiting room, her husband’s early demise.

In the end, it is the same. She is leaning in too close to some someone. She is blinking back tears, grabbing onto sleeves, is saying, Dead man, dead man.

I have often thought of my father in Florida, finding him there, a new tan, a good wife. I imagine he tends bar near a dock and lives in a house on the water filled with sliding glass doors. I have never seen an ocean except on postcards.

I test the glass of all the windows, press on their thin bends. I move room by room, one by one. My mother’s birthday is a week from tomorrow. She has been brainstorming our night together. She is saying to me drinks, dinner, a patio restaurant. She wants button-downs, and wine pairings. The glass flexes underneath my fingertips. I know there is a breaking point, can feel it, and I am beginning to think of bricks, punches, shattered glass pieces.

My thought is this—something has to give.

There are times I would like my mother to find a room, a door to close behind her. I have seen her without her socks on, watched her weekly paintings. I know that if I ran off she couldn’t catch me. 

Sometimes I think of other things, worse things.

Mostly, when I see her feet, I picture washing them. I have dreams about rinsing them under cool water, spreading a lotion across the papery skin and removing all those years, fixing callouses, red blotches, the bulgy veins that look ready to burst.

Two summers ago, the basement here flooded. On top of the water our old things floated. I found my mother awash in the mess, old pictures freed from a shoebox, face up, face down, a younger mother, in motion, with light, a mother when my father was still in the picture.

My mother says to call her Bea. Be a good son, she says. No one has to know.

We have stayed home for her birthday, made a meal of our own. My mother has tried on three different outfits so far. She wants the one I like best.

I tell my mother that is something I can’t choose.

So why not this new one, my mother says. What happened there with her?

My mother has put out fruit platters for dessert. She spoons into grapefruits while we speak. She is being careful about her figure, she says. She is talking about the girl I went out with last Sunday, the one I took to the movies. She knows how we kissed during the end-credits, that I made it to one half of second base.

I try to explain where the rest went wrong. Our teeth clicked, I say, biting down, showing. I say, Her mouth didn’t fit mine.

My mother makes use of her mouth at the table. She eats, she drinks, and in between there is talking. She says things like, At your age… She uses words that sound like beau. She is telling me what it was like for a girl like her. The backseat of her brother’s borrowed Buick, a fast song on the radio, something altogether difficult to fit into words.

Just listen, my mother says.

This is what she expects from me now.

At this late hour the windows are all turned around. What there is to see is what there is inside: a table, two chairs, our plates, my mother and me. My reflection makes faces in the glass. I would like to reach out and touch the dark spaces behind it. Outside there is a wind sifting through treetops. Down the street, loose dogs move over lawns, snap at raised sprinkler heads. I have begun to sweat under our ceiling lights. I count the second passing inside of my head. I put together lists: Antigua, Morocco, the Oregon Coast. Islands, I say.

I think there are places I'll never get to see.

About the Author

Brian Lynch is a writer from New York, living in Washington State.  He can be contacted at blynch285@gmail.com

about the artist

Breanna Cee Martins (b. 1987) is a Latina artist living and working in New York. Known for her large-scale watercolors mounted on canvas, her ghostly paintings of phantom people and children evoke faded photographs or half-forgotten memories. At the core of her practice is spontaneity. Mixing watercolor with hydrogen peroxide and bleach adds to the fluidity of each work, with the images swimming to the surface, the final result is only revealed after the pieces dry. The materials resist the illusion of control, her paintings are seemingly conjured out of thin air. Martins has exhibited both domestically and internationally and received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2011.