The Damage We Endure

Alaina sat in the train station on her usual out-of-the-way bench. It was plain and worn with rust-spotted legs. She lost herself in the unintelligible din that did little to cover the intermittent click-clack of high heels as the station announcements rattled off their repeating messages. Everyone had someplace to go and something to do.

Except her. Stuck without a job, she was the one person in the station who was completely unimportant.

The vibration of an incoming call pulled her from her daydreams and she pulled out her phone.

Ugh.

If she didn’t answer before it went to voicemail, she’d have a five-minute long message which would be followed by a second in ten minutes because she hadn’t called back yet. She might as well get the inevitable over with now. She pressed the button to answer.

“Hi Mom.”

“Well, hello! How are you?” At least her mother was cheerful today. Though that could turn in a heartbeat. 

“Fine, I was—“

“You always say you’re fine. You never tell me anything.” 

If you ever let me finish a sentence I would.

Someone passed her by, and she wished she could be that person for even a moment instead of spending the next half hour listening to a woman who never paused for breath. As her mother started on the latest escapade of somebody’s cousin’s neighbor, two women approached, one steadying herself with a cane. Perhaps they were mother and daughter. The younger woman was saying something, and the older was nodding along. They looked happy. As they passed, she heard the younger woman say, “Oh Mom, I wish you’d have been there.”

Other people had mothers who were interested in their children’s lives, mothers who they wanted to spend time with. In the ultimate lowering of standards, Alaina simply wanted a mother who would let her complete a full thought.

“My goodness, it’s loud. Where are you?”

“The station. I got another job rejection and I needed—”

Her mother cut her off. Again. “You know, Joshua is in your same boat, there’s been so little snow this year, his plowing business was way down.”

She and her mother’s handyman were not in the same boat, not that she’d get a chance to ever defend her situation. With spring on the way, Joshua would transition to landscaping, and he’d be busy. It would be tight, but he’d make it.

Alaina had no job at all, and her savings were drying up. Every time she looked for something new, her mind screamed for some reason that she was unqualified. She knew it was stupid, she knew she was wrong, but she didn’t know how to stop.

It was an old habit stemming from growing up with a narcissist. Her mother always had to be the best, which meant always putting Alaina down. Oddly, her mother also had to be the worst. Nobody was allowed to have a bigger problem or a have a deeper hurt than she was. Her life had been a competition for acknowledgment and a never-successful search for empathy.

But knowing the wrongness of her childhood and defeating the demons they caused were very different things. The last time she talked about job prospects with her mom, and she told her that she could do anything she wanted. That wasn’t particularly helpful as Alaina grew up learning to want nothing. Any opinion that differed from her mother’s would result in denial, condemnation, or outright derision. How could she apply for a job that stretched her when she expected to be emotionally thrashed at every turn?

There was one opportunity down in Arizona that she was very interested in. She loved the desert, and her friend Kathy had a spare bedroom she could rent out until she could get her feet under her. But the last time she mentioned moving to her mother, Alaina had to endure a two-week-long temper tantrum about having no one to take care of her. It was Alaina’s duty to put her entire life aside to take care of her poor and lonely mother. Except that her mother was not the person who was either of those things. 

Alaina was.

“Mom, mom… MOM!” The subject had turned to her neighbor’s grandchildren.

“Yes, sweetheart.”

 “I’ve been thinking about that idea Kathy had— “

“Oh, you don’t want that. Who wants to live in the desert? You remember when you graduated college?” Her mother’s voice cut into her thoughts. “You didn’t know what to do with your life. Your dad was so frustrated by your wandering between majors.” Her tone changed like a lightning bolt and Alaina shrunk back from the angry voice on the phone. “He said, ‘You should have gotten a degree that made sense!’”

She blinked several times and caught her breath, all but seeing her mother’s angry eyes flashing. That look would always haunt her. If demon possession was a real thing, then the demon that lived inside her mother invariably showed itself at times like this. There was no other description for the pure malevolence that emanated from her when she got angry. “I don’t even—”

The words “remember that” died before forming in her mouth as her mother went from an inferno of anger to diabetic sweetness in a heartbeat. She should have known better than to bring it up.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’ll get something around here soon. Say, would you like me to take you shopping on Sunday? We can have lunch at that place you like, and I’ll take you to McArdell’s for a nice dress for interviews. I need a few things from there myself.”

Alaina felt her toes curl inside her shoes. Conversations with her mother always left her the victim of emotional whiplash.

As Alaina forced her feet to relax, uncountable other memories of her failings flashed by. Her mother felt that pointing out faults and being other people’s conscience was something along the lines of a holy calling. Alaina’s therapist called it something else entirely.

In fact, her therapist had encouraged her to move to Arizona.

She knew her therapist was right, but for whatever reason, she was unable to make that truth move from the therapist’s office into her own life. A shadow crossed the periphery of her vision, and Alaina looked up to see a woman with a clerical collar walk by. What would God say about all of this? Hopefully, He wouldn’t condemn her. She has got enough of that here on earth.

“So that’s all I know. What’s new with you?” 

Was she kidding? Had she not heard any of the dozen or so words Alaina had been allowed to speak?

Of course she hadn’t. She’d blocked out Alaina in the same way Alaina blocked out the absolute mundanity of hearing intimate details about people she didn’t know.

Mutual disregard for each other. What a wonderful family she had.

Of course, experience had also taught her she would hear ‘so that’s all I know’ at least twice more before her mother would actually wrap up the conversation. Then she would take 15 words to say, “I love you.” 

Alaina would never say “I love you” back.

Part of it was she didn’t love her mother, at least not in the way her mother defined love. The other part, perhaps the larger part, was that she knew how badly her mother wanted to hear those words. By responding “yup, see you later,” Alaina owned one point in the conversation where her mother listened instead of waiting to talk. She did it to deny one thing to a woman who bullied her way into everything else. It was Alaina’s line in the sand that she would not cross. It was an ant hill of a victory, but it was the only victory she had ever been able to forge out.

She felt horrible for claiming it.

The call ended as she knew it would, and Alaina went back to watching people cross the floor.

She thought of the cleric again, and what God would say about the way she allowed her mother to bulldoze over her. Then, her mind went to how much imagining the life of passing train travelers gave her. 

Or how little. It was like the buzz she would get at the first sip of vodka. It was a momentary rush, her painful reality always hovering like a predator. Or like the demon that lived inside of her mother. She knew it, just like the drunk did. By imagining a world of acceptance and confidence, she was admitting she had neither in real life.

She held out her hand to watch the shadow it cast on the stone floor. Whenever she moved her hand, the shadow followed her in perfect obedience. A shadow couldn’t step out on its own because it had no desires of its own, no power of its own. 

She looked from the shadow to her hand, covered in the bright white of a spotlight just outside her alcove. As she turned it over, she saw a small line on her skin from when she accidentally stabbed herself with a pair of scissors. No shadow could display a scar or remind her of the lesson she learned that day. Shadows were passive things, bland and characterless. So was the emotional comfort she got from pretending she was a stranger. For all she knew, the woman passing by her now was in worse shape than she was.

In the sunlight, her hand was proof of healing and adventures that nobody could deny. She left her bench, walking further into the atrium and looked up to the ceiling. It was a beautiful patchwork of colored glass which changed the light that passed through it instead of blocking it.

She walked outside, leaving her imaginary selves behind. The clouds from the morning’s thunderstorm were gone and the air smelled fresh. The pavement was dry and clean from the washing. The birds competed for her attention with a departing train’s whistle. A sculpture of an old-fashioned train conductor checking his fob-watch stood next to a beautifully carved wooden bench.

The shadows held nothing for her they never had. They were a miserable escape that could not deliver the pleasure they promised.

She relaxed into the sunlight warming her skin. She moved over by the statue and read the plaque dedicating it to the brave men and women who took a chance and founded the city. They believed. They believed in themselves, they believed their critics were wrong, and they believed in their future.

Alaina sat down on the ornately carved bench and opened her phone.

“Alaina! What’s up butter cup?”

“Hi Kathy. Is that offer of an extra bedroom still open?”

“You know it is. Wait… I know that tone of voice. Spill the tea, girlfriend. What’s happened?”

“I—“ Her voice cracked. Kathy wanted to listen to her. She genuinely cared and wanted to listen to her.