Sad Eyes

My mother had sad eyes. I don’t believe she was naturally a sad person, but there was a certain melancholy about her. The nagging feeling that she was never entirely present. In the winter, as soon as she stepped outside, the wind glazed her eyes with tears. She was never more strikingly beautiful than on those days, with her wool coat wrapped tightly around her, her face disappearing behind one of her large knit scarves, and her shiny melancholic eyes. Looking back on it, I am now certain that it was that aloofness about my mother, her absent presence that led men like my father to her.

My mother never sought to possess anything, much less anyone. She existed in the world like a guest in a stranger’s home, accommodating and discreet, determined not to leave a trace. It was as if she could always disappear on a moment’s notice. But my father, like most men of his background, felt a great need to claim, to own, to possess. There are few things more human than the desire to possess. To accumulate possessions is to prove our existence in the world, to mark it through our ownership. It is as though we are saying the more I own, the more I exist; you cannot ignore me for look how far my existence has spread. It is an ugly habit; we often want those things that cannot be had. As my mother floated through the world, almost unseeing and barely there, my father, with his grasping hands, picked her up and took her with him.

My mother grew up in the big house on Northwood Drive, in the pink room all the way on the third floor. It was called the pink room after its tired pink wallpaper that had been picked out a few decades before she was born. The house was a couple of centuries old and, as it was remodeled a few times to allow for running water and more bathrooms, the pink room found itself isolated from the main staircase. The only way to access it was a small winding staircase that climbed from the pantry all the way to the third floor without so much as a window. Thus isolated from the rest of the house, my mother had a quiet and completely undisturbed childhood where one may have altogether forgotten she existed if it wasn’t for the creaking of the staircase that resonated into the halls of the other floors.

The room itself had a small desk, an armchair, and an imposing oak bedframe that suited it very poorly as it took over most of the limited space. True to herself, my mother did not change anything about the room, she didn’t even pick at the peeling wallpaper. She owned very few things, most of them Christmas and birthday gifts, although there were very few of those as well as her family was at a loss about what to get her. She seemed to want nothing, and she greeted every new gift with an uneasy smile as if the task of accepting it was costing her great effort.

One might think this was the behavior of a self-conscious child, but there was nothing self-conscious about my mother. She did not seem to take much notice of the people around her, much less care about their perception of her. It seemed to me that she much preferred her own world, parallel but separate from ours, not entirely rooted in reality. She maintained a careful distance from the real world and every gift, every forced participation with the material world brought her further into it.

But she had me. What greater claim of existence, of ownership, than the one a mother has on her child?

She came from a large, busy family, everyone, especially her own mother, overwhelmed with their own preoccupations at all times. They were more than happy to let her inhabit the world in whatever way she chose to, especially if that way was keeping out of their own way. But my father was not so. There was something magnetic about my mother’s aloofness, it drew men to her from an early age. I cannot say why she chose my father amongst those men, perhaps he had some quality about him that appealed to my mother’s mysterious mind or maybe he was simply the most insistent. She was fascinated by the claim of ownership my father had on her. She didn’t understand it and was, at first, greatly amused by it. How could her actions affect someone so much? What was this invisible thread, binding them to each other, that had materialized from nothing? While he claimed her entirely, making his ownership clear through gifts, promises, and ostentatious displays of affection, my mother never claimed him back; she did not know how, it was simply not in her nature. As he molded his existence to fit hers, the pattern of his days reshaped to see her as often as possible, she was content to simply exist alongside him, an exciting new distraction in her strange world.

I wonder if I truly was an accident, a careless mistake of young people in love, or if I was engineered in some way by my father, as his final, greatest claim to my mother, binding her to him forever. As soon as my parents found out about the pregnancy, very late on, things began moving very fast. The families swooped in and organized a discrete ceremony at the city hall, my mother was ousted from the pink room and went to live with my father, and everyone’s lives began to revolve around the small embryo barely the size of an apple in my mother’s womb. Everyone’s lives except my mother’s, who seemed utterly unconcerned by the changes going on around her; she went from one doctor’s appointment to the next and on painful shopping sprees for my nursery with a patient, albeit slightly worried, smile. As if the whole ordeal was simply another of my father’s eccentricities and she was content to indulge him in it.

I was born on a rainy night in April, the gentle patter of the rain against the hospital windows covered by my mother’s wails. Labor was long and painful; although my mother had never tried to hold on to anything in her life, it seemed that her body was unwilling to relinquish me. At around one in the morning, my head made it out of the birth canal, but my shoulders refused to follow. My mother and I were rushed to an operating room for an emergency C-section.

Unlike me, an energetic screaming bundle from the moment I entered the world, my mother did not recover well from the surgery. She was not let out of the hospital for weeks and, for months, her mind was clouded in a thick haze; her thoughts, heavy, clumsy things, refusing to align coherently. When she was finally returned to us, still a shadow of her past self, she was vaguely surprised to find a husband and a child waiting for her, as surprised as her foggy, sedated state allowed her to be. I, like my father, was eager for her, hungry to claim her as my own. The role of mother was thus immediately thrust onto her with all of its outrageous all-encompassing demands. She took it on like an automat, my robot-mother, completely overtaken by the mountain of chores required to take care of my tiny self.

June of that year was uncharacteristically hot. For a week, the temperature did not fall under 80. My father had moved us into a small flat in Reading, on Kensington Road, right by the park, but the shade of the trees was powerless against the unyielding heat. My mother’s haze was worsened by the heat, the fog clouding her mind even thicker than before. Her every waking minute was spent tending to my howling overheated body, as the laundry and dishes piled up. What little sense of herself she had had before had completely melted in the face of the insurmountable task of being my mother.

It took 8 days for the heat to break. On the morning of the 8th day, my mother awoke on her own for the first time; the cooler temperature allowed me to sleep for more than a couple of fitful hours at a time. The storm that had finally burst in the night had left the air crisp and cool.

It was very early; the morning light, still timid and grey, fell upon the slumbering neighborhood. Through our open living room window, my mother could see the empty park and the smooth wet pavement of our street. She was overwhelmed by the silence, the wonderful peace of this morning, as if the rain and the thunder had replaced the thick torridness of the air with a blanket of stillness. A deliciously cool breeze carried in the smell of rain and wet earth. The colors seemed to have a renewed brightness, the green of the oaks in Kensington Park so luminous against their dark trunks. As she looked around the empty street, she felt she was seeing everything with clarity for the first time in a while, the crispness of the air lending more detail to the two-story brick homes, the flowers growing in between the pavement, the moss on the tree trunks. She could feel the fog of her mind receding, an awakening of sorts; she was coming back to herself.

She turned her gaze away from the street to the dim apartment. There was something else in the crispness of the air, a wrongness in the order of things, as if the particles themselves were vibrating incorrectly. Something subtle that she had not been able to notice before, but was now glaringly obvious to her newly awakened self. She could not yet entirely put it into words, it teetered at the edge of her mind; a nagging, but abstract, thought.

The living room was sparsely furnished; an old couch and a coffee table were huddled around a boarded-up fireplace. Baby clothes, clean and dirty, were littered on every surface, along with diapers, wipes, bottles, and dirty dishes. The smell of spoiled milk lingered in the air despite the open window. As if seeing the room for the first time, she examined the dark carpet, the poorly painted walls; it all felt, as most things did, so far removed from her, a stranger’s home. Everything was as it should be, yet the wrongness persisted; it felt more like an ache now, a fluttering of sorts in her chest. She walked into the hall, stepping on a sticky pacifier on her way, and pushed open my bedroom door.

I was awake now, cooing in my crib, happily awaiting her. As she lingered tentatively by the door, taking in the smell of soiled diaper, I extended my chubby little hands towards her, wanting to be picked up, taken care of. The fluttering, a panicky, racing feeling, intensified. On her own hand, she could feel the smooth metal of a wedding band; how strange, how out of place it felt. She looked down at this tiny body she’d created, that looked back at her with her own eyes brimming with adoration. She understood now the invisible threads tying her to this child, to the man that was her husband, to this poorly lit apartment in Reading. Not a stranger’s life, but her own. But it could not be, it did not feel like her own. My greedy little fists, grabbing up at her. They were shackles, these threads, terribly heavy, much too heavy for her.

I began to cry, demanding her attention on me at once, commanding her to be my mother. It was her; she was what was wrong, out of place. The thought of walking out, fleeting, felt even more wrong than the thought of staying. She knelt down next to my crib, her chest, no longer fluttering, swelled with unbearable heaviness. This was it, this was her worst nightmare; she was trapped, caught in a life that she had mistakenly walked into.