Nothing Special

beautiful town.

2010

My mother had a book she liked to read to me as a child. She must have discovered somewhere that it’s good to educate your child. She must have encountered that fact amongst a haze of other facts at the time. She might have even once seen a mother and daughter on a bench working their way through the pages of a book, the mother pausing only to kiss the daughter on the forehead. They probably looked like they were having the best time of anyone on the planet. This was the type of image that would have obsessed and overwhelmed her.

I think that she got it in a gift shop. It had that sort of sheen, the invariable pleasantness of the gift shop. In the book there were different types of farm animals with various attributes listed alongside them. I guess my mother felt sort of bad about raising me in a city amid the noise and crime. The graffiti scrawled everywhere, signalling mass discontent.

The farm arrived late. I was much too old for the book. I understood that even then. I was at the age where I was starting to become aware of the many unconventionalities of our lives – our family arrangement, our dreary, rattling apartment, the aura that seemed to engulf us as a trio, the diner, our dirty and sombre street. My father wasn’t around, and even if he had been my mother insisted he wouldn’t have had any interest in reading. He wasn’t smart. She wasn’t embarrassed by this, why did the men she slept with have to be smart? That’s vanity, my mother declared. She believed many things to be vanity. Like you need to be smart to point at a page. So I never got to know my father, and he never got to know the book in which sheep took on existential qualities. They appeared sinister to me whenever my mother and I sat on the floor together. There was something happening under their dry, calm frolicking.

If it was late, if my mother had been drinking, a lot of what she said was unpredictable. She often pointed at a cow and said, ‘That’s a sheep.’

‘A sheep,’ I repeated.

I knew it was dangerous to correct her. I knew, in my heart, that it wasn’t a sheep. A sheep would have had a halo of fuzz encasing its cartoon body. The accused animal stared out of the pages as if to say: I’ve done nothing wrong. It was one of my happiest memories. My mother’s presence and undivided attention was special, irresistible. I think that everyone felt that way around her. I liked being close to her soft face, watching her gentle frown lines, her breath sweet in my ear as she whispered lies. Silence, nothing – my mother’s trembling hands turning the pages. Then she would point at another animal, a donkey maybe, and say, ‘That’s a sheep.’

‘A sheep,’ I repeated.

I went along with all of it. I did until the end. Whenever I was in my mother’s retirement village – they sometimes called it a village as if they were all careening down country lanes on bicycles – and a nurse enquired what my mother and I had been talking about, I simply said, ‘Sheep.’ This is the type of tepid, pointless humour I bring to my daily life now. Where I’ve lived for the last three decades, it’s not about wit. We don’t have those sorts of desires. It’s more a matter of corresponding. I’m having as ordinary a day as you, my thoughts are as standardised as yours. The laughs are chaste here.

In the mid-1990s, when my mother and I still weren’t speaking, I became fixated on the farm book. I was having some personal problems which, like all difficult people, I believed could be traced directly back to my relationship with my mother. Was I caring enough? Was I responsible? The answer to both of these questions was no and it was probably because my mother hadn’t read to me enough as a child. Then I remembered the farm book. The internet was newly available to me, and I searched for information. Eventually, I emailed the publishing company responsible. I considered this a highly productive act. A spiritual mission. And I thought I owed it to her. People were still getting to grips with email then. There were articles in magazines I subscribed to – how to send an email, how to receive an email, etiquette, helping us to learn a language we didn’t yet understand. Say hello, kiss somebody’s ass, say goodbye. All best. Computers still sat, fat and white, in front rooms where the owners could keep an eye on them. I knew the keyboard instinctively. I like to think we recognised each other at once.

I think, at first, the publishing company were alarmed by the amount of emails I sent – every five minutes or so a new email burst out of me, like a shrieking mechanical bird from a cuckoo clock. A new email, a new idea, a new vision. I could only picture the recipient of my emails as a girl in her early twenties, no older. I imagined her with a neat desk, combed hair, more sophisticated than I was at that age, a healthy, freckled complexion from an educational trip to Europe, all of this effort belying an internal disorder, a gloomy impatience. I told her that my mother had adored the farm book. I never knew where she acquired it. I deliberately used the word ‘acquired’ to set the tone. Acquired. This new language made everything sound hollow. In my second email, I asked what year the farm book had been published, and who had been involved. In my third email, I argued that it wasn’t strange for a person to love a book. The makers of the farm book – were they still alive? – couldn’t have known the spell they were going to cast on my proud mother’s heart when they grouped the animals together in this particular formation, when they dreamt those warm-faced sheep and set them down.

In those days, the days of my emailing, I felt the emptiness of my apartment like a punch. I’d had a number of worthwhile relationships in my life, but now I couldn’t fall in love like I used to. What was there to do instead, what to do with all that energy and focus? Collecting, shopping. There seemed to be a lot of rooms in my home and I had a desire to fill them all. My possessions would smile at me with a new camaraderie. While I waited for a reply to my emails, I visited websites that were designed to appeal to me, an easily seduced woman in her mid-forties. I guess I didn’t know what to do with my time. I’d lost control of that. I needed furniture that I could manoeuvre around the room for hours. I needed appropriate trousers and blouses to sit and type in. It was essential that I look like a typist: grey, unforgiving and forgettable. A role I’d once played so effectively.

I kept at this project for a number of weeks. I estimated that I sent over 200 emails, most of them containing unasked for information. I explained that my mother had worked in a diner down the street from our apartment. Her life had been limited in that respect – not that her work made her some receptacle for sympathy. I outlined, in one particularly garrulous email, a day in my mother’s life. I was highly detailed. I told them about her insatiable taste for coffee. She always bought some in the store downstairs to drink on her way to work. She made another pot in the diner, a perk of her job, and drank that throughout the day. She smoked constantly. One evening, I told them, a thief in the diner had cut my mother’s face with a pocket knife. She was hysterical about it. I walked in on Mikey, the man we lived with, cleaning the wound with a dirty dishcloth. Like a lot of people, she didn’t love her job and complained often. Unsavoury types wheezing all over her, touching her. Men used to jump the counter, wring her little neck, and the following week she’d serve the exact same people, as if nothing had happened. She could only do this because, as she told me and Mikey, she had a greater understanding of human frailty than the average person. She called the customers ‘her poor souls’. What else? I didn’t know because I was no longer sure if what I remembered was my mother’s life or the life of a different woman, a woman who worked in a diner in a movie. My mind felt that porous. There were so many images that were familiar. But my mother was tetchy so the number of things she liked was easy to categorise. She liked the unique solitude of the diner after she closed up at night. And she liked the farm book.

I imagined a young woman reading these emails – the emails about my guilt, about how I’d treated my mother, about the fractures in our relationship – and slipping on her coat, walking to the subway in the dark, thinking about all the things she had to do, her endless list, hundreds of things. My correspondence disappearing like a hallucination. Perhaps she was new to the city and it was opening up to her like a dream. All that noise, the allure of strangers, the heat.

Some rude bitch replied. They think you can’t see their personality through formal language but you can. You know by their clipped and arrogant tone. People want you to crawl on your hands and knees even through the computer. They want you to beg. I continued typing. I imagined the meeting they must have had about me, this new sort of person they were ill-equipped to deal with. Of course, they had crank callers in the past, people who kept them on the line with sad details of their lives, their voices quivering with regret. It’s easy to dismiss a call like that, roll your eyes at a colleague to communicate that the caller on the other end is murderously stupid, make comical faces, hang up and walk away. Nobody wanted to turn on the computer and read about a deranged person’s life. I was the minority then. Now, I’m the majority.

They sent another email informing me that unless I ceased they would be forced to take legal action. I imagined a judge reading my emails to a packed courtroom, a spiralling situation. Where would I even get a lawyer? I didn’t know anybody like that. Well, it seemed like an overreaction. All I wanted was a copy of the farm book so I could organise a reconciliation between me and my conceited, selfish mother. I wasn’t embarrassed at any stage of this. Sometimes, I become embarrassed in short, unexpected flushes when I see my life clearly as it is now – the chat shows I keep on rotation, my underwear rising coarsely over my trousers as I reach for a box of cereal in the supermarket. Blah, blah, blah. The banal things that come out of my mouth. I watch my face from outside myself. It’s no longer young or sincere. There is a certain classlessness that I think he would find amusing. Not that I care anymore what he would find amusing.

My mother’s nursing home was a short drive away. I went most afternoons, and acted like it was out of duty. It was my duty; I felt a responsibility towards her that was born out of my own superstition and guilt. After we had reconnected, and she got older and more helpless, I moved her closer to me. During my visits, my mother was impulsive and often made nasty comments. The nurses – I envied their skills, patience and professional distance – smiled at me earnestly. I found it funny, the forgiveness they immediately extended to her. They thought she was sharp and depressive because she was elderly. They couldn’t have known she had always been that way.

The nursing home wasn’t the most expensive, but everything in it looked solid which appealed to me. There was an inexhaustible priest charged with holding everyone’s deathbed confessions; some old nuns in the dining room pouring ice cream into their mouths as if it was some last, measly grasp at pleasure. My mother suspected me of cheapness but I was actually spending more than I could afford. I wanted her to have comfort at the end of her life. I listened to all her complaints without argument. I tried to retain a neutral tone. She often went to the recreational room to talk with a group of other residents she called ‘the girls’, who, without any particular effort on her part, she’d become the leader of. She ascended that ladder so quickly. It was partly because she was from New York, which conferred on her an artistic quality she never possessed, and partly because my mother was always exceptionally good with women, who both admired and were terrified of her.

She spent a lot of her time in her room watching the home movies that Mikey had made of her. She’d requested a VCR for this exact purpose. Her ghost walking down our street to work, her in the diner, her, despite the fabulous show of her early cynicism, still believing something good was going to happen. These movies were made after I left home so there was something unsettling about them, how they imparted new information about lives I believed I knew thoroughly. I tried to discourage her from watching them. There was something terrible and sick about the act. I disliked seeing her lying on the bed, her gummy mouth open, her eyes glued to the screen, doing unknown damage to her brain with large doses of nostalgia. The nurses assured her she’d been very attractive. ‘Sexy,’ she corrected them. Mikey knew how to film her. Those videos confirmed to me that my mother had her own secrets. I knew she encouraged puppyish devotions in male customers, let them buy her the odd meal or take her out for a drink, turned away quickly when their wedding rings caught the light, smiled forgivingly. I knew my mother got what she wanted. But her secret was inside herself, how she carried herself. It took Mikey to catch it. Mikey, who was always waiting for her, who often drank with her until she was numb, or until she felt like touching him. I don’t hate him for this, or consider him bad or evil. It doesn’t make me love him any less. Through the decades, and the broad reconfiguring of men’s behaviour, I saw him through other people’s eyes, staying on our couch, sleeping with my mother when she wasn’t sober. I was told I was supposed to be filled with righteous indignation, denounce him publicly. But I knew my mother took from him too, and in ways that were perhaps worse – used his kindness, his naivety, used him as a babysitter for me so she could do whatever she felt like. I don’t know how all of this was supposed to get me worked up and thirsting for revenge. It only made me sad that he thought he could translate their drunk fumbling into love as she withheld all real affection.

During the last six months of her life, she started asking questions she wouldn’t normally have. I blamed the younger nurses who, demonstrating calm in the face of death, scattered their gossip magazines around the home. The front pages were occupied with celebrities, their obedient, hard smiles, but the back pages were full of stories about women initiating sex on planes, in nightclubs, in offices where they were, would you believe it, the bosses. The descriptions of danger, the lust, the graphic positions. My mother and I had never been close enough to talk about sex. I’d left home at eighteen, so our opportunities for adult conversation had been minimal. That was almost late to leave home then, we followed our friends, we did what our friends did. Now, she was greedy, rapacious: there wasn’t much time for her to gather all my secrets. One Sunday morning, after Mass, which we sometimes went to together, my mother asked if I’d ever faked an orgasm. She was sucking on a straw stuck in a supermarket brand of orange juice.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What does it matter?’

‘Women do it.’

‘Yeah.’ I wiped away the spit collected at the side of her mouth. ‘Sure.’

‘Even the well-paid ones?’

‘Especially the well-paid ones.’

She sniffed and removed the straw. She fixed me with a cold, determined stare. ‘Why?’

‘I suppose it’s to do with kindness and being pleasant.’

‘For goodwill,’ she said, with disgust.

‘Did you never?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s so insulting. I never did.’

She was pleased with herself. I wanted to explain how it was potentially more insulting not to fake it but she had already moved away from the conversation, away from me. Over the course of a few weeks, she enquired about my sexual life in a way I found both horrible and freeing. Had I ever cheated? I had. How did I find giving a blow job? Rewarding but only because you’re aware of your own generosity throughout. Had I ever been propositioned for an affair? Several times, but the needling tone of the emails and messages designed to set up the affair disgusted me so much I realised I didn’t have the constitution for it. In the town where we lived, my reputation as distant, dreamy, eccentric only made me more popular for propositions because if I said no, the men’s egos would barely be damaged. That bitch etc. My mother nodded sagely at this information as if it was centuries old. Had I ever had sex with someone who earned less than me? I didn’t know where some of these questions came from. She was, because of the magazines, shallowly concerned with the financial nature of these transactions. I must admit I found these little chats oddly inspiring. Once I woke up in the middle of the night and realised I was trembling with laughter at the idea of my mother’s uncooperativeness. I imagined her looking at a parade of men who had tried to pleasure her with total indignation. She didn’t have the ability to fake one measly orgasm. Tears streamed from my eyes. I couldn’t believe she’d been that ill-tempered, so steadfast in her refusal to please people. Maybe I loved her after all.

A short time after I had been told to stop emailing the publishing company, and life had resumed in its normal manner, I received a book in the post. It was, of course, the farm book. The world seems to know instinctively when you’re about to give up on it. There was no note. I don’t know if it was done to appease me, or out of kindness. I pictured the assistant, a double of my younger self, smuggling it out of the office, bravely paying for the postage herself. Either way the gesture touched me. I sent the book to my mother and she called. We had spoken a number of times since Mikey had died. Her voice down the phone, a familiar poison. Neither of us had taken his death well. Time afterwards, for me, was patchy, impossible. I couldn’t conduct normal interactions, watch movies, pay attention to the news. What on earth was everyone in the world talking about? We were a comfort to each other then. It was a way of keeping Mikey alive. By 1996, when I sent the farm book, she had been sober for over a decade and was relearning her place in life. The past had tortured her enough. She was looking forward to the future. I understood that. I visited her in New York; we had some good times. We were both more relaxed. Our tempers had dampened with age. I couldn’t work myself into the furies I used to. Many of her comments had lost their sting after she had quit drinking: she’d lost her venomous touch. ‘I’m not as catty as I used to be, now I don’t have customers to practise on,’ she said. One day, after she’d moved