God that took forever...
Incessantly I glimpsed over my shoulder, as I traced the rusty metals shelves that held up the cereal of aisle one. I suppose my paranoia and escapism were nurtured on these rusted shelves of Giant, and every other supermarket in the Bethesda-area. I deliberately lagged behind my mother, whose legs began swaying to an imaginary two-four beat in her head. The episode was beginning, and my mind was fuddled with contradicts of loyalty to nature versus nurture. Nature being the society I always wished to be apart of, and nurture the family that I could never escape. The only words to escape my mouth were sliced nouns and weak verbs.
“I was jus... um…could get them I mean I… uh… they are in aisle eight not far or anything” I tried.
I could feel my lungs turn shallow as she began to laugh to herself, letting the sound bounce through my eardrums and plaster through my veins into my shivering heart. Suddenly she slowed her pace, and now we were in sync.
“Um…” I panicked, “I could jus... get them. Make it faster so we…we… get…home…”
“Shut up Ewu,” She snapped sharply, “Onwu, is better then you! Did you hear that death is better then you!”
“Don’t call me a goat!” I protested, “If you’d just give some ego I’d buy the pads myself!”
She glared at me embarrassed holding her head high like an ostrich. I rolled my eyes as she danced on the tip of her toes. We turned a corner, and a lady with plain tan dress on accidentally clipped my shoulder as passed through the aisle. I felt my mother’s hand protectively heave me against herself hard.
“I’m sorry,” The woman rubbed her stuffy brown eyes, “I didn’t see…you know.”
“Liar and tricker!” My mom screamed, “I know them all!”
“Um excuse me?” The woman asked her breath smelling like cigarettes.
Their eyes met in a strange quirk of silence.
“Shame. Shame!” Snickered my mom.
The woman’s eyes narrowed in utter confusion, her mind clumping us together as one of the same. Slowly she pushed her cart towards a checkout lane.
“Um, she’s having a bad day,” I tried to explain to her back, “You know how it is?”
She stopped for a second, but didn’t turn around. Her mouth was still open in disbelief, as she stumbled away clasping the handle of her cart so tight her knuckles were red. I prayed she’d turn around to nod or smile flakily but she didn’t. As my heart sake I took a deep breath thinking back to my childhood trying to remember how mother’s Sunday pancakes tasted; and how she’d slapped my sister’s hand as before she tried to steal fluffiest one on my plate. Veins flowing with nostalgia, I feel my mouth water as I almost feel syrup on the tip of my tongue. Before it could be cemented, it was burned by a sharp pinch on my arm.
“Ewu!” she shrieked at me but mostly to herself, “You expect you child be someone, help you when your sick, take care of you. Not this, if I ever told anyone they would be like huh? You’re an ugha, a liar but I can not lie about my enemies how much more my flesh and blood.”
I rolled my eyes as slipped out of my mother’s sight towards aisle eight. Searching through the pad section, my eleven-year mind wished her mother was beside her to point to the right choice. But suddenly a vague memory of my sister crying and screaming as my mother callously threw the blockiest and cheapest diapers in their cart when she was eleven. I stared helplessly at the selection, until a girl no older than sixteen with auburn hair picked up a box of Kotex pads for the “heavy days”. As she sauntered away, I picked up the same brand, and quietly searched through the checkout lines to find my mother. I could hear my mother voice before I even reached the line by the incisive laughter; laughter that ruled my dreams. I took each step slowly hoping by the time I arrival to checkout 3, scraps of explosion would remain. Sadly I wasn’t so lucky; instead she had already begun her speech.
“Liars and trickers, come,” She snickered, “Come inside my cart.”
The man, who she was talking to, voice turned slow and harsh, “Do you understand English?”
“Yes,” My mom responded tilting her face towards the ceiling.
“Well” he spoke slowly as if he was talking to child plagued with metal retardation, “I was here first, my child was holding my place in line while I was getting these tomatoes. See t-o-ma-to-e-s. So if you could just move your cart, so I can get to my son and unloaded my shit.”
“Ngozi?” She called out to me, “Do you see this? This Liar and tricker, I use to not see them but when your hands are clean in the eyes of god. You see how Endocha (white people) always play lies and tricks on blacks because they think we don’t know.”
The whole store was tuned into our station, even cashier mischievously peeked through their confining square boxes and the baggers tuned into the channel as they items bunch up in their corners.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” The man screamed, “Take your voodoo crap and go back to Africa.”
“Ngozi!” She signaled me, “Did you see that?”
“Um… I didn’t,” I started, “I…”
The store was quiet and waiting on me to speak. Contradicts came flooding in as I stared at my mother’s face. Times like this, as a child would run into her arms proving my loyalty. Instead I couldn’t even look into her eyes.
“Um… mom I saw him,” I lied, “He was just… getting tomatoes.”
She silently shook her head defeated as she pulled her cart back allowing him to squeeze inside. She glared at me; she knew I didn’t see what really happened. She knew my loyalty had run out. We strolled out of giant both knowing it would be the last time, we would ever go grocery shop together and the last time the food supply of my house would be more then spoiled milk and cornflakes.
As the years passed her spirit became clogged in herself like a rusty engine. I should have known when she made me do a Google search on Paxil that something was wrong, but I didn’t want too. And the nightly talks dad had with mom advising her to up her dose only made me think of cholesterol and heart disease. Finally as the summer before of my senior year rolled in I learned from an air condition vent in the basement.
“What does your therapist say?” My dad whispered.
“I don’t know,” She whined, “I’m not feeling well.”
I raided the medicine cabinet, and pulled it out a bottle of Paxil with thirty-two capsules. I threw it back in and grabbed the cleaning bucket from the cabinet. I scrubbed the toilet seat until my fingers started to bleed, until the pain began to peel off. As I tried to ward off memories of mom and I cleaning up the house on Saturdays while my sister watched television in the background. All her hopes and dreams buried inside of me as my brother was diagnosed with autism and my sister’s intelligence scores declared at the age of fourteen she had the mind of nine. Then one afternoon, at the age of five excited to see her, I ran in front of her car, and she braked yards before being in the vicinity of hitting me. But it became engraved in her mind, and she would call it “the day she almost killed me.” And would forever become the epic story of my “attempted suicide” and would be erratically told back to me; my new name changed to ewu.
As the school year began it became a casual conversation between me and my dad.
“What’s mom’s drug dealer say?” I asked as I made my own dinner, “I mean “psychiatrist.”
“Who says she has a psychiatrist?” He asked as he stirred his own dinner.
I rolled my eyes and I brought out the onions and tomatoes to cut. As I grabbed the knife from the dishwasher, it slipped out of my hands.
“Shoot,” I yelled picking it up.
“Ngozi,” He responded, “You’re always so angry. Maybe you need physiatrist too…”
“Too? So she does see one…” I inferred.
And that’s where the conversation ends, and we eat the separate dinner we have made with the television blasted BBC. I just blank out thinking about how everything has changed, before it was always:
“Dad! Mom called my English teacher a liar and tricker…. Dad, mom drove into incoming traffic and almost got us killed…dad, mom hit a parked car and drove away like nothing happen…dad, mom got stopped by a police car and told the policeman that he was shit in her toilet and got a 50 dollar ticket….DAD!”
But now I step uneasily around my dad wanting to scream:
“Dad, mom isn’t doing anything. She’s just lying on the couch with a blank television screen reflecting from her eyes only getting up to broil beans and carrots for lunch. Make her stop!”
But he can’t, and I don’t ask him too. Instead I escape with Kevin to his house so we can smoke cigarettes on his patio when his parents aren’t home.
“So I’m getting my new turn table Monday and…”He starts casually,
“My mom is on drugs,” I interrupt abruptly.
“Drugs?” He asks bemused thinking of crack and heroine.
“Anti-depressants like Paxil,” I answered defeated putting out my cigarette, “You know that shit…”
“Well she was a little weird,” He tries offering me another cigarette, “maybe it was for the best.”
“Yeah so am I” I kindly refuse.
As he lights another cigarette, I’m reminded of the grocery store and the beginning of the end as her spirit comes over me. Imagines I miss watching that are on some videotape in her attic that I can only begin to tap into. But when I do, I feel myself scream:
“Hey, Mom could you drive on the left-hand side of the road for old time sake!”
But she doesn’t answer; instead she sits blankly with pills in her hands only moving to get a glass of water.