LA Stories from Development Hell
MOTHER’S FUR (Lauren Sweeney)
There are only two things I’ve ever known for sure about my parents. First, that my father was deeply in love with my mother. Second, that he could never make her happy. It wasn’t that he didn’t try. He was a dedicated husband and father, the owner of a small but successful movie marketing business. Handsome in that weathered California way that improves with age. His devotion to surfing kept him in excellent shape, even as he was rounding fifty.
He gave her a house. A pool. A baby. We lived in a comfortable house in the canyon surrounded by trees, but her mind always seemed to be elsewhere, her dark, heavy-lidded eyes communicating some deep sadness I could never comprehend. I assumed it was loneliness, or the loss of her family, whom we never mentioned. I wondered if she was an orphan from a war-torn nation, or a runaway from an abusive home. When I was little, my dad told me she was mermaid. He said they met when his leash got caught under a rock and she saved him from drowning, just like Ariel. Whatever it was, she couldn’t commiserate with the other mothers, who subdued their melancholy with Xanax and designer purchases, though of course, she had those too.
Last year, during a family dinner at Urasawa, my father presented her with a gorgeous pearl necklace. I wondered if was a birthday gift. I say “wondered” because I never knew her birth date. She refused to celebrate it. She took the necklace from its box, murmured a thank you into my father’s ear, then dropped the pearls into her purse and proceeded to eat the last of the unagi. Months later, I found it while rooting around in her sock drawer, pushed into a back corner along with a pair of ruby earrings, a diamond engagement ring and a few broken seashells. I asked if I could wear the pearls to homecoming. She nodded, “Yes, of course.” I don’t think she recognized them. My father did. He tried to protest, but was softly overruled, as usual.
This was the way it was. She always let me do exactly as I pleased. I used to think it was because she loved me. After all, that’s the way you show love, isn’t it? By giving your beloved everything they ask for? Eventually, I suspected apathy over love. She didn’t care if I crawled to the top of the stairs. She didn’t care if I ate ice cream for dinner. She didn’t care if came home after midnight.
It wasn’t until middle school when the boys started saying dirty things about her that I realized how beautiful she was. To me, she was always just my mother, a soft, lovely comfort who could never quite return my hugs. I prayed that I would inherit her generous curves so the boys might say those things about me.
The nearest she ever came to smiling was in our pool. My friends’ moms also loved to sit by their pools, but they would sunbathe all day long, taped into their bikinis and never dream wetting their hair. My mother would strip naked, then dive in headfirst and swim for hours, doing c