Starting Fresh - Part 2

 

Jake picked up the tape gun because his hands needed a job. Ran it along a seam that was already sealed.

"Say it worked," he said.

"Okay."

"Like, it actually worked."

"Okay."

"It's not the—" He stopped. "It's the whole day. Right? Like, it's not one thing. It's every single second of a day."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you'd be in it. You couldn't put it down." He was aware of his own hands, which was a horrible way to be aware. "Standing up. Sitting down. Reaching for stuff. All of that would be different and I'd just have to—" He shook his head. "For weeks."

Marie was looking at him with her head tipped, that same expression from the doorway. "That's what I'm saying it would be. That's the whole thing."

"Yeah, but you're saying it like it's a vacation."

"It's not a vacation."

"You're saying it like it is."

She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, which was such a teenage way to sit that he had to look away. "Do you know I've known your body since it was the size of a bag of sugar," she said, "You've never known me as anything except ‘Mom’."

"Right."

"That's all I've ever been to you. Standing in a kitchen. Driving."

Jake didn't say anything.

"And you've been in there before," Marie said.

The hallway went very quiet.

She heard it about a half-second after he did. He watched it land on her, watched her mouth open slightly and then close.

"That's not what I—"

"I know."

"I meant—"

"I know what you meant." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Can we not."

"Yeah." She laughed, one short unhappy note. "Yeah. Sorry."

"We're starting over anyway," she said. "That's what I keep— we're doing the hard part regardless. New house, new everything, no one knows us. That part's happening," She turned the book a few degrees on the carpet, "So why waste a clean slate."

"That's not a reason."

"It's a little bit a reason."

He looked at the ceiling, where the butterfly had gone. There wasn't a mark. There wasn't anything.

"Okay," he said.

Marie didn't move. "Okay what?"

"Okay, like." He shrugged. "Okay."

"Okay you'll think about it, or—"

"Okay okay."

"Don't do that. Don't say it like that. If you say it I need you to actually—"

"Okay," he said, and looked at her, and said it flat and clear and out loud so neither of them could pretend later: "Yes. Let's do it."

He'd expected something. A pressure change. Her crying, maybe. Instead she just sat very still and said, "Oh," in a small voice, like someone who'd been pushing on a door for an hour and had it open on the first pull.

Then she laughed, wetly, and put her hand over her mouth, and said, "Oh my God," and he understood that she was scared too, and that she hadn't planned past this, and that she'd been lying about that.

She got up eventually to find the packing list. He heard her in the kitchen, moving things.

He stayed on the floor.

He figured he’d have to study her, maybe even keep a running list of her tics. But the new town had made all of that irrelevant. No one here had any fixed idea of Marie; there was no default setting for him to fail at reproducing, no gold standard of “Mom” against which he might be measured and found wanting.

At first, he’d taken this as a small mercy. It meant not having to worry about blowing his cover at the supermarket or getting called out for a fake laugh by one of her old friends. It meant that when he sat in a meeting at her job, or walked the aisles at Target, or signed a permission form, nobody would clock him for a fraud, because the baseline didn’t exist. The impression of her was whatever he made it. He could get everything wrong—her posture, her taste in cereal, the way she said “goddammit” when she dropped something—and to the outside world, it would all seem perfectly in character.

Except.

Nobody would know if he got her wrong. Which also meant nobody would know if he got her right.

He tried to map out the feeling: it was not that he wanted to be her, exactly, but the idea of inhabiting her, of slipping into her like a borrowed coat, was a dare he kept issuing himself, like holding your breath until you pass out, or seeing how close you could get to the edge of the roof without your knees giving out. It was the possibility of getting it absolutely right, of becoming indistinguishable, of fooling the entire world and maybe even the universe into believing he was her. The prospect made his skin crawl, but it also made his heart race.

She came back in with the list and a pen behind her ear, and he made himself look, properly, the way you look at a room before you sign anything.

Forty-two years of use. There was weather in there. Things that hurt when it rained, a lower back with opinions, whatever her shoulder had been doing since February that she mentioned once and never again.

He wasn't going to learn what his mother was like. He was going to learn what she'd been carrying around the whole time she was standing in kitchens telling him to take his feet off the coffee table.

"You okay?" she said, not looking up from the list.

"Yeah," he said.

They got it down to one envelope and a shoebox and a bin for the consignment place, and the hallway light was doing the yellow thing it did.

Marie sat back against the wall with the envelope in her lap and didn't open it.

"You know what's going to be strange," she said, “In ten years, if we’re looking at pictures,” she said, and the words came out more like a dare than a musing, “From the new place. From this year.”

She let it hang there, inviting him to finish the thought, to imagine some snapshot—Christmas in the living room, Thanksgiving at a new table, some blurry, accidental photo from a backyard barbecue—and to admit that the person in the picture, the one wearing her skin, might not be her. Or if it was her, that it would be an afterimage of this year, this moment, this decision, echoing forward through time.

Jake didn’t respond, but she could feel the way he’d gone quiet, the small, deliberate freeze to the air between them. Maybe he was seeing it too: the way their lives would fork, and the photos would prove it, if you knew where to look. He wondered if anyone else would ever catch it, some infinitesimal shift in the way Marie stood or smiled or tilted her head at a joke. Would a stranger notice? Would he, looking back?

“That’s the strangest part for me,” she continued, her voice low and urgent, “That we could do this and, unless we told anyone, no one would ever know.”

Jake wanted to say something smart or comforting, but all he managed was a nod, and then, feeling like he ought to mark the moment, he took the tape gun and made a single, perfect line down the seam of a box already closed.

Marie blinked hard, then stood, using the momentum to shake off whatever spell she’d just conjured. She pushed herself up off the floor, “Come on. If we’re doing this, we still have thirty pounds of closet to shove into a wardrobe box before three in the morning.”

Marie ’s  fingers dragged along the plastic hangers, clicking them down the metal pole one by one until she stopped, hooked two fingers inside a collar, and yanked one free.

It was a pale lilac wrap top in a thin, worn modal jersey.

She held it up by the shoulders. It looked tiny, limp, and entirely familiar.

"God, I've had this forever," she said, looking at the frayed seam near the hem.,”I don't even remember where I bought it."

Jake leaned his shoulder against the doorframe, hands shoved deep into his jeans pockets, "You wear it constantly."

"Because it doesn't need ironing," she said, tossing it onto the bed.

She looked over at him, one eyebrow slightly raised, letting the quiet hang between them until Jake felt the back of his neck prickle. He’d seen that shirt in the laundry basket every other week for years. He’d seen her sitting across the kitchen counter in it, leaning over a mug of coffee.

“They're just clothes,” She turned back to the rack, sliding a row of hangers aside with a sharp metallic clatter.

She pulled down a washed-out, honey-gold sundress with faint white sprigs and skinny string ties at the shoulders. The cotton was wrinkled, crushed between two heavier winter coats.

Marie held it against herself for a second, looking down at the faded print under the bare ceiling bulb. Her expression drifted, softening into something distant.

"I don't think I've ever seen you wear that," Jake said.

"Probably not since you were little," she murmured, running a thumb over the threadbare neckline, "Every spring I'd see it in the back and tell myself, Oh, I'll wear that this year. Never did."

She tossed it lightly toward his chest.

Instinctively, Jake caught it. The cotton was shockingly weightless, almost fragile, completely unlined. It felt less like an actual piece of clothing and more like a handkerchief.

Jake shifted his weight, looking down at the gold fabric crumpled in his grip. "Mom, come on. I'm not wearing a sundress."

"Oh, you definitely are," she said, deadpan, though her voice had that faint, teasing edge she used when she knew she’d backed him into a corner, “August in that town gets to ninety-four degrees. You'll put it on."

"I'll look ridiculous."

"You'll look like me," she said flatly.

She pulled open the bottom drawer and pulled out a slick, dark bundle of fabric.

When she shook it out, two separate pieces dropped into her hands, dangling by thin string loops.

Jake felt his cheeks go numb.

It was a bikini. Deep emerald green, two tiny triangles of ribbed nylon lined with beige mesh, and low-rise bottoms that amounted to little more than two curved patches joined by knotted ties.

"No," Jake said immediately, his voice cracking slightly. "No way. Absolutely not."

Marie grinned, just a little, and held the bikini out towards him, like an offering or a test of nerve. Jake took an involuntary half-step back.

“No,” he said, and it came out quick, voice already cracked with disbelief, “No way. Absolutely not.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Marie said, not lowering her hand, “It’s just clothes.”

“It’s not just clothes,” Jake said, looking anywhere but at the two flaps of green.

"Jake—"

"Mom, no."

"I'm not throwing away an eighty-dollar suit," Marie said, stretching the fabric taut between her thumbs. The Lycra gave a tight, synthetic snap. "I bought this for that beach week a couple summers ago. Wore it once."

Jake stared at the scraps of slick green fabric, his pulse thumping in his throat. He had a sudden, horrifying mental flash of himself—standing on a public boardwalk or a crowded strip of sand, with nothing covering his stomach, his hips, his chest, except those few square inches of emerald Lycra.

"It's twenty minutes from the ocean," Marie said, her eyes meeting his with relentless directness,”Jake, you’re going to have my body. You’re going to be me. No one will know. It’s okay."

He looked at the bikini, looked at his mother, and tried to picture himself in it. His mind skittered off the image, caromed into impossible scenes: himself on the sand, or Marie—but not Marie, him—lounging in a folding chair, skin splotched with zinc, squinting at the glare. He pictured the way people looked at women at beaches, the long, subtle scans, the algorithm of appraisal.

Jake started to say something, but his tongue caught on the edge of his teeth, and he made only a small, guttural sound. He wanted to protest the logic, to find a loophole or a mercy in it, but the only thing in his head was the sick certainty that she was right: he would wear the bikini, and he would look like her, and no one would ever suspect the difference. The only one who would know was him, and maybe her, and neither of them was going to let on.

Marie tossed the bikini onto the mounting pile with a brisk, almost cheerful snap of her wrist.

“Swim stuff, check,” she said, and looked back at the closet, as if the matter was now permanently closed.