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Even

Margaret Karmazin

    There she lies, all of ninety pounds of her, after spending most of her life plump. A portly, dignified women, the sort who had her club meetings and bridge group, her luncheons with the ladies. Almost unearthly how she’s become so small in the end.
    Barry sinks onto the kneeling bar and rests his arms on the coffin edge. His mother, this woman who once grew him inside her body, is dead. The end of a long story, often cozy, yet frustrating and deadening. One in which two people “life snuffed”...well, to be accurate, one did it first and the other got revenge.
     When you’re a teenager, you think you’re going to be all right in the end. You have your doubts, but they’re piddling - if you’ll ever get laid, if anyone will ever really like you, or if your rubble of a complexion will eventually smooth out. But the things that will eventually gnaw at your psyche, you never imagine. Those will ambush you.
    The undertaker, a beefy man in his thirties who doesn’t look the part (should be off downing beers with his cronies in a sports bar), has given Barry an hour if he wants it.
    “No one’ll bother you...we’ll be downstairs. Just let yourself out when you’re done and we’ll see you tonight at the viewing.”
    The man assumes, Barry guesses, that he is full of despair at losing his mother. After all, he is a single man in his fifties who still lives at home. Perhaps everyone believes she is the love of his life. Either that or he’s gay.
    Neither is true. He has not loved her very much and he is not gay. No, he is a heterosexual man who has not fulfilled his biological destiny, not to mention his professional and emotional potentials. He looks again at his mother’s face and fights down a sudden and ridiculous urge to bash in her dead skull with a sledge hammer. And then, just as suddenly, he is overcome with remorse and guilt.
    It’s amazing how, in one household, in one small span of time, how so much silent drama can take place between two people. Please pass the meat loaf on the surface, and underneath, you bitch, how do you like the paybacks?

     Nineteen seventy-four and he was filling out forms to apply to colleges - state schools, being all the family could afford. Dad was still alive then, driving daily to the post office where he was now manager and making an adequate, if not spectacular living. Mother, Ruth to her peers, was working on and off as a substitute teacher at the junior and senior high schools.
    “I’ve decided to major in anthropology,” Barry told them. He had spread out his applications on the coffee table while his mother set the dining room table for dinner. It was a small house and they carried on conversations room to room.
    “What’s that exactly?” asked Dad.
    “The study of man,” replied Barry. His voice rose as his enthusiasm swelled. “There are different kinds. There’s archaeology - you probably know what that is; physical anthropology, the study of how humans adapted to their environment and their bodies changed over time; linguistic anthropology, the study of how their languages developed; and cultural anthropology, how people live now and how they may have lived in the past.”
    His father stared at him while his mother, who was standing in the archway between the two rooms, was silent; the result perhaps of his having exhibited intellectual passion, something that was not the norm in this family.
    After some throat clearing, Ruth spoke. She used the tone she probably used with her less favored students. “Now, Barry, what do you think you would actually do with a degree in any of those things? Work at some museum? Don’t you know those jobs are as hard to get as a place on a rocket to the moon?”
    “She’s right, son,” said his father, always quick to dispel any disagreement (i.e. kiss up to Mother). “You need something you can use in the world. After all, you’re probably gonna be supporting a wife and kids!”
    Barry’s face grew hot. “Of course anthropologists have jobs! There’re a million jobs they can get, all over the world! I want to go on digs, I want to travel and see all kinds of stuff!”
    His mother wore her steely expression. She walked over and laid her hand on his arm. Her touch felt cold and poisonous and he yanked the arm away.
    “Listen, Barry. It has been difficult for us to save for your education; we’ve given up a lot for you. You owe it to us to study something that will bring you a pretty much assured living.” She paused. “We want you to go into teaching. We’ll pay for you to attend one of the state colleges specializing in education. With a degree in that, you’ll always be able to get work. If you want to major in something else, you’ll have to pay your own way.”
    He remembered the rush of rage he experienced, an almost lunatic desire to hurt her. It was she, he understood, not his father who was behind this. She ran the roost, as his father sometimes joked. Barry wasn’t fooled by the “we.”.
    He had stood up and walked to his room, feeling a sense of utter impotence. As he lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, ignoring the call to dinner, watching the plaster turn from cream to gray as night fell, he understood that he was lazy. Not exactly in the physical sense - he would expend energy on physical or mental labor as well as the next person, but when it came to risk taking, stepping outside the box, taking command of his own life, he didn’t seem to have that same vigor. He knew, with sinking disappointment, that he would never go off on his own and see about school loans or scholarships in order to be the man he wanted to be. Instead, he would become the teacher his mother wanted, because he was too passive, too damn craven to do anything else.

    College was relatively amusing. Barry stayed away from home as much as possible, taking anyone up on an offer for the holidays that didn’t cost too much money. He worked in the school cafeteria and for one of the history professors to earn money for himself, but did not mention this to his parents. While he could have taken anthropology as an elective, he avoided it. Why put himself in a painful position?
    After starting as a history major, he switched to English. Reading literature was a pleasure, so why not get credit for it? Before he knew it, he was student teaching in a suburb of Philadelphia, then after his mother told him about the retirement of his high school advanced placement English teacher, accepting a position in his hometown outside of Scranton. While he planned to look for an apartment, he stayed with his parents, then Edgar was diagnosed with cancer and gone in a mere six months.
    “There’s no reason why you can’t stay here for a while,” said his mother. “It’ll help you save up for a house of your own and I could use some help while I get things in order and figure out what I’m going to do.”
    She meant about the house, which had a large yard, quite a bit to keep up for a widow. The months passed, then the years and she never sold the place and Barry was still there.
    How had he turned into the eccentric old teacher who never married? Once people speculated about it, said he was a mamma’s boy, a old fairy, and sometimes darker things. Was it due to the constant manifestation of his old laziness of character or the fact that time moved faster than he did? He did not know.
    “Now that’s a nice girl,” Mother had said once about Lillian Ferguson when Barry invited her to an Hispanic Fest in Scranton. “About time you were thinking of settling down. She comes from a nice family.”
    She also, now that Barry studied her more carefully, seemed to subtly resemble his mother.
    Though he followed through on the Hispanic Fest and took Lillian out a few more times, the weird resemblance to his mother stifled any sexual fire he might have felt. A year or so later when he dated a fellow teacher Camille Parmentier, a woman from Montreal who taught French, Mother had made the comment, “Not quite up to your speed, son. She may have managed to become a teacher, but you can still see she comes from trailer trash.”
    “That is utter bull,” Barry shot back. “Her father owns a bowling alley and her mother is a receptionist in a doctor’s office.”
    “I don’t care,” said Mother calmly. “She has the look and attitude of a low class person. It will never go away. You’re better than that, Barry.”
    In spite of his outrage over what she had said, Barry suddenly found himself seeing Camille through his mother’s eyes. The way that she sniffed whenever she disapproved of something and her manner of tossing her head when she was annoyed looked tough and low rent. She wore too much makeup and wouldn’t taste exotic foods, which annoyed him.
     “Your mind is kind of closed,” he ended up telling her. “You don’t read books either and books are important to me.”
    That had sent her into a tantrum, right in the restaurant where they were having dinner, which embarrassed Barry and only confirmed his mother’s diagnosis. They still had to see each other at school which made things difficult, but the romance was over.
    Barry passed through a period of depression, again hating himself for his apparent lack of character. Did he have no opinions of his own or were they so weak that they could not stand up to anyone else’s? Or was his mother a steam roller that crushed anything anyone else thought or wanted?
    Why did he so often remember that time in his junior year of high school when his friends encouraged him to run for class president? “We’ll be your campaign managers!” they yelled happily and Barry had thought, why not? Even if he lost, it would be fun to try. When he told his parents about the idea, Mother squelched it. “I don’t think so,” she said. “You’re such a subdued boy, even kind of negative in your thinking. You don’t have the personality to win or do that sort of thing.” She shook her head. “Giving speeches in front of all those people, no, I can’t picture it. You’ll lose and get all mopey about it.”
    And so, he had backed out, disappointing his friends. For weeks afterwards, he’d felt so down that it scared him.

    Several years passed with more incidents in which his mother rained on his dating until one day Barry realized he had entered his thirties with no wife, kids, home or real life of his own. The rage he had kept repressed now threatened to surface, making low rumblings like a potentially dangerous volcano. Half of this anger was directed at himself. He knew there were mothers all over the world who stifled the lives of their children, while most of these children rebelled at some point and refused to give up their autonomy. There was something lacking in himself that left him to collude with her tyranny.
    It was then that Barry felt something within him turn cold and hard. And just in time for the surprise of his mother being courted.
    The suitor was a local funeral director, widowed the year before. John Barnard was a quietly confident, sturdy man in his late fifties. Barry could see, even as a male, that Barnard was good looking for his age, and though this was hard for Barry to understand, obviously in love with his mother.
    And she...well, she was softening. Barry saw the change in her dress, that she was never without lipstick and a touch of blush now. She had her hair colored - subtly lightened and the gray covered. He noticed she was eating cottage cheese and fruit for lunch instead of her usual sandwich and all baking had stopped. She was falling for John Barnard, no doubt about it. He watched her closely.
    For some reason, another memory came to him now. When he was ten and rode his bike with his best friend William all over the neighborhood; they knew every street and alley, shortcut and place to avoid infested with angry dogs or mean big kids. But the time came to move on, to ride across town and maybe see kids they knew from school on the other side. It was only two miles away. William’s mom said okay and packed them a lunch that included Hershey bars for dessert, but Barry’s mother said no. “You stay in the neighborhood and that’s that. You’ll get lost, something will happen. You’d be the one to drive in front of a car or do something stupid. You can’t go.”
    And though William, being loyal, had at first tried to stay close to home with Barry, eventually he couldn’t stand it and went off with another boy. After a while, he outgrew Barry.
    “Well, he wasn’t your friend then,” Mother said.
    He sighs and looks at her now, stiff and tiny in her silk lined prison. “Mother,” he whispers. “Remember Mr. Barnard? Remember how he courted you and you began to believe that he’d propose? You told me about it at dinner. It was swiss steak, I recall, scalloped potatoes, peas with pearl onions and sherbet for dessert. You didn’t have any dessert. Do you remember now? ‘I believe John is going to ask me to marry him,” you said. The look on your face was like a teenage girl’s. Your cheeks flushed and your eyes sparkled. But then he didn’t propose, did he? Do you remember how you cried? I heard it from my room at night, even when you had your door shut.”
    He hesitates, then goes on, watching her waxen face. “I am the reason he stopped. One day he called me at work and asked if I would meet him for a cup of coffee. I did that same day after school, at Spear’s Diner. He told me he was thinking of asking you to marry him and he was so glad you were a healthy, robust woman, that after all the sickness and death he’d seen with his business and poor late wife, he wanted a thriving woman, one that would see him into old age, not that anything is guaranteed.
    “I told him that maybe he ought to know something about you and could he please keep it to himself, and of course he said yes. I said you’d been diagnosed with MS and that though you looked fine now, deterioration would be inevitable, that eventually you’d be in a wheel chair and I’d be taking care of you. You should have seen his expression. He thanked me and after that, his attentions stopped - a sharp cut off if I remember right. You called him a couple of times, but he said he had family obligations to deal with and that was that.”
    He looks off to the side for a moment, listening. Could someone hear? Did he just hear a noise? He looks back at his mother’s body. Can she hear him? Does a human spirit really exist and would it hang around if it does?
    Leaning against the coffin, he sinks down, remembering. A couple of years passed and his mother’s church hosted a minister exchange during the summer. Reverend Canfield and wife went to Norfolk, Virginia and a Reverend Freeze came here. His wife had died the year before, a freak accident involving a snowmobile, and his one child lived in Oregon. He was younger than Barry’s mother by four or five years. Barry imagined that the single women in Reverend Freeze’s own church were probably all over him, but for some reason he was attracted to Ruth, invited her out to dinner and all sorts of places, couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. Barry supposed Ruth was a decent looking woman, though too zaftig for his own taste. She had a magnificent head of thick hair and a proud, almost Grecian profile.
    The romance was sudden, thick and heavy and Barry interpreted the signs: the minister would propose any time, most likely before he left in the fall.
    Reverend Freeze was a different sort of clergyman than Ruth’s own minister. Freeze was fire and brimstone, while Canfield was middle of the road, even slightly liberal. Freeze would have worked out better with the Baptists or Assembly of God; it was a mystery how he got to be Methodist.
    Barry had not liked him from the get-go; big fat phony was what crossed his mind. Apparently, his mother had wildly different ideas about what was attractive in people than his own. But what Barry suspected, and this was not a pleasant subject for a son to consider, was that what Ruth felt for the colorful minister was fierce sexual attraction, pure and simple.
    In late August, the three of them attended the county fair. Ruth wanted to visit the jewelry booths while the men did not, so Barry and the Reverend sat down at a picnic table in the barbecue chicken tent. “Your mother is a fine woman,” began the minister, “a good, upstanding, moral person. You don’t see many of those anymore, I’ll tell you.”
    Barry suddenly thought of when he was twelve and his father invited him to accompany him and his friend, Joe Taylor, on an overnight fishing trip to New York State. Barry was excited, especially when Dad said they were going out the Friday before to buy Barry a fishing pole of his own. But Mother put a stop to it. “I don’t even like that you go on this,” she said to Dad. “Especially with that Joe Taylor. He’s not a nice man; he drinks and swears, not our kind at all. No way are you subjecting Barry to that.”
    How disappointed he had been, his father too.
    The Reverend wore a smug look on his wide, florid face and Barry felt that he hated the man. Although that had nothing to do with what he said next.
    “Yes, my mother has been through a lot. She has strength of character all right, too much for this small minded town.”
    Freeze shot him an intense look. “What do you mean?”
    “Well,” said Barry, “first my father died, then she took up with that professor who was here for the summer and unfortunately got herself pregnant. Of course at her age, the last thing she wanted was a baby, so she went to Planned Parenthood and got rid of it. Good thing too because the fly-by-night professor up and left town without a word.”
    He looked at Freeze, whose face had lost it’s normal redness.
    “Then, a few years later she got involved with Sammie and you can imagine how that went over with certain people in town.”
    “Sammie?” echoed the minister, eyes wide.
    Barry chuckled. “Yeah, ole Sammie. The poor woman should have been born a man. She was a man for all practical purposes, even down to the hard drinking and gun rack on her pickup. She was famous for all night poker games, something my mother would never approve of, so no one told her about them. Believe me, Reverend, I was as surprised as the next guy that Mother would get involved with someone like that; didn’t know she had it in her. I mean to look at her, you have to admit the first thought in your head is ‘straight-laced’!”
    “She had an affair with a lesbian?” whispered the preacher in a deadly tone
    Barry sighed. “Well, yeah, but it only lasted a year or two. Sammie moved on then, left town. I hear she went up to Saskatchewan.”
    Reverend Freeze slapped his big, sausage fingered hands on the table and stood up. “I’ve gotta be going, boy,” he said. “You tell your mother I remembered I had an appointment and you take her on home.”
    Barry had had to arrange a ride for them with a coworker he ran into at the fair and that was the last they heard from Reverend Freeze, who returned to Norfolk sooner than planned.

    He shakes his head now and places a hand on his mother’s carefully crossed, ice cold ones. “It was I, Mother, who got rid of Reverend Freeze. Just like John Barnard. I need to tell you about it, need to get it too off my chest.” And so he does, leaving out nothing.
    “And then there’s one more thing,” he says. “You remember Darlene Michael, who ran the vintage clothing boutique with the silk flower sideline? Darlene, with her shoulder length, blond hair and nineteen forties red lips? Recall how she liked your flower arrangements and the talent you had for setting up displays that year you were helping her out in the store?”
    He and Darlene had gotten together a few times for rather shocking sex and excellent hashish. “Remember, Mother, when she started hinting about you two going into business together? About setting up a mail order deal with a catalogue and all? She was thinking of taking you in as part of the store business too. Remember?”
    Barry stared at the wall over the coffin where a wooden cross hung between two rather tacky wall sconces. He went on. “Well, she told me about this one of those nights we were naked and smoking dope in her apartment over the store. She asked me what I thought of her plan. And I told her I thought it wasn’t a very good idea.
    “I remember she stopped her sort of constant giggling, due to the dope, and said all serious, ‘But why, Barry? Why do you say that?’”
    He stops and looks back at the woodenly peaceful face. “So, Mother, this is what I said. I said, ‘She had a little trouble with some embezzling back when.’ And Darlene looked at me with those big eyes like those of an injured but still hopeful little girl, and I said, ‘Remember that preacher who was sort of interested in her a long time back?’ And Darlene, trying to sober up quick, said, ‘I heard about it, that’s all. How he up and left her, that’s what I heard.’
    “I said, ‘The reason he left her was, she was doing some work for him and was going to be doing it for his church if they got married, and she was worried about her pension - there was a stock market crash or something at the time. Well, she just gave into temptation and took some of the church money.’
    “‘Oh God,’ Darlene said and I could see she was withdrawing. She got up from the bed with a no nonsense expression on her face and put her robe on. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said. Then next I knew, I was dressed myself and saying good-bye and somehow that was the last time I saw her; she was always busy after that when I called. She dropped you too; no more talk about going into business together. If I remember right, you cried over that one too.”
    Barry leans back and stands up. His legs are stiff, he is moving like an old man. How much time has passed? He looks at his watch. Forty-five minutes. He feels cold, as cold as his mother there so small and skinny.
    He says, “This is what we did to each other. Hurt each other, prevent each other from living our destinies. Or were these our destinies after all?”
    He looks at her one last time, the two of them alone. “You’re on your own now, Mother. Let’s make a deal. You do your thing and I’ll do mine.” He pauses, then adds, “It it’s not too late.”



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