“You will never find anyone,” my mother says to her younger sister, sitting opposite to her, and to her middle daughter, at the other end of the table. “You’ll both die alone.” My sister and my aunt are women in their forties. I’m not sure either one of them is still looking to couple up with a man. Straightness is a female survival instinct that never lands you leeward.
After my mother’s words, aunt and sister break in routine tears with blank faces. The insult is formulaic, yet the pain it draws is real. The other relatives around the table roll their eyes or stare at their plates. A male chuckles.
I get up and command my mother to follow me to the bedroom. I close the door behind us. I’m standing towards her sideways, closer than what our family dynamics allow for. “What did I say?” my mother asks. I look at her and realise she actually wants to know. “You hurt your sister and daughter and now you’ll go back in there and apologise to them,” I admonish her.
My mother gets away with everything, because nobody takes her at face value. It’s the same joker charm I’ve learned to rely on. I was raised to believe I can do whatever I want, without anyone bothering to tell me how anything is done. That is, I was raised like a boy by women. The only one in our family keeping me in check is the middle sister. She calls me sometimes to remind me what an arrogant bitch I am, followed by a self-harm monologue, and ending with an “I love you.” She means all of it.
We’re standing still in the bedroom between a king-sized bed and a closet full of junk. My mother’s trying to talk her way out. She sounds like someone who’s never used language to make things better. I can hear my oldest sister’s children breaking the silence in the living room, wondering why nobody’s speaking.
An ugly sadness takes over when I think about my sister having created life. She should be lauded for her steely defiance against a doomed futurity, but I can’t see the appeal in reproducing any of this. I’m a theatre artist whose works are never repeated. Mine is the stage of finitude. Hers is the museum of hope.
She’s the first to start leaving, not afraid to show she’s had enough. She will take her time so as to stay in control, asking her youngest to finish his meal, making sure none of the children need the bathroom, while collecting the dishes with an underscored dignity. She’s packing up the leftover Christmas food into plastic trays in the kitchen when I saunter to the living room with our mother. “I guess I’m sorry.” Her slipshod words, offered while she hobbles back to her seat, inspire no response.
My mother isn’t apologising to anyone in particular. It’s hard to aim your words, when all of us here owe an apology to each other. Maybe she’s expressing regret to the idea of whatever this is we’re attempting to maintain by assembling around holidays. “I’m probably not the mother of the year.” The line breaks my heart for more reasons I can count. The male who chuckled earlier does so a second time. I wish nobody would laugh at my mother ever again. My aunt has already left. I wave faintly at my oldest sister’s family getting to the car outside on the driveway.
My mother’s serrated remarks about dying alone cut to the core of cissexual, straight womanhood. The performance of being a woman is measured by your ability to put down roots with a man. If heterosexuality is gravity, then marriage is geotropism, while everything else withers away. The latter option is what my middle sister and I are about, neither one of us marrying or procreating. She has reclined on the couch, playing poker on her phone, far gone. She and I are going to get hammered tonight.
Six hours later, we are shitfaced. It’s 3.40 am and the only bar around here has just closed. The temperature hovers around minus ten degrees. The town’s quiet like a grave. We slide on the icy road past my high school to catch up with a young man. I look at him under the streetlight: a slender, long-haired boy with a kind face, with the death metal band Mayhem’s logo peeking from under his leather jacket. He was the only one left at the bar besides us two. We invited ourselves for an afterparty at his place.
We reach his place quick. He lives above the hair saloon where the mother of my first boyfriend used to work. The apartment is small and glum. His desktop PC is emitting a blue light from a table next to his bed. I don’t know where to sit. “You look weird”, he quips. “I’m an artist!” I respond combatively. We settle down on the bed. He wants me to hear his music, reaching for the four-track recorder next to the PC and hitting play. He and I listen in silence to the electronic sounds attempting to imitate fast-paced black metal drumming, with his trashy guitar solos on top.
His music is as good or bad as anything I’ve ever done. I become increasingly aware of the class difference between an unemployed man stuck in this town, and myself, a professional artist. I say nice things to him, like I would to a colleague wanting me to pet them at a gallery afterparty. I go on a tirade about modern music production, a topic he doesn’t care for, given he’s making lo-fi black metal recorded direct to cassette.
My sister is rummaging the fridge in the corner of the dark room. “There’s only two beers here”, she announces with an assertive tone. When my sister wants something, she gets it. She opens both bottles, drinks most of the first in one go, and hands it to me. I take a sip while she finishes off the other one.
My sister unlocks the window to smoke. Our host would clearly like to tell her not to do that, but instead he goes to lie down prostrate on the floor, muttering about giving up. What am I doing marauding beers from a 20-year-old in the early hours of Boxing Day? I’m here because I belong to a pack of thermal thieves. After we’re done with you, the coldness. I get up and tell my sister it’s time to go. I give one final look at the guy on the floor as I close the door behind us.
I wake up at noon. I join my sister in the living room. My mother’s cooking dinner in the kitchen. We don’t help her: nobody knows how. Yesterday’s crisis has been wiped from our collective scoreboard. A single event has little impact after the initial shock. Family is a place where you fight without consequences until there’s some. My mother’s phone rings as if on cue. She puts her knife down on the cutting board and answers.
Our father – the laughing male from the previous evening – storms into the kitchen to snag the phone from my mother after he has realised who’s calling. Half-crouching at the living room table, I fix my eyes on them. My father is holding the phone at knee-height. They are both staring at the phone, making it look like they’re talking to a small child.
It’s my oldest sister on the line. She hasn’t forgotten about yesterday. She’s blaming our parents for what happened, or what has been happening for decades. “Let me put you on speaker so we can both hear these wonderful things you’re saying about your mother,” my dad says. He isn’t yelling. His tone of voice rings outside the average emotional frequency range. He seems both unperturbed and bloodthirsty.
My sister wants to make clear how there are absolutely no redeeming factors for their rank failure in parenting. I feel she’s about to cross a line. I thought no such lines existed. I’ve considered my unorthodox way of living as a byproduct of our family’s unspoken allegiance to chaos. My unboundedness has seemed like a blessing. Until today, I have been under the impression our family has figured out a way to live without rules.
By establishing a family of her own, my sister has been learning about the pitfalls of limitlessness. She has come to name the chaos I’m puffed-up about as violence. She is attempting to teach us all about this re-naming by forcing my father into focus. None of us women have ever dared trying to see what he is. He has always done what he wanted with us.
Calling from her house, my sister’s reaching from a place of safety towards the cynicism emanating from the core of our family. She’s using the decrepit language of hate – our language – knowing full well she would be misunderstood here with her newly discovered vernacular of love.
“You were disgusting already as a child,” my father informs my sister. I study his face. He is incandescing a dark light. My mother, silent, is trying not to look up so that our eyes won’t meet. “Do you think you’re special? Do you think you know better now that you have your own little family out there, did you really think you can talk to us like we’re idiots? Don’t you know you’ve always disappointed us? Nobody takes you seriously. You’re too weak and stupid, you can’t handle this world and now you’re blaming us for it.”
My father’s words are traveling inside my sister’s head and grinding her cranium to dust. There’s a lull in the call. My sister replies listlessly, “Well if that’s how you want to do it.” Her voice is barely audible. “Goodbye,” she whispers. My father shows no sign of remorse. My mother is frozen, out of reactions to play back. Her belief in our family is unwavering, and only much later do I realise that she extends this to include me, too. She believes in me, in all of us, holding all the contradictory stories together.
I walk over to the kitchen to tell my father you shouldn’t talk to your child like that. My reproach doesn’t make a dent on his demeanour. The line goes silent, the light over our family becoming dim. In the weeks to come, my middle sister decides to take our parents’ side, cutting ties with our oldest sibling to protect herself.
A year later, my father starts to show the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease. He drifts away quickly now that his demolition job is finished. He made a family so he could break it. I can understand that. I am a destroyer, too. Done with love, it’s a sacred vocation, a midwife to the aftermath.
After my father is lost to the disease, a deluge washes over the family stage, and we are free to name ourselves differently. If not as mothers, sisters, and daughters, how do we want to see each other, now that we’re not prostrate to the familial? What beautiful things could we transform into?