rupture of the globe (excerpt)

Miriam worked the evening shift at the aquarium, taking tickets and covering for tour girls when they called in sick. She had memorized a script for the highly occasional occasion on which she recited it to groups. By the time she came home, it was often 10pm. She worried she’d wake her mother.

Months ago, she started practicing in the bathroom. She bought a shower curtain in the aquarium gift shop, printed with hundreds of aquatic creatures. On the lowered toilet seat, she recited the script, pointing at fish on the shower curtain. Danny or Meg were old enough to know better than to bang on the door if she was in the bathroom. Ironically, as soon as her kids were old enough to give her privacy, Miriam’s mother showed up.

Miriam’s mother said she was getting over pneumonia, and asked whether she could come and stay a month. When Miriam arrived to pick her up, her mother told Miriam she had cancer.

‘What kind?’ Miriam asked.

‘The bad kind. I didn’t want to trouble you, but I’m dying.’

‘We’re all dying, Mom.’

‘I’m doing it faster. They think maybe a year.’

‘What kind of cancer?’

Her mother wouldn’t tell her, just asked whether Miriam would take care of her until she was too much trouble. She didn’t want to die in a hospital, and if Miriam would let her die at her home, that would make her happier than anything.

Miriam didn’t want anybody dying in her house, but wanted to make her mother happy, because she never had. So Miriam put her mother in Megan’s old room. It had linoleum flooring—used to be a kitchen; when they moved in, Miriam and David never put carpet down because they figured, Megan, a kid, would ruin it. Miriam’s mother was harder on the floor than Meg. Miriam mopped several times a day. If she heard Miriam in the bathroom, her mother yelled, ‘What if I need to use the facilities? What am I supposed to do? And you’re in there chattering away like it’s a regular ladies’ society.’

Under her breath Miriam said, ‘You never make it to the bathroom anyway,’ and eyed the mop and bottle of Lysol, which she’d moved upstairs for convenience’s sake.

It’d quieted down, mostly. Everyone adapted to the new situation. These days, Miriam’s mother slept. In the bathroom, Miriam ran through passages about stingrays and sharks; she got excited when she reached whales. There were endless opportunities for embellishment with whales.

‘Whales perform such behaviors as head lunge, spy hop, pectoral fin extension, tail slapping and pectoral slapping.’ Miriam enacted these gestures as best she could, imagining smiles from an audience.

Up until two years ago, Miriam hadn’t worked outside the home. She tucked in the kids by the time David returned from work. Now, one of the kids was there when Miriam came home, because someone had to be there in case Mother needed something: glasses of ice water, tea or coffee, a different book. Somebody had to be there to hear when she called. Miriam had given her a bell to ring in case nobody heard her, but she used it as a last resort. Her mother said it felt like summoning a servant and while she’d wanted to summon servants all her life, her daughter and grandchildren were not servants.

Miriam’s boss at the aquarium changed the script twice a year, because a local Girl Scout troop came twice and complained that the girls didn’t learn anything new. So Miriam memorized details. ‘If you find a beached whale, call a wildlife or national park officer, pour buckets of water on the whale to help regulate its body temperature, but never in its blow hole or it will suffocate.’

Sometimes when she reached whales, Danny woke up. Meg, in her bedroom steps away, could sleep soundly two inches away from a passing freight train, but Danny, on the floor below, could hear through vents, and shouted, ‘Be quiet!” through them when he couldn’t sleep. He’d been a tedious child, often crying in frustration when somebody flushed the toilet.

The twins woke her often enough themselves, so she figured it was only fair. But she still had issues about waking her mother. As a teenager, she liked to think she suffered from insomnia, but really she drank too much coffee. Caffeine-lit, Miriam crept through the house in the middle of the night, startled by moon reflecting off the grand piano, wind through blinds, a shadow of her father’s hat.

Sometimes, walking past her parents’ room, she woke Mother, who followed Miriam down the hall to her room, angry, half-asleep, feet pounding the wood floor, nightgown whipping behind her. She’d push Miriam into bed, pelt her with a few soft slaps and tell Miriam to sleep. Sometimes her mother woke in the middle of this, and said she was sorry. One morning, Miriam woke to find on her pillow a gold bracelet of her mother’s that she’d admired in the jewelry box, which she took as apology.

If she woke her now, by reading her script, Miriam’s mother called for peas. ‘Bring me some peas, Miriam,’ she said. ‘Step on it.’ The first time she’d said it, Miriam feared her mother’s mind had gone; perhaps the onset of Alzheimer’s. She’d never liked peas. When Miriam questioned her, her mother stated from her pile of sheets Miriam was to bring her a full bowl of frozen peas.

‘You want me to heat them up first, right?’ Miriam asked. Her mother said she wanted them cold. She’d read about it in a magazine Miriam gave her.

Miriam went to the kitchen, terrified of her mother’s demise. She skimmed all magazines she gave Mother, to make sure there was nothing upsetting inside, and she didn’t remember anything about frozen peas. Also, she’d heard stories of patients on chemo suddenly wanting things like watermelon milkshakes, and refusing to eat anything else. But her mother told Miriam she’d stopped chemo months ago.

Meg came into the kitchen for a popsicle and saw Miriam crying, asked what was wrong. ‘Your grandmother wants to eat frozen peas.’

Meg shrugged. ‘It’s fashionable at school to eat frozen peas. Lots of girls eat them.’ Miriam wondered whether Meg had made this up.

‘Sit with me while I eat,’ Miriam’s mother directed. ‘You might as well keep me company.’

Miriam moved toward the foot of the bed.

‘No, pull up a chair,’ her mother raised her hand and waved it at the armchair. ‘Haul it over. Let’s talk. I have some important things to say to you, Miriam.’

She told Miriam she was sorry about her father’s verbal abuse during Miriam’s childhood. ‘Maybe you’re repressing it, Miriam, but he was abusive to you until you were six. He used to pitch fits when you wet your pants and he’d lock you in your bedroom for hours. We had terrible fights. I don’t want to tell you the details, but… and I couldn’t join a support group for fear you’d get taken away. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t let on that anything was wrong. It was his drinking.’

Miriam cringed. ‘Why haul up the dregs? I don’t remember any of this. I don’t need to know.’

‘When I finally got him to unlock your door so I could go to you, you were in soiled underpants, crying into your pillow. I thought for sure he’d ruined you; that you’d bloom with strange neuroses as an adult…then, you marry a gentile and then you up and get divorced.’

‘Stop.’

She handed Miriam the empty bowl; a pea stuck between her teeth. ‘Well, have it your way,’ her mother said. ‘I just thought you should know. It’s your history. We all need to know our history.’ She smiled, face loose with exhaustion, and rolled onto her side to tell Miriam to leave. The hall carpet shone under the hall light. Miriam was glad to escape the aroma of Lysol.

Danny took his grandmother’s presence as a personal insult. They’d never gotten along. His sense of humor was sarcastic and pointed. In high school, he decided he wanted to become a fashion designer, and began wearing tights and dresses with asymmetrical hems. Miriam’s mother said things like, ‘Danny, dear, that dress is unbecoming. Why don’t you wear a suit in that color instead?’

Today, Danny modeled a gaudy 70s dress, orange with kiwi colored stripes, something neither Miriam nor her mother would have been caught dead wearing when it was in style. Danny, before Miriam could stop him, paraded around his grandmother’s bed. ‘How about this?’ he said. ‘Do you like this better than the other ones, Grandma? It’s better than the dress you’re wearing.’ Her mother hissed as Miriam put her hands on his shoulders, roughly pushed him out the door.

Danny stomped downstairs to his room, slammed his door and streamed out curses. Through the vents, Miriam heard him fling himself onto bed. He screamed, ‘BRING ME SOME PEAS! AND STEP ON IT!’

Miriam’s mother hissed, ‘You couldn’t keep a good man, now you can’t raise one. You’ve got two daughters, Miriam. And you didn’t raise them Jewish.’

Miriam held her breath, counted to ten, removed the bowl from her mother’s nightstand, and exhaled. ‘I’m sorry about the drag show,’ Miriam said, rushing out before her mother could respond.

She threw the bowl into the sink and it didn’t break, so she picked it up and hurled it again until it shattered against the faucet. Then she opened Danny’s door and grabbed his ear. ‘NOW YOU BE QUIET YOUNG MAN!’ He was crying, a skinny brown-haired boy with a splotchy face, hands knotted up in his shirt.

‘I just felt hungry, Mom,’ he said.

Miriam ran her hand over his back once, shut the door and heard her mother shout, ‘I want blueberries with cream.’ Blueberries with cream was Danny’s favorite snack. Miriam shook her head and went to the deck to think.

Often, during these months, she told herself, ‘I’m just going to go out on the deck to sit and think,’ but she never did any thinking. She stared at the hummingbirdless feeder. Sometimes she whispered amazing facts about whales to potted petunias and snapdragons. ‘Killer whales have a slower heart rate when diving. Whales don’t spout water, they let air out of their lungs.’ She waited until the moonflowers opened to go inside. Her mother would be asleep then, and any mishaps could to be cleaned up the next day.

At night, she was angry with David because it would’ve been nice to have someone else mop Mother’s floor and rinse ice from frozen peas. It would be good to have him there for Danny, a son Miriam didn’t know how to help.

She broke off a snapdragon and spoke into it like a microphone. ‘Blue whales voices are among the deepest voices on the planet. Underwater, they can travel up to 100 miles! Do you think your voice could reach Pittsburgh, even if you screamed? Do you think someone would hear you, and respond?’