By Pat Foran
She made her wheelchair-bound son’s lunch an hour ago. Tuna salad. He hasn’t touched it. The fork’s too heavy, he says. The doctor said this would happen, that he’d continue to lose range of motion as well as his strength, but it shouldn’t be happening yet. Not with a plastic fork. He needs to keep doing for himself, the doctor said. Her mother agrees. But it’s been like this for days. Now she’s seeing stars, her vision’s narrowing, her head’s a cement mixer, her stomach’s a kiln. “Please eat please eat please eat,” she says, her voice a warped vinyl recording spinning at 45 rpm. Her son tisks. “I guess I don’t have a condition,” he says.
***
The stars she’s seeing, maybe they’re shooting stars and they’ll shoot her out of this cannon of a kitchen with too many clocks — through the door or out the window — into a sit spin, that sit spin, her sit spin, on a frozen river of no return. She’d need her skates, the ones her mother gave her, the ones that have been buried all this time in the closet, under the cutting board, colander and cat food. But she says she was never really good at spinning. Or making tuna salad. Or doing anything. Except marking time. That, she can do. Especially in this kitchen. The bleeding blue numbers on the microwave clock read 2:13.
***
Her mother always knew what time it was. She knew how to spin. Her kids cleaned their plates — they couldn’t leave the dinner table until they had. They didn’t have degenerative diseases. They didn’t have conditions.
***
He’s so thin, so thin. He’s been taking so much time to eat he’s been missing meals. Against the doctor’s wishes and her mother’s objections, she relented one day and spoon-fed him. They cleaned his plate. The cuckoo clock with a bullseye for a dial, the one that hangs on the wall behind her son’s customary kitchen floor spot, says it’s 3:05. Her son’s got a look, one he’s had since he was four, the one that made the girls in pre-school want to take off and put on his coat for him. “I can’t do it myself,” he says. Her lungs fill and her head hangs. She exhales. “Neither can I!”
***
The cats — Joseph and Ersatz — have been slinking in and around the tires of her son’s wheelchair all afternoon. They’ve waited long enough for something to fall from the fork that has yet to be lifted. They’re rip-rustling plastic bags filled with last week’s groceries, they’re pat-pat-patting cupboards to make them open, they’re getting increasingly aggressive in their expressions of discontent, summoning low-rolling mewls, channeling Ice-T and telepathically transmitting menacing thoughts. “It’s on,” they’re saying. She slumps into her kitchen-table chair, the legs for which routinely catch the cuffs of the jeans she hates but it’s the only pair she says she has that fits. “Caught,” she murmurs, sinking into a deep sleep. Her Westminster Chimes wrist watch strikes 3:30.
***
In her soul, a scene from a Faye Dunaway movie plays on a conditionless loop: Mommy Joan Crawford, seeing her daughter at the dining table, sitting up straight, meat untouched, plate unclean.
***
At 4:30 according to the shadow of the indoor sundial, she bursts into the kitchen closet, digs out her skates and rushes to the sink. Fevered, she fills the stainless steel basin, drops her skates in and holds them down. Holds them down hard. Until they stop breathing. “It’s on, motherfucker — you can’t turn this shit off,” she raps and raps Ice-T at them hard. “Catch you in the streets and your ass’ll get tossed.” Her son laughs and lifts his fork. Joseph and Ersatz freak and flee the kitchen. Still seeing stars, she drains the sink and fishes out the lifeless skates.
Pat Foran is a writer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Twitter: @pdforan
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