Since, A Novel

vii. PIQUE IS THE PUNT OF A BOTTLE OF WINE

vii.
PIQUE IS THE PUNT OF
A BOTTLE OF WINE

          "Have everything with you?"

               January 2018. The girl's eyebrows tighten on fixing her school tie as the mother checked her things. It was black, cut short, and it was supposed to look like Andrew's Cross with a small, yellowish pearl in the middle. It didn't look right and how annoyed she grew; her face screwing up at the sound of the blender, the turnt up commercials from the television, and her stepfather's loud chewing of bacon sandwich. At some point it made her right knee cap itch, her teeth sensitive. The mother smiles, says, "Let me help you with that," and properly sat on one knee to level with her kid.

     It was freshman year. And it was strange. She thought: How do you respond to an adult woman being this close to you but not really? How does a mother not feel like a mother at all? A stepfather, how about him? They have this tension that leveled strangely with each other, like a third secret thing, but it was also loose and impassive. Like losing a bet but winning the half of it, or buying something you've so long eyed but still wanting the change, in hopes for more. Having parents but seeking more of their presence. A seventeen and a thirty-two. A thirty-two and a thirty-eight. Should it matter? It was an everyday pingpong match of I love you and I wish you weren't here.

          "Mom," she calls.
The mother for a second looked up to her, eyebrows raising.
          "This is the last, right?" she asks, sleep in her eyes, her eyes at the window.

The blender stops working. The mother was unsure of what her daughter meant by the sudden (but expected) question. Is this her last transferring of school? Is this their last moving? Is this her last stepdad? The last boyfriend?

          "We're . . ." the mother clears her throat, "We will see about that," and smiles.

     That's them, never really asking and never really answering. The both have fed on the ambiguity seeping off their tongues, their teeth too formless to defend what each other has had to say, their lips too dry from apathy and the lack of speech, resting too much. How was school? What made you happy today? How was work? I loved tonight's dinner. No, nothing like that. It is as if the daughter exists on the mother and stepfather's silence and sound—their disagreements and bargain, the blatant detachment retrieved by a peck on the cheek, the gap and the filling—and no one ever really survives there, but someone has to quietly last because maybe it is okay to hope that this moving, this time, is the last.

     And it is sickening. It's been going on like this. She, the daughter, was certain that she can no more continue living like this. It's as if everything and everyone were living in a bin with a 'biodegradable' label on it, and the mother carries on with a solid thought of everything's renewability. It has been a couple of years. Why won't they stay in one place? Why won't they feel their place?

     The father was not a drunk but neither was he sober. He's like an adult in the house that inhabits the living room and gets to drink almond milk from the box and finishes all the corn chips. He's never opened a can of beans for the wife, has never fixed the ceiling where beads of sun and rain stubbornly come from, has never looked at the unsettled sink tap, has never touched a single box of their belongings from the truck that was there two days ago, but once has mopped (crudely) the floor (when he blew the milk off his nose and mouth from watching South Park in the TV). That was his favorite game-card: I mopped the floor last week and you think I'm useless. Well! This useless is the only one that makes money in this damn house! And the wife would suggest, "Why don't you just watch, Hun? I'm on this," in good hopes that he'd choke on his milk and own saliva from too much snorting and chortling.