by Grant Howington
My mother was always in the water drowning. Mostly I stood near shore flapping my arms. Sometimes I cupped my hands and shouted but the onshore flow carried my voice away. I’d half-heartedly toss a buoy that never reached her. The lifeguard up in his tower slept behind his sunglasses. My mother’s shrieks drove seagulls into the air and I watched them as she drowned.
I remember one night she dug up darkness in our backyard. In the moonlight she was angular, hard, uninviting, beautiful. All of her sinewy muscles working double-time under taut skin, muscles bustling, muscles afraid to sit still. My pudgy baby-fat face smooshed against the darkened glass of my bedroom window, a face inadequate to her hollow cheeks, pointed chin, furrowed brow. At the time she was the oldest person in the world. It’s hard to believe she wasn’t even old enough to drink.
Not that she let it stop her. This was before the meetings, before plastic bottles wrestled from fisted hands, long after my father had left, but before holding her and her Bible in my lap to quiet the shakes. In fact, that’s what she was up to the next morning: drinking and cooking breakfast, her tank-top hanging from her slender shoulders sweat-limp and darkened. I counted the baby-hairs plastered to her forehead as I tried to find the best way to tell her the faucets weren’t working. From an early age I understood there was a way to deal with her, a cadence and tone to use to speak.
It didn’t matter if it was the man from the city who fixed the waterline my mother had severed, the guy she met at Jonny B’s who taught me all the cowboy chords, the college kid who wanted to come out of his skin for the two weeks of family dinners he managed to sit through. They all said or did the wrong thing, or maybe they did nothing at all, and still it was wrong. They’d leave, with split lips or slashed tires, cursing and spitting blood on our front steps. Some of them I did my best to help. Most, I couldn’t bother with, but some of the guys were decent. The one named Ron I liked. He held on for three years, the lunatic. He taught me to ride a bike, how to toss a ball around. I’d sit up with him night after night comparing notes, the two of us trying to crack my mother’s code. I clung to the bicep filling-out his starched white shirt because I knew it couldn’t last.
By the time I was a teenager the men were all gone. I’d been given what I dreamed of most as a child so I was loathe to receive it. Every time I tried to see my friends she’d sob and say I was killing her. The one time I went on a date she almost convinced me I really might. I hated her and the more I hated the harder she clung. I had forgotten what heat radiated from her chest on nights our gas was shut off. I couldn’t remember the feeling of the ribcage under her skin under my fingertips as I sat in her lap eating the last can of food in the house. I hated her the way only a kid can hate his mother before he understands how unbelievably small and frail she can feel in his embrace. In this way I guess we almost were normal.
You want to know how to save somebody from drowning? I’ve been trying my entire life and haven’t figured it out. But if I could, I would swim into their thrashing. I’d let their wild arms batter me, let them tangle their frantic fingers in my hair. I would pull their body close to mine, look into their scared, sinking eyes, and push my deepest breath into their mouth.
Grant Howington is a Michigan-based writer whose works have appeared in Diagram, Nightingale & Sparrow, The Albion Review, and Black Horse Review. He writes to find and feel his place in the world.
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