“That boy you were seeing was so into you.”
And every other vagina in his building.
“You had so many friends.”
She had not heard from one of them since she’d left.
“Well.” Laura sighed. The list of encouragements had been short if not probing. As usual, she had read Andy like a book. “Baby, you’ve always wanted to be somebody different. Someone special. I mean in the sense of someone with a gift, an unusual talent. Of course you’re special to me and Dad.”
Andy’s eyes strained to roll up in her head. “Thanks.”
“You are talented. You’re smart. You’re better than smart. You’re clever.”
Andy ran her hands up and down her face as if she could erase herself from this conversation. She knew she was talented and smart. The problem was that in New York, everyone else had been talented and smart, too. Even the guy working the counter at the bodega was funnier, quicker, more clever than she was.
Laura insisted, “There’s nothing wrong with being normal. Normal people have very meaningful lives. Look at me. It’s not selling out to enjoy yourself.”
Andy said, “I’m thirty-one years old, I haven’t gone on a real date in three years, I have sixty-three thousand dollars in student debt for a degree I never finished and I live in a one-room apartment over my mother’s garage.” Air strained through Andy’s nose as she tried to breathe. Verbalizing the long list had put a tight band around her chest. “The question isn’t what else can I do. It’s what else am I going to fuck up?”
“You’re not fucking up.”
“Mom—”
“You’ve fallen into the habit of feeling low. You can get used to anything, especially bad things. But the only direction now is up. You can’t fall off the floor.”
“Have you ever heard of basements?”
“Basements have floors, too.”
“That’s the ground.”
“But ground is just another word for floor.”
“Ground is like, six feet under.”
“Why do you always have to be so morbid?”
Andy felt a sudden irritation honing her tongue into a razor. She swallowed it back down. They couldn’t argue about curfew or make-up or tight jeans anymore, so these were the fights that she now had with her mother: That basements had floors. The proper direction from which toilet paper should come off the roll. Whether forks should be placed in the dishwasher tines up or tines down. If a grocery cart was called a cart or a buggy. That Laura was pronouncing it wrong when she called the cat “Mr. Perkins” because his name was actually Mr. Purrkins.
Laura said, “I was working with a patient the other day, and the strangest thing happened.”
The cliffhanger-change-of-subject was one of their well-worn paths to truce.
“So strange,” Laura baited.
Andy hesitated, then nodded for her to continue.
“He presented with Broca’s Aphasia. Some right-side paralysis.” Laura was a licensed speech pathologist living in a coastal retirement community. The majority of her patients had experienced some form of debilitating stroke. “He was an IT guy in his previous life, but I guess that doesn’t matter.”
“What happened that was strange?” Andy asked, doing her part.
Laura smiled. “He was telling me about his grandson’s wedding, and I have no idea what he was trying to say, but it came out as ‘blue suede shoes.’ And I had this flash in my head, this sort of memory, to back when Elvis died.”
“Elvis Presley?”
She nodded. “This was ’77, so I would’ve been fourteen years old, more Rod Stewart than Elvis. But anyway. There were these very conservative, beehived ladies at our church, and they were bawling their eyes out that he was gone.”
Andy grinned the way you grin when you know you’re missing something.