Light Language
TESS RAUSCHER
When I was fifteen years old, my mother left my father, citing a need for a change in lifestyle. In the months leading to this announcement, my mother spent her time sanding all of the wooden surfaces of our home. It became a joke between my brother and I, the sound of the scratching paper, her determined stare. She departed and we absorbed her absence like that of house guests made to keep home for an afternoon while the host had important errands to run. She traveled abroad, and when she called I wouldn’t answer, or if I did, I would speak in a feigned distraction, as if there was something that might soon be sending me away. But I couldn’t hold my distance for long—her voice was so full of excitement, it made me feel like her adventure was my birthright in a way, evidence of the many lives I could live.
When I went off to college, my mother’s own exploring intensified, as if the self she occupied became doubled and she could stand next to herself, an other. She tried polyamory and they/them pronouns, both of which proved inconvenient. She stopped dying her hair, which somehow made her seem younger. She let the grey grow in patches. She even became detached from her own woes of domesticity, taking on any binary discussion of gender as backwards and dated. She said her own need for a maintained home and well-brought-up children was because we lived in an era of downward mobility. She was nervous of financial regression, and it was a matter of class, and the maintenance of our higher class, rather than the oppression of my father and all that a man in a home represents, that had brought her distress. I found myself repeating her words in my college classes. It was those parroted words that I said with most conviction.
After my junior year, I walked into her new apartment with my brother. The drummer of my father’s old band answered the door in a robe. We asked where our mother was; he said inside. We entered. She was there, prone on the couch, naked. My brother screamed. He called our father, demanded she explain to him what she had been doing with his friend. My brother called her a whore. My father echoed, though the words he said instead were “free woman.” She had tears in her eyes. She said they were ruled by cheap sentimentality. I stayed silent, glancing about the room, studying the old furniture, the way my mother’s eyebrows furrowed and then relaxed.
We did not see her again until my brother’s wedding. He was marrying a prim woman who he had met when he was eighteen. My mother sat in the front row, though no one looked at her. My father sat beside her. In my brother’s vows, he spoke words like the home we will build, the trust we will keep, you are what brings stability to my life.
At the reception, my mother got drunk and invited me to take shots with her. She patted down a loose hair of mine and told me to smile. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. We played games like resting shots on the back of our hands and raising them as quickly as we could to our expectant mouths. I was quite studious and serious at the time, and so I did not handle liquor well. I lost my shawl and soon both my mother and I were barefoot, on the dance floor, and then on grass, we were outside the white tent.
We should do a running contest, she said. Do you mean a race? I asked. Yes, she said, let’s see how far we can go, let’s see if we can think of the same place to stop. It’s collective thinking, linked consciousness, let’s test it, you came from me, and the trees talk anyway, just like the light does, and the dark does too. So we lifted our dresses and then we were running though I did not remember starting, and I found it hard to avoid the tree trunks and branches and rocks. I saw my knees and my ankles and I felt like my toe nails could fall off, and she was ahead of me, and I think she was laughing. She stopped at a clearing and I was behind her so I stopped too. See, we both knew when to stop, she said, in a whisper.
It was so dark, I could only see the whites of her eyes, her teeth, the patches of silver hair. Her mouth turned to a circle, her eyes right into mine, unwavering. She paused, waiting for me to join her. She started howling, and screaming, and I screamed too, though mine sounded strained, like I had already lost my voice before I opened my mouth, but I screamed with the voice I didn’t have, and I stared at her, wondering if it was with her or at her, until that didn’t matter either. We returned to the tent and she kissed my cheek. My brother walked by, his wife in tow. He raised his eyebrow and his glass to me. It occurred to me then: I don’t know these women.
TESS RAUSCHER is a writer based out of Philadelphia, PA. Her work has been included in Bennington Review and elsewhere.
