Mommies All the Way Down

Annie and Daniel lived in a brick house at the end of the street. He was 36 and she was 27. It was their culture for girls to marry boys who were just a little bit older than them. He went to work during the weekday, she made his coffee in the morning then cleaned and looked up their stocks online. She sat there at the computer watching them like wildlife. Three to four times a month they had sex and he treated her like she was made of porcelain. He barely touched her at all. They had a five year old daughter named Ellen, who was cute but had a lazy eye.

One day Annie was late picking up Ellen at school and when she arrived one of the other mothers was hovering over her in the playground. “Sweetie,” the woman said to Ellen. “Hold still.”

“She’s got something in her eye,” she said to Annie.

“Oh darling, did you get sand in your eye?” Annie asked. Ellen was crying.

It was just some sand, though combined with the existing lazy eye Ellen did look a little odd. She was always looking into corners, the way an animal would. But it would all clear up in a few days, Annie told herself. Daniel didn’t even notice, so it couldn’t have been so serious.

The rest of the week was usual. Ellen watched TV on her iPad, while Annie and Daniel watched TV on their television. But on Friday, Annie had some wine after Ellen went to bed and couldn’t help herself. “This is gonna sound kinda crazy?” she said to Daniel during a commercial break. “But have you ever noticed how Ellen's eye is sorta weird?”

“Yeah,” he said, turning down the volume. “I was going to ask you about it. Can you get her checked out next week?”

On Wednesday, they had an appointment. Their pediatrician had recently moved his office to the other side of town, so on their way there Annie and Ellen drove through the neighborhood where Annie had lived when she was younger, before she’d married Daniel, and had to make her living by working at a screaming parlor.

“You probably think I’m just one of those mothers,” she said to the doctor once they arrived.

He crouched to examine Ellen with his instruments, then wrote down a name on a piece of paper. “This is for a specialist,” he told Annie without ever looking at her directly. “It’s probably nothing, but I’d like her to take a look just to be sure. Tell Louise at reception and she’ll call his office to set you up.”

The screaming parlors were places where wealthy people could pay to scream at poor people. They came in on their breaks, before, or after work, in their suits with their briefcases. Sometimes the men took off their ties so they could really get comfortable. The women took off their high heeled shoes.

Annie got the job through an old friend, Jane, who’d done it for years. She had bruises down her arms when they met up one day for coffee. “I don’t get it,” said Annie, “Can’t they get angry for free whenever they want?”

“This way they don’t have to feel bad about it,” said Jane.

“What are they so angry about, anyways?”

“Money, mostly.” She tilted her head to the left and wrinkled her nose. “It’s kinda like The Sixth Sense. They don’t know how rich they are. They walk around thinking they’ll always need more. You know, kinda like a Bruce Willis type thing?”

Annie showed up for her first day dressed like a waitress, a black skirt and a white shirt. “You’re pretty,” said the boss, Mrs Ogden, without looking at her. “What are your days?”

It was a nice place, classy. There were plush, velvet couches and breath mints by reception. Each girl was expected to keep their areas clean and they took some pride in it, wiping up any blood or sweat or whatever seeped out of them. “We aren’t like one of those dirty parlors,” they often discussed on break. “We don’t let just anyone in.”

Other times they helped each other with their makeup, shared stories about their weekends, and made jokes about some of the more unusual rages: cinnamon, the butcher’s daughter’s teeth, Groundhog’s Day in general. Other than that it could come to feel quite mundane: traffic, mothers in law, the government. The anger was hot and cold, wind and fire, fast and slow. Annie saw all kinds of it. Countless different breeds and hybrids. It was vague and specific, personal and political. Relatable and alienating.

She struggled at first, but Jane kept Annie under her wing. After her first week, they drank beers together in the alley behind the parlor. Jane told Annie it would get better soon, “You get used to it eventually.”

“I’m not sure I can do it,” Annie said. Mrs Ogden had reprimanded her that morning for crying in one of her sessions. (“They shouldn’t have to feel bad,” she’d said. “It’s what they’re paying for.”)

Jane squeezed her hand. “The key is to get some regulars. You think it’s passive, but it’s not. You have to feed the anger. Create demand.”

“But how? Mrs Ogden said we’re not allowed to talk back.”

“You keep eye contact,” Jane said. “Hold your spine straight. Never let them know you’re embarrassed.”

Jane always said she did it because she was saving up to be a doctor. Fundamentally, she wanted to help people. This had always been true. Once in their senior year, she’d gone out with a thirteen-year-old boy after his parents died in a fire. She was the type to carry bugs outside and talk to them in a low, soft voice as she did it. Another girl at the parlor was in film school, two more were studying economics at the university. There was even a rumor about Mrs Ogden once playing violin in the symphony orchestra before arthritis set into her fingers. Annie often felt ashamed that she had no other side of herself.

Her life outside the parlor during this time consisted mostly of her boyfriend Matthew, an amateur magician who took himself very seriously. He looked down on Annie for getting screamed at, and said she ought to respect herself more, the way he did, earning a living off of something he was passionate about. He had a tophat and dressed up in tails for birthday parties and on street corners because he said it was important for people to understand there was more to this world than met the eye.

He was so thin she got bruises on the inside of her thighs from his hip bones. She got bruises in many places actually. They could spend a whole weekend together hardly leaving the bed at all. They weren’t even hungry, they just laughed and had orgasms. “You could spend your whole life having sex and watching dumb TV,” he once said to her.

“I know,” she said, not realizing until years after they parted that he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

Once an angry person was so upset that they went to a screaming parlor to murder a girl. Not at Annie’s, another one in the neighborhood. Annie was married to Daniel by then, six months pregnant with Ellen. It was a big story, everyone was talking about it. The man had tied the girl up with ropes and carved his initials into her stomach. She was very pretty and her photograph got printed in all the papers. People had a real, national conversation and no one was ever angry again.

Annie went to classes six times a week where she sat in rooms with big bean bag chairs and took sound baths. She knew that sometimes on corporate retreats Daniel’s company brought in paid women. He’d come home once with scratches down his neck and explained the whole thing to her. “So it hasn’t really gone away?” Annie asked. They were on the bed, Ellen was in her room. “You still have anger and it feels like you always will and you don’t know what to do with it?”

Daniel shook his head. “No! Not at all,” he said, promising it wasn’t like that. “It’s not anger, just a bonding exercise.” He kissed her on the nose and told her not to worry, he’d never be angry at another woman. It was a very healthy society.

Ellen liked going to the doctors. She preened and giggled for all the professional men. This will serve her well when she’s older, Annie thought. Then get her into trouble. Eventually she’d meet a man nine years older than her who treated her like porcelain.

The specialist was a stooped man with dyed black hair. He treated Ellen like a specimen, performing a series of tests: puffs of air, moving lights. “Watch my fingertip,” he said as his hand orbited around her head.

“Ellen, look at the nice man’s finger,” Annie said.

Ellen started to get frustrated, “I’m trying!” she said.

Sometimes still, Annie’s body confused her. In moments of uncertainty, she felt anxious to feel Ellen move in her belly just as she had when she was pregnant with her. When Annie felt nothing, she panicked just as she had so constantly panicked all those years ago. The baby has died, she would think. No, she reminded herself, slowly moving her hand away from stomach. The baby is gone. She was born. She’s right in front of you, crying.

On their way out of the hospital, Annie saw a nurse who looked just like Jane, her old friend from the screaming parlor. But what were the chances? Jane, after all these years? The last time she’d seen her, Jane had been on the news, protesting the closure of the parlors. “It’s our livelihood!” she said.

Seeing her face like that, hearing her voice again, Annie felt a flush with happiness. She wrote to Jane and Jane too was happy to hear from her, replying with a long message. Annie replied with her own details: “Now I am married and have a daughter named after his mother, I like it when she sucks my thumb.” “I’m thinking a lot about society and where anger comes from,” said Jane. Gradually though, the messages got shorter and further in between, until Jane’s final reply never came at all. Oh well, it was what always happened between old friends. Annie understood. Nothing to get angry about.

Now, on her way out of the hospital with Ellen, Annie was in a daze. She wasn’t awake. It couldn’t have been her real life, just some strange dream. They arrived home but she couldn’t remember driving. They went inside and she put Ellen in front of her iPad. When Daniel came home from work he asked her what had happened.

“There’s something wrong,” she said. “They say they have to do more tests.”

“For her eye?” He wrapped his arm around her when she started to cry. “But it’s just her eye. Worst case scenario, what? She gets a glass eye? They’re very realistic. No one will know the difference.”

“It’s not her eye,” she said. “They say it’s something in her brain.”

They went to bed that night without dinner. Annie remembered the beginning of their little family, when Ellen was a baby. She had struggled, at first, to identify as a mother. Annie had known mothers all her life and didn’t feel she had the constitution. At best, she and the baby could have been a fun aunt and niece, brought together by some tragedy that permeated all aspects of their life but at the same time was impossible to articulate. Then the baby got sick. Little things at first, a head cold, a slight fever that sent them rushing to the emergency room. Annie became the mother then, gradually. Who else would Ellen’s mother be?

The next day Daniel took off work and they went to the hospital together. Ellen played with blocks in the corner of the room as the doctor laid out all his recommendations. “I’m very sorry,” he said.

“But it’s only just her eye,” said Annie. “She only got some sand in her eye.”

Daniel squeezed her hand, then let it go to wipe his cheek.

“I’m very sorry.”

One day, after Annie had been at the parlor for a few months, Jane asked her if everything was alright. The two of them were outside, sharing a cigarette. “You seem distracted lately,” Jane said. “And I can tell you’re not moisturizing.”

Annie told her it was Matthew. “He’s sleeping around again,” she said. “Came over last night at 4 a.m. with marks all over his back and I could smell the perfume.” (“Baby,” he’d said. “Don’t be mad at me. Let me put your feelings in my hat and I’ll make them disappear.”)

Jane took a long drag. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Really. But you know what might help?”

“What?”

“I’d let you scream at me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure,” said Jane. “Me and the other girls do it to each other all the time. It really takes the edge off. I’ll set a timer and we can each have a turn.”

Annie wasn’t sure what to think, but Jane started anyway. “You know you’re a dumb fucking cunt, right?” Jane began talking right up in Annie’s face. She went through each member of her family and their various deficiencies, back several generations to a great uncle who lost the family fortune in a bet. After the words came strange, guttural noises. She moved as if possessed. Annie had seen this before in some of her regulars. Anger in its purest form. Jane spit in her face right as the timer on her phone went off. “Ok,” she said, wiping Annie off gently with her shirt sleeve. “Now you can try.”

Annie said she didn’t know how. “I’m really not an angry person.”

“Just try, trust me. You’ll feel better.”

“But I love Matthew,” she said. Even when she was with him she missed him. She missed the way he was only sometimes, when he gave her his full attention. But why was he only like that sometimes? Other times all he cared about was magic and what his friends thought of his tricks. “They’re not tricks, Annie,” he always told her. “If you really cared about what I did you’d call them revelations.” Once he lost a white rabbit in her apartment and it chewed through her computer cord. Or what about the time when she was a kid and her parents never let her have the name brand soda and her brother put a dead mouse on her pillow and blamed it on the cat and the cat got run over by a car and then in high school when everyone talked about her brother forcing girls and she hated her face and personality and body and couldn’t catch her breath, there was just so much to say, and on that thought—

The timer went off. “See?” Jane said. “Doesn’t it really work?”

Lunch was over and they went back inside.

That afternoon a handsome man in an expensive suit came in. He was very tall and had bright blue eyes. Mrs Ogden treated him with the utmost respect, having all the girls stand in a line across the lobby so he could choose whoever he wanted. He sat there in the big velvet chair, took one look at Annie, and nodded. As she led him down the hall he didn’t say a word. His footsteps were so quiet that twice she looked behind her to see if he was still following her. He always was. He was looking straight at the back of her head. Then they were alone in her studio and she stood there taking it.

The handsome man came in again the next Wednesday, and soon two or three times a week. He told Annie he wasn’t usually an angry person, it was just that there was an issue at his work. He felt his boss didn’t respect him the way he did his colleagues, which made him feel small and taken advantage of.

“I was thinking maybe I could strangle you?” he asked Annie after he’d been yelling at her for almost six weeks. Annie didn’t usually let clients touch her but knew the other girls did for extra cash. Mrs Ogden let you keep whatever the clients paid beyond the normal rate. The handsome man had full, pouty lips. Annie could tell he really needed it. “A hundred dollars,” she told him.

He walked towards her, put his hands around her neck and squeezed so tight she felt the corners of the room buckle into darkness. When he let go, she fell to the floor. He never came back to the parlor after that.

“What happened to that man?” Mrs Ogden asked her several times. “He was one of our best customers.”

“I don’t know,” she said, partially ashamed by what had happened but partially not in the slightest, which in itself partially ashamed her but also partially did not. “He mentioned he might have been getting transferred at work.”

“Yes,” said Mrs Ogden. “He seemed like someone very important.”

Two months later Annie was sitting alone in a cafe when a man she didn’t recognize sent her over a drink. He smiled and waved hello. Annie waved back, but she was confused. It was only when he walked towards her that she recognized him from the parlor. He asked if he could sit with her, then said he wasn’t actually an angry person. “I just wouldn’t want you to get that impression of me,” he tried to explain. “It was just this one situation at work, but that’s all been sorted out.” He was very handsome and he had on such a crisp shirt. Annie was probably wearing something of Matthew’s, she was clingy and he hated that about her.

“In fact I recently got a big promotion,” the handsome, not angry man said. “This might be crazy, but could I buy you dinner to celebrate? I’m Daniel, by the way.”

He had the air of always being on the winning team and by his side Annie got to be a part of it too, without ever having to do anything to earn the superiority. This was what she liked best about being a wife, even if she still thought of Matthew sometimes, even if sometimes when she closed her eyes she could still feel the bruises on her thighs.

“So where did you two meet?” people asked them at dinner parties.

Daniel would grip Annie’s hand. “She was a temp,” he said.

“Ah,” they always responded. “Like a fairy tale.”

It didn’t take long for Ellen to fear the strange men poking her. It wasn’t fun anymore because it was normal. She tugged at Annie’s dress from her bed but couldn’t look her in the eyes. “Just some tests,” Annie told her. “They’re just making sure.”

But while Ellen was asleep, the doctors spoke very gravely. They said they’d never seen anything like this before and their only option was to medically induce a coma to bring down the swelling. “There’ve been some cases in Sweden,” they said. “Etc, etc.”

Daniel agreed, “Anything! She’s our baby girl.” He squeezed Annie’s hand.

Because Ellen was scared it was their job to be brave. That was only fair. We brought her into this world, thought Annie. We gave her the faulty body. She excused herself to the washroom, pacing back and forth in the stall, trying to get through as much fear as possible because she didn’t want her daughter to die. If she’d known this was what was going to happen she never would have had her. She never would have left her own mother. Thinking about this was the only way to calm herself down: her and Ellen safe inside her mother’s belly, floating and protected by womanly fluids. And her mother was inside of her own mother, who was inside of her mother, who was inside of her’s, just like that since the beginning of time. Mommies all the way down.

On her way back to Ellen’s room she saw the same nurse from the other day, the one she thought was Jane. This woman had cut her hair short and become more solid in her limbs, but Annie was even more sure now. She stood there and stared.

“Is everything alright?” the nurse asked, looking straight at her without a hint of recognition. She had Jane’s eyes!

“Jane,” Annie said. “Don’t you remember me?” She lowered her voice, “From the parlor?” She knew it was unbecoming to bring up something like a screaming parlor in broad daylight but she also had a sick child and felt entitled to literally anything.

“I’m sorry ma’am, you have me mistaken. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“No,” said Annie to the Not-Jane, then walked away.

Ellen slept. She almost looked normal when she slept, Annie thought, if you could ignore all the machines. After all, her eyes were closed.

The next day, Daniel had a meeting. The doctors told Annie to go home and take a shower. “Nothing will happen today, “ they said. “You have to look after yourself.” It was a healthy society. But when Annie got to the car it wouldn’t start. The lights didn’t even turn on when she tried the keys. She didn’t pretend to look through the manual, though she knew when Daniel asked her she’d say she had. Made a couple of calls even, if she felt up to the performance.

She got out of the car and walked to the nearest train station, a place she hadn’t been in years. The smell was foul. It was loud and people brushed past each other with little regard. Annie made note not to touch anything. Then, suddenly, there on the walkway between platforms she saw Matthew. He was standing on a box in his old suit, waving a set of ribbons through the air. Was she dreaming?

“Is it you?” she walked right up to him and asked.

He smiled and said hello, as if it was just yesterday since they’d last seen each other.

“You’re still doing magic?”

Matthew shrugged. “I do the tricks. Magic shows up when it feels like it.”

She took him to a diner nearby and told him to order whatever he’d like. “I have a lot of money now,” she said. “I live in a big house. Where do you live?”

“Here and there,” he said.

“You look exactly the same.”

He nodded with his eyes closed. “It’s funny, as much as I’ve tried, I can’t change. I even cut my hair once, but it just grew back.” His face was just the same, always like he was right on the verge of winking.

“That’s the artificial lake,” she told him after two trains and a fifteen minute walk to her house.

“Looks real to me,” he said. There was a bird above them.

“Do you like my new body?” she asked him. They’d gone upstairs without even talking about it. Her hips were wider and her breasts were fuller, ever since Ellen and eating three meals a day. Matthew ran his hands up her legs then put his finger in her pussy and she literally died.

After they finished she understood why it never would have worked between them. He looked just the same, but she looked so much older. She started to feel her backache and her neck tighten. This was why girls were supposed to marry men a few years older than them, because they aged on different trajectories. In just a few years I’ll look like his mother, she thought. Then maybe he would die too. She felt tears well up in her eyes but before Matthew could notice they heard the front door open downstairs. Annie recognized the cadence of Daniel’s footsteps enter the house, pause by the kitchen, and turn towards the stairs. “My husband,” she said. “I thought he’d be at the hospital.”

She took Matthew with her to hide in the closet. It was still a dream to her, sitting in a pile of her high heeled shoes. Daniel came upstairs, punched the wall by their wedding photograph, then fell back on the bed. He took his shirt off, looked at something on his phone, and started to cry.

“Jesus Christ,” said Matthew.

“Shut the fuck up,” she whispered. “Just please shut the fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking.”

Finally, Daniel got dressed and they heard him leave the house.

“I have to get to the hospital,” Annie said.

“You’re not feeling well? Do you need a glass of water?”

“No,” she said. “I have to meet my husband there. Our daughter is sick.”

“Oh.”

“Our daughter is sick,” she said again, like the words didn’t stick. “In the hospital.”

“I’m sorry,” Matthew said. “Maybe I could help you. If you ever needed to blow off steam, I know people. They’d let you do whatever you want.”

“I don’t have time to be angry,” she told him. “I have to get to my daughter.”

Unfortunately, things had taken a turn for the worst and the doctors said they needed to perform an experimental surgery on Ellen as soon as possible. Daniel chewed his fingernails and began to shake. Annie held his hand like she couldn’t smell Matthew on her skin. “I was getting something to eat,” she told him, though he’d never asked. They watched Ellen in her bed.

Later, when the same nurse from the day before walked by and paused outside the room across the hall, Annie asked Daniel, “Doesn’t that woman look familiar to you? My old friend I work with,” she used to work with me.” She lowered her voice, “At the parlor.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Daniel, “I only went a couple times.”

Ellen’s surgery stretched through to the next afternoon, and Annie saw the nurse again. She had Jane’s eyes and looked right at her. “I'm going to get something to eat,” Annie told Daniel. “I’ll pick us up a toothbrush.” He nodded without looking at her.

Annie walked straight to the train station. Matthew took one look at her and understood. “Did you mean it?” she asked. “You can really help me?” He put on his tophat and guided her down to the train. They rode three stops and he told her that he’d always felt bad for the way he treated her.

“We were just young,” Annie said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Really,” he said. “I never took you seriously. I’ve thought about it a lot, actually. Everything you did seemed like an impression. You seemed like a child impersonating an adult. Maybe that’s what we all did to some extent, but you were just so bad at it. You never knew any of the magicians I followed, or any artists. Even when you tried to talk about them it was all so clumsy. Only later did I start to think of it as something subversive. Like, you were so bad it had to be a comment on adulthood in itself, even if only inadvertently. You were calling out the whole absurdity of it.”

“I don’t know,” said Annie. Now they were walking through a crummy neighborhood. One of the houses had a couch on the lawn. “But it sounds kinda like these classes I go to where we have sound baths?”

They were at an old warehouse now. Matthew knocked and a thin woman with short bangs answered the door. “This is Clover,” he said. “You can do anything you want to her. Don’t worry, it’s on me.”

The woman led them inside. The space was divided by old bedsheets hung from the rafters and it smelled like miscellaneous smoke and cheap beer. Annie followed Clover to a naked mattress in the back. Beside them, laid out on a dresser, was a row of knives. “I’m not an angry person,” she tried to explain. “I take these classes.”

Clover nodded. “You’re going to do great. Just focus on whatever's on your mind and follow your instincts.”

“Well, my daughter, she had this lazy eye.” Annie walked right up to Clover’s pores, watched the light coat her peach fuzz. The rest of it was easy. It felt like years ago, with Jane in the alley. None of those things had ever changed. Nothing changed, she just swallowed her whole life and let her husband fuck her like porcelain. Now her daughter would die and also be dead for the rest of her life, Annie would take sound baths and swallow it.

Matthew had to pull her off. Clover was smiling, “That was great! So good! You’re a real natural!”

When Annie returned to the hospital, the doctors had incredible news. The surgery had gone even better than they’d expected and Ellen would be good as new. Annie and Daniel held hands and kissed on the lips. He ran his hands through her hair. Ellen woke up that evening. She was groggy but her eyes were normal, crystal blue and beautiful.

Before they took her home, Annie saw the nurse again by reception. “Excuse me,” she said. “I know you don’t want to talk and I really don’t want to be invasive but I just wanted to say how happy I am to see you. Look at us! You made it out. We both did, look at us! Everything’s worked out!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The Not-Jane’s voice was tired, but it had that familiar warmth. She grabbed Annie’s arm and dug her fingernails into her skin. “You dumb fucking cunt,” she said with a smile.

____