My Year of Rest and Relaxation

What would I do without her?

More often than I needed, I’d get face peels and pedicures, massages, waxings, haircuts. That was how I mourned, I guess. I paid strangers to make me feel good. I might as well have hired a prostitute, I thought. That’s kind of what Dr. Tuttle was years later, I thought—a whore to feed me lullabies.

But at least she cared.

After she left, I spent days in the house alone, <…>, sobbing over piles of my mother’s unopened packages of pantyhose. I cried over my father’s deathbed pajamas, the dog-eared biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Josef Mengele on his bedside table, a green nickel in the pocket of his favorite pants, a belt he’d had to drill holes in to make smaller as he’d grown sicker and thinner in the months leading up to his death.

Occasionally, over the years, when I’d felt abandoned and scared and heard a voice in my mind say, “I want my mommy,” I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

She’d been vigilant about keeping her hair icy blond as long as I’d known her, but her natural color had grown in, a warmer shade—honey blonde,

In the afternoons, I took the car out, driving aimlessly or to the mall or the supermarket. My mother left me lists of things to buy, with a note for the guy at the liquor store.

“I’m fine, Peggy. No, don’t come over. I’m going to take a bath and a nap.

I wanted her to hold me while I cried, bring me cups of warm milk and honey, give me comfy slippers, rent me videos and watch them with me, order deliveries of Chinese food and pizza. Of course I didn’t tell her that this was what I wanted.

“But why do you care? It’s not a contest.”
“Yes, it is. You just can’t see it because you’ve always been the winner.”