Something in Leilani held her back as she rose from the co-pilot’s chair and followed her mother into the galley. Her braced leg didn’t respond as fluidly as usual, and she clumped through the motor home in an ungainly gait rather like the one she used when she wanted to exaggerate her disability in order to enhance a joke.
By the time that Leilani reached the galley, the refrigerator closed. She switched on the sink light.
Old Sinsemilla had gotten a liter of tequila from the liquor supply. She was sitting on the floor, her back against a cabinet door. She held the bottle between her thighs, struggling to open it, as though the twist-off cap were complex futuristic technology that challenged her twenty-first-century skills.
Leilani took a plastic tumbler from an upper cabinet. All the drinking vessels aboard the Fair Wind were in fact plastic, precisely because of the danger that Sinsemilla would injure herself with real glassware when she descended to this condition.
She added ice and a slice of lime to the tumbler.
Although the motherthing would happily pour down tequila warm, without a drinking glass and condiments, the consequences of allowing her to do so were unpleasant. Swigging from the bottle, she always drank too fast and too much. Then what went down came up, and Leilani was left with the mess.
Until Leilani stooped to take the bottle from her mother, old Sinsemilla seemed unaware that she had company. She relinquished the tequila without resistance, but she cringed into a corner formed by the cabinets, holding her hands protectively in front of her face. Tears suddenly washed her cheeks, and her mouth softened in these salt tides.
“It’s only me,” Leilani said, assuming that her mother was still operating from an altered state and was less here in the galley than in some tweaked version of the real world.
With her wrenched face and tortured voice, Sinsemilla made an anguished plea for understanding. “Don’t, wait, don’t, don’t… I only wanted some buttered cornbread.”
Pouring the tequila, Leilani nervously rattled the neck of the bottle against the plastic tumbler when she heard the word cornbread.
On those occasions when Leilani had awakened to find her steel support missing, when she had been forced to endure a difficult and humiliating game of find-the-brace, her mother had been highly amused by her struggle but had also insisted that the game would teach her self-reliance and remind her that life “throws more stones at you than buttered cornbread.”
That peculiar admonition had always seemed to be of a piece with old Sinsemilla’s general kookiness. Leilani had assumed that buttered cornbread had no special significance, that the words oatmeal cookies or toasted marshmallows, or long-stemmed roses, would serve as well.
Huddled on the floor, peeking out between the knuckled staves of her palisade of fingers, apparently expecting an assault, Sinsemilla pleaded, “Don’t. Please don’t.”
“It’s only me.”
“Please, please don’t.”
“Mother, it’s Leilani. Just Leilani.”
She didn’t want to consider that her mother might not be in some drug-painted fantasy, that she might instead be trapped in the canvas of her past, because this would suggest that at one time she had been afraid, had suffered, and had begged for mercy that perhaps had never been given. It would suggest also that she deserved not just contempt but at least some small measure of sympathy. Leilani had often pitied her mother. Pity allowed her to keep a safe emotional distance, but sympathy implied an equality of suffering, a kindred experience, and she would not, could not, ever excuse her mother to the extent that sympathy seemed to require.
A shudder, Sinsemilla’s body rattled the cabinet doors against which she leaned, and each clatter seemed to crack the rhythm of her breathing, so that she inhaled and exhaled in short erratic gasps, blowing out bursts of words with breathless urgency. “Please please please. I just wanted cornbread. Buttered cornbread. Some buttered corn-bread. “
Holding the tumbler of tequila with ice and lime, the way dear Mater preferred it, Leilani knelt on her one good knee. “Here’s what you wanted. Take it. Here.”
Two tans of trembling lingers visored Sinsemilla’s face. Her eyes, glimpsed between overlapping digits, were as blue as ever but were tinted by a vulnerability and by a terror not like anything she had shown before. This wasn’t the extravagant fear of the never-were monsters that sometimes stalked her head trips, but a grittier fear that the passage of years could not allay, that corroded the heart and bent the mind, a fear of some monster that, if not still abroad in the world, had once been real.
“Just buttered. Just cornbread.”
“Take this, Mama, tequila, for you,” Leilani urged, and her own voice was as shaky as her mother’s.
“Don’t hurt me. Don’t don’t don’t.”
Insistently Leilani pressed the tumbler against her mother’s face-shielding hands. “Here it is, the damn cornbread, the buttered corn-bread, Mama, take it. For God’s sake, take it!”
Never before had she shouted at her mother. Those last five words, screamed in frustration, shocked and scared Leilani because they revealed an inner torment more acute than anything she’d ever been able to admit to herself, but the shock was insufficient to bring Sinsemilla out of memory into the moment.
The girl placed the tumbler between her mother’s thighs, where the bottle of tequila had been. “Here. Hold it. Hold it. If you knock it over, you clean it up.”
Then her cyborg leg went on the fritz, or maybe panic short-circuited her memory of how to move the encumbered limb, but in either case, Leilani was locked in genuflection to the failed god of mother love, as Sinsemilla sobbed behind her screen of hands. The galley shrank until it was as confining as a confessional, until claustrophobic pressure seemed certain to wring unwanted revelations from Sinsemilla and to compel Leilani to acknowledge a bitterness so deep and so viscid that it would swallow her as sure as quicksand and destroy her if ever she dared to dwell on it.
Frantic to be out of her mother’s suffocating aura, the girl clawed at the nearest countertop, at the refrigerator handle, and pulled herself erect. She pivoted on her bad leg, pushed away from the refrigerator, and lurched toward the front of the Fair Wind as though she were on the deck of a pitching ship.
In the cockpit, she hall climbed and half fell into a seat, and listed her hands in her lap, and clenched her teeth, biting down on the urge to cry, biting it in half, swallowing hard, holding back the tears that might dissolve all the defenses she so desperately needed, drawing hot staccato breaths, then breathing just as hard but deeper and more slowly, then more slowly still, getting a grip on herself, as always she’d been able to do, regardless of the provocation or the disappointment.
Only after a few minutes did she realize that she had sat in the driver’s seat, that she had chosen it unconsciously for the illusion of control that it provided. She would not in fact start the engine and drive away. She had no key. She was just nine years old, in need of a pillow to see over the wheel. Although she wasn’t a child in any sense other than the chronological, though she’d never been permitted the chance to be a child, she had chosen this seat in the manner of a child pretending to be in charge. If a pretense of control was the only control you had, if a pretense of freedom was the only freedom you might ever know, then you better have a rich imagination, and you better take some satisfaction from make-believe, because maybe it was the only satisfaction that you would ever get. She opened her fists and clutched the steering wheel so tightly that her hands almost at once began to ache, but she did not relax her grip.