Brewster by Mark Slouka Read Free Book Online Page B

I’d cursed her to her face. Like she’d always expected it of me. In an instant, disbelief turned to rage and we were both yelling.
    “You would raise your voice—?”
    “I didn’t, I didn’t.”
    “Change your tone.”
    “ You change your tone—why do you hate me?” I was sobbing now, furious. I remember feeling sick—like I was fighting myself somehow.
    It got ridiculous. She grabbed me by the collar of my brown jacket and dragged me to the kitchen sink. I didn’t know what she was doing. I didn’t know what to do—you can’t hit your own mother. I flapped around like a shirt on a clothesline, trying to get free but not too hard because I was worried she would slip and fall. “Change your tone, change your tone,” she kept screaming, and scared as I was I kept yelling, “ You change your tone,” and, absurdly, “there is no girl.”
    It was a big, new bar, and it wouldn’t go in. She tried it the other way but it wouldn’t go either, just hit against my teeth. “ This is what we raised,” she kept hissing, “ this is what we raised,” and grabbing the bar she turned it in her hand a few times, then jammed her lathered hand in my mouth and turned it like she was rinsing out a small cup. I gagged and wrenched free.
    Farce. Seen from the outside—and time is outside, I guess—these things are always a farce. I can picture myself standing there in the kitchen but what I see is Dopey after he swallows the soap in Snow White : that same surprised look— hick! hick! —then bubbles popping out, one after the other, and even though I’m sobbing, frothing at the mouth, yelling “I wish I was him, I wish I was him,” even though I’m humiliated, stripped, the shame doesn’t take away from the farce, it multiplies it.
    Hick! Hick! She’s burst into tears, her face in her hands.
    Hick! I’m staggering around the kitchen, my shirt soaked, my jacket half pulled off. “I wish I was him,” I’m screaming—melodramatic, self-indulgent, beside myself. “You blame …” I start to gag, cough, “You … you …”
    And she looks up at me, weeping, wrecked, a bizarre calm like clear sky coming over her face, and says, “Well, you were there, weren’t you?” and goes up the stairs.
    I TRIED to make it up to her afterward, to say I was sorry. We ate dinner that night like nothing had happened, the three of us at the table, the little clinks of silverware—“You want more brussel sprouts? No? Potatoes?” She seemed energized somehow, controlled, sitting straight-backed and stiff, holding her silverware just so, even answering something I said while looking right through me, like some contessa who, having just received some terrible news, is determined not to let the company see her suffer.
    We never said much after that. There was no going back, though thinking about it, I’m not sure there was much to go back to anyway. Truth is, there’s nothing more stupid than fighting something that isn’t—a lack of love, a lack of respect. It’s like fighting an empty room. Nobody understands what you’re doing. You punch the air, you yell, you weep, but there’s nobody there—just this feeling that there’s something holding you back, that there’s a place outside that room that could answer everything, that could tell you, finally, who you are. And you’re not allowed to go there.
    I T SOUNDS TOO NEAT, I know: Literature Teaches a Lesson. Still.
    I was in the library one day during free period when I decided to find a book I remembered liking as a kid. I never found it. I was going through the K’s when I found Kafka. I’d heard of him. The book was called The Trial and it had weird little drawings like the kind a messed-up kid might make of stick figures trapped inside fences or frames or doors. The fences or windows overlapped and crossed. I sat down at one of the round tables—and I didn’t get up again. I skipped gym, then lunch, then math. Nobody asked.
    I didn’t understand most of