Love May Fail by Matthew Quick Read Free Book Online

ill-fitting suit or out-of-fashion tuxedo who ever slid cheap flower arrangements around my wrist while pretending not to look at my hoarder mother’s many piles of dusty junk before taking me to a dance—me wearing poofy Disney-princess sleeves and shiny cheap fabric that made me into the shape of an uppercase A.
    My mother’s life work is on these four walls.
    I am her single contribution to the world, the poor woman.
    It’s amazing that she’s never had an existential crisis.
    Of course, the fourth wall is mostly pictures of Ken’s and my wedding, all removed from the very expensive leather-bound album I sent her and in which she doesn’t appear, because—even though Ken purchased her first-class airline tickets and an ocean-view suite at the hotel—she refused to travel to Barbados to attend the ceremony, claiming it was “too dangerous for an unmarried white woman.”
    And then beyond the wedding photos on the fourth wall are all of the shots I’ve sent her over the years from trips Ken and I’ve taken around the world—scenes I do not wish to revisit. And yet I know them all by heart already and can’t help imagining me smiling stupidly in front of the Eiffel Tower holding a flaky baguette like a sword in two fists, the Great Pyramid ofGiza resting like a tray of food in the palm of my hand, me in a black bikini sipping rum and sugary milk from a coconut with a ring of flowers around my neck in Hawaii, me pretending to talk on the phone in one of those red booths they have in London, me standing next to a koala bear in a tree at an animal refuge in Australia, the underwater shots of me and Ken in flippers and the silly snorkel gear floating over the Great Barrier Reef, me with my arms spread Christlike with the great white iconic statue looming over my shoulder in Rio de Janeiro—so many stupid pictures we took all over the world ended up here in this hellish place, with my mother circling endlessly around her National Geographic s tower to fuel the merry-go-round narrative of my life, wearing out the dusty carpet even, an endless zero of obsession and insanity keeping her from having any adventures herself, from ever experiencing anything but the piles of trash with which she surrounds herself.
    For some reason, I envision ancient ape people finger-painting on cave walls, the glow of a torch illuminating their Neanderthal faces as they squat and make stick figures and hide in sunless godforsaken dankness from the saber-toothed tigers that roam freely with huge top-of-the-food-chain teeth and ferocious appetites.
    What is my mother’s real-life saber-toothed tiger? I’ll probably never know.
    Now we have reality TV shows, memoirs, and all sorts of information and resources about hoarders, but when I was a child I didn’t even know the word for what my mother was. There was never a diagnosis, so how could there have been a solution? No one found my mother grotesquely fascinating enough back then to put her on television and make her disease part of popular culture. I can’t decide if that was a blessing or a curse. And regardless, I’ve come to believe that there is no cure for Mom now.Her mind’s been rotting for far too long. Some people you just can’t resurrect, no matter how much you love them.
    The living room is almost inaccessible, as Mom has made a mini city of out-of-date phone books and expired coupon clippings tied up with string. There are pyramids of cheap teddy bears and plastic-faced baby dolls, more cases of Diet Coke with Lime stacked and waiting to quench my mythical thirst, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton records purchased by mail order and still in the original plastic because Mom owns no record player, shoe boxes crammed with receipts older than me, endless cans of spaghetti sauce, never-been-cracked cookbooks, my grandfather’s childhood baseball card and tool collections in boxes labeled D ADDY’S S TUFF , and so many other useless items, stacked and teetering in a way that