Overdosing on Disney

 Mom is sitting on the couch, the one piece of furniture that fits in this room, watching Beverly Hills 90210 and doing her fourth hook rug since dad died. She discovered a hook-rug kit last summer at one of the antique stores Jack dragged us to in Sayville. Her eyes lit up when she saw it, as if she sensed how pleased her hands would be to have something other than nail-biting to do. So now, the yellow walls of our den are covered with hook rugs of Peter Pan and The Little Mermaid, and Snow White and her seven dwarfs greet mom every morning in her bedroom. She said she made it for me. I insisted she keep it. I know it reminds her of the stage. Besides, my room doesn’t need any more help in the tacky department.



Here’s a little secret that stays hidden between my football-wide shoulders and double D breasts: I wish one cell of my being looked half as beautiful as my mother.


Right after my dad died, when we were still living in Houston and I’d yet to learn of my mom’s vital hand in dad’s death, my dearest and only friend Diedra rented the film Three Colors: Blue. The plot mimicked real life a bit too much for me but somehow, Diedra thought this was therapeutic. The main character loses her husband and child in a fatal car crash and suddenly feels free. I wanted to hate the widow but couldn’t. I felt this irrational pull to comfort her narcissistic actions.


“Oh, my, G-d, Juliette Binoche is totally your mom!” Diedra said with a fistful of tissues to her nose.


Yes, that’s what it was. The dark eyes and silky chocolate bob of Juliette Binoche looked hauntingly similar to my mother’s. The two could easily be mistaken for twins. And just like my mother, both were too strikingly beautiful to hate; both dark-haired ravens seemed too delicate to handle the everyday stresses of life on earth.


In the film, instead of mourning, Binoche’s character runs away from everyone she knows. Two days after dad’s shiva, my mother announced that we were moving to New York.


Watching her fingers at work on the hook-rug makes it hard to stay angry, makes love seep into the cracks of my armor. Mom’s hands rapidly move across her next work in progress: Lucy from Peanuts. She looks serious, and I am getting a thrill watching her like this. It is the closest that I’ll ever come to seeing her insides out. There is no planned smile on her face, only the furrowed brow of deep thought. She sighs and the sound makes me think of a dog trapped in its crate. I want to hold her like this, and maybe even trust her.


“What are you going to do when you run out of all the characters you’ve played?” I ask and sit down next to her.


“What?” Her voice is breathy and she is sitting straight up now, her hand to her chest. She must sense her lapse into human being because there is the fake smile and Stepford Wife calm again. “Oh, I guess I’ll have to do some more shows then,” she forces out a laugh.


“But where are you going to put them all? There won’t be any room left on the walls.” She lowers the volume on the television like it’s an effort. It is a half-assed invitation to talk. Her eyes focus on the hook rug. “I guess you could always take down that picture,” I say. It is the one photograph of our family hanging in the apartment, a Sears portrait taken five years ago. It was before I had big boobs, before mom turned into a peppy robot, and Jack was still her son and not her peon. Dad is the only one in that picture who could still be normal, unchanged. He is the only reason I don’t rip it to bits. If there were other pictures of dad up on the walls, if there were any pictures of Jack and me taken after 1993 in this apartment, I wouldn’t resent that picture so much; I wouldn’t feel compelled to get under Sam’s skin. “Hello? I asked you a question,” I sing.


“Would you like me to take that picture down?” She is still working on that stupid hook rug as if her life depended on it.


“Well, I don’t know. What if we forget what Howard looks like?” I ask and wait for a flood of anger to rush through her plastic face. But she only gives me her beautiful profile, and sighs.


“Amelia, don’t be silly.” She shakes her head and strands of her black bob stick to the sides of her crimson lips. She pulls at the loose strands but keeps her eyes brutally focused on her hook rug.


I walk over to a worn cardboard box beside the television. The outside flap reads “knickknacks” in a rushed, uncaring scribble. Inside are a handful of pens, post-its, rubber bands and even two candy bar wrappers. A person could look at these items and think that someone was fired and asked to quickly clear out his desk. Everything about it screams discarded, unimportant. Only below the office supplies and wrinkled wrappers are pictures from our past. The photos are stacked like paper sardines, all crammed together without thought. Already, several pictures are curling at the edges in defiance, voicing their sense of abandonment.


My back is turned to Sam when I unearth a random photo. I don’t need to see my mother to know that her pulse began to race the moment I touched the bruised cardboard box. Good. She needs an emotional slap in the face; needs to know that her burying our past is disrespectful.


The photo is a formal shot of Sam and Howard on their wedding day, their immediate family flanked on either side. I take the picture and sit on the couch beside my mother.


“You can definitely tell it was the seventies,” I joke and point to dad’s pale blue tuxedo and fluffy undershirt. Mom chuckles but her eyes are fixed on the orange carpet. She thinks I cannot tell, that somehow she is fooling me but I know those eyes are nowhere near the photo. “I love your corsage,” I say and wait. There is no corsage, only a red bouquet of roses in mom’s small hands.


“I didn’t wear a corsage. Zelda and Grandma Ruth did though,” she says and leans down to look at the orange carpet again.


If only she couldn’t remember. If only she suffered from early Alzheimer’s or was so wracked with grief that she repressed all memories of my father. Then it’d be easier to forgive her. “Don’t you even miss him?”


“Well of course I do honey.” Her eyes are finally on mine.


“Then let’s put this picture up,” I say and lift the yellowing snapshot to her face. Mom turns her head fast, as if I’ve slapped her.


“Amelia, you know I don’t like clutter,” she says.


I wave the photo around her face. She squirms and buries her head in her hands.


“Dad is not clutter!” I scream. Shards of emotion stab the back of my throat.


Sam lifts her head and shakes it almost imperceptibly. Her eyes are shiny and my heart begins to lift with hope. “No. But I can’t—”


The phone rings, punctuating the tense air between us.