Dovetail

I am walking the ruts of Central Park, horizon spattered with window lights, as a young mother passes by, gripping her little boy’s doughy arm. It has been like this all day: A citywide parade of motherhood. Or so it has seemed. Because my mother died today, in Ohio, the world is suddenly filled with these false, past iterations. I hadn’t known her for years, yet each passing mother and child thrusts me back to her. Where am I returned? With all of time and all of space at my mind and heart’s disposal, I wish I could say it was the last time I did know my mother, but I must be honest in my shortcomings: Today my mind returns, again and again, to the last time that she knew me.

The day I landed in New York my parents and I moved what few things I owned into a little red brick dorm on campus and covered the walls, any open space really, with reminders of home, of Ohio, and of them. A photo with the three of us sat on my desk. My dad hung a poster for the Toledo Mud Hens while my mom held thumb tacks for him in her hand, like a piece of living furniture, immensely proud and useful.

“Just like home,” she said and smiled, and my dad smiled too. Her voice was full of fear. I was 19 going on 20, cheeks a just-smacked red. I had youth, every bit of it.

It was late summer, August, and cockroaches fluttered and glimmered through the air like the falling skins of peanuts at a ballpark. The heat was terrible and wonderful and just for me. That night my parents took me to dinner at a humble place with white tablecloths and bread that jumped tables if the previous owners left it untouched. I have seldom been happier than I was in that moment in the darkish when we sat down, together, New York water in our glasses.

The quick server tried to sell my religious mother on a glass of the house red. She didn’t drink and neither does my father, so she said “thank you, no.” The thanking always came before the refusal, with her.

Over our bowls (longer and flatter than their Ohio counterparts) of pasta my mother explained how I would need to hold tight to my Christianity here, “especially here,” and as she said it she looked around suspiciously, as if one of the neighboring devils would hear us and work all the harder to corrupt her boy. I bit into my spaghetti and promised her I would. She didn’t know the burgeoning secret-me, and even years later she wouldn’t know of the extent of my private world. She’d produced an intelligent child, which was confusing enough for her, I think, without having to reckon with my duplicity.

“There’s lots of pretty girls here,” she said.

“I agree.”

“Have you heard anything from Clara at all?”

I looked down at my brain-shaped noodles and stuffed the annoyed flush away as best I could.

“Mom,” I warned.

“Clara’s a good girl. Honey now, don’t get flustered. What’s wrong with saying she’s nice?”

“Mom.” I never was excellent with words on the fly (a rich inner life, a teacher once said to excuse my lack of oratory talent). But it must have come out even more defenseless than I intended because my father reached over from his side of the white tablecloth, now crumb-freckled, and put a big, hairy hand on my mother’s forearm. His hand put a stop to that specific line of questioning, as his hand always will. Dad’s authority was unquestionable by either of us. I looked to her fledgling grimace with sympathy and camaraderie, and anger that she was always afraid of the wrong things.

“I’m excited to meet new people,” I said. “Girls, yes. But also other art students, established artists too.”

I was being generous. It was no use trying to explain to her that indeed some of the pretty girls were artists and art students. The outside world, New York, it was just nothing like our town, our Ryan. Mom and Dad were born and raised in Ryan. Most people rarely left Ryan. Clara was in Ryan.

Her.

I’d broken up with her, with Clara, a few weeks ago, ahead of the move, and though she wasn’t pleased it upset our families more than either of us, the relationship’s participants. Mom was now evidently prepared to let me know what a huge mistake I’d made dumping pretty, Midwestern, wait-for-young-marriage Clara.

We were just irreconcilable. I’d cheated on Clara once with a girl named Bailey who made it clear she was available; she gave me a few beers and I looked at her straw hair and little shorts with desire, but really only the desire of the unfamiliar. It didn’t last too long but I’ve never forgotten the way she moved in such an unfamiliar way. Truth is I was awfully bored of Clara. Bored of her body. I could touch it only over the clothes and only under them after we’d talked about marriage. To me she was simple; living in Ryan with me was going to be enough for her, so after three years of half-hearted car-groping, I’d said goodbye with just a little nostalgia.

But I could see my mother struggling to imagine how I’d make it, soul intact, out of New York.

“Maybe I’ll give her a call next week,” I said. “Make sure she’s doin alright.”

At the meal’s end Dad paid the bill in cash and we three said goodbye outside of my dorm. It was far too hot for a prolonged embrace, but I hugged my mother and didn’t budge until the car they’d hired, a white sedan with a frame of small LED lights around the back window, came rolling along. As the car pulled away, I looked up at the airplane comets and the windows of the skyscrapers that glistened like movie set stars. I looked at them to avoid looking at my mom’s face from behind the glass, refracted into shambles, as it pulled away.

I woke up the next morning having dreamt of Clara, feeling a horrible ache of loneliness and lust. I wanted to reach beside me and graze her peach-fuzz skin and to feel the painful, celibate contact between us. But I rubbed my eyes and soon my mind was filled with the fresh images and cold discomfort of a new room. Still the sterile smell, perhaps the lingering scent of kin. All the old things were there: posters, crucifix, my sculptures from the years. In that hot August morning they looked like reproductions. I pulled my room’s white paper shade down, calmed my thoughts of Clara (her acne-scarred temple, her long, striated nails), and slept for another dreamless 2 hours.

When I woke for a second time it was the afternoon. I swung my legs to the side and slid my socks on the polished ground. A small panic came at me from my haze. I looked about. Nothing to do. I figured I’d take a walk around the city.

I went downtown. Gum-dotted sidewalks under my footfall, I stepped slowly and looked around and was pushed past every now and again with a look of utter contempt, and when I was, the panic went away and I felt too wonderful for any human heart to bear. Like all the jostled of old. Sometimes they pushed past without any acknowledgement that someone had been touched, no recognition of existence, and this, too, had a quality of peace to it.

Everybody was there. Kids with skateboards and scooters, holding their necks and swinging them. Uptown girls in white buttoned dresses, and the other ones, too, who giggled and flopped around in grommeted jeans, waited in lines for tacos, took quick puffs from cigarettes. A priest with only a ring of deep red hair left to call his own, and businessmen, businessmen, businessmen. A madman screaming and spitting. Lots of mothers, because I guess those are everywhere. Fathers, but fewer.

Midtown: I zig-zagged the streets. It was blare and glare and practically the most exciting thing I’d ever seen, even though while seeing it I registered an almost instinctual disgust for this mass of image. Though, this wasn't strong enough to move my feet once they planted themselves on the corner of 42nd and 7th Ave. People kept coming up to me. People in costumes, people with seduction in mind. A normal looking woman took my picture, a polaroid, then told me it was $5. I didn’t understand I had a choice. I took my brown leather wallet from my pocket and searched for a five, which I produced and swapped for the thing I didn’t even really want. I slid the undeveloped picture into the larger fold where it sat between an old movie stub and my cash. I looked up at it all. News headlines. Stinking derelicts. They wore rags, grey, beige, once-white, all the fabric was thermal, waffle, scuba, canvas, marvels of texture, wintry and dense, gone to pieces. Everyone took pictures; it was all pictures.

I’d walked for quite some time, stepping all the way to Riverside and then crossing through the central streets and all the way to the other side, over and over, even through the park, breaking it and breaking it with my path. Riches, one-man slums, cool kids, loud speakers and angry faces shoved far out from the chin. I stopped for a drink in Chelsea, then for another on the water somewhere that the skyline cut the almost-dark sky. Or maybe that was Chelsea? Or maybe I was lost? I recognized The Village, at last, by its iron gates. Poetry and gates: that’s what I knew of The Village. My stomach grumbled. Shuffling men on drugs caught my eye on every side of the avenues.

And then it was dark, and so light came only from below: A little bar tucked beneath the street with a deep red sign called me home.

I stepped down under and into it and smelled the ale-soak on the wood and fancied a gaze at the grommets on the bar stools (girls in grommets, no girls here) and took a seat. It wasn’t terribly busy, mostly older men. I ordered a whiskey sour and while I sat there I really thought I was in New York, loving New York, resident, citizen, subject. I had the first drink and loved it so much that I had another, and as my tongue rasped the egg-foam stubble off my upper lip, I shuddered with delight. I started talking to an aged man around the corner, tucked in the nook between window and countertop, about the city. I didn’t stop to ask myself why he was drinking alone or if he was happy to. Rich was his name. His hair was once black. His clothes were once nice, or at least, once they were not bad. He spoke dreamily of schooners and of Montauk, and the kinds of people who used to live in New York, of longshoremen in Brooklyn, and how awful clean it’s gotten. Awful clean. I really couldn’t believe that. I told him, “Rich, that sure is rich.” My twang, fugitive and standoffish, found its way to my voice.

The stench of Rich’s touch, his old man’s furtive tongue, was still on me when I woke up in Washington Square Park, the sun beginning to rise. My wallet was gone, my undeveloped polaroid nowhere to be found. I hunted my pockets for change, thinking to call home, but even after securing a few quarters and dimes, I didn’t call, I didn’t reach back.

I suppose I knew, that possessionless morning, that my old life was lost to me. I have lived in New York ever since, and when I pass overturned garbage cans or browse photo galleries across the city, I long to stumble upon that picture. It appears to me in quarters and fifths, falsely, in abstract paintings and trashcan newspapers. I hope to see it tonight, even, speared on the end of a worker’s garbage pole in Central Park. But I know I wouldn’t recognize it if I saw it. I am certain that only my mother could have managed that.

Madison Patterson is an emerging fiction writer based in New York City. She is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing at Columbia University.