Thirteen

“That’s gonna be a hard maybe for me, Paige.”

“Uh uh. Nope. Not gonna fly, babe.” Paige gave Alison a skeptical but familiar look. “We’re getting you out of your comfort zone.”

Alison let out an overblown sigh, half joking, half deadly. “A party?”

“A gathering. It’s nothing. Jenny and Jon are just off campus. They’re setting up a projector in their backyard and a few people are going to come over and watch Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.” Alison signaled to speak, but Paige cut her off. “You can drink bubble water with a little lime in it. Nobody cares what you drink. And I’ll sweeten the pot with chicken tendies if you can’t bring yourself to eat grown up food.”

Alison did an encore performance of her sigh, for the fans. “Paige! Don’t bring chicken tendies into this. Honey mustard?”

“It can be arranged. I know a guy.”

Alison huffed again, while the huffing was good. “It actually sounds really nice. I want to go, but my internal clock on visiting mom is past due. I haven’t even heard from her in two weeks. I’m worried about her.”

“You can’t call?”

“No, I need to drop in. If she’s hoarding again, I need to catch her in the act.”

“That’s very thoughtful, Aly. I think. I’m getting this vibe that you’re your mom’s mom on some levels.”

Alison reflected. “They grow up so fast, Paige.”

“Okay, so you’ll go over, share a grinder from Luke’s, and organize her National Geographics from nineteen eighty-eight.”

“Smithsonian, but yes. I’m going to organize them right into the trash.”

Paige giggled. “Okay, but what if they spark joy?”

“Honestly, it’s the candles that drive me crazy. She’ll have, like, a cilantro lime candle and a lavender mint candle happening at the same time and I can’t.”

Paige reeled at the olfactory imagery and moved on. “So, you ditch mom’s collectable Burger King Twilight cups, and swing by the party for the second act.”

“She doesn’t even like Twilight. I don’t know why she has so many of those god forsaken cups. But, yes. Fine. And you said gathering.”

“Gathering. It’ll be small, I pinky promise.”

“I’ll swing by the gathering at nine and I’m leaving at ten forty-five.”

“I accept your terms,” Paige conceded. “You’ll be glad you took the opportunity to unwind.”

Alison laughed. “I never said I’d unwind. I’m gonna be so uptight!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, super uptight. And like, obnoxiously paranoid.”

“I love that!” Paige was bordering on a snort classic but settled on a diet snort as she encouraged Alison’s nightmare party persona.

“Yeah, you’re going to be so glad you brought me. I’m gonna chew my potato chips at three hundred beats per minute and I’m gonna bring a loose bottle of hot sauce as a gift. I’ll just present it to the hosts like a bottle of wine.”

That pushed Paige into the true snort zone. “Jesus, Aly. You know, you’re actually very socially savvy.”

“Tell that to my anxiety.”

“I know, I know. That’s the trick, isn’t it?”

***

Alison was feeling cautiously optimistic on the way to mom’s, but a twinge of something-ain’t-right ran up her spine as she crossed the walkway and approached the house. There wasn’t even much of a difference. Just a thin layer of dust on the landing that shouldn’t be there. She let the nervous shiver run its course and stopped with her hand on the doorknob for a too-long moment, knowing full well that she couldn’t take it back once she opened it.

Then came the yipping. Two small, vaguely Yorkie-looking fur-demons completely lost their minds when they heard Alison’s weight shift at the door. They scratched and yawped endlessly– not even stopping to check for ID when Aly opened the door. The transition to humping was seamless: one on each foot. She was extraordinarily distracted from the mission at hand. You know. Because of the humping. And the smell kind of crept up on her. The smell and the humping dogs and the disarray. Where in tarnation did she get the idea to add dogs into the mix?

The living room had exploded with clutter. Some of it disguised as order due to the neat stacks of DVDs, papers, and knick-knacks. But the uselessness of the items in question gave it away. Hard to make order out of junk that no one needs. There was an area for Amazon boxes that she wasn’t ready to throw out. Three dog beds lined the throughway to the kitchenette. Perhaps one was the wrong size? Or there was a dog she hadn’t found yet. Nothing would surprise her at this point. Except, actually, one thing did surprise her. Irene Ashe herself, stirring on the couch after an apparent nap.

The movement was really jarring to Alison because mum had been quite camouflaged by the chaos of the room. She had been napping on the couch, covered by two too-small blankets, her hand gently mothering a Big Gulp.

“Oh, honey! Hi,” croaked mum through the end-haze of her midday repose. “I wish I had known you were coming. I’d have tidied up a bit.”

Alison cried.

“Honey,” Irene repeated, dropping her blankets as she deftly avoided the carefully stacked take-out boxes. She embraced her daughter, who couldn’t move just yet, but allowed the comfort given.

Alison cried into her mother’s loving shoulder as two long-forgotten ancestors of the mighty Canis lupus went to town on her ankles.

Eventually, she just started cleaning. Mom knew the drill. If they just kept cleaning, they wouldn’t have to talk about it. Alison took advantage of the silence by taking an armful of boxes straight down to the trash. She did have to ask about the dogs, though.

“Went with boys, then?”

“They’re brothers,” mom replied, perking up at the opportunity to talk about her new fur babies. “Met them both at the Humane Society. Well, the Humane Society Instagram. I couldn’t separate brothers, could I?”

Alison failed to understand why not adopting them would somehow constitute separating them, but she let it go.

Irene continued “Aren’t they sweet? Danny and Ascot.”

“Ascot?” Aly questioned.

“Yeah, he keeps getting his you-know-what caught in the dog door.”

This was a very Irene Ashe joke, and like all Irene Ashe jokes, it got her, lightening the mood considerably. They laughed together and resumed packing in silence, sans the extremely necessary Tokyo Police Club pumping its way through Alison’s earbuds. The electrified brit pop channeled the nu punk simplicity perfectly, surely via an analog pedal and some extra tweedy amplifiers.

She needed the good vibes of the upbeat, catchy record if she was going to properly grin and bear the awkwardness of a mother-daughter cleanup sesh with strong “who’s mothering who?” energy.

‘Cause I’m still amazed you made it out alive
After what you did
Born on your feet, running
Forest fires underneath your bed

But it’s good to be back
Good to be back
Good to be back

It was good to be back. However, something was itching her brain and she couldn’t shake it. Something was sort of floating around in there that didn’t add up. She had definitely seen mom slip into hoarding before. Nothing new there. Not entirely surprised that she got herself some company, though the quantity of the beasts was somewhat alarming. Wait. That. Something about the dogs. Danny. And. Ascot.

“Mom, how do you have a dog door?! You’re on the second floor of an apartment complex.”

Irene looked around like someone else was going to answer. “Well,” she started, buying herself some time to consider her wording for the tricky part. “I made a little yard out of the balcony.” She gulped, big. “I got astro-turf.”

Alison was on the move. This was beyond irresponsible.

“Mum, this is beyond irresponsible!”

A dog door was, in fact, fitted into the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. There was, in fact, a strip of astro-turf laid out, parallel to the black iron railing that confined the small space. It was littered with waste, solid and otherwise. The distinct smells of old and new urine danced together above the explosive olfactory sensation of ripe solid excrement. Alison downed the stairs and made a u-turn around a familiar, black banister towards the covered parking lot where she could catch a glimpse of the underside of mom’s balcony, which also served as the upper face of the patio of the couple living below. Sure enough, a wet stain was beginning to darken through the concrete.

Irene followed after her to find her daughter gesturing to the discolored ceiling of the neighbor’s patio. “You see that, mom? It’s not just you that this stuff affects!”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. I’ve just been so tired since–” An alarm went off on Irene’s phone upstairs. She trailed off after it.

After the trek, she silenced the alarm and started preparing her insulin shot. Instinctively, Alison moved toward the supplies to help, but they were different now. Several of the disposable syringes had already had their tops twisted off, and were stopped by small sections of wine corks. Several other, larger, reusable syringes contained various amounts of the clear liquid. Irene injected herself with two of them, one a quarter-full, another half-full.

“You’re rationing insulin?!”

“Insurance doesn’t cover the whole dose anymore. It’s fine. I’m at three quarters. And I do the full dose every other time.”

“Mom! You cannot– absolutely cannot– ration insulin! Please, don’t argue with me on this one!”

Irene sighed as Alison continued. “You can have the dogs. You’re going to take them on five minute walks twice a day and I’m going to scrub the bejesus out of that ‘yard’ after we dismantle it. But you can keep the dogs, and I’ll even babysit them sometimes when things get hard. You can have your magazines from three decades ago, and your insane candles, and you can have as many Big Gulps of half Diet Dr Pepper and half iced tea as you want. But you are not going to die to save thirty eight dollars a month on insulin. Okay?!”

Irene looked more tired than ever. “Okay. I’ll call Dr. French on Monday morning. Maybe there’s a local pharmacy or another plan or something.”

“I’ll call her, too, and follow up. Take that other quarter-dose.”

“Okay.”

***

Alison had developed a habit of silencing her phone when she visited mom. Between that and the shock of the new developments, she managed to miss 16 texts and four phone calls from Paige. The party was over. Paige wasn’t happy about being stood up.

The last text read “The game is cool and all, but sometimes I just want a friend, you know?”

Alison breathed in sharply. She did know.

It had been about three minutes of idling in the carport before she realized she was home. She cut the engine, but she wasn’t ready to move yet. A yellow light from the neighbor’s porch gave her an eerie feeling, compounding the uneasiness of the day’s new weight. The crumbling, baby blue paint on the siding became a soft sunburst of tawny and ember. She clicked off the headlights and let her eyes adjust again. Now she could detect the faint blink of the car’s red quartz digital clock reminding her that it was always midnight.

“Guess I’ll keep fighting,” she blurted out without connecting the dots as to where that thought came from. Where did that come from? She gave it some air. It seemed like everything was some kind of fighting for Aly. She was fighting to keep her scholarship. Fighting to make rent. Fighting twice as hard as the country club kids for the same A minus that they got on pedigree. Theatre was fighting because the only thing she could excel at was stage combat. The game was fighting because she had to fight to be noticed, fight to be trusted, and then sometimes actually physically fight– usually against someone who could just glide through on natural strength alone.

Not Aly, though. Nope. Every win was tempered with fire. It was starting to get very tiring watching everyone around her start on third base and stroll to the plate, half the time on her own RBI. After all, she was working for below minimum wage so that someone else could profit off a product that was addictive on its own. “Don’t worry,” her supervisor told her. “You’re so pretty, the tips will more than make up for it.” Even at the bar, she was fighting her own self-interest by glaring at customers like a piranha at a fat thigh.

When you’re poor, everything is fighting. Every intersection is against something meant to drain just a little more life out of you. Did you linger a little too long as you changed lanes? In a 2002 Camry, yes, you did. Don’t be late with that fine, now, or you’ll get your license revoked. That’s okay, just take a day off work and school and go to the courthouse to get things cleared up. Just, don’t drive there, obviously. Here’s a fun game. Would you rather. Would you rather have the energy to make a healthy dinner, or have the money to pay for the ingredients? Would you rather have the water shut off, or the gas? Would you rather go to work sick, or use the fourth of your five yearly sick days before your pay starts getting docked? Meanwhile, Casey doesn’t even get sick because he can afford to shop at Whole Foods and the cops never pull over new Land Rovers.

Alison sighed. “Okay, so my metaphor kind of ran out of gas there at the end.” She removed a long hair clip, holding it to her face as a microphone as her sloppy bun fell to her shoulders. She smiled over the glasses she wasn’t wearing to an audience that wasn’t really there. “Just like my poor Camry.” The audience roared. She shot a glance over to Jimmy Fallon, who was pounding his desk and fanning himself with his cue cards. He gestured to her to keep going.

“She’s still got it, folks,” he said, applause and laughter dimming as several whistles permeated.

“I’ll be here all week, folks.” She gave the audience a cute little smirk as they waited. “My eviction notice doesn’t kick in ‘till Thursday.”

Jimmy wiped joyous tears from his eyes. “Alison Ashe, everyone. You can check out her fight scenes in Hamlet, March 1. We’ve got to go to break. Please listen to a few words from our sponsor, Nachos.”

Alison was back in the car with the ominous yellow light and the blinking 12:00 and the existential dread. Maybe it was okay that she was tempered by fire. Maybe it was some kind of weird, twisted privilege if she looked at it the right way. For now, she needed to rest. And maybe some nachos.