Like many who quit drinking, my mother became a proselytizer for sobriety.
The other half was the memories of the end. The time Teddy had threatened to burn the only copy of my novel.
He struggles to come up with actions that give him a sense of joy or purpose when she is not around.
He says he feels like all his problems would be solved if he stopped going to that bar.
Things that make sense: plants, deer, video games, sushi, beer.
He stole my Tupperware, the largest one in a glass Pyrex set.
I was telling stories. I was enjoying music. I was proselytizing. I was observing.
His white face is red. Mom taught me that people turn red like tomatoes when they’re drunk. I look around and see pink and red faces all around me.
I am torn with longing for many unnameable things.
At night, we lay on unmoored mattresses, pressing hands over our eyes to block out spears of light from the street. We cursed our naked windows.
What the Mother wanted to show us might be different from what we wanted to see.
“My grandma drinks that,” the kid ahead of me at Duane Reade snarks at my six-pack of Ensure bottles.
She feels bad for being taken aback before; she really is a very nice doctor.
The attic room in the student town of Ordrecht went for 365, 52 euros monthly, not including the safety-deposit, called borg in Dutch.
“Lucky boy, just too late. Because we have crisis in Holland,
In the mornings, the woman sees her husband off to work in her night dress, sometimes with curlers in her hair. After he leaves, she always lights a cigarette and stands with the glass-paned storm door cracked open. I can tell the inside of their house smells like knock-off Estée Lauder and menthol smoke.
