Free In the Drink by Kate Christensen

the factory lights got so bright they made haloes on our eyelashes, my mother appeared in the back doorway, stocky and imperious, yodeling “Hoo-oo!” out into the darkness, a sound that made Lauren laugh and me cringe inwardly with embarrassed irritation at my odd, foreign-born,hopelessly uncool, self-righteously backward mother. It was time to go in for dinner.
    Through the years, my mother hired a succession of women to cook and clean for us. I didn’t know any of them well, since they came during the day while I was at school. By the time I came home they were gone, and our laundry was clean and folded, the breakfast dishes were washed, our beds were made, the floors were swept. They also left pots of stew or chili on the stove, pans of enchiladas in the oven. The food they made was oddly repellent to me; a stranger’s hands had cubed the meat, chopped the onions, wrapped the tortillas. My mother loved this food and ate it with tremendous enjoyment. It annoyed her that I wouldn’t eat it: “Stop being so picky-picky,” she commanded. “If you don’t eat it you’ll have to starve, there isn’t anything else.”
    I gagged it down in spiteful silence, not that she noticed: she was too involved in her rehashes of squabbles with a few of her more contentious colleagues, in this case Mark Wickers and Susan Fletcher: “They asked permission to teach together a verkshop on the techniques of Skinner. Too bad for them, because Fletcher is not coming beck next year and Vickers is dem lucky he got that contract. I cannot bear these idiot people! They drife me crazy vith their stupid ideas!” She glared at me as if I might be in secret cahoots with them. I fled upstairs the moment I’d dried my hands on the dish towel.
    At eight-thirty, I went down in my pajamas to poke my head into her study to say good night. In books, mothers kissed their children, told them stories, sang them lullabies. I stood in the doorway, shy with dread, filled with hopeless longing, picking at a sliver of wood in the door frame, gazing at my mother. At the slightest hint of encouragement from her, I would have flung myself into her arms, buried my face in her neck and heldon to her so tightly she would have had to peel me off her, one limb at a time, to rid herself of me.
    After a moment, she looked up from her book, placing a finger on the page to mark her place. “You brushed your teeth?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Face clean? You finished your homework?”
    “Just about,” I lied.
    “All right then, up with you. Sleep tight, liebchen.”
    I waited just a moment. No dice. “Good night, Ma,” I said then, and went upstairs.
    After breakfast, a hurried bowl of cold cereal I forced down my throat to keep my mother from getting out the rectal thermometer, I waited as usual in front of Lauren’s house until she came out. We walked the eight or nine blocks to school together. She was nice enough to me until we set foot on the playground, but then a formidable junta of girls coalesced around her, popular girls, secretive and snide, and she forgot all about me, as well she should have, since my political value to her was nil. I wandered off to the shady breezeway, where I sat until the bell rang, leaning against the cool cinder-block wall with a book propped against my knees.
    The Saturday morning after my fourteenth birthday, which is to say, when I had reached what my mother considered to be the age of “sexual maturity” (I’d had my period for over a year already but hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell her), she marched upstairs and knocked on my bedroom door, then strode into my room brandishing a thick white orthopedic-looking garment she’d bought especially for me. It bore so little resemblance to the lacy pink castoffs Lauren had been handing down to me for two or three years that I might not have figured out what it was if my mother hadn’t demonstrated its purpose for me. Her means of doing so was typically blunt: “Claudia,”