Free Shades of Eva by Tim Skinner Page A

but kept the
cigarette. For once, she blew her smoke toward the window.
    “When was your mother committed,
Mitchell?”
    “First time or second?”
    “First.”
    “I’m not sure. All I knew was that she said
she was a girl when it happened. She’d been having what she called
crying jags, and reduced the reasons for that committal to not
being able to stop crying. She—”
    Amelia blew a long, punitive stream of smoke
in my direction and interrupted me. “She was fourteen-years and
two-months old! The year was 1950! Do you know how long she was
there?”
    “Not really,” I said. “I really don’t think
she knew, either, tell you the truth.”
    Amelia just sat there staring at me, waiting
in vain for me to regurgitate facts I was never privy to. She took
in another draw of smoke. I braced myself for more fallout.
    “Seven years, two months, and twenty days!”
Amelia’s words lingered in the air with the smoke she exhaled. “She
graduated highest in her class from all the drugs they pumped her
with, but you lay there smiling like none of this matters to
you!”
    I was smiling, but not because these facts
didn’t matter. I was trying to save face. I should have known the
answers to those questions. I should have been told, by family or
by friends. I should have looked into things better, but I hadn’t.
Instead of apologizing, all I could think to say was, “Mom was
sick! It’s what happens, isn’t it, in asylums for the insane?”
    Amelia took my defensiveness as more apathy,
more excuses for my self-induced amnesia. “Is that what your daddy
told you?” Amelia barked. “That she was sick? Is that what you’re
telling me? That you blame your father for not knowing the answers
to those questions?”
    I was staring at Amelia like she’d just
flicked my ear. There was a school boy’s rage in my eyes and I’m
sure Amelia could see it.
    I did blame Dad. I blamed everybody but
myself for my ignorance, and I had never thought about that. I had
a role in remembering, in learning about Mom, and it was a role I
had failed to exercise. My school boy indignation subsequently
turned to disappointment, and then to shame, and I hung my head in
according phases. I could only laugh at myself, however, trying to
sort through that mixed bag of emotions. It was the same old thing
day in, day out: the same old mixed bag of affect and guilt that
never seemed to let up.
    Mentioning Dad in the context of Mom’s
illness made me remember another poem, this one a poem that Dad
concocted for Mom. It wasn’t written down, and it wasn’t
necessarily given to her. It was just a rhyme, really, something
Dad used to mumble to his self, or to me, typically when Mom was
having one of her crying jags.
    “Dad used to call my mother triple-D,” I
told Amelia, “but the nickname had nothing to do with the size of
her tits.”
    “Have some respect!”
    “He said she was triple-D, and he turned her
nickname into a poem. You want to hear it?”
    Amelia didn’t answer, so I took her silence
as a yes, and echoed that maniacal chant from so many years ago
whispered so many times before under my father’s breath to me:
 
    Defiant as a child,
    Deluded as a wife!
    Demented from birth to the end of her
life!
    “It was the only poem he ever came up with
as far as I know,” I said. “Get it? Triple-D?
Deluded…demented…defiant?”
    “Yeah, that sounds like Brad,” Amelia
rejoined. “He was an asshole when he was young, too!”
    “Oh, you know something about my dad’s
youth, do you?”
    “Something,” Amelia said, taking in more
smoke.
    “Then you know he was a drunk.”
    “Also like you!” Again she blew smoke at me.
She had me there.
    “So you didn’t just break into his place—or
rent it for a night? You actually talked to my old man?”
    “We talked.”
    “And what about Ully? You talk to my uncle
Ully, too?”
    “Someone did.”
    “One of your contacts?” Amelia ignored the
question like she’d ignored me earlier