Free Breaker by Richard Thomas Page A

black cut-glass and bronze creation with a purple pleated shade, magenta crystals running around the frilly edge. I always thought it looked like it belonged in a whorehouse. My mother said it was from France.
    The room remains dark and muted, the heavy velvet drapes blocking out most of the light, a dark red that pours down the wall and onto the floor. The wallpaper that wraps around the inside of the room makes my head spin—a gold, olive, and black pattern of fleur-de-lis, curved lines, upside-down pineapples, and ornate scrollwork that makes me feel as if royalty has just stepped out of the room. Two brown leather club chairs sit to one side, a glass table between them, holding nothing but a round ashtray made of vintage amber glass, a pile of long, thin cigarettes in the middle, nearly overflowing, her burnt-sienna lips left on the filter of them all. The brass bed is dull and faded, with scrollwork running up and down the shafts, ending in sinewy claw feet, talons grasping chipped spheres. And on the far wall is a painting I try to avoid looking at, a reproduction, but disturbing nonetheless. It is an oil painting, one that always looked crude and rudimentary to me, and yet I can never take my eyes off of it. It is by Francisco Goya, and it is titled
Saturn Devouring His Son
. What she saw in this painting, why she hung it in her bedroom—it told me everything and nothing about her, it defined her, and let me know that I really didn’t know my mother at all. It is horrible, the open mouth of Saturn, the head of his child gone, torn off, one arm inside his gaping maw, his eyes wide open, as if in horror, or shock, or under a spell.
    My stomach clenches, and I want to retreat. But I don’t. I can’t. Because I still don’t know to this day what happened, what’s truth and what is in my imagination.
    She hands me her cigarette to hold, but I miss it, the hot cherry pushing into my arm, me screaming and pulling back, her voice echoing into the room as it falls to the floor below me.
Careful, honey, you okay?
Up and down my right arm are a dozen little circles, pink where the flesh should be white.
    Washing my hands again and again, the water hot at first, then hotter, telling her it was too much, chastised for whatever I touched or handled—my penis, the garbage can, her own cigarettes.
Oh it’s not that hot, see?
And she holds her hands under the water and nothing…she doesn’t move, her skin pale, never turning pink like mine, not a flinch or a moment’s hesitation.
    At one point she was convinced I had a tapeworm, as I experienced a rapid loss in weight, the mixture of up-and-down constipation and then diarrhea, eating and eating and never getting full. I’m sure it had nothing to do with my father sitting at the end of my bed. Waking up in the middle of the night, I saw him sitting there, not moving. To get rid of the tapeworm she swore I had—warning me of the creature swirling around in my gut, until I could feel it writhing—she’d give me an old family remedy of a spoonful of castor oil and a few drops of turpentine. I’m lucky she didn’t kill me. It made me vomit every time. I could never keep it down. Many years later I ran across the home remedy in an old
Farmer’s Almanac
—so nothing about that experience is clear.
    Was I clumsy, distracted, dirty, and in need of attention?
    Maybe.
    Was she trying to kill me?
    I’m not sure.
    I push the door open a bit farther and step into the room, the perfume and gin filling most of the space, but a hint of something rotten underneath it all, sour and sickly sweet. I don’t talk to her, not really. It’s not like that. I don’t hear her voice, not in here anyway. Out there, when I’m failing, her scolding echoes into the void. But not in here, no, in here I sit at the edge of her bed, and tell her I’m sorry. I tell her that I still don’t know anything—what she meant, what she did, if she even loved me.
    When I ask questions, I don’t expect