Tiny Town Harps
After we moved to Tiny Town, Mom started selling huge Egyptian harps that were larger than the tiny houses. Our neighbor, a tiny version of Barbara Eden in “I Dream of Jeanie”, said, “the sound is lovely; it reminds me of the pyramids over the Nile, but how can I possibly fit this in my home?” “No problem,” Mom said, just open up the roof.” The neighbor shimmied her harem pants around in the bright afternoon sun. Though I didn’t know how to play, I strummed the harp repeatedly with my thumb and index finger, hoping to keep her dancing. Our houses were so close together that we could feel each other breathing at night. I couldn’t sleep, imagining the incense of her breath. Mom seemed annoyed with me for interrupting her sales schpiel earlier, and clunked around in our doll-sized bathroom. At the same time, our neighbor was taking a bath and splashing so much water on our windows that it seemed as though it were raining. “Tiny Town needs the rain,” I said to mom, imagining Jeanie arising from the mist of her bath. “I can’t figure out what went wrong,” Mom said, her face sad and old. She had not sold even one harp, and her magical harps stood on the roof as though waiting for someone to rescue them from silence.
Steeping the Leaves
“Good tea is easy to make properly if you follow these directions,” Mom said. Mom’s tea was special, hallucinogenic, and I’m not sure what directions she was actually following. She no longer tried to make dinners for us at home. “Americans eat way too much,” she would say. Instead, we sat in the dark kitchen, sipping her strange, exotic brews. And after a while, there would be a startling display of color like a flamingo spreading its feathers. Mom told me that if I wanted to have a girlfriend, I would need to learn exactly how to court the leaves. So I watched her and practiced, and then I served the tea to one of my dates, who sank down in her chair and stared at the ceiling as though she had been knocked over the head with a skillet. When I told mom about it, she said that I had either let the tea leaves steep too long or used the wrong tea leaves. Mom always had a reason for romantic failures. But she really couldn’t explain why with all her coaching and my tea-making skills, at 28, I was still a virgin “Young women just don’t appreciate how much hard work all of this takes,” she said. So I spent another decade sipping my own tea and listening to my mother talk about the nuances of tea-making even as I grew thinner and less solid, like so many tea leaves floating in a puddle.
Being Seen
“See you soon,” she said. Since he moved out of his mother’s home, he worried that she now saw him everywhere. Some days, he worried so much that he stayed in his dusty little apartment and kept the windows and shades closed. He googled, “does worrying about being seen by your mother make you ill?” But Google had no answer for him, even though Web MD popped up on the screen and an ad for adderall came up. It offered him no solution for why he was lying on the floor with the windows and shades closed. This is silly, he thought, I’m twenty three years old, and turned on the lights and put on his light blue balaclava to go outside. When he opened the door, she was standing there staring at him and smiling. “Mom, what are you doing in those glasses,” he said. “They’re French,” she answered. “But your vision is perfect,” he said. She shook her head. Gray strands fell out, and she brushed them off her shoulder. “These are magic glasses. With them, I can see you everywhere.”
