Khiara Ortiz The church basement was exactly as I had imagined it—a low ceiling and air that felt like the brown of an aging banana. It was another holy space forced into humility by a lack of funds which meant God’s presence was guaranteed. In the center area, folding metal chairs were arranged in a semicircle, their seats sagging from years of cradling robust suburban butts. A plastic table set against one wall offered refreshments to the attendees—some baby carrots and celery sticks turning grey because no one had ever wanted them, stale oatmeal cookies, a jug of water, and a coffee urn that was probably on its third or fourth life. The aroma of roasted beans and the gentle murmuring of people as they came in and greeted each other had a sedative effect I happily welcomed. Some of them gave me the type of careful smile reserved for strangers. The pace of their small talk picked up here and there but could not dispel the palpable grief that was milling about the room. ⚬⚬⚬ I hadn’t been very close to my grandmother, but she also hadn’t been very close to me. The most I had managed to do during her final months was picture myself asking her dozens of questions that would reveal her interiority to me. It’d be like pulling hundreds of colorful scarves out of her throat. After all the scarves had been released from the cavity of her body, we would both sit in complete exhilaration and satisfaction about finally knowing each other, really knowing each other, and by understanding her, I would understand myself. At her funeral, I focused on this expulsion of scarves to ignore my mother sitting next to me. The noise from her constant sniffling and shifting was making the ancient wooden pew moan, drowning out my aunt’s eulogy. I knew she couldn’t stand not being the one up there, but my aunt had insisted. Still, my mother kept herself busy, looking at me sideways in a very obvious way she probably thought was inconspicuous I knew what she was looking for. According to her, I was in need of a seismic emotional release. For months, I hadn’t shed a single tear and she found this deeply troubling. She believed that unexpressed grief was one of the leading causes of death in the country because of how it inevitably morphed into a terminal illness in the body. We all needed to constantly be releasing our negative emotions, whether that meant screaming or crying or ruining everything for everyone around you. My mother had always encouraged me to weep as frequently as I washed my hair. I’d grown up seeing her cry as often as she did the dishes. She would do it quietly, to herself, but her heaving shoulders would tell us she wanted comfort, which only my father was suited to give. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my mother. At some point during childhood, something overcame me, something porous with a spent absorption potential rendering me incapable of taking in or letting out. Watching a woman as tiny as my mother exist as a container for so much emotion made it seem okay to feel nothing at all. ⚬⚬⚬ The Sunday after my grandmother’s funeral, my mother cornered our priest, Father Tom. Despite the life path he had willingly chosen, he always looked to be on the verge of soiling himself if a parishioner approached him in want of fortitude or absolution. From the end of the aisle, I saw her hands flying in front of her face as she spoke to him, her thumb jutting out to the right at one point, then both of her hands turned into her chest to form a V, then clasped together in supplication. Father Tom’s eyes followed their every movement, which unfortunately made it seem like he was looking where he shouldn’t. At the end of my mother’s rant, he put his hand on her shoulder, which I realized was not to calm her down but to console her. She’d started crying. I sighed and walked out to wait for her by our car but before reaching it, I heard her exiting the church and watched as she moved toward me with the determination of a bowling ball. “Nora! Tuesday nights! There’s a grief support group!” Her eyes were still watery as she descended the entrance steps, screeching. A small flock of birds burst into flight from a nearby tree. Everyone in the parking lot heard her, looked at her, and did their best to avoid looking at me. My skin warmed instantly and turned a painful red. On the way home, she sped through the quiet suburban streets like a maniac, euphoric about the prospect of my attending this group. “You’ll start this week,” she said, rolling past a stop sign. “Father Tom said the sessions really help people heal. I might even join you.” Her black hair was shimmering like an oil spill and her eyes, nostrils, mouth were all expanding the way they did when she was on the up. My fingertips started tingling and I realized I was gripping the edges of my seat. There was no point in resisting her because there was no way I’d be anywhere but the support group that Tuesday night. Recent events had essentially made me a teenager again, minus the angst. My parents had welcomed me back home three months ago after my divorce from Joel. At dinner that night, she told my father about the grief group, speaking as quickly as if she were relaying a neighborhood rumor. “Is this to talk about Joel?” he asked, looking at me with raised eyebrows. He’d been trying to broach the whole divorce thing with me for weeks. Really, it was an extension of a conversation he’d been attempting to have with me for years, since we’d stopped pretending my mother’s behavior was normal. Across from me, she scoffed and then laughed and the trill of it ran like an electric current around the room. “Not Joel, honey!” she said, shaking her head. “To talk about my mother.” “Ah, yes.” He smiled at her and took her hand in his, something my father often did as an attempt to diffuse her intensity. I could tell there was more traveling between them than just good feeling because my mother looked back at him as if recognizing or remembering something. Despite my mother’s emotional forcefield, my parents were like trees in a forest, individual entities to the naked eye but connected by an underground system that was known only to them. It was something I’d always thought was a given between the people in any couple until I experienced firsthand how limited my private language had been with my own husband. “Sounds like it’ll be helpful,” he went on. “I hope so?” I said. I looked at my mother as I prepared to say the next thing as delicately as possible. “I’ll probably just go a few times.” “Nora,” she said, setting her fork down and folding her hands over each other on the table to show us she was anchoring herself. “You should give it a fair shot.” Her voice was steady but not without immense effort. “It’s okay to accept help from others and you might even like it more than you think.” I smiled and nodded my head. We all went back to scraping our silverware against our plates and I knew they were also thinking about the last time one of us was told we needed to get help. ⚬⚬⚬ The woman leading the grief support group was beautiful, which was completely disorienting. She introduced herself as Vicky, “Short for Veronica not Victoria.” I wanted to tell her this unnecessary explanation did nothing but engender a slight sense of mistrust. It made her seem greedy, not being able to accept the nickname Vera or Ronnie like every other Veronica on earth. Vicky looked around the room and made eye contact with each of us—the nine people, including me, who’d come here in order to grieve. Her cheap silver earrings tinkled every time she turned her head, lending her an otherworldly, supernatural quality that was absolutely necessary in the hell that was the church basement. Her long blonde hair probably required constant brushing and her face was a well-arranged collection of arcs that was hard to look at for too long. I could tell she knew how beautiful she was because she emphasized all of this with makeup and annoyingly good posture. The rest of us, hunched-over with our pedestrian sadness, had no choice but to succumb to her good looks and willingness to lead. I smiled at her, trying to expand my presence in the dim room. “If any of our new members would like to introduce themselves before we start, now is the time.” She looked at me and at a man sitting at one end of the semicircle, whose face looked heavy and sunken like a giant had pressed his thumb into it. The white T-shirt he was wearing had already acquired a few small coffee stains I couldn’t help noticing. “My name is Nora,” I said, cooperating. I looked at the man. “Emilio,” is all he offered. Vicky nodded after each of our brief introductions. “Let’s begin.” ⚬⚬⚬ Toward the end of my marriage, I developed an obsession with stain removal. I had a specific cabinet in our laundry room where I kept everything I needed: baking soda, salt, vinegar. When Joel cut himself shaving while wearing one of his starched white button-ups because he was running late to work and was too confident in his grooming abilities, I’d rip it off him before the blood could dry, lay it flat on the kitchen table, and start what he called my “eraser technique.” I’d scrub and scrub and scrub and watch the red slowly fade and I’d feel invincible. It’s sad to think of now, but I’d get the type of superhuman focus people probably get in life-or-death situations. I’d hand the shirt back to him within minutes and he’d always look at it a little scared, as if it were going to strangle him once he put it back on. The adrenaline would last me the rest of the day. I guess this was my way of showing Joel I loved him. I wasn’t an affectionate person but I was optimistic. When he started to pull away, it was quick, like a huge boulder I’d been holding on to suddenly let loose from the top of a hill. He was a good husband for trying to get a handle on me for as long as he did, so I didn’t blame him for finally realizing I was one big wall he’d never get his arms around. I didn’t blame him at all for leaving as easily as opening and closing a door. In the first few weeks after the conversation that ended things, I felt like an immovable object but I also felt a tremendous amount of relief. Once we’d already separated and I was staying with a friend but making trips back to our house to gather my things, I opened the laundry room cabinet and found a spray bottle with a yellow sticker that read REMOVES ALL STAINS! I took it with me and threw it into one of the black trash bins at my apartment complex, as if Joel couldn’t just buy a new one. ⚬⚬⚬ Vicky had us go in seat order but said Emilio and I could go at the end. Everyone took their time. All the inhales and exhales and sighs accumulated above us like our own private atmosphere. I could feel my pelvic bones sinking and pushing against the metal of my chair. There was an older woman who’d lost her sister to suicide. There was a widowed father of two boys. There was a teenager who’d lost her best friend to drunk driving. Everyone looked a bit dead themselves and I wondered if this was a consequence of reaching some threshold of emotional suffering. The way these people spoke about their deceased loved ones made me feel embarrassed to be there. There must be a word for what was going on with me. Cold? Cunt? I hadn’t even cried over Joel. A man wearing a tight gray shirt with dark sweat circles around the armpits started to speak about his late wife. He listed off every good thing she’d done, how she’d strived to be saintly. “I always gave her a hard time for being vegan. I just wanted to have a burger with her every now and then,” he said, his eyes starting to shine. “She loved Satan so much, it drove me insane.” He looked up and saw Vicky’s and everyone else’s faces. “Say-tohn. Say-tan?” “Seitan, yes, I remember. Thank you, Paul.” It was my turn. The air in the room tightened. I had a sudden stroke of empathy for all those press conference husbands, the guilty ones, who don’t know how to appropriately demonstrate grief for their murdered wives while on national television. I couldn’t locate a single pure sentiment for my grandmother and I was sure everyone in the room could tell. I looked at the invisible cloud of exhalations above us as if it had something to offer. Then I thought of my mother’s face the day I told her Joel had left, how tense and damp it’d been, as potent as a water balloon about to burst. I’d desperately scanned myself then, too, trying to summon just a drop of her endless emotional reservoir. Emilio broke the silence, snapping it like a rubber band. His voice came out as a croak and I could feel its effort as a vibration in my own throat. “I’m here about my mother,” he said. “She’s not dead but it feels like she is.” He looked at Vicky, waiting for her blessing to continue. “She hasn’t spoken to me or anyone in my family for a few years now and, yeah, we don’t know what to do.” He went on to describe his mother’s strange and gradual retreat into herself, like a time lapse video of a flower blooming but played in reverse. The woman who’d lost her sister was rocking side to side in her chair and when the metal started to creak she finally stood up and said, “I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I have to pee.” She sped-walked out of the room. Underneath the thin, unforgiving fabric of her capri pants, I could see her butt was clenched. “Let’s take a break,” said Vicky. Everyone headed for the coffee thermos once again. ⚬⚬⚬ There was a week during which my mother stopped speaking to us. It started the day I got my period and even now, years later, I still get a phantom sense that she’s mad at me the second I start bleeding. I got home from school that day with a wad of toilet paper in my underwear that hadn’t held up and a dark red stain that was threatening to spread on my jeans. I ran to my bathroom upstairs to sort out the tiny massacre and found my mother sitting there on the floor. She was sobbing. There were used tissues everywhere and her hair was partly matted over her face, partly sticking out at odd angles. Her eye makeup was smudged. It looked a little too dramatic. I had already spent years forming my own opinions about her sadness. “I didn’t know you’d be home so early,” she said, gathering the tissues. “It’s 3:40, Mom.” “What?” She continued straightening herself out and looked at the delicate gold watch on her wrist. “I didn’t realize.” She stood up, smoothing her linen skirt. “Where’s Dad?” I asked. “He’s…I don’t know. Downstairs? Did you look?” She saw herself in the mirror and jumped. With a bit of saliva on her thumb, she wiped at the black around her eyes. I suddenly felt very angry. How long had she been sitting on the bathroom floor? Why didn’t she know my father’s whereabouts? And what on earth was she crying about? For once, I wanted to be the one having an emotional meltdown. “I got my period at school today.” I said this biting my teeth down hard to make a sort of cage for my tongue. I was on the verge of saying something irrevocably cruel, which wouldn’t have been out of character at that moment considering I was a menstruating teenage girl. My mother looked at me with cloying affection that reminded me of the toy dolls on my bedroom shelves and the exaggerated disdain they had begun to provoke in me. She brought me close to her chest in a hug and her wet face soaked the shoulder of my blouse. I remembered how uncomfortably damp I was and that I needed to clean myself up. I started to pull away and we unlatched. “I need to use the bathroom and change out of my jeans,” I said. My mother’s expression, which was well on its way to tenderness, suddenly froze as she scanned the pair of denim she’d passed down to me after some cuffing, which had belonged to my grandmother before her, a sort of wearable heirloom. “I think I might have stained them,” I went on, trying to locate exactly where the blood had seeped through. Before I did, my mother’s hands were on them and on me, pushing my hips to angle this way and that with too much force. “I told you to be careful with them!” Her voice flooded my tiny bathroom and I looked away, letting my gaze land on the pink bath mat that still held her seated outline. “I trusted you, how could you be so careless!” I started counting each knot along the outer edge of the mat, waiting for my mother to tire herself out. I had spent years existing around her like a stone and didn’t yet understand that her sadness had anything to do with her happiness or her rage, that they were all extremes against which my father and I were completely helpless. Our house had its own weather system dictated by my mother and my father loved her too much to deny her this power. She told me to take the jeans off. As soon as they were draped across my hands like a peace offering, she snatched them away and finally left me alone. I changed into new underwear and sweatpants and headed out of the house to look for my father, who’d recently received clearance to work from home for a few weeks because things with my mother had been worse than usual. I knew he couldn’t have gone far since our car was still in the garage and when he went on walks, he usually just did loops around our block. After walking past a couple of houses, I saw him coming down our street looking more tired than ever so I ran to him. Without even having to ask him what had happened, he said, “I’m just trying to help her, Nora. I didn’t mean to make her upset but she needs a special program or some time in a hospital.” He stated this like what it was—confirmation of something we’d been living with for years. It was the first explicit acknowledgment from anyone in my family that all was not right. From where we stood, our house suddenly looked smaller, like a scaled-down version serving as the set for something else. The silence of our street felt too intentional, as if anyone who was home had hushed their breathing and pushed an ear against their front door to listen to our family’s turmoil. I told my father about the jeans and regretted it immediately after seeing how it made him look even more depleted. He gave me a hug and we both steeled ourselves as we walked back into our house. Inside, my mother was in the kitchen and looked brand new. Her hair was slicked back and wrapped in a low bun so tight it seemed to stretch her skin. She’d put fresh makeup on and there was barely any redness in her eyes. My jeans were hanging over one of the dining room chairs without a stain or wrinkle in sight. She acknowledged us with a glance and proceeded to loudly open and close cabinet doors, the refrigerator, and drawers as she started to prepare dinner. It was the only noise in the house for the rest of the night. We ate our dinner quietly and for several days, she didn’t say a word. ⚬⚬⚬ The metal chairs waiting for us after the break proved to be the only religious aspect of the grief group in that they truly made us suffer. Every few minutes, someone in the room shifted their weight, crossed or uncrossed their legs, anything to support blood flow to the ass. I couldn’t take my eyes off Emilio as he continued speaking about his mother, about her vibrancy and how its sudden loss had made this current period of silence so acutely stark. He had known her and lost her to herself. The wrinkles on his forehead and around his mouth moved with every word, underlining the emotion pouring forth. Then, suddenly, his face was wet and I felt something like envy. When he had finished, Vicky looked at me. “Nora? Would you like to share why you’re here with the group?” I looked at my hands folded in my lap. I pictured the scarves flying out of my grandmother’s throat and thought of what it might be like for someone to pull them out of mine. “Yes,” I said. “I’m also here about my mother.” Khiara Ortiz is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Eaten Magazine and The New Yorker, where she works on the editorial staff.
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