A Mother’s Love
Alice’s mother, Leila, leans in close to her daughter and plucks a stray hair from in between her eyebrows, causing Alice to flinch slightly. She studies Alice’s pale face and finds a few more imperfections to pluck away.
“There,” she says when she’s finished. “Much better.”
Alice lets out a deep sigh as her mother trades out her pair of tweezers for a hairbrush and begins gently brushing out Alice’s glossy golden hair.
This is Leila’s favorite part of the nightly routine that she has with her daughter. She loves Alice’s hair, loves the honey blonde color, one of the few things passed down to her from her father. She’d inherited her mother’s dainty nose, almond-shaped hazel eyes, but her hair was one hundred percent her father’s.
“I can do this myself, you know,” Alice tells her.
“I know,” her mother replies. “But I don’t mind doing it for you. Besides, whenever you brush out your hair, you do it too quick, too hard, and you give yourself split ends. You don’t take your time with it like I do.”
She continues brushing, a small content smile resting on her lips, until Alice’s hair is silky and tangle-free. She runs a hand through her daughter’s hair, letting it waterfall down her nightgown-clad back.
It’s been like this for all of Alice’s life—just her and her mother. She has no siblings and never got the chance to meet her father. He died before Alice was born.
Alice’s mother doesn’t like to talk about her father. She doesn’t like to talk about anything that reminds her of that awful night when that masked man broke into her house and took her husband away from her. She doesn’t like to remember how dark the man’s eyes were—black almost—as they looked at her through those two tiny slits, lying there in bed, trembling hands clasped over her pregnant belly. She knew that if she hadn’t been pregnant, he would have killed her too. She could sense it in the way he stood there, hesitating, before finally turning and walking away, stepping over her husband’s crumpled, bleeding body, laying in the doorway to their bedroom. In a way, Alice had saved her life.
She could hardly believe it when Alice was finally born two months later. A beautiful, healthy baby girl. So soft and pure. She knew she had to keep Alice safe the way that Alice had done for her.
Alice watches as her mother puts the brush and the tweezers back in their designated spots on her vanity.
“Hey, mom,” she says.
“Yes, dear?” Leila replies.
Alice breathes in deeply, her heart fluttering anxiously in her chest, before she begins. “Julie, from school, is having a couple girls sleep over at her house Friday night and she invited me to come.”
The sentence comes out in one single breath. Alice watches as her mother’s back tenses up. For a moment, she says nothing.
“Mom?” Alice says.
Her mother turns around now to face her, an unreadable expression on her face. “Sweetheart, you know how I feel about you spending the night out.”
What little hope Alice had built up drains immediately and is replaced by the sinking feeling she’s become so familiar with. This isn’t the first time Alice’s mother has turned her down. There have been birthday parties, trips to the mall, other sleepovers, and even school field trips that Leila refused to let Alice attend.
It only got harder as she grew older. Every time Alice would go to school on Monday morning and hear all the girls in her classes talking about what they did over the weekend, envy would prickle under skin, constricting her throat and tightening around her chest. All the girls at school got to go to the mall on their own or go see movies on their own. Meanwhile, Alice’s mother didn’t even allow her to have access to cable or the internet. “Too many ugly things out there,” Leila had said when Alice asked why she kept these things from her.
“But mom,” she pleads. “I’m sixteen. Everyone else gets to spend the night out. Why can’t I?”
“Just because other people do things doesn’t mean that you should too,” Leila remarks evenly. “I don’t even know this Julie or her parents. How can I possibly allow you to spend the night in the home of people I’ve never met? What kind of parent would I be then?”
She moves away from the vanity to pick up the cardigan Alice had thrown on her bed. As she moves to the closet to hang it up, Alice rises from her seat and follows her.
“Well what if you meet her parents?” she asks. “Then could I go?”
Leila hangs up the cardigan, avoiding her daughter’s gaze, then turns and walks back towards the vanity, her narrow shoulders squared and rigid.
“Mom?” Alice says, continuing to follow her around the room.
Leila comes to an abrupt halt in front of the vanity, her hands clenched into tight fists at her sides.
“Alice, I am done discussing this with you,” she says firmly. “The answer is no. Do not bring it up again.” She turns on her heel and walks out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Alice hears the clickof her mother locking it from the other side.
Alice’s chest begins to grow tight. Her teeth grit together behind closed lips and angry tears well up behind her eyes. She wants to scream. She’s sick of being stuck in this house with her mother all the time. The only time she ever gets to leave is to go to school or to flute lessons or on her daily walks around the neighborhood, which would be wonderful if they weren’t always accompanied by her mother.
But Leila would never let Alice go out walking alone. She tells her it’s because Alice is a young, beautiful girl and bad things tend to happen to young, beautiful girls like her. She tells her it’s for her own good, for her safety, but Alice doesn’t think that all these rules and restrictions were put in place for her benefit.
When she was younger, she trusted her mother when she told her that going outside alone was too dangerous or when she told her that she kept her door locked so that no bad guys could break in and take her in the middle of the night. She assumed that it was normal to have a lock on the outside of her door, that all little girls’ parents locked their doors to protect them from bad guys. But as she grew older, she began to wonder if the lock was to keep bad guys out or if it was to keep her in.
Once, her freshman year, she met a girl named Haley in her algebra class. Haley had an older brother and he was planning to throw a party one weekend because their parents were going to be out of town. She invited Alice to the party, but Alice declined the invitation, telling her that there was no way her mother would ever allow her to go, so Haley suggested that she sneak out of the house. This was when Alice mentioned the lock that her mother had put on the outside of her bedroom door. Haley stopped talking to Alice after that.
A lot of girls eventually stopped talking to Alice when they realized that she’d never be able to hang out with them outside of school. Julie was different though. She was a transfer student who had just moved here this year, and she didn’t know about Alice yet. She didn’t know her as the weird girl whose mom always drops her off and picks her up from school or the girl who is never seen by any of the students outside of the walls of their high school. To Julie, Alice was just a normal girl. And Alice was determined to keep it that way.
The next day at school, Alice told Julie that her mom wouldn’t let her sleep over unless she talked to her parents, so Julie wrote down her mom’s cell phone number on a piece of paper that she tore out of her notebook and gave it to Alice to take home to her mother.
That night, Alice made sure not to flinch or pull away when her mother plucked a stray hair above her lip. She held her hand out straight and flat while her mother filed her nails so that the tops formed smooth little half-moon shapes, and she sat perfectly still, shoulders back, while her mother ran her brush through her long blonde hair over and over again.
Now, as her mother finishes up with their nightly routine and turns to walk out of Alice’s room, Alice rises from the stool at her vanity.
“Mom,” she says. Leila stops in her tracks, pausing for a moment before turning around.
“Yes, dear?” she replies.
Alice goes over to her backpack and pulls the slip of paper with Julie’s mother’s phone number on it out of the front pocket. She walks over to her mother and holds the paper out in front of her.
“This is Julie’s mom’s phone number. I thought that maybe if you gave her a call and talked to her that you’d be more comfortable letting me spend the night there tomorrow.”
Leila stares down at the piece of paper in her daughter’s hand, her thin lips set into a hard line. She sucks in a deep breath through her nose and snatches the paper up.
“Alice,” she begins, her voice chillingly calm, “I told you last night not to bring this up again. If you don’t want to listen to me then not only will you not be spending the night at Julie’s; you also will not be going to school tomorrow. I’ll call your school to let them know you’re sick and I’ll bring your work home for you to do.”
Alice’s heart sinks like a rock into her stomach. She can’t do this. School is the only time away from her mother that Alice gets. It’s the only time Alice ever really feels free. She can’t take that away from her.
“Mom, no! That’s not fair! I have to go to school!” she cries. Tears begin to well in the back of her throat.
Her mother crumples the piece of paper up into a ball inside her boney hand. “Well maybe next time you will listen to me when I ask you not to bring something up again.”
She turns on her heel, her silky pink robe billowing out behind her, and walks out of the room. “But mom!” Alice shouts, following behind her. Leila slams the door and Alice’s hands fall onto the white painted wood.
Click.
“Mom!” Alice shouts, banging on the door with balled up fists. She jiggles the handle, but it doesn’t budge. “Mom!” she shouts again, louder this time, the words like sandpaper in her throat.
Classical music floats up from downstairs, the volume increasing until it drowns out her screams. She kicks at the door, her bare toe instantly throbbing as she does so. She lets out a guttural cry and turns around, her arms shaking at her sides.
Alice pushes over the stool that sits at her vanity, throws the brush and the tweezers and the lotion and the nail clippers and file all to the carpeted floor. She tears the pink, frilly comforter off of her bed, followed by the pressed white sheets. Takes all of her neatly folded clothes out of the drawers of her dresser and tosses them on the ground. Removes all of the shirts and sweaters and dresses from their hangers.
When she’s finished, she looks around at the mess she’s created, sweat prickling in the pits of her arms, on the back of her neck, causing her nightgown to stick to her skin. It isn’t enough. All of this stuff can be cleaned up, put back in it’s place as if it was never out of place to begin with. It isn’t enough.
Alice walks over to her closet and kneels down, pulling out her box of art supplies from the back corner of it. Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 fills the pastel pink walls of her room, the walls of the house. She takes the scissors from the box and goes over to the vanity, turning the stool upright and sitting down on it.
She stares at herself in the mirror, at all of her beautiful blonde hair, long and silky and smooth. The hair her mother loves. The hair her mother brushes each night. The hair that’s just like her father’s. She grabs a chunk of it and begins cutting. She cuts and cuts until it falls just below her ears, jagged and ugly.
She stares into the mirror and smiles.