Jolly

Parent Support Groups are Where Goodie-Two-Shoes Go to Die

The first time Mireille told her mother she’d  not speak to her again, Bettina stifled it.  A laugh. Don’t tip off a daughter about her ancestors. Everyone thinks they’re original.

Then Mireille moved twice, without a forwarding address. She blocked her number, and arranged for a skater boy to pick up her stuff— Damien? Damien’s brother? But didn’t that one disappear too?

In any case, a teen from the Christmas tree lot came to pick up Mireille’s suitcase from the ancestral manse. Bettina got the message. Mireille was gone. Gone Baby gone.

Bettina called the aunties. It was like a holiday tour. “Remember when Miri was just a baby in the pouf, that thing for Halloween?” Corrie asked.  Auntie Fran cried hard for a minute and then had to crawl back to lie on the floor. Her back was a mess.

“Remember,” said Auntie Took,  “When she made a cake for Xmas in that godawful green frosting? Jolly 4-Ever?”

Bettina took out an old polaroid of the “Jolly" cake sitting on the Christmas table. Such a classic; so beautiful— they’d put it in the fridge until the frosting curled.

She could hold the little photograph now, like a museum curator, without feeling a thing. If you’re charred on the inside, what does it matter if there’s nothing to see on the paint?

You never know if you’re at the beginning of a family silence. Is it the middle, or close to the end?  Of course there is no end, not the way we used to think. “Ends” look like a mirage.

Long before the months code-switched into years, Bettina joined a support group. She had her pick of dozen. "Estranged Parents with Adult Children" was the new 12-step tell-all.

The first session, Bettina humbled herself. “Shut up,” she told herself,  “Take a seat.”

God knows what kind of sick creeps populated such gatherings. What did they do that drove their children away? Beatings, incest, blackouts? A few narcissists who leaned heavy on Suzuki violin lessons? Maybe they were religious zealots who sent their kids to conversion camps.

“I don’t know what I’ll say,” she told Tookie, “when it’s my turn.”

“You don’t have to take a turn.”

Maybe she could hang by the coffee pot and stay well out of it.

One old woman, older than Betty, started the meeting. She brought a book of photographs and held them up in her lap, because she seemed to have trouble talking. —Parkinson’s or something. In the first picture, she was holding her young daughter close, they were wearing red mittens; it looked like they were a bike trip. In another one, she and her daughter were the same height, same dimples, wearing matching PJ’s and carrying a big wooden picket sign down at the Hyatt hotel, on that strike so long ago, that said, “Sleep With the Right People.”

In her last picture, her now-grown daughter was in a hospital bed . All you could see was a partial close-up, an accidental shutter snap. The daughter's hand, plastic-cuffed with her name and number, was squeezing her mother’s arm so tight the knuckles looked white.

Bettina spilled hot coffee on herself. Fucking styrofoam. Everyone jumped at her yelp and turned around.

“Jesus! —So sorry! So sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

She could imagine what Mireille would say to that. “You take the air right out of the room, ma.”

The grey-haired trembling lady with the mismatched photos carried on; she still had plenty of oxygen. Everyone nodded in sympathy at Bettina, the newcomer, as if they’d already earned their dark brown Folgers stain.

This Folgers crowd was too much. Maybe it was too close to the holidays. Photographs and trembling, shaky hands were more than she could handle.

Bettina decided to join one of the online groups— remove the in-person empathy factor. She preferred her tremors out of the shot.

Betti dialed into a dozen guided group chats: sometimes sober, sometimes stoned, caffeinated, or well-sugared. She never did meet any rapists or thugs or fundies. It turned out that Sad Parent Support Groups were where goodie-two-shoes go to die.

One time on the group phone chat, Bettina said she had a question, but it wasn’t a question, it was a story.

She told them all about the Jolly4Ever cake, and a daughter who had unsinkable pluck and affection.

“My own mother was not like that, you know,” Bettina remembered. “She hated holidays; you never knew what she might do to spike it. One time I wanted to carve a Jack-o-lantern and light a candle inside. She said, no, but I kept doing my best with a little pumpkin and a paring knife out on the sidewalk. ‘Can I light the candle? Can I light the candle?’

"I saw a dark look in her eyes, but I had holiday fever; I couldn’t shut up. Mama lit a wooden match and put it in my fingertips. I was little, I didn’t know how to stick it into the pumpkin. She grabbed and pressed my thumb into the flame and wouldn’t let go. My thumb turned black in two seconds and—”

“My god, what, what happened?” Strangers' voices broke in on the line. The other greyhairs.

“I don’t remember,” Bettina said. “There’s no pictures. She didn’t talk to me for awhile after that. Then we moved to the Yukon. I didn’t have the nerve to light a match again until I was eighteen.”

“What?” Someone else interrupted.

“I honestly wanted to light a joint by myself, and that’s what finally did it, that’s how I learned to light a match! Marijuana!”  Betti had to laugh at that.

“Did you stay close to your mother?” A man’s voice on the line.

“Yes, I did.” Bettina looked at her phone. Its battery was dying. Good. “Isn’t that weird. Yes, I stayed.”

Auntie Took agreed. She had memories of her own visible on her soft crepey skin. “Yeah, you get a mark like that. You don’t let go.”

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“Jolly” is a short story from my new fiction collection, There’s No Hope But I May Be Wrong.

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