A Pain So Common

We’ve been on the road three weeks when a white man with long copper hair tells my mother he loves her. Mama generally has a one night, one-person rule but she breaks it when this man offers to pay double.

He is a bartender at a small shack-like dive on the outskirts of town and puzzling in the way that older white men are when abandoned, like discarded Christmas trees.

He wears a patch like a pirate though he seems too soft to really be one. When he speaks, only one side of his mouth opens and I can’t decide if that is reason enough to worry.

Mama passes me the wine bottle and I grip the neck of it. The man doesn’t say anything like real adults do, so I decide to give him a chance. When I feel good enough, I ask him questions:

“Do animals drink wine?”

“How come you talk funny?”

“Do you kill people?”

He takes a sip from his own wine bottle before casually mentioning the war, like he skinned his knee on a street in Afghanistan. We are parked behind the bar where he works. There is one star over us, metallic and blinking, and Mama stares at it long enough for him to know she doesn’t feel the same way he does.

He continues, throwing in “people like us,” and “I don’t see color,” and “we don’t need nobody.”

Mama giggles as he traces the lines in her face with his finger, delicately mapping the upturn of her lips. In the moment, the way he leans back tilting his head, I am certain he sees beauty. But the crack in her wrist is too loud for my heart not to stop. Mama is mostly surprised, but there is a certain familiarity—like this is all a common pain.

I scream for him to let her go, but he doesn’t immediately. He holds her like a prize out of a cereal box, waiting for something like gratitude.

That’s when Sandy knocks on the window.

The man lets go and gets out, slamming the car door. He stands there, brushing his pants off like the car has something in it he doesn’t want on him. He doesn’t look back when he walks off, and somehow that makes sense to me.

Mama wiggles her fingers a bit to see if it all works okay. Her eyes are completely dry of the tears I know I’d have if it were me. Mama never cries, she just rolls the windows down, the radio screaming as the world blurs by. Sometimes she’ll circle whatever town we’re in with a wine bottle between her honey-brown knees, passing the bottle to me now and then, tussle my curls and kiss my hand. I’ll watch her in the rearview mirror and see Mama’s face next to mine, no seam in the middle.

Sandy welcomes herself inside, turning toward my mother like it took her forever to get here. Sandy doesn’t know much about the man in love with Mama, she says. She’s new around here, and just started working at the bar. Mama flinches a little when Sandy runs her finger lightly across the bruise forming.

“Doesn’t look like it’s broken, but we should check. Scoot over,” she says.

Sandy drives us to her friend, an ex-nurse, who labels Mama’s wrist a minor fracture, something that can heal without further aid. With this news, Sandy becomes a saint to Mama, so I use the ride back to ask her questions.

“What do you do?”

“Do you have a family?”

“Why is your hair like a boy?”

“Did you fight like that man did?”

“She tried loving people though they rarely loved her back, “a product of being different,” she says.”

Sandy didn’t fight anybody. She tried loving people though they rarely loved her back, “a product of being different,” she says. She smiles when the words come out, but I don’t think she means to.

After a week of dinners with wine and leftovers, Sandy knocks on the window early one morning yelling road trip. She brings the usual bottles and bucket of cold fried chicken from the bar. She doesn’t have a swimsuit like Mama, just boxers and a white tank top. We follow the signs to Assateague Island and throw leftover steak fries to the wild ponies and watch their patchy bodies chase each other. Mama and Sandy start galloping too, splashing each other, their limbs sparkling with the wet of the ocean.

It’s early enough that it’s just us on the beach. I look at the yellow strings curving around my Mama’s waist and I watch Sandy touch them. I watch the tenderness unfolding in front of Mama—her happiness so real I could pinch it.

I jump in the middle of them, head first, and a large wave comes and spins me in deep. I fight my way to the surface when my legs tangle with a set of tiny tentacles. A jellyfish. The pain radiates like a crown fire on my skin.

I don’t know how I make it back to shore, but when I open my eyes I am rocking. Mama holds me tightly, her breast thumping heartily against my head. Sandy pulls off her pants and a hot stream of piss sprays my leg. We are rocking a little more then—back and forth so evenly I might have gone to sleep.

The pain settles when I realize Mama is naked from head to toe. I look hard at her—at the deep brown circles in the center of her breasts, at the scar on her stomach, at her arms deep with a farmer’s tan, lower down at the large nest of wiry black hairs. I look back and forth between her body and my own. I see the similarities and the differences—the tenderness I’ve yet to experience. I wonder how my love for Mama works if Sandy can love her too?

“Do jellyfish have teeth?” I ask later, chewing on a chicken leg in the back of the car.

“Sandy, why don’t you wear a bikini like Mama? Were you always gay?”

“Shaye!” Mama yells, my name a bullet out her mouth.

“Since as long as I can remember, honey.” Sandy laughs. “And your Mama look better in a bikini than I do.”

Mama laughs a little bigger than usual to compensate.

“Well, wearing boxers doesn’t make you a man,” I say.

“The pain is dense—full of roots that dangle through me, spindly ends torn suddenly from the source.”

Mama’s slap hurts worse than the stinging in my legs. The pain is dense—full of roots that dangle through me, spindly ends torn suddenly from the source.

That night, we’re back at the bar, and a heavyset blonde woman yells at Sandy to get to work. She tells us goodbye and kisses my Mama on the cheek. I don’t feel anything the way I did before, the tightness in my chest lost to a new feeling. 

“Mama, do you like Sandy?” I ask.

“Yeah, don’t you?”

And I do. In fact, there is not much to dislike and the thought of that makes me answer:

“No, I don’t.”

“Well that’s too bad,” she says, pursing her lips, smearing them with a berry lipstick she lifted from CVS. She reaches over into the bag Sandy left on the floor and pops the top off of one of the bottles. She holds it up to me.