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Bed

A Cult of Personality

By Isabel MurrayPublished 2 years ago 5 min read
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The morning George was arrested I tallied all the things my mother had tried to quit. There were jobs, cities, dairy, boyfriends, nicotine, Klonopin, identities, weed, social media, coffee, watching TV before bed, refined sugar, Ambien, and the idea of ever dating men again.

I felt mean and asked her if she got off on quitting. She took the question surprisingly well and said something about how an impending quit always promised to deliver a better version of herself, that it allowed her to become someone who shirked gluttony and dismissed unkind thoughts. I asked her if this constituted a sort of metaphysical anorexia and she closed her eyes and said, no, Lucy, more like minimalism of the self.

I asked her why she couldn’t just quit quitting. There was a muddiness in her eyes when she said that we couldn’t stay here any longer.

She didn’t get out of her bathrobe that day. She read the news on the computer, staring unblinkingly at the screen. I swept the porch, organized my bookshelf, plucked my eyebrows, leaned against the kitchen counter and listened to the rasp of the kettle progress into a scream.

“No more tea,” my mother screeched.

I startled mid-pour and stared at the tea leaves swimming in the mug like minnows.

“It’s just catnip and passionflower,” she said. “George sells the jars in the shop for $60. This new reality dictates that I can no longer believe in transubstantiation of a $60 bottle of dried herbs to carry the healing power of a man who claims to be God.”

My mother clutched her stomach and heaved. She opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of red Pedialyte. Summoning the courage to drink, she stretched her palms across the linoleum counter and inhaled sharply, slumping her head with effort.

“I buy that for my hangovers,” I said.

She ignored me. As she drank, a stream of phosphorescent red dribbled down her chin and soaked into the dingy white cowl of her bathrobe.

I locked my bedroom door and googled George. In news items, certain words like “penetration” and “sodomy” and “mind control” leapt off the page. I heard my mother vomit in the bathroom, the loud retching sounds perforating the silence. It felt like my brain was swelling against my skull, so I lay on the carpet and listened to the odd purring sounds of distant lawnmowers and cicadas. When I got up, I found my mother back in the kitchen, using disposable chopsticks to maneuver shards of ice onto her tongue. Then she lurched, cheeks puffed, and ran to the bathroom again.

***

We had moved to the edge of the compound four years earlier. I was used to the damp elastic city that contracted into the cloister of the studio apartment my mother and I shared. Our new house was large and airless. It rained so infrequently that the sun singed the leaves on the trees. They curled up inside themselves and looked like ashes shuddered off the tips of cigarettes.

I had one friend, a girl named Sofie. She had moved with her mother from Germany a few months before we arrived and was the granddaughter of one of the most notorious Nazis. I had looked him up on the internet and learned that he was hanged at Nuremberg. His final words were “Heil Hitler.” This disturbed me initially but I also believed that you can’t choose your parents or grandparents and besides, when it came to making friends, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“Do you know what is going on?” I texted her.

“My mother hasn’t left her bed,” she wrote back.

We met at the midway point between our two houses and sat on the death-lulled grass by the creek that circled the compound like a wayward moat.

Sofie unfurled a blackened banana and chewed thoughtfully. “I suppose I always knew that George was a sex pervert,” she said. “Usually men who only surround themselves with women employees are sex perverts.”

“I guess we’re lucky he didn’t rape us,” I said.

“Yeah. I read he also had a baby farm somewhere in South America. But it was in the National Enquirer so perhaps it wasn’t true.” She took a swill out of her flask and handed it to me. “Rye.”

We only drank rye because we didn’t care for it, which was important because Sofie had a congenital liver condition and I suspected I was an alcoholic.

“How stupid do you have to be to believe someone who calls himself ‘George of God’?” Sofie said, throwing the banana peel into the creek. I felt big ponderous tears well in my eyes at the thought of leaving. I would miss Sofie, her bulldog underbite and the way she pronounced the word “Thursday.” She ignored my tears and said, “Fuck, I am getting a döner kebab the second I step off of the airplane.”

When we got to my house, the $5,000 bed that my mother had bought from George was on the porch, the attached rod bereft of its crystal bulbs. Gilded by the soft afternoon light, the bed seemed to brazenly gesture to itself. This startled me, as Sofie and I were normally forbidden to come anywhere near it. We would sneak into the healing room after my mother was done administering the light therapy George had pioneered to her various clients. We surreptitiously learned how to turn the bed on and listened for the prim murmur as it began to remember itself. Then we’d lie under the flickering varicolored bulbs and wait to feel new.

I told Sofie that my mother wouldn’t get rid of the crystals, that they were too expensive to throw out. We looked for them everywhere, opening drawers, dragging our fingers across high shelves. We finally found them in a shoebox in the hall closet, each crystal wrapped in tissue paper like they were ornaments we would exhume next Christmas.

We held each in our hands, curling our fingers against the cool cylinders. I closed my eyes and tried to interrogate their power. I thought I felt a buzz coursing and releasing through my fingertips. I silently prayed that this was not my own insipid pulse because I wanted to believe, for the first time in my life, that my mother wasn’t full of shit.

She appeared at the door frame wearing a clean cotton dress, her hair slick from the shower. “The most important thing,” my mother said, nodding at the crystal bulbs sweating in our palms. Her voice was stripped of anger, dampened by a muscular resignation. “The thing that you two have to understand is that he promised he would rid me of ever wanting anything again.” She bent down and grasped my cheeks, her breath skating across my nose. I felt the crystals tumble down my thighs and clatter on the ground. Up close, her eyes were sooty and unblinking. “So can you really blame me?”

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