I take the bat, miss her first three balls, and get clean-bowled on the fourth.
The holidays are over; and so is the new me.
It’s my view that we should make no preparations for my mother’s arrival. None at all. ‘She’s the one with the problem,’ I tell Jocasta. ‘Why should we get uptight about it?’
But Jocasta just shakes her head. ‘You don’t understand. The woman of the household always gets the blame. It will be on my head. Not yours.’
My mother believes we live like pigs in our own filth. She will arrive on Wednesday wearing white gloves to ward off the germs, and will insist on washing all our glassware, plates and cooking utensils before she agrees to eat anything prepared in our kitchen. During her last visit, she located the Spray n’Wipe, and attacked our stove top—squirting in so much cleaning fluid that the thing wouldn’t work for three months. Many women of her generation have a cleaning fetish, but not many have actually cleaned one of their son’s appliances to death.
My mother also believes that I’m obscenely overweight and possibly close to death. She will arrive wearing a solicitous look, pulling her white gloves on ever-tighter, as her eyes swivel between my belly and the stained kitchen benchtops. She will exercise self-control and decide to say nothing—the corners of her pursed lips twitching with the effort. It is an effort at self-control that will break down in a spectacular fashion sometime on the second day.
And so I scrub and I diet.
I say to Jocasta: ‘Why should you be responsible for the fact that I’m just the tiniest bit overweight? It’s nothing to do with you. I don’t care what she says, and neither should you.’
Jocasta replies in a dull, beaten-down monotone, as she scrubs at a recalcitrant piece of skirting: ‘You know nothing,’ she says. ‘It’s the patriarchy. The woman always gets the blame. The mother blames the wife, and never the precious son. Oh, no. He’s perfect.’
It’s true my mother has two photographs of me on her hall table. They are side by side—one of me at age fourteen, looking painfully thin. And another, taken a year ago, in which I’m photographed from below in a way that makes me look like Marlon Brando after a binge. Says Jocasta: ‘It’s her way of saying, “This is him when I looked after him; and here he is under the regime of that fat girlfriend of his.”’
Jocasta squirts some Spray n’Wipe onto her cloth and starts singing a mournful slave song from the American south. She appears hopeful that some sort of chariot might swing low and take her to heaven, sometime before Wednesday.
Says Jocasta: ‘She’ll think the shower recess is dirty, but actually it isn’t. The tiles are permanently stained, and so is the grouting, but I’ll get the blame. I think you should regrout it.’
I reply: ‘I’m not going to regrout the whole bathroom just so my mother can have a single shower on Christmas Day. You’re insane.’
I clean the ceiling of the kitchen with sugar soap—a job which sends rivulets of caustic chemicals straight into my eyes. After further discussion with Jocasta, I then decide to regrout the bathroom. The process takes about four hours. The house is getting cleaner and surely—by mere dint of sweaty effort—I’m getting thinner.
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