Family Law by Gin Phillips (phonics reading books .txt) 📕

I spun myself, like a Lazy Susan, and the person I was in the outside world moved out of reach. I became a Rachel who looked for signs and portents. A Rachel who studied her mother’s face and plotted her next move.

I could feel myself spinning, as familiar as the rhythm of hopping the cobblestones, and I hated it.

I did not want to watch my step.

I pushed through the door, and the tinsel rippled on the Christmas tree in the corner. The colored lights were woven too deeply into the branches, weak flickers of blue-green-red-yellow. Mom sat on the edge of the sofa, one knee bent, toes resting on the coffee table. She didn’t even look up. Her legs were slick with lotion, and she pulled her plastic orange razor steadily up her calf. Ankle to knee, ankle to knee.

I turned down the volume on the TV, and that made her look at me.

“What are you doing wearing those?” she asked. “It’s fifty degrees outside, for heaven’s sake, and those shorts—”

“She won’t even talk to me,” I said.

“Rachel, you look like—”

“Why did you tell her to stay away from me?”

Mom lifted her razor. She held it in the air.

“You need to ask me why?” she said. “You must have heard every word I said to her. You went by anyway, I guess? After I told you that you were not allowed. You lied directly to me and told me you were going to Tina’s.”

She pumped more Vaseline Intensive Care into her hand, slicked up her leg, and started over. This was part of her routine. Every night she shaved each leg at least four times. Sometimes she did it for an hour or more; she said she found it relaxing, even though her skin would streak red. I preferred when she did it in her bedroom behind a closed door.

“You don’t get to tell me I can’t see her,” I said.

“I do get to tell you that.”

“No,” I said. I took a step closer. “You can’t lock me inside the house and slide food under my door and keep me from seeing anyone. I have a car. I’m not some little girl you can drag around.”

“And that’s why I spoke to Lucia,” she said. “I knew she’d respect my wishes, even if you don’t. I’m your mother. It’s my job to protect you.”

It was the first time I’d ever thought my mother and Lucia sounded alike.

The lotion had soaked in completely, and the razor scraped against her skin. I could hear each hissing stroke. It was getting dark outside, and the moths thudded against the window.

You can’t do this, I thought, only it was not a thought. It was a pounding in my head. This was worse than gunshots.

“You’re not doing it to protect me,” I said.

The blade sliced into her. She sucked in a breath, but she didn’t move her leg. I watched the blood drip into the dent of her ankle, splattering on the polished wood of the coffee table and on the floor.

“Look what you made me do,” she said.

Her nightgown had slipped off one shoulder, and I could see her nipple. This was a woman who practically hung upside down in front of a mirror before she left the house, making sure not the least bit of cleavage showed, not that she had cleavage. I could see her rib bones through the V of her gown. She hated even the slightest curve of her breasts to show through her blouses. She spent all day covering herself up, but at home she’d wander naked from the shower to the den, not even bothering to wear a towel. As if I weren’t even there.

I made sure never to be naked in front of her.

“You did it,” I said. “You cut yourself. Why do you always make it someone else’s fault? Why are you always just sitting there, some poor pitiful thing who has things happen to her?”

She straightened her knee then, more blood running down her long pale leg, and it was hard not to stare. Her legs were pretty, of course, and you could still see that she’d done ballet all through college, but there was also something beautiful about the blood.

“I am your mother,” she said, finally tugging her nightgown back into place. “You do not speak to me like that. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” I said, raising my voice. “I hear you.”

“You will not speak to me like that.”

I thought of what Lucia once said about everyone having a need for conflict. I wondered if when he lived in the house with us, my father had filled my mother’s need for conflict. I wondered if anyone else living in the house might at least spread the conflict around. Because most of the time it felt like Mom was waiting for me to hit a hidden trip wire, like in a war movie, only she’s the one who would explode. Usually my anger couldn’t match hers—no emotion of mine could ever match hers—but at this second I thought it might.

She picked up the razor again, and I heard it rasp along her thigh, and I hated the sound. I hated the sound of her razor and I hated the smell of her nail polish remover and I hated how her hair spray got in my eyes, and she did all of it right in front of me, no matter what I said, and it turned out that I did have a need for conflict.

“Well, why?” I asked. “Why do you get to be my mother? I didn’t have any say in it.”

She stood up in one smooth motion and threw her razor. I felt the wind of it across my cheek before it bounced off the television set and landed in the red basket full of magazines, and it was such a flimsy, tiny thing that it would have been funny, except it wasn’t.

Her arm hung there in the air, frozen after her throw. She looked