Your Name is Katherine

Author's Note: (I've been reading too many theoretical author's notes in Critical Fictions. So apologies if I get lofty here.) This story is in second person. I know everyone has something against second person but it was truly the only facility I had to write this story. In workshop everyone thought it worked well, and felt it was distancing and personalizing all at once, which was what I was going for in this story. This story was so hard to tell because, though it is thinly veiled, it is ultimately nonfiction. The fictionalization came from second person and accurate details, both of which are sort of veils.

Your Name is Katherine

Your mother says she named you for Saint Katherine of Alexandria because she wanted you to marry someone grand. But it is also your mother’s name. You call her Kathy. When you were sixteen you renamed yourself Kit. That was four years ago. In that time you’ve done a lot of things. You moved out of the house and went to college. You worked the night shift in a 24-hour IHop. You went to Paris and smoked romantic cigarettes. You kissed a lot of boys, and some girls too, but that comes later.

Inside of you there’s a tumor but it isn’t cancer. For just a moment, and secretly, maybe you hoped it was cancer. You ran your fingers over this lump, the size of a grape, and thought about how your life could change. It would have been a reason to eat organic raw food and practice yoga. It would have been a reason to yell at people for no reason and they’d love you still. They’d love you more.

But none of that would happen. The tumor was benign. “A lipoma,” the doctor said. A hard deposit of fat clogging up that hole in the hipbone and compressing nerves. “Don’t worry! Even the thinnest people in the world can get them!” he sang and you half-expected him to give you a light punch in the arm. Kathy made the appointment to remove the tumor for later that month.

Back in the city you go to a friend’s party and drink gin and tonics and wish you had remembered to buy some limes. The host comes up to you and you touch his elbow. “Happy birthday, darling,” you shout, cutting through the music. Someone is playing the Stones, and the host thanks you and touches the satin on your dress. There are playing cards scattered on tables like dried leaves across a swimming pool. It feels like a movie—it’s always love in the movies, it’s always Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Then you realize you’re drunk. Your girlfriend, Bee, is drunk too. She’s in the bathroom throwing up, so you wipe her mouth and take her home, pull the covers up to her chin. That morning, in your favorite diner you eat raspberry pancakes and sip what must be instant coffee. The girl you love sits across from you, eating eggs.

When you get back to your apartment late that afternoon your bedroom is filled with orange light. Take in a lungful of this light, hold it in you, and let it rumble inside you like it’s always been there. Think of the tumor. Let it go.

Kathy hasn’t called in a week and some part of you knows she is drinking again. It doesn’t surprise you. Her sobriety has been a revolving door since she was your age.

After the morning of a different party (this one with Diet Coke and watermelon vodka, this one with Daft Punk and denim) you’re sleeping next to your girlfriend in the milky light of nine a.m. Your father calls you out of the blue, which he never does, and tells you Kathy had to be taken to detox in an ambulance.

“I’m sorry, Kit. We all know by now that this is your mother’s demon, and it’s a hard one to beat,” he says. This renaming of things is his ritual. It soothes him.

“How long has she been drinking for this time?” you ask. He sighs.

“It’s really hard to say.”

They watch television in separate rooms every night. During the day he’s an ear nose and throat doctor. He lives by the Hippocratic oath. Don’t harm. Never tell.

“Should I still come home for my operation? It’s in three days, I think.”

“Yeah, might as well come home. We’ll get this whole mess straightened out.” All of his words come in a groggy exhale, as if he was sleeping.

When you hang up, Bee asks if you are okay. You’ve told her about Kathy. Bee understands that nothing about Kathy’s drinking is reasonable. Bee sits on the outside, while you, under the warm beery breath, try to find definitive reasons Kathy bounces from sober to drunk every other month.

It’s because I’ve left the house and she has no one to mother. It’s because alcoholism is as regular and familial as telephone lines. It’s because I’ve told her things I wished I hadn’t. Until you inevitably arrive at the only grain you can attempt accept as logical: the dopamine must move like syrup in her brain, reaching the synapses much too slowly. Instead of waiting it out, she opens a bottle of wine, and then another.

You’ve told Bee these things because you want someone to scoop you out of the river and dress you in warm clothes again. You want to be in her arms, drinking tomato soup from a blue bowl, your head rising and falling against her lungs. She’ll tell you it’s okay to cry. You probably wouldn’t cry, but it’d be nice to know it was ok.

You want something to add up to an answer you can swallow. There was the Christmas Eve Kathy promised you a sober holiday, a sober new year, a sober forever. Christmas morning you tried to wake her up and she was still drunk from the night before. The presents remained in shopping bags in the attic.

Then, on your first day of college she helped you move into the dorms and pressed every button in the elevator. The other elevator riders tried not to laugh when she flung you into her arms and squealed, “I’m so sad you’re leaving!” Later she passed out on the common room couch.

There was the time you came home for the summer and had to find her sponsor’s number hand-written in a copy of One Day At A Time. You called because Kathy hadn’t left her bed in a week, except to go to the liquor store. She smelled metallic, her hair was coated and slick and she never stopped crying but you couldn’t understand what she was saying. Only that it was a hundred personal betrayals all spelling out I need you. Can’t you see that I need you?

During one white wine summer she watched the news everyday about a missing little girl. She cried for that little girl, squeezed your hands in hers and slurred, “Oh Kit! I couldn’t imagine losing you. I just couldn’t imagine it!” You can imagine losing her.

In the car, your father tells you that they wanted to keep her until Tuesday, but she got them to let her out today, a Sunday, because she wanted to hold your hand during the operation.

“Oh, God,” you say and slide on dark sunglasses. It’s four o’clock in the dead of winter and there are no leaves on the trees. “They should have kept her.”

“I guess we figured two days wouldn’t make much difference.”

When your father first picked you up at your apartment he turned the car radio volume down to an inaudible five or six on the dial. Neither of you are brave enough to turn it back up so you make the journey in silence. She probably told the detox center that it was a major operation she couldn’t miss. It’s not supposed to be. It a novocain surgery and you’ll be walking that very day. They’ve just got to open you up an inch and get under the skin, pull the tumor out.

Here is the town you left behind. Here are the old houses and older oaks. Here is the house you grew up in. Inside it are the things you left: holes in the walls from hanging your paintings, a fish bowl with dried algae, and a stuffed pink elephant named Galileo.

You find Kathy in the laundry room, wearing pajamas. She is crying and she cries more when she hugs you. Her bones feel like splinters in your arms and she is shaking. You ask her the usual questions: how she’s feeling (shitty), how long she’s been drinking for this time (since October, a little less than four months), and you want so badly to tell her to stop doing laundry. She’s sorting the lights and the darks and talking about a young man who said in group, “‘Ever since the first time I did crack every cell in my body oozed for more’—wait, maybe he didn’t say ‘ooze’. But that’s what it’s like.”

“Ache?” you offer.

“How are you? I didn’t even ask,” Kathy says.

You smile because it doesn’t matter how you are. Tell her you’re good.

“I can tell you’re good because you look it. Did you dye your hair?”

“No.”

“Ah, that means it’s getting dark like mine.” This makes her happy.

In the refrigerator there seems to be nothing but meat and molding cheeses. You’ve been a vegetarian for four years. You have pistachios and buttered toast for dinner while you watch reality television. As you’re sitting there, your back has never hurt more than it does now. But you can hear your mother wailing upstairs and bumping into things. She must have mixed the medications the doctors gave her with whatever wine she hid in the house. You’re afraid to go upstairs so you tell your father to help her.

You know that tomorrow’s surgery isn’t an option. You’re afraid to have them open you up, but mostly you want this thing out of you. Your mother has them, small ones in her arms. “Feel it, it’s right there,” she said after your doctor appointment. But you refuse. “I’ll take your word for it,” you tell her. The doctor said lipomas are genetic.

When you get bored that night, you attempt to make macarons like the ones you adored on the Champs-Élysées last year. When Kathy was your age she wanted to be a translator in French publishing houses. But she had to leave college because of her drinking, and she’s never left the country.

Kathy stumbles down the stairs and asks what you are doing. You tell her and try to give her a spoonful of the almondy batter. She refuses. She’s always on a diet. You used to always be on diets together, even though neither of you have much weight to lose.

“Mom, should you go back upstairs? Back to bed?” She’s standing there, swaying.

“You said that if I ever drank again you’d never trust me or love me or talk to me again.” She’s still crying, hasn’t stopped crying.

“When did I say that?”

“I don’t know, two years ago. You said you wouldn’t love me or trust me!” the words gurgle out.

“I was young. I’m sorry. I don’t even remember saying that.”

“You said it!”

“I didn’t mean it. I love you. I wouldn’t take love away from you.”

In high school you took a psychology class. In it you learned about unconditional love—no matter what someone does, you love them anyways. It’s what parents should have for their children. Last summer, you sat next to your drunk mother in a lawn chair, attempting to get as tan as her. You don’t love me anymore. I can tell, she said when you gave her a short answer to some question. That’s not true, you said. A girl always loves her mother.

No, it ebbs and flows, until one day it stops, she said, waving her hands in the air.

You couldn’t understand this, or why she said it. Your love for her has always been homeostatic.

Your father is upstairs with Kathy. He comes down now and then, shakes his head. “She’s crazy, she’s going crazy. She just repeats the same things over and over. I’m sorry, Kit. I really am. She never should have left there.” Your father is older, and Kathy was his receptionist when they met. When he married this bright, young thing he couldn’t have expected this.

“What about my surgery?”

“I could take you.”

“I’m too nervous to do it without her. If she stays sober for a while, I’d still like her to take me,” you say. You’re not angry with her. That ended years ago.

“We can try to get an appointment for next week. We’ll just have to keep in touch about if Kathy’s going to meetings or not. I’ll bring you back to your apartment tomorrow.”

You hug him goodnight and go to your old bedroom. You call Bee and she asks how everything is going. You can’t tell her, not yet, you don’t have the words. So you say, “Please, tell me what you did today. Tell me every little thing. Just talk.” And she does. She talks and talks and you listen to the thread of her voice until you fall asleep and wake up to the static of telephone lines.

Last year you told your mother you fell in love with a girl. Up until that moment, you believed Kathy understood everything about people and about you. Kathy always told you, “it takes all kinds in this world.” But her silence that day made you this strange, weird girl who possibly would not marry someone as grand as your namesake dictates. She can’t understand why you’re like this. “I thought you told me everything,” Kathy said.

The truth is, you were surprised too when you found yourself in a stairwell asking Bee to kiss you. Was this just what you’ve always done—make friends into lovers because you want everything from anyone? And yet, possibly you were meant to kiss this girl in that stairwell. Fibers of you ached for it, and not only for the kiss. You ached to diverge from the heavily wooded path you saw yourself following blindly. The one with brambles that stick to your clothing like mundane annoyances, rather than the quick drop-offs and sharp corners you felt would be a welcome alternative.

“You’re only going to hurt her in the end,” Kathy had said. “You’ll find some boy and she’ll have been lied to that whole time.”

Because that’s what you do, you take the things you love and you carve them a new face with a dull blade, just to leave your mark. When you were little you threw a rock at another child in the schoolyard. Your mother said you had a mean streak running through you, and you imagined a bolt of lightning.

The day after you told Kathy you were a girl who likes boys and girls she relapsed. She had been sober for almost a eight months, one of her longest stretches, and you ruined it. You did.

“I’ve got nothing against it! But being gay, or bi, or whatever, just makes life harder,” she after refilling her glass for the fourth time.

“Kathy, the hardest part of all this has been you.”

In a fit of hunger this morning you drive to the grocery store. You find yourself standing in the frozen food aisle next the dinners, for ten minutes. There are goose bumps on your arms. Do you want mushroom masala with wheat pasta? Or black bean mango rice? It feels like forever since you’ve eaten real food and your heart is fluttering from having only cups of coffee for breakfast. Indecisive, you walk to the produce section. Under the florescent lights you marvel at the mathematically stacked fruit, at all those colors. Each orange seems perfect until you pick it up. Consider an avocado. One summer you ate a tomato and avocado salad everyday for lunch. You were beautiful.

Eventually you get cucumber sushi and a carton of raspberries. Your back hurts. You feel plain and empty. You imagine that everyone can see the hole in your torso, can look right through you into the lines of cash registers. That afternoon, your father takes you back to your apartment and you and Bee watch foreign films together all week and go to theme parties all weekend (cults of the 1970’s, white trash and mustaches). At one, with a fake mustache scratching your nose, you see a boy you used to sleep with. You catch up with him for a few minutes until you and Bee have to dash for a train. Each morning you wake up with your head swimming until it is time to go home again for the operation.

This time it is really happening. Kathy is driving you to the outpatient surgery center. It is raining, but it shouldn’t be. It’s February and this should be snow. Kathy is trying to be positive—she has not had a drink in five days and she’s convinced herself that things are going to be different this time.

“Do you think you want to go to lunch after, sweetie?” she asks, exhaling a stream of smoke into the rain through a cracked window.

“I’m not sure if I’ll feel like eating after.”

“You’re still nervous?” she asks and you nod. “You’ll be okay. I’m here.” She touches your hair.

In the waiting room she tries to make small talk. She’s proud of your grades and proud of your internship. She asks how you and Bee are.

“We have our ups and downs, but we’re mostly good.”

“I can tell you don’t like talking about her with me.”

It’s true, you don’t, even though you know Kathy is trying to accept things. Still, you tell Kathy you’re just tired.

When the nurse brings you to a small room she tells you to take your pants off. You didn’t realize this would happen, and your underwear is pink and lacy and possibly dirty. She wraps you in a sheet and asks if you’ve eaten.

“No, I was too nervous,” you say. So the nurse gets you a can of warm Pepsi and two graham crackers held in a Kleenex. You need something in your stomach—they don’t want you to faint. The doctor comes in and lays you on your stomach.

As he washes your hip he and the nurse speak to you sweetly. You’re being so brave, so very brave, their voices seem to say. You’ve stopped listening. You’re concentrating on the needle going in, trying to numb you. You keep pouting until the doctor says he cannot give you anymore novocain. You skin doesn’t feel like your skin anymore—it feels like rubber. Then the operation starts. You hear your skin being cut, then there are a lot of slimy noises and squishes. It feels like he is trying to pull the flesh right off of your body. You’ve gone white with the idea that you are open back there, that he’s got his hands inside you. You’re moaning like you have before, in sangria hazes when your body crashes into another’s so fast you swear you’d both ignite, and that’s embarrassing. The nurse pulls the hair from your face with a purple gloved hand.

“Almost done, hang in there, Kit,” the doctor says and you think he is stitching you up then. You feel him put the gauze dressings on and he tells you to stand. You rise from the table, still unsure if you really can. You body feels new and open. The pair leaves the room so you can put your pants back on. The nurse comes back in to wash the instruments. You see she washes two shot glasses and you find that funny.

“Will I get the tumor back?” you ask. It’s yours, after all.

“Oh, no. We send it to the lab and they biopsy it, just in case. But lipomas are rarely cancerous. Nothing to worry about.” She is washing scissors now.

When you get to the waiting room there is nothing but your coat in one of the stained chairs. You take the elevator down and walk towards the car. Kathy is there, smoking a cigarette.

“I was just about to come up! Hold on, I’ve got to go give them the co-pay,” she says, tossing you the car keys. You sit in the car, listening to nothing but the rain on the sunroof. The words That was awful keep playing in your mind and you start to weep. That was awful and my mom left me. You feel young for thinking this.

When Kathy is back in the car she says to you, “Are you glad you got it over with? No more nerve pain?” You tell her no and she sees you crying.

“Aw, baby, what’s wrong?”

“That was horrible and disgusting and you weren’t there!” you cry, snot running out of your nose.

“I was about to come up, I swear. Katherine, come on, I love you. I was about to come up.”

“Fine. Just take me to my place.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come home? Aren’t you hungry?” she asks and hugs you, but it pulls at your back and you yelp. Think about the bottles on the windowsills in your mother’s home. Some were red, and some were blue, but most were white. Light streamed out through them and always looked so wrong. The shadows created phantoms stretching across the floors. You want to be back in your apartment where the light is red like watery blood because the sun hits the windowpanes just so.

“No, I want to go to my apartment.”

So she takes you home and you sleep for a long, long time.

During the next few days, you feel angry. The tumor is gone, but you still feel the doctor’s hands inside you. It hurts to move and walk, and you’re afraid that if you lean too far forward, you’ll split open. Bee comes over and hugs you like your bones are eggshells. “I don’t want to hurt your little back,” she says. It’s late and she’s drunk from dinner beers with her friends.

You’re annoyed at everything she does (the stumbling, the rambling) and when you both crawl into bed that night you don’t move to kiss her. If she kisses me first then this is real and I’m not making it up.

But she doesn’t kiss you, and she’s afraid to touch you in case it will split your wound apart. You flop around the bed, searching for a comfortable position.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” it sounds like you’re shouting.

You drift in and out of sleep until three a.m. when you find yourself in the kitchen, peeling the skins from oranges and eating ice cream off a fork. Bee woke up to the noise and joins you in the yellow lozenge of refrigerator light.

“What are you doing up?”

“Do you love me?” you ask her, shutting the fridge.

“I love you so much,” Bee says. You want so badly to believe her. You want so badly for something to be concrete, to be definitive. No more of this floating in the light of rooms painted in red.

So you ask, “How much?” longing to quantify something there are no words for. You are going to wear her out, and you know this. She knows it too. She throws the orange peels in the trash, puts the fork in the sink and brings you back to bed. She kisses you, silently snapping the twigs of your heart, possibly trapping burrs and brambles in your sweater.