Queen for a Day

by Emily Collins

I find my mother in the garage curled like a cat on top of the washing machine—something she hasn’t done since I was small and hurting and drunk off her love. I stand beside the washing machine and shake Mother gently. Her shoulder is fragile. Her eyes open one at a time. She looks up and smiles. There’s something in her pulling me in, but like the child I was I don’t get too close.

“Rachel,” she says.

She sits up and yawns. I stare at the vintage wringer she won on a 1950s gameshow for being the saddest and prettiest woman on stage. The thought strikes me as if for the first time. How hard I’ve tried to forget that my mother, younger than I am now, once televised her grief. On air she spoke of the children who’d died inside her while America watched before television screens so clear they reflected those who gazed upon them.

When I was a child I watched an old recording of Queen for A Day. I’d found the tape buried in Mother’s sock drawer and watched it in secret. I was transported to a black and white stage. It was 1958 and my mother was twenty years old. Women stood before a handsome host and answered his questions into the mic. He asked why they were there and what they hoped to gain. There were stories of failed businesses and husbands who died in hunting accidents. The woman with the most heart-wrenching story would take home a grand prize.

When it was Mother’s turn, the host complimented her dress. He asked her how someone so young and beautiful could end up on a show like this. She told him. Mother said she’d had three miscarriages and that her husband had already suffered from a heart attack. I never knew this man. He wasn’t my father. Mother said if she was crowned Queen for a Day, she would like a new washing machine and college tuition so she could study theater. The host patted her shoulder. He assured her she would make a swell mother one day. Twenty years later she would give birth to me, but how could she have known that then?

Near the end of the show, the host retold the women’s stories. The audience’s applause was measured with a dial. The camera focused on Mother’s unreadable face as the host reminded the audience of her dead children. Her sorrow jerked the Applause-O-Meter to Nine. She was the winner. She emerged center stage. Costumed women in high heels and feathers draped the mantle over her shoulders. They handed her a staggering bouquet of long stem red roses. The host placed the crown of diamonds on her head.

I watched her on the edge of my seat. I sat tall and balanced an imaginary crown on my head. I cupped my hand and waved. My mother a queen. I inhaled and tricked my mind into smelling the roses. Then the audience was silent and my mother vanished. The tape popped out of the VCR and the television went dark like a curtain’s sudden fall.

*

We leave the garage and walk around the front of the house where Abe waits for me with our baby on his back. He knocked on the front door for a good minute before I thought to check the garage. I told him to wait right there as I crossed the front yard. The garage felt far away. I held my breath as I skipped each stone blanketed with weeds. That was the game I’d play with myself every time I went looking for her.

Mother opens the door then steps in front, blocking us. “Let me get a good look at you,” she says with a smile. I get a good look at her. Her skin is paper thin and some of her hair sticks out like a cockatoo. Her smile is irreverent but sincere. She’s lived in this town for almost forty years but her accent is misplaced, too slow and honeyed for rural New Hampshire. Her cheek has reddened from her nap on the washing machine. We don’t live far, but I realize I’ve missed her.

She cradles Nola then lifts her into the air. Sunlight catches the frills of her dress. Nola beams at her grandmother and giggles and squeals. Little pearls of spit shine on her chin. Mother rests Nola on her hip and gives Abe a hug. She hugs me next, but she doesn’t meet my gaze.

In the living room Mother jiggles Nola and asks if Abe and I would like a drink. I didn’t know she started drinking again. I owe my upper body strength to the years I spent heaving mother’s bags of empty Beefeaters into the trash. Abe squeezes my hand and I’m comforted. He is bearded like a sea captain or novelist. His skin gleams. I remember we are here for only one night. These visits never last long even when they do. Soon we’ll drive back to Montpelier and life will be more or less the same. Abe takes Nola from Mother’s arms.

“We don’t drink Mom,” I say.

My tone is more judgmental than I intend. Mother gives me a look I know too well. I will pay for what I said, like always.

Abe and I are new parents. We are young and dangerous to ourselves. We are sleepless and overprotective and overjoyed. Before Nola we were protesters and cinefiles. Vegans and socialists. Then I gave birth to that beautiful girl. We held her in our arms and saw a little fate we couldn’t control. Risk meant something it never had before. The past thirteen months have been Big Daddy Vaccine and Saint Pasteurization. For the first time, we are afraid. We hate it. Abe assures me things won’t always be this way. I want to believe him. I want a lot of things.

Mother ignores me. She gives Abe and Nola a tour of the house even though they’ve seen it before. I sit down on the couch and stare at the T.V. I once asked Mother about being queen for a day. Her cheeks turned the color of rhubarb. She scolded me for going through her things. She said being queen was humiliating. She wished she had never gone on that show. “You have to work for what you want,” she told me. “You can’t expect to just be rewarded.”

Nothing about her life was glamorous. She worked at the diner and directed plays at the community theater. We survived because my dad paid more in child support than was ever required. My parents never told me this. I figured it out. My dad lived in California with my stepmom. I visited them twice a year. They paid for surfing lessons and let me eat ice cream until I got sick.

They return from the tour and Abe sits beside me on the couch. He puts Nola on his lap and waves her little hand at me. “Hi Mommy,” he says in a voice meant to be hers. I smile at Nola but she doesn’t look at me.

*

We eat a late dinner at the kitchen table. I sit between Mother and Abe. Nola’s baby monitor sits in the extra chair like a dystopian guest. For dessert Mother has made her famous carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. She cuts each of us a slice then sits down. She looks at her slice as if studying it. Her brow furrows and her eyes widen. She leans back in her chair and laughs. I remember my drinking comment from earlier and know Mother is laughing at me.

“Rachel,” she says. “Do you remember when I made you this cake for your birthday?”

I’d known where this was going the moment I tasted the frosting. I nodded.

“What happened?” Abe asks.

“Well,” Mother begins, “Rachel had just turned nine and we were having a party. Rachel and I had just placed all the candles on the cake. We’d planned on lighting the candles outside where the guests were. Rachel helped me carry the cake. Slowly, we moved through the kitchen. Then a crow flew through the window and landed on this very table. Its wings were spread and it stared at us with these hollow beady eyes. That’s when Rachel screamed. She was inconsolable. You’d think she had PTSD. Of course, half the cake fell off the tray and down her pretty dress. Several guests ran inside. By then the bird was long gone. When I told the guests what happened, everyone laughed. Even her friends.”

I say nothing. I want the baby monitor to say something. Abe and I look at each other. He smiles, but I can tell he’s worried about me. He shifts in his seat. I don’t know what to do either. I wish I were graceful. I consider grace a balance of decorum and the fight for the self. I lose that fight to Mother every time. The loss plays in my mind like a familiar movie. Now the scene closes in on Mother’s face and the bitter satisfaction she took in saying, “Even her friends.”

“I mean,” Abe says after a while, “it sounds like it was a pretty big bird.”

*

I help Mother clean up after dinner. She tells a story with no direction or point. I ignore her like a master. For all I know she’s revealing a diabolical plan to destroy the rainforest or kidnap my child. Mother pauses. She takes in my coldness, the virtuosity of my silence. She rests her chin on my shoulder. A warmth I cannot help spreads through me. She looks up at me with eyes so wide and full of need I swear they once were mine.

“It’s so good to see you, Rachel,” she says.

*

In my childhood bedroom Abe and I are quiet. Nola sleeps soundlessly in her bassinet. We don’t wish to wake her. Abe falls asleep first, but I’m restless and cold. I sit beside Nola and watch her sleep. I don’t remember the last time I held my daughter. It couldn’t have been long, but why can’t I remember?

The months following her birth I felt pangs of panic. My thoughts were dark and unfocused. They snaked through the backroads of consciousness where I went from zero to hell.

I don’t understand why it’s lasted so long or why the loneliest I’ve ever felt was when I pumped breast milk into one bottle after the next. Maybe it’s because the suction cup would fall off if I didn’t hold it in place. I stared at the winter sky as milk spurted out of me and flowed down the tube. In that moment, I believed I was all I had. I discovered places in myself I hadn’t known were there, places I wish I never saw. I feared the worse would happen to Nola. I still do.

Abe is patient and understanding but I wonder what rolls beneath the surface. Maybe I don’t want to know. My husband is good. I give myself the gift of leaving things at that.

I look under the bed for extra blankets. I find a box of Christmas decorations and look inside. I hold mother’s angel lights. The angels are made of glass. They hang from the wire by their halos and blow on slender trumpets. Tiny unlit bulbs are shoved inside their bellies. Mother used to hang the angels high on the tree just beneath the star.

As a child I pretended they were the brothers and sisters I never met. I once stood on a chair so I could trace my finger over their mouths. There was one I couldn’t reach. I stood on my toes and then I was in the air. Mother had lifted me even though I was too big to be held like that. When I touched the last angel’s face, I cried out and didn’t know why. I knew I would be punished. Mother hated when I cried for no reason. Instead she kissed me on the cheek and put me down. “Wait here,” she said.

When she returned, the crown glittered in the flickering light. She never wore the crown. I wasn’t sure if she still had it. She kneeled before me and placed it on my head. She turned up the radio and we danced beside the tree. The crown was heavier than I’d imagined, but I didn’t think too much about it because in that moment I was free.

I go to the kitchen for a glass of water. On my way back I find Mother sleeping on the couch. She holds a book against her chest. I put down my glass and remove the blanket from my shoulders. I take Mother’s book and tuck her in. I’m reminded of the time when I was a child and I first saw her napping on the washing machine. She’d been drinking. There was broken glass on the garage floor. She said she hated being queen for a day, but I’d seen the look on her face when she won. She reflected surprise and the deepest gladness. Who could have helped it?

I brush back her hair and she mumbles something in her sleep. I think about that old machine in the garage. I’m amazed at how objects can represent the things we don’t believe we have, as if they exist not to improve our lives but to prove them.

I tell Mother good night. My whisper is so soft I almost can’t hear myself. I walk back to my bedroom but stop outside Mother’s door. I go inside. Her bedroom is spacious with tall, open windows. Her walls are a faded lemon, a curious color I no longer despise. I go to her closet and reach towards the far left corner of the shelf. I wonder if this is where she still hides it.

I exit the sleeping house in Mother’s crown. I’m barefoot and the grass is lush beneath my feet. My nightgown sweeps the damp earth. The sky is starless, smooth as a dome. I go deeper into the woods. As a child, these pines were my closest friends. A doorway into Thank God. I kneel before a white pine and remove the crown. I hold it in my hands. The diamonds are fake. Of course they are fake. Their realness was never the point. I know the crown is fragile, but I test its strength. It breaks in my hands.

I pull the diamonds from the crown and bury them into the earth. I plant them like seeds of tenderness. Yes, that’s what I want. I imagine that tenderness pulsing in the dark until it sprouts. It will wrap itself around existing roots and feed the pines. It will move like a traveling light and break through the surface. I’ll watch it crawl back to my mother’s house and enter through the crack beneath the door. It’ll pass through Mother and Abe and my sweet girl who I pray is dreaming a good dream.

It’ll come back to me, this tenderness, and I’ll keep it somewhere safe. I know one day I’ll give it to Nola. Like a river overflowing the banks, I’ll give my daughter everything and I’ll save a little for myself too.

*

*

Emily Collins’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Oyster River Pages, Entropy, Angel City Review, Gone Lawn, and others. She lives in Portland, ME