Pink-Haired Troll by Alison Bloom-Feshbach

They first started laughing because Mama says she doesn’t like crying, and they were still laughing when I moved Mama and Sara into the two twin beds in the guest room where they could try to eat and try to sleep and try not to moan, and also, so they could laugh together. Sara Tolbert, Mama’s best friend since age four, had open heart surgery the Thursday before, and saying that phrase, drawing out the vowels of “open heart surgery” in their slow Southern drawls, made tears of laughter come into their eyes. I came in the room to see Sara clutching her incision, howling with laughter because it was just so unbelievable, and who would have guessed it, to see the two belles of Bonaire Heights, pushing fifty, lying in bed next to each other, in the dead heat of July, no makeup, no sundresses, and (for Mama) no hair to put up in curlers. When I’d pass their door, which was always open at least a crack, I’d hear Mama saying to Sara things like, “Laid out in these pajama tee-shirts, I hope R. John doesn’t come by today.” And then I’d hear the laughter, Mama’s low and rumbling, and Sara’s higher pitched and more like giggling, because just thinking about R. John, the thirty-year-old priest who is a dead-on double for Keanu Reeves, perching awkwardly in the armchair next to Sara’s bed, cracked them up.

They seemed to think the word “cancer” wasn’t quite as funny as “open heart surgery,” since it sounds less dramatic, less like nuclear war or an asteroid collision, which is what Sara says it felt like, and more like a long drawn out civil war slowly, painfully, trickling in more casualties. But Mama’s bald head was funny, because it made her look like an egg, Sara said. And Mama’s oxygen tank beside the bed, well that was real funny, because maybe they would tell the next visitor that Mama was training to be a deep sea diver, resting up before heading out for a little trip down to the Wassaw Sound. Sara was getting better but Mama was dying and they both knew it. I didn’t know it because I saw them laughing, and I saw Mama draw herself up out of bed so Sara could lean on her to walk to the bathroom, even though I told them both not to move, and I saw Sara limp over to Mama’s bed to fix her IV, and so I thought to myself, with big sighs of relief, they’ll both be fine before long.

When the neighbors would bring the casseroles over and head upstairs to sit with Mama and Sara I could hear them asking about me, the Yankee girl. They would say, “How is she?” drawing out the question into three long syllables. But what they really wanted to know was, Do I still like boiled peanuts and Brunswick stew? Do I still go down with the boys who race their cars out by the Larner’s place? What they wanted to know was, Am I back home because Mama’s sick or because I still belong at least part-ways in Bonaire? What they wanted to know was, Did that college up north turn me into a stuck up you-know-what?

And I can imagine Mama’s answers, especially to Mrs. Pershing, who would tsk-tsk and frown whenever the subject of me heading up to Connecticut for school came up, mostly because I made Salutorian at graduation and Mia Pershing ended up with third highest GPA. Mia got a half-ride scholarship to University of Alabama, so she’s got no reason to complain, but you know how people are. Mama speaks so gently, she can say things and get away with it. She’d say to Mrs. Pershing, “How is Mia enjoying Tuscaloosa? I heard she got a lovely butterfly tattoo right above her buttocks! They sure know how to have fun down there.” The way Mama can say things, conversational and light, but picked out just so Mrs. Pershing will need to change the subject off daughters and college and onto the latest gossip about Mark Hounley’s arrest or the School Board elections.

At the end, the guest room was empty, because Mama had gone to the hospital, and Sara had gone back to work, the fault lines in her heart pieced together by the stroke of the surgeon’s magic wand, she said. My big sister Nicole took off work, and came down from Atlanta. Nicole is older than me by three years and I am pretty sure that the two things she loves best are celebrity magazines and her boyfriend Christopher, who has to breathe into a Breathalyzer in the ignition just to make his car start, he’s had that many DUIs. When Christopher graduated from University of Georgia, Nicole dropped out and moved with him to Atlanta and now she works at the makeup counter in a department store. The doctors would call me and not Nicole when there was something new going wrong with Mama, which mostly made me feel proud but also gave me a sickness in my stomach when unknown numbers with the Georgia area code popped up on my cell phone. At first I used to call Nicole to tell her what the doctors said, but she would either start sobbing or she would talk fast in this strange high voice about anything, the weather, her job, or her plans to marry Christopher.

At the end, Nicole and I sat in the kitchen every night with the TV on low and played Gin Rummy. Nicole decided she would eat a Hershey’s kiss every time she won a game, but when I tried to eat anything my stomach just twisted. In the mornings and afternoons, one of us would sit with Mama, until Sara came by after finishing up her day as a clerk at the Houston County Court. What’s funny about this town is that when people don’t know about something, it’s all they talk about, but when everyone knows something, no one will say it, so even though everyone knew where my Dad was not, no one would say a word about it. Dad was not in the hospital room, he was not with me and Nicole, in fact he was not even in Bonaire. For all I know, he was not in Georgia. One of the last days I heard Sara talking to Mama, since Sara liked talking aloud to Mama, as if they were having a real conversation, even though Mama was on so much morphine it was hard to tell if she could understand a word of it. Sara said, “Maybe if we advertised free bourbon we’d get that goddamn man in here.”

When Mama got diagnosed, which was two summers ago, Dad went to the liquor store, came back with three brown bags, locked himself in the basement, and didn’t come out for two days. And when he did come out I’ve never seen Mama’s face look so tight. I finally figured out how it all happened. When I was about ten, Mama drew an invisible curtain around herself, and me, and Nicole. If Dad floated inside the curtain to occasionally attend one of Nicole’s dance recitals or one of my soccer games, we barely noticed. If Mama was disappointed or heartbroken that her high school sweetheart who she fell in love with at age sixteen and married when she turned twenty had disappeared into an alcoholic haze, we barely noticed. But when Dad was too drunk to drive Mama to her first round of chemotherapy, and too hung over to come to the brunch held in Mama’s honor at the Heald Society, we finally noticed. Maybe Mama was just too tired from radiation treatments to have the strength to hold up that curtain around us. And when we noticed, we saw Dad notice when I didn’t show up in Bonaire for Christmas.

Sara is here to visit for Parents’ Week get worse and worse. Dad lost his job a year ago and Mama told Sara, “I’ve got to make sure Nicole and Jenny get the house at the end of this,” and Sara said, “Don’t you dare talk like that,” but Mama made their separation official anyway.

On the morning of the funeral my mind was blank and my arms and legs felt so limp that I was actually grateful for the flood of people there to carry me along. At the time I noticed but didn’t care enough to feel annoyed at how excited everyone seemed, mostly because my group of girl friends from college had come down from New York and New Jersey and even California and Maine, and the most interesting of all was of course my boyfriend Michael who doesn’t play football and doesn’t even watch football which makes him fascinating to begin with, and that’s not even mentioning the fact that he sings in an a cappella group. Sara wept because without Mama around to disapprove there was no one to stop her. After the funeral I told Nicole I wanted to sell the house and never come back to Bonaire. After the funeral, I went into my old room I grew up in and pulled Michael with me and we flipped up my skirt and did it in our funeral clothes but when it was over he looked at me almost like he was about to cry, and said, “Jenny, did you feel a thing?” and I said, “Barely,” and that’s when I cried for the first time that day.

I’m back at school and its funny because I’m so free I could skip off the earth. Sometimes I like it and sometimes I’m afraid I could just melt away and disappear, and maybe Nicole would only end, and she is wearing a yellow cardigan sweater and a wool scarf but she still can’t believe how freezing it is up in Connecticut in October. Sara sits in my swiveling desk chair and I sit on my bed and she tells me about the Bonaire gossip and it’s nothing much except for Mia Pershing coming home four months pregnant. After a while Sara opens her big straw bag and pulls out a plastic bag bulging oddly. She looks at me, and says, “From your father” and then she looks down and turns away, to let me have my moment of feeling. She says quietly, “He showed up in Bonaire a few weeks ago. He was drunk and raving. I invited him for dinner, and when he came inside he started sobbing about your Mama, asking about you girls. I told him I’d be seeing you. A few days later he stopped by, all sobered up, asking me to bring this to you, saying how he can’t afford a trip up north...” She trailed off.

I spit out the words, “It doesn’t cost much to call” and it surprises me, this bitterness, since he is not the one that I miss.

I shake the contents of the bag onto my bed, and would you believe it, out come two troll dolls, the small plastic kind with pink hair that eight-year-old girls collected about ten years ago. One is a girl troll doll, dressed in sports gear, a soccer ball attached by a string to her foot, and her pink hair held back in a purple ponytail scrunchy. The other one is an old man troll doll with streaks of white in his pink hair and a fishing pole looped to his troll hand. The dolls are just hideous. The dolls are hideous and strange and worthless and I hate them, and I actually can’t remember anything I’ve hated as much as I hate the sight of these hideous dolls, and so I forget Sara sitting there and I snatch up the girl troll doll and hurl it against my dorm wall. It hits the corner of my hanging mirror and falls to the ground, and I pick up the old man doll and slam it across the room, and it hits the door knob and falls on its hideous pink and white head.

Sara doesn’t say a word but she goes over and bends stiffly from her back and picks each of them up, and the girl doll’s hair has come loose, and Sara is shaking her head, and sighing, and my fists are clenched tight under my thighs. But then Sara looks over at me, and we lock eyes, and all of a sudden its like the air loosens up, and my throat opens, and my fists unclench, and at the same second with Sara and I looking at each others’ eyes we just burst out laughing. We are howling, hysterically, wildly, we are open-mouth giggling, we are belly laughing like I haven’t laughed since I saw Mama give her dead-on impression of Mrs. Grave’s fake limp and put-on British accent. Sara and I are laughing and now the tears are flowing and Sara collapses in giggles on the bed next to me and we are laughing so hard that we have to lie back into my pillows and every time we stop to catch our breath one of us points at the troll dolls and we start up laughing again. We are laughing so hard that we’re shaking, we are laughing because when your mother or your best friend dies of stomach cancer, and when your father or your best friend’s ex-husband is a dead-beat drunk, and when this man sobers up for a day to pick out a special present to send 850 miles north to his grieving twenty-year-old daughter who he hasn’t seen or spoken to in almost year, and when that special present is two pink-haired troll dolls, well, what can you do but laugh until you cry.