Part 42: Mrs. Brixton

Mrs. Brixton awoke, feeling groggy. At some point she must have gotten under the covers, though she was still fully dressed. She rolled over and stared at the alarm clock on her nightstand until the numbers acquired some sort of meaning. 7:21. AM or PM? Either she’d been asleep for about four hours or sixteen. The light coming in through the window on her other side offered no clue. It was not marked as morning light or evening light. It was just light, universal and meaningless.

She needed to find out before she left her room, preferably before she left her bed. Not knowing if it was morning or evening was humiliating, disorienting. It seemed that she was a different person at different times of the day and she needed to know which mask to put on. She listened for noises that would reveal the reality, but all she could hear were birds. But were they morning birds or evening birds? Maybe an ornithologist would know, but she was in pharmaceuticals.

The television: that would help. She fished around for the remote and found it tucked between her second and third pillows. She pressed the power button and saw newscasters: no help. It was one of the twenty-four hour news networks that she sometimes put on as a sort of white noise. Cartoons, CSPAN, music videos. Finally, an infomercial for a rotisserie appliance of some kind, definitive proof that it was in fact Sunday morning.

She had slept too long. That was why she felt terrible. What a fickle machine the human body was. You give it exactly what it is crying out for, and rather than taking what it needs, it swings like a pendulum in the other direction. Hence the need for clocks and schedules and planning. If she had been thinking properly yesterday, Mrs. Brixton would have set the alarm for seven and a half hours later, in accordance with the latest body of research on sleep, and would have awoken in the middle of the night feeling refreshed. Then maybe she could have gotten some work done. She had brought quite a bit of paperwork home on Friday afternoon, and it was seeming likely that she would bring it all back, untouched, on Monday morning.

“All you have to do,” declared the infomercial host, a bronzed middle-aged man with a perpetual smile, “is turn the knob and let the oven do the job!”

I should have gotten into advertising, Mrs. Brixton thought.

“Turn the knob, do the job!” repeated the co-host, a grandmotherly woman, possibly the man’s mother in the conceit of the program.

Did her company have an advertising department? Almost definitely, but she had never met anyone who was part of it. She rarely thought about the middlemen that connected her work in the lab to the slick, glamorous pharmaceutical ads that she watched on TV. In an ideal world, they wouldn’t be needed. People would be rational enough to purchase the medicines they needed to treat the problems they had, without having to be tricked into it by pleasant-sounding names like Altrium and Xaldac or gimmicky commercials. The scientific names, the real names of the drugs, would be sufficient.

“Not only will you be saving precious time, you’ll also save money,” the host added.

“Time and money!” exclaimed the woman.

“And we all know time is money, so really you’re saving four times as much.”

“That’s amazing! Why didn’t I know about this sooner?”

“And if you call now . . .”

Mrs. Brixton shut off the TV. It had served its purpose, it had told her it was morning. Now she supposed she should probably eat something for breakfast. She hadn’t eaten since lunch at that horrible eco-friendly vegan restaurant Elizabeth had brought them to yesterday. (Vegan was an epithet; she’d actually ordered chicken, which had turned out to be just chicken, a tiny cutlet on a small, square plate with a drizzle of something that tasted an awful lot like store-bought teriyaki sauce.) She didn’t feel hungry, but you couldn’t let your instincts guide you, after all.

She emerged from her bedroom, and passed the still-shut doors of her husband’s room (formerly Catherine’s, but why have one empty room and two adults crammed into another?), Elizabeth’s (preserved like a museum exhibit for holidays and the several years she would inevitably spend back here after college, when it turned out that no one was hiring sociologists), and finally Victoria’s. Hannah was still here, she remembered with a throb in her temple.

Reaching the kitchen, she filled a glass with water, downed it, filled it up again and left it sitting on the counter. She should probably use the bathroom as well. The sight of water made her think of it. She did so, washed her hands thoroughly, and returned to the kitchen, to see Victoria sitting there at the kitchen table, looking anxious. Her daughter must have been waiting to hear her stir, and wasn’t even trying to hide it.

“Mom,” Victoria started, her voice heavy with emotion.

“Good morning, Victoria,” Mrs. Brixton said, in a tone that implied that Victoria was the one who had slept for sixteen hours.

“Mom.”

“Is everything alright? What’s going on?” She wondered which of the important teenage conversations they were about to have - the smoking one, the sex one, the alcohol one? Hannah surely had already done all three, and it wasn’t all that surprising that she had taken advantage of Mrs. Brixton’s temporary coma to corrupt Victoria. It was just a question of degree.

“Mom, I’m worried about Hannah,” Victoria said finally.

“Hannah? Why? Is she still sleeping?”

“I don’t know.” Victoria was biting her nails again.

“How do you not know if she’s sleeping or not?” Mrs. Brixton picked up the glass of water from the counter and took another long sip, her mind on breakfast. Cereal? Or toast? But first, she needed to know how serious a conversation this was going to be so she could know if it was acceptable to eat.

I’m the mother. I can eat if I want to eat, she said to herself, and looked through the cabinets as she tried to make sense of Victoria’s diatribe:

“Because she left her phone here so when I tried to call her I heard it vibrate in my room, and then I kept hearing it vibrate but I didn’t know that’s what it was but then I figured it out and it was James and he thought I was Hannah and then --”

Hannah went home last night, Mrs. Brixton concluded as she grabbed the box of granola bars.

“--but Courtney Collins is, like, super dramatic, so we don’t really know if she heard anything or not, and James was like, well Hannah will figure it out, and I know she will, but then at the same time, I know what her mom is like and he doesn’t, he’s just trying to act like he does because he’s always trying to make it seem like he’s super close with Hannah, which is the whole reason --”

Hannah had gotten into an argument with her mom, just like every other weekend. Apple cinnamon, not mixed berry.

“--and like, yeah she’s Hannah but yesterday she was being wicked, like, not Hannah, but maybe that was just cause she was fighting with James, oh and then he was like what if she thinks I’m her boyfriend so that’s why he couldn’t go pick her up, like you wish kid, no one would ever think that, and like, Hannah’s in trouble and that’s what you’re worried about?”

James was somebody.

“Wait, who’s James?” she interrupted.

“James Cooper,” Victoria explained, exasperated. “He’s the one who’s like pathetically in love with Hannah, and is always, like, super jealous of our friendship, and that’s really why he doesn’t like me, it’s not anything to do with me, it’s just about her. So like on Friday night he did this survey online and it said who’s your enemy and he put vb in there --”

She took a bite from the granola bar and realized she had actually wanted wild berry. But it was too late now. It was already unwrapped; she was committed.

“So what exactly are you asking me, Victoria?” she said after a while, having lost the thread of the story.

“I don’t know, what do you think I should do?”

“About James?”

“About Hannah!”

“What about her? You’ll see her at school tomorrow. You can give her her phone back then. You don’t need to spend the entire weekend together, Victoria. Shouldn’t you just be appreciative of the past few days?”

“Ohmygod Mom, what if she doesn’t come to school tomorrow, what if she can’t come to school because she’s dead or got foster cared or something?”

“She’s not dead, Victoria.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Ms. Pascucci might be a little . . .” (What word would Victoria understand?) “She might be a little different than us, but that doesn’t mean . . .” (Oh, God, she sounded like Elizabeth.) “She might not be perfect, but she’s not going to kill her own daughter, this isn’t a Lifetime movie.”

“She was drunk, Mom,” Victoria said, as if that explained it all.

“You don’t even know what drunk means.”

“Of course I do. I know more than you think I do. We learn about that stuff in school, Mom. Maybe you didn’t back when you were my age, but we do now! And drunk people are dangerous and do things they would never do sober.”

Mrs. Brixton, finishing the granola bar, paused to reflect. Victoria wasn’t wrong, exactly, not in any specific way she could identify, but her understanding of alcohol was naive. But shouldn’t it be, at fourteen? And wasn’t it better for her to think alcohol was too dangerous than too benign? She tried to fight the impulse to correct, to be exact

“So what do you want to do?” she asked. If she couldn’t follow the principle of Exactness, she could at least insist that people ask for what they want in clear, direct language rather than beat around the bush. That was Victoria’s biggest fault.

Victoria shrugged. “Idk,” she added, pronouncing each letter individually.

“You DK?”

“I don’t know!” Victoria screamed. “I thought you were gonna help me, I thought you’d know what to do.”

“I do know what you should do, Victoria, and I’ve already told you, it’s nothing. You’re not going to fix Hannah’s mom, you can’t control other people, you’re better off just keeping your distance from situations like that. You know what?” She felt in a moment of disorientation that she was at work; that was one of her go-to phrases, which she liked to imagine engendered panic in those who heard it. “Maybe it’d be better if you didn’t spend so much time with Hannah anyway.”

“Ohmygod Mom, I can’t believe you, why do you have to be so selfish, why do you hate Hannah so much, what did she ever do to you, why are you so . . .”

“So what, Victoria? So what?”

“So . . . I don’t know!” Her famous phrase. She stormed off to her room, stomping her feet in what seemed like a parody of teenage rage. Mrs. Brixton took another sip of water and breathed deeply. 

Why was she so like this, this way of being that Victoria lacked the vocabulary to describe? (What was the right word? Vindictive? Petty? Stubborn? All in the right family, but none quite captured all of what she perceived. There had to be a more exact word.)

It’s this damn headache, she thought, feeling it coming back to its full force, despite the sleep, the food, the water. I’ll be myself again once I finally shake this headache.