Crabapples

The mother hunched over the washing machine, phantom blow dealt to her insides. White and gray blurred within her watery vision and through autopilot effort, the laundry basket in her hands had been set gently on the ground. A trembling hand clutched onto the cold, straight edge of the appliance as she lowered to her knees, a prayer pose for divinity corrupted. Her hands fell limply into her lap and she rested her forehead on the front of the machine, metal groaning beneath the weight of her skull. Her ankles began to ache, overextended, unnatural in their positioning. She could not move. She would not move. This is where she wanted to be. Where she needed to be. Where she deserved to be.

There was only pain where there should be pleasure. A cold sense of transaction, of chaotic callings guised in latex and lace, conquered flowery warmth. Love was conditional, apparently, but devotion was not. She’d cracked her shell, realizing the beauty in her softness, but her hardened exterior was scattered across the floor and cut her feet with frustrating regularity. Her tenderness was not a gift, but a fee- a price to pay for the life she’d chosen to lead.

She could not maintain her pose and rolled over, back against the machine. The tears were hysterical now. Sticky mucus clogged her nose and mixed with the bitter rivers flowing down her gasping lips. Her head rolled to the side and a memory projected onto the sagging walls of the laundry room.

She was seven, and had picked handfuls of crabapples from the tree in the front yard. She stowed them beneath the rusted lid of a tiny charcoal grill kept underneath the house. Her grandfather discovered what she’d been doing and scolded her. She’d burst into tears, sobbing as she ran into the house. She recalled the obvious shock on Papa’s face as he realized that this was not about apples. He sent her mother in to talk with her as she cried bitterly in her room. They spoke of the neighborhood boy who’d visited that day and took a piece of her around the corner and down the hill. She felt pulled, roped in by the need for his attention and the desire to give him what he wanted. But attention had come and gone, and the seven-year-old was drained, guilty for reasons she did not understand. In the most tender of tones, her mother told the little girl that she needed to learn to say no. He was a grade older than her, and despite the lewd gestures he’d make in her peripherals, she would never meet his eyes in the hallway again.

A montage of groping hands and lingering eyes filled her mind. She was nearly thirty and had been emptied too many times over. If it was not sex that was demanded of her, it was attention. If not attention, ability. Even the pursuit of art and knowledge were not sacred acts. She yearned for innocence, for simplicity. For gentle, tender, worshipping touch void of entitled wandering. To submit as an act of devotion, not expectation. She wanted to feel curious and clean; to know anticipation instead of dread. Had these sweeter moments completely slipped between her fingers or was there still a chance for her to grasp at the remnants of those fleeting days? Could she still find rosy evenings, nights where the only intrusiveness to be found was a touch of a winter chill within the lofty breezes of early spring?

Papa died seven years prior. Her childhood home had cracks in the foundation and leaked when it rained. The crabapple tree dwindled with disease, but there was a dip in the ground where it once stood. She’d twisted her ankle in it more times than she could count, reminded of its existence as she limped to the porch to tend to her swelling joint. She’d withered, dried, and grown anew, a outwardly unshakeable perennial rooted in rocky, unforgiving clay but each bloom seemed to yield less than the season before. Within a mature, fertile body, an waify child cried beneath the shade of the crabapple tree, mourning what could not be changed and cursing all she’d done to wound herself further.

Heavy footsteps descended into the basement and walked into every room except the one the mother sat in. She almost wanted to be discovered, crouched and blubbering on the cement floor, to be found in scary, disturbing ways so that the depths of her were seen and not just discussed- gone over at the tail end of tired arguments that were never really about who or what they seemed to be about. Fate struck, and steel toed boots ascended the creaking steps and the mother was left there with her thoughts, staring into the vibrant eyes and goofy, ignorant grin of a stuffed animal her daughter had forgotten downstairs.

The child would be waking soon, and the mother’s duties usurped her crisis, just as they always had. She wiped her nose on the collar of her tattered laundry day shirt and rose to her feet. She picked up the basket beside her on the floor and dumped her intimates into the basin, careful to avoid pressure on her restless, protruding belly.

Overpriced, dye free, non-toxic detergent. Delicate cycle. Water as cold as it could be. Cleanliness was an exhaustive act.