"Had your stepfather no concern for you, a child who had lived under his roof for over six years?" asked Victor.
"If he did, I was unaware of it. He never adopted me. I think he believed that sufficient money absolved him of any personal obligation where my mother and I were concerned. I never tried to contact him. I have never seen him again."
"One divorces wives. One does not divorce children." Victor stated. "He has a great deal to answer for. What happened then?"
"I went to stay with my grandmother for several weeks until the dust settled and their separation was well underway. Just when it seemed as if my mother would go back to her old way of life, she came back for me.
"When she married my stepfather, she had been a young and pretty woman. That had been six years before. She had gained a lot of weight, but when she came to take me to our new home, she had seemed to age almost overnight, and looked as if she was well into middle age—she had a lot of lines on her face that I could not recall having been there before.
"We drove from my Grammie's, which was in the country, through our little town, to an area which was about as rundown and slummy as our town got. During that drive, she was utterly silent. I asked a few questions, but when she refused to answer, I stopped. I could tell something was terribly wrong.
"We parked in front of a converted row house, and went in. It was shabby, and it smelled bad. The paint on the foyer walls was cracked and peeling. Our apartment was up on the second floor—a one bedroom apartment, with yellowed, peeling linoleum on the floor, and the bathroom wasn't attached—it was across the hall. We were going to have to share it with another family. The kitchen was one wall of the room that wasn't the bathroom.
"As I looked around that grim, dismal set of rooms, I could only think that we were now desperately poor. It was years before I found out that my stepfather had been quite generous with his alimony. We were well off by the standards of our area. She had chosen that place freely. 'Do you like it?' she asked me. It was almost the first thing she had said to me that day.
"'No.' I said. I wanted to cry. 'Can't we live with Grammie? She's got room. I know she'd like it if we stayed with her. She would.'
"'Grammie is not your mother. I am. You are mine, and if I have my way, you're never going to see her again. I'm not going to have her coming between us and making you think you don't have to listen to me—and if you don't like it here, that's just too bad, because this is your fault.' That was only the beginning of the tirade that poured out of her in a flood.
"It was the first time she ever spoke to me like that, but it was not the last. We lived in that ugly place until my grandmother died. We had to share the bedroom, although she drew the line at sharing the bed. I would lie awake at night, nearly paralyzed with fear that she would suddenly wake and start yelling again."
I told him about how I had to do the meal preparations, and suffer her accusations that I had put poison in her food whenever she had indigestion, and how she had even phoned the police about it, and how I had wanted to stay in foster care. I told him about how she randomly woke me in the middle of the night to do chores that I could have done hours before had she only told me. I told him about how gradually more and more duties fell to me, until eventually I had to take care of the bills, drawing up the checks for her to sign them. She could not go shopping, as she got into fights in the store.
"Our world shrank down until it seemed as if we were the only two people in it. She had no job, she lived off the alimony. I doubt she could have kept a job had she tried. No visitors ever came to our place, neither the apartment nor my grandmother's house, and I was not allowed to hang out with friends, or go places. I had to come straight home after school, and sit there with her. She would watch me as I read or did homework, silently. Her silences were terrible—because I was always waiting for her to explode again.
"She smoked and drank coffee all day, using the same cup she started with in the morning. There was a brown blob on the outside of it where her lower lip rested, and a little trickle dried down the side. With every refill, she would put in a spoonful of sugar, but not stir it, so when she reached the end of the last cup before bedtime, there was a sludge of coffee grounds and softened sugar at the bottom of it. I remember how she would throw her head back as she let the grainy mess slid down into her mouth, her cigarette glowing in the half-light like one baleful red eye.
"There were good times, now and then—like when we made chocolate chip cookies together, or when we watched 'Pride and Prejudice' on TV. That was her idea, I knew nothing about it until then. She introduced me to it. She loved that story…It wasn't all bad."
"Only most of it." Victor commented.
"Yes…I've come to realize, with the perspective of years, that something was terribly wrong with my mother, something that got worse over time. The reason that more and more chores fell to me was because she was growing less and less capable of performing tasks such as doing the laundry.
"When you think about it—well, you probably haven't done your own laundry in years, so you don't think about it, but there are really dozens of steps involved—noticing that it needs to be done, deciding when to do it, get the clothes together, take them to the machine, sort them—and making a meal is even more complicated. It wasn't as if she didn't know how—she was the only girl in her family, and they took a traditional view of gender roles, so her mother made sure she knew how to cook and clean—she was losing it.
"She needed me. She needed me, because she was increasingly incapable, but at the same time, she acted as if I was doing it to her—as if I was stealing her life skills. She looked at me as if I was a cancer feeding on her body.
"I couldn't wait to get out of there, but I had to. I went through college on the little money my Grammie left me, and I worked to supplement that, too. I got my education, even if I did pick something that wasn't lucrative. Three months after I graduated, I had enough money to get a studio apartment in a nicer neighborhood than the one she had brought me to, eight years before. I told her I was moving out. She ignored it. I thought she would be glad to be rid of me, but then—."
"I can feel that your heart is starting to race under my hand." Victor interrupted. "You can and should have the chance to talk it out and cry it out, but can you defer it for a while that I might ask a few questions of you?"
"I think so." I said.
"I know so. First, if you were seven when your mother married, and she was eighteen at your birth, she was about twenty-five she married, and thirty-one or so when she was divorced, was she not?"
"Yes. Just the age I am now."
"Indeed. It was during her marriage that she began to exhibit aberrant behaviors?" he queried.
"As far as I know, that was when the problems began. I might have been too young to notice before that, or not present when things happened."
"I understand your limitations in that respect. Would you describe her manner as cold, unaffected, when she was not angry?"
"Yes."
"Did she neglect herself, her appearance, her personal hygiene?"
"Dreadfully. In the summertime, she reeked. In the wintertime, she just stank." I replied.
His next question startled me.
"Do you recall if there was anything unusual about your mother's sense of smell?"
"What? Yes—she'd leave a pot of food on the stove until it boiled dry and burned, while I was out raking leaves or something, and I'd come in to a house full of smoke, and she'd swear she didn't smell it for the odor of furniture polish—when there wasn't a trace of polish in the air, and I hadn't used a dust cloth in weeks. She was always doing that, as if her nose was smelling things in an alternative universe. This has some meaning for you, I can tell. What is it?" I asked him
"It confirms what I had been suspecting. Joviana, I hope it will give you some comfort to have her malady given a name." Victor said, his voice very low and serious. "Your mother is schizophrenic."
A/N: Hello, Julietsdaughter! The magic will be taking a secondary role in the story. The people are always my main focus. The wedding will be coming up in a few days, as they fly back to Latveria in the morning, the preparations will go into high gear. As for the baby--well, the revelations of this chapter may explain a great deal of concern.
Hi, Chantrea Savann! I'm not sure if I got it or not, but I'll write soon. I hope that you like this chapter, even if it too is sad.
Hello, Madripoor Rose! This chapter explains a lot about her mother. The next will delve into the implications...
Hiya, GothikStrawberry! Low self-esteem is far too common among girls, but you're right. Joviana has a king-sized case of it, and now you know more of why. I'm not into Manga--at least not yet. You make it sound very intriuging,