Allie can laugh tonight. She looks almost smart when she leans her head back and smiles her turtle-on-a-sun-rock grin. The shapeless lace of her wedding dress sags across her sunken-in chest, but she’s flushed with sauerkraut and attention, finally happy. Elvis howls on her boom box, and she claps her hands. Erin gave her a manicure this morning, and her nails shine with purple stars. Simon locks his elbows, grasping her shoulders as though he’s carrying a platter at the Olive Garden, where he’s washed dishes for fifteen years. “Youuuu-woh! Silly!” She giggles, “Come heeee-ere!” She wraps her goose-bumped arms around him and they sway, slower than the music, but stepping together.
No one danced at my wedding. There was no laughter, only Dodo’s thin-lipped frown, her fist clenched too tight about the pen as she signed the certificate. I wore the tube-topped gown meant for Richard. The skirt filled the clerk’s office obscenely, blatant next to jeans and muddy boots. Nobody said I looked pretty, they just thrust my hand into Jake’s bony grasp, pointedly ignoring the melon stretching the waist of my dress. Allie kicked at my ribs as I promised my years to a grinning blond boy from Bermidge.
I didn’t forget I was engaged to Rich when I slept with Jake. Nobody forgets something like that. Knowing I was spoken for as he panted over me made it hotter, somehow. His spine arched against the plaid wallpaper of his trailer. The place reeked of mustard. Cheap mustard, the kind with so much yellow dye it looks like puréed crayon. Hamburger mustard, the crusty carnival condiment, Heinz in a plastic bottle. If Jake is Crayola mustard, Richard would have been Grey Poupón, Dijon imported across the Atlantic in glass. The years I gave to Jake have been Heinz years. I’ve spent them drowning in cheap mustard, trying to keep my head above the watery film.
I had a belly ache called merconium and poisoned Allie through the placenta. She was born blue and hairless, with shriveled lungs and Jake’s long limbs. We flew to Fargo, where they drilled a hole in her chest. She had a plug over her left lung, where they inserted Interferon, a life-juice tube straight to the bloodstream. Instead of crying, she wheezed. No life-affirming shrieks stabbed our early years, only the sandpaper sound of her struggle for breath. I watched her pale pile of bones tremble and gasp, able only to plug in the nebulizer and rub her goose bumps.
At eighteen months, they removed half a lung. Her alveoli were withered like rotten pomegranate pockets, and the pus was spreading. After the surgery, a nurse with a double chin and too much eye shadow drugged her to immobilize the body for healing. Allie lay paralyzed, too still, the mesa of her chest unmoving. I read the label and recalculated, screaming. The nurse added an extra zero and condemned a life: ten times the dose flowed through Allie’s alfalfa sprouts of arteries. Mrs. Olsen? Mrs. Olsen, we’ve stabilized your daughter, but there seems to be considerable brain damage. Brain damage. Brain damage.
I dreamt I was kissing Jake, but when I closed my eyes, his mouth turned into a maze and consumed me. I could hear Allie wheezing everywhere, but I was in this dark maze with skyscraper walls. The maze stank of mustard, and when I tried to run, I sank knee-deep into neon sludge. Allie wheezed louder and louder, but the harder I looked for her the narrower the walls got and the fatter I grew. I woke up when I got stuck and the walls started scraping against my flub. I couldn’t understand why Jake turned into a maze. He’s usually such a straightforward guy.
Allie’s bedroom smelled like eucalyptus from the Vick’s Vapo-rub I spread between her sharp shoulders. Jake and I painted her walls green for her when she was six. With the curtains closed and the humidifier running, it was a separate ecosystem from the rest of 121 Birch Dr., a tropical rainforest of medical tubes and puzzle pieces. Puzzles always calmed her down. She’d rub the over-sized cardboard as she rasped into the nebulizer. Its motor hummed incessantly, the giant dragonfly of Allie’s steamy room. That nebulizer’s artificial breath gave her more than I ever could.
When Allie was eleven, I couldn’t get her to shower for Rachel’s wedding in Milwaukee. “Nooo-whoa-whoa!” she slapped my forearms. We snuck into the ceremony twenty minutes late, with greasy hair and scratched-up arms. At dinner the competent cousins talked about test scores and college. 32. Carleton. After graduation… “I, I, I, EYE! I want to go to college in New-uh Mexico!” Allie declared. We read a book about roadrunners and mountains, and she remembered. That’s rare. Her short-term memory was diagnosed at less than 20 percent. She doesn’t remember fighting me about the shower. She probably doesn’t even remember Rachel’s wedding. The crowd smiled at her primitive sounds, amused at the idea of a wreck like Allie ever attending college.
She’s not stupid. Sometimes I wished she were. She can write and multiply and understand she’s different. When her sisters were surpassing her and got invited to over-nights, she looked at my bloated face and asked, “MomEE! What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t anyone want ME to spend the night?” What do I say to that? Say there’s nothing wrong with her? Say she’s special? My special, special angel. Give her a kiss and buy her another Barbie? I tried it all. Sometimes I wished she were dumber, yes. Dumber, and content in her disability. I wished she could plug my love into a machine and make it useful, distill it into a drug I could feed her through the nebulizer. I couldn’t even make her smile, though. I just reached for another dozen doughnuts to tame my despair. I was obese by the time Allie hit three. Not that I blame her. I chose food over my appearance. Of course I’m ashamed, but in this life, with this cast, I couldn’t have chosen otherwise. I wonder if Jake still loves me, if it is humanly possible to love these thighs. I wonder if he ever loved me. It’s quite possible that he only understands sex and duty. A few fucks in his plaid trailer, then marriage duty, diaper duty, dishes duty, Allie duty, bedtime duty. Dootie. Duty. Dootie.
At thirteen Allie decided she loved boys, but the boys didn’t love her back. She stuck her fingers in their faces and laughed too loud, ignorant of all limits. They ran away from her kisses and called her a retard. And she was just smart enough to know what that meant. Maybe she doesn’t remember those tears. Yes, sometimes I wished she were a bumbling fool in a wheelchair, deliciously oblivious, even of her own drool. I guess that’s a horrible thing for mother to wish. Parents should want their children to achieve, but I only want her to be happy, and idiots are easy to please. She’s stuck in this watery purgatory between retardation and normalcy.
Tonight, though, Allie can laugh. Simon understands her love with every ounce of his torso. His hands understand her. They don’t need an IQ, and they will be gentle. Tonight my mustard girl is grinning. She dances without rhythm and shakes with permanent goose bumps. She will always wheeze a little, but I’m certain she’ll remember this night. She planned the wedding herself, insisted on ruebens and sauerkraut with lemonade and Elvis. I’ve put on a hundred pounds and sighed a hundred times, but I’ve staked out some solid footing in this Heinz. The maze in Jake’s mouth gave way to tonight, and Allie isn’t rasping anymore. She’s laughing. Give me merconium and cheap trailer fucks; give me Vapo-rub and a million nebulizers. I’d live it all over again for her little turtle grin. Dijon was always too bitter for my taste anyways.
"Mustard Girl" was originally published in Manuscript and has been reprinted with permission from the editor. The publication is a student-produced literary and fine arts magazine. To request a copy or to submit written pieces or artwork, e-mail Manuscript editors Gloria Jimenez (jimenezg@carleton.edu) or Gwen Kirby (kirbyg@carleton.edu).