A Box of Worms

Corinne O’Shaughnessy

The author’s mother

Word Count 1187

“Eww, what’s that?”

Kids at my middle school cafeteria table never yelled, Yum! or Wanna trade? as I unpacked my lunch. Rather their eyes, simultaneously attracted and repulsed by whatever I had unwrapped from the waxed paper, would tense to a slivered squint. Sometimes the cause was a tofu sandwich with home grown alfalfa sprouts. Other times it was cream cheese and jelly with watercress my mother and I picked next to streams in the woods behind our New Jersey development. Occasionally, she sent an old mayonnaise jar filled with homemade yogurt mixed with chopped dates and raw honey. Even the peanut butter and jelly sandwich stood out for its ground peanuts and syrupy homemade jam. The bread was always differently dark, too, not spanking white like everyone else’s. How I yearned for tuna on Wonder Bread with a package of chips like everyone else.

My mother, called Tomi by everyone including her children, had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her mid-20s. She had two children at the time. The doctors told her not to have any more since there was no treatment for MS. She stopped after me, her seventh. She enjoyed having babies. Raising them, not so much.

But she did educate herself about the effects of nutrition on health. She studied books like Stalking the Wild Asparagus and could often be found in our kitchen making complex recipes while sputtering about the evils of agribusiness.

Her concerns were laudable and prescient, but they also added to our otherness. Tomi wore overalls, while my friends’ moms wore housedresses; she drove a VW bus, while my friends’ moms drove Buick sedans or station wagons. She cursed “like a truck driver” as my father would reprimand, while my friends’ moms would apologize if they let a Darn, or Jeez, slip.

While other kids pulled out Hostess Cupcakes, my daily desserts were dried out carrot sticks and Sunmaid raisins. One day after I had eaten half a box that tasted a bit grainy, I shook out a few more and glanced down at my hand. Crawling through the dark raisins were tiny white worms. A primal moan shot out of my mouth as I lurched awkwardly off the bench and hurled the box into the garbage, brushing my hands furiously over the pail. I gulped tepid water from a nearby fountain, then slowly sat back down. The incident had clearly been witnessed, though only those closest saw the exact reason for my leap to the pail. Their concern, mouths forming silent ovals, took a bit of the sting out of my deep embarrassment.

When I got home, I told Tomi about the raisins after she woke up from her daily nap. I was ready for a glib “Great, more protein!” or “What, I thought I packed the ones with ants?” her usual response to any complaint her children dare utter. Instead, she went silent for a few seconds.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, looking pained.

We both didn’t quite know what to do after that. I went to my room and put Joni Mitchell’s Blue on my record player. I stayed there until it was safe to come out and pretend it had never happened. I would never have to pretend again, because it was the first and last apology I ever received from her. She took great pride in feeding us, as though homemade bread and chocolate chip cookies made up for all the bizarreness of our homelife. Worms in raisins warranted an apology. Everything else did not.

Tomi counter-balanced her interest in nutrition with a daily martini cocktail hour with my father. The time of day only varied depending on whether my father had a job or not. When unemployed, all sorts of creeps, introduced as potential business partners, would appear in our living room. My father was always scheming to “make a killing” in mergers and acquisitions or commodities trading rather than simply making a good living in standard corporate management jobs. Those jobs, he quit or was fired from.

Dinner time found a collection of kids and various “business contacts” around our large dining room table where we were constantly reminded to “sit up straight” and keep “elbows off the table.” Meanwhile, an honored dinner guest would pass out in his chair, farting while he snored. We were not allowed to give the guy a tap and suggest he go sleep it off on the couch. Instead, we continued with the “Pass the potatoes, please,” and “May I have more salad?” while my parents discussed the sad state of world affairs with whichever dinner guest hadn’t yet succumbed to their third martini. More than once, the man who’d passed out, woke in the middle of the night and tried to climb into bed with one of my sisters, claiming he was looking for the bathroom. On hearing a loud “Down the hall, down the hall!” from a sister, my father might rouse himself long enough to escort said gentleman back to the couch where the incident would repeat a few hours later.

Neither my father nor my mother protected us, but I resented my mother more. On some level I knew it should be a mother's primal instinct.

“I will not apologize for how I raised my children!” she yelled one day when I tried to broach the subject of our upbringing. I was hoping that one small, “I’m sorry,” might bring some healing. I never brought the subject up again.

Tomi didn’t land in a nursing home until she was 78--a pretty good ride for someone with MS and nightly cocktail hours. When the nurses called to say her passing was imminent, I got in the car and drove the two hours to say my good-bye.

An empty wheelchair inside the entrance and the quiet of the thick paisley carpeted hallways added to my foreboding. My mother was on morphine and her face barely registered my arrival. Within a few minutes, a nurse came in and asked me to sit across the hall while she attended to my mother.

I hadn’t been sitting there long when the nurse ran into the room. “Are you her baby?”

At 39, the word baby took me a second to process.

“Yes!” I answered. “I’m the youngest.”

“She wants her baby.” The nurse was elated.

My heart leapt and we rushed back in and I was ready for whatever final words my mother wanted to impart. While the piece de resistance would have been an “I’m sorry,” I’d have also been thrilled with an “I love you.” Instead, she looked at me blankly.

I stayed uncomfortably a while longer, then kissed Tomi’s forehead and told her I loved her. Driving home in the dark, I switched from station to radio station, then forcefully slapped it off, the silence easier to handle.

A sister called early the next morning. Tomi had passed in the middle of the night. I was surprised at how uncontrollably I sobbed. I knew I wasn’t sobbing because of what I’d lost, but rather the end of hoping it could be something different.

Corinne is a retired New York City public school teacher. Her essays have been published in sadgirlsclublit.com, themanifeststation.net, reideasjournal.com, deadmule.com, and HerStry.com, as well as this publication. Her short fiction has been published in BookofMatchesLitMag.com and SurvivorLit.org. She also participated in Haunted, a live reading with Read650.org, and will participate in their Aging reading, this October, because, well, aging is so much fun.