Motion Sickness
Enjoying the still silence of the moment, Lucy and her mother sit in the rest-stop diner sipping burnt coffee. They stare out at the cement landscape of the highway.
“Remember how sick you used to get in the car when you were little?” her mother says.
Lucy gazes across the table and watches her mother’s small face disappear as she tilts the oversized coffee mug to take a sip. She’s annoyed that her mother has decided to start a conversation about this, annoyed because it’s completely inaccurate.
Lucy’s mind flashes back to the back seat of the family station wagon, one of the many family moments seared into her memory. There, pigtailed freckled little Lucy sits sticking to the brown leather seat, drowning in the full heat of the summer sun as it leaks in from her window.
She looks across the seat at her brother, Steven, a pale blond-haired boy a few years older than her. He is hugging a mint-green Tupperware bowl, the kind usually reserved for salads. Sweaty and looking exhausted, his mouth is perched over the top of it.
“That wasn’t me, that was Steven,” Lucy says, still annoyed that her memory of it is so strong.
Her mother looks at her but her steel-blue eyes focus more past her than on her. “Well, I suppose it was both of you.”
“Why does she do that?!” Lucy thinks. She had a habit of haphazardly assigning memories to the wrong child.
Lucy is back, once again, in the station wagon. She remembers the feeling of peeling her sweaty sticky skin away from the hot brown leather. She can smell sweat mixed with something acidic and sugary. Inside the mint-green Tupperware bowl on Steven’s lap is a shadowy liquid sloshing around. It’s THAT mint-green bowl that she blames even today for her acute aversion to Tupperware. She can even hear herself whining from the backseat, “Mommy, Stevie’s making me sick!”
Her younger mother turns around, rubs Steven’s legs, and sympathetically says, “Oh sweetheart, are you going to be okay? Ted, pull the car over.”
Ted, a suburban version of an 80’s Tom Selleck, seems as equally annoyed as Lucy. “At the next exit,” he replies. He addresses Steven through the rearview mirror, “You can wait a few minutes, buddy, can’t you?”
Lucy sees Steven’s silent scowl in response, his head still perched over the bowl, his steel-blue eyes narrowing and throwing a glance of hatred at everyone.
Lucy’s mom then turns to her and says, “Open the window a bit more and you’ll be alright.” Turning back around in her seat, her mom then begins complaining to Ted about how she should have brought two barf bowls.
But little Lucy is already drowning out her mother, the smell, the back seat as she forcefully rolls down the window all the way and sticks out her head. She always loved that moment when the warm air would hit her face at full force, momentarily knocking the breath out of her. She can even smell a hint of the salty ocean air, the first clue that they were getting closer to the Cape and that the car ride would soon be over.
Lucy returns her focus to her mother and the diner in upstate New York. Everything, even car rides, always seemed so difficult for her brother growing up. Her mother knows that, and that’s why Lucy thinks she tries to relieve Steven of some of those difficult memories—by assigning them to his sister. To Lucy, however, it once again feels like she is being blamed for something that she isn’t responsible for.
She can’t help but notice how much her mother has aged these last months. She had always looked young for her age and Lucy was hoping she too would continue in this direction. But in the last six months, since Ted died, her sixty years have finally caught up with her.
Her mother depended on Ted for everything. And before that, Lucy’s dad. In fact, it seems like she has always depended on a man since leaving home at 18 years old. Lucy knows there were a few years in between of her mother living with a best friend, working as a secretary, being a single lady. But she can’t picture this part of her mother’s life. She can only ever remember her under someone else’s shadow and she’s disappointed that she has this viewpoint of her own mother.
Pushing away her half-full cup of coffee, Lucy swears this feeling of mild disappointment is mutual. Her mother’s occasional offhanded comments and stolen glances at her reveal that she really doesn’t understand Lucy’s life and choices, who she has become. It also doesn’t help that Lucy looks like her dad, a man she hasn’t seen since she was five years old when her parents divorced. She is a walking reminder of him for her mom, a man who ran off on her. Not to say Lucy never ran off once she had turned 18 years old, again and again, always trying to get as far away from her family as possible.
At least Lucy was here now, with her mother, being a responsible adult. But this wasn’t about her, it was about Steven. They had traveled four hours together to the middle of upstate New York to find Steven’s last known address.
As if affirming Lucy’s own thought, her mother whispers, “Poor Steven” into her mug of coffee. Lucy is not sure if she is referring to her car-sick little boy or her grown-up son.
It has been several years since Lucy has really talked to her brother. She knew something was not normal, even for Steven, when he didn’t show up at Ted’s funeral. Their mother needed him now more than ever. Steven, who never seemed to get his shit together, was still their mother’s favorite. Last either of them knew he was living with a woman in a small town north of Utica.
“Are you ready to go?” Lucy asks. Her mom nods in response and gets out her wallet.
“No, Mom, I’ll get this.”
“Nonsense, save your money.” Getting up, her mother places a couple of dollars on top of the check at the edge of the table. She smiles and yells “Thank you!” to the uninterested waitress behind the counter.
Lucy gets up and follows her mother back to the car.
