Kathy Curto
Cool and Low in the 70s
The pills are moist and a little swollen. My mother carries them into my room using the bottom of her apron as a shovel. Picture this: an apron, stained in all the right and wrong places, with gravy, grease and grime, now being used as a fabric dustpan for tiny, pink pills. That’s what she calls them, his ulcer pills.
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” I chirp, acting like a highfalutin bigshot shaking my head, my hand on my hip. I’m about twelve.
“For Chrissakes,” my mother says, “stop carrying on and plug in the goddamn blow dryer!”
So here we are. In my bedroom with my father’s ulcer pills strewn across my bed. We can’t see them all because they are lost in between the flowers and swirls of the bedspread. It’s the kind that everybody has now, the print both bold and delicate at the same time. Curvy flower petals and splashes of color everywhere.
There’s a 13-inch television on the dresser and a bunch of posters on the walls. When I hung them up last year, I used Scotch Tape on each corner instead of staples. My sisters used staples when it was their room a couple of years ago and my father blew his top because he said the walls got ruined and he works his ass off (my mom’s version of this: your father works like a dog) to give us everything and then we act like we don’t give a shit by stapling posters and papers all over the place.
Back to the hard-to-find pills in the bedspread garden. Some we can see, but barely. They sit, sinking into the fabric. What’s left looks like smeared mini pink polka dots. Which doesn’t match my room at all.
They are still swollen, though shrinking a bit, and grainy, too. Now my mother is asking me to blow them dry so they won’t be wet anymore and we can put them back into the pill bottle that is kept on the windowsill, just above the sink. “He won’t know a thing,” she says.
The “thing” she’s talking about is that they accidentally fell into the dirty dishwater when she was scrubbing the pots. Maybe her wrist knocked them over when she was grabbing more Palmolive. Who knows? What I do know is this: the top of the dish soap sits pretty close to the bottom of the pill bottle. I’ve looked at these tops and bottoms tons of times because I daydream when I wash the dishes. So I look at more than just coffee cups, the platter we always use for chicken cutlets and the juice glass somebody brought back from Miami. Anyway, the top of the pill bottle slipped off which is why my mother is frantic. She gives my father his pills, he doesn’t use his own hands to open the bottle and take one each day, she does it for him. He can use his hands, he just doesn’t. At least not for this. She does it for him. Takes one out and puts it next to his coffee and juice each morning. So what this means is that she didn’t put the top back on tight enough. It means it’s her fault.
And that means trouble.
I dig the blow dryer out from the bottom of my dusty closet and plug it in. She turns it on, and hands it to me. “Fix the goddamn button, Kathy, please. Make it cooler so we don’t burn these frigging things.”
I look up at her. My mother. Who does everything for my father.
“I do everything for him,” I catch her saying to herself sometimes. “And for what? What good is it?”
Her face is flushed now and she’s shaky but determined. I turn the button to Cool and Low, point it down and let the air blow toward my father’s tiny, pink ulcer pills. I glance up at
my bedroom wall and the posters look like they are about to come alive and for the first time I notice the Scotch tape on each corner. It’s loosening. It’s a little brown and worn. Now it’s fluttering from the Cool and Low. I never thought Scotch Tape on the corners of posters could remind me of a butterfly’s new wings but today it does.
I scan the posters again. Shaun Cassidy, Donny Osmond and Jesus Christ stare right at me, just waiting to see what happens next.
******
Not next, but about a decade later, in what I think was their forty-second year of marriage, she left him. The shakiness diminished and her determination emerged, bringing with it a quiet glowing I had never seen before. It was way beyond fluttering butterfly wings. Or coming-alive images of dreamy-eyed teen idols. Or the divine.
It was my mother’s awakening. And mine, too.
Kathy Curto is a writing professor and the author of Not for Nothing-Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and can be found in her front yard, on most mornings, replenishing her Little Free Library with donated books. This practice has become one of her daily delights. Please visit: www.kathycurto.com or on IG @kathy.curto.