Umbilical - Chapter 1
letters to my mother: preface Excerpt #1 from Letters to My Mother by Constance Taylor i penned these phrases, for him to sing my praises: a false melody. this evolution of our hollow relation, turned to misery, etched onto virgin pages of ivory skin, you have ruined me. for this love you take, leaving me empty, i make this apology.
1
As far back as I could remember, my mother had always been a liar.
She was never particularly good at it, though. She had a tell: her voice would get soft as if she believed that appearing vulnerable meant that she was speaking the truth. It was indiscernible to virgin ears but obvious to the few who knew better. My mother was anything, but delicate. Throughout the years, she became better at it. So good, in fact, that she could lie her way out of any situation as quickly as she lit her cigarettes. Only I could see right through her each time. And where I used to find comfort in her bad habit, as it gave me license to do the same, I had grown into an emotion I could not shake: utter disgust. She disgusted me almost as much as I disgusted myself. Despite my better judgment, I was a liar as well.
“Did you screw him?” My husband, Oscar, barked from the other side of the living room.
“No,” I replied pointedly for the hundredth time that day. I did not know why I kept up the dishonesty. After all, I had been the harbinger of his pain for years and somewhat relished the role. I completely lost myself in the persona every time I bore sight of his ridiculous face. And thus, I could not understand why, in the final moments of our story, I wanted to spare him the lethal sting of my betrayal.
Oscar’s shoulders dropped and he sat on the couch, dejected. “Why do you keep doing this to me?” His voice was muffled from his hands covering his face. “Why do we keep doing this?”
“Because we wanted to be right.” I paused to consider joining him on the couch. I imagined myself wrapping my arm around him, quieting his sorrow as I confessed my sins. I decided against doing any of that. “We wanted to be right about us.”
Oscar and I had been married for nearly eight years but had been happy for only ten months. Both of our families had been vehemently opposed to our union, which only served to enflame our resolve further. My father had insisted that we were not well-matched and that I wanted to be him, more than I wanted to be with him. A bunch of Freudian nonsense if you ask me. But my father passed away last winter, and his words suddenly bore more weight, urgency, and truth than they ever had when he was alive. Part of me was desperate to ignore him. After all, my father had not been the most levelheaded in his final years. Oscar’s parents loved to call him Justin, after the emperor Justin II in cruel mockery of my father’s former profession as a historian. I never knew what was more pathetic: the fact that they had gone out of their way to research a Byzantine ruler who had gone insane or that they gossiped about the most honorable man to exist like children.
My dear mother-in-law had warned that our marriage would destroy us and our reputations. She had called me a scamp on multiple occasions, failing to realize that her machinations would take her beloved son down much faster than my dishonor. Her passing had brought Oscar and me much relief, though he would never admit to that. Since then, Mr. Hastings had gone awfully quiet at the rare family dinners he invited us to. Nevertheless, the ghosts of our past had been right about everything. Our fate was never ours to begin with.
“Don’t look at me like that,” He whispered; his demeanor that of a wounded lamb.
I rolled my eyes. Every time he took on this stance, all I could see was my mother. Both loved to recoil into a state of defenselessness. But I knew they were only feigning retreat, opting to take a step back in order to lunge at their prey with more vigor. “Like what?”
“Like you’re holding a weapon and you’re wondering if you should use it.” Oscar had always had a flair for dramatic one-liners. He used to be a lauded writer of political thrillers before he started his own publishing company. We met when I was looking for an agent to publish my first manuscript. It was titled Duck Confit and was an amateur attempt to revisit George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He had decided against publishing it, calling it undercooked and immature. Instead, he asked me out to dinner. It was a more economical way to get what he wanted. After all, he was a smart man. Being married to the head of Hastings Publishing gave me few advantages in the industry. In fact, it took six years for a manuscript of mine to be approved and seven to get published. I stopped consulting my husband after he rejected my fourth manuscript, shredding it from cover to cover. In the end, the only company that would have me was a small, independent publisher with big dreams. My first book was a short poetry collection about my mother, and how I had come to hate her.
“You’re not making any sense.” I retorted, annoyed.
“Perhaps,” He stood from the couch and strode toward me. He grabbed my cheeks in one hand and pulled me towards him. “Perhaps, you’re making me this way.” Gone was the delicious lamb I was ready to devour for dinner. My dearest husband had shed his skin to reveal the wolf beneath. That was the Oscar I knew. That was the Oscar I had married. “I won’t ask again, Constance. Did. You. Screw. Him?”
I inched my face closer, unwilling to flinch. “For the last time, no.”
He released me, slowly backing away. And he did it. He did that thing I hated. He raised his hands like I was arresting him and tilted his head sideways to feign innocence. “Okay, I believe you. Don’t get all defensive.”
“I wasn’t being defens—”
“I get it.” He interrupted. “I could have handled this with less belligerence.”
“Handled this? And what, pray tell, is this that requires such violence to handle?”
“There you go again.” He sighed, obviously tired from years of dealing with my antics. Except that they were not antics but attempts at putting the both of us out of our collective misery. He did not want anything to do with that.
“Well, one of us has to!” I paused to stop my blood from boiling. I sat in the armchair across the couch and motioned for him to sit as well. “I want a divorce.” I tried to steady my voice, unwilling to get another rise out of him. “And I think you want one, too.”
“Are you insane?” He shot back up again and leaped in my direction. “Do you hear yourself, right now?” He poked my head at every word he uttered, his fingers folded into a loaded gun. Part of me believed I was crazy for bringing it up again because I knew he would never divorce me. He would never allow himself the scandal, even if it meant that he could finally be free.
“Maybe, I am,” I whispered, before raising my voice. “But you’re most likely to blame.”
He shook his head and smirked. “No, darling. That wasn’t me.”
He had finally pulled the trigger. “You don’t get to speak of her!” I reminded myself to breathe, hoping that would be enough to deter my tears from free-falling down my cheeks.
“It’s cute that you keep defending her, even after publicly humiliating her with subpar poetry.”
“Go to hell, Oscar!” I began to leave the room, desperate to retreat from the battlefield.
“Oh, darling! Where are you going?” I ignored him and made my way to the front door. “She won’t take you back! No one wants you anymore!” His words rang in my ears, although he made no effort to follow me. In our eight years of marriage, Oscar Hastings had never been the first to apologize. In his private life, just like at work, people always came to him. It was not—could not—be the other way around.
But as much as I loathed the man I had married, I knew he was right. No one wanted me anymore; I had made sure of that.