The Trim

When I was nineteen years old, I cut off the lower fifth of my mother’s right ear. I did it with kitchen shears—and with so much practiced serenity that, in the seconds prior, my mother had forgotten I was behind her.

I hadn’t expected the mess—hadn’t even considered blood before making the cut. The bath towel around her neck caught most of the initial spatter, and I handed her a dish rag to staunch the rest. Working together, we caught the pooling red at her clavicle before she’d even moved from the kitchen chair.

To her credit—for just once in my life—my mother said nothing. She looked at me, down at her earlobe that lay on the ochre linoleum, and then back at me.

“Sorry,” I said.

Just before I sliced into the meat of my mother’s ear, she had blown cigarette smoke over her shoulder and directly into my face. “Not even you could grudge me a cigarette,” she’d grumbled, the sour cloud slipping out of her vowels. “Not today, of all days.”

“Today, of all days,” was the day she’d been released from the hospital after another failed suicide. I was being released too; finally returning to school after guard-dogging my mother’s house. Every few hours I had turned the lights on or off, switched the channel on my mother’s television, stepped onto the front porch. I kept that house safe from theft, destruction, and squatting with each day of our respective internments. As the weeks had passed, I’d felt letter grades slip, felt a long and pointless lecture from my academic advisor percolate in an office far away, felt my minimum wage job change hands. “Today, of all days,” was the day before I drove up to survey the wreckage of my own life; to see what could be salvaged this time.

Does it sound like a routine? It nearly was. My mother was the kind of person who lit fires—every year, the way other mothers planted bulbs. She couldn’t touch or control these manifestations, but she lit them anyway. And I was a different sort of person. I stepped into her fires, turning over embers with callused toes to see what of ours could, like me, survive the blaze.

Her latest gasoline pour into our domestic chaos didn’t feel as bad—terrible as that is to admit—because it didn’t have my name attached to it. It had been, instead—for a handsome middle manager who drove an El Camino and had begun dating a younger woman lower down on the factory floor. My mother, when she found out, tried throwing herself into the fiberglass slicer. She was unsuccessful, she was committed, and she was let go from her position.

After all of that, what she needed was a fresh haircut.

“A bob. Not one of those mom haircuts, though. Not one of those.”

I had my orders: To give my mother a haircut that would not be the haircut of a mother.

I nodded, wrapped a towel around her shoulders, and tightened the wobbling screw of her kitchen shears.

“Okay.”

Not too long before, all of her attempted suicides were assigned to me. They began during my sophomore year of high school, on the last day before winter recess. I’d walked into my Western Literature class to find an enormous bouquet of long stemmed white roses at my desk. That was my last minute of pure childhood; overflowing with sentimentality in a way that was both classically American and all uncannily wrong.

Somebody adores me. Somebody wants me. The whole world is watching as I get my own dizzying romance; just in time for walks in the snow and kisses under golden lights and…

I—a little smugly, I admit—tugged the envelope from the plastic prongs behind the cellophane. I laid the letter on my desk, level with my semester final. On the left, “Reimagine and reconstruct a twentieth century American poem (25 lines minimum,) using the first ten words of the original work,” and on the right, a mother’s suicide letter.

“By the time you read this I’ll be with God. I am going to drive into the Arkansas River. I will drive over the bridge by our church. I am not sure why you never found it in your heart to love me like I love you but I have loved YOU with EVERY BREATH no matter how painful. Now I am tired of EVEN BREATHING!! I have given you everything I have and now I feel like I have nothing for ME! I hope one day you realize what I mean and finally make room for YOUR MOMMA in your heart. Try to be a good person!!”

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by silence/ Dripping titrations of that zeitgeist compound/ A combustible cocktail of passivity and fear distilled into a status quo/ Reacting, exploding into the crowd, claiming every young life/ With not a single scream for a eulogy/ Only these fire-blinded eyes turned away/ Afraid to move or shout or cover one another’s bodies with our own/ Because to acknowledge the pain is to share in it/ Because we can make a gallery of ashen pillars as a monument to how little we were bothered…”

I read my poem in front of the class—not so much marveling at how one desperation could effortlessly supplant another as I was wondering how I would get home with my mother newly dead; wondering what a dead mother even was.

So passed her first attempt. She succeeded in totaling her car and in having her license taken away, but walked off of the bridge and into a police cruiser without even a yellow bruise for her effort.

Years later, my mother had five attempted suicides to her name, and four were mine. She let me know how, exactly, they were mine, and to what degree, in a series of letters that I kept folded under a dormitory mirror.

I didn’t get a letter the last time, and it was a bit of a relief—as attempted suicide goes.

“Why you refuse to wear jewelry, I’ll never know,” she drawled, removing four pairs of swinging, clattering earrings and dropping them into a stained coffee cup. “Earrings might distract from your teeth. But whatever I say, you’ll do the opposite.”

“How short am I cutting your hair?”

“It’s not as if you’re ashamed of your body. God and all see the clothes you wear.”

“How short this time?”

My mother sighed, shook a cigarette from its silvery foil box, and sat. “A bob. Not one of those mom haircuts, though. Not one of those.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve always wanted me to look like such a mom, haven’t you? Hey. Hey.”

“What?”

“Don’t ignore your Momma.”

“Sorry.”

Then she mimicked my voice. Or, more accurately, she twisted her face into a sneer, pitched up—despite my voice being considerably lower than hers—and squeaked through her sinuses, “‘Just because someone’s sorry doesn’t mean they’re apologizing.’ You said that to me once. Remember?”

“Yes.”

I was brushing her thick, almost unyielding hair in the continuous sweeps that she liked, matching up the ends between my fingers. My eyes fixed on the back of her brown ear; on the vertical lines where her hoops and chandeliers had stretched the flesh ever downwards—year after heavy year.

As she expertly used the tip of her long, filed, painted thumbnail to trigger a lighter, I remembered her debut suicide; the roses, my fifteen year old’s Howl. And I pieced together something about my mother; realized exactly how we’d failed to connect after so much time.

“Mom,” I tried.

I lost my grip on the threads of her as she inhaled and blew a mouthful of smoke over her shoulder. It made me squeeze my eyes shut—a knee-jerk reaction I carried from infancy into adulthood. “Not even you could grudge me a cigarette. Not today, of all days.”

I combed back another black lock of my mother’s hair, opened the shears, and severed her earlobe. It tumbled from her shoulder to the floor with the tiniest, most substantial plop.

She stood tall and faced me, dish rag pressed tight against her head. We watched one another very closely.

“Sorry,” I said.

The incident with the fiberglass slicer has been, to date, my mother’s final attempt on her own life. Most of the people who know her think she found her peace in jail—she’d been caught driving an unregistered motorcycle; badly, without a license, and with a BAC of .13—but I knew something most people did not.

What was once my mother’s earlobe now puckers like dried fruit against her jaw, and she can only wear six earrings in total; four on the left, two on the right.

We very rarely understand one another, my mother and I. But we will always have that one and only moment in which she spoke my language, and I spoke hers. Without a word, I spoke directly and deftly into her right ear—and my mother replied.

A. Jenson is a trans, non-binary writer, artist, and farmer. Their work appears recently in Swim Press, Ouch! Collective, and The Bitchin Kitsch. They are currently revising a fiction manuscript.