Maithu Koppolu

Gravity

Excerpt

My mother dies on my twenty-second birthday. After Maya hangs up, I stand in my kitchen with the phone to my ear for another minute, listening to the sound of onions burning on the stove. They are well past translucent, like the recipe calls for, and are now bordering on charred. My eyes are damp, static tears clumping my eyelashes together and shifting my vision into the kind you see in slanted mirrors at a funhouse. They stay there though, caught on my bottom lid, and I can’t help but wonder if they’re simply left over from the onions I diced before she called. I can’t help but wonder if there are any new tears at all. 

At her cremation, all three of us place one hand on the torch to make up for her lack of a first-born son. Maya’s hand is on the carved wooden stem, my hand atop hers, Mizra’s atop both of ours. Our skin tones are all the same, two shades darker than the sandalwood of the torch, our cuticles perfectly ovular and the skin around them shredded by stress. In the raised casket, our mother’s are the same, her hands folded neatly atop each other an inch below her sternum, the skin around her cuticles smooth and taut, encumbered by neither tooth nor nail. 

Watching our mother go up in flames is, in some way, an out-of-body experience. Of all things, the cotton the embalmers have stuffed into her nostrils is what catches first, and her face follows barely a second afterwards. In some slight nod toward mercy, or karmic retribution, or whatever it was that was absent the second the man behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler chose to sip his sixth beer before he crossed paths with her deep maroon minivan, the flame turns opaque just as her skin begins to dissolve, and we are all pardoned from seeing the very first face we knew turn to dust. In the split second before she is gone I see her face light up in orange and am reminded, with some nausea, of the way she looked each year on our birthdays, the glow from the candles coated across her nose and cheeks like the blush she’d apply even just for a quick trip to the grocery store. 

As I was getting dressed this morning in a spectacular show of effort, I had convinced myself one’s stomach was what would disappear first; the center of gravity seemed like a solid place for a flame to attach itself. A woman’s center of gravity, according to a quick Google search I had done in an incognito tab so as to assuage the accompanying notion of shame, is usually located in the waist to hip area, something most would generalize as her stomach. Added weight in the chest makes it such that a woman’s center of gravity is lower than that of her male counterpart’s, which is located an inch below the sternum, and allows for her to remain more grounded, remain more firmly planted on the soil upon which her feet are resting. Although men may find it easier to fly, a task impossible in its own right, women find it easier to stay where they are, regardless of the pressure they are placed under. Whether it be irony or coincidence or simply an accidental meaningfulness, this is also where the uterus resides. 

I think often of my mother’s pregnancies, the two I was present for, and the one that came to fruition. Part of me has accepted I’ll never fully know the latter, that that woman, in some indirect way, stopped existing the second Maya was conceived, the second there was more than one life to her name. My father is now only a widower though he was once also a husband, my mother was a mother though she was once only a woman. I think of her femininity, young and sensual, locked in a wardrobe behind her motherhood, behind the sacrifices her body had made, the life her body had lost. I remember the way she’d sit on the back porch after we had finished dinner, while my father dressed Maya and me in our pajamas, our small minds still wondering where the little brother we were promised had run off to, why the balloon that we were told resided in her belly had popped so quickly. In those moments, when he’d whisper in our ears to go say goodnight—Quickly though, girls! Your mother is tired tonight—I’d kiss her cheek and implore her to kiss me back. Maya would turn me away before my mother could turn away first and I wish now that I could go back and unlock that wardrobe, untether her womanhood. I wish now that I could go back and ask, using the naivete of a four-year-old as my armor, Did it make you feel more or less woman? Or, conversely and in a way I am not ready to admit to myself even now, Did it not feel woman at all? 

As I watch her body become not her body in a chorus of orange limbs, I am suddenly fifteen again, illicitly drunk and fumbling to unlock the front door of our old home in silence. In my purse is a small plastic strip that I cannot bring myself to turn over. It smells of urine but I’ve shoved it in there anyway, the +/- sign pressed up against my half-empty lip gloss tube and the mascara my mother bought me on my twelfth birthday. It’s your first ever makeup! she had said. Next, we’ll get you blush. It’s been empty for years, but I know I’ll never throw it away. 

The door opens from the other side after my fifth attempt at jamming the key into the lock. 

My mother blinks at me. “You reek.” 

I blink back. “I know.” 

“Get in the shower.” She walks away after that, leaving the door half open between us, my feet still planted firmly on the welcome mat she had bought in delight two years ago. In script so yellow I can see its edges even in the dark, it reads, Shoes off, homie!

After I’ve showered, stumbling and heavier with each step, I walk out to find her sitting cross-legged on the couch. In her pajama set, a pink button-down and pair of shorts, each printed with little black Yorkies, she looks barely five years older than Maya. I stop when I see what she’s looking at, the strip placed flat against her bare thigh. 

Before my teenage brain can accuse her of invading my privacy, she holds up a finger. “I was looking for the rest of your stash,” she looks pointedly at the small line of shooter bottles lined up neatly along the edge of the dining table, standing in their full glory after having been undoubtedly taken from what I had thought were subtle hiding spots. Behind my toilet. In my underwear drawer. Next my (untouched) chemistry textbook. Now, in their single-file line, they look like they’re mocking me. 

My gaze shifts back to the strip. “What does it say?” I can’t tell if it’s alcohol I hear in my ears, rhythmic and pounding, or just blood. 

“What do you want it to say?” I cannot meet her eyes; my vision is fixated on the Yorkies. 

I shrug. “Negative, obviously.” 

“Is it?” Her tone brings my gaze back up as suddenly as if a hand had lifted my chin. “Is it obvious?” 

I’m silent, but my swallowing feels loud. 

She stands up then, equally as silent, and walks over to the shooter bottles still lined up on the dining table—an audience watching the scene. In one swoop she drops them in the trash, loud enough that I can hear my father shift in his sleep. She places the strip atop the bottles and ties the trash bag swiftly before unlocking the side door to drop the entire concoction, my shame and my mistakes—I’m not sure which one is which—in the dumpster behind our house. 

On the way back to her bedroom she says, as though she is commenting on the weather, “You can’t possibly know what you want it to say.” 

Later, after I’ve stood in the same spot for more minutes than I can count, I unlock the side door once more and untie the trash bag. I don’t dare remove any of the bottles. On the strip, in clear blue ink, is a single horizontal line. To its left is a smudge of mascara, its presence startling me perhaps more than the negative itself. Looking back, I realize I had never actually checked to see if it was empty. 

My mother and I never spoke of that night again, and to this day I wonder if my father knows. If she went back in their room and whispered my mishaps in his ear, if she cried thinking about the possibility, if she ever thought about it again. Obviously, I had said. Maybe, I had meant. 

Here, brought back to the flames that were once my mother but now are a simple element, I think again of my unborn baby brother, if he is dying again with her, if he is saying his second hello to her, if anything will ever seem as obvious to me as the strip did that night, if that kind of dogmatism is achievable only when one is fifteen and drunk off of shooter bottles they’ve stolen from behind their parents’ backs. Or, I suppose, if none of it is true and her center of gravity is nothing more than just that, a center of gravity. 

About the Author

Maithu Koppolu is a second-year MFA candidate in Fiction from San Diego, CA. She enjoys writing about diasporic communities and the intersections of brownness and femininity.