The Weight of Small Things

I’m on my hands and knees, my most frequent posture whenever I visit Mother. This time, I’m scrubbing the floor in her living room. “What does she do, this housekeeper of yours?” I ask.

“See these linen pants?” Mother replies, plucking up the smooth white fabric. “Elaine keeps a nice crease in them for me.”

I wring out the rag then hold up the basin to show Mother the dirty water. “What you need is a maid who will get down on her hands and knees and scrub this filthy floor.” Sweat drips from my nose into the murk. “Not someone to iron your pants. No one cares what your pants look like. No one else even sees them. You’re holed up in here alone, like a dragon on your hoard, surrounded by all these beautiful things. Meanwhile, you let your dog shit all over the house.” Filled with priceless antiques, every surface crowded with precious objects whose provenance only she knows, Mother’s home is like a museum, everything arranged just so.

Mother looks past me. She returns to her crossword.

Throughout her house, Mother lays pee pads for the dog, who relieves himself, sometimes near the pads, never on them. On my last visit, I observed Mother drag another untouched pee pad over to a pile of shit, cover it, then wheel across it. “Let Elaine get that on Monday.”

After every visit, I swear off going there again, as long as her dog remains. I think of my grandfather, whose job it was, as a boy, to milk the family cow. Every night, he was fond of telling, he’d pray that the cow would drop dead before morning.

Blind and deaf, Mother’s toothless white-faced chihuahua finally tottered out into the back yard, lost, then stumbled into the koi pond. Even before the animal’s cremains had cooled, Mother began scheming to get another dog. Stooped with arthritis, Mother is in no condition to care for another creature. But soon she conned someone into giving her a dog. This one, a Havanese, raised by a breeder, was crate-trained, she assured.

On my next visit, I let myself in to find Mother sound asleep, the television a low murmur. By its dim glow, I see in the middle of the floor a pile of dog shit.

In the morning, I make coffee then settle into a Damask arm chair in Mother’s living room. There I’m attacked by fleas, an angry cloud swirling about my feet and ankles. I put down my coffee and grab my car keys. I know from experience that the nearest Wal-Mart will open in minutes, at 6:00 a.m.

“What’s this?” Mother squints without her glasses as she pours her coffee.

“Flea killer. Your house is swarming with them.”

“What? I don’t have fleas,” Mother replies, indignant. Hers is a $3,500 pure-bred show dog, not some flea-infested mongrel. “You brought them here,” she says accusingly. Later, Mother announces to the waitress at lunch, “My son has fleas.”

“Have you been giving the dog a monthly flea preventative?” I ask. Mother’s pale blue eyes are vacant, hardened steel.

“I’ll phone your vet. You’re going to need an exterminator too.” I’d been reading up on the internet about fleas. “They’ve got a three-month life cycle,” I inform. “Maybe longer.” A flea, I learn, can jump what, for a human, would equal the span of two football fields. But it relies on more than just the strength of its legs to propel it to great heights. Inside the flea is a highly elastic protein, like rubber, called resilin. With each bound, the flea compresses the resilin, which acts like a natural spring, storing and releasing mechanical energy to fling it, head over claws into the air.

Mother rests her coffee cup on a tray atop her rollator, then wheels herself into the living room. Now we’ll see who’s got fleas, I think to myself, as I watch Mother ease herself into the infested chair. Now she’ll see for herself. For several minutes she sits exactly where I’d been swarmed earlier. “I don’t have fleas,” she declares. “They’re not bothering me.” Indeed, not one flea appears to land on her. The edges of Mother’s mouth turn up slightly, not so much in triumph, but in determination, as though she is willing the fleas to remain at bay in her presence.

I picture myself, packed like a musket, full of resilin, scrunching my body tight, then catapulting myself free, far, far away.