Cravings -- fiction by Eva Rami

There comes a time when our bodies begin to crave, a phenomenon so acute, it makes us question every part of ourselves down to the dirt that has made a home of our nail beds. Every human craves a home. And then another. Every home, new bedrooms; every bedroom, new lovers; every lover, new purpose. If it all collapses, there’s someone and somewhere else out there for you to scrounge together. Perhaps, when we say we want a home, what we really mean is that we want refuge. That is to say, home is both a place and a people. That is to say, home is impermanent.

I went home in June, to a modest, seventies-built corner house in New Mexico and my mother, who had bought the property promptly after divorcing my dad. She picked me up from the airport in a borrowed car from her neighbor, because part of her present spiritual journey involves letting go of as many material possessions as possible. Naturally, she has to do that in a newly bought house, with all new furnishings, because she thought moving her current furniture from Houston to Albuquerque was too strenuous. 

There are certain things one thinks about when they visit their mother after spending the spring semester of junior year with their maternal grandmother, Amma. Why a mother would leave her daughter in the middle of the school year to embark on a journey of “midlife self-actualization” is one. Whether or not “self-actualization” was just a fancy way of saying that one was quitting her job, becoming single and temporarily childless again, and going to run naked through a grove of sycamore trees, is another.

After my father signed the divorce papers, he touched my shoulder in goodbye, before boarding a plane to Ontario, where a cousin’s empty guest room awaited him. My mother looked at me, lips pursed, before telling me that I would be staying at Amma’s house until summer. She wanted a little time to figure herself out. She wanted to become a better person, she said. My mother left that afternoon to find a house and job in the favored place of her liberation journey: Albuquerque, New Mexico, a city she had only discovered two weeks before in a magazine in the grocery store check-out line. 

My mother and Amma don’t have an amicable relationship. My mother considers herself a product of second-wave feminism and loathes the way Amma insists on cooking daily dinners, taking it upon herself to plate everyone’s meal and serving herself last. Mom has never thought of a meal as a conduit to unspoken emotion. Amma understands that art, the one of disingenuous generosity. I told her I liked her dhokla once when I was five, and heaping bowls of it have lined her dining table for every visit since. Food is how she says “I love you.” Dhokla is how she says “I know you.” 

The second I land in Albuquerque, the dry, sharp air envelopes me, coaxing my childhood eczema out to cover my lips in a scaly lizard’s coat, and carve pink, flaky creases into my inner elbows. When I was born, I had a small, raised rash on my eyebrow. My mom thought it was residue from the womb, and spent five minutes trying to rub it away, before realizing, with the same reluctance she harbors when coming to any realizations about me, that it wouldn’t budge.

The first thing I notice when I walk into my mother’s new life is what’s not there. There are no photos with more than two people, because there are no photos with my father in them, and my mother and I never took photos of just the two of us. There are individual shots of her, and solo shots of me placed within the same frame, as though our physical proximity will make someone disregard the fact that her photo fragment is from a college semester abroad in Dublin, and mine is from my third birthday party at the Chuck ‘e Cheese near Amma’s house. 

“Can I get you something to drink?” My mother asks, rehearsed, like she might request a fifteen percent gratuity afterwards. 

“No thanks,” I reply, as though I’m not her daughter at all, but merely a stranger, a freeloader in her home for the summer.

We take my suitcases up to my room, a shapeless, repurposed attic with barely any insulation. My teeth begin to chatter the moment we climb the stop step. She notices.

“Sorry about the draft,” she motions to the attic around us, “I haven’t had time to call the insulation guy.” 

As I set my bookbag on the mattress, I wonder what makes it okay to refer to a man, to compact his entire identity, in only the parts of his person with which one is familiar with. Insulation guy. Eczema girl.

For dinner, my mom orders takeout from the Mediterranean spot down the road. She organizes the lamb kabob skewers onto the ceramic dishware she only brings out for guests, and pours the plain basmati rice into a lopsided bowl that I made in an elementary pottery class. 

“Why are you using the fancy stuff?” I point to the serving platters, “You’re making more dishes to do later.”

“I want to be a little fancy! My daughter is back with me. Isn’t that a cause for celebration?” She smiles at me, warmly.

“I don’t think so,” I respond, “It’s a waste of water to do unnecessary dishes. You know that our tiny choices have a lasting impact on the climate crisis, right?” 

My mother chooses to ignore this. “So, tell me about school. How were all your classes?” 

“Good.” 

“That’s it?” She leans closer. “What about that boy you were talking to? What’s his name?”

I fill my plate with lamb skewers, stacking them in a tight row on my plate. “Jack is just a friend. We’ve talked about this, Mom.” 

“Are you upset with me?” She leans back in her chair like a chastised child.

“No,” I respond, stabbing a lamb kabob with my fork. Mom smiles immediately, and claps her hands together.

“You’re just a little tired aren’t you? End-of-year jetlag, I used to call it. God, I remember those days. I used to feel like I’d just come back from hiking through the Appalachian Mountains on the first day of summer. Tell you what – let’s have a night, just you and me. We’ll put on Breakfast at Tiffany’s and blend some cucumbers to smear on our cheeks. It’ll be like when you were little.” 

“I was thinking I’d turn in early. I’m pretty drained.” 

My mother’s smile tightens for the first time that evening, but she’s quick to school it back into something perfectly maternal. “You’ll holler if you need anything, won’t you?” 

I nod, before depositing my plate and the remnants of our meal in the sink, and climbing the stairs to my room that has not yet been graced by the insulation guy. I inhale the oddly nostalgic smell of attic draft, before sitting on a hastily unrolled shag carpet with my knees tucked. I stare at the blinking, discolored light fixture, wondering if my mother really believes that this place is a home or if she knows that it’s just a house pretending to be.

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Eva Rami is a current junior at the Kinder High School for Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Texas, where she studies creative writing. Eva enjoys writing dramatic scripts and plays that highlight femininity, culture, and change. Her past publications include SILLY GAL Mag, the Octopus Ink Magazine, Blue Marble Review, and Cathartic Literary Magazine. In her free time, Eva enjoys getting stumped over crosswords, perusing used bookstores, and asking strangers to pet their dogs.