head egg

The mother hit the corner of her eye hard on the window knob. She oommphed gutturally out loud but nobody heard. She collapsed face down on her daughter’s bed, which she had been making when her eye whacked into the knob. Her daughter had texted her from school asking her to make the bed. This was a first. The daughter was having a “very smart girl” come over after school to work on their science project. The mother supposed that was why her daughter had asked for her bed to be made. The woman lay there, face in the covers, for a long time. She allowed the corner of her eye to swell, pulse, heat. She could feel the egg grow on the side of her face.

She remembered her mother’s egg. Her mother had fallen out of bed, hit her forehead on the side table, and broken her arm. She had not been able to come for Christmas. After Christmas, the woman had visited her mother and seen the egg on her head. It was still huge. She had made her mother buy one of those fall-down-alert necklaces and wear it to the doctor’s office. In the cold small hospital room, while waiting for the doctor to arrive, she had started to laugh so hard she could pee in her pants when she looked at her mother, sitting there, with the egg on her head, and the alert dangling around her neck, like a statement necklace. Then, they both started laughing uncontrollably, tears coming out of their eyes, until the doctor came in.

Now, the woman had her own egg on her own head. She put ice on it, and it hurt. There was this thing that happened when she hurt. It was like she could not get enough. She could not get enough sympathy, empathy, or whatever the word was. She just could not get any kind of enough. And so, when she told her husband about the window knob, and showed him her egg, his reply, and she could not remember what it had been, was certainly not enough.

Later, in the evening, she pointed the egg out to her daughter and told her what happened. The daughter ooooohhhed and awwwwwed and said oh my god, are you OK? And, for this split second, her daughter was her mother saying those words – her dead mother. And the woman let herself feel that enough-ness. But then she shook herself out of it and told herself, your daughter should not be your mother. Your daughter should not take care of you. So, the woman said blithely, yeah I’m fine, it looks worse that it feels.

This was not the first time her daughter had been her mother, or been like her mother, she should say. They were, after all, the same astrological signs – her mother and her daughter – Cancer. But the woman did not know what that really meant, although she felt it meant something. Her daughter had recently started to say certain things, and it was like her mother was coming out of her daughter’s mouth. It was so delightful to the woman. She laughed so hard, tears came to her eyes, and she said to herself, I know this feeling, this feels so good. But it also scared her. She was confused if she should delight in her daughter becoming her mother. No, it’s wrong, she would say to herself, she needs to just be herself.

When the daughter was little, when her head hurt, she would say she had a head egg. She meant headache, but they let her say head egg until she figured out it was wrong. Still, sometimes, her daughter said it just to be funny. The woman’s other daughter was no one else’s astrological sign. She was all her own sign. Her other daughter hadn’t noticed, or had noticed, but hadn’t mentioned, the woman’s head egg.

The next day, the woman put heavy layers of creamy make-up over her bruised egg so that her clients would not think she was a victim of domestic violence. But some kind of domestic violence had occurred. She had backed her eye into the window knob, and it had taken her breath away, and she had laid face down on her daughter’s bed for some time. She had not gotten enough, and then she had gotten enough for a brief moment, but had felt bad about it, so bad. And then, there she was, listening to other people’s, other kinds of domestic violence. Somehow, she noticed that sitting with them, listening, and oohhhing and ahhing at their eggs, she felt some kind of enough, just enough of some kind of enough. But it was enough for them, not for her. She would never have her mother’s enough. That was over, and she had to be her own enough, and it hurt.