Learning
by Meagan Stallworth
“Ew. What happened to your hands?” Joanne asked David.
He looked at his hands, both of them wetly stained with blood from his own welts and the dog’s mouth. He was embarrassed that he still needed lotion and tucked them back into his jacket pockets.
“Nothing,” he told her.
Now, Joanne was fixing her hair.
“What happened to your arms?” David blurted.
He startled his mother and she dropped her comb. Leaning over to pick it up from beneath her feet, she mumbled his response right back to him.
“Nothing,” she told him.
There was silence after that. A few minutes later, the car was started, and the trip back to their home had begun. Joanne pulled out of the large driveway and past all of the big houses until the neighborhood became the highway. Her hands gripped the wheel so tightly that her veins were growing more and more visible.
David found the lotion. It was beneath a pile of mechanical pencils underneath the passenger seat. He smeared the lotion all over his hands until his blood turned it as pink as Joanne’s bubble gum, which she was no longer chewing. He grabbed one of the mechanical pencils, too. He clicked it incessantly, like small children often do with the backs of remotes or the lids on their toy boxes. He held it up to his ear, infatuated with the noise. It almost sounded like a gun cocking, David thought.
“Put that damn thing down, David. It’s dangerous. You could hurt yourself.” Joanne said while trying to pull her shirt together to cover her front side, irritated with the sound.
David didn’t stop. He didn’t hear his mother. He was thinking how the puppy’s leg had made a sound like that earlier. He couldn’t decide whether or not it sounded more like the gun or the dog. So he clicked it faster and faster until Joanne swerved to the shoulder of the highway, reached into the back seat, and grabbed David’s face as hard as she could with her left hand. Her nails pressed sharply into his cheeks.
“You don’t listen to anything that I say!” Joanne screamed as she shook his head with the inflections in her voice. She looked into her son’s face for the first time in hours and paused.
“You act more and more like your Daddy and Granddaddy every damn day. Like three hateful peas in a fucking pod,” Joanne said in a lower voice than before. David didn’t like peas.
“You don’t have anything to say?” she asked.
He didn’t. Joanne let her grip on his face go and used the same hand to slap him. The noise was much louder than her gum. Maybe even louder than her screaming, David thought. He touched his stinging cheek and Joanne had turned around before his gums began to bleed.
She reached into the dashboard and handed David some of the napkins she had used. David grabbed a few, and thanked her. His mother placed the rest of the napkins on the passenger seat and her hands slowly back on the wheel.
“You’re welcome David,” she said softly.
He patted his face a little. His body ached from a lot of places. He hugged the napkins in his fists, squeezing tightly. It felt good to David to hear his mother talk so quietly. He smiled about the change in her, even though he knew that the next day, or even later on that evening, she would be yelling again. He rested his face back on the glass. There was only darkness in between the tree trunks on the highway now, and they didn’t seem to be moving at all anymore as David watched. Maybe next time, he thought, they would visit a surgeon or a police man and the trees would be even bigger.
He placed his hands in his jacket pockets again, and as he fell deeper into sleep, his grip did not loosen on his mother’s white napkins still clutched between his fingers. As Joanne drove, they drooped deeper into David’s pockets, growing heavy with blood until they weren’t white anymore. Just when he began to drift off to sleep, he remembered what his dream had been about earlier. David spent the silent ride home trying to forget again and succeeded.
