In Limbo

     I had big dreams when I was a child. My mother said I was incredibly hard to contain when I was growing up. That wasn’t due to physical activities; I never cared much for sports, running, or even playing with pretty dolls. I was hard to contain because I was always in my mind.

“Coming up with some insane story again, are you?” I remember my mother asking me more than once during my younger years. I would simply nod and continue staring off into space. Thinking was one of my favorite things to do as a child.

***

Some parents see a parallel of themselves with their child the older they grow. No one ever says how old, though. Oliver is six now, and he is a spitting image of his father. Not a single strand of hair matches my DNA. Oliver runs around the living room as if he is racing invisible mice concealed in the white carpet. The carpet is blindingly white; I make sure of it. The carpet is one element of the house that I am proud of; one of the few things I can maintain.

The only mess is Oliver’s black shirt, which has a large white mayonnaise stain from lunch.

***

I didn’t eat sloppily as a child; my mother raised me better than that.

“Eat like a lady. Never let a man see the food you chew inside of your mouth.”

I was only seventeen when I met my husband. At first sight, I felt nothing, but he felt love. He offered himself to me repeatedly, regardless of how much I sent him away, turning my head away from his repeated attempts to kiss my hand or take me by the waist. After long months, my mother slapped me across the face.

“This boy likes you.”

“But what if I don’t like him?” I ask Mother.

“You have no say in that; you are a woman.”

So I agreed to a date with the boy. The date was entirely stale, as one could expect at the age of seventeen. Dinner at the local diner, crowded with high school students sipping from the same milkshake with two interlocked straws, followed by a trip to the theater. The date ended with a long, “romantic” walk through the over lit tunnel that linked my house to his. And the school, and the diner, and the theater. It ended with a kiss that lacked something to be desired. I have no say in this. When he asks me out again, I agree. At the age of eighteen, I find myself standing in front of him in a different aisle.

***

“Oliver,” I beg as my child runs around my legs, dirt and grime sticking to his body as if it were a parasite, residing underneath his skin and refusing to leave its new host. I don’t recall the last time I bathed my child; perhaps I should know. Perhaps I am a bad mother. There is too much else to do around the house: feed the child, make sure the child does not die, clean the carpet, cook dinner, clean the dishes, make sure the child does not crawl into the oven to sit with the dinner, appease the husband, put the child to bed, cry myself to sleep, never sleep, get up in the morning to do it all again.

I have the bath drawn, but he’s running around in his suit of dirt. At least he’s not on the carpet.

***

My childhood house and my current one have no windows, so I had to imagine how the outside looked. Mother told me not to worry about the outside; I didn’t need it. A tunnel connected our house to my school and back again. Mother never left the house; a good mother and wife shouldn’t.

I decided that the sky outside would be pink with purple cotton candy in the sky, delicious and sickening when taken in excess amounts. The ground would be like a carpet, but not that white that mother never kept clean, but I do now. It would be blue, vibrant blue, and never yellow or white. The best part of the outside was that once I entered it, I could never go back inside. I wouldn’t have to go back to my mother or the boy my mother wanted me to date because I had no other choice. I wish I could live in the outside forever.

***

Oliver never dreams about the outside, but he did ask me about it once. He asked why his father walks through the tunnel every day for work and what lies beyond the doors, but I never answer him. The husband never answers him either: maybe we don’t have the energy to make up some nice story. I spoiled him with toys, so he would never concern himself with what lays outside the doors labeled “DO NOT OPEN.”

***

Oliver watches me now, his eyes stretched out with curiosity. For once, he is still. He needs a bath. He’s filthy. I can’t clean him enough.

“Mother? Please.”

I let go of his shoulders that I have been holding tightly, and he pushes himself up, the water of the bathtub coming now just up to his ears. He continues to watch me, but I don’t say a thing. He’s expecting an apology; men always are.

The clock strikes loudly, ringing five times. The husband will arrive soon, and he will require feeding.

***

I’m still not fully sure how the food appears at the door; it just does. It’s for our convenience, mother told me long ago, so that we don’t have to leave the house. Sometimes I will forget about the food when I am busy, or my mind is on the outside. It will sit outside the door the whole day, permeating the whole tunnel with the odor of rotting food, until the husband comes home and slaps me across the cheek for forgetting. I tell him that now, at least, it will have some flavor.

***

Mother taught me how to cook, but I still despise doing it. I do not eat; I never really did. Mother was proud of that; I would never let a man see the inside of my mouth as I chew.

The husband enters with a loud clattering, making a show to remove his shoes as loudly as possible and drop his briefcase with a loud thump. Sometimes he is alerting Oliver that he is home, other times he is mocking me since I have nothing to drop. Oliver comes running, as he always does, and the husband lifts him and places him against his hip. My child chatters away about his day while the husband listens, and the wife stays in her place.

***

Bedtime is the hardest time for Oliver, as he cannot settle himself. His mind, I suppose, is like mine in some form. He throws a fit until I give up, and his father puts him to bed instead. Oliver asks for a story. He soaks up the information his father gives him about his day. He tells a story about a client he had—it was a woman who tried to leave the inside.

“What happened to her?” Oliver asks, his large eyes shrinking as sleep begins to steal him.

“She will be executed,” the husband responds.

Oliver, half asleep, smiles.

***

I recall my husband bringing home stories of the women who tried to escape: a few men as well, but it was mostly women who were unhappy with their lives. I don’t blame them; the men can exit the house through the tunnel and visit the bar if they please. Then they can return home, reeking of smoke and drink, expecting the home to appear the same. Women must slave over our children and husbands, reeking of bleach and failure.

They all stand trial, the escapees, and they scream as if they had gone mad (maybe they have, depending on what they saw). They all get the same fate. They are a danger to society, to the safety of our little bubble. It makes sense, to them at least.

***

I cried selfishly when my mother died. I was twenty. There were so many things she did not teach me, and Oliver was only one at the time. How would I be a good housewife with a child? How can I balance the responsibility of a house and a child? How can I balance the chaos in my mind? Mother never knew the answer to that question, just as much as I know the answer now. She would tell me to ignore it. It’s not important.

“It’s wrong for a woman to do so much thinking, you know. You should stop. No good will come from it. There is no place for you in that world.”

I don’t know if she means the world that I am creating in my head or the world that I am living in. The world that she had the great pleasure to finally leave. I don’t know which one she means, but I understand all the same.

I never knew my father. He died when I was a child. Mother never remarried, of course. After finishing school, she never got the chance to go and meet somebody else. She never left the house, even while I was at school. Maybe that’s why everything in the house was so clean in ways I can never keep up in my house. Except for the carpet; the carpet is perfectly white, even with every stain Oliver attempts to put into it. It should remain perfect; it has to remain perfect.

***

I lay awake during the night, or what I have come to assume is the night. Any room can appear as the night when the lights have turned off. It’s a placebo, forced to make us believe that there is a sense of time in this world. But there is no sense of time or sense of self: not outside of this room, outside of this house, or outside of my head.

I often wonder if my husband will die someday, the way my father did. I wonder how that will bother me; I wonder if it will bother me. Oliver would be crushed, not to have his father. The husband teaches him so much: how to play, make a mess, be a boy and a child, and grow up to treat women the way that he does. I am a tool to both the child and the husband, and someday, when Oliver has grown, he will meet a girl he will treat the same way. Her mother will look her in the eye and say she has to give herself to my son because she has no other choice. I will have no say in this, the way that she will have no say in this. My son will have all the power, as he will be the only one who has a say in this.

This child will have the say in this.

And the girl will have nothing.

The girl will be nothing.

I am nothing.

***

When I was twenty-one, I plotted an escape. Oliver was two at the time, still enough of a baby to need me but independent enough to know he owned me. I put Oliver down for his nap at one o’clock in the afternoon according to the clock that hung on the wall, bland and white with silently ticking hands. With hands shaking, I turned the knob of our wooden door until it seized under me, and the wood creaked as I pushed it open. The door jammed before it could open all the way, momentarily stopping my heart. Grunting, I pushed until the husband stepped out of the way. He used to come home for lunch. He pushed me back inside, and he shook his head, his blond hair defying his disappointment and sitting perfectly above his forehead. He wouldn’t let me out; I belong to the house.

***

Oliver stares at me as I walk past him in the morning, hours after the husband had left for work, but he does not say a thing. His wide eyes stare at me, but I don’t meet them. I touch his hair as I walk by. The husband’s hair. It doesn’t move.

“Mother?” He calls as my hand falls on the doorknob. It is ice underneath my pale hand, burning my skin and sending a shiver of excitement up my spine. I turn to him, and I give him a small smile.

“Go play, Oliver,” I speak softly, my words catching in my throat, “I will too.”

The food sits outside the door, but I step over it. It will begin to rot soon, and the husband will yell when he comes home to find it untouched. He will pose his arm, ready to slap me across the face as he enters the house. The child will not care to bring it in, and neither will he, even when he finds me gone. I shut the door, leaving the child alone in the house without casting a glance back. So close. I’m so close to finding the pink sky and the purple cotton candy that I can eat all I want until I get sick all over the blue grass. The large metal door has a flashing sign now, stating “DO NOT OPEN.” A warning sits underneath it:

“Opening the door will lead to immediate execution. No one is to open this door. There’s nothing for you out there.”

***

As a child, I would daydream for hours about what the outside was like, but it was always the same, no matter how the image has changed. It was better than the world in here.

***

I push on the large metal door, and it opens with little restraint. A bright light blinds me monetarily, but I don’t shield my eyes. They become accustomed to the light after a moment, my pupils falling to their normal size again. My hand stays on the door, my body still frozen. White goes as far as I can see outside the door. There are no vibrant colors, only dull grass lying dead beneath me. Gray and white and nothing more; the sky’s the color of the book pages that described the world we had ruined. I could lay down on the ground, my cheek pressed to the carpet, and stare into this same view I had inside. But the outside is infinite and full of choices. Choices I can make once my foot hits the white ground.

***

“What if I don’t want to marry him?”

“You have to. You have no say in that.”