Irina Iriser for Unsplash
My mother’s closet is where I learned her secrets. I gathered and hoarded the secrets until I could use them. Until they meant something to me.
The closet itself was a long, shadowy enclosure filled with my mother’s clothes. She wore rose-colored robes that fell to her ankles, pale silk pants knotted at her waist, and yellow sweaters cropped just below her breasts. She had exquisite clothes and gorgeous shoes, but we, her daughters, were never allowed to touch, wear, or share in their vibrancy.
Sometimes, I would sneak into her bedroom, with its dark walls, wood floors, and soft, piled-up furniture. I would enter her closet, shut the doors, and rustle quietly amongst all of those lovely things. The closet doors were old-fashioned and slatted. If she came into the room while I was hidden away, I could watch her move about her room privately. I learned many things in the closet. I learned where my mother hid her most expensive perfume, which drawer was full of green dollar bills, the tender way my mother spoke on the phone.
I was the only one of my mother’s four daughters to hide in the closet. No one else felt as much interest in my mother’s doings as I did. We weren’t close to her, even though we all remained in the same house. We went back and forth between our home, school, work, and the places our boyfriends lived. But we always returned to the white farmhouse, which rose above the surrounding green fields and trees as if it had grown right up out of the ground like some glorious fungus.
My mother was a distant person, a cold mother. She had a handful of girls with our father, a mysterious figure we’d never really met. He had left after the youngest of us had been born. The rest of us were only a couple of years old. Viola was the oldest, so she had blurry recollections of what he had been like. She said he’d been tall and handsome with the red hair we’d all been born with. He wasn’t much like our mother, and neither were we. We took after our father with our purple eyes, our red hair, and freckled lips.
Our mother was small and dark-haired with dusky shadows on her face and hazy eyes that slipped right past us when we happened to be in front of her. But she had a lot of money, so she kept all the daughters when our father vanished. We learned not to ask questions; she simply wouldn’t answer them. But we did learn to cook and clean and to stay out of her way. The house, overall, was a girlish house, full of laundry and glass bottles of scented lotion and fruit rotting spectacularly in bowls before we’d remember to eat it.
I was hiding in the closet when I learned my mother’s true name. She was on the bed, naked. Her face was upturned to a man I’d never seen before. He was big and brown and also nude. He had one hand on her shoulder; the other tipped her chin up so that his face could meet hers. Though she was small and had waves of silk hair where he had none, their shadows looked the same.
He called her by the name I knew her by. He called her Virginia. But, at a crucial moment, after some time had passed and the vigorous motion between the two of them had gone this way and that, she leaned down from her perch astride him and whispered into his ear. The closet I was in was close enough; I heard it all.
Her name, she whispered, was not, in fact, Virginia. Her name was Vienna, and she could only reach the level if he called her by her true name. When he said her name, when he called out “Vienna,” she moaned loudly. The blankets rippled outwards from their conjoined bodies, and the room suddenly got brighter, and I felt a shiver run down all of our spines.
When I told my three sisters, after my mother and the man were done, and I had crawled weary and wondering from the closet, the shock I felt was visible on their faces. We sat in a circle between the towering lilac bushes in the backyard. It was early, with dark, threatening skies and a cool breeze. Our mother was inside, washing her hair; the faint scent of her almond shampoo could be smelled even amid all the lilacs.
We often gathered in the backyard, which opened up into the wild fields. Beyond the fields, full of overgrown ferns and low trees, and green bushes dotted here and there with blood-poisoning ticks like beauty marks, ran the river, and then the neighborhoods of the town we lived on the outskirts of. We convened in the garden because our mother couldn’t hear us there. Because we could see her coming.
We weren’t shocked that my mother had been having sex with a strange man. She did that sometimes. She didn’t explain herself, except to tell us that it was perfectly natural and to stay out of the way when she had a guest over. Our mother was just like that. She treated us like roommates, especially now that we were older. We didn’t mind it too much. Sex wasn’t something we balked at. In fact, the last of us, Vega, was the only virgin left. And it wasn’t something she feared. She glowed when she thought about it. It was only a matter of time before she, too, would join us to leave the farmhouse to find someone to nuzzle into, returning home only when she’d satisfied herself.
No, it wasn’t the sex. It was the fact that our mother wasn’t named Virginia.
Vega, round and reductive, somehow, in both speech and body, felt that it was shocking, yes, but nothing more than a meaningless secret that our mother had every right to keep from us. Vega was only fifteen, so she felt the closest to our mother, though none of us could seriously claim to be close to someone like her. Still, it had only been fifteen years since Vega had been in our mother’s stomach, listening to her thoughts, so Vega could claim a reasonable sense of camaraderie.
Victorina, who was the second-oldest at twenty, with a flip of her horsey red hair, said that she had always known our mother was sneaky. Of all the things our mother kept from us, this really took the cake. “She’s not to be trusted,” said Victorina.
But Viola, the eldest of us all, a wise, worldly twenty-three, saw two sides to the situation. On one hand, felt Viola, was the dangerous fact that our mother was not who we thought our mother to be. The treachery of hiding something like a true name from her daughters belied the nature of our house, our home, and perhaps even us as people.
“I was raised a daughter of a Virginia,” said Viola, her eyes heavy with lashes like fences, her shell-peach mouth forming dark words. “Not a Vienna. Who is Vienna? Who is Virginia? What else is she hiding from us?”
We nodded, exchanging furtive looks. The grass underneath us tingled. The earth felt like it was vibrating, like the soil beneath us was shuddering all over with the excitement we felt. We were on the verge of something. We could sense it.
“On the other hand,” said Viola, blinking solemnly, as the light of a flashing sun caught her in the eye, as the lilacs tossed in the wind, as someone distantly laughed, “she doesn’t know we know. She didn’t want us to know her name. Why,” Viola laughed nastily, reaching out to touch my arm with a black-glossed finger, “would she not want us to know? What would we do with her name? Why could she not trust us with her name?”
Like smoke, the thought dispersed itself amongst us and settled uneasily in the cracks. The wind blew. A bell somewhere rang.
It was Viola who first said it.
“Vienna,” Viola said.
“Vienna,” Victorina said.
“Vienna,” Vega said.
“Vienna,” I said.
As I spoke, the wind hit the lilacs suddenly, fanning them out fiercely, and a sound like the crack of a whip slashed through the air. From the open window of the white bathroom came the sound of my mother screaming. A thousand bubbles escaped, floating in and out of the intermittent sunshine. The bubbles were full and varicolored, moving without limit on the back of the thrashing wind.