A Map of Conditional Love

“How do you think you do under pressure?

I look across at the woman interviewing me. She could be 39, like me. But that is where our similarities end. Everything about her exudes ease. Cashmere layers, warm blonde extensions, oversized diamond studs, a fresh set of acrylic nails. I glance around the dining room of this small restaurant, note the subtle bamboo wallpaper and blue aprons hanging from the wall. From behind the nearby kitchen door, I can hear the hurried, harsh shouts of service starting. Already, the space feels like it’s closing in on me.

I look at my resume on the bistro table between us. Its design seems cartoonish under the fluorescent lighting, the font slightly too large, the graphic trying too hard to distract from the actual job history, which at an easy second look, doesn’t add up. I strain to read the notes she’s made in all the margins. Shame washes over me the way it always does, the way it always has. 

I feel the familiar tentacles of desperation winding upwards, isolation and the urgency of survival writhing up around my wrists and funneling into my throat. I wish we could skip the performance and cut to the only question there is, the only question there has ever been: how has your life been with the center blown out?

Looking over at her Chanel bag, I feel like trying out the truth on her. I don’t have a mother, I want to say. I don’t have a parent who knows or cares where I am right now. Despite a well wishing cohort of friends on the periphery, there is no one in my life with any natural, biological sense of obligation to aid my struggle, or to track how it has compounded.

Sitting here, waiting for this stranger to render judgment on my worth, it is almost impossible to remember that I once had a mother, along with a soft, intact world where there was no question that I belonged. There were heart shaped pancakes, a hand on my forehead, carefully embroidered sundresses. My mother lit the candles for a warm Christmas Eve packed with family, and measured the changing seasons by the number of freckles on my face.

When I was thirteen years old, on a sunny spring Mother’s Day, she was murdered.

Now, my eyes dart out the window, past the interviewer and across the street to the old Amtrak station, then up where the roads curve sharply in a steep incline, and evening sinks into black pockets in the mountains. I am not stranded just anywhere: banned from his hometown, my mother’s murderer was released here, to this county where I live. At last report, he had escaped his transitional housing; and now, driving through the dense landscape, I feel him in the absence of streetlights, the sooty space of side yards, where Christmas lights hang long past the season, and wood stoves left burning sit in run down garages. At the wheel on these backroads, I am blinded by the uneasy neon of every interstate gas station, sense the drawn curtains in a second story window. I double-take, squint, try to come back, constantly convinced that I’ve missed a turn. Once, I persuaded myself that I had slammed my fingers in my car door, even though it didn’t happen. My paranoia is close behind me, the shadow of my mother’s killer closer still.

My interviewer’s phone rings. She silences it and clears her throat, returning me to the present. “Do you think you have a passion for hospitality? Are you a people person?”

I get flashes of all of the restaurant jobs I have had since the age of 18, how my hands used to shake carrying large trays from the kitchen to the dining room, and how my body, on its best day, registers the panic of someone who realizes, five hundred miles into a drive, that she left the oven on back home. Just don’t look down, the old career servers used to snap at me sharply through the kitchen door. Just don’t think about it!

Lately, I am always thinking about it, the land of no mothers. Even the daydream, the thrill of a quick exit from this remote town, comes with a new and sinking permanence that I’m only now getting to know: the question of where exactly I would go, and why. Even if I could, whatever the coordinates, the geography will remain the same, an infinite map of conditional love, a hollow inner grid, clean rows of houses and gated loops with no entrance that feel like an affront to me alone, each patio and door frame set back from the road representing a family I am outside of, a kitchen table where no one waits for me.

I listen as my potential boss assures me, or maybe herself, that the stakes aren’t high here. “It’s first come, first serve, dollar oysters, martinis.” Nothing I haven’t done before. “American fare with a twist. But what about the gap in your resume?”

Which one? I wonder. My life is consumed and defined by the gaps, by the relentless, unpaid internship of parenting yourself, the weary, labored coordination of the next favor, sewn and patched and glued together by the next quick job, the willing friend, the right state agency.

A nagging pain in the center of my chest reminds me that I was reluctant even to let go of quarters for the meter to park next to the owner’s Tesla. In fourteen days my car will be repossessed. I smooth the back of my ponytail, reach up and touch my earrings, mindful of the cruelest irony: the more you need help, the more you must ensure that you don’t seem to need it. I am careful not to reveal a hint of my recently committed cardinal sin—which is to say, I stayed frozen a moment too long when my mother’s killer was released, a grenade thrown into the house of cards I had constructed for myself. Paralyzed, staring at the ceiling, stunned and despondent, I stopped moving. I lost a steady job that included my housing and couldn’t find another one. My health declined; a cough I couldn’t shake went deeper, and my lungs filled with fluid. Now, I have been swiftly returned to that parent of all parents, the most reliable of teachers: low wage work that no one else wants to do. This is one of twenty interviews I’ve had during this area’s cold “dead season,” staring down the tunnel of service work and hoping it can save me.

At a nearby table, a woman is celebrating. A candle in a crème brûlée to share. Many Happy Birthdays. A single tap on the burnt surface with her spoon, and the confection shatters.

As I glance at neighboring tables, the steaming plates and smiling faces vanish, the benign chatter and fragmented laughter fade. All I can see is a giant web of invisible support connecting these strangers. Instead of patrons, I see co-signers, wedding gifts, hand-me-down couches and movers, rides, deposits, guidance, a startlingly quick voice on the other end of a call. A floor you can’t fall through. A sense of safety I’ll never know again.

“No holidays off, not when you’re new,” she says. “And we don’t say customer, we say guest,” she tells me, as she motions to a busser and whispers in his direction.

I wonder if that means I got this job, and if it will matter at all that I did. I think about my fellow citizens in this punishing land of absent mothers, all of us who will never be just a phone call away from a safe landing, or a dependable pickup up from a bad sleepover, and how we cannot buy ourselves the distance, or perspective, or reassurance we need to build a bridge over the great expanse of grief we were promised we’d someday cross. Instead, we are left here, building our champagne tower, layer after layer after layer, each tiny glass stem supporting another surface of paper thin flutes, threatened by even an exhale, responsible for a crash.