New Stories from the Midwest

Captivity

86 Captivity ■ Abby Geni At the age of thirty-one, I moved in with my mother. This was not entirely my fault. My apartment building was about to go condo, and I could no longer afford the rent. My lanky, bookish boyfriend took a job in Florida and unexpectedly moved away. My pet octopus caught a mysterious virus and died; I came home from work and found her bobbing sadly on the surface of her tank, her skin washed clean of color. The combination of all these factors left me listless. I could not cope with the hassle of moving, much less finding a new apartment in my price range, in a good neighborhood , within a matter of weeks. It was much easier to pack everything I owned into boxes and ship it all into storage instead. I liked the feeling of shedding my belongings; it seemed as though the objects that had pinned me to the ground were lifted one by one, rendering me weightless. It was as if my own personality could similarly be purged of excess baggage and rendered new. And so I moved in with my mother, half a mile away in northern Chicago. She put me in my childhood bedroom and didn’t have to ask why I began to spend all my time at work. During the first week of living with her, I managed to stay at the aquarium for three days straight. It became a joke in the cephalopod wing. I tested the water samples, cleaned the tank of algae, and donned scuba gear to feed the big Octopus vulgaris before a crowd. I had never needed much sleep and now subsisted on next to none—a few minutes with my head down on the desk, and I was good for a couple more hours. Even my boss told me to go home, though I thought the octopuses and cuttlefish seemed comforted by the constancy of my presence. When I could no longer focus on my own work, I visited the dolphin boys. They were young, strange men, unfazed by broken femurs and smashed hands, a set of top teeth knocked clean out by a playful flick of the tail. I talked with the sea-horse behaviorist, who was concerned about a fungus killing the algae and plants; it was either caused by the animals or else Captivity ■ 87 dangerous to them. I wandered down to take my break with the sea-otter crew, who all trooped outside every hour on the hour to smoke cigarettes and discuss exactly how Mickey the sea otter had got hold of Charley the trainer’s hat. And then I went home and found photographs of my brother Jordan scattered all around my mother’s house, and she and I looked at one another with a terrible politeness. There was even a photograph of him in my bedroom, though I quickly moved it into the living room, where Mom must have noticed its sudden appearance on the end table. It showed Jordan at the age of five, wearing a purple baseball cap and making his picture smile, a grin so wide it hurt his cheeks and nearly closed his eyes with squinting. In the photo his feet were blurred; he was drumming his heels on the legs of his chair, as though the energy required in so fierce a smile had to shoot out of his body in other ways. It was not my favorite photograph. He looked manic and distressed. I missed my mother more, living under her roof, than I had when we were on opposite ends of the same city. I knew her so well that I could predict, as she sat in the evenings flipping through the paper, when she would crack her knuckles or tilt her head back in a yawn. She was a fascinating woman, her hair silky and chalk-white, her eyes crackling with energy. She dressed like a gypsy: bright shawls, swingy skirts, and hoop earrings. At the age of sixty she still worked at the bookstore down the street from her house and loved to rattle off Einstein’s reasons for supporting the creation of Israel or calmly drop the fact that Maurice Sendak had once claimed all his books were written about the Holocaust. She often returned home with a resigned smile and a grocery bag full of brand-new books, saying, “Well, I just lost it.” It broke my heart that two such interesting women...