Thy Neighbor by Norah Vincent Page A

chimerical, as anything else.
    I see the picture of my mother in my memory’s eye.
    It’s a lie, but I will speak in the language we all understand, just as I have been doing all along, even to myself.
    I will say that I loved my mother, and you will know what I mean. Sort of. We will agree to the common misconception and bask in it.
    I will tell you that I smelled my mother’s ghost again this afternoon when waking, and you will understand what I mean when I say I trust the hallucinations of my nose to conjure feelings that are not true but that I want to indulge anyway.
    I learned this bitter lesson of love from my mother, over time and with repeated frustration. Much and desperately as I loved her and thought I communed with her, or was an intimate part of her and she of me, the fact remains: there was no one there.
    My mother was a mirage. I made her up.
    And, of course, she helped me along, because she was especially good at faking it. I don’t mean that she faked loving me. She bought into that business as much as the rest of us. No, I mean she was good at faking being a person—which is, again, what we all do—but she
knew
she was doing it. She knew she had to do it, and she knew it much sooner than the rest of us ever do or can.
    She knew probably by the time she was a young teenager that she was empty, that this person whom everyone called Diana and looked to for responses, opinions, signs of recognition, for substance of any kind—she knew that this person did not exist.
    And I’m sure, especially coming as it did at such a young age, that this insight was disconcerting to say the very least. Horrifying, I bet. She probably thought that there was something terribly wrong with her. Who wouldn’t? In fact, I’m sure she did, because she spent the rest of her life, and the immensity of her intelligence, first carefully figuring out what was required of her on any given occasion, and then expertly constructing, honing, and perfecting the required delivery.
    Psychiatry will tell you that such a person is a narcissist or, more precisely, suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder. But that’s reductive and, to my mind, just more proof (if any was needed) that many of the things we call disorders are just unpleasant truths about the so-called human condition that we don’t want to face.
    My mother was a genius at being a person from scratch, and she sustained that illusion till the day she died, which must have taken more energy than anyone could possibly imagine.
    It’s boggling, really.
    Think of holding up the constant trick of your existence, knowingly, effortfully, and all for the sake of the people around you who haven’t got a clue.
    That’s the part that really gets me.
    What can it mean to murder such a person? How do you kill someone who isn’t there? And how can they come back to haunt you? I ask myself that all the time. And then I think—maybe that’s exactly why she’s still here in some form, as much or as little as she ever was (and he, too, come to that), a broadcast still bouncing around in the ether.
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    I smelled her when I woke today. I smelled her in the form of clay. The grotto, wilted lily smell of a woman’s compact, and the residue it leaves on her face; the feather catch of powder and blush, just in the back of your throat, and the candy sweet of lipstick. The humid confines of her favorite cavernous leather purse and all its contents came down on me like a blinding bag, as it did when I was a boy when I would plunge my entire head in there, breathe, and look out through the seams at a world too bright for hiding in.
    It was all there again in the scent. The leaky ballpoint pen, the used tissues, crumpled and frayed, her wide lady’s wallet with the change pocket that clipped, its belly full of grimy dollar bills that smelled of pencil lead, and crisp new twenties that didn’t. There were pennies,