"Fake It"

 "Fake It"

To this day, I cannot remember what exactly led to this event. But I do remember the mosquitoes of Bishop, Texas.

Breath hitching in my throat, I swat at another mosquito on my arm. But I’m too late. I scratch at the already reddening spot, and my 3^rd grade teacher named Mrs. Barbour reaches for my hand as we both go to cross the street.

Other kids attending Bishop Primary School rush and bustle past us, eager to head home for the day. I recognize a few from my class, but nobody says goodbye, and neither do I.

We’re a year into living at this tiny town we’ve recently called home. And Bishop really is a small town with a tight-knit community. Every Sunday, my mother wakes us all early to go to the Saint Paul Lutheran Church. There’s always some kind of outburst or fight during the chaos that comes with having to dress three stubborn children. Miraculously, my mother managed to load us all up and get us to church on time for Sunday School. Church was the only place she was ever on time for.

At 9:00 a.m, us children went to Sunday School. At 10:30 a.m was when the “divine service” took place, or so the old ladies of the congregation called it. The doors leading into the classrooms for Sunday School were all vividly colored doors, and I always wondered why they made sure to color the doors but not the plain, red bricks that make up the building’s sturdy foundation. I always liked playing outside in the playground out back, past the basketball courts. There me and my brother often ended up wrestling with Ryan and Jared, our new neighbors. One day Mrs. V, a Sunday School teacher, had to pry me off Jared and cease fire to the onslaught of pebbles being thrown between my brother and Ryan.

For the main church service, my mother fusses more than usual over our clothes and our hair. If we had time to go to the playground, my clothes were always dirty and ragged. Then, all of us—my sister, my brother, my mother, and my father— listened to Pastor Frankie preach the word of God, though I always spent more time doodling in the pamphlets tucked away in the seat in front of us, where our knees are. I do not always understand what he says, but I do understand that there is a God that we must love or else we’ll be in time out for a very long time.

For school today, my mother dressed me with tights, a skirt, and a shirt that says ‘princess,’ with white gloves adorning my arms. Having been a clothing designer before she got married and had kids, my mother is able to explore her passion of fashion onto us. Sometimes I feel like a puppet. Other times I really do feel like a princess. I cannot remember the last time she bought clothes for herself, and even to this day, she’ll buy clothes for us in a heartbeat, but not for herself.

“Hi, Mrs. Reeves,” Mrs. Barbour says as we approach my mother’s car where her window is rolled down. My mother quickly puts out her cigarette.

            “Good afternoon, Mrs. Barbour,” My mother says with a smile.

            My teacher glances down at me then back at my mother. “I’m very worried about Sarah. She just seems so sad. I tried talking to her today, but I couldn’t get her to smile? I thought I’d talk to you about it.” The teacher releases my hand, and my mother gets out to open the door to the van for me, her smile turning into a concerned frown. Inside, I can smell the strong bitterness of the smoke from her cigarettes. A cough builds in the back of my throat, but I stifle it.

            “I’ll talk to her about it,” My mother says, but her voice lowers as I turn to stare out the window; she doesn’t want me to hear, but I can still hear her hushed voice nonetheless. “She’s having trouble making friends.”

            “Some kids take longer to come out of their shell. Why don’t you put her in our UIL?”

            I lose interest in my mom’s conversation with my teacher and watch other kids play with a soccer ball next to the sidewalk. I want to hop through the door of the minivan and join them, even though I am wearing tights and a skirt.

            When the teacher leaves, my mother pulls out of the parking lot and begins driving.

            “Sarah, what did I tell you?” She asks, lighting another cigarette as she keeps the window rolled down so the smoke won’t hit me, even though it still does. My eyes tear a little when a powerful whiff hits my nostrils. “You’ll never make friends if you don’t come out of your shell. If you think people are scared of you, it’s because you don’t smile at anyone. I’ve told you time and time again, smiling makes a huge difference.” She pauses and sighs. “Just...tomorrow, be happy, okay?”

            “Why?” I ask. At the time, I knew that people could be happy. I knew that I was. I just didn’t see the connection between having to smile to show I’m happy.

            She throws her arms up in exasperation. “I don’t know! Act happy, even if you have to fake it, okay? Fake it.”

            I stare hard out the window as we continue driving home, her words seeming to stick with me as our mutual silence ensues the rest of the way.

The next day, I do what my mother said. I smile even when I feel no need to. During recess, a group of girls ask me to play with them. We sit underneath a large, shaded tree, and the girls gush about Cody telling someone that Samantha is cute. But Cody’s a boy? Gross! I want to say, but I don’t. They mention a word I’ve never heard before, so I ask what it means. They all laugh before realizing I am serious. “Gossiping means to talk about someone,” the most popular girl named Addison with the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen tells me. As they go on to talk about even more boys, I keep glancing at the boys on the field, playing soccer. Playing soccer seems more fun than gossiping.

At the end of the day, Mrs. Barbour walks me to my mother’s car again. Hand-in-hand, with me mindlessly scratching at the mosquito bite on my arm, we trek past excited kids. Addison says goodbye to me with a beaming smile that I return. By now, though, my lips are hurting from straining so much. I want so badly to rest them, but I am determined to keep this up until I am with my mother.

“Mrs. Reeves, I don’t know what got into Sarah, but she was so happy today!” Mrs. Barbour gushes as soon as we are in earshot of my mother, who had again quickly put her cigarette out when she sees us. “I don’t know what it was, but she spoke to the kids and played games during recess. She was like a completely different person.”

From the corner of my eye, I see my mother smile in relief.

“Sweetheart, what were you so happy about today?” My teacher asks me. My mother opens her door and stands in front of the Tahoe, opening the back door for me to get in.

“My mom told me to fake it,” I say.

My teacher’s smile quickly dissipates, and for a few moments, I feel my mom’s horrified stare boring into me. I quickly turn away from my teacher’s flabbergasted expression and climb into the car. Behind me, I hear my mom laughing louder than she normally does.

“Why in the world would you tell her that?” my mother rages as she drives home faster than usual, taking sharper turns. She smokes cigarette after cigarette. I don’t even think she breathes in between lighting them. She even swerves a few time when her attention is diverted on lighting a new one. I clutch hard onto the seat, my stomach churning.

“I don’t know,” I reply quietly, the typical phrase as a kid you’d use when you didn’t quite know how to word something, or when you were in the bathroom with a pack of gum and the teacher looked at you accusingly and said, Do you have gum? ‘I don’t know’ is a typical reply when you don’t want to lie, but you don’t want to tell the truth either. 

“How embarrassing,” my mother mutters, flicking her cigarette bud against the window as she exhales, the dark wisps of smoke filtering out into the bright afternoon light.

After a few minutes of silence, I ask, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“At Sunday school, Mrs. V told us that God sent his one and only son to die.”

“That’s right. So what’s your question?”

“I thought God was good?”

“God sent Jesus to die on the cross for us,” my mother replies. “Without Jesus, none of us would be here right now.”

“But why did he have to die on a cross?”

“To take away our sins. Honestly, Sarah, you’ll understand more of this when you’re older. All you have to understand for now is that God sent Jesus to save us all from our sins. You remember what sins are, right?” she turns to glance at me over her shoulder, putting out one of her cigarettes in the ashtray sitting on the middle console.

“Sins are when we do bad things,” I say.

“Yes. Like stealing, fighting with your brother—”

            “Lying,” I interject softly, and I see my mother’s shoulders stiffen.

            “Yes,” she says curtly. “That is one of the ten commandments.”

            “Is smoking a sin?”

            For a couple of seconds, she doesn’t reply. We’re turning into Aurora Street, our neighborhood. The first house on the right is my best friend Shelby’s house. She’s two years older than me, so I don’t see her much at school. On our left is Jordan’s, someone who forever boggles my mind. My mother told me that he was born sick. Every time I see him, he’s sweating a lot, even when it’s winter, and he always breathes really hard, like my brother with asthma does when he is really sick. It isn’t until she pulls into the driveway of our small, pink-bricked house, and I can see my father starting to cook dinner through the front window that she says, “I don’t know.”

            Ten years later, I’m a 21-year-old woman. My grandmother on my father’s side was admitted to the hospital the day before Thanksgiving of 2016 with chronic bronchitis and emphysema, two lung diseases related to smoking cigarettes. She got out of the hospital okay, but now she has to carry an oxygen tank everywhere she goes, which means she can kiss going to my parent’s cabin in Colorado in the summers goodbye. The high elevation will have too much of an effect on her already struggling lungs to risk it.

            I will not delve into my mother’s habits to this day, but I will delve into the darkness of smoking tobacco smoke. My mother has a beautiful, kind hearted soul, and she is the most spiritual person I know. Most mornings, when the rest of us are still fast asleep, as the sun is just starting to rise over the horizon, my mother can be seen standing right underneath the warm rays of the morning light, with her arms outstretched towards the sky, her eyes closed, and face peaceful.

            “I’ve never seen an angel before,” my father has said to me. “Until I met your mother.”

But when it comes to her addiction of smoking, the addiction often takes over all of that. She will choose smoking over so many things in her life—her faith, food, even water itself. Unlike my father, who has made the conscious decision of attempting to quit over the years, my mother has not tried. For this I will hold no judgement on her behalf because I cannot fathom what it is like to be that addicted to something, to the point where I feel like I will die without it, even though it is slowly killing me.

            I thought it was difficult to fake smiling as a child, but now I know it’s so much more difficult to fake my concerns and anger and frustration and sadness when I see her hands trembling as she lights that cigarette first thing in the morning, or when I am heading to bed for the night and see her step outside to light her one last cigarette for the day. All the empty cigarette cartons laying around our house. There is an angel statue we have next to our front door, a little girl cradling, with her hands bowed in prayer. In her hands lies mountains of used cigarette buds. When her voice goes out every morning, her lungs wheezing, and she says it’s allergies and I don’t argue.

That’s the thing about cigarettes. With all the warnings on the back, all the testimonies from victims of its aftermath, excruciating deaths from lung cancer are likely to sneak up on you. All the warnings and facts are there, written behind or on the side of every cigarette carton, warning the calamities that smoking entails.

But, someone must make the ultimate decision to quit, which is not an easy challenge to overcome. In fact, a challenge is a massive understatement. Upon recalling this vivid memory of mine, I have discovered that little compares to watching someone you love slowly destroy themselves.

It makes me wonder why? And the answer is simply I don’t know.