Ah, I think, so this is autumn: the season when spiders come inside. But the spider and I stand still, together outside time. I peer into the corner from a safe distance and wrap the towel tighter around me.
Water begins to pool on the floor at my feet. I eyeball the spider. Evening continues. When my mother still rescued me from spiders, she could scoop them up with her bare hands. I remember those bitten nails and her freckled forearms. Can you open the window for me please, doll? And I would fling the window open and retreat. My mother would lean out and place the spider onto a plant. There you are. I am large, I am clumsy. I have so few legs.
She seldom talked down to us. Saturday mornings were for dozing in bed or drinking bottomless cups of milky tea and reading. She read dense, philosophical novels by Iris Murdoch and Elias Canetti. There, her thoughts could splash in a pool that lay out of reach on regular days, while she taught small children how to wash their hands and played nursery rhymes on the piano.
You see, when she met my father, my mother was tiny and boyish and cute, an Ethics tutor in Dunedin, all high-waisted corduroys and a shaggy haircut. She wielded her mind like a paring knife.
Principled and exact. Eventually, she was dragged kicking and screaming her words to Wellington. After she got pregnant with my older brother, her PhD withered and fell away. It was a word that engulfed women. I nodded solemnly. Also, I liked using her name and said it before all my questions, certain my mother had all the answers.
