---

---

 

Pretend I am your mother. Pretend you love me the way you did when you were small, and the world was big, and you could still feel, in some deep primordial way, that not so long ago, my body created your soul.

With my children, it was always Pretend. They begged me to play with them from breakfast till bedtime. The games they came up with were easily the best part of parenthood. They cast me as an evil queen, a shark, a puppy, a ballerina, a nurse, a knight.

At the park, my son cried, “You’re a bull! You’re a bull and you see red, and you chase me!”

At the beach, my daughter said, “I’m a fairy mermaid. And you’re a clam. No, Mommy, you can’t talk. Or move. You’re a clam. You watch me dance.”

They loved Pretend so much, I began using it to my advantage. Pretend the Chores Witch is coming. She can’t enter a tidy room, but she’ll get you if the bed isn’t made. Pretend Jesus can hear your prayers as he suffers on the cross. They reach him across space and time. Each recitation of the Lord’s Prayer eases his pain just a little. Pretend aliens are invading, and only a forcefield powered by multiplication will keep us safe.

I’d say, “Five times two is….”

“Ten!” my daughter would shout, and I’d make a whoosh sound, which was the forcefield growing stronger.

They outgrew Pretend before I did. Now, my daughter is twenty-three years old. She lives far away and has a job researching existential risks. When I ask what that means, she talks about resilient food sources that will save us in the event of nuclear wars and supervolcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts. It’s important work, she says. It keeps her very busy.

For someone who doesn’t have time to call, she certainly has time for Twitter. That’s where I see her opinions about things like the Lotus Sutra (good), cryptocurrency (also good), AI (bad), and social institutions (it’s complicated).

She doesn’t know I’m on Twitter, but I am, in fact, four of her followers. I am Amanda, who agrees with her about everything, and I am Dan, who asks the questions I would if she ever spoke to me about Marcus Aurelius or the Federal Reserve. Khadijah occasionally likes her posts, and Carol is a “hater.” Out of all of them, my daughter engages most with Carol. She might respond to my text with a single word, but she’ll write long scathing paragraphs to Carol.

My daughter loves to argue. Gets that from her father. When we had children, I assumed he’d be kinder to them. But he was hard on all of us, especially our daughter. They’d be having a fight straight out of literature. I’d be making eggs, pretending she didn’t need my help. Pretending I was powerless to stand between them.

Now, they’ve patched things up. Now, they have a perfect relationship because he’s dead. Now, she only has me to resent.

Last time she visited, I asked, “Do you want to come to church?”

“No,” she said. “I’m into Eastern religions, remember?”

“Me, too,” I said. “Bethlehem is in Asia, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“The Middle East,” I said. “Doesn’t East mean Asia?”

“Well—”

I nodded and said, “I’m into an Eastern religion, too.”

She looked at her phone. I knew she was looking up which continent Bethlehem is on. She pursed her lips and put the phone away without correcting me, and that’s how I know I’m right. But I would have argued about it, asked about her logic like Dan or snapped like Carol, if it had kept her from disappearing into her room until dinner.

She’s not really a Buddhist, anyway. I can dye my hair pink, but it’s brown. She can convert to any religion she likes, but she’s Catholic. Is there a temple anywhere in the world where people ask after her, the way they do at St. Nicholas’s? I think not.

I did read the Lotus Sutra. I liked the part that says, “Your true nature is the right way of thinking and the right way of acting. The longer you go on this path, the more you avoid making the wrong decisions.” I tweeted that to my daughter, as Amanda, with a lotus flower emoji. Then Carol commented and said, “READ THE BIBLE.”

Meanwhile, my son has joined one of those internet cults. That’s what he’s doing all day in the basement. I never thought I’d miss the video games. He doesn’t know I’m in the cult, too. I joined as Carol. If my children spoke to one another more, they might find me out. They might ask: What are the chances that we both know Carol Witkowski? But I’m not worried.

The cult is led by a couple. They are blissfully happy because they live in perfect alignment with their inner vibrations. They say we all can be happy and rich and in love, too. We only need to join their Facebook group and attend Zoom meetings called Devotionals. Luckily, my son is not a full-blown, dues- paying member. He’s not, as the leaders call it, Inner Circle.

I created a “deepfake” video of Carol to join my son’s weekly calls. I used a program to make it. It took me a long time to figure out, but I managed. My children assume I’m bad at computers because the technology isn’t intuitive to me. At work, the young man from IT assumes the same. But they forget I’ve been a secretary since I was my daughter’s age. I lived through the whole history of computers and adapted to each new system. On computers, innate knowledge isn’t half as valuable as patience and persistence.

We got a home computer in 1995. A year later, I got us a second one. I told my husband it was for the children, but really, it was for me. I’d found out by then that my husband was an adulterer. He had a profile on Match.com. He was going into chat rooms and message boards. He was exchanging photos and declarations of love with any woman willing to speak to him.

So, on our second computer, I made my own profile and sought him out as Moira. When he got bored of her, I created another woman. Back then, before AI images, I’d use photos from blogs and online bulletin boards.

When I began messaging my husband as other women, I was full of rage and fear. But over time, I began to think of what we were doing as Pretend. Pretend I’m not your bitter wife, mother of two, stressed and underpaid. Pretend I’m Sally, twenty-one, no children, no job, desperate to show you photos of my body so you can tell me what you’ll do to it.

He didn’t care about Sally, beyond her breasts, but I did. I decided her favorite book was Moby-Dick, though I hadn’t enjoyed it much. She’d grown up in Florida, in a town I passed through on vacation. Her father owned a crab shack. Her mother waited tables there. Eventually, I reread Moby-Dick. But I read it as Sally and liked it significantly more.

I’ve been so many people on the Internet. There’s an overwhelming amount of information there, and it comes at you all at once. I’ll see an idea or an opinion that seems absurd. But then I’ll see it again. And again. Over time, it becomes familiar. Eventually, I think maybe it was right all along. I can feel it all molding me into some misshapen blob, pulling at me in every direction. I read two opposite points of view. Then, an alternative take. Then, a critique of that perspective. It’s good. It’s bad. It’s irrelevant. It’s important.

And it all lives inside me.

I don’t know what to think. It’s much easier to divide all those ideas into different selves and explore them properly. Sally is a Republican. Dan thinks politics are stupid. Kadijah is a solar punk anarco-feminist. Carol has evidence that a satanic cabal runs the US government.

As my husband was dying, I thought about telling him the truth. I thought about whispering in his ear that I’d been Jessica and Moira and Sally and the rest of them.

I wanted to say, “Your whole life, you were only loved by one woman. And I hated you.”

In the end, I didn’t tell him. I watched him die without saying anything. Not even good-bye. But every Sunday, I confess.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six days since my last confession. I have lied.”

The priest doesn’t ask for details. He must assume I’ve said I was busy when I wasn’t or that my daughter called when she hadn’t. The priest tells me to recite the Act of Contrition. Then, I go to the pew and kneel to pray.

Lord, is it a lie if everyone is lying and we all know it? Aren’t we all playing Pretend? If it is a sin in Your eyes, Lord, allow me to see it clearly. It doesn’t feel wrong. It feels like my true nature. Or have I strayed from Your path for so long, I can’t tell the right way of thinking and acting anymore?

Next, I pray for my children. For my daughter. For my son.

Lord, let them find what they need. Lord, if they aren’t finding it, help me become it.

My final prayer is for all the children of the world, and especially for those I saw in a video online. It’s a video of children playing Pretend in a war zone. In their game, one of the children lies down, very still, and the others pick up their friend and carry them through the bloody halls of a crowded hospital. The adult filming asks what they’re playing, and they say, “Martyr.”

That’s the Holy Land, I thought as I watched, and I wondered what kinds of games Jesus played as a child. Did he pretend to be a rabbi? A Roman soldier? A prisoner dying on a crucifix? Did he ever twirl in the waves of the Mediterranean and tell Mary to be a still and silent clam?

 

---

MARY WILLIAMS writes fiction and essays. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Tin House, and Harvard Review, among others, and her novel was a finalist in the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. In 2023, she attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She’s currently working on a linked short story collection that explores how human nature and technology shape one another. Find her on Twitter @mardragosa.

 

Featured image by Martin Martz, courtesy of Unsplash.