Parents and projectiles [Midterm SA29] Isis navigated through the hallway of the apartment building as she had done a thousand and one times before, but this time was intrinsically different because she wasn’t doing it alone. Her hand tucked safely and warmly in Nathan’s, she led him all the way to the correct apartment’s door before stopping abruptly and spinning around. It was much farther than she’d expected to get. “You really sure you want to do this?” Isis double-checked. “Because if you don’t want to, we don’t have to do this. I’ll just tell my mother that we’re very sorry, but something unavoidable came up, and-”
“I really want to do this,” Nathan interrupted. Early in their relationship, he would have waited for her to finish talking, but he’d learned that doing so could take a while, and it was just easier for all involved to respond to the nerves behind the rushing stream of words rather than to all of her complete thoughts. “You’ve met my parents. You’ve even met my brother and sister-in-law and nephews. I’d like to meet your mother.” He worried, though, that maybe Isis didn’t want him to meet her mother. The invitation had been a long time coming, and her nervous chatter now was not convincing him otherwise. “Do you want to do this?” he returned, not wanting to push her if she still wasn’t ready for this step. He really hoped she was though. He wanted to be part of her life. All of it. Not just the pieces that resided on Sonora grounds.
“Yes,” she said, although not terribly convincingly. “I’m just… worried. My mother is-”
Just then, the door swung open behind her, revealing a woman who wore a smile as boldly as she wore her age. “There’s my girl!” she beamed, throwing her arms around her. Despite knowing the occasion’s purpose - to introduce her to the man in Isis’s life - Louisa Carter only had eyes for her child. She was always pleased to see her, just pleased she came back. “Come in, come in!” she added when she released Isis from her grasp.
Isis glanced to Nathan nervously before following her mother inside. She was immediately relieved that at least the apartment was somewhat tidy; it was frequently a mess, which only served to highlight its small size. One small bedroom, one small bathroom, one small living room, and one small kitchen. It was what Isis could afford without depleting the account she was trying to build for Nevaeh’s college education.
Now that they were fully inside, Louisa looked at the man accompanying her daughter. “Oh,” she said, her tone somewhere between surprise and disappointment. “You ain’t tell me he was white.”
“Oh my God,” Isis uttered. That was one way to kick off this disaster.
Louisa held up her hands. “Hey, your choice,” she stated. “Just surprised. Ain’t a lot of good ones where we come from,” she added for the man’s clarification. “So it’s Nathan, ain’t it?”
Nathan had blinked in surprise at the mention of his skin color. He supposed he’d been lucky in that regard. His mother had met Isis before they’d officially been dating, and had encouraged it, so there had been no surprises there when he’d brought her to his family’s Christmas brunch last year. Plus, when your pureblood English mother marries an American muggle, there really isn’t much your folks can say about dating outside of the familiar.
“Uh, yes, ma’am, that’s right,” he answered politely. “I’m from Connecticut, originally,” he added, to address the point that there were few good white folks where the Carters came from. He didn’t think she was implying there weren’t any in all of Michigan, but half a country of distance from that neighborhood might not be a bad thing.
Louisa shook her head. “Shoulda known a man called Nathan ain’t no brother,” she muttered. “White man from Connecticut.” Admittedly, she did appreciate being called ma’am, and in fact took a slight satisfaction in it, but it didn’t outweigh her reluctance to accept the situation around her.
“Right, well,” said Isis abruptly, taking a seat on the couch. “Let’s talk about, I don’t know, literally anything else.” Her mother gave a small laugh and held up her hands in peace before taking a seat in the chair. Isis glanced at Nathan, who seemed a bit relieved by her initiative, and signaled for him to sit beside her, which he did. “Nathan teaches Herbology,” she stated to her mother. “He’s also Head of House like I am. Remember, I explained how that works to you?” Louisa was a Muggle and had no magical education experience of her own to draw on, and Isis hadn’t gone to a boarding school with any kind of Sorting process, so she’d previously had to explain how the whole thing worked.
“Yeah, I remember,” Louisa replied. “Herbology, huh?” she directed to the man in question, her tone, as before, almost like an inquisition. “What is that, flowers and shit?”
Nathan blinked, taken aback by the casual curse word. He lived in a school, specifically in the Teppenpaw area of one, so he didn’t actually hear that kind of language very often, and when he did from the teenagers, he usually deducted a point or two, with a mild reprimand that there were nicer ways to express your thoughts. When the staff used such words in the staff room, there was almost always frustration behind them rather than it just being conversational. “Plants of all varieties,” he amended, “but flowers are included, yes.”
Under other circumstances, he may have left it there, but he felt oddly compelled to explain himself, like this was some kind of job interview (an explanation of his teaching curriculum, ironically enough, had not been required when Mortimer Brockert had actually interviewed him to work at Sonora; though, of course, Nathan hadn’t been dating Mortimer Brockert’s daughter and, at that time, neither had Nathan been teaching a class). “I cover different habitats in general, and for specific plants I’ll talk about their life cycle, any magical properties they might have, and any important notes on maintaining, growing, or harvesting the species. Having Nevaeh,” he tilted his head toward Isis, “in the current Intermediate class has helped me make sure my classes are well rounded and not too dependent on a single sense. She does very well in Herbology,” he added, figuring Louisa would be interested to know how her granddaughter was doing in his subject.
Louisa Carter was not a young woman. On top of chronological age, she had been further degraded by stress and circumstance. At her old age, there was a lot that she tended to miss. But at this, she stiffened sharply, her back tense; she did not miss that name. “Nevaeh?” She repeated, then turned demandingly to her daughter. “Your Nevaeh? Our Nevaeh?”
Isis had also stiffened abruptly. “Yes,” she admitted, though she hated to lay claim on the girl like that. Nevaeh didn't belong to her, and she definitely didn't belong to Louisa. “She's a student at Sonora. She's in her fifth year.”
Louisa grabbed the nearest item - a magazine off the coffee table - and threw it at Isis’s head. The younger woman barely leaned out of the way. “You got my only grand baby at that witch school and you ain't think to tell me?! I wanna meet her! I wanna see her! Why ain't she never here?!”
“I-” Isis began but was cut off by another magazine flung at her head, this one making contact. “Stop that!” But her demand had no effect, and the air remained full of print. One came dangerously close to hitting Nathan, and at that point, Isis snapped. “I don't want her knowing anything about Detroit!”
This struck Louisa as hard as any of her projectiles had struck anyone else, and she stopped mid-throw. Her arm lowered slowly. “You're embarrassed by me,” she concluded. “You're ashamed. Of me, of yourself, of where we come from. You so smart and educated now that you lookin’ down your nose at your own!”
“I just… I want her life to be… less complicated than mine was,” said Isis with obvious strain and self control.
“Oh, so now I'm a complication?”
“Maybe we should go,” Isis suggested weakly, searching blindly for Nathan’s hand. His found hers and squeezed an apology for opening this can of worms.
“You go right ahead,” Louisa asserted. “You go. He can stay though. I like him. He tells the truth.”
Nathan blinked in shock (mostly for having been deemed ‘liked’ as he’d been under the impression Louisa hadn’t entirely approved of him up until that point - his race had been mentioned blatantly, but he couldn’t imagine Louisa hadn’t noticed he was nearly twice her daughter’s age as well) and looked back and forth between the two women, hoping for some clue as to the polite and proper way out of this mess. He wasn’t sure there was one.
He had realized he had made a tactical error right around when the magazines had started flying. Isis and her mom obviously did not have the happy sharing relationship he and his own mum had; that much had been fairly clear even before they started dating. Equally clear was that Isis was keeping things to herself again - it had been nearly a year before Isis had told Nathan that her mother was living in Phoenix, and it seemed Nathan was not the only one kept in the dark about key details of Isis’ life. Her mother was not taking that as well as Nathan did.
“Do you want to leave?” he asked Isis calmly, willing to follow but hoping to show her that he wasn’t freaked out and he could deal with this if she could. His first loyalty was, of course, to his girlfriend rather than to her mother, but if he could avoid walking out on his hostess, and help find peace between mother and daughter, he would find that much preferable. He was a Teppenpaw like that.
Isis took a sharp breath in. She, on the other hand, was not a Teppenpaw. She was aptly Pecari: instinctive and adaptive. It was just a problem when instinct (“run away from here”) and adaptive (“we need to make this work”) opposed each other. There was a pause that felt like forever, a pause so long she was surprised her mother didn’t have anything to interject. “No,” she said at last. “We should stay.” Isis looked firmly at her mother. “But we’re going to behave like adults, not throw things, and you and I can have that conversation later.”
Louisa crossed her arms. It was pretty obvious that Isis didn’t want to have that conversation at all, which hurt, but the promise of later was at least something. “Fine,” she said. “But if you got any pictures, I want ‘em.” The Muggle woman glanced around the room and happened upon a clock. “Oh! Food’s gotta be done by now.” Louisa stood up quicker than seemed possible for her age - what else was a mother to do when there was food on the line? - and rushed into the kitchen.
The moment the door shut behind her, Isis sank slightly into the couch, her free hand pinching the bridge of her nose. “This is great,” she sighed, mostly to herself. She was, at least, always grateful to see her mother regaining her fire. The woman had been so down beaten when Isis had found her again in Chicago, so muted and colorless, a shell of her former self. It was just that the former self had a penchant for making Isis miserable, so maybe there was just no personal gain to be had.
Isis straightened herself and turned apologetic eyes to Nathan. “I’m really sorry about… all of that,” she offered. “I didn’t think…. I mean, I should’ve told you that she didn’t know about-.... Well, you know how I am,” she conceded weakly with a shrug. Communication was objectively not one of Isis’s strong points; it was something she was trying to work on.
“Yeah,” he agreed, knowing how she was.
With a subdued repetition of the sigh-and-sink routine, Isis leaned her head on Nathan’s shoulder. For a moment, she sat there silently, but then, abruptly, she began to chuckle as a thought occurred to her. “At least one good thing came out of this,” she smiled, looking up at him. “My mother said she likes you.”
(Cowritten by the authors of Isis Carter and Nathan Xavier)