* * *
William, Mom, and I moved things at a reasonable pace from the pickup truck I’d borrowed to the stairs leading up to my door on the second floor. We’d taken my stuff out of a storage unit my dad got me before I moved into the cabin. Mom and William were so overdressed I offered them t-shirts, but they declined. Mom had been overweight my whole life, except during the period when she divorced my dad. She had attributed her weight loss to the Atkins Diet. Dad later discovered that her sudden gym motivation was not fitness but an affair, along with a new desire to escape the constraints of being a wife and mother. Mom’s metamorphosis was a coming out or an awakening to the life she had always wanted but sacrificed for her family. For me, it felt like she was suddenly a stranger.
The spring my brother, Tyler, graduated from high school, my parents divorced, and Mom moved to an apartment. By Thanksgiving, she had shrunk down to half her previous dress size and grown her hair long. We walked down to a bar, and I watched her kiss men my age, then pass out in a diner booth. I was embarrassed, but later that feeling transformed into a loss that I did not know how to grieve. I wanted my mom back.
Dad had dissolved himself into a new family for a while, too. The woman he dated right after the divorce was jealous and had three boys. She didn’t like me coming around. “Take care of yourself,” he said to me once after breakfast at a Denny’s near their house.
My parents had moved on, leaving me emotionally orphaned. I vowed to never put the same amount of physical and emotional space between Mia and me.
Now, staring at Mom, married to a British man who was only seven years older than me, I saw she had ballooned several sizes larger than she’d ever been, so much that she seemed uncomfortable in her body. I couldn’t help but stare at her while she stood next to me speaking in a fake British accent. It had been maybe seven years since she’d moved to Europe, but I’d seen her only a handful of times.
Halfway through moving my many boxes of books, she started talking about how good a burger sounded. “And a beer,” she added the next time we passed each other on the stairs. It was barely noon, but she was in vacation mode, which meant drinking began early. She suggested we go to Sirens, a bar downtown with outdoor seating. My mouth watered. I hadn’t been out to eat in months.
“I have to work after this, but I can go,” I said. I had a job cleaning my friend’s preschool once a week for $45. I also needed to return the truck and pick up Mia from Jamie’s.
That day Mom cleared out several huge bins of her own—old photos and knickknacks she had stored in a friend’s garage. She brought it all over to my new place as a gift. I took it willfully, with nostalgia, and as evidence of our former life together. She’d kept every school portrait, every Halloween photo. Me holding my first fish. Cradling flowers after my school musical. Mom had been in the audience, supporting me, smiling and holding up a camera. Now, in the apartment, she looked at me only as another adult in the room, an equal, while I stood there feeling more lost than I’d ever been. I needed my family. I needed to see them nodding, smiling, reassuring me that I was going to be okay.
When William got up to use the bathroom, I sat next to Mom on the floor. “Hey,” I said.
“Yes?” she answered, like I was about to ask her for something. I always got the feeling she worried I’d ask her for money, but I never did. She and William lived a frugal life in Europe, renting out William’s flat in London while they lived in a cottage in France, not far from Bordeaux, which they would turn into a bed-and-breakfast.
“I wondered if maybe you and I could spend some time together?” I asked. “Just the two of us?”
“Steph, I just don’t think that would be appropriate.”
“Why?” I asked, straightening.
“I mean, if you want to spend time with me, then you’ll have to accept that William will be there, too,” she said.
At that moment, William walked toward us, loudly blowing his nose into his handkerchief. She grabbed for his hand and looked at me with her eyebrows raised, like she was proud of herself for setting that boundary.
It was no secret that I didn’t like William. When I’d gone to visit them in France a couple of years earlier, William and I had had a fierce argument that upset my mother so much she went out to the car to cry. This visit, I wished to gain back the lost relationship with my mother, but not just as someone who could help me care for Mia. I craved a mom, someone I could trust, who would accept me unconditionally despite my living in a homeless shelter. If I had a mom to talk to, maybe she could explain what was happening to me, or make it easier, and help me not see myself as a failure. It was hard, admitting that level of desperation, vying for the attention of your own mother. So I laughed whenever William made jokes. I smiled when he poked fun at American grammar. I didn’t comment on my mother’s new accent or the fact that she now acted uppity, as if Grandma didn’t make salad from cans of fruit and containers of Cool Whip.
Mom and Dad grew up in different parts of Skagit County, an area known for its fields of tulips, located about an hour north of Seattle. Both their families had lived in poverty for generations. Dad’s family was rooted deep in the wooded hillsides above Clear Lake. His distant relatives were rumored to still make moonshine. Mom lived down in the valley, where farmers grew fields of peas and spinach.
Grandma and Grandpa had been married for close to forty years. My earliest memories are of them in their trailer home in the woods that sat next to a creek. I stayed with them during the day while my parents worked. Grandpa would make us mayonnaise and butter sandwiches on Wonder bread for lunch. They didn’t have much money, but my memories of my maternal grandparents were filled with love and warmth: Grandma stirring Campbell’s tomato soup on the stove, she’d have a soda in one hand and stand on one foot with the other tucked into her thigh like a flamingo, and there was always a cigarette burning in an ashtray nearby.
They’d moved to the city to an old house next to downtown Anacortes that became so run-down over the years it was nearly inhospitable. Grandpa was a real estate agent and would pop in between showing houses and burst through the door with little toys he’d found for me or won from the claw machine at the bowling alley.
As a child, when I wasn’t at their house, I’d call Grandma on the telephone. I spent so much time talking to her that in the bin of photos were several of me at four and five years old standing in the kitchen with a large yellow phone pressed to my ear.
Grandma had paranoid schizophrenia, and over time it became nearly impossible to have a conversation with her. She had grown delusional. The last time Mia and I visited, I’d brought her a Papa Murphy’s pizza that I purchased with my food stamps. Grandma, with thick black eyeliner and hot pink lipstick, stood outside smoking most of the visit. We had to wait for Grandpa to get home so we could eat. When he did, Grandma then said she wasn’t hungry anymore and accused Grandpa of having an affair, even of flirting with me.
But Anacortes was the keeper of my childhood memories. Though I had fewer and fewer ties to my family, I always told Mia about Bowman Bay, an area of Deception Pass—a crevasse in the ocean dividing Fidalgo and Whidbey islands, where my dad took me hiking as a little girl. That small pocket of Washington State, with its towering evergreens and madronas, was the only place that felt like home to me. I’d explored every nook of it, knew its trails and the nuances of the ocean currents, and had carved my initials into the twisted reddish-orange trunk of a madrona tree and could point out exactly where it was. Whenever I returned to Anacortes to visit my family, I found myself walking the beaches below Deception Pass Bridge, taking the long way home through Rosario Road, past the large houses on bluffs.
I missed my family but took solace that Mom and Grandma still talked every Sunday. Mom called her from wherever she was in Europe. It consoled me, like I hadn’t lost Mom entirely, that she still had some remembrance inside of the people she’d left behind.
* * *
Mom ordered another beer when th
e bill came for our lunch at Sirens. I checked the time. I needed to give myself two hours to clean the preschool before I picked up Mia. After watching Mom and William amuse themselves with outlandish anecdotes about their neighbors in France for fifteen more minutes, I admitted that I had to leave.
“Oh,” William said, his eyebrows rising. “Do you want me to get the waitress’s attention so you can pay for lunch?”
I stared at him. “I don’t,” I said. We looked at each other, in some kind of standoff. “I don’t have money to pay.”
It would have been appropriate for me to buy them lunch, since they were visiting and had helped me move, but they were supposed to be my parents. I wanted to remind him that he just moved me out of a homeless shelter, but I didn’t and turned to my mom with pleading eyes. “I can put the beer on my credit card,” she offered.
“I only have ten bucks in my account,” I said. The knots in my throat were growing in size.
“That barely pays for your burger,” William blurted out.
He was right. My burger was $10.59. I had ordered an item exactly twenty-eight cents less than what I had in my bank account. Shame pounded inside my chest. Any triumph I felt that day about my move out of the shelter was shattered. I could not afford a damn burger.
I looked from my mom to William and then excused myself to use the bathroom. I didn’t have to pee. I needed to cry.
My reflection in the mirror showed a rail-thin figure, wearing a kid-sized t-shirt and tight-fitting jeans that I’d rolled up at the bottom to hide that they were too short. In the mirror, there was that woman—overworked but without any money to show for it, someone who couldn’t afford a fucking burger. I was often too stressed to eat, and many mealtimes with Mia were just me watching her spoon food into her mouth, thankful for each bite she took. My body looked sinewy and sunken, and all I had left in me was to cry it out in that bathroom.
Years ago, when I thought about my future, poverty seemed inconceivable, so far away from my reality. I never thought I would end up here. But now, after one kid and a breakup, I was smack in the middle of a reality that I didn’t know how to get out of.
When I returned, William still sat with his nostrils flared, like some kind of miniature dragon. Mom leaned toward him, whispering something, and he shook his head in disapproval.
“I can pay ten dollars,” I said, sitting down.
“Okay,” Mom said.
I hadn’t expected her to accept my offer. It’d be days before I’d get a paycheck. I fumbled in my bag for my wallet and then handed my card to include with hers. After signing the check, I stood and stuffed my card into my back pocket and barely gave her a hug goodbye as I walked out. I was only a few steps from the table when William said, “Well, I’ve never seen someone act more entitled!”
2
THE CAMPER
For Christmas in 1983, I got a Cabbage Patch Kid from my parents. Mom had waited for hours in lines at JCPenney before the doors opened. The department store managers held baseball bats over the shoppers’ heads to keep the mobs from rushing the counter. Mom elbowed shoppers from left to right like a fighter and grabbed the last box from the shelf right before a woman tried to snatch it. Or that was how she told the story. I listened with wide eyes, relishing the fact that she had fought for me. My mom, the hero. The champion. Bringer of sought-after dolls.
On Christmas morning, I held my new Cabbage Patch Kid on my small hip. She had short, looped blond hair and green eyes. I stood in front of Mom, raised my right hand, and pledged, “After meeting this Cabbage Patch Kid, and learning of her needs, I want to make the major commitment of becoming a good parent to Angelica Marie.” Then I signed the adoption papers, which was the key part of the Cabbage Patch Kid phenomenon. It expressed family values and encouraged responsibility. When I received the doll’s birth certificate with my name printed on it, Mom wrapped both me and Angelica, who was carefully cleaned and dressed for the occasion, in a proud embrace.
* * *
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer. Growing up, I wrote stories and disappeared with books like they were old friends. Some of my favorite days off were the rainy ones, when I’d start a new book in the morning at a coffee shop, finishing it late that evening in a bar. It was during that first summer in my late twenties with Jamie that the University of Montana in Missoula began wooing me with postcards for their creative writing program. I imagined myself inside the photos, walking through the pastoral landscapes of Montana, somewhere beneath the quotes from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley scrawled above in scripted fonts: “…but with Montana it is love,” he’d written simply. They were words that brought me to the “Big Sky Country” of Montana, in my search for a home in the next phase of my life.
I met Jamie walking home from a bar, where my coworkers and I went after our closing shift. It was close to midnight, and the midsummer crickets hummed from the grass. My hooded sweatshirt had been tied around my waist while I sweated and danced all night. Now I grabbed for it in anticipation of a long bike ride home. The front of my Carhartt pants still had little drips of espresso from the café where I worked, and I could still taste that last sip of whiskey in my mouth.
Outside into the refreshing breeze, I heard the wafted sound of a guitar coming from a park bench and the unmistakable voice of John Prine. I paused long enough to recognize the song and noticed a guy holding an MP3 player and portable speakers in his lap. He wore a red flannel coat and a brown fedora and sat hunched over, gently nodding his head, taking in the music.
Without thinking, I sat down next to him. The warmth of the whiskey stirred in my chest. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said, and smiled at me.
We sat like that for a while, listening to his favorite songs, breathing in the night air on the banks of Port Townsend’s downtown strip. Brick Victorian buildings towered above the waves lapping against the docks.
When I stood up to leave, in the excitement of meeting a new boy, I scrawled my phone number across a page of my journal and then ripped it out.
“You wanna go out sometime?” I asked, handing him the page. He looked up at me, then glanced toward the sound of laughter as people stumbled out of Sirens. He took the slip of paper from my hand, looked at me, and nodded.
The next evening, while I was driving into town, my phone rang.
“Where you headed?” he asked.
“Downtown.” I swerved my car, failing to downshift, steer, and hold the phone at the same time.
“Meet me outside the Penny Saver Market,” he said, and hung up.
About five minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot. Jamie leaned against the back of a red, pieced-together Volkswagen Bug, wearing the same clothes from the night before, waiting for me. He smiled at me coolly, showing crooked teeth that I hadn’t noticed in the darkness.
“Let’s get some beer,” he said, throwing the butt of a rolled cigarette onto the pavement.
He paid for two bottles of Samuel Smith stout, and then we climbed into his Volkswagen and drove to a bluff to watch the sunset. While he talked, I thumbed through a New York Times Book Review that I found on the passenger seat. He told me about a bike trip he had planned—down the Pacific Coast on Highway 101 all the way to San Francisco.
“I already got the time off work,” he said, glancing at me. His eyes were a darker brown than mine.
“Where do you work?” I asked, realizing that I knew nothing about him other than his music preferences.
“The Fountain Café.” He took a drag of his cigarette. “I used to be a sous chef. But now I just make the desserts there.” He exhaled, and a plume of smoke disappeared over the bluff.
“You make the tiramisu?” I asked, pausing in my feeble attempt to roll a cigarette of my own.
He nodded, and I knew I’d go to bed with him. The tiramisu was that good.
Later that week, Jamie brought me to his camper trailer for the first time. I stood in the tiny space, taking in
the wood paneling, the orange beanbag, and the shelves lined with books.
Jamie apologized when he noticed me looking around and fumbled to explain that the trailer was just to save money for his bike trip. But I’d seen Bukowski and Jean-Paul Sartre in a line of books above the table and couldn’t care less about the trailer’s appearance. I turned immediately to kiss him.
He pushed me slowly to the white down of his bed. We kissed for hours, as though nothing else in the world existed. He encased me.
Eventually, Jamie and I planned to go our separate ways—me to Missoula, and him to Portland, Oregon. When he suggested that I move into his trailer to save money, I did so immediately. We lived in a twenty-foot camper trailer, but the rent was only $150 apiece. Our relationship was one with a definitive end, each of us helping the other toward the goal of getting out of town.
Port Townsend’s work force was mainly that of the service industry, catering to tourists and those with disposable incomes who arrived in droves during the warmer months. The ferries were packed with them, crawling over the waters between the mainland and the peninsula, the gateway to the rain forests and hot springs on the coast. The Victorian mansions, shops, and cafés on the waterfront brought the city money and in turn provided livelihoods for many residents. Still, it wasn’t a ton of money pouring in. Unless a Port Townsend resident started a business, there wasn’t much more the average worker could do to build a future.
Many of the core residents already had their futures firmly set in place. In the late sixties or early seventies, a band of hippies had moved into Port Townsend, then a near ghost town barely surviving, thanks to a paper mill that employed most of its residents. The town had been built on the promise of being one of the biggest western seaports and failed when lack of funding from the Depression rerouted railroads to Seattle and Tacoma. The hippies, some of whom were now my employers and loyal customers, bought the Victorian mansions, which loomed with decay from a near century of abandonment. They spent years working on the buildings, preserving them as historical landmarks, improving the town, building bakeries, cafés, breweries, bars, restaurants, grocery stores, and hotels. Port Townsend became known for harboring wooden boats, with interest evolving into a formal school and yearly festival. Now that core group who’d worked to revive the town kicked back, slowed their pace, and settled into being the bourgeoisie. All of us service workers catered to them, worked for them in our various ways, living in tiny cabins, yurts, or studio apartments. We were there for the weather—the rain shadow the Olympic Mountains provided—and for the hidden artsy community that was only a ferry ride from Seattle. We were there for the calm ocean water in the bay and the sweaty work and lifestyle bustling kitchens provided.
Maid Page 2
