by Saul Black
“I want to go to school.”
Joanna sighed. “For Christ’s sake,” she said.
“Okay, let’s go somewhere. I just—”
“No, no, I wouldn’t dream of it. Why would you want to go somewhere with me when you could be doing fucking algebra or whatever?”
“I didn’t mean it. Let’s go somewhere. I really want to.”
Joanna stared at Abigail as if she hated her for being her only friend. In these moments of wonderful impulses the girl knew everything could go wrong. She had to be careful.
So she kept still and said nothing. Her mother’s eyes were fierce and pleading. Then they filled with tears and Joanna rolled over onto her back.
Abigail put the clothes down on the floor. She wanted to get into bed and wrap her arms around Joanna. No matter how many times she saw her mother cry, she never got used to it. It was as if her chest cracked down the middle and a hurrying emptiness filled her.
Instead she went to the kitchen, stood on the stool to reach the counter, poured a cup of coffee from the pot (lots of cream and sugar), and took it back to the bedroom.
“Mommy?”
Joanna was staring at the ceiling’s brownish stain from where the roof had leaked last winter. The stain was roughly the shape of an elephant. Abigail imagined it trapped there, separated from its normal elephant world. She felt sorry for it.
“I made you some coffee.”
No reply. Abigail set the cup down on the nightstand and went to find her mother’s purse. It was still in the bathroom. Purple fake leather. With its zipper open it was like a soft face with only a mouth. She hunted through the makeup and loose change until she found a crumpled pack of Winstons and a yellow plastic lighter. There were three bent cigarettes left. She took the pack and the lighter to her mother.
“Here’s your cigarettes,” she said.
The last time she’d done this, a couple of days ago, Joanna had held her and kissed her and said, Oh, honey, you’re my angel, do you know that? You’re my guardian angel. For Abigail it had been as if the icy house filled suddenly with warm sunlight. But then the phone had rung and her mother had put on her makeup in a hurry and gone out and not come back until the following day. When she went out that way, with urgency and a kind of sheen to her face, it was as if Abigail had stopped being a person and had instead become just an ordinary thing, like a cushion or a shoe or an old TV magazine. It was as if her mother didn’t even know she was there.
“Mommy?”
Joanna hadn’t moved. She was still staring at the elephant.
“Get me my purse, would you?”
This was for the other things, Abigail knew. The medicines. She’d brought the coffee and the cigarettes but she’d left the medicines in the purse. She didn’t know why she didn’t trust them. They definitely made her mother better, sometimes happy and full of a sort of bright craziness—but there was something about the whole business Abigail didn’t like. It was as if the medicines knew something about her mother that she, Abigail, did not.
Nonetheless, she went and got the purse.
“Go look out the front window and tell me if the car’s still there,” Joanna said.
Abigail knew her mother didn’t like to take the medicines in front of her. She also knew the car was still there. This was just to get her out of the room. But she went anyway.
* * *
“I’ve thought where we can go,” Joanna said, as she pulled the battered Ford out of the driveway.
“Where?”
“You’ll see. It’s a surprise.”
The medicine had done its thing. Joanna had put on fresh makeup and perfume, and when she drove it was as if everything about driving was a delight to her.
“Where?”
“You’ll see. You’ll like it.”
“Have we got any money?”
“Some.”
Abigail didn’t ask what she wanted to ask. But her mother had the magic now.
“Enough for a hot dog and soda, probably,” Joanna said.
* * *
They went to the recently opened New Jersey State Aquarium across the Delaware River. It was an ugly concrete building with a white dome on top, and inside was a strange smell and a lot of echoey noise bouncing around like at the indoor swimming pool.
Abigail was nervous when they had to pay. Sometimes her mother would hunt through her purse and find she didn’t have enough. But this time it was okay. Abigail decided she wouldn’t say anything about a hot dog or a soda unless her mother asked.
“Do they have sharks here?”
“I guess so. I guess they have everything. Turtles, dolphins, jellyfish, hell, maybe they’ve got a whale.”
“A whale?” Abigail had school facts about whales. Beneath the skin lies a layer of fat called blubber. Whales can be up to 110 feet long and weigh up to 150 tons. The thought of one of them being in a glass tank in a building made her feel queasy.
“Well, maybe not a whale,” Joanna said. “What do you want to see first?”
“Sharks.”
“But what if you fall in?”
“I won’t fall in.”
“But what if I push you in?”
“I’ll pull you in with me!”
“You will, will you? We’ll see about that, missy.”
Her mother was glimmery with the magic. When she smiled it filled Abigail with excitement. But always in the excitement was the thought of the medicine and the fear of when it stopped working. She tried not to think about it.
* * *
There were no sharks. There wasn’t anything apart from fish, and most of them were gray or brown. All of them were ugly, with bottom jaws longer than their top ones. They looked as if they were in a bad mood, though they just kept gliding back and forth in the tanks, doing nothing.
For a while the magic lasted, though Abigail could see her mother was only pretending to find the fish interesting. Abigail wasn’t interested either. Common carp. American shad. White sucker. Brown bullhead. They all looked pretty much the same. Only the catfish were different, with their whiskers that made them look like Chinese wizards. Her mother got tired of reading the names. “You read them,” she said (as the magic wobbled). “You’re the one reads everything.” Then she seemed to catch the wobble and steady it. “Look at this dude,” she said, pointing to a largemouth bass. He’s like: ‘I hate this goddamned place. I get out of here, I’m going to Florida.’”
That became the game: Abigail would point to a fish and her mother would do an impersonation of what it was saying to itself. She did different voices. It was funny.
* * *
They were leaving the aquarium when Joanna remembered the hot dog and soda.
“It’s okay, Mommy, I’m not hungry.”
“Don’t be such a drama queen. You can have a hot dog or a soda. Which do you want?” Her voice had changed. The words “which do you want?” made Abigail’s throat tighten with a feeling of selfishness. It was like she was doing something mean to her mother.
“Come on, which? I don’t have all day.”
Abigail’s mouth was dry. The thought of eating a hot dog made her feel sick. But she wanted to go to the bathroom (she didn’t want to say that, because the restrooms might be miles away) and if she drank a Coke that would be worse.
“Hot dog, please,” she said.
She had only taken two bites by the time they got back into the Ford. Her mother was moving briskly now, as if the trip to the aquarium had made her late for something. The day had darkened and the wind rocked the car.
Joanna turned the ignition.
Nothing happened.
* * *
Joanna sat back in the seat and closed her eyes, breathing hard through her nose. Abigail kept trying to think of something to say. She was afraid of saying anything, but her mother’s silence and closed eyes and hard breathing were unbearable. It had started to rain.
“Could we…”
“Could we what?”
> “Could we take the bus?”
Joanna opened her eyes. She laughed. “The bus?” she said. “Oh sure. Or what about a taxi?”
Abigail knew she’d said the wrong thing.
“Shall we take a taxi?” Joanna said.
Abigail shook her head. No.
“No,” Joanna said, smiling. Her forehead was shiny with sweat, though the car was so cold. “No, maybe we won’t take a taxi. You know why?”
Abigail didn’t answer.
“Because we just spent the last of the fucking money on your fucking hot dog. Which you’re not even fucking eating.”
Abigail said nothing. Hot tears hurried out of her eyes. The empty space in the car, the whole empty space of the day and the rain and the darkness pressed around her. Weirdly, in the middle of everything, it made her picture a whale in a huge tank of dirty water, not moving.
Her mother went through her purse, throwing every item one by one onto the floor. She found a quarter and a dime.
“Stay here,” she said, and got out of the car.
“Where are you going?”
Joanna just slammed the door and walked away.
The only thing Abigail could think to do was finish the hot dog. If she ate the hot dog at least her mother wouldn’t hate her for not eating it. It was almost impossible. Each bite made a bigger, drier ball in her mouth, and each time she forced it down her throat got tighter and more tears came.
She couldn’t see out the windshield for the rain, which was heavier now, so she rolled down the window. Her mother was standing at an unsheltered pay phone across the parking lot, talking fast into the receiver, getting drenched.
* * *
Zeke came and picked them up in his car. Abigail didn’t like him. He had a magic of his own, soft and musical, and when he talked it was like a lullaby—but the sort that made Abigail think that if she fell asleep she’d never wake up again. His skin was smooth and brown and he had strange marks tattooed on each of his knuckles. His car smelled different than theirs, a sour cigarette odor something like herbs and molasses. He blinked slowly, his long eyelashes meeting and parting with a kind of sly tenderness.
They were still a ways from home when Abigail began to feel she couldn’t hold her pee any longer. The whole ride back to Philadelphia she’d been in agony. She was terrified of asking to stop and terrified of wetting herself in Zeke’s car.
Meanwhile Zeke and her mother said things she didn’t understand.
“Quid pro quo. That’s Latin. Know what it means?”
“I can guess.”
“You got a fat tab already, girl.”
“You know I’m good for it.”
Zeke laughed.
They pulled up in front of the house. Neither Zeke nor Joanna made a move to get out.
“Mommy? Can I have the keys? I need the bathroom.”
“You got heat?” Zeke said to Joanna.
“No.”
“Jesus.”
“Mommy? Please can I have the keys?”
Zeke looked up and down the street.
“There’s heat in here.”
“Yeah. Sure, what the hell.”
“Momm-eeee!” Abigail wailed. Her legs were crossed so tightly her thighs ached.
“Give the kid the keys, for Christ’s sake. She’s gonna piss herself.”
Abigail got out. Uncrossing her legs made her feel dizzy and wide open, as if she were on stilts. She went to her mother’s side window. Joanna hunted in her purse. Seconds. She couldn’t hold it. She couldn’t. Not one second more. The window rolled down.
“Go in and stay upstairs,” Joanna said.
Abigail snatched the keys and ran. There was a wooden side porch and a door that led into the back hall and the downstairs toilet. She would make it. She would.
But in her hurry she tripped on the top porch step. Without time to get her hands from between her legs she went thud-rasp flat on her face on the boards—and the pain and shock made her let go of holding her bladder—and she wet herself.
The first moments were pure joy. Hot pee spread through her jeans and she didn’t care about anything. She felt her face smiling, even.
Then the warm wetness began to cool and the joy went and she tasted blood in her mouth. Two splinters of pain shot up the length of her nose. She didn’t stop peeing. Just lay there and let it come.
She got to her feet. Her face was hot in the cold air, nose and mouth throbbing. She looked back to the car to check if her mother had seen what happened. But Joanna was talking to Zeke.
After a moment Zeke put his hand on the top of Joanna’s head and guided it down toward his lap until it disappeared from Abigail’s view.
* * *
Despite her ravaged education, Abigail learned and understood things quickly. Their house in Harrowgate had belonged to Joanna’s mother, who had left it to Joanna. They’d been losing it ever since they moved in, and one day when Abigail was eleven they lost it for good. Nothing was said about it. Money and possessions traveled in one direction only: away from them. One minute they were in the house, the next they were in a bare apartment in which the sole fragment of beauty was the blue flame in the immersion heater.
Abigail accepted the changes, adapted, found whatever new minimal footholds were available, assumed it would all change again. She was a skinny girl with her mother’s blond hair and green eyes and a fierce privacy that put people off her. She had a big, erratic intelligence. When she realized Joanna was a drug user and a prostitute and by most people’s standards at least half-crazy, she realized, too, she could feel sorry for her own younger self, the four- or six- or eight-year-old Abigail who’d had to cope, without knowledge. She realized this, but turned away from it, as if it were a dead thing.
She missed too much school and, despite her intelligence, never racked up the hours vital to putting the various things she learned together. Her life was one of forced practicality, in which all actions derived from a single goal: keeping Joanna alive. Which meant food, the laundromat, cleaning up vomit, lying to people, stealing. She had to keep her mother alive because her mother was all she had.
Joanna, meanwhile, came in and out of reason, manageability, presence. There were periods in which she willed herself into competence. Even, occasionally, jobs: washing hair in a salon; waitressing; cleaning. For a while she helped Mr. Lee in the laundromat. None of it lasted.
Still, her beauty held, precariously. The blond hair and green eyes emerged from the wreckages more or less intact, renewable. Her glamor was a fortune resistant to all but the most reckless spending. And even by the time Abigail turned fourteen the spending wasn’t, quite, reckless.
Then, in the winter of 1999, everything changed.
* * *
“Honey, you got something to eat tonight?”
They were in the bathroom, Joanna drying herself, Abigail in the tub. The latest was that Joanna was dancing at a club called Jezebel’s in Frankford. An attempt to shed Zeke, whose protection skills weren’t what they had been. Abigail knew her mother couldn’t possibly just be dancing, though Joanna sometimes came home bearing traces of glitter and smelling thrillingly of dry ice.
“Ariel’s bringing pizza,” Abigail said.
“Girls’ night in, huh?” Joanna said.
This friend, Ariel, wasn’t quite mythical, but Abigail had exaggerated their relationship, which only very occasionally involved hanging out for a couple of hours after school.
“Well, at least you can watch a movie this time,” Joanna said.
The television was out of hock as of yesterday. Courtesy of Jezebel’s they had light, heat, hot water.
Joanna got dressed, plainly by her standards, in a pink puffer jacket from thrift, jeans, and shit-kickers. Her dancing gear was at Jezebel’s. Abigail leaned against the radiator, looking out of the window. The black streets were gashed with frozen slush. Tiny snowflakes swirled in the dark.
“Don’t stay up too late,” Joanna said from the doorway.
You knew I didn’t want to.
No, I didn’t.
You knew I didn’t want to and you went ahead anyway.
You’re talking crazy.
You like it better that way, if you know I don’t want to.
For God’s sake.
This was the other world, with sex running through it like a dark river. She’d been masturbating regularly for some years now. Initially it had been nothing more than instinctive physical self-comfort. Later it was attended by images from magazines and the Adult section of the video store—and eventually by the inevitable shock of knowing, really knowing, that this was her mother’s life, too. Abigail didn’t know what to do with the feeling of empty sickness and compelling excitement. The guilt just seemed to heighten her pleasure. It was as if she’d come into a dirty inheritance, a wretched legacy that had been waiting for her since birth.
After working her way up all four floors (nothing particularly good tonight) Abigail went out onto the building’s roof through a security door that should have been locked but never was.
This, too, was something she liked to do, stand up there under the sky and know that below her all the overheard lives were going on, and to imagine herself and her mother, one day soon, getting far away from the city, to a time and place where everything she knew now would be a distant memory.
* * *
She was asleep on the couch in the small hours when she heard the apartment door open and her mother, breathing heavily, slam it behind her. It was still night. The snow had stopped.
“Mom?”
Joanna stumbled in the dark to the bathroom and turned on the light, then the shower.
Abigail went to look. Her mother was sobbing, pulling off her clothes. With the exception of the puffer jacket, not the clothes she’d gone out in. These were clothes Abigail had never seen: a short dress of green spangles and a pair of white knee boots. One of the white boots had a splash of red down its side. More red on Joanna’s thigh. Abigail knew it was blood.
