by Jamie Mason
My mother tracked from my eyes to the doll in my hands, a ruin-haired thing I hadn’t touched in a year. We locked eyes again, but she drifted her attention to her guests with the pretense that she hadn’t really seen me. She let me stay, but more important, she made sure that I knew she’d let me stay. The transaction tingled at the base of my skull.
Paul was too beefy for me to consider nice looking. I had only just begun to check men for handsomeness, and at the time, it was always how they stacked up against my music teacher. Mr. Noakes was narrow, with longish, dark blond hair that swept his collar. He waved like seaweed in the ocean, eyes closed over a sweet, crooked smile, when he set us playing on our recorders, woodblocks, and maracas. I had decided I was one of his favorites since I’d scored a coveted assignment to the ranks of the new xylophones the school had just acquired to Mr. Noakes’s pride and delight.
Ever on the lookout to shrink Paul in my opinion, I saw him as the anti–Mr. Noakes: too thick even if he was nowhere near fat; too old-fashioned with dark, tightly trimmed hair held down with a sheen of styling wax; and I was sure that Paul would only ever sway in an earthquake. He was solid when he stood, feet planted in line with his broad shoulders, and he went just shy of clumping when he walked.
Because of Paul Rowland, for the entirety of my life I never met a mustache I liked.
“So I get to the door,” Paul said, “and there’s this skinny little girl with wet-noodle posture, droopy hair, and not a damned thing going on behind her eyes. So, I ask this kid, I say, ‘I’m with the Veterans of Foreign Wars membership committee, and I’m looking for Carl Cowling.’ And she says . . .” Paul laughed into his pause. “Go on, Annette. I can’t do the accent like you did.”
My mother let her face fall slack and somehow snuffed the lasers out of her eyes. “Uncle Carl ain’t here. I ain’t seen ’im in a coon’s age.”
I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that such a sound could never have come from my mother, but it slid up and out of her throat with the casual music of mountain mine country, utterly natural and pleasant in the way that things can be only when they fit just right.
Paul sniffled over his mirth. “Oh, she played me, I tell you. She had me going with this story of how there’d been somebody else poking around for her uncle earlier that very same day, which, of course, got my radar buzzing. I mean, who the hell else was hot on Carl Cowling besides me? I had to know. I was half on my way to giving her my name, rank, and serial number while Cowling slipped out the back and right off into the sunset, while this one”—Paul cocked his thumb at my mother—“led me around by the nose.
“Then she finally drops the accent and the dim stare and right before my eyes turns all hard and real pretty like some damned magic trick and says, ‘Look, Carl lit out of here half a minute after you rang the bell, G-man. He said he’d give me five dollars if I kept you busy. He said you were a debt collector. Then you say you’re from the VFW. Nobody tells me anything.’
“ ‘G-man? Why do you think I work for the government?’ ” Paul said he’d asked her.
“ ‘Well, you’re not a cop.’
“ ‘Who says?’
“ ‘I do. You asked me if the men who had already been here were cops. If you were a cop, you would know.’
“ ‘Not necessarily.’ ”
Paul crowed with laughter ahead of his own, or, more accurately, my mother’s own, punch line. “This one, she just laughed at me. Right in my face, she did.
“ ‘Bingo,’ she says. ‘And if I didn’t know that you weren’t a cop before, I surely know it now. Not necessarily. Jeez, mister. So that leaves mob or government, and pardon me for saying so, but you’re not dressed nice enough to be mob.’
“ ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you see in the movies, kid.’
“ ‘Words to live by, I’m sure. Thanks for the tip.’
“That’s what she says to me! ‘Thanks for the tip,’ ” Paul wheezed.
“Anyway.” He swatted the air after catching up with his own amusement. “That whole Cowling business turned out not to be the leg up and big promotion I had hoped it would be, but discovering the smartest skirt this side of the Berlin Wall? That took all the sting right out of losing that little fish.”
“It only took you three more years to bring me into the fold,” my mother replied.
“It was worth the wait. Best damned liar I ever met.”
Later, when they had all left, I braved the subject that had kept my mind stuck in the afternoon’s eavesdropping. “Mama, why does Uncle Paul think it’s good to lie?”
The question dog-eared the moment in time. A thrill sped through me. I’d never asked her anything important before. I’d never pitted her against my private opinion of Paul.
She had always been open and matter-of-fact about everything, never fatigued by any endless volley of curiosity that my brother and I had pummeled her with. But this question seemed even bolder out loud than it had sounded in my head. It hung in the air between us, and for the first time I knew that pricking someone with a question could be more important than whatever answer they might come up with. For the first time, I knew I might have nudged her onto her back foot.
She watched me balance up the weight of the moment. “Five points for you, Plucky. That’s a very smart question.” She turned to the mirror and swiped a dollop of cold cream over each eye. It looked like white frosting going on, but darkened to gray sludge with each swirling pass of her fingertips. “You know how they say, ‘Honesty is the best policy’?”
I nodded.
She continued to massage her mascara into the cream. “If you’re still there, Plucky, I can’t hear your brains rattling. Speak up!” She laughed as she groped for a tissue.
“Yes, I’m here.” I slid the box of Kleenex under her searching hand and knew for sure that she wasn’t put off by my question. And then it was another first for me to find that, as relieved as I was that she wasn’t mad at me, I wasn’t entirely pleased at my inability to rattle her.
“Well, for a change, the great nameless, faceless they is absolutely right.” She wiped her eyes bright. What she lost in wattage without her makeup, she gained in youth. “Honesty is most certainly the best policy.”
Then she turned and took my hands. From the corner of my eye, I could see our profiles in the mirror, her bending down to me, the towel turban making her taller than ever.
“But they make it sound so simple. And the biggest, meanest trick in all the world is how complicated they have made things. They know, even as they say it, that the best policy doesn’t always get the job done. Honesty is like your best shoes.” This was especially relevant, as she well knew, because I kept trying to convince my mother to let me wear my white, patent leather Mary Janes with everything, most recently my bathing suit. “Your best shoes make you feel good and they make you look good, but there are some jobs that just aren’t suited to them.”
“Mama, do you lie to do your job?”
Not a ripple in her composure, she smiled into my eyes. “Sometimes.”
The sapling of my eight-year-old integrity quivered. “Do you lie to me?”
“Not ever if I can help it.”
“But they say you shouldn’t lie!”
“Ahhh. There they go again, huh?” My mother kissed the backs of my hands. “Tell me. Do they know your favorite color?”
I shook my head.
“Do they know that you like the side and bottom crusts cut off your sandwiches, but that you like me to leave the top one on?”
“No.”
“Do they love you as much as I do?”
“No, Mama.”
“Do they build the world you live in?”
I froze.
Finally, a flinch from her; from somewhere deep in her eyes it shuddered and drew tears in its wake. “Two points for you, my darling, for stopping to think on that one.” But she did not tremble. Her hands were calm and she took my face between their warmth. S
he pressed her lips hard against my forehead. She hugged me to her, and the blue chenille smelled of Chanel No. 5. “You’re such a bright girl, Plucky,” she whispered into my hair.
She pulled back. “They do indeed build the world. So do listen when they say things. Hear what they say and weigh it carefully. But when you hear me, remember that I never told you not to lie, baby girl.” She checked to see that it had sunk in. “I’ll only warn you to hate it.”
2
Growing up, we’d wanted for nothing. We lived in a plain, saltbox house on a plain, saltboxy cul-de-sac, but my mother always had her clothes, even her blue jeans, tailored. That’s how I knew for certain we weren’t like other people. My little brother was oblivious and never thought that it was odd that he had only to whine for a new football, baseball glove, or hockey stick and somehow “Uncle Paul” would, like a magician with his rabbit, pull it out of nowhere on his next visit. I’d get a bag of coconut Neapolitans and a bauble or a book. I could feel the oily purpose, like a film, on those gifts—Keep ’em distracted and they won’t ask any questions. My mother would get a fat manila envelope or locked briefcase and a courtly kiss on the cheek.
I hated Uncle Paul. He’d take us out to dinner or to the movies, so I liked his visits well enough, and the coconut candies fed my rabid sweet tooth, but the air crackled whenever he came around. My stomach would go tight and heavy without ever answering to my brain for its unease. As I got older, I’d feel my hair bristle and my skin crimp into goose bumps, only to turn and find Uncle Paul watching me, a little knowing smile playing under his mustache.
“Annette, you’re tuning them up. You sure that’s wise?” I’d heard him say after one of our little standoffs. I turned the corner and held my breath to eavesdrop, but my mother only laughed.
• • •
Whether Paul Rowland approved of them or not, my mother’s games put her eyes on me. Or perhaps more accurately to the way it really felt, the games were a sure chance to put me in her sights. I was the target, my mind a solid bull’s-eye for her aim. I never felt more real, and she never felt more anchored to me, than when she worked a lesson of what could be known from the quick scanning of a deserted park trail or how much could be read in the postures of the people on a busy street corner.
My mother’s attention had a clamping quality, and somehow I’d been born feeling full of helium, as if I’d sail away into oblivion if I weren’t nailed down. She was all mine, the paperweight to my flutter, when I would work under her instruction, mastering whatever trick we were honing at the moment.
For me, that’s what the games were for—for seeing her and for being truly seen. Simon, on the other hand, thought the games gave him superpowers.
From time to time, Simon took his fledgling knack for observation and deduction for a test-drive with varying degrees of success and the occasional punch in the nose.
He’d solved the case of our missing outdoor shoes when he was nine. First, my mother’s left garden clog went missing. Then Simon’s flip-flops and one of his soccer cleats disappeared. I straightaway brought in all my shoes from the back porch at the first sign of trouble and lost nothing. It turned out that our neighbors two streets over had a dog, and this dog had a neurotic affection for shoes with a sidecar mental disorder, a hoarding complex.
Simon staked out the clues and worked it all back to the dog’s impressive stash of ancient-to-almost-brand-new footwear. Seven full pair in all, plus nineteen singleton shoes, left ones only, were squirreled away in the crook of an old planter and a hose box behind the neighbor’s house. If only Simon could have figured out why the crazy hound always took the lefties first, I would have called the mission a complete victory. As it was, no one wanted the chewed-up, spider-infested things back, but Simon was pleased with himself, and to me at least, the world is always righter with one less mystery in it. My mother gave him twenty-five points for his persistence.
From that proud moment on, he was completely hooked on sleuthing.
Then when the middle-school band trip was in jeopardy from the theft of the fund-raiser candy, Simon put an eye on his classmates and an ear to the ground. His blood was up—in equal parts righteous indignation against crime in general and also that he’d been fizzing for months with barely hidden glee for the chance to play the saxophone in a big auditorium and take his own picture of the famous arch in St. Louis.
With a speed and precision that startled even our mother, Simon called out Brendan Corrigan and his buddies for nicking Red Cross badges from inside the blood-drive vans that had been out to the school, then selling the fund-raiser chocolate bars in the guise of volunteers, all on their own, for mad money. A couple of afternoons hitting up the far neighborhoods with red crosses pinned to their lapels, and suddenly Brendan Corrigan and his crew were pumping tokens into the arcade games all afternoon in flashy new sneakers.
But by the end of the week, both my brother and Brendan Corrigan were in the nurse’s office with ice packs on their faces, and my mother was in the principal’s conference room letting his canned speech slide right over her. I heard the whole thing from my chair, waiting just outside.
“Mrs. Vess, we’re going to have to assign Simon a week’s worth of after-school detention for fighting.” Mr. Campbell paused in the expectation of protest.
He got none. “I understand,” said my mother. “And I’m sure Simon does, too.”
“While we very much appreciate Simon’s efforts to get the band fund-raiser back on track, I’m sure we can all agree that it would have been better if he’d simply brought the information to us and let us handle it. The tensions over tattling—”
“They didn’t fight over the candy situation.”
“Pardon me?”
“You talked to them, yes?”
“I did,” said Campbell.
“Then you know it was all posturing. Chest beating.” She got no reply and presumably a blank look from Mr. Campbell. “A pissing contest? Once the Corrigan kid couldn’t get a rise out of Simon by calling him names for getting him in trouble, he switched up tactics and called me a dyke.” I could see in my mind the curl of amusement bending her mouth and sending the words out sideways, letting them hit with just the right thump. Not too hard. Not too soft. The Goldilocks of confrontation.
Mr. Campbell coughed in discomfort, and even from the other side of the wall I could tell he didn’t realize he’d done it. He would have been surprised to hear a taped playback of his automatic rumble of unease at considering my formidable mother in sexual terms of any sort.
I bit down on the corner of my lip to keep from smiling, wondering if she was, too. I was nearly seventeen, wavering on the line just past giddy blushing at anything in the same zip code as innuendo, past most of that sort of silliness, but not yet at peace with the idea that all kinds of things made the world go round, but nothing so much as sex and the near constant calculations over what to do about it.
Mr. Campbell cleared his throat. “Well, yes. I’m sorry you had to hear that. I’ll have Mr. Corrigan write up an apology for baiting Simon like that and bringing you into it with an insult.”
“It’s not an insult,” my mother said in her best peppermint voice.
More coughing from Campbell. “No! Of course not. I just meant—”
“It’s fine. And it’s all beside the point, too. It had nothing to do with me. ‘Your mama’ jokes never do. It’s all about escalation. It’s what boys do.”
“Of course, of course. And I’m sure you don’t need your son to defend you, Mrs. Vess.”
“Now why would you say that?” Voice a little warmer. Buttermints now. “You don’t know me, Mr. Campbell, I could very well be emotionally delicate.”
Campbell’s giggle-cough put him just where my mother liked him, liked all of them: talking freely. That’s how she got things done.
The principal cleared his throat again, an obvious tic, not an allergy. “Now, the boys do have an option to replace detention with a joint presentati
on, of their own devising, to the Health and Development classes on why violence is never the answer to a conflict. They would work up a ten-to-fifteen-minute talk with slides or some kind of visual aids, and then they would lead a discussion. They’d get out of the detention and get extra credit for the project. We like to think of it as turning a negative into a positive.”
“Simon will take his detention.”
“Well, shouldn’t we at least ask him if—”
“No.”
“Okay,” Mr. Campbell said, blunted to uncomfortable silence. She’d shut him down, withdrawn the light, rescinded the invitation to stand on the same step.
“Mr. Campbell, I know you mean well, but you’ll strip every bit of lesson from this dustup if you or I or anyone else digs into their business any deeper. We don’t need to turn this into anything in particular for them, positive or negative. Let the boys weigh the pain in their faces that they feel today and the nice afternoons that they’re going to lose to detention next week against whether or not it was worth it to push it that far or, on the other hand, to push back to make it stop.”
“Mrs. Vess, you can’t want Simon to think anything’s ever settled by force.”
“Of course not,” she said, all velvet bludgeon. “Except for the things that are. Life is choices, Mr. Campbell. And sometimes other people’s choices even more than your own.”
3
Friday
I’m headed straight west and the sun is preheating this damned oven of a car. I’ll be cooked by the time I get there. But even though it’s way too hot in here, I roll down the windows instead of turning on the air. I’m already not blinking enough as it is, staring wide to take in all of this road that I’ve never seen before, making sure I don’t miss anything. That’s how I do it when I’m caught out of my routine. I can take the shine off anything new faster than anyone I know. I scour down every novelty with lathered-up concentration until it feels normal.
So I’m studying this countryside hard, eyes scanning, cataloging the roll of the road and the different shades of green at the borders. The few sections of as-yet-undeveloped fields are flagged with ruins, the silvered barns in the near distance looking set there as leaning markers to the time when this was probably all one vast farm. I don’t want cold air pouring into my face from the vents and drying out my eyes any more than they already are. If it did, then I’d blink. Then I’d miss something. Then I’d doubt. And when I doubt, I freeze. And when I freeze, I convince myself that maybe it’s not so bad—it’s familiar, it’s safe, it’s normal, I guess I’ll just stay here. . . .
