What did I do? I kept my promise and said nothing. I couldn’t help my body’s physical reaction.
I drew myself up and knocked.
Trish answered and rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to say anything to me. It was nice having dinner, good night.”
She started to close the door, but I slapped it back open.
“I can’t leave you like this.”
“Why not? You left Mom like this.”
She slammed the door and left me in the yellow light.
Left Mom like this, she’d said, as if at fifteen years old I’d been my mother’s guardian. Did Trish think I skipped out of there happily, whistling show tunes? Did she think it was easy, in the white-water rush of puberty, to leave my mother’s home to go live with my father in the two-bedroom flat he’d rented? We’d sit there every night at our Formica kitchen table pretending not to notice the jagged edge left where we’d torn away from the rest of the family.
I hadn’t even meant to do it. To leave, that is. It’s just that Mom took us girls to the amusement park, and the fun we had that day was so rare and bright that it was like an eclipse that burned away the reality back home. I was sitting on a bench in my wet bathing suit, having zoomed down a waterslide with Trish, both of us in an inflatable tube and shrieking with the lack of self-consciousness that comes with youth and the fake terror of such things as waterslides. Then we took a break and sat down to eat corn dogs and slurp sugary pop. We were teasing Trish about the cute boy she’d been flirting with the whole time; somehow this kid kept popping up every time we were waiting in line for a roller coaster or something . . .
And Mom said, “You’ll have to get his number and call him when we get home, you minx, you . . .”
Home. We had to leave this place and go back home, where the air reeked of cat urine and rotted food. Where we had to ignore the skittering in the corners that I only hoped was spiders. Where her junk had begun to cross the Maginot Line of my bedroom threshold, because at school all day, or off at my part-time job at the mall, I could not stand guard. Where Dad no longer came home after a workday to ask us about our classes and listen, really listen, not just fake-listen over the newspaper.
“I want to move in with Dad,” I’d exclaimed. Mom dropped her corn dog and turned as white as the puffy clouds above us. And though I wanted to take it back as soon as I said it, seeing her face, I knew it was too late anyway. Something had been fractured just at the utterance of the words. And so I did move out, and Trish chose to stay. I’m not sure “chose” is the right word because that implies two options weighed and considered.
But she did leave, eventually. She grew up and moved out as we’re all supposed to, right? Why was I the only one who betrayed Mom?
I stood on Trish’s porch so long, wondering what to do, that the floodlight winked out with my lack of motion.
Chapter 5
I waited for my sister’s car to drive away. I listened to her walk across the gravel, open the door, and close it, but she did not start the engine.
I wanted to open the curtains to look, but that would be impossible, given the wall of boxes and bags.
She said she wanted to help me clean, but that would last about two days, then it would be just like with Mom; she’d turn her back and leave, and go back to her insulated life.
Or maybe she wouldn’t do that. Maybe she would stay and use me to make amends for neglecting our mother to death. Fuck me for being her charity case. She could take her hives and her barfing and never come back.
I stretched out on the couch, turned to face the back of it, away from the mess.
“Ronald,” I sniveled, letting a tear run onto the crusty upholstery.
The Ronald I missed, of course, was not the same Ronald who bellowed at me last night over the cell phone about why CPS had called him.
“You told me he tripped and fell at home, and she’s saying a pile of junk fell on top of him. He could have been crushed, Trish!”
“He did fall!” I’d insisted in a hissing whisper, down the hall so Jack wouldn’t hear me. “Some books fell on him after he tripped, but that’s not the same as being crushed by a pile of . . . debris, or whatever. It was just an accident. I’m allowed to be imperfect, you know. Remember that time you were watching Drew and he fell down the stairs and got three stitches above his eye? He’s still got a scar.”
“Something you weren’t exactly calm about back then, dear.”
“I swear to you, he’s safe here. That doctor was young, he’s probably naive and earnest and thinks he has to report every bump and bruise. I’m handling it.”
The doctor was actually about my age, but I had to keep talking, to settle Ron down.
“So if I drop by there unannounced someday, I’m going to find a nice clean and safe house?”
“Jesus, Ron. I would never hurt Jack. You know how much he means to me. You also know how hard it is for me to keep up the house, especially since I had to start working full-time after you left me.” My voice was breaking up like melting ice.
He sighed and I knew I had him. I’d hit the guilt button dead-on.
“Just keep me posted, OK? And answer your damn phone when I call you.”
I sat up from the couch’s scratchy upholstery and wiped my face roughly. The Ron I loved and married never would have ordered me to answer my damn phone. He was supposed to love and protect me. Not leave me, then boss me from afar.
I heard a car pulling up, and then Jack’s chirpy voice. I wiped my face again, smoothed my clothes, and ran my hands over my hair.
In they came through the door, all three of them. They’d let in Mary, too.
“Mom! This lady says she’s Aunt Mary,” Jack said, slinging his bag onto the couch before coming to give me a one-armed hug.
“Well, she is Aunt Mary. She was just heading home, though.”
I glanced at her over the top of Jack’s head. She was studying her folded hands as if she’d never seen them before. Drew was burning a glare straight at me.
I met his gaze with a challenging stare of my own. I diapered his skinny ass and he was not going to intimidate me, even if he was almost six feet tall and dressed like Halloween.
“Aunt Mary and I talked,” he began, at the moment sounding so much like his biological father I got chills, “and we thought this weekend we could clean. Jack could visit Ron and Grandma Pauline.”
“No!” shrilled Jack. “No! It’s not their weekend!”
“But, Jack, you don’t want to be here while we’re cleaning, do you?” my sister asked, bending herself partway over, using that falsely high, sugary voice that those without children always use, as if all children are just tall babies who know nothing about anything. “Wouldn’t that be boring?”
“No!” he shrieked, dashing down the path to the hallway. “You’re not touching my room!”
I threw a glare at my idiot sister. “Thanks a lot for that. Now I’ll have to spend twenty minutes calming him down.” I addressed the pair of traitors at once. “You two seem to have this all figured out, but neither of you knows how to handle Jack. He can’t be just handed off like a house pet when he’s inconvenient. Don’t I get a vote in this? His mother? My own house? Or are you planning to kick me out, too?”
I didn’t wait for an answer.
I found Jack in the center of his floor, arm wrapped around his favorite stuffed animals. He’d also pulled up some of his treasured boxes of Legos and action figures to gather around him.
I moved some old clothes out of the way and settled down next to him. He whimpered as I dislodged some of the toys surrounding him.
“Pal, they’re just talking; they’re not going to do anything without my say-so. I’m the mom and I’m in charge. You don’t have to leave if you don’t want to.”
“They won’t take my stuff away?” He cried a few more tears into the top of his thread
bare Cat, named simply Cat ever since he was two and naming everything in the house.
“Of course not,” I said, stroking his hair, which still had baby-soft fineness.
“I can help clean,” he said, sniffing hard and taking a shaky breath. He looked around his room. “I think it’s probably a good idea.”
I looked around, too. There were baseball posters and a wallpaper border behind the piles, but you’d never know it. His closet was blocked, so he got clothes out of the laundry piles, same as I did. Or sometimes I just bought new clothes. It was easier, and he was growing so fast anyway.
“Yeah,” I agreed, ruffling his hair. “It’s probably a good idea.”
I scrunched my eyes shut as I kissed his forehead and tried to wish away my haughty sister and judgmental son, who I knew were still hovering in the doorway, plotting.
I left Jack reading a Magic Tree House book and in the hallway took a deep breath, which set me to coughing as I inhaled some dust.
When I came out of the hallway, my sister and son were on the couch. Drew was slouched way down, his knees spread wide, arms folded. Mary was next to him sitting primly on the edge, knees together, as if she couldn’t bear to let her ass touch more of my couch than she had to.
I wanted to knock her block off.
“OK, fine,” I said. “We’ll start cleaning this weekend. But I’m not sending Jack away. He can help.”
They traded a look.
“Stop that!” I snapped. “Stop this . . . conspiracy between you. You barely even know each other; I mean, when was the last time you even saw him, Mary? Before he showed up at your house.”
She flushed pink and I felt satisfied, but also a little ping of discomfort registered. It’s not as if I tried to stay in touch either.
Drew chewed on a black fingernail. “She wants to help.”
“That’s a switch considering she turned her back on your grandmother.”
Mary had picked up a piece of paper and was creasing and smoothing it. “That’s not true,” she said softly. “Not the whole story.”
I snatched the paper out of her hand. It was a shipping receipt for a tablecloth I’d ordered. “I don’t know what the rest of the story is that you think made it OK to walk out on her.” I could still picture Mom’s paling, crumpling face when Mary announced it, her intention to move in with Dad. How she’d picked a day out at an amusement park to lob that mortar round, and how Mom dropped her corn dog onto the pavement and it was so ludicrous I almost laughed, when I really wanted to shake my sister until her teeth rattled. The ink was barely dry on their divorce papers, Mom was so depressed most days she could hardly brush her hair, and then her youngest daughter jumped ship, too? When Mom turned to me with moist eyes and asked if I wanted to go, too, there was no other answer to give.
“I couldn’t live like that anymore.” She raised her eyes to me. I’d forgotten how much they looked like mine; I could tell because they looked so much like Jack’s, that odd pale hazel color that seemed to alter with the light. She went on, “You said you couldn’t stand it either.”
“But I stayed as long as I could. I supported her.”
“I stayed as long as I could, too. I just didn’t last as long.”
I looked at Drew, appealing to him to see it my way. I could see only revulsion. Anger.
I put my face in my hands. Would this be Jack at seventeen? No, it wouldn’t be, because Jack understands me. Jack would never hate me. At least that I could cling to, when the whole world turned on me.
But if I lost Jack, maybe he would hate me after all. If my mess forced him to live away from me, in Pauline’s sterile condo or that bachelor apartment of Ronald’s. The rest of the family would blame me no doubt, and with Jack living there all the time, that’s all he would hear, how bad of a mother I was. . . . I’d not only lose him physically, I’d lose his love.
I’d blow my brains out. I really would. And that would teach them all.
“I care about you,” Mary said, and she flushed as soon as she said it, like her words had just slipped out. Like she’d farted at a dinner party.
Jack wandered out from the hallway and wordlessly wrapped his good arm around my waist. I settled on the couch and he curled into my lap. He fit awkwardly this way, all lanky limbs, but he shrunk into an approximation of his old toddler snuggling habit: head sideways on chest, just under my chin, body coiled in my lap. I put my hand on his back and the other on his hip to avoid his broken shoulder and rocked him lightly with my eyes closed.
Regardless of their traitorous reasoning, regardless of the unfairness—whoever told you life was fair? our mother used to say—the cold fact remained that if I didn’t do something, they could take my Jack away.
I heard a muttered good-bye from Mary and nothing at all from Drew but footsteps as they went out the front door. At last, when two engines puttered away, I exhaled.
Jack dropped off to sleep next to me as he always did, in my bed. The other thing little Ayana Reese disapproved of.
But try explaining to a seven-year-old why grown-ups get to sleep with someone even though they’re big and brave, but scared little kids have to sleep alone. And I have a big old bed with no one to fill the other side. The other choice was listening to him cry in his room, alone, and being mean and making him stay in bed and fighting with him for an hour about it before he eventually passed out from exhaustion.
Or in fifteen minutes he could fall asleep with me, no trauma.
I gingerly slid my arm out from under his neck. Jack sighed in his sleep and nuzzled Cat but didn’t wake up.
I got back up out of bed every night, because though Jack is like a part of my own body, so essential was he to my very existence, I also, like any human being, needed a little bit of solitude.
I got myself a bowl of mint chocolate chip and went back to the couch. I left the rest of the room in darkness and let the television be the only light. I was in a private little cave here, where no one could bother me, enjoying my ice cream and stupid TV shows about “real” housewives.
The housewives couldn’t keep my mind away from recent events, like that humiliating call I had to make to the psychologist’s office to set up an appointment, the lie I had to tell my boss about seeing my gyno because I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her the state was forcing me to get my head shrunk.
If I had to march through a charade to get the state out of my life and keep Jack with me, so be it. But I’d be damned to hell every which way before I’d give my boss, my neighbors, my family, or anyone else a front-row seat to my humiliation.
And then my sister! Mary had some balls coming here, acting the savior after she brushed off Mother—and me—like dust. She moved in with Dad, barely talked to me at school, and took her honor roll and National Honor Society off to the University of Michigan to go read dense novels by dead people. I remembered sitting there at her high school graduation with Mom. Dad sat two rows behind—no Ellen yet, he sat with his brother, our uncle Howard—and Mom murmured to me with admiration that she was off to college. I set my jaw and asked her what was wrong with what I’d chosen to do with my life, to make a go of a jewelry business while office work made the ends meet. Oh nothing, she’d insisted, patting my hand. Nothing at all, your jewelry is beautiful. But her eyes were on Mary, who was crossing the stage and choosing that moment to try to adjust her mortarboard, which fell off in front of the principal trying to hand her the diploma. And I saw it in my mother’s face then, in her smile and shining eyes: Mary was still the favorite. She’d abandoned us in Mother’s hoard, but she was still the special one. The fragile one, the one to be protected and sheltered, and now she’d also be the educated one. The one Mom would talk about to her friends with pride, and when asked about me, she’d have to strain to make me sound important and successful.
“Maybe I’ll go to college,” I said then, not knowing if I meant i
t.
Mother had stopped clapping, as Mary thumped down the steps with her mortarboard and diploma pinned with one elbow; with the other hand she was trying to fix the barrette in her hair.
Mother turned to me and clasped my hand in hers. I looked around like I was still in high school myself instead of two years out, reflexively worrying if I’d look like a dork. She squeezed my hand to get my attention. “You are a special woman, Trish, with uncommon vitality and creativity. They don’t teach that in college. You jumped into your life with both feet.” Mother searched the crowd of graduates—still holding my hand as the principal continued droning names—maybe looking for the back of Mary’s head. It was impossible; they all looked identical from the back. “Some people aren’t ready for that yet. Mary’s college education doesn’t make her better than you, and don’t you ever think that.”
I stirred my now-melted ice cream as the tears leaked down my face again, which still felt tight and dry from the earlier crying. Fourteen years later, would I ever again be able to think of her without weeping? Dammit, at forty years old I still wanted my mother.
I called up in my memory her tight embrace when I told her that Drew’s father wanted nothing to do with me, or his unborn baby, at the time just a bulge at my waistband.
I pictured my mom—stout and round and sunnily cheerful—in her kitchen basting the turkey, overseeing the side dishes, on Thanksgiving. Clutter was there then. But it was just stuff around her house. It hadn’t yet begun to creep up the walls in stacks, or spill out of her fridge in rotting sludgy piles.
They thought I was just as bad, I could see it in Drew’s sneer, in Mary’s hives and heaving. But my house does not have rotten food, ever. I do not have pets to leave their poo in places I can’t reach, no matter how much Jack begs me for a dog. It might be dusty in here, but it’s dust, not cat shit. It’s just dust.
Dust never killed anybody.
But, I thought, as I spotted my wedding photo in its frame on the wall, just peeking out from behind a tall stack of storage bins, Mother and I did have this much in common. Our husbands left us when they could no longer stand the stuff.
Keepsake Page 5
