Talk

by Rachel Zachary

  I could see it in her eyes sometimes when she didn’t think anyone was looking. Mom would be (or seem to be) happy for days on end, singing while she did housework, making everyone’s favorite meals and she would go for walks in the woods and pick armloads of flowers to decorate every flat surface of the house with.

  But then all of her smiles would die and she would go quiet, and when Mom got quiet she became sad and when that happened she refused to leave her bed even when Dad was at work and my sister and I showed up at the foot of the bed when we were hungry or wanted her attention. After one time when she threw a table lamp at us screaming to be left alone, she took to locking her door.

  Every morning we got up we would check with my father first to see which version of my mother we were getting today. If we were lucky and my father gave us a quick goodbye before rushing off to work it meant that my mother was my mother again and she would leave her room and we would have breakfast. If we weren’t lucky then we would see him outside of her room with that hangdog ‘Aw Shucks’ expression of his and he would say, “Mom doesn’t feel to good today,” or “Mom’s feeling sad today why don’t you draw her a picture to cheer her up,” or “Mom has a bit of a headache so why don’t you girls play extra quietly outside today huh?”.

  Sometimes I was too curious. Whenever my father went off in the Wagoneer I would try and sneak into her room. If I could get in, I would bring her water sweetened with honey (my sister and I weren’t allowed to use the stove without supervision) and little saltine crackers or chewing gum because Mom knew how to do all kinds of neat tricks with it. I would read to her from my Winnie the Pooh book like she did for me when I wasn’t feeling well.

  She cried a lot when I was growing up and she used to throw up too, I could hear her making the most awful wet gagging noises, gurgling like a sink clogged with hair. I could smell it whenever she threw up too, despite the air fresheners she sprayed and the candles she lit.

  It was something else musky and sweet like rotting honey or expired cough syrup. Tobacco smoke clung to her skin, and something else that was dark and heavy that settled in my lungs –it was the same smell that later became synonymous with my rapist- it took me years to admit that this was the look and the smell of an alcoholic.

  Chapter Four

  I like to tell people the story of how my parents first met.

  Not because it was romantic but because it was the only thing I could tell people without feeling ashamed or flat out lying. The way Mom told it, Dad had been living on his own holding down a three to four jobs at the time to make ends meet. He mainly worked as a handyman, but sometimes he would head down into the mines, other times he worked with the electricians because he was good with his hands, and once he had a short lived career as a plumber.

  My mother lived with her parents in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and went to the local college and worked at the Community Garden and later for the Public Library. The two of them had met only once before in passing on the sidewalk, Mom thought he was handsome but my father hadn’t even looked her way. My father said that the sun was in his eyes.

  The two of them met a second time at a speed dating event. It wasn’t love at first sight, but they didn’t hate each other either. Mom said that she thought that Dad was a jerk because he kept laughing at all of his own jokes, but that he had a nice laugh and a nice smile.

  Dad thought that Mom was interesting in the free spirit kind of way, the way he told it, it didn’t make it seem like a good thing, but he asked if he could see her again and Mom gave him her number.

  They talked every other week, then every other day and then every day, until my parents got married. My grandparents didn’t approve but Mom said she wanted them out of her hair and she wanted to travel and live a little not stay in one place until she died like they seemed content to do. By then Dad had gotten all of his licenses and certifications and joined the electricians union when they moved up to Washington.

  It’s a sweet story.

  What I don’t tell people is that my mother, suddenly alone without her parents to talk to, her friends back home had become too busy with their own lives (It didn’t help that she was too shy to make any new ones) and my father who was always out working to pay off the house or with his friends, drank her first beer and never looked back. She didn’t try to hide it. Mom would tell me and later my sister how hard it was. She had always been open with it but she didn’t think my father cared. My father didn’t believe in treatment and convinced her that if she wanted to stop drinking then she had to help herself.

  She couldn’t do it.

  She was sober the whole time she was pregnant with me, but picked right back up after I was born, one bottle for me and one bottle for her until my father and her started fighting.

  It wasn’t until my sister was born that she really tried to stop, she didn’t quit out right she only got better at hiding it.

  It lasted for years, long enough for us to pass through twelve dusty desert towns, we stayed in a cramped little apartment New York City for a while, on a rancher’s farm in Montana, and in an old plantation house with six other families who had fallen on hard times in Alabama before we finally stopped in Dogtooth. Somewhere in between Montana and Alabama, Mom had gotten sober and stayed sober for the next six years.

  ***

  Growing up I wasn’t sure my parents really loved each other. Sure they fought sometimes, yelling and slamming things down but they were always friends again laughing and joking, Mom pouring Dad a cup of coffee every morning. Dad taking the time to fix the clasp of one of her necklaces but I never saw them hug each other. I never saw them kiss. I could easily count how many times I had even seen them hold hands in public, which was odd because my father was a touchy feely kind of guy around everyone else. I saw other grownups hug and kiss their husbands and wives, I saw them hold hands at home when I was visiting friends or classmates or in public, always in front of me.

  Unlike at home.

  My parents hadn’t been distant, in fact the morning that I demanded that they show any kind of affection towards each other they had been happily sitting in the kitchen, Mom was dicing up tomatoes and Dad was reading the newspaper. Dad was going to be away for the next couple of days working on some big project out of town but I didn’t care about that. Mariah’s words had gotten under my skin. I wanted to see some kind of token of love between them. I wanted to be sure that they were in love, not that they loved each other and in my twelve year old mind seeing them kiss was the only way for them to prove it to me.

  “How come you never kiss Mom?” I asked Dad.

  Mom laughed suddenly nervous. Dad, I remember was a bit flustered and said something like, “Because we don’t need to.” But that wasn’t enough for me. I knew then, instinctively that something wasn’t right, the word Divorce irrationally sprung up in my mind.

  “Kiss Mom.” I said, then demanded.

  I didn’t want my father to be the weird Dad. I wanted him to be normal. I wanted him to kiss my mother, to hold her hand, and to not look at me like I had grown a second head for asking him to.

  I remember how Mom had come over and put her hand on his shoulder and leaned down with her lips puckered but to my surprise Dad had reached past them and kissed her on her cheek. Not on her lips like Mom and I had obviously been expecting, not on her lips like the people in her romance soaps who loved each other.

  And his eyes stayed on mine the entire time.

  Chapter Five

  My baby sister Mary had been born just a few days before my eighth birthday just a week before Christmas in the middle of a late snow storm in January. She was the prettiest little thing that anyone had ever seen. I wasn’t so sure about that. When she had first come home she had been awfully pink and wrinkled. Mary was a long skinny baby, like a bean sprout, but she had big green eyes and a head full of soft brown curls and the cutest little laugh.

  Money was always tight. Dad was always in between jobs. We had to use cloth diapers and ge
t baby clothes and supplies from the Goodwill down the street. I’m not ashamed to admit sometimes when I was really hungry I would eat a cup or two of the little jars of mashed up pears or apples that were packed with vitamins and much needed calories. I was as skinny as a lamppost and Mom used to joke that if I got nay skinnier that I would disappear when I turned sideways.

  Because money was so tight Mom had told me that my new sister was going to be my birthday and Christmas present for the year and made me promise to take care of her. I had wanted a dollhouse but didn’t say anything. Sometimes it just wasn’t worth the fight.

  In this family, you had to pick your battles. Though Mom tried to make up for it by scrounging together enough money to surprise me with pizza one day (not our poor homemade attempts either this came from a real restaurant in town).

  When I finally turned eight, my father came back home one day early from work still wearing all of his flannel shirts and wool coat, there was snow melting in the creases and folds of his work pants and it was caked onto the bottom of his boots.

  He looked around the room we were all gathered in, Mom was sitting on the sofa, Mary was in her little cot beside of it and I was sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace carefully adding small sticks to it every now and then so that it wouldn’t go out. We were all wearing our coats because it was so cold and Mary had been wrapped up in a old comforter from the closet that the moths had gotten into over the summer.

  Dad had clapped his hands together loudly, rocked back on his heels and said “That’s it, we’re going on a vacation. Happy Birthday baby girl.”

  Dad had bought an old Station Wagon in October to replace their even older Ford truck whose wooden bed had rotted out and they had all piled into the back with a few books and some clothes for a few days and headed down to the hot springs.

  The hot springs were a few miles north just beneath the mountains where the waterfalls made the most incredible rainbows. It was warmer out here than it was in town the springs were surrounded by crumbling dry dirt and sand that stuck to everything. The water was hot and the steam smelled like iron, was pouring past the windows of the station wagon whipped up by the wind. We stripped down to our underwear and rubbed some suntan lotion on shivering as it was still awfully cold out while Dad was singing something about a lady who wore white shoes.

  Mary was sitting in the car with Mom still bundled up but watching everything that was happening through the windows. I was excited but nervous as I had learned how to swim but was still afraid of it. My mind had the nasty habit of imagining the worst case scenario like a giant squid or a shark biting off my arm or drowning. Water had always scared me. Even the smallest puddle. It had always seemed impossibly deep. I was the complete opposite of Mary who
  When she was four and we stayed at a hotel (when we slept in the parking lot in the station wagon) we had swam in the pool for hours (we had snuck in with a crowd of other kids and Mary had swam with them and kept swimming long after they left, I had sat on the side of the pool with my feet in the water) until it was time for us to leave (my parents had dined and dashed in the hotel and had almost gotten caught but we had fresh fruit and an armload of waffles and bagels from the serve yourself bar that lasted us a week).

  I let my feet get wet first and used to the heat. Then I waded in up to my knees, and then up to my thigh, and my stomach until I was up to my shoulders. The water was hot and turned my feet pink, and the rocks shifted under my feet so I had to half tread half swim to keep myself afloat.

  I looked back over my shoulder and saw Mom watching me from the car and my father standing in his shorts with his arms crossed and a funny look on his face that made something in my stomach flip-flop and send bright warning lights off in my head. It was the same look he got when Mom drank too much or when he was really angry about something. I swam out a little farther.

  Dad jumped in the water with a big belly flop and swam over to me, “What’s wrong baby?” he asked me. “You’re not enjoying your birthday surprise?”

  “No, I had said quickly. “I am.”

  “Well why don’t we go out a bit further. You have to get over your fears, today’s the best day to do it,” Dad said.

  I didn’t wanted to go anywhere with him, and as I tried to splash away from him toward the car he put his arm around my waist and he started tugging and dragging me across the water. I was terrified and shaking and holding onto him as tightly as he was to me. So tight that my hand went numb.

  I went under the water once and came back up to the surface gasping.

  “Almost there,” Dad said, and we were but it didn’t make me any less scared. We reached the edge and then he let go of me and pulled my fingers lose and pushed away from me swimming back to the other side.

  I screamed and flailed around behind him, at first I tried to just walk around the edge of the water but he kept pulling me in by my ankles, and every time that he did I would flail around some more and swallow more of the hot water that burned my eyes, the inside of my nose and my throat. I sputtered. My lungs burned. I tried to hold onto his arms, his neck and each time I grabbed him he would push me away. I floundered and I sank in the water.

  I could hear my Mom yelling something, and Mary was crying because she was yelling and then I felt my father’s hands on my waist as he pulled me up and then back to the edge of the water. I hadn’t stopped shaking until the water was up to my knees.

  “There you go, It’s okay, catch your breath you did great.” my father said. “That was fun wasn’t it?”

  I was still coughing and spitting up water and rubbing the wet clumps of hair off of my face. I started getting dressed without toweling off.

  “Wasn’t it?” he asked and that tone was back in his voice when he thought something was funny, something that made him laugh and laugh but never made anyone else happy.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “You see! She’s fine!” he yelled back up at Mom before he yanked my pants and underwear off with one quick tug and grabbed me right back up holding me close and threw me into the middle of the spring.

  I screamed but I was swimming away from him terrified and every time I made it to the edge on either side or I tried to run away he was right back there grabbing me and throwing me back in. The water was everywhere and got in everything my ears my nose down my throat.

  Dad was laughing and shouting but I was screaming and kicking every single time he grabbed me and every single time I hit the water. He did it again and again until I just started to stay in the water holding my breath with my eyes shut tight so that they wouldn’t sting so that he wouldn’t be able to find me.

  I did it again and again until I could stay down there longer. When I finally surfaced he was sitting on the shore and shouted. “There she is, the birthday girl, you’ve got a good set of lungs on you!”

  I half swam half crawled until I was on the shore, my eyes hurt from how tight I had crunched them up and my palms hurt too. I couldn’t quite catch my breath no matter how hard I tried and when I started crying I shrugged away from my father who had tried to hug me and pushed away mom who had done nothing to help me. Mom looked hurt and said she thought I was having fun playing. I looked at her incredulously. Dad had shrugged and told me to lighten up and saying things like “I had been a real trooper” and how I had learned some real life lessons. I didn’t want anything to do with them. You could have killed me I thought.

  I put on my clothes and sat in the car, no amount of cajoling or asking or even yelling would get me out or to talk to them until they both got dressed to and then we were driving home. I was so so so mad that when we stopped at a gas station for Mom to change Mary I slapped him as hard as I could when he opened up the car door to try and talk to me.

  “Look here now baby,” he said. “You’re okay now, I know I took it too far but you’re okay.”

  But when he tried to touch me I wouldn’t let h
im.

  No Daddy, I thought, nothing is okay.

  Chapter Six

  Growing up I remember how some people liked to make fun of Dogtooth. We would get people who came from out of town, passing through on their way to Washington or New York always going somewhere never stopping here. They would say that it’s ugliness was only rivaled by the people, and it was true that there were some ugly people living in Dogtooth. But that was only because of the weather which had the nasty habit of turning people skin to leather and the fact that there was nothing to do but work and when (and if) you weren’t working there was nothing to do but drink and smoke which most people started doing by the time they were thirteen.

  I hated living there, but I also thought that it had its moments. Like when the fields would turn dark green and the corn was growing, and the apple trees would get all fat and we would sneak in to the groves to steal some that had fallen to the ground.

  The real reason that I loved and later learned to tolerate living in Dogtooth was because it meant that when I came home from school we weren’t in the middle of frantically packing up to move somewhere else or living out of the car for months on end.

  Dad liked to pretend and later Mary with him that it was all one big adventure and we were cowboys out on the lam. I just wanted some place that we could call home.

  ***

  A few weeks after I turned thirteen, Michael Dunlap and his mother Ruthanne “Call me Ruth” moved out into the sticks. The sticks was one of the worst areas to live in Dogtooth, it was out near the train tracks and the woods where all the old trailers and shacks were. Michael was five years older than me, tall with a runner's body with a head full of dark blonde curls and bright blue eyes. He was pretty in the way that a girl was and that made him as much a target as the rest of us were for the older boys and girls who picked on us mercilessly because we were poor (even though they were just as poor as the rest of us).