I shrugged because I didn’t have a good answer, but now I could tell them more. My eyes are gray, but hers are bright blue with thin crackles in them like the old marbles I have at home. She has a trail of freckles across her nose and I don’t have any. We don’t really look alike but that’s okay with me. I’m just happy to be sitting next to her.
We turn off the main road and bump along a dirt road full of potholes. It’s so thick with trees that it feels like we are headed into the wilderness. Branches stick out like arms and screech along the sides of the car. A small house appears, surrounded by an enormous thicket of blackberries, just like my mom said. Animals and chickens are running in all directions as we pull closer. A gray and black goat bounds toward us, leaps onto the hood of the car, and stares at us through the windshield with big amber eyes. I laugh out loud.
“That’s my Opus,” says my mom. “And here comes Slope, but she won’t jump on the car. She’s a scaredy-goat.”
Then Ray comes out of the house—a big lumberjack of a man with a red beard and a long ponytail to match. He’s pale and shirtless. He gives me a nod and a “Hi” from the front porch, then slips his feet into a pair of unlaced work boots.
“Your boys used up the milk again,” he says. “I told them Nanny only gives so much.”
Behind Ray’s big body, I notice the house has no glass in the windowpanes, just sheets of clear plastic stapled up. The paint on the house is the texture of crusty oyster shells.
Jamie and Eden come tearing out of the woods in cutoff shorts. Jamie’s furiously waving a stick in the air. Eden doesn’t even stop to say hi. Jamie comes to a dead halt. He’s completely out of breath, and I can hardly see his eyes beneath his long dirty-blond bangs.
“Hey, Sis, I hope you brought a roll of toilet paper and your shovel, ’cause there’s no bathroom in the house.”
“Oh sure. Right, Jamie,” I say. He always likes to joke around.
“I ain’t joking. And I hope you brought a flashlight too, because there are no lights at night.”
“Okay, cut it out Jamie, or you’ll be sleeping with the chickens tonight,” my mom says.
“What for? For telling the truth? Is there a secret toilet somewhere that I don’t know about?” He laughs and bolts into the woods after Eden.
My mom smiles at me. “I’m going to explain how things work when we get inside.”
I follow her through the screen door, wondering what else I don’t know about. The house reeks of sour milk and rotting vegetables. I try not to breathe through my nose. The air is hot and still, trapped by the plastic sheets covering the windows. It is a quick, one-room tour. In the center of the room is a big mattress layered with green army blankets and a torn patchwork quilt. The bedside table is an overturned crate topped with loaded ashtrays, paperback books, and a cigar box overflowing with bangles and glass beads.
“You get to sleep upstairs with the boys. Up there in the rafters.” She points. “Just be careful on the ladder. It’s very rickety. If you need water, you ask Ray. He can pump it out of the well. And don’t listen to your brother. There is a shovel on the porch that always has a roll of paper on the handle, and at night we use kerosene for lighting. You can’t expect too many luxuries when the rent is dirt cheap.”
“You mean there really is no bathroom here?”
“Well, no proper bathroom, but certainly plenty of trees to pee behind.” Then she whispers down to me, “Just don’t let Ray catch you going too close to the house. You need to travel out a bit.”
Berry Bush Farm is different than I imagined it. I’m wondering if my dad even knows about the no-bathroom situation here. Would he have allowed us to come if he did? I look out through the screen door and see Jamie and Eden setting up plastic army men on grass battlefields. I can hear the rat-a-tat-tat of their gunfire, the exploding tanks, and the high-pitched screams of dying soldiers. Eden likes to set the army men on fire and watch them melt.
“You want to go out and play with your brothers?” Mom asks.
“I think I’ll go see the goats instead.”
I sit down outside with my legs crisscrossed on the brown grass. The twin goats jump high into the air off the hay bales, then run over to Nanny and tug on her teats full of milk. I hold out a handful of dry grass. Opus, the one with the black stripe on his back, comes over, sniffs, then turns up his nose and runs off, kicking his legs in all directions. I laugh because I feel like they are putting on a show for me.
I wander around to the back of the house where I discover a junkyard full of car parts, huge pipes, and old metal containers. I exit through a broken gate and find a million red jewel-like berries spilling over into an old claw-foot bathtub with a rusty bottom. These must be the huckleberries my mom was talking about. I roll a small, red berry between two fingers. It’s shiny and smooth like the salmon eggs that my brother fishes with. I pop it into my mouth and can’t believe that something can be so sweet and sour at the same time. Here in the hot August sun, I eat handfuls of huckleberries from the old bathtub. Time slows down.
I catch my mom moving through the tall grass on the other side of the yard. She stops between groups of tall yellow and orange flowers. I fill my mouth with one last handful of huckleberries and walk across the yard to her.
“What are you doing, Mom?”
“Taking care of the poppies.”
She takes a razor blade and carefully cuts a circle around the bulbous base of the flower. A milky white juice seeps out in little wet dots where she cuts. Then she cuts a second circle around the base, making the flower bulb look like it’s adorned in double strands of white pearls.
“That’s so neat,” I say. “Why are you doing that?”
“They’re opium poppies. Don’t touch. It makes something special when it dries.”
“Could I do that? I like the way white stuff comes out.”
She laughs. “You can try it sometime, but not right now. It takes practice.”
I continue to watch her do her work. Her fingers full of rings handle the flowers so delicately as her razor cuts into the green skin.
When evening arrives, there is a lot of yelling inside the house. Jamie and Eden are fighting over who has to clean the goat poop on the porch. I get to help light the candles and kerosene lamps in the kitchen. At the table I watch Ray’s big hands as he sprinkles dried grass along the crease of a cigarette paper. He rolls it up, licks it closed, and lights it against the candle flame. He and my mom pass it back and forth, holding their breath between turns. It smells just like “grass,” the word my dad and his friends use for the stuff they smoke sometimes. I know that grass makes people act differently but I don’t get what the big deal is. My dad always sends me away whenever someone lights up a grass cigarette at our house.
I hold my breath because I don’t like the smell. My mom will soon slip into a different voice, slow and lazy, like she’s from the South. She says she likes to get “high,” whatever that means. Maybe this time I will find out what’s so great about grass.
I help fill the center of the table with thick, buttery noodles and bowls of fresh chard and other greens from the garden. While we eat, my brothers keep trying to scare me with the idea that we are out in the middle of nowhere, and that there are definitely wolves and bears outside the house at night.
“So just don’t be surprised if you wake up in the morning and one of us is missing. Or maybe you’ll just find a bloody arm out on the porch,” says Jamie.
I ignore them. My tooth is so loose that I can’t stop spinning it around in my mouth with my tongue. Ray doesn’t say much at the table, other than telling the boys that he is going to throw them outside if they don’t pipe down. My mom drinks red wine from a jelly jar and speaks in her slow southern drawl. She kisses Ray in a sloppy way and then sits on his lap and sings: “I went to the animal fair, the birds and the beasts were there…The monkey he got drun
k and sat on the elephant’s trunk. The elephant sneezed and fell on his knees, and that was the end of the monk, the monk, the monk.”
When Ray looks over at me, his eyes are as red as his beard. I turn away because I don’t like when people stare at me. And I happen to know that people stare longer when they have been smoking grass. I take a swig from my bottle of orange Fanta and try not to look at my mom or Ray. Eden complains that there’s no dessert. Jamie dips his canned sardines into a bowl of ketchup and says he’s eating bloody fish. Ray and my mom kiss some more.
I climb up to the rafters, tired and queasy, and lay out my sleeping bag between the two-by-fours. The floor space is divided up into small rectangular plots, so each of us has our own sideboards to prevent us from rolling on top of each other—or off the rafters.
I’m so tired but I can’t quiet all the thoughts in my mind. Jamie and Eden are already asleep across from me. I stare at the wooden beams just above my head, watching shadows dance from the candlelight down below. I hear my mom and her boyfriend whispering. When I press my eye to a crack in the floorboards, I can see a thin slice of them. Down below, underneath the torn quilt, he is allowed to touch her skin. He can touch her in a way that I can’t. I wonder why she lets him. In this moment, I hate her. I wish she were more than an occasional mother to us. I imagine her skin, cool and polished like sea glass. I wish that I were Ray, nestled close to her, her warm skin touching me and her arms hugging me until I knew I was safe.
When I wake, it is black all around me. I am full of orange soda and have to pee badly. I recall my brother’s words, “Hope you brought your shovel and some toilet paper.” But I didn’t think about having to pee in the middle of the night. I can hold it, I tell myself seven times in a row until I can’t any longer. Shoot, I’m not afraid of bears and wolves.
I get up as quietly as I can and edge myself down the ladder. I can see through the screen door. Tiptoe, tiptoe, slow. I grab onto the spring of the door so it won’t creak as I open it, and I slip onto the porch.
I look up at the sky. There is a blanket of brilliant white stars—stars like I have never seen—and the moon is so big that it lights up the whole yard. The scent of ripe berries surrounds me. If only I didn’t have to pee so badly.
I step off the porch. Where to go? My mom said to go into the woods, but even with the full moon, it is too dark in the thickness of the trees. I take a left toward the junkyard. Maybe I can find a place near the old bathtub.
And then I freeze. Something is coming at me from out of the shadows. Two beasts side by side. They are ready to attack. I can see it in their red eyes and puffed-up chests. It’s George and Martha. The two geese stand in my path with their orange bills raised as high as my shoulders.
“Please, I have to pee,” I plead.
I take a step backward. They take a step forward.
I don’t even need to look down. I know what are on my feet. I pulled them all the way up to my knees before going to sleep. Red socks. Not just any red, but a bright neon red like a clown would wear. The one color the geese hate.
I run back toward the house. George and Martha honk and lunge at me. They continue to chase me—a chicken girl running through the night in red socks. Behind me, their big orange feet pound the earth like elephants’.
I jump onto the porch and turn around. They stop and glare at me. I want to be brave and kick them in the chest like Ray.
“Fine, you stupid geese,” I whisper. “I don’t have to go anymore anyways.”
I slip back into the dark house and stand very still. I think the sound of my heart beating might wake someone but the lumps under the quilt are motionless. A sour milk smell fills my nose again. I tiptoe back up the ladder and crawl to my section of wood. I try crossing my legs together tightly. I try to get in my sleeping bag, but I can’t. There are gallons of orange soda inside me. I sneak over to the far corner of the rafters, where the roof touches my backbone, and crouch down as low as I can.
I let it all out. So much inside me. It won’t stop. It splatters on the wood, then seeps like hot tea into my red socks. It sounds like there is a faucet on, except this is the house with no running water. I close my eyes until it stops. It is not the smell of orange soda that fills this corner, but the distinct scent of boiled chard water.
Then I hear the worst sound of all—urine spilling through the wood slats and hitting the floor below like hard rain. I jump up and leap into my sleeping bag, tripping across Eden on the way. He stirs.
“What are you doing? What’s going on?” he says.
“Shhh. Nothing. Go to sleep.”
“Yeah, whatever,” he says and rolls over.
I push as far into my sleeping bag as I can go. I peel off my wet socks. For all I know, I have peed on Ray’s head. What if the paperback books got hit? For a second I feel safe in my sleeping bag, like I’m sealed in a cocoon. But I also have a terrible thought—I like the idea that I may have peed on Ray’s head. Maybe he’ll get so mad that he’ll send us away to some motel. A cheap motel with a bathroom that works and no stupid geese. Maybe I will be sent back to California where I am safe with my dad. Maybe my mom will be so disgusted with Ray’s peed-on head that she’ll leave him.
Then I feel tugged the other way. I think about the sweet and sour huckleberries here in Chimacum, and how the baby goats aren’t afraid to jump around and have a ball. Neither are my brothers. But I am. I am afraid of so much, and I don’t want my mom to know that I am afraid of anything. Because if I’m afraid of her and Ray and the goats and this strange place, she might not let me come back.
Like the sea turtle at the aquarium, I pull my head out of my sleeping bag. I listen. Everything is quiet and still.
• • •
When I wake up in the morning, it feels like a jagged piece of glass is pressing against the inside of my cheek. I reach into my mouth. My baby tooth, clean and white, falls into my palm. I look down over the rafters. My mom is alone, sitting on the mattress with a book and a cigarette. Sheets of newspaper are spread out across the floor like a huge Chinese fan.
She sees me. “I’m sorry about not having a bathroom,” she says.
I want to pretend that I don’t know what she’s talking about or that one of my brothers must have peed in the night. But she points to the floor with her cigarette. “I threw down newspaper, same as you do with a puppy.”
I don’t want to be the same as a puppy. I want to be her “Little Liddy Bumpkins.” As she looks up at me, I get the rules now. I won’t drink soda at night. I won’t wear red ever again. I’ll study her hands and learn to cut the poppies. I’ll be tough-skinned like my brothers.
“My tooth came out,” I say, excited that I have something to show her. I hold it up in the air like a pearl from an oyster.
She smiles up at me. Her eyes are as blue and open as the sky. “Lemme see, lemme see.”
This will be the first tooth of mine that she’s ever seen.
I hold on tightly to my baby tooth as I climb barefoot down the ladder toward her.
NOW
faithful
Before boarding the plane to come here to Olympia, Bella told me that her tooth was loose. She always leaves a letter for the tooth fairy underneath her pillow, and her fairy replies with tiny handwritten notes as well as some kind of special treasure—a pearl, a fairy chandelier, an amethyst jewel, a rhinestone button, a crystal teardrop—mostly pieces that sparkle and are the proper size for a fairy to deliver. In my role as the tooth fairy, I revel in finding each treasure. I suppose it comes from what I might have liked as a young girl who believed in good fairies.
I think about calling Bella back to tell her I miss her. It’s late. Maybe she’s already gone to bed. And I should tell Dominic that I will make time to play cards or watch a movie with him when I get back. But how can I be a parent when I am such a child right now? All of my attention is focused on my
mom. I am a small girl waiting for my mother to die.
• • •
I wait until all the lights are out in the house and then slide open the drawer of my mom’s filing cabinet. Her letters are in no particular order and almost none of them are dated, though I’m piecing together a few that clearly date from before she left.
I’m absolutely batty in this sinkhole. Dirty diapers staining the floors, strained peas everywhere, and the washer’s on the brink. J. is all up in arms because I would like to at least take a week by myself sometime. I can’t see where it’s such a weird idea. He ought to cut me some slack. I’m inclined to think he’s worried about me having a rendezvous with W. and I can’t scoff him on that point. But this affinity W. and I have is so totally unrealistic it’s ridiculous!
“W”—I know this refers to Bill, a former “beau” and horse trainer from Texas that she loved and thought about over many years. I met him once when I was thirteen and was struck by how flirtatious my mom was with him. I want to understand how he fits into the timeline of my mom’s life. So I read on.
J. is out with friends—probably drinking and having fun while I suffer the indignities of attending to numerous tots. We will take our vacation in two weeks. Ah, bliss. Only 6–7 days, but 6–7 days without babies is like 21 with. We’ll probably go to Tahoe for a few days and then pan for gold and camp out. I would be so excited if I found a real gold nugget! And it does happen sometimes.
I don’t know if this vacation ever happened or who we would have stayed with for those six to seven days. All I can concentrate on is her hope of finding “a real gold nugget”—so very Mom.
The next note is on composition paper.
I had an English professor once who started out giving me As on all my papers—a thing he didn’t do often. Well, he got to know me and my work better, and then gave me Cs. As a way of explanation he called me after class one day in which we had been handed back tests. I had gotten an 86. He asked me if I had seen the movie The Hustler. I hadn’t.
Pieces of My Mother Page 8
