She considered this. “Would they tilt?”
“Of course!” I said a little overenthusiastically. “We wouldn’t think of having any other kind. And we could get those rafts—you know, the ones that have a place to put your cocktail.”
“I love those,” my mother said as I knew she would.
“It’s going to be awesome. We’ll put a cabana on one end and a snack bar on the other and maybe we’ll have a diving board, too.”
A few minutes went by. We were driving under the overpass to Route 57. The beams above were streaked with bird shit, some of it dripping and wet.
“You know what . . .” she said. She pulled the car over, put it in park, took her sunglasses off, and twisted in her seat to look at me. Through the seam in the pavement above us a sliver of light fell across her face. It flickered like a strobe as the cars thump-thump-thumped overhead.
“I’ve been thinking. You’re right. I think it’s time for a change of scenery. What are we waiting for? We have a car and we have money now.” It was true, we got $950 for Phil’s stuff and we hardly ever had that kind of ready cash. “And you know what else?” my mother added. “I think it’s time you and I head to Boston. We’re going to end up there anyway.”
My mother was not certain about much, but one thing she knew for sure was that I was smart enough to get into any college, and Boston, according to her, had all the best schools.
She and I had lived on and off the street, or in shelters. We moved in and out with boyfriends—sometimes with breathtaking speed. The few times that we could afford to rent our own apartment never lasted. Even when my mother worked four jobs, it was hard for us to pay our rent. And we never stayed in one place for more than six months. But I hardly ever missed a day of school. She made certain that every school system knew who I was and where the bus should pick me up.
“Yup.” My mother nodded, agreeing with herself. “Harvard is going to hand you a scholarship, I just know they are.”
I didn’t really see how I’d end up in college, but the thought of it could bring her out of any slump.
“Maybe when I graduate, I’ll become a doctor,” I said.
“Oh my God. I was just thinking the same thing. You’d make an excellent one.”
A smattering of garbage blew down the street and sprinkled the hood of the car. She grabbed her pack of cigarettes off the dashboard, lit one, then pitched the match out the window. “I’m even thinking that when we get to Boston,” she said, shifting the car into gear, “once and for all”—she took a long hard drag—“I’m going to quit smoking.” She blew the smoke sideways out the window. “Dammit, let’s do it.” She stepped on the gas and we drove out from under the dark overpass and into the light of the wide-open freeway.
We went from zero to sixty in no time. I was out of school and she was out of work. We had no place to be and not a thing to lose.
With the windows open, strands of my mother’s hair flicked and flashed in the sunlight, trailing behind her like ribbons. In between places was my favorite place to be. With the past behind us and the promise of better things ahead, few things ever felt as good.
I stuck my head out the window. The rush of air whipped around my face, flapped my lips, and made my eyelids flutter.
Gas tanks and power grids raced by. Mounds of gravel zigzagged across the earth and cranes punctuated the sky at sharp angles. When the city receded in my mirror, it couldn’t go fast enough.
My mother glanced over at me and smiled. She reached forward, pushed a CD into the player, and turned the volume up.
“We—are—fam-i-ly. I got all my sisters with me!” Sister Sledge—our favorite and the theme song to our lives—blared out. We swayed and sang the lyrics at the top of our lungs. The freeway widened, the landscape emptied out. The engine hummed and I pictured the car lifting off the ground. We’d sail across mountains and by clouds, we’d dip in and out with the birds. “Look, there’s China!” I’d shout. We’d hover just long enough to wave at all the people. Then we’d surge into orbit, leaving only the rush of sound and a white, wavy streak in the sky behind us.
This was how our story always went. With the wind at our backs we soared like bandits narrowly escaping through the night. And no matter where life took us or how hard and fast the ride, we landed and we always stayed together.
Daylight faded. The sky became a show of waning color. Yellows shimmered into blues. The sun singed the underside of clouds with orange. Poetry was everywhere.
Then, boom!—the car backfired. A burst of sparks erupted from the tailpipe.
“Oh my God!” I yelled. “We’re on fire!” My mother looked in her rearview mirror. When she swerved off the road and slammed on the brakes, an assortment of Phil’s shit went flying.
She grabbed her purse and we both jumped out. Smoke poured from the back end. My mother thought fast. She clicked in her heels to the passenger side of the car, ducked in the window, and grabbed her supersize Diet Coke from the holder.
“Stand back!” she yelled. In a single dramatic motion, she chucked the top on the ground and pitched the Coke at the muffler.
With a startling pop and a hiss, a giant vaporous cloud enveloped us and we doubled over choking. My mother took her bag off her shoulder, covered her mouth, and coughed into it.
Her purse was black vinyl, and oddly shaped like a giant pork chop. She never went anywhere without it and, like a man with a Swiss army knife, she used it for everything. She jammed parking meters and fixed vending machines by batting them hard on the side with her bag. I’d seen her use it as a weapon. She’d wind it up, let it go, and with the shoulder straps flying, it’d spin through the air until bam! she’d hit her target every time. She used it as a pillow on the bus. She swatted flies and shaded her eyes from the sun with it. I’d seen her hold it up against the wind and rest it on her head when it rained. And sometimes it just punctuated her mood. She’d fling it fast and hard on the ground, or lob it, tired and slow, on the couch.
“For Chrissake.” She flapped her bag up and down this time, using it as a fan.
“Really,” I coughed, “who knew Diet Coke was so toxic?”
Once it was safe, my mother inched her way forward. Clutching her purse, she bent over slowly and peered underneath the car.
It was almost dark by then. The freeway had quieted. A warble of insects pulsed through the air.
“The muffler’s dragging on the ground,” my mother reported from her bent-over position. She stood up and pushed her bag back on her shoulder. She put the key in the trunk. It popped and with a creak, slowly opened.
When we robbed Phil, we ended up with a lot of worthless stuff like his coffee mugs that said my love is like diarrhea, i can’t hold it in. “Collector’s items,” he’d claimed. We stole his blender that only worked when the kitchen light was on and his toaster that set the toast on fire if you didn’t dig it out.
But the only thing we took that I really wanted weighed a thousand pounds. In the patch of dirt and dead grass in front of Phil’s building I’d found a cement statue of the Virgin Mary. She was lying on her back with bird shit on her forehead.
When I grow up, I want to be a preacher so I can set the record straight. Religion is a hoax and when I read the Bible, I really did not like it. The characters were all flat, the dialogue was bad, and the imbalance of power cheapened the plot. In my version, Mary would play a bigger role. She’d rise up, take control, and set the world straight. As it is, she’s just written right out of the book, which for me was like killing off the movie star in the very first act. I wrote a paper on this topic for class and got an A-plus-plus on it.
I collected Mother Mary figurines. I had a string of plastic Mary lights that blinked on and off when you plugged them in. I found a porcelain one on the street in perfect condition, and I had a teeny-tiny hand-blown glass piece that I kept in a cardboard jewelry box. M
y favorite, though, was the Mary I had glued to our dashboard. Her eyes rolled back into her head as if she found life endlessly boring. There were others, but none as big as the one lying in our trunk.
The streetlight cast her cement-gray complexion a cold and stony blue. A swirl of lingering smoke drifted by her. A dog barked in the distance. A breeze kicked up on the freeway behind us and sprinkled Mary with dust. I picked up a rock and threw it just to watch it sail through the air and hear it drop.
“I’m sorry, Ruthie.” My mother laid a hand on my shoulder. “But the weight of her is dragging us down.”
We left the Holy Mother facing the road. Backlit by a line of trees, her outline glowed. She gazed upward toward heaven—waiting, it seemed, for a ray of light to deliver her from evil and take her home.
CHAPTER THREE
Flesh
Hours passed and we kept going. We made it to Utah that first day. It was almost midnight when my mother got off the highway and pulled over on an empty country road. She turned the key, the headlights went out and a slick of flat black inked out all the stars. Not a single pinprick of light showed through.
Halfway in a ditch, we’d spent the night at an angle and in the morning I was crammed up against my door. I sat up and looked around disoriented. An ancient billboard loomed in front of us, scraps of old ads peeling up in scales of faded color. Four rusted posts sat in hooves of crumbling cement like something prehistoric.
My mother was still sleeping when a dark cloud above us tore open and the rain fell. It surged and swelled and streaked across the sky in angled sheets of gray. But as quickly as it fell, it evaporated. Then it stopped. The road sizzled in its wake and a hush of steamy fog roamed across the earth. A flock of birds landed in the field next to us and started pecking for worms.
My mother finally woke. She stretched and yawned in her seat. When she was done, she tapped me on the thigh, as if to say she was glad to see me. With her foot, she pushed open her car door and got out.
She stood on the side of the road, looked out at the field, and stretched a bit more. She was wearing her usual outfit—tight jeans, high heels, and a tube top.
The first rays of sun pierced the clouds, she lifted her face and parted her lips as if trying to drink the light. She reached inside her pocket for a hair tie, twisted her hair into a bun, then hoisted up her tube top. When she stepped off the road, the birds rose up. Dipping their wings in unison, they banked in the air and in one synchronized motion, they landed on the edge of the billboard. Lifting their little rumps, they settled down, then looked around like they were bored.
My mother walked a few feet into the field. She unbuttoned her jeans, pulled them down, and squatted on the ground.
She and I almost never had privacy—from each other or anyone around us. The nicest place we ever lived had a shared bathroom without a door. She’d stopped caring about stuff like that. “Even the queen shits,” she’d said to me once when she was squatting in a bush.
My mother didn’t know it, but she deserved a nice bathroom. If I could give one to her, it would be grand and made of marble, suitable for Cleopatra. Pillars would rise at the corners of a sunken tub. I would travel to the Dead Sea, by camel if I had to, just to bring her back an urn of healing salts—if only for twenty minutes, she could float weightless in a bath of warm water, relieved of all her pains.
A sliver of light cut across my mother’s back. She reached between her legs and pulled her tampon out. She flung it by the tail as if it were a rat and replaced it with a new one.
“Hey,” my mother said when she made it back to the car. “You ready?”
She settled in her seat, stuck the key into the ignition, looked at me, then stopped.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
A lump rose in my throat. My eyes welled. “I’m just hot.” If there was one thing my mother never wanted, it was pity.
“Here.” She reached over the seat, felt around, then pulled up a half-filled bottle of water and handed it to me. “Have some.”
She went to go turn the key again.
“Mom?”
“Yeah.” She looked at me.
I searched her face. The lines between her eyebrows were deeper than I remembered. Her lips were creased and chapped. Her red fingernail polish was almost all chipped off.
“Nothing.” I swallowed hard.
She glanced at me and sighed. She smiled just a bit. Then she reached across the seat and stroked my forehead.
“You’ll cool off,” she said.
The wheels spun. The car rocked back and forth, and with a grinding grunt, we drove out from the ditch and into the sun.
The heat pummeled down in blistering rays. The earth looked left for dead. The “deluxe” air-conditioning in our car never worked. Even at sixty miles per hour, the wind through our open windows couldn’t cool us off. The highway threaded through a quilt of bone-dry barren fields. Wavelengths of telephone wires were punctuated with sickly looking birds.
We drove clear across Utah and through the mountains of Colorado. We slept on the side of the road or in rest areas. Twice the cops woke us up and told us to move on. We took sponge baths in gas-station bathrooms, we ate at McDonald’s, and when we got sick of that we ate snack food: chips and Cheez-Its, Doritos and nuts. And always we drank Diet Cokes.
Halfway through Nebraska on I-80, my mother’s toothache flared up. She’d had one on and off for months. When it hurt, it hurt so bad she had to wear sunglasses even in the dark. The toothache had always gone away, but this time was different. Her mouth was bleeding and the pain went all across her face.
She stuffed napkins and toilet paper inside her cheek. She stopped the car and lay across the seat with her head upside down out the door. We bought her bourbon and Advil—a combination, according to her, that could cure almost anything. But nothing could stop the bleeding, and the pain was only getting worse.
My mother found a gas station, parked the car, and pulled me into the dingy bathroom. She held the edge of the sink, squeezed her eyes shut, thrust her wide-open mouth at me, and waited there. I had no idea what she was doing until she opened one eye, then both, and said, “Don’t just stand there. God help me and pull it out.”
Except to say things like “God, this sucks!” or “God, I hate this,” the only time my mother ever mentioned God was to say that he’d given her good teeth. Now it seemed she was losing even that.
“Ruthie,” she pleaded when I didn’t move. She grabbed my hands and held them. “Please. I can’t do this myself.”
Her face was swollen. Her cheek throbbed in and out. Her eyes were bloodshot, her skin blotchy and red. There was a scab above her brow, from what, I couldn’t remember.
She dropped my hands, opened her mouth, and squeezed her eyes shut again. And I realized I had no choice. I had to pull her tooth out and I had to do it fast.
I held my breath and looked inside her mouth. It was wet and red and her tongue was swollen. It smelled like cigarettes and bourbon and blood. My knees shook. My vision blurred. Her mouth zoomed in and out of focus, the scale of it shifted. It felt as if I might lose my balance and tumble deep down inside my mother’s throat.
I steadied myself on the edge of the sink, closed my eyes, and swallowed. A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead and settled in the corner of my eye. I pushed my sleeve up and like a farmer reaching inside a cow, I stuck my hand into my mother’s mouth. The tooth was in the back. It was loose and slick with blood. The stench of someone else’s bowel movement lingered in the stifling air.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” There were so many things to be sorry for. But this was how we lived—with pain and foul smells.
I clenched my jaw, held my breath, and dug my fingers underneath her gum. The tearing of her flesh was audible. My mother moaned. But I knew I couldn’t stop. I braced a hand on her shoulder and yanked. The tooth flew out b
ehind me. She stumbled backwards, hit the wall, slid down, and landed with her legs spread-eagle on the floor. Her eyes rolled back, her head fell forward. She took one long gasp of air. A line of bloody saliva ran down the corner of her mouth. The back of her head started bleeding where she’d hit the wall.
“Mom!” I fell to my knees in front of her and shook her, but there was no response.
I took her head and with my bare hand, applied pressure where it was bleeding.
“Wake up, Mom. Please.” I cradled my mother and rocked her.
I did not believe in him, but God, they say, is everywhere. I looked around this nasty bathroom. “Please,” I prayed to him. I lived in fear of losing her. Every time she closed her eyes to sleep, I worried she’d stop breathing.
I was tough. I almost never cried, but when my mother groaned I started weeping.
“It’s okay,” she said. She reached a hand up and held my cheek. “I’m here.”
I folded up some paper towel into a tight square and had her bite down hard on it. When the cut on the back of her head stopped bleeding, I helped her up and washed her hair.
She splashed her face with water and I rinsed mine, too. We braced ourselves on the edge of the sink.
“Come here,” she used to say when I was a kid. Pressing our cheeks together in front of a mirror, she’d first pucker up and examine her pout from all angles. Then she’d hold my face and study my lips.
“Yup, you got my mouth. And let me see those eyes.” I’d raise my eyebrows in an effort not to blink. “Yup,” she’d say, and drop my face. “When you get older we are going to look just like sisters.”
But I could never see it. She and I were opposites. I had short, coarse hair; hers was long and silky. Her figure was curvaceous and feminine, mine was lean and hard. I wore jeans with high-tops and she wore hers with heels. But in the dismal light of that bathroom, as we looked at each other in the mirror, I saw a sadness in our eyes and a weariness around our lips that we shared.
All We Had Page 2
