When she bent to retrieve her bag of Cheez-Its, her hips bulged. Then she turned around, surprised to see me, and dropped the Cheez-Its on the floor.
Sally Milander was larger than life. From a distance her breasts ballooned out from the top of her tight shirts like pillowy rafts. But up close, they looked more like missiles. Her lips were pink and glossy, her eyelids rimmed with heavy black liner. And her brown eyes simmered. A reflection of myself dwarfed inside each one of them.
My face turned red and hot. I swallowed. “Sorry,” I muttered as she glared at me.
When I went to pick up her Cheez-Its my glasses fell off. Before I stood up, she snatched the Cheez-Its from my hand. “Creep,” she sneered, then kicked my glasses out of reach and walked away.
I had wanted to drop out of school way back when I first started at age five, but my mother kept me going. “I don’t care what anyone says, you are going to do great things, and I don’t want you to let anybody stop you.”
I couldn’t bear to disappoint her so I never told her how much I hated school. I felt around, found my glasses, put them on, bought my chips, and kept going.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Envy
In November a deep frost howled down from Canada and the cold settled in early. The leaves were still on the trees when the earth froze and the blades of grass twinkled with a coat of ice.
We had never experienced a winter before—we had no idea what we were in for. Even the onset of it was freezing. We bought ourselves down jackets and got into bed. Except for running back and forth to the bathroom, we barely used the rest of the house. And the TV at the foot of our bed was always on. Game shows, talk shows, classic movies, reruns, even infomercials enthralled us. McDonald’s wrappers piled up on the floor. Islands of mold drifted in mugs of old coffee. When the temperature dipped at night, a thin layer of ice skinned the water in the toilet bowl.
One morning, my mother was getting ready to leave for work when she stopped and looked out the window. A delivery truck from Walmart had pulled up in front of Patti’s.
“Pfft,” my mother went when two oversize men lifted a La-Z-Boy out. “I hate those things.”
Patti and Roger and all four of their children ate at Tiny’s once a week. They always sat in my mother’s section and even with her kids crawling all over her, Patti continued her tireless chitchat. She had moved on from obsessing about Miss Frankfurt and now talked nonstop about the redecorating they were doing. When they finished, the mess they left in and around their table was enormous. Ketchup and mustard on the walls, french fries on the floor, piles of sugar dumped out everywhere. And the tip they left was never big enough.
Three days later, around the same time, the truck was back at Patti’s. This time, as my mother watched she lit a cigarette but didn’t smoke it. She tapped it on the side of her ashtray, flicking the end of it with her thumb and waiting for the back doors of the truck to open.
“Oh my God!” she said as the delivery guys unloaded a couch. “It looks like leather.” She watched dumbstruck as they maneuvered it up Patti’s walkway.
Less than a week later on Veterans Day when we both had the day off, I was finishing a bowl of cornflakes and my mother was finishing her coffee. She stood up from the table, lifted her mug to take one last sip, but abruptly stopped. Another truck was barreling down our street. My mother lowered her mug slowly and fixed her eyes on the back of it like a dog fixes on a squirrel. She lit a cigarette, clenched her jaw, tightened her lips, and took short, clipped drags. When the same two guys emerged angling a flat-screen TV on their shoulders, she stabbed her cigarette out, snapping it in two. She flared her nostrils and two lines of smoke shot out.
“That’s it. I’ve had it. Get your coat.” Then she grabbed her bag off the back of her chair and walked out. The door banged shut behind her.
“Where are we going?” I struggled to find my sleeve, running after her.
She opened the car door and looked over the roof at me. “Where do you think we’re going?” she said. “We’re going to Walmart!” Then she pitched her purse over the driver’s-side seat where it hit the back window, punctuating the air with a smack.
On a clear day in winter when the trees were bare, if you looked down Main Street, across the valley, and up the hill, you could just make out the giant blue W of the Walmart sign. It normally took twenty minutes to get there, but on that day my mother drove so fast it took us only twelve.
The automatic doors flew open and a jolt of white fluorescent light shocked us. My eyes slowly focused. The enormity of the place left me speechless. It was possible that one of everything in the world might be right here. The thought sent goose bumps up my arms. My God, I muttered to myself.
“Ruthie,” I heard my mother say. “Ruthie,” she repeated, shaking me. “Let’s not get distracted. Come on, grab that.” She pointed to a cart.
I took the cart and followed her. She turned left, she turned right, then I lost her briefly down an aisle.
“Look how cute this one is,” she squealed when I found her. There were certain things my mother couldn’t resist like T-shirts with cats on them. We had not made it far before she’d stumbled upon a whole rack.
The one she held up was hot pink and sleeveless. The Siamese cat on the front had real fake eyelashes and a collar studded with costume-jewelry pearls.
She turned it around, looked at it again. “I love it!” she proclaimed, then gleefully dropped it into our cart.
Before we knew it, we were roaming with no direction, filling up the cart with random stuff. We got lost in Kitchen Gadgets. There were so many of them! The musical cake slicer—“You’ll never have to listen to anyone sing ‘Happy Birthday’ again!”—and the spork wizard, a battery-operated twirling spaghetti fork, were my favorites.
“What’s this?” my mother asked, holding up a package.
I took it from her and examined it.
“It’s a pepper mill,” I declared, rolling my eyes. How boring.
“No, it’s not.” She took it back from me. “It’s a flashlight.”
I grabbed it back. “No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
We passed the object back and forth, studying it like cave people would a phone.
“Oh my God,” I finally said. “Look! It’s both!” At the corner of the package was a small photo of a woman standing over her husband, peppering his salad in the dark, the “As Seen on TV” logo stamped beneath them in red.
“Oh my God, you’re right,” my mother said.
Enraptured by the possibility of this thing, we stood there holding it between us until my mother turned it over. “It’s only two forty-nine!”
Oh my God, oh my God! We hyperventilated the phrase to each other, like a call-and-response hymn.
“Let’s get it!” And even though we never peppered anything, let alone in the dark, my mother tossed it into our cart.
Less than halfway through the store, the cart was overloaded. A review was in order. “What the fuck do I need this for?” my mother asked, picking up a soap dish she’d loved just minutes ago. “It’s hideous,” she declared. She crammed it onto a Tupperware shelf miles away from where we’d found it. One item at a time she pulled stuff out of our cart, leaving a trail of crap lining the shelves in all the wrong places, only to replace each discarded item with a new one. In Walmart, time passed unnoticed. We got hungry and dehydrated. Delirium set in. The sharp fluorescent light cut right through my mother’s temples and her headache flared up.
“We gotta get the fuck out of here,” she said, abandoning the cart altogether. She was sweaty and agitated and needed a smoke but finding the exit proved impossible. The maze of aisles led nowhere. We doubled back through Bath and Bedding twice. We got stuck in Luggage. And then I lost her. I looked up and poof, she was gone.
I panicked. I imagined us as wandering Jews i
n the desert. We’d pass each other in adjacent aisles without knowing it. Disoriented and starving, we might easily collapse in Housewares just yards away from one another. To the sound of Muzak, in the cradle of Chinese plastic, our lives would fade to black and our story would end.
I looked across the store, and there, far away in the distance, I recognized my mother by the way she stood when she was looking up—with her head back, her shoulders down, and her hands in the back pockets of her jeans.
When I reached her, she sighed. “It’s on sale.”
I looked around and caught my breath. A canyon of flat-screen TVs loomed over us.
Live with Regis and Kelly was on and they were doing their thing: cackling together like imbeciles. Regis tossed his head back and laughed harder and Kelly smacked his knee and the antic repeated on every screen around us.
“We’ll be right back,” Regis managed to choke through his laughter.
“You get a fifty-dollar rebate if you charge it,” I heard my mother mutter.
I was spellbound by a Scott paper-towel commercial. Apparently just owning a roll of it would give us a better life.
“Ruthie,” my mother said, tugging on my arm. “Did you hear me?”
A wall of pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut now glistened in every frame. A hunger pain roiled in my stomach.
“Maybe we could get a credit card and charge it,” my mother said.
My mouth watered. I still worked the weekends and a few hours after school. Even with our dip in income, we were doing fine.
“Could we qualify?” I asked.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Winter
By early December it was frigid out. Our windows were drafty. The one in the kitchen was missing a pane. I sealed it with cardboard and plastic, but it didn’t matter. The cold seeped in and the wind sliced right through our walls.
An Alfred Hitchcock marathon got us through until the middle of the month. The Birds was my mother’s all-time favorite movie. To me, the final attack scene struck a false note. I simply could not believe Tippi Hedren’s character could be so helpless. I wrote a whole paper on the topic for English class once. Despite my A-plus, my mother insisted the leading man had to save her. “It’s the story of romantic love,” she’d argue. She and I never agreed but it was the only intellectual debate we ever had, and we both felt smarter when we had it.
In the weeks before Christmas the Hansons taped elegant candle lights in their front windows. Miss Frankfurt hung a tasteful wreath. Pancake donned a string of bells that jingled daintily when she walked him.
But Patti and Roger were Christmas zealots. Their house was ablaze. The roofline dripped with bright red icicles. Their front yard was scattered with little plastic elves. A giant inflatable Santa rocked back and forth waving while Bing Crosby’s “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” blared out from a speaker hidden in a bush blinking with gaudy blue lights.
For me the whole focus of Christmas was off. It was all Jesus this and Jesus that—not a single thing about Mary. I protested the holiday by acting as if it was hers. I outlined our door with my string of blinking Madonnas and I set up the rest of my collection on the front windowsill facing out.
The older my mother got, the more she hated Christmas. The lights gave her headaches and, as if a chorus of elves had infiltrated her brain, the Christmas carols kept her up at night sweating. “They won’t stop!” she’d shriek, holding her temples.
Christmas was a celebration of money and we never had any. Every year we’d give each other the same gifts. I’d get her hair bands and nail files, little things that were easy to slip into my pocket at The Dollar Tree. And she’d give me socks. The lead-up to the holiday made her want to kill someone and the actual day made her want to kill herself. Last year, on Christmas she got into bed with a bottle of vodka. When she was good and drunk, she reached over the side, hauled her bag onto her lap, and fished out her lipstick. “Do me a favor, would you?” She fisted the tube in her hand and in a drunken scrawl the lipstick went all over her mouth. “Wake me up when this is over.”
But that year in Fat River was different. Mel had given everyone a Christmas bonus. So on Christmas eve we turned up the heat, took our coats off, and lip-synched to Madonna all night.
Neither one of us could wait. Just before midnight we nestled all snug in our bed while visions of flat-screen TVs danced in our heads.
“It’s here!” my mother screamed the morning after Christmas. She raced around, hopping into her slippers, then she flew out the door. For the first time in our lives we’d qualified for a credit card, and our very own flat-screen TV had arrived.
It was so big, the delivery guys had to take it out of the box to get it inside the house. And no matter how many ways they angled it, they couldn’t fit it through the bedroom door. So they set the TV up in front of the couch.
The couch was full of junk but with a swipe my mother cleared it onto the floor. It was late afternoon and Jeopardy! was on. We loved this show. We almost never knew the right answer; when we did, we screamed it, and the jolt of adrenaline we got kept us hooked.
“This is amazing,” my mother said. We were drinking Diet Cokes and she was shoving fistfuls of chips in her mouth. She was wired from all the excitement. “You like it?”
“Yeah! It’s great!” I sounded a bit overenthusiastic. In reality, I couldn’t read the clues. The couch was too close to the TV, but there was no other place to put it. I didn’t like watching television sitting up, and the high definition was so sharp that every bump and blemish visibly erupted through the makeup. It was gross.
A week went by. The radiation started giving us headaches. My mother went through a whole bottle of Advil. On the night that she ran out, she gave up. In the middle of Cheers (one of her favorites), she announced she was getting into bed to flip through her catalogs and I decided it was time for me to read a book.
For days we pretended not to miss seeing our shows. But then one night when we were in bed, my mother sighed and tossed her catalog onto the night table. She picked up the remote, and with an outdated buzz, our old TV was on again.
By mid-January, half the lights on Patti and Roger’s bush had gone out and Santa was lying on the ground. The only thing that still inflated was his arm. It bounced up and down and every time it hit the ground, it shook back and forth twice.
By February, one of the kids had knocked over the speaker so Bing Crosby now crooned into the dirt. Santa was completely deflated but the plastic went on vibrating in the same rat-tat-tat pattern right through to the end of the month.
Then one night, around one o’clock in the morning, we heard a noise. We got out of bed, pried open the slats on the blinds and peered out. The sky was dark velvet and the scattering of stars were pins of jewels. Half the moon looked tucked inside a buttonhole. The other half cast long purple shadows in the light dusting of snow.
The sound was getting closer.
“Where’s that coming from?” my mother asked. It was hard to tell.
“There,” I said. “Look!”
Moving across our window frame from left to right, Hank was hunched over his walker. With one long chshhhhhh he pushed the walker forward on its tennis balls, and then with two shorter shh, shhs, he dragged himself behind it. He kept his head down and looked at his feet, astonished, it seemed, to see them move.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“I think he’s jogging.”
“You can’t jog with a walker,” I said.
“Well, that’s a jogging suit.” I looked and realized she was right. He was wearing sneakers and a red velour sweat suit. Instead of his beret, a headband circled his head.
The streetlight cast a globe of yellow on the road. Hank shuffled across it. The little gray wisps of hair on the top of his head glowed. Then he stopped. He dabbed at his brow with his left sweatband. Then he gripp
ed the walker and began to move again.
“Oh my God,” my mother said. “Where is he going?”
He made a three-point turn to the left. Then he headed off the road onto Patti’s yard. We watched him navigate around a Big Wheel and a hockey net. When he got to the bush he stopped.
“Oh my God, is he peeing?” my mother asked. Then, “Oh my God, he’s on the ground!” We held our breath and covered our mouths. Hank was on his hands and knees. He might have needed help, but neither one of us moved for fear we’d miss what might happen next.
He began feeling around in front of him.
“He dropped something,” I said.
“He wasn’t carrying anything,” my mother pointed out. “Oh my God, what’s wrong with him?”
He now reared back like a horse. It took us a while to realize he was pulling at something, and then suddenly, it snapped. He fell backwards and in the instant just before he hit the ground, the Christmas lights on the bush stopped blinking, the air pump went off, and Bing Crosby finally croaked his last note. Hank lay on his back like a june bug, holding up the end of the plug.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Contentment
In late March, timid tongue tips of daffodils and crocuses poked through the surface of the ground and then—bam!—overnight they shot up and sprayed the earth with color.
At the end of May the Hansons took out a loan and threw a “Grand Reopening” party for their hardware store. Two men showed up with ladders and buckets of paint, whitewashed the storefront, and cleaned the windows. And at long last the window display changed. A wheelbarrow, a sprinkler, a weed whacker—there was now a decipherable garden theme. They replaced the mishmash of warning signs at the register with a tasteful photo of themselves, young and grinning, with the caption, “Proudly in business since 1950.”
Together with a giant pair of scissors, they cut a red ribbon. For the first time since I’d known her, Dotty looked happy. She leaned over her walker, pinched Hank’s cheek, and when she pecked him on the mouth, the crowd erupted.
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