Every man I ever knew had something dark and horrible hidden inside of him, but Mel was different. He didn’t drink. He didn’t swear, he never yelled. And he was unlike any man I knew: he never leered at my mother and he was faithful to his wife, even though she really was the Ice Queen. But my mother ruined men.
An owl lifted off the branch above me. A swirl of leaves fell. It felt as though the sky was falling. It had been a fluke that time had passed and nothing bad had happened. Now, it seemed, our luck was running out. Mother Earth was gearing up to shrug us off like flies.
When I got home, my mother was already there. She said something but I walked right past her, microwaved some popcorn, and left her sipping through a straw on her giant cup of rum and Diet Coke. She was drunk and getting drunker.
I kicked my sneakers off so they hit the wall on purpose. I got into bed and flipped through the channels, desperate to lose myself in some overwrought melodrama. Thank God they play reruns of ER all the time.
On ER there are no regular accidents. There are tornados and plane crashes. Olympic swimmers lose their legs, fourth-degree burns turn movie stars into monsters. The hospital itself catches fire on a regular basis. I found an episode and was hooked right away.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” my mother asked. I hadn’t noticed, but she’d followed me and was now standing in the bedroom doorway. I shoveled popcorn into my mouth and ignored her. She shook her ice and took a purposefully loud slurp from the bottom of her cup. Then, in and out, in and out, she pumped the straw through the top so it squeaked. It was so annoying.
On-screen, an explosion outside the hospital shook the IV bags. The lights flicked on and off and the building filled with smoke. One after another, the nurses and EMTs wheeled patients in. And in between all the chaos and coughing the doctors barked a stream of indecipherable orders.
“Don’t play this game with me,” my mother sneered.
Half the city was now burning and the place was jammed. The camera shook. Sirens wailed. A woman was convulsing, then the beeping of her heart flattened out. “Clear!” The doctor shouted.
“It’s not like I fucked him,” my mother slurred.
In rapid building sequence, from one disaster to another, images flashed back and forth.
“Don’t be such a goddamn prude.” My mother turned to go.
“Trash,” I muttered as she headed through the door.
My mother grabbed the doorframe to stop herself from falling forward. She teetered, took a huge breath, swung her head low, and turned around. With her eyes ablaze, she flared her nostrils, raised her head, and the alcohol on her breath ignited. “You think you’re so high and mighty, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something. If I lost my job right now we’d die on the streets.”
We had always heard home ownership was a pathway out of poverty but it was leading us down a hole to hell. Our monthly mortgage bill had gone up so fast, it had almost doubled. We’d missed one payment already. We’d fallen further behind on all our other bills and my mother had stopped sleeping.
She stepped closer, shook a crooked finger at me, and I turned the volume up.
“You should be thanking me. You think Mel’s above it all, don’t you? Well, let me tell you, when push comes to shove, he’s just like every boss, all he cares about is money. He’d lay me off in a heartbeat if I didn’t give him reason not to.”
George Clooney’s surgical mask pulsated in and out and he dripped with sweat. He was cutting through bone when—splat!—a piece of bloody flesh flew up and hit him in the goggles.
“Not a single one of them could give two shits about us. You’re a fool if you think they do. When it comes right down to it, I’m the one who takes you with me when I go!”
My mother spun around and lurched to leave the room, but missed the door and hit the frame instead. She staggered, and then—bam!—flat on her back she hit the floor.
I looked down at her, registered that she was still breathing, then turned the volume up. I crammed another fistful of popcorn into my mouth.
“Weight gain, insomnia, heart palpitations, diarrhea, and in rare cases death or stroke.” An antidepressant commercial was on and the list of potential side effects made depression itself sound fun.
My mother coughed. Then she gagged. I glanced at her again. A bubble of vomit parted her lips. I sighed, rolled my eyes, tossed my bowl of popcorn aside, got up off the bed, and turned her over. “Not on your back,” I said.
A bruised and bloody woman swaddling a dead baby crashed through the emergency-room doors. A doctor in another room cut a tumor out. He placed the glistening bloody mass neatly on a stainless-steel tray, then a nurse whisked it out as if to serve it hot.
I grabbed my mother by the hips and held her up. “Come on, Mom,” I pleaded, and gave her a little shake. “Spit it up.”
In my dream that night, Anne Frank, Mother Mary, and Hillary Clinton were all sitting at a table. Like writers on a TV show, they were brainstorming my ending.
“She’s enslaved in a dungeon. She is starved and beaten. But when she dies, her suffering makes her a hero,” Anne Frank said.
“Don’t be stupid,” Mother Mary retorted. “She’s worshiped in perpetuity for her submissiveness before man and God.”
Hillary Clinton let out a snort. “Let’s be real. This girl’s story is going to end exactly how it began. In a run-down, rat-infested hovel with her crazy mother. Now snap out of your stupor. Let’s work together and get something done.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Forgiveness
Ruthie! Ruthie!” My eyes slowly focused. “Wake up.” My mother stood over me holding my clothes. “We overslept, you’ll be late for school.”
I hardly ever missed a day of school. She kept two alarm clocks by her head and if we slept through them, she’d drive a hundred miles an hour the wrong direction on a one-way street just to get me there. It was the only reason she ever left the house without makeup, and no hangover ever stopped her.
She took my arm, guided me out of bed, and pulled me into the kitchen. She still reeked of alcohol. “You can change in the car. Here,” she said, and grabbed a box off the table. “Have a Pop-Tart.” She thrust them at me and, like that, we were out the door.
I put my jeans on, slipped into my long-sleeved T-shirt, and rode in silence.
“You’ve got two minutes,” she said, looking at the dashboard clock, skidding to a stop in front of school. “Now go!”
A mass of hair was heaped on top of her head. Her roots were showing and her hair clip was falling out. Her skin looked almost gray. She’d lost weight and the pockets underneath her eyes were swollen. The one nearest to me twitched.
I was still half asleep so she reached across, opened my door, and pushed me out. Bleary-eyed, I made it halfway up the steps to the door when my mother shouted, “Wait!” I turned around. Still in her slippers and robe, she was running toward me.
“Your paper,” she panted, and handed it to me. “They’re really going to want to read this one. It’s brilliant.”
I made a face. My mother claimed that about all my papers.
“I mean it,” she said. “I think it may be your best one yet.” Even though I knew she didn’t understand half of them, she kept all my papers neatly preserved in a three-ring binder.
“Now go. And you better run.”
“From Slavery to the Holocaust and Beyond: An Examination of the Decline of the Human Race.” She handed me my paper and I took off. Just before I pulled the school doors open, I looked back and saw her. She was sitting up in the seat, looking at herself in the mirror, a tube of lipstick in her hand.
She would only wonder why her knees hurt and she’d marvel at the bump on her head. And I would only swallow. And swallow again until the lump inside my throat subsided.
I was walking home from school that day wh
en it began to pour. The clouds were low and heavy. The sky was dark. I put my head down, adjusted my baseball cap, and soldiered on.
I had less than a mile to go when I heard the slither of tires on wet pavement come up behind me. On the one-way street, the car pulled up and slowed.
“Want a ride?” the driver asked, rolling down the window.
I looked up and realized it was Mel.
“Nope,” I said, picking up my pace to get away from him.
He stepped on the gas lightly and caught up with me.
“Okay,” he shouted over the rain, “how about an umbrella?”
Then he drove his truck halfway up the curb. He reached his body out the window, stuck his arm out, and opened up an oversized umbrella.
“Pfft,” I said, throwing my head back, not stopping. The wind had picked up and was blowing the rain sideways so the umbrella was useless anyway.
“I’ll drive the whole way like this if I have to.” He was steering with one hand and holding the umbrella with the other. “It would be much easier if you just got in.”
I stopped short on the sidewalk, crossed my arms, and shot him a dirty look.
“Please, Ruthie, just let me give you a ride home.” I looked up at him. His face was red and he was sweating. The rain fell off the edge of his cap in strings like tinsel. His glasses were slipping off his nose. He tilted his head back and tried to look through them anyway. “Please,” he said again.
I kicked the mud on the side of the road and it hit the door of his truck. A little clump of it sailed up and landed on his arm.
“Don’t expect me to talk to you,” I snarled.
I stomped around, climbed in, and slammed the door shut.
Mel closed the umbrella, gave it a shake out the window, and pulled it back in. He leaned it on the seat between us and settled himself behind the wheel.
“Phew.” He lifted off his hat and wiped the sweat off his brow with his forearm. He took his glasses off, opened his mouth wide like he was about to swallow the lenses, and—ha, ha—breathed one quick hot breath onto each one. Then he tugged on his shirttail and wiped them off.
“Are we just going to sit here? Or are you going to take me home?” I asked.
“Oh, right.” He put his glasses back on, pulled the shift stick on the steering wheel toward him and drove off.
I looked out the window and flattened myself against the door, trying to stay as far away from him as possible. A Styrofoam coffee cup rolled around at my feet. His truck smelled like sticky buns and gasoline. The rain kept coming, banging on the roof. The wipers were on high, flapping and squeaking and smacking but never keeping up with it. Mel inched along—like a total sissy, if you asked me.
“Jeez,” he said, “I gotta pull over.” I rolled my eyes. He glided slowly to a stop, put the car in park, and turned his hazards on.
A giant crack of thunder boomed and a gust of wind shook the truck. I gripped my seat but before I knew it, the wind had set us down again.
“My God, would you look at that?” Mel said.
I turned and looked. He was sitting forward, staring out the window. As if pulled by a string, a train of clouds glided into place in front of us. They split the sky and shot the earth with bolts of lightning. Veins and capillaries of light ran ragged everywhere. A row of pine trees swayed. With another clap of thunder, a wall of rain came at us. Then, abruptly, all went still. The trees stopped rocking. The sky gathered up the lightning and the caravan of clouds moved on.
Flap-flap-squeak. Flap-flap-squeak. Neither of us talked but the windshield wipers kept going. The downpour had turned to drizzle. I figured I could finish walking home now, but just before I pulled the door open, he spoke.
“Svetlana hates me with good reason.” When Mel wasn’t explaining how something worked, he rarely talked. When he did, he used short, unadorned sentences. His words came out slowly but they always left the impression there was a deeper meaning hidden behind them. And he never talked about Svetlana, so I couldn’t help but stop and listen.
“It was raining that night, too.” His voice was strange and distant. “There was a thick fog everywhere. I was young and drunk and I was driving the car. I shouldn’t have been and Svetlana tried to stop me. ‘Pull the damn car over!’ she kept screaming.”
I turned and looked at him. He was staring straight ahead in a trance. “But I wouldn’t stop, so when we got to a light at the top of the bridge she jumped out, ran around, opened my door, and tried pulling me out. She yanked at my arm over and over again. But you know, I’m bigger than she is and the rain was coming down in buckets and we were soaking wet. She grabbed me with both hands, pulled back with all her weight, and gave me one last tug. But then her hands slipped, and she went whirling. She tried to catch her balance, but she stumbled backwards into the fog until she was in the middle of the street.”
“It only took an instant.” Mel paused for a moment. “I watched it all happen. The light turned green and a Wise potato-chip truck barreled through the mist and hit her. I remember everything. She was wearing a dress. It was silk and printed with red poppies. When I think about it now, it seems beautiful. Her dress fluttered as she tumbled up the windshield and somersaulted over the roof. I half expected her to stick the landing—arch her back, throw her arms up, and face her audience smiling, like I’d seen her do so many times before. But she didn’t. She landed in front of me with a thud. The truck slammed on its brakes and just before it careened off the bridge, the back door flew open. Hundreds of single-serve bags spilled out of their boxes and buried her. Splashes of red from her dress winked in between the shimmering blue foil. Her face glowed, her eyes blinked. She looked every bit as breathtaking nestled in those chips as Bette Midler in her bed of roses.”
There was a catch in his throat and his voice trailed off. He was still looking off into the distance. Mini-wipers reflected in his glasses. Flap-flap-squeak, flap-flap-squeak.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
“Because if we could have had a kid, I’d want a kid just like you, full of wit and smarts. And because I’ve never told anyone the truth before. And if there is anyone who deserves to know the truth, it’s you. The truth is, I am deeply flawed. And the only chance I have at your forgiveness is owning up to it.”
The vinyl squeaked as he twisted in his seat to look at me. He swallowed hard.
My chin quivered. I bit my bottom lip to keep from crying.
“Of everyone I know,” he said, “you deserve better.”
No one had ever said those words to me before. I wanted more than anything to believe him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Illness
In early November 2007, the chairs out back filled with mummies of snow. The windows at Hanson’s Hardware were boarded up. Overnight they were covered with graffiti. Trucks finally came and emptied out their house, leaving the neighborhood with a gaping hole. Across the street, Patti and Roger had a week-long yard sale. What they couldn’t sell, they dragged out to the street with a sign that read, for free. The stress of everything made my mother sick. She got a cold that lingered for weeks, then the cold became a cough and the cough got so bad she tore a muscle in her neck and broke three ribs. She had sweats and chills. I missed over a week of school staying home to cool her down and warm her up.
She had been sick like this once, years ago, and ended up in the emergency room. We waited hours for the doctor to tell us she had pneumonia and send us home with pills. We never—not now or ever—had health insurance. Even though the visit took fifteen minutes at most, we got stuck with this enormous bill. And the bill kept coming. Everywhere we moved in California it followed us. A debt collector tracked us down and scared us half to death pounding on our apartment door.
So this time when I told her she had to go to the hospital, she harnessed just enough strength to sit up in bed, look at
me soberly, and say, “Over my dead body am I going there.”
The days dragged on. Mel sent over a glazed ham. Arlene dropped off soup. Peter Pam kept me company every chance she could.
On day six, Miss Frankfurt left lasagna at our door. On the evening of day eight she left a note.
Dear Ruthie,
I have had my uncle contact my cousin—his son—in Boston. My cousin made a few phone calls and I’ve arranged to have a doctor from Albany come see your mother tomorrow free of charge. She will be arriving at 10 A.M.
Your neighbor,
Mary Elizabeth Frankfurt
I was dumbfounded. I had only ever known her as Miss Frankfurt, the principal of my high school. She was tough and grim and everybody was afraid of her.
I looked across the street, but except for a dim light in her den, the house was dark. Patti had told us she sat there in the evenings reading and I imagined her in her favorite chair, a floor lamp at her side, lost in something good like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.
The doctor arrived right on time. She gave my mother antibiotics, prescription cough medicine, and anti-inflammatory pain relievers. She looked down my mother’s throat and taped her ribs. She even called and checked on us the next morning. My mother slowly got better. Two days later, she got out of bed and on the day after that, I went back to school.
The next time I saw Miss Frankfurt it was in between classes. She stood outside her office with her arms crossed, overseeing the hallway, inspecting her students as they passed. I caught her eye to acknowledge what she had done for us. But Miss Frankfurt was the kind of person who had no interest in sentimental thank-yous. She glanced at me stoically, nodded once, then looked away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Extinction
One morning right after that I woke up and found my mother staring out the window.
All We Had Page 12
