All We Had

by Annie Weatherwax

  “They’re gone,” she mumbled.

  As if the bank had repossessed their souls, in the middle of the night Patti and Roger had vanished. All that remained was a tipped-over Big Wheel and the protest of their screen door banging against their empty house in the breeze.

  My mother sighed and her breath left a fog on the window. She stood there a while and when she turned and looked at me, dread sickened her eyes.

  When you live so close to it, the bottom is never far away. And it is so far from the top that from there we probably look like ants spoiling a picnic. We could all die and nobody would miss us.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, even though I felt like crying.

  She looked at me and shook her head. We were next and she and I both knew it.

  My mother had lost almost two weeks of work when she was sick and we’d fallen further behind on our bills. We’d missed two more mortgage payments and our first foreclosure letter had arrived just the other day. And business at Tiny’s had slowed so much, it was impossible to see how we’d ever catch up.

  My mother swallowed hard. I could see the lump of fear rising in her throat. Her knees buckled. She collapsed into the kitchen chair and grabbed her pack of cigarettes. She fumbled it, so I took the pack and pulled one out for her. Her hands quaked so I held it to her mouth. She pinched it in her lips and I lit it with a match.

  She was crumbling right in front of me. I could almost see her breaking apart into tiny little pieces, leaving nothing but a pile of ash.

  Late one night I was lying in bed watching Seinfeld when she stumbled in the door drunk. I heard her bag hit the table. She tripped over something on the floor. I waited for the sound of her falling. When I heard her huffing and puffing, I got up and peered down the hallway. She was madly tearing the cushions off the couch, looking for something. When she finished, she staggered over to the kitchen table and started pawing through a pile of junk. She sighed, exhausted, looked up then down the hallway. Before she saw me, I ducked and dove back into bed. When she was like this, just the sight of me could set her off.

  A few minutes later I heard the trash cans outside clatter. I got up again and looked out the side window.

  Coffee grounds, Big Mac wrappers, scraps of old food, empty cigarette packs, used tampons—my mother was digging through the trash. A cigarette drooped from the corner of her mouth.

  It was cold out. The glow from the window outlined her in a parallelogram of light. Snowflakes appeared as they passed through the darkness. A fragment of the moon dangled above her as if by a breakable thread.

  She looked small and frail. A deep line bisected her brow as she sifted through a stack of scratch tickets. She picked up each one and double-checked the numbers. Her nail polish was chipped, her fingers chapped and red, one of her knuckles split and bleeding.

  An ash fell. A ticket caught on fire. She shook it, ouch! The embers floated up when she tossed it up behind her. And my mother just kept digging, leaning deeper and deeper into the garbage.

  When she came in, I heard her vomit. She took a shower. She brushed her teeth. When she got into bed and fell asleep I went outside, picked up the garbage, and secured the lids.

  That night I dreamed of floods. The last of the polar ice caps collapsed into the sea. Snatching chunks of land and pulling them under, the ocean engulfed the earth. I escaped on the tail of Florida, but then a tidal wave obliterated me.

  I woke with a start. It was still dark outside. In the cold hours before dawn, a gust of wind barreled down our street. It tipped over our garbage with alarming ease. It smacked at the earth and our trash erupted into a twister. The oak tree out front shuddered. With a belch, it heaved. The root system upended and the tree keeled over. It fell away from the house and sprayed the window with dirt.

  This could be how it ends. The credits would roll over time-lapse footage of the decomposing tree. There would be no theme or overarching meaning to our story. Just a drawn-out anonymous dying. The kind of dying people like us tend to do.

  But dawn came like it always did: with the crow cawing on the telephone wire outside the bedroom window. A brand-new thread of sunlight frayed the horizon line behind it.

  At noon my mother got up with a restful glow. She shuffled into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “Look what happened,” I said, pointing at the tree lying on the ground.

  There is a tipping point, Peter Pam had told me, when the earth will become so hot, the leaves on the trees will curl up and catch fire like they do when you angle a magnifying glass at them.

  My mother gazed groggily at the fallen tree. She yawned and scratched her head. “Oh well,” she sighed, and shuffled back to bed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Fear

  The human race is a godless self-destructive one. It destroys its habitation and eats its own. This was now the universal theme to all of my school papers.

  My current paper tackled Darwinism: “We are evolving backwards. Our brains are getting bigger but malfunctioning more.” I was sitting at our kitchen table rounding out my argument in my usual way—with one or two indecipherable sentences (it was amazing what an impression this made!)—when my mother emerged from the bathroom.

  She came careening toward me down the hall with her arms raised and her head stuck in the neck of a brand-new dress. When she emerged from it, her hair was a different color. She was now a dark brunette.

  “Will you zip me up?” she asked, spinning around in front of me. She held her hair off her neck and waited.

  Something had changed. She was perky and she smelled of high-priced perfume.

  “Hurry.” She stepped closer and lowered her back. “Or I’ll be late.”

  “Where are you going?” I asked, zipping her up. But she didn’t answer. She dropped her hair, grabbed her coat and bag. “Don’t wait up for me,” she said, and was out the door.

  I looked outside expecting to see her get in the car and drive off, but she didn’t. She stood on the side of the road as if she were waiting for a bus. She rubbed her hands together and exhaled into the hollows of her cupped palms. Steam rose from her breath. A car pulled up and my mother got in.

  Mice were living in our walls. I had visions of being overrun. At night they lurked in every darkened corner. By day they were brazen and bold. I saw one once angling a Dorito across the floor like a carpenter with a sheet of plywood.

  Peter Pam brought me mousetraps. They were extra-roomy “condos.” “When you catch them,” she’d explained, “you walk them out and open both doors.”

  But my mother had thrown the condos away and sprinkled the house with poison. Every living critter was now dying: the insects in handfuls like raisins behind the toilet, the mice in corners in pairs on their backs, as if they had been in the middle of a synchronized-swimming routine when they expired.

  The leak in our ceiling had gotten worse and we couldn’t afford to fix it. Our toilet was broken and overflowed almost daily. Life stunk of death and shit and poison. But my mother didn’t notice. She had found what she was looking for when she was digging through the garbage: Vick Ward’s home phone number, written on a napkin. She was now out with him all the time.

  That next Saturday between lunch and breakfast at Tiny’s, I was sweeping the floor when he pulled up. He slithered in so quietly, I didn’t see him until he was standing just inside the door.

  The suit he wore was precisely tailored with crisp lines and sharp planes of blue fabric. His hair was dyed an unnatural pitch-black, and, like Regis Philbin, he plucked his eyebrows.

  With a toothpick in his mouth, he sized up the place. When he saw me, his lips widened into a grin.

  “Hey, how you doing, kid?” Vick was overly friendly and had a booming voice. He could spot the only other customer across the aisle or two rows down and start a conversation: “Hey there.” He’d stick h
is head out of his booth. “What are you having?” And he’d keep talking to them even when they’d turned away.

  In his shiny leather shoes, Vick walked past me and ruffled my hair. I jerked my head away but he didn’t notice. “Where is everybody?” he asked and slid into a booth.

  “How should I know?” I leaned on my broom and gave him a look.

  “Whoa, Nelly,” he said. “Guess someone got up on the wrong side of the bed.”

  Pfft! In the story of my life I was just going to delete him. I left and headed for the back, but stopped when I saw my mother.

  She was standing in the kitchen looking out through the window in the door. She reached up, fixed her hair, took a deep breath, and plastered on a smile.

  She poured him a cup of coffee and when she turned to go, he grabbed her ass. She giggled and flicked her rag at him pretending not to like it. It was an embarrassing display and they repeated the idiotic antic right in front of me. It made me want to kill myself, but it got my mother a twenty-dollar tip on a cup of coffee.

  This triggered in Arlene a hot flash so enormous an audible sizzle of steam rose off her when she hit the cold air of the walk-in refrigerator.

  Arlene had separated from her husband again. She was having trouble paying her rent and her hot flashes had gotten worse. They now included full-blown anxiety attacks and one or more of the following: aching joints, muscle pain, bouts of rapid heartbeat, bloating, itchy, crawly skin, and tingling extremities. All of them, apparently (“God help me!” Peter Pam had said), common symptoms of menopause.

  When Arlene stepped out, it was clear the refrigerator had done little to cool her. Her eyes were shooting flames. Droplets of sweat beaded on her scalp through her thinning hair. She stormed right up to my mother and demanded a 50 percent cut of Vick’s tip. “I’m the head waitress here and we’re now pooling our tips, so fork it over.” Peter Pam and I were sitting facing out at the empty counter. My mother and Arlene stood right in front of us. They’d been bickering for weeks about who got which tables and how many.

  “Breathe through it,” Peter Pam instructed me, closing her eyes, inhaling and exhaling. She’d been trying to teach me the art of “calmness,” but the lesson wasn’t working. My mother hissed at Arlene and I bit my fingernails until they bled. And when Arlene reached for my mother’s apron pocket, their shouting erupted into a windmill of slapping.

  “Bravo!” Peter Pam sprang to her feet. They stopped and looked at her, confused. “What folly!” She turned toward each one of them with prim little claps.

  “Bravo!” she hollered again. “The denouement was simply splendid. And the dialogue was spot-on, spot-on!”

  Peter Pam believed that the soul was almond shaped. I had always imagined a kidney bean, plump and red. “One thing I know for sure,” she’d said to me, “it is not edible. It is solid like a rock. No matter what storm tries to capsize it, it simply laughs it off. The more you know of it, the more life reveals itself to be a farce.”

  My mother and Arlene looked at Peter Pam, stunned. “Now go on, the both of you. Off to your dressing rooms.” She shooed them with the back of her hand. “Chop, chop.” She clapped twice. In their confusion they stumbled off.

  Peter Pam winked at me. “You see,” she said, blowing on her fingernails and polishing them on her dress, “that is how you do it.”

  Sniff, sniff. My mother twitched her nose. “Something smells clean and fresh in here,” she said, stepping in the door. Life had plunged me headlong into a cleaning frenzy. The first one I’d ever had. While she was out with Vick, I was home plunging the toilet and sweeping up the dead. I scrubbed all the floors. I scoured the mold off the shower stall and polished the sink. I glued back all the missing tiles on the floor and painted over the food splatter behind the stove. I reorganized our closets and alphabetized our dwindling supply of food. I reinforced the leaky ceiling with double-thick cardboard, triple-thick garbage bags, and extra-strength duct tape. I cleared cobwebs from corners. Every speck of dust underneath the couch was gone. There wasn’t a single spot I missed. Our house was now a model home. But no matter how much I fixed it up, the scent of disinfecting Lysol was all my mother ever noticed.

  “Can you take your shoes off?” I asked.

  She stopped abruptly, looked at me, decided I was joking, and gave a dismissive wave. “Oh,” she snorted, as in Why bother? and then she proceeded to track in all this mud.

  We were losing the house anyway, she’d told me. So she abandoned it. Every time we got a letter from the bank, she tossed it out. She stopped doing her dishes and throwing her garbage away. She dropped her wrappers on the floor and left food out to spoil. I now trailed behind her with a rag, wiping up her mess.

  I had just finished bleaching the linoleum but she walked across it and grabbed a handful of Ritz crackers. Every time she ate, all I saw were crumbs. They fanned out from her mouth in every direction, ricocheting when they hit the ground. Still chewing, she flopped down in the middle of the couch. She now did this any old time she pleased, never acknowledging that the only reason she could was because I had cleared it off. And I’d scrubbed out all the stains with high-octane spot remover too.

  “I’m thinking about taking up yoga,” she announced. I had no comment. I officially did not recognize her anymore. “There isn’t anything yoga can do that a good fuck and a shot of bourbon can’t do better,” she’d claimed on more than one occasion.

  “Lynette did yoga, did I tell you that?”

  “Lyn who?” I asked.

  She looked at me incredulously. “You know, Lyn-ette,” as if simply repeating the name would clear things up. “As in vinaigrette and kitchen dinette? Vick said yoga really slimmed her down.”

  “Was she heavy?” I asked.

  “No, not at all!” she retorted as if my conclusion was outrageous. “She was gorgeous. I stole a picture of her—do you want to see?”

  Vick, she finally explained, producing a wallet-size photo from her bag, was a widower and Lynette was his dead wife. In the picture she was at the beach wearing a bikini, sitting on a towel, her legs pushed together, bracing herself on one arm. With her sunglasses pulled halfway down her nose, she gazed at the camera and smiled.

  “She died in a boating accident. Can you imagine?” My mother wiped a speck of dust off the photo with her thumb. “It’s so tragic.”

  Oh, please! I thought to myself. The official story was that Lynette slipped on something and her feet went out from under her.

  Vick was a pitiful man. He was the kind of guy who had no idea how to catch or throw a ball. He probably tripped on his own feet and when he reached to steady himself on her, he accidentally pushed her overboard. And I was sure he didn’t know how to swim. I imagined him immobilized and whimpering like a baby while his wife flailed and drowned.

  My mother put the picture of Lynette back in her bag, reached across the couch to the side table, and helped herself to a Kleenex as if by magic the box had been neatly placed right there for her. “Poor Vick.” She blew her nose. She picked up the pillow from the corner of the couch where I’d propped it up just so, and hugged it to her chest. She redid her hair clip at the back of her head and when she raised her arms her Kleenex fell.

  Every time she was in the house, she messed it up again. She’d use the bathroom and leave the sink smeared with toothpaste. She’d change her clothes and drop them on the floor. And when she got home, she never noticed that they were neatly folded and replaced again.

  Lynette, she continued, had been a woman of many hobbies. She sewed, she cooked, she played golf. My mother went on and on and with each hobby she listed, she tossed the pillow between her hands, spinning it in the air. Watching it made me dizzy.

  I felt queasy now all the time anyway. My cleaning products gave me headaches. And the way my mother acted made me sick. Every topic she brought up was related to Vick. Mostly she talked about
his house: it was so big, his things were so nice, the yard was so neat, and he had a pool. “A pool, Ruthie! Can you imagine that?” She went on and on. And she’d cleaned herself up in a way I really didn’t care for. Her hair was always neat; she now ironed her clothes. She kept open fashion magazines on the edge of the bathroom sink so when she did her face for him it was a major production, not her usual effortless routine.

  With Vick she became girly and stupid as if an idiotic twin had supplanted her. She didn’t swear around him because she sensed he didn’t like it. And apparently her twin had hearing loss. I tried once at work to tell her she had toilet paper stuck to her shoe, but she brushed right by me with Vick’s plate of food, eager to serve him while it was still hot.

  And now there was this Lynette! When she finally finished listing off her hobbies, the pillow landed.

  “I don’t know, what do you think?” my mother asked. “Should I take up yoga or crocheting? Or should I do both?”

  With the pillow now on her lap, she grabbed her bag and fished out her pack of Camels. When she took out a cigarette, bits of tobacco spilled everywhere.

  “I knew a woman once who crocheted toilet-seat covers.” She picked off the tobacco crumbs and one by one tossed them on the floor. “She sold them on the Interweb.”

  And with that she gave the pillow a swipe with the back of her hand and the pillow landed on the floor. I was just about to scoop it up, brush it off, and restore it to its place at the corner of the couch when I heard a noise. My mother heard it too.

  We looked at each other in silence waiting for it again. Then there it was: the unmistakable squeaking of a mouse. It stumbled out from the wall; a dusting of poison powdered its minuscule snout.

  “For fuck’s sake,” my mother said, finally sounding more like herself. She stood up, walked over to the wall, and picked up the tennis racket she now used to kill them.