“Your nose is cold.” She pulled a blanket off the bed. “Come here, I’ll warm you up.” She wrapped herself around me.
The sound of the sprinkler system outside slowed. The synchronized arcs of water fell. The sun lowered in the sky and swaddled us in bluish gold.
Piney Hills was a deadening place. But that afternoon, something shifted. I could tell by the way my mother looked off into the distance, her wheels were turning. She and I would leave this place and laugh at it someday. The only question now was when.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Purgatory
No matter how hard I tried not to, I could always hear them having sex. With formulaic rhythm, my mother’s manufactured high-pitched whimper would slowly bloom into a vapid, overdone crescendo.
Then I’d wait. With every guy we’d ever lived with, I’d eventually hear the sound of her feet, pat, pat, pat, as she made her way across the hallway. “Push over,” she’d say to me. “I can’t sleep.” And this was how I knew for sure the end was near. She and I would eventually leave together and the warrior that was my mother would reappear.
The moonlight sank below the houses and the long angled shadows traveled westward up the street. It was a Friday night when I finally heard the shuffle of bare feet coming toward me on the carpet. We’d been at Vick’s for almost a month by then.
My bedroom door slowly opened.
“Mom?” I said.
In my mind, I will forever see the two of us sitting up in bed. I can picture her gathering her hair and laying it back down on the pillow behind her. I hear us laughing as she recounts all the crazy things we’d done together. And I can see the tip of her cigarette—how it lit up her face when she smoked, how it waved around and rested between her two fingers as if it had always been there, a graceful part of her hand. And I would think: there was nothing I ever wanted more than to sit and watch my mother smoke.
“Mom?” I asked again.
A figure stood by me.
“Push over,” I waited to hear.
But in the dark I realized it was Vick standing over me. The waning moonlight inside the room gave his face a purple glow.
My heart began to pound. There was a drumming in my ears. My throat closed up. Bits and pieces of my life flashed in my mind: the California skyline, the gap in my mother’s smile where she was missing her tooth, Peter Pam’s mules, Patti’s ponytail.
I was afraid to move. My eyes drifted down expecting to see an axe in his hand, but instead I came face-to-face with something far worse.
Vick’s erection bounced in the pup tent of his pajamas. The little yellow birds printed on the fabric winked as they rode up and down.
I looked at his face again. He was shaking now. He winced and sucked his bottom lip in. His eyes were moist and pleading as if to say, I am mortified by what I want to do.
Enh!—Enh!—Enh! My adrenaline kicked in and an alarm went off inside my head. Procure the fireplace poker just in case, Peter Pam had written in her last letter. And I had. I jumped up away from him, dropped to the floor, and reached under the bed where I kept it. I grabbed the handle, stood up, and wielded it above my head. I was going to kill him if I had to. I lifted the poker higher, but then something stopped me.
My mother, I realized, was standing in the doorway. A stripe of moonlight trailed along the wall and fell across her face.
Vick turned and saw her. His cheeks glowed bright red. “I was just leaving,” he said. Hunched over and covering his erection, he scurried out the door like a rat.
I dropped the poker. My mother barely looked at me before she turned and followed him. There was no time to plot things out. She and I both knew the drill.
“This is my daughter, Ruth.” With every guy we’d ever lived with, this was how she’d introduce me, simply as Ruth. “Now, I don’t know where you and me are going”—she’d point back and forth between him and her and curl her lip—“but you ever try laying a hand on her and I will kill you.” That night in Fat River hadn’t been the first time my mother threatened a guy with a gun.
With the same garbage bags I used when we moved from Fat River, I ran around feverishly packing. I stuffed my clothes into the bags and, on the dresser where I kept them, I gathered up my Mary figurines. In the middle of the night, she would come and get me.
I imagined we’d tie Vick up, steal his car, and douse his house with gasoline. I could hear our tires squeal, spinning backwards down the driveway, where my mother would pause long enough for me to strike and throw the match. She’d shift the car, and as we lurched forward, she’d flip her middle finger out the window and yell “Fuck you!” to the insolent squirrels flanking his driveway. Then the house would explode. Silhouetted by the yellow moon we’d streak across the earth and the sound of our triumphant laughter would fill the streets.
With an overstuffed garbage bag under each arm and the poker lying across my knees, I sat up and waited. In increments, the night sky lightened. The afterglow of my mother lingered in the doorway until the sun rose, but she never came to get me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Denial
In the morning, he was gone and my mother was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Her back was to me. Her legs were crossed. A swirl of steam rose off her mug. A bottle of rum sat at her elbow. She was waving her hands as if she were speaking to someone across from her, telling them something urgent.
It was still early, but she was already in a dress, floral print and not her style, but it’s what my mother did now: she got up, like Lynette, every morning and put on something nice.
She paused, lifted a hand, and hooked her hair behind her ear. It was a familiar gesture, but I wasn’t sure anymore who was doing it.
“Mom?” I said, but she didn’t hear me. She cocked her head. She shrugged and held her palms up: beats me.
“Mom?” I repeated. My chin began to quiver. “Can we please go now?”
She and I used to find things in other people’s garbage. When I was six, we found a whole bag filled with clothes that fit us perfectly. We wore them for two days until we discovered they were infested with bugs. She had to steal lice shampoo from Walgreens and wash us in a Burger King bathroom. Then there was the time when a cop caught her urinating in an alley and wouldn’t let her go until she showed him her “titties.” And there were all the nights we couldn’t sleep because our hunger pains kept us up.
A lifetime of humiliating poverty had left a laceration on her soul. And it was all there, written on her face, when she turned around and looked at me.
She was gaunt. Her eyes were swollen. Bits of her broken life were scattered inside them in shards like shattered glass.
Please, Mom, I started to say. But she looked away.
“I was just about to make some pancakes,” my mother said, getting up and hustling by me. “I know exactly how to do it now.” She prattled on, opening drawers, pawing through utensils. “So they’re nice and fluffy, not too dry, not too moist. I’ll make them golden brown. I saw it on this cooking show. It’s all in the wrist when you whisk the batter. And you can’t just use a fork.” She pulled out a whisk and raised it up. “Using a fork is like using a pencil when a thick Magic Marker is really what you need.”
She buzzed around the kitchen, opening and closing the cupboards and pulling things out. A maze of words spilled from her mouth and landed at my feet. It was impossible to make sense of what she said. She bounced around from Magic Markers to paper towels to skydiving and then to Paris Hilton. I listened closely for transitions, but there were none.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Sacrifice
Quick,” my mother said, “get your bags.” It was two days later in the middle of the night and she was pulling me out of bed.
Dear Sir Pam-o-lot, we are coming home at last!
P.S. What’s your opinion? Shall we paint the room i
n the back of the gas station blue or red?
I should never have doubted her. She might stray or crash and burn or need a place to rest, but in the end my mother always rises.
“I gave him extra sleeping pills. We gotta make it fast before they wear off.”
I dragged my garbage bags and followed her. With a flashlight in her hand, we snuck through the house like thieves. I lagged behind, looking around for something to steal.
“There’s no time for that,” my mother said when she saw me. “Here, stick this in your pocket.” She gave me a wad of cash. “I swiped it off his dresser.”
At the door to the garage she handed me the flashlight. Holding up a piece of paper, she punched the combination into the keypad and the door swung open. She’d stolen his car keys. We slid into the seats, and with the press of a button, the garage door lifted and she and I were out.
We sped through the night. This time, the ride was much nicer. Nothing banged or rattled in a BMW. The tires slithered soundlessly on the surface of the road like a snake across a pond.
As if a ream of fabric had been stretched across it, the sky was black and solid. When we were far enough away, light seeped through and the pulse of life returned. The soothing sound of cars rushed on a distant highway. The sky became full of complicated grays and dappled warm tones of bare earth replaced the blinding green.
At long last, we were on the road again together. That was all that mattered. I sighed, relieved. My shoulders dropped. The silhouette of my mother’s profile in the driver’s seat eased me into a dreamy, peaceful sleep.
“Wake up, Ruthie. Come on.” My mother reached across me, opened my door, then ran around to pull me out.
I was still half asleep as she led me through a parking lot. I remember the smell of gasoline and the flickering of streetlights overhead.
My mother pushed open a door and pulled me through. A blast of light blinded me. Our footsteps echoed on the concrete floor. When she finally stopped, I rubbed my eyes and looked around. The ceiling was vaulted with metal beams. Overhead a fan wheezed. A passerby hit my shoulder. An old lady shuffled behind him. Her chin hairs caught the light. A dreary couple sat on a wooden bench against the wall, a worn-out duffle bag between them. A big woman with a double chin big enough to fit a second face pulled a tiny suitcase with a missing wheel. When it left my line of vision, a large pair of women’s shoes was there. A cardboard box with handles sat beside them on the floor.
The owner bent to pick the box up and a meow inside soared soprano. Pigeons scattered in the rafters.
My eyes traveled up the woman’s arm and standing right in front of me was Peter Pam. I looked around, confused, then startled when I realized where I was. We were in a bus station. I turned to find my mother, but she had vanished. A pigeon feather drifted down and landed in the place where I last saw her.
Epilogue
The September sunlight dapples and moves in mesmerizing patterns. A dusting of yellow light catches the tops of the trees as if an angel had grazed them with spray paint. A breeze cuts across the campus and cools my cheeks. It is five years later and I am standing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the edge of Harvard Yard.
Peter Pam was holding two tickets for Boston that day. My mother had charged them on Vick’s credit card and sent them to her with a note to meet us. Tiny’s, Peter Pam had told me, was closing, so she was ready to leave Fat River anyway.
We live together in a basement apartment in Somerville where Peter Pam’s waitressing career really took off. The place she works has horrible food, but throngs of people go there just to see her. Recently Peter Pam’s boyfriend, Doug, moved in with us. Doug and I get along famously and he is so sweet with Peter Pam. I hope someday to meet someone myself, but I don’t trust women and I’m afraid of men. I have a dog, though. I found her on the street, a scrawny frightened little girl we named Tara. We loved her up and fed her, and that was all it took. She’s now plump and happy and Dave the cat is in love with her. They sleep snuggled up together on the couch. The five of us make a family and that’s all I really need.
For a long time, without my mother half of me felt missing, the half that knew how to relate and laugh and joke. My mother, I knew, did what she thought she had to, but the pain of it nearly killed us both.
When she called, she’d fill the space between us with idle chitchat or she’d repeat an episode of a TV show verbatim. Sometimes she’d recount a crazy thing we’d done together. She hid behind her laughter, but I could hear the sorrow in her voice. “I miss you,” she always said to me.
For a while she sent me letters twice a week. And she’d tuck all kinds of things into them: a picture she’d clipped from a magazine with a sticky note, “Isn’t this funny?” Or an article about a celebrity from People magazine. And always there were coupons. Land O’Lakes butter and Philips light bulbs, Maxwell House coffee and Brawny paper towels—anything she thought I might need. Once a month, she’d send me cash. Vick kept his billfold on his dresser, she’d explained to me, and my mother stole a little every week.
She came to see me twice; each time she looked a little thinner. More and more when I spoke to her, she was drunk. She’d slur her words, telling me how much she really loved Vick, then ranting on about how she hated him.
Her fatigue grew progressively worse. Her cough became more violent, and two years ago when they discovered a tumor in her lung, she had no strength left to fight it. She swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills and washed them down with bourbon. Vick found her face up in the middle of the tarp covering his empty pool as if she’d died searching for a place to get cool.
I buried her in Fat River. I made sure she was wearing heels and so she went with plenty of color, I took handfuls of the most brilliant confetti and sprinkled it in her casket.
Mel and Svetlana flew back for the funeral from Florida, where they now live. Arlene drove up from Pennsylvania. Miss Frankfurt came too. It made my heart ache to have us all together. Vick, of course, wailed. People emptied their pockets of Kleenex for him but he carried on, blowing his nose like an old lady.
A box from my mother arrived for me a few days after she died. Inside was her old pocketbook, two pairs of earrings, a wristwatch she’d told me once belonged to her mother, the Virgin Mary that had been glued to our dashboard, and a Polaroid of the moment right after I was born. In it, my mother was reaching forward. A pair of hands held me up to her. Like a ribbon of visible music, the umbilical cord still joined us. Stuck to the bottom was a Post-It note with her last words to me scribbled on it. “I’m so proud of you,” it said.
It took me years to finish high school. I lost interest in writing papers. I kept dropping out and reenrolling. For a long time, not even Peter Pam could cheer me up. But here I finally am.
The trees that line the Harvard walkways are full and healthy. Their tender leaves grow on low branches in clumps like clouds. A tower clock chimes. A group of students walks right by me. Someone’s shoulder knocks mine. I turn around, but no one stops.
The meek shall inherit the earth, the Bible says, but how many have to suffer first? Where I come from, children are wrenched away from homes. Men are disposable, boys are lost, women are beaten or killed. Little girls are left quaking at the sight of so much blood. And we blame them when they become less than perfect mothers. The meek shall inherit the earth, but why can’t we just share it?
This was the beginning of the essay I wrote that got me my interview at Harvard. My appointment is at three and I came here straight from work. Religion is what I want to study, and I already know what I’d do for my senior thesis project. I’d deconstruct the Bible and point out all its flaws.
A sparrow hovers overhead. It plummets to the ground a few feet in front of me. I look up to see where it came from and find myself thinking about my mother. Always, I feel her watching me. I remember a night in Fat River. It was after midnight and she and I were in our
lounge chairs looking up at the sky. “We’re so lucky,” my mother had said. It was hard for us to believe that life could be so good.
I look down at the bird again. I am sure it’s dead. But its eye opens. It blinks and looks around. The beak lets out a timid chirp. The bird gets up, hops about, and, as if not a single thing had happened, it lifts off the ground. I raise my head and follow it. The silvery undersides of its wings flicker in the sunlight, until it finds its flock and they soar off together like a thousand hopeful minnows in the sea.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all those who provided support, read my book, and offered feedback. Thank you to my good friends Jack Coyle, Carol Previte, and Jim Chiros for reassuring me the book was done. Thanks to Becca Kauffman and especially Alex Leake, who calmed me down and helped me cross the finish line. My gratitude to Helen Brann and the late Joan Parker for their friendship, advice, and wisdom. Thanks to Lou Goodman for his amazing work and Janice and Debra Barsha for their enthusiasm and support. I am grateful to the people who have guided me, especially my fifth-grade teacher William Schoen and Robert Alter. And to my brother, Andrew, who has taught me how to live with grace and humor. I am indebted to my team at Scribner: Whitney Frick, Paul Whitlatch, Lauren Hughes, Katie Monaghan, Tal Goretsky. My deepest gratitude to my agent, Esther Newberg, whose interest in my work has changed everything. And to Joyce Kauffman: I am eternally grateful for all that you are and all that you have given me.
About the Author
Annie Weatherwax was the 2009 winner of the Robert Olen Butler Prize for Fiction and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, for years she earned a living sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters for Nickelodeon, DC Comics, Pixar, and others. She is currently a full time painter and writer. Visit her at AnnieWeatherwax.com.
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