The Benefits of Being an Octopus

by Ann Braden

  “Can’t right now, Zoey.” She starts shaking the bottle of formula. “Maybe later.”

  Lenny stands up to announce he’s leaving to go fill out an application for a maintenance late shift at the hospital.

  “Good luck, sweetheart!” my mom calls after him.

  I hand my mom the nipple for the bottle that she’s looking for. “We need to talk now, Mom.”

  She tests out the temperature of the formula on the back of her hand, and then goes over to scoop up Hector from his ExerSaucer. She thinks she can ignore me.

  But I’m not going to let her.

  “Here,” I say, picking up the bottle from the counter. “Let me feed Hector.”

  She squints at me and then releases him to my outstretched arms.

  I cradle Hector in one arm and give him the bottle with the other, just like my mom does. “Now,” I say, “we can talk in your bedroom, or we can do it right here.” I gesture to the back of Frank’s balding head. “But we need to talk.”

  My mom glares at me. “I told you no.”

  “But this isn’t just about you,” I say, raising my voice. “This is about me, too. And Bryce and Aurora and Hector. If you still claim to be our mom then you better—”

  “Fine!” she hisses. “But keep your voice down.” She spins around and walks into her bedroom, and I follow after her.

  As soon as I close the door behind us, I turn to face her. “Lenny doesn’t treat you right.”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve bringing this up again,” she says, her eyes narrowing.

  “But you need to explain something to me that I don’t understand.” I step toward her. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth? You knew that Lenny never turned in that form to the power companies. You knew it wasn’t your fault and that the form hadn’t been filled out wrong, because otherwise you wouldn’t have gone and filled out another one and turned it in yourself!”

  My mom glares at me and then looks away. “I just figured it was worth a try.”

  “Did you even tell Lenny you’d filled it out fine? Does he even know how the power came back on?”

  “The main thing is we have power.”

  “But it’s not fair that he blamed you for that and that now he’s blaming you for why he lost his job. It’s not fair!”

  She shakes her head. “I should have been paying attention to the gas gauge. I was so focused on getting that ground beef. I thought that it was going to fix things, but I just screwed things up more.”

  This is where I need to come up with my rebuttal, but not by discrediting my opponent. I need to do the opposite. “Mom, you didn’t—”

  “My job is to take care of you,” she says without looking up. “And I am doing the best I can to make this work. This is our shot at a good life. With a stable place to live, that has heat and electricity and a kitchen with enough to eat.”

  “But Lenny isn’t—”

  “He’s just upset about losing his job. It’ll be better once he gets back on his feet. And, look, he’s filling out a job application right now. He’s doing the right things.”

  The right things? “Mom, he made it sound like you were the reason he lost his job. That’s ridiculous.”

  But it’s like she doesn’t even hear me. “I shouldn’t have cried. That always makes things worse. I just need to make sure I’m thinking through things first, so I don’t screw up like I did with the gas tank. And make sure that I’m thinking clearly in the grocery store. And do a better job of … ”

  Suddenly I see my old mom, the waitressing mom. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Planning every little detail. Except that this time the customer she’s waiting on is sending back pizza after pizza and blaming her for it every time. She’s doing everything she can to figure out some way to get the next pizza right.

  And if you’re just watching that from the other side of the room, all you’d see is one incompetent waitress.

  When it’s really the customer that’s the problem.

  “Mom, we can’t live with him anymore.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “We can find someplace. We did before, right?”

  “With four kids now, and no security deposit saved up and no car of our own. And don’t forget that I wouldn’t even have my job if it wasn’t for Lenny. Restaurants don’t hire waitresses who are missing teeth.”

  “So just because he bought you a new set of teeth, he owns you now?”

  She looks away.

  And I realize that’s what my mom really thinks. Yes, he does.

  “Mom, whatever you owed for your teeth has been paid off for a long time.”

  She shakes her head. “Not when I keep making mistakes all the time.”

  No matter how good a person’s rebuttals are, nothing matters if the person is living in a whole different reality. It’s Lenny who I need to discredit. Who needs to be held up so my mom can see how he really is. “But, Mom, don’t you get it? It’s not you making mistakes. It’s not you at all. It’s him! He’s the one who didn’t turn in the form. He’s the one who yelled at one of the old folks and got himself fired. He’s the reason Bryce is having nightmares every night. It’s him!”

  She looks at me. Likes she’s really hearing me for the first time.

  “It’s not you, Mom,” I repeat, quieter this time. “It’s him.”

  My mom sinks down onto the edge of the bed. Her mouth is slightly open and her eyes are fixed straight ahead.

  “Every night?”

  I nod.

  She shakes her head. Finally she murmurs, “He should get another chance.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Instead of automatically giving up and going back to the broken toilet apartment? Instead of giving up on my kids having a father figure? Instead of giving up on having a boyfriend who can hold a job and tells me that my cooking smells good? Yeah, he gets another shot.”

  “Mom, Bryce is starting to talk the same way as Lenny. Is Lenny really the kind of person you want him looking up to?

  She purses her lips and closes her eyes.

  Hector starts crying. I look down to see that his bottle of formula isn’t tipped back enough for him to get the last drops. I quickly fix it, and he quiets down to start sucking again.

  My mom opens her eyes. “You can’t mention this to Bryce or Aurora. If they breathed one word of it to Lenny … ” She bites her lip and shakes her head. “He should get another chance.”

  When Lenny comes back home, he’s all upbeat. “Had a good chat with the manager, and I got the job!”

  “That’s great!” my mom says. She’s in the kitchen, mixing up some meatloaf.

  “Yeah, he was just a few years ahead of me back in high school. Knows a lot of the same people.”

  “Wow, Lenny, I’m so proud of you.”

  “And the pay is even better than it was at the nursing home.”

  Things are all flowers and sunshine for the rest of the evening. Lenny even takes the meatloaf out of the oven for my mom and tousles Bryce’s hair when Bryce shows up to get his plate of meatloaf.

  But I don’t buy it. I don’t believe in Lenny’s good moods anymore.

  After I’ve gotten Bryce and Aurora into bed and told them a story, my mom and Lenny are cuddled up together on the couch, watching the dancing on Make It or Break It like they used to. After a while Lenny heads for the bedroom, and my mom silently scoops up Hector from his ExerSaucer and follows behind.

  My mom might have said I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I spied on them again. But I’m pretty sure I’ll regret it more if I don’t.

  Frank is fiddling with his cigarette in his recliner during a commercial break, which is enough for me to start across the main room—crawling so there’s no chance he’ll notice me.

  With my octopus eye in position, I look into their bedroom. My mom is changing Hector’s diaper, while a still upbeat Lenny is pacing around, twirling a sock in his hand. “This is going to be great. I can’t believe it’
s even more money than before. You’ll have to switch your hours at the Pizza Pit, of course,” he says. “I won’t be able to eat during the shift at the hospital like I could at the nursing home, so I’m going to need to have a better dinner ready for me when I get home.”

  My mom looks up with a start. “But I can’t just shift hours like that. Connor’s been doing the lunch shift forever, and he can’t change those hours because he works nights at the brewery. And Ricky wouldn’t let me switch things anyway. If I say I can’t work nights, then he’ll say I don’t need to come back!”

  Lenny plops down on the bed, lifts up one of his feet, and starts cleaning between his toes. “Well, you could just find another job. One where you don’t have to deal with that Connor always poking his nose into our business.”

  My mom stretches the Velcro on the new diaper into place. “Are you serious?”

  “Look. I’m not the one getting all worked up here,” Lenny says. “You just need to go with the flow a little. I mean, it’s just a job.”

  “It’s my job.”

  He shrugs. “Like I said. Just a job. And considering the mess you’ve put us in, you better get your head screwed on straight soon.” He finally looks up from his toes. “Now, where’s that expensive smile of yours?”

  My mom doesn’t smile. She doesn’t even look up. She’s managed to stuff Hector into his pajamas, and one by one she’s snapping them up.

  Snap.

  Snap.

  Snap.

  After she gets to the last one and moves Hector into his crib, she stands up straight—and then walks out of the room.

  She blows past me and heads right into the bathroom. I scramble off the washing machine and knock on the door.

  “Mom,” I whisper. “It’s me.” Without waiting for an answer I slip inside the door and shut it behind me. My mom is sitting on the floor against the wall, her head buried in her knees.

  “I told you you’d regret it if you spied on us again,” she says. “You shouldn’t see me like this.”

  I don’t say anything. I just slide down next to her.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she whispers. “I always thought I just had to explain myself better. That if I could do that, he’d understand.” She looks up, tears streaming down her face. “But I don’t think it matters what I say. I don’t think he cares one bit about understanding me.”

  “I don’t think he does either,” I say. I stare at Lenny’s perfectly lined-up shaving items: his shaving brush, his tub of shaving cream, his lather bowl, his razor—always lined up by size, with the handle of the razor perfectly parallel to the wall. “And I know that you said that he doesn’t hit you, but that doesn’t matter. He’s still making sure that you’re scared.”

  My mom reaches for a towel and wipes her face. I picture Fuchsia with the lines of eye makeup running down her cheeks. There are too many people hiding in bathrooms.

  “It was Fuchsia,” I blurt out.

  My mom turns to me. “What was? What are you talking about?”

  “The shots that were fired in the parking lot. That was Crystal’s new boyfriend trying to scare Fuchsia.”

  “Oh, Fuchsia.” My mom closes her eyes and buries her face back in the towel. When she emerges again, she takes a deep breath. “That whole family is trouble.”

  I eye the rest of Lenny’s perfectly folded bath towels. But not us, right?

  She stands up and tries to put the towel back the way he had it.

  “What are you going to do about Lenny?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “I can’t lose my job.”

  “What if we were able to find our own apartment?” I whisper.

  “I told you. I don’t have enough saved up to pay a security deposit.”

  “But if we just tried?”

  She bows her head and closes her eyes. “He can’t know.”

  I don’t take my eyes from his perfectly square towels. “We won’t let him find out.”

  CHAPTER 24

  On Saturday morning, my mom announces that she’s going grocery shopping. “Who wants to come?” she says, staring directly at me.

  I nod. “I’ll get Bryce and Aurora ready.”

  I drag Bryce and Aurora out of their pajamas with the promise that we can hang out in the toy aisle as long as they want, and finally the two of them along with Hector are strapped into the back seat of Lenny’s car.

  And I realize how impossible this all is without our own car. If we leave, what’s that going to look like? Us walking down the shoulder of the road hauling a car seat and a booster seat with us?

  My mom takes the road that leads up to Route 14. I hate the way my mom drives these days. Every time she steps on the accelerator it’s so tentative. It’s like she’s scared she’s going to use too much of Lenny’s gas.

  “Why are we going this way?” Bryce calls from the back.

  “We’re going to the J & H Supermarket this time,” my mom says, without taking her eyes off the road.

  “But, that one doesn’t have the cart with the steering wheels,” he whines.

  “They’re having a sale,” my mom says without batting an eye, “on ground beef.”

  Part of me wonders if she’s lost her mind, but then when she pulls into the parking space, she hands me the EBT card. “Don’t spend more than five bucks and don’t buy anything except for ground beef. And keep the kids occupied as long as you can. I’ll meet you back here.”

  She gets out, hoists Hector onto her hip, and starts walking quickly out of the parking lot—toward Family Services.

  Half an hour later, Bryce and Aurora are driving packages of Matchbox cars around in the toy aisle when my mom shows up again. She shakes her head when I meet her eyes. “Not a single opening for low-income housing,” she whispers. “The waiting list is years long.”

  “We’ll find something,” I say. “Right?”

  She watches Bryce and Aurora as they scoot around with their cardboard boxes yelling, “Zoom!” “Wherever we end up,” she says, “we’re going to need a car and there’s no way we can afford one right now.”

  “But we can walk places. If we lived downtown, we’d be close to the laundromat, and you’d just have a long walk to work instead of the other way around,” I say.

  “With Hector? And then you walk all the way back with him and Bryce and Aurora after you pick them all up? There’s no way.”

  I don’t know what to say. How is it possible to have no visible cage around you, but to be so trapped?

  My mom bites her lip. “But Lenny is going to expect me to either ask for new shifts when I go in to work today—or to quit. And I won’t. I can’t!”

  Bryce crashes his Matchbox car box into a display of Valentine’s Day decorations, and they all go flying.

  “Bryce, quit it!” my mom yells, and both of us are soon on our knees picking up packages of paper plates and paper cups covered in hearts and containers of heart confetti.

  “We’ll find something,” I whisper to her. There’s no other option.

  I pick up the last bunch of items on the floor, hot pink headbands with bobbly hearts. They’re practically screaming Fuchsia’s name, and I’m tempted to jam one into my jacket pocket, but my mom’s too close and might see me.

  Nothing in life is fair. We shouldn’t be forced to choose between a place to live and life with Lenny, and if Fuchsia is going to get threatened by an angry guy with a gun, she sure deserves to have a hot pink headband with bobbly hearts. Except that she doesn’t have a friend with enough money to buy it for her.

  On our walk back to the car, my mom pulls me close to her and shows me a little scrap of paper with a phone number.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “I got it from a poster at Family Services.” She pauses. “It’s a domestic violence hotline number.”

  “Are you going to call it?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think I should? He’s never hit me.”

  “Mom. You’re scared. I’m scared.
That counts.”

  She bites her lip. “But … what if … ”

  I stop walking and look at her. “What if they can help us find a place to stay? You need to call them. I’ll get the kids in the car while you do.”

  A tear slips down onto her cheek, but she nods. “Okay.”

  When I’ve gotten Bryce, Aurora, and Hector all buckled in and kept them occupied by singing “Baby Beluga” about forty times in a row, my mom climbs into the driver’s seat and stows her phone in her purse.

  “So?” I ask.

  “We need to have a safety plan in place if we ever manage to leave,” she whispers. “And we can apply for a protective order so Lenny has to stay away from us. They asked if he cares about his reputation enough to obey a protective order.” She lets out a long breath. “I think that he does.”

  Behind me, the back seat is full of shout-singing about baby belugas in the deep blue sea. “Did they know of a place for us to go?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “The shelter is full right now.”

  “So, the protective order can work, but only if we can actually find a way to leave.”

  My mom sighs and starts the engine. “Yup.”

  When she pulls out of the parking lot, I turn to her. “What made you change your mind?”

  “About what?”

  “About Lenny.” I’m tempted to mention the whole slapping thing, but I want her to answer the question.

  She bites her lip. “I think I’ve known deep down for a long time, like a creeping feeling of numbness getting bigger every day. But it was just too unbearable to think about. Especially when I couldn’t see any way out.” She looks over at me. “It was when Lenny talked to you the way he talks to me. When he refused to believe you about that debate club of yours and said you just wanted to make trouble.” She shakes her head and looks back at the road. “That was when it started to click for me.”

  Even though what he said to me was nothing compared to what he’s said to her. How is it so different when you’re the one who’s being bullied?

  I stare out the window at the fancy grocery store and car dealerships that we’re driving past. Tied to the new cars are balloons bouncing around at the mercy of the wind.