Puckers Up

by Mark Peter Hughes

  Despite everything she did, or maybe because of it, I have to go see her. We need to talk.

  9:45 A.M.

  I can’t believe it. It’s really going to happen. I told Brenda what I decided and she wasn’t happy but she didn’t argue. “If that’s what you want,” she said, “then there’s no point in putting off the inevitable.” There’s a bus leaving from Providence at two o’clock this afternoon. I don’t think it’s fully sunk into my head yet. We’re going. Today is the day.

  10:10 A.M.

  I’m amazed to be writing this, but I’m actually worrying about what I should wear. What’s the rule for something like this? Do I dress up? Do I put on a skirt and blouse, maybe even a pretty dress for her, trying to look my best? Or do I just go as I am and not worry what the heck she thinks when she first sees me? After all, she had her chance to see me at my best, my worst and everything in between, and she decided to turn it all down. Maybe showing up in ripped jeans and a nasty old T-shirt would make a statement.

  1:00 P.M.

  I’m a total mess. I didn’t even want to eat lunch but Brenda insisted, which I guess was good because now we’re heading to catch the shuttle to Providence. Brenda called ahead to let Jess know we’re coming, so now she’s expecting us. She even told Brenda that she’s excited to meet me. Just looking at those words on the page totally weirds me out.

  My mother is out there somewhere.

  She’s expecting us.

  She’s excited to meet me.

  Me. My mother. Mine.

  3:50 P.M.

  We’re somewhere in central Massachusetts. It’s drizzling outside and Brenda’s asleep beside me, and somebody nearby has a radio playing softly. I brought a book to read but it’s no use. I can’t concentrate. I keep thinking about all the things I don’t know about her and all the things she doesn’t know about me. The music I like. The books I read. My friends. My favorite foods. I’m not even sure she knows where I went to elementary school. What will she ask me first? What will I ask her? Where to even begin filling in the gaps?

  I also keep thinking about Lemonade Mouth and how everybody’s so unhappy right now. This has been the strangest summer I could have ever imagined, and it’s not about to let up. I wish my friends were here with me now. Especially Wen. He has a way of making me feel calm and safe. But even if I could have found the courage to talk with him and the others about this, I also know that whatever happens today, this is something that has to be between Jess and me. I know I should be excited—and I am, in a way—but I’m also dreading this. After all these years without her I’m less than an hour away from meeting the woman I barely remember, the woman I almost remember waving to from the window just before she got into that taxi and disappeared from my life.

  My palms are sweating. My whole world is hanging by a thread.

  9:25 P.M.

  On the bus again. It’s dark outside and we’re on our way home. I want to set down my thoughts while they’re fresh, but I’m not sure I have the words. Everything is all jumbled. It’s like I had an old storage attic where I kept things locked carefully away but now somebody’s gone in and messed it all up, leaving me with a huge pile of stuff to sort through. I don’t even know where to begin.

  So, yeah, I met her. It’s done. Only, it was completely different from anything I ever imagined it would be. Or maybe it was exactly what I’d imagined. I don’t know. I’m so tired and empty.

  Now I really wish Wen was here. Talking to him would calm me and maybe even help me get my thoughts in order. So I’m going to pretend he’s sitting next to me. I’m writing this to you, Wen, even though I might not ever show it to you. You’re here and I’m talking and you’re listening. I can already tell this is a good idea. Just writing it down is making me feel a little better.

  My mother lives in a halfway house called Sunshine Haven, a three-story brick building on a busy street opposite a public park with a little pond. You know that building we bike past when we go to Muffit’s Music in Riverside? The one with the lion sculptures and the hedge like a staircase? Well, it reminded me of that. Sunshine Haven is a sort of stepping-stone home for women in transition. My mom’s there because of the type of life she’s been living and because she’s sick. She’s getting treatment at a local hospital because her kidneys aren’t working as well as they used to.

  Brenda and I had to sign in when we got there, and then a lady showed us to a room on the second floor. The whole place smelled of disinfectant. We opened the door and there sat my mother on a chair by a window, waiting for us.

  The first thing I thought when I saw her was that we were in the wrong room. I guess I’d been expecting to see the girl from the picture I’ve kept by my bed since forever, but instead here was this short-haired lady in a frumpy flowered skirt. She was skin and bones, with dark circles under her eyes. She looked fragile. She didn’t even get up from her chair the whole time. But when she put her hand to her mouth and said, “Oh, Olivia, honey! You’re even prettier in person than you are on TV!” I knew this really must be her. For a few seconds I just stood in the doorway. Brenda stepped in and asked how she was and she said fine as they gave each other a hug. I think I said something polite like “It’s nice to meet you,” but on the inside I was just overwhelmed and still taking in this stranger, this alien from outer space who has everything to do with my life and yet nothing to do with it.

  “Well, don’t just stand there like a statue, sweetheart,” she said. “Come on in. Let me get a look at you.”

  I did what she asked. I stood in front of her and let her study me even as my face got warm. Inside, I was furious at myself. This woman left me when I was still practically a baby and here I was like a kid from a Dickens novel, presenting myself to her for inspection. What was wrong with me? But as much as I hated to admit it, I guess I really did care what she thought, because I’d picked out a nice dress, my knee-length pale blue one, simple but pretty, just for her.

  “Wow,” she said with a glance toward Brenda, “it’s like I’m looking at you again, Ma. I’m staring at another version of my own friggin’ mother.”

  I had no idea what to say to that. Brenda just smiled and then asked, “How are you doing with your appointments, Jess? Are you showing up for dialysis?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve been going,” she said with a flash of irritation. “Don’t nag.”

  There was only one other seat in the room, so I let Brenda have it while I took the edge of the bed. Then we talked, sort of. It was pretty awkward. Brenda started telling her about me and my life and Jess just nodded without saying much. I said even less.

  “Is she always this quiet?” Jess interrupted after a while, looking at Brenda but nodding in my direction. “That’s her dad all over again, I suppose.”

  There was another silence and then Brenda clasped her hands together. “You know, I think I’m going to step out for a while. Give you two some time.”

  I start to panic. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be left alone with Jess. Jess seemed to feel the same way, because she gave Brenda a worried look and said, “No, Ma, stay here. I don’t think you should go.”

  But Brenda had already grabbed her walking stick and was heading toward the door. “I need a little fresh air,” she told us. “I won’t be long.” It was a lie, of course, and everyone knew it. She was just trying to get us to talk to each other.

  So then I found myself alone with my mother. I had no idea what to say. My eyes fell to the bedside table next to her, where there were maybe a dozen photographs. They were mostly of Jess herself, which I thought was interesting, and most looked like they’d been taken a few years ago, because she appeared younger and her hair was longer. There was my mother sunning herself in a beach chair. In another she was smiling on a porch swing. In yet another she was twirling around in a red dress at what looked like a dance club. There were only a couple where she was posing with anyone else, and I didn’t know them.

  “You like pictures?” Jess asked, following
the direction of my gaze. “Me too. I only have these, but I always keep them with me. They bring back memories.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked, pointing to a shot of Jess standing at the edge of a cliff with a beefy bearded guy wearing a headscarf.

  She looked at the picture and frowned. “Oh, that’s just me with Dylan, my off-again on-again. Mostly off-again now. We were at the Grand Canyon. But this one,” she said, picking up a photograph where her hair was poufy and she was grinning at the camera while straddling a huge black motorcycle, “is me in my glory, back when I lived in Memphis for a while—the happiest days of my life. This one’s my favorite. Every time I look at it I smile.”

  I felt a flash of something I couldn’t name—Sadness? Frustration? Something else?—and I almost asked her where the heck were the pictures of my dad and me. But I didn’t.

  “I’m glad you came, Olivia,” she said. “This must all be pretty weird for you.”

  Ya think? Was she trying for the understatement of the year?

  It occurred to me that maybe it was good that Brenda had left. I realized that while a part of me was feeling like a lost little kid, another part of me was quietly fuming, and being alone with my mother had made me remember why I’d come all this way. I decided to concentrate only on that.

  “I have some questions for you,” I said more forcefully than I meant to. “That’s really the only reason I’m here. I just want to understand some things about what happened. I want to know why everything … you know … played out the way it did.”

  She studied me. “You want to know why I left.”

  I nodded.

  “Olivia, hon. I was never meant to be a mom. I would have been terrible at it.”

  “How do you know?”

  She waved her hand as if it was a dumb question. “My mother always said I was born selfish. I guess it’s kind of true.”

  “And that’s it? That’s why you disappeared out of my life?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, that was part of it.”

  “So what was the other part?”

  She looked at me like I was asking a lot, as if I was pushing some kind of limit, but I didn’t care. I stared right back at her. I wanted to know.

  “All right, then,” she said. “If that’s what you came here to find out, then I’ll give you your answer. I’ll tell you how it was.”

  And so she told me the story. She started by talking about things I already knew, like how she was barely seventeen when she had me and how my dad was only a year older, and how it wasn’t easy for them. But then she told me some things I didn’t know, like how all her life, ever since she could remember, she’d had panic attacks. As you know, Wen, I sometimes get them too, so I guess now I know where I get them from, except my mother’s sound like they were much more severe than mine. At times, she said, she’d get really angry at people, especially Brenda, who was raising Jess alone. Jess told me she would throw things at her and call her every bad name she could think of. She’d been taken to doctors who’d called her unstable and had given her medications to help with her mood swings, but she didn’t like how the pills made her feel so she didn’t always take them.

  I knew my mother had issues, but I was surprised to learn they were that bad.

  She told me that starting even before she was a teen, she was sneaking out to parties, drinking and going out with older boys. “I was a hellion back then, there’s no denying it,” she said with the faintest of smiles. “I’ve never been one to let anybody control me.” Things got worse and worse as she got into her teens. Drugs. More alcohol. Fighting. According to my mother, she sometimes had blackout periods when she wouldn’t remember what happened. At fifteen she ran away and was picked up six days later in Albany, New York, by the police, who found her sleeping under a bridge. She told me she didn’t even remember leaving home.

  In retrospect, it should have been obvious she needed more help than she was getting, but it’s easy to look back and criticize. Brenda did her best with her, I’m sure.

  And then my mom met my dad and got pregnant, and suddenly Jess was terrified. My dad didn’t run, though. To her surprise, he moved in with her. Jess said there was a time when she thought maybe things were going to get better because of the baby, but it turned out she was wrong. Having a newborn in the house was hard. My mother hadn’t really changed, and my dad was in and out of trouble with the police, so he wasn’t always around. And when they were together they were fighting all the time. For almost two years the arrangement worked, sort of, but mostly because they had Brenda helping.

  “But one night,” my mother said, “when Brenda was away and your dad had stormed out yet again, all up in arms about something I can’t even remember anymore, I decided to invite some friends over, and pretty soon we had quite a party going. You were less than two years old and you were sleeping in the next room.” She’d been looking toward the window but now she turned to me. “Olivia, I don’t remember much from that night, only that I woke up the next morning all alone beside a Dumpster off Atwells Avenue in Providence with the sun shining on my face.”

  I waited for her to continue but she took her time, gathering her thoughts. Meanwhile, I was gripping the edge of the mattress.

  “Now, I’m not the best person in the world and I know it,” she went on, “but I’m telling you, my first thought was of you and whether or not you were okay. I realized I must have left you all on your own at home. What if something had happened to you? I panicked. I had no money. Nothing. Somehow I managed to hitch a ride back to Opequonsett. I ran back to the house. I threw open the door. My friends were all gone, the place was a friggin’ disaster, but you were okay, thank god. I found you still in your crib, holding on to the wooden bars and looking out at me. You were crying your little head off but otherwise fine. You were scared, that’s all. And I was too. If anything had happened to you, I swear I don’t know what I would have done. So I picked you up and I held you close. My heart was racing. And that’s when it hit me: my whole life was a roller coaster and it wasn’t about to change. So for the sake of my daughter, I knew I couldn’t stay.” She looked up at me again. “I just knew it, Olivia. I had to go.”

  “But why? Why couldn’t you have just made the decision not to do those things anymore?”

  Again she didn’t answer for a while. “Honey,” she said finally, “even back then I knew who I was and who I wasn’t. You’ve got to understand, there’s always been something inside me, a little voice in my head telling me I gotta go live my life. I wasn’t going to suddenly transform into a responsible mother, and I knew it as well as anyone could know anything. But that didn’t mean you stopped being my little girl.”

  She leaned toward me then and put her hand on my arm. She was looking at me, and I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to believe she cared about me. I wanted it so much, Wen, and yet how could I forget everything I’ve been through all these years?

  “I don’t buy it!” I snapped, pulling my arm away. I surprised even myself with the sudden bitterness in my voice. “I think you could have at least tried to be a good mother.”

  “Olivia …,” she said, leaning back in her chair again. Her smile faded.

  But my blood was racing and I was just getting started. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to grow up without you?” I asked her. “I needed a mom, Jess. I needed you there, but you didn’t care enough to even pick up the phone to talk to me. Would that have been so difficult? Was it such a big deal to write a letter every now and then, or maybe send a postcard just to let me know where you were? That you were even alive?”

  “I understand you’re mad,” she said quietly, her face darkening. “I don’t blame you. But don’t think my own life has been a slice of cherry pie. People don’t end up in places like this because they want to. I’m not going to spell it all out for you, Olivia, but let’s just say that bridge in Albany wasn’t the only one I ever slept under. I know I’m no angel, but not everything in life is in our control.”r />
  “That’s crap! That’s just an excuse!”

  I couldn’t believe I was saying these things. I’d come to get answers, not to argue with her, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. My eyes were stinging and my throat was tightening up, but I choked it all back because one thing I refused to do was show her any tears. After all these years without her, I wasn’t going to start crying in front of her now.

  Jess’s lips went tight, and for a moment I saw the girl from the picture again, the determined kid who knew what she wanted and wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I thought she was getting ready to shout back at me. In a way, I wanted her to so we could have it all out and then maybe I’d feel better. But instead she just went quiet, her face all red and her eyes still on me as her fingers adjusted and readjusted the folds in her flowered skirt. At last she reached out her hand again, this time to brush back a lock of hair that had fallen in front of my eyes. She tucked it behind my ear.

  “I’m real tired, Olivia. I think you better go.”

  “What? But we’re not done!”

  “I think we are. It was sure nice of you to come visit me.”

  I almost wanted to laugh. It was ridiculous. I’d been there less than an hour. But she was serious—she really was sending me away. So what could I do except stand up and head out?

  “Tell your grandmother I’m sorry,” she said to my back. “Tell her I’ll see her next time, and shut the door behind, will you?”

  And that was it. For a while I stood in the hallway feeling like my insides had just been ripped from me. I was so angry and sad and confused. I couldn’t have talked if I’d tried. I stumbled down the corridor and found my way downstairs, and there was Brenda sitting in the little lobby area, waiting for me.