Mare's War

by Tanita S. Davis

  For all of us, lest some of us

  be forgotten

  1.

  now

  It’s just a sporty red car parked across our driveway, but when I see it, my stomach plummets. It’s my grandmother.

  Already, I hate this summer. Usually, I laze around with my best friends, Eremasi and Rye, for the first few weeks until it’s too late to get a job and then find a babysitting gig or two to keep my parents happy, but this year, my parents jumped in and planned my summer for me. Yesterday was the last day of school. Last night, Mom pulled out the suitcases and made us pack. We’re going to some kind of a reunion—with my grandmother. Today.

  My grandmother isn’t at all normal. She doesn’t read mystery novels, or sing in a church choir, or knit, or sew. She doesn’t do the Jumbles in the newspaper, and she hates crosswords. She isn’t at all soft or plump, doesn’t smell like cinnamon, pumpkin bread, or oatmeal cookies. My grandmother, Ms. Marey Lee Boylen, is not the cookie type.

  She wears flippy auburn wigs, stiletto shoes, and padded push-up bras. Once, when we were little, my sister, Talitha, and I found a pair of panties in her bathroom with a fake butt. (We kept snickering, “Fanny pants!” at each other and busting up all afternoon. My mother finally made us go sit in the car.)

  My grandmother has long, fake nails and a croaky hoarse drawl, and she’s always holding a long, skinny cigarette—unlit, otherwise my dad will have a fit—between her fingers. She’s loud and bossy and she drinks bourbon with lemon juice at dinner. She has a low-slung red coupe, and Dad says she drives like a bat out of hell. She’s over eighty, and she still lives by herself in a town house stuck on a cliff near the Golden Gate Bridge. She takes the bus so she can avoid parking tickets and walks everywhere else on strappy high-heeled sandals.

  Our journalism teacher, Ms. Crase, would say that my grandmother is colorful, like somebody from a book. I say my grandmother is scary, mostly because I never know what she’s going to do next.

  She talks to strangers. She asks questions—totally nosy ones—as if just because she’s old, she can afford to be rude. She says what she thinks, she changes her mind every five minutes, and she laughs at me—a lot. She and I are completely different types of people.

  I like predictability. I like maps, dictionaries, and directions. I like lists of things to do, knowing the answer, and seeing how everything fits. My grandmother is definitely one of those people who thrive on chaos and instability. She’s what my mother calls a free spirit and what I call completely random.

  She can’t even go by a normal name. No one calls my grandmother Grandma or Granny or even Nana. When my parents got married, she said she didn’t want anyone calling her a mother-in-law. When my sister was born, my grandmother told Mom she didn’t want anyone calling her a grandmother, either. They finally decided that the grandchildren were supposed to call her Mare, and that’s what we all call her now, even my dad.

  Mare. Mère. Like the French word for “mother.” Which is just another example of how Mare is completely bizarre—I mean, we’re not even French. And she’s not our mother.

  So going with her to a reunion is bad enough, but to make matters worse, we don’t even really know where we’re going. Mare has some whacked idea that it’s more of an adventure if we just get in the car and drive east. And yeah, I said “car.” See, since 2001, Mare won’t fly—so we have to drive ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE UNITED STATES.

  In the middle of the baking-hot summer.

  My grandmother, my sister, and me, all trapped in one car.

  I’m not the only one who hates this idea. You should have heard my sister.

  “What? Us?” Tali’s voice had climbed. “Why do we have to go, Mom? They’re Dad’s relatives.”

  “They’re your relatives, too,” my mother reminded her. “And, Talitha, it’s a long drive back east. It’s not something your grandmother should attempt alone, and you know your dad can’t take the time off of work until the end of June.”

  “Can’t we just fly?” I groaned.

  Mom shook her head. “You know Mare doesn’t trust planes. She wants to see her people, so she’s going to get in her car and drive to them.”

  “Oh, nice,” Tali sighed. “This is just how I wanted to spend my summer break. With the slow and the dead.”

  “Talitha Marie,” my mother had said in that dry-ice voice she uses. “Enough.”

  Tali had given my mother one last look and then yelled for Dad. But no matter who she whined to or argued with, the end result is the same: in an hour, my sister and I are starting out on a 2,340-mile drive across the United States to somewhere in Alabama.

  So much for summer vacation.

  I’m not eager to see Mare, and neither is Tali, judging from the way she’s sitting on the front porch with her backpack.

  “Hey, what’s Mare doing here already?” I ask, dropping my bag of library books on the step next to her. “Didn’t she say we weren’t leaving till eleven-thirty?”

  Talitha shrugs, busily sending a text to one of her best friends, either Suzanne or Julie. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

  “Why are you waiting out here?”

  “I’m not waiting. I’m texting, duh.” Tali keeps her eyes on her cell.

  I push up my sunglasses. “Well, if Mare wants somebody to wash her car, it’s your turn.”

  “Fine. Last time she paid me twenty bucks.”

  “What?! She’s never paid me anything!”

  Tali glances up, her dark eyes barely visible above the edge of her blue-tinted sunglasses. “So? You should’ve asked.”

  Before I can answer, the front door swings open. “Girls, why are you outside? Mare’s here.” My mother has a line between her eyebrows and looks a little tired, the way she always does when my grandmother comes over.

  “We’re still not leaving for another hour, right?” Tali looks up, brushing a hand through her short, dark hair. Last week she dyed the tips the same fiery auburn as Mare’s.

  My mother sighs. “Talitha. You’ll leave when your grandmother’s ready, all right? You’ve seen Suzanne every day for the last six months; the least you could do is spend a little time with your grandmother without complaining. God knows you won’t have her around forever.”

  “That sounds bad,” I say nervously. “Is she acting sick or something?”

  “Yeah, did she think the UPS guy was a burglar and mace him again?” Tali grins.

  My mother ignores both of us. “Look, you’re not going to spend a whole year at this reunion. All you have to do is spend a little quality time with your grandmother on vacation. It won’t kill you. Look at it this way—you’ll finally get a chance to know her.”

  “Mare?” I frown. “Mom, we already know her.”

  “Hello, she’s been around since we were born,” Tali reminds her, flipping the phone closed. “We’ve had dinner with her the first Sunday of the month since forever. We know her, all right.”

  My mother shakes her head. “There are parts of her you won’t know until you take the time to get to know them. I wish I’d gotten this kind of opportunity with my grandmother before she passed.”

  Tali rolls her eyes and heaves a sigh.

  Mom taps Tali on the arm. “Listen. Drooling at the lifeguards at WaveWorld is something you can do every summer for the rest of your life, if you so choose. But this summer, you’ll spend some time with your grandmother, without complaint, thank you. You won’t have her forever, girls. Don’t forget that.”

  Tali groans. “Mom, don’t do the guilt thing, okay? Acting like Mare’s going to die any second is so not fair.”

  “Yeah, you’re the one who always says she’s ‘a tough old broad,’” I add.

  My mother is quiet, looking across the street at the neighbor�
��s sprinklers. “She is a tough old broad,” she says finally. “You know, girls, the world is different now than it was when Mare was growing up. In the South, women of color worked cleaning houses or tending other people’s children or sharecropping on their farms. If Mare wasn’t such a tough old lady, she wouldn’t have left home; she’d have stayed on your great-grandmother’s farm and probably would never have left the state, never bought herself a nice car or done anything, really. Aunt Josephine always says that running away from home was the best thing Mare ever did. Your grandmother changed the world.”

  “Whose world did she change?” Tali asks skeptically. “Not the one I live in.”

  My mother shrugs a little, then smiles. “Maybe she’ll tell you sometime.”

  “Manipulative, maybe?” Tali scoffs. “Mom, what you’re not getting here is I’m going to be wasting my summer driving around when I could be working, saving up for my car. You could at least make it worth my time. I mean, if I go, couldn’t you buy me a car or something?”

  “Buy you a car? When your grandmother is covering all of your expenses and has offered you girls spending money to boot?” My mother’s voice rises. “Don’t start with me about a car, Talitha Marie. You’ll get one when you need one, and I don’t want to hear about it again.”

  Mare’s paying us? While Tali does kind of have a point, getting paid for vacation when my other choice is getting a job cleaning up dog doo at a vet’s office like my friend Eremasi? I don’t have to think twice.

  “I’m in, especially if she’s paying us,” I say.

  My sister glares at me. “Of course you are, Octavia, because in your pitiful little world, anything looks good. I, on the other hand, have a life,” my sister continues, glaring at my mother now, “which you are totally ruining.”

  She pushes past my mother and stomps into the house, leaving me to trail behind her, feeling dumb. My mother rolls her eyes and shuts the door.

  I used to really like Tali. Since she’s two years older than I am, it’s not like we have all the same friends and interests, but it used to be that she didn’t mind me so much. She’d let Eremasi, Rye, and me read her magazines when she was done with them, and she didn’t get mad if we borrowed her CDs, as long as we put them back in order. She let me tag along with whatever she was doing, sometimes even with her friends, and I took it for granted that nothing would ever change.

  And then it did. Suddenly it’s like she objects to me existing. I can’t even look in her direction without her throwing a fit. Octavia, buy another color. Octavia, go to another movie. Octavia, get your own friends. Now that she’s going to be a senior, it’s even worse. Tali walks to a friend’s house and catches a ride so people don’t even know she’s my sister. Tali and I might live in the same house, but it’s like we’re from different planets.

  It would have been great to go on a vacation on the other side of the country this summer—by myself. Now not only am I stuck with Mare, my parents are making Tali go, too.

  Like I told Eremasi and Rye, I already completely hate this summer.

  Eleven-fifteen. My grandmother closes the trunk with a solid thump and minces on her high-heeled sandals back toward the driver’s seat, the last of a cigarette between her fingers. Dad is standing in the living room with his arms crossed, the screen door a flimsy barrier between us. Mom has already kissed us twice and gone back inside to pack up a few things for a snack, but Dad’s fidgeting. Even through the screen, the tension rolls off him in waves. He’s told us to be good now about six times, to watch the speed limit, and to make sure the car doesn’t overheat. He’s finally finished telling Mare the best route to get to I-5.

  “You girls be good,” Dad says to us again, and my grandmother groans. She takes another drag on her cigarette, and Tali coughs loudly, instantly diverting my father’s attention.

  “Mama, you’re not going to smoke in the car with the girls, are you?” My father’s voice has that edge that means he’s not really asking a question, and Mom’s not here to tell him to be cool.

  My grandmother sighs deeply, drops the cigarette on the driveway, and grinds it out with her sandal. “Goodbye, son,” she says pointedly, and turns away.

  “I’ll just get you something to pick that up with,” my father shoots back, and vanishes toward the rear of the house.

  Mare mutters something under her breath and turns toward Tali. Tilting down her enormous sunglasses, she stares down at my sister.

  “Talitha, you’re not going to be a pain in my behind this whole trip, are you?”

  “ME?” Tali huffs, offended. “I’m not the one blowing smoke on people.” She replaces her headset and turns up her music, hunching into her hooded sweatshirt and closing her eyes.

  Mare tugs an earphone out of Tali’s ear. “Don’t put that thing on when I’m talking to you. You’ve had something to say from the beginning—first it’s my driving, now it’s my cigarettes. Tali, I’ll tell you what—you keep those earphones out of your ears, and I will keep my cigarettes in my purse.”

  “Whaat?” Tali squawks, indignant. “Forget it. Me listening to my music is totally not like you poisoning me with your cigarettes. I mean, I’m not making you listen to it. It can’t be bothering you.”

  “Oh, it can’t?” Mare’s brow rises. She reaches into her pocket and fishes another cigarette out of her pack. “It bothers me. You put those things in your ears and you’re dead to the world.” Tali tenses as Mare lights up again and drags in a deep, poisonous breath. “You think you know everything, and you can ignore anyone you don’t want to hear. Those headphones are bothering me, all right.”

  Last week, when Tali had tried for the ninth time to get out of going on this trip, she’d claimed she didn’t feel Mare’s driving was safe. So Dad told Tali she was in charge of half of the driving, and Mare agreed not to drive more than six hours a day and not after dark. But then Mare said we’d have to be up every morning by six. “We have to drive early if I can’t drive at night,” Mare had insisted. Tali had gone to her room muttering about spending her whole summer waking up at the crack of dawn. Now she crosses her arms, looking sullen and sleepy.

  “At least my headset isn’t giving anyone cancer,” my sister says. “Forget it, Mare.”

  My grandmother doesn’t answer her. The silence stretches as Mare studies my sister, her unreadable expression making Talitha squirm. Finally, she jerks out her earphones in disgust.

  “All right! Fine! I won’t listen to my music right now, okay? Just don’t smoke anywhere near me, either, and you have to turn on the radio, okay? I can’t sit in the car all day without listening to something.”

  “No earphones where I can see them at all,” Mare counters, “and we’ve got a deal.”

  “No earphones at all? Mare, that’s not fair! Octavia has a CD player!”

  “It’s for books. I’m listening to books,” I insist.

  “You have music CDs, too,” Tali accuses. “Don’t lie.”

  Mare shakes her head. “I’m not talking about Octavia. I’m talking about you, Talitha. No earphones from you, no smoking from me. Deal?”

  “Whatever.” Tali sighs. “Let’s just go before the summer’s over, okay?”

  My grandmother drops the butt onto the ground and puts it out deliberately.

  “Girls?” Mom’s coming down the stairs, holding a paper shopping bag. “I packed a few things for you to snack on.” She glances down at the butts on the driveway. “Mare, you’re going to give him a stroke one of these days.”

  My grandmother flashes her a conspiratorial smile and takes the bag. “Girl, what have you got in here? There’s enough to feed an army!” She puts the bag into the car and gives my mother a hug. “We’ve got to get going, Thea,” she says.

  Mom hollers for Dad. “Phillip!”

  My father erupts from the house with a whisk broom and dustpan and holds them out to my grandmother, who looks at them and grins.

  “I’ll take those,” Mom says smoothly.

&
nbsp; Dad sighs sharply but gives in, his shoulders slumping. He bends toward Mare to brush her cheek with a cursory kiss. “Have a nice trip,” he says grudgingly. He won’t forgive her for the cigarette butts anytime soon. He leans into the car. “You girls be good,” he says once more. “I don’t want to hear about you two fighting or—”

  “Your father loves you,” my mother interrupts, leaning in next to Dad. “Have fun, girls.”

  “Have fun,” Dad echoes, looking sheepish. Giving Mom a sideways glance, he adds, “You give us a call if there’s any trouble, all right?”

  Then finally, finally, Mare settles in the car and snugs her seat belt around her waist. She checks her lipstick in the rearview and puts the car into reverse.

  “Where in Alabama are we going? And who’s going to be at this reunion anyway?” Tali asks suddenly. “Aren’t Dad and Aunt Josephine your only relatives?”

  “You know, Tali, you’re working my nerves already. You remind me of a girl I knew when I was in Des Moines, Iowa.”

  “Iowa? Didn’t you grow up in Alabama?” I interrupt, opening the map.

  “Yes.” My grandmother raises a plucked eyebrow in my direction. “And I grew up in Iowa, too. Stop interrupting me and wave to your folks so I can tell my story.”

  “Sorry,” I say, annoyed. Tali snorts. Reluctantly, I wave and manage a smile as Mom blows kisses and mouths, “Have fun,” in my direction. I catch my father’s grim expression as Mare backs slowly out of the drive. He steps into the driveway and lifts his hand briefly before bending to sweep up Mare’s cigarette butts with the broom and dustpan he’s grabbed back from Mom.

  “As I said,” Mare continues conversationally, “Tali, you remind me of a girl named Gloria. Now, Gloria was a pain in my behind. She had something to say about everything, and you couldn’t tell her anything, just like some people I could mention….”

  Tali whines, “Mare … you said you’d turn on the radio….”

  So much for summer vacation.

  2.

  then

  Around about six, just before it gets too dark to see, I pin on my hat, then shrug into my mama’s felt coat and tie the belt. It is still her coat, though she don’t never wear it. She hardly goes out after dark, but I do. Money is tight, and I am old enough to make wages on my own.