But it wasn’t. She couldn’t even get a brochure. And what was the point? Anything interesting would be on the net. She could have stayed after school and found out all she wanted to know. Instead she went to visit her grandmother.
That’s proving what good decisions I make.
Mother was sitting at the table, a cup of chocolate in front of her. She looked up and watched Alessandra shut the door and set down her book bag, but she said nothing.
“Mother, I’m sorry, I—”
“Before you lie,” said Mother softly, “the witch called me and screamed at me for sending you. I hung up on her, which is what I usually end up doing, and then I unplugged the phone from the wall.”
“I’m sorry,” said Alessandra.
“You didn’t think I had a reason for keeping her out of your life?”
For some reason, that pulled the trigger on something inside Alessandra and instead of trying to retreat, she erupted. “It doesn’t matter whether you had a reason,” she said. “You could have ten million reasons, but you didn’t tell any of them to me! You expected me to obey you blindly. But you don’t obey your mother blindly.”
“Your mother isn’t a monster,” said Mother.
“There are many kinds of monsters,” said Alessandra. “You’re the kind that flits around like a butterfly but never lands near me long enough to even know who I am.”
“Everything I do is for you!”
“Nothing is for me. Everything is for the child you imagine you had, the one that doesn’t exist, the perfect, happy child that was bound to result from your being the exact opposite of your mother in every way. Well, I’m not that child. And in your mother’s house, the electricity is on!”
“Then go live there!”
“She won’t let me!”
“You would hate it. Never able to touch anything. Always having to do things her way.”
“Like going off on a colony ship?”
“I signed up for the colony ship for you.”
“Which is like buying me a supersized bra. Why don’t you look at who I am before you decide what I need?”
“I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a girl who’s too young and inexperienced to know what a woman needs. I’m ten kilometers ahead of you on that road, I know what’s coming, I’m trying to get you what you’ll need to make that road easy and smooth, and you know what? In spite of you, I’ve done it. You’ve fought me every step of the way, but I’ve done a great job with you. You don’t even know how good a job I’ve done because you don’t know what you could have been.”
“What could I have been, Mother? You?”
“You were never going to be me,” said Mother.
“What are you saying? That I would have been her?”
“We’ll never know what you would have been, will we? Because you already are what I made you.”
“Wrong. I look like whatever I have to look like in order to stay alive in your home. Down inside, what I really am is a complete stranger to you. A stranger that you intend to drag off into space without even asking me if I wanted to go. They used to have a word for people you treated like that. They called them slaves.”
Alessandra wanted more than ever before in her life to run to her bedroom and slam the door. But she didn’t have a bedroom. She slept on the sofa in the same room with the kitchen and the kitchen table.
“I understand,” said Mother. “I’ll go into my bedroom and you can slam the door on me.”
The fact that Mother really did know what she was thinking was the most infuriating thing of all. But Alessandra did not scream and did not scratch at her mother and did not fall on the floor and throw a tantrum and did not even dive onto the sofa and bury her face in the pillow. Instead she sat down at the table directly across from her mother and said, “What’s for dinner?”
“So. Just like that, the discussion is over?”
“Discuss while we cook. I’m hungry.”
“There’s nothing to eat, because I haven’t turned in our final acceptance because I haven’t decided yet whether we should sleep or stay awake through the voyage, and so we haven’t got the signing bonus, and so there’s no money to buy food.”
“So what are we going to do about dinner?”
Mother just looked away from her.
“I know,” said Alessandra excitedly. “Let’s go over to Grandma’s!”
Mother turned back and glared at her.
“Mother,” said Alessandra, “how can we run out of money when we’re living on the dole? Other people on the dole manage to buy enough food and pay their electric bills.”
“What do you think?” said Mother. “Look around you. What have I spent all the government’s money on? Where’s all the extravagance? Look in my closet, count the outfits I own.”
Alessandra thought for a moment. “I never thought about that. Do you owe money to the mafia? Did Father, before he died?”
“No,” said Mother contemptuously. “You now have all the information you need to understand completely, and yet you still haven’t figured it out, smart and grown up as you are.”
Alessandra couldn’t imagine what Mother was talking about. Alessandra didn’t have any new information. She also didn’t have anything to eat.
She got up and started opening cupboards. She found a box of dry radiatori and a jar of black pepper. She took a pan to the sink and put in some water and set it on the stove and turned on the gas.
“There’s no sauce for the pasta,” said Mother.
“There’s pepper. There’s oil.”
“You can’t eat radiatori with just pepper and oil. It’s like putting fistfuls of wet flour in your mouth.”
“That’s not my problem,” said Alessandra. “At this point, it’s pasta or shoe leather, so you’d better start guarding your closet.”
Mother tried to turn things light again. “Of course, just like a daughter, you’d eat my shoes.”
“Just be glad if I stop before I get to your leg.”
Mother pretended she was still joking when she airily said, “Children eat their parents alive, that’s what they do.”
“Then why is that hideous creature still living in that flat in Polignano a Mare?”
“I broke my teeth on her skin!” It was Mother’s last attempt at humor.
“You tell me what terrible things daughters do, but you’re a daughter, too. Did you do them?”
“I married the first man who showed me any hint of what kindness and pleasure could be. I married stupidly.”
“I have half the genes of the man you married,” said Alessandra. “Is that why I’m too stupid to decide what planet I want to live on?”
“It’s obvious that you want to live on any planet where I am not.”
“You’re the one who came up with the colony idea, not me! But now I think you’ve named your own reason. Yes! You want to colonize another planet because your mother isn’t there!”
Mother slumped in her seat. “Yes, that is part of it. I won’t pretend that I wasn’t thinking of that as one of the best things about going.”
“So you admit you weren’t doing it all for me.”
“I do not admit such a lie. It’s all for you.”
“Getting away from your mother, that is for you,” said Alessandra.
“It is for you.”
“How can it be for me? Until today I didn’t even know what my grandmother looked like. I had never seen her face. I didn’t even know her name.”
“And do you know how much that cost me?” asked Mother.
“What do you mean?”
Mother looked away. “The water is boiling.”
“No, that’s my temper you’re hearing. Tell me what you meant. What did it cost you to keep me from knowing my own grandmother?”
Mother got up and went into her bedroom and closed the door.
“You forgot to slam it, Mother! Who’s the parent here, anyway? Who’s the one who shows a sense of responsibility? Who’s f
ixing dinner?”
The water took three more minutes before it got to a boil. Alessandra threw in two fistfuls of radiatori and then got her books and started studying at the table. She ended up overcooking the pasta and it was so cheaply made that it clumped up and the oil didn’t bind with it. It just pooled on the plate, and the pepper barely helped make it possible to swallow the mess. She kept her eyes on her book and her paper as she ate, and swallowed mechanically until finally the bite in her mouth made her gag and she got up and spat it into the sink and then drank down a glass of water and almost threw the whole mess back up again. As it was, she retched twice at the sink before she was able to get her gorge under control. “Mmmmm, delicious,” she murmured. Then she turned back to the table.
Mother was sitting there, picking out a single piece of pasta with her fingers. She put it in her mouth. “What a good mother I am,” she said softly.
“I’m doing homework now, Mother. We’ve already used up our quarreling time.”
“Be honest, darling. We almost never quarrel.”
“That’s true. You flit around ignoring whatever I say, being full of happiness. But believe me, my end of the argument is running through my head all the time.”
“I’m going to tell you something because you’re right, you’re old enough to understand things.”
Alessandra sat down. “All right, tell me.” She looked her mother in the eye.
Mother looked away.
“So you’re not going to tell me. I’ll do my homework.”
“I’m going to tell you,” said Mother. “I’m just not going to look at you while I do.”
“And I won’t look at you either.” She went back to her homework.
“About ten days into the month, my mother calls me. I answer the phone because if I don’t she gets on the train and comes over, and then I have a hard time getting her out of the house before you get home from school. So I answer the phone and she tells me I don’t love her, I’m an ungrateful daughter, because here she is all alone in her house, and she’s out of money, she can’t have anything lovely in her life. Move in with me, she says, bring your beautiful daughter, we can live in my apartment and share our money and then there’ll be enough. No, Mama, I say to her. I will not move in with you. And she weeps and screams and says I am a hateful daughter who is tearing all joy and beauty out of her life because I leave her alone and I leave her penniless and so I promise her, I’ll send you a little something. She says, don’t send it, that wastes postage, I’ll come get it and I say, No, I won’t be here, it costs more to ride the train than to mail it, so I’m mailing it. And somehow I get her off the phone before you get home. Then I sit for a while not cutting my wrists, and then I put some amount of money into an envelope and I take it to the post office and I mail it, and then she takes the money and buys some hideous piece of garbage and puts it on her wall or on a little shelf until her house is so full of things I’ve paid for out of money that should go to my daughter’s upbringing, and I pay for all of that, I run out of money every month even though I get the same money on the dole that she gets, because it’s worth it. Being hungry is worth it. Having you be angry with me is worth it, because you do not have to know that woman, you do not have to have her in your life. So yes, Alessandra, I do it all for you. And if I can get us off this planet, I won’t have to send her any more money, and she won’t phone me anymore, because by the time we reach that other world she will be dead. I only wish you had trusted me enough that we could have arrived there without your ever having to see her evil face or hear her evil voice.”
Mother got up from the table and returned to her room.
Alessandra finished her homework and put it into her backpack and then went and sat on the sofa and stared at the nonfunctioning television. She remembered coming home every day from school, for all these years, and there was Mother, every time, flitting through the house, full of silly talk about fairies and magic and all the beautiful things she did during the day and all the while, the thing she did during the day was fight the monster to keep it from getting into the house, getting its clutches on little Alessandra.
It explained the hunger. It explained the electricity. It explained everything.
It didn’t mean Mother wasn’t crazy. But now the craziness made a kind of sense. And the colony meant that finally Mother would be free. It wasn’t Alessandra who was ready for emancipation.
She got up and went to the door and tapped on it. “I say we sleep during the voyage.”
A long wait. Then, from the other side of the door, “That’s what I think, too.” After a moment, Mother added, “There’ll be a young man for you in that colony. A fine young man with prospects.”
“I believe there will,” said Alessandra. “And I know he’ll adore my happy, crazy mother. And my wonderful mother will love him too.”
And then silence.
It was unbearably hot inside the flat. Even with the windows open, the air wasn’t stirring so there was no relief for it. Alessandra lay on the sofa in her underwear, wishing the upholstery weren’t so soft and clinging. She lay on the floor, thinking that maybe the air was a tiny bit cooler there because hot air rises. Only the hot air in the flat below must be rising and heating the floor so it didn’t help, and the floor was too hard.
Or maybe it wasn’t, because the next morning she woke up on the floor and there was a breath of a breeze coming in off the Adriatic and Mother was frying something in the kitchen.
“Where did you get eggs?” asked Alessandra after she came back from the toilet.
“I begged,” said Mother.
“One of the neighbors?”
“A couple of the neighbors’ chickens,” said Mother.
“No one saw you?”
“No one stopped me, whether they saw me or not.”
Alessandra laughed and hugged her. She went to school and this time was not too proud to eat the charity lunch, because she thought: My mother paid for this food for me.
That night there was food on the table, and not just food, but fish and sauce and fresh vegetables. So Mother must have turned in the final papers and received the signing bonus. They were going.
Mother was scrupulous. She took Alessandra with her when she went to both of the neighbors’ houses where chickens were kept, and thanked them for not calling the police on her, and paid them for the eggs she had taken. They tried to refuse, but she insisted that she could not leave town with such a debt unpaid, that their kindness was still counted for them in heaven, and there was kissing and crying and Mother walked, not in her pretend fairy way, but light of step, a woman who has had a burden taken from her shoulders.
Two weeks later, Alessandra was on the net at school and she learned something that made her gasp out loud, right there in the library, so that several people rushed toward her and she had to flick to another view and then they were all sure she had been looking at pornography but she didn’t care, she couldn’t wait to get home and tell Mother the news.
“Do you know who the governor of our colony is going to be?”
Mother did not know. “Does it matter? He’ll be an old fat man. Or a bold adventurer.”
“What if it’s not a man at all? What if it’s a boy, a mere boy of thirteen or fourteen, a boy so brilliantly smart and good that he saved the human race?”
“What are you saying?”
“They’ve announced the crew of our colony ship. The pilot of the ship will be Mazer Rackham, and the governor of the colony will be Ender Wiggin.”
Now it was Mother’s turn to gasp. “A boy? They make a boy the governor?”
“He commanded the fleet in the war, he can certainly govern a colony,” said Alessandra.
“A boy. A little boy.”
“Not so little. My age.”
Mother turned to her. “What, you’re so big?”
“I’m big enough, you know. As you said—of childbearing age!”
Mother’s face turned reflective. “And th
e same age as Ender Wiggin.”
Alessandra felt her face turning red. “Mother! Don’t think what I know you’re thinking!”
“And why not think it? He’ll have to marry somebody on that distant lonely world. Why not you?” Then Mother’s face also turned red and she fluttered her hands against her cheeks. “Oh, oh, Alessandra, I was so afraid to tell you, and now I’m glad, and you’ll be glad!”
“Tell me what?”
“You know how we decided to sleep through the voyage? Well, I got to the office to turn in the paper, but I saw that I had accidentally checked the other box, to stay awake and study and be in the first wave of colonists. And I thought, What if they don’t let me change the paper? And I decided, I’ll make them change it! But when I sat there with the woman I became afraid and I didn’t even mention it, I just turned it in like a coward. But now I see I wasn’t a coward, it was God guiding my hand, it truly was. Because now you’ll be awake through the whole voyage. How many fourteen-year-olds will there be on the ship, awake? You and Ender, that’s what I think. The two of you.”
“He’s not going to fall in love with a stupid girl like me.”
“You get very good grades and besides, a smart boy isn’t looking for a girl who is even smarter, he’s looking for a girl who will love him. He’s a soldier who will never come home from the war. You will become his friend. A good friend. It will be years before it’s time for him and you to marry. But when that time comes he’ll know you.”
“Maybe you’ll marry Mazer Rackham.”
“If he’s lucky,” said Mother. “But I’ll be content with whatever old man asks me, as long as I can see you happy.”
“I will not marry Ender Wiggin, Mother. Don’t hope for what isn’t possible.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what to hope for. But I will be content for you merely to become his friend.”
“I’ll be content merely to see him and not wet my pants. He’s the most famous human being in the world, the greatest hero in all of history.”
“Not wetting your pants, that’s a good first step. Wet pants don’t make a good impression.”
The school year ended. They received instructions and tickets. They would take the train to Napoli and then fly to Kenya, where the colonists from Europe and Africa were gathering to take the shuttle into space. Their last few days were spent in doing all the things they loved to do in Monopoli—going to the wharf, to the little parks where she had played as a child, to the library, saying good-bye to everything that had been pleasant about their lives in the city. To Father’s grave, to lay their last flowers there. “I wish you could have come with us,” whispered Mother, but Alessandra wondered—if he had not died, would they have needed to go into space to find happiness?
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 177
