Maybe in your nightmares you’re trying to run away from someplace where you’ve been held prisoner, but then you discover your legs don’t work. Or maybe you’re running away from men like the ones who hang around in the lot beside the Elm Street Convenience Store drinking out of bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. Certainly your worst nightmare does not feature a woman like me who is doing her best to raise two children and who takes time to compare the quality and nutrition, as well as the price, of grocery items before making a purchase. When I shop, I reflect upon how women like our mothers and grandmothers made from scratch many of the foods we now buy ready to eat, especially cookies and snacks. My maternal grandmother grew up on a farm, as your grandmother or great-grandmother probably did, and you, too, may lament not having a connection to the wholesome rural lifestyle of the women who came before us. My mother and grandmother wore skirts rather than pants, and so do I, because skirts make me feel feminine. In the cold weather, I usually wear panty hose, but my last pair got ruined early this morning in the parking lot next to the Elm Street Convenience Store. My skirts are shorter than my mother’s or grandmother’s ever were, because that is the style now, though in winter it can be cold. In the clinic waiting room, a student-looking woman started clearing her throat loudly, and I realized I was nodding off and had let my legs fall open. She probably thought my female parts were flaming with venereal disease—I’ve met plenty of stuck-up college girls at the bar and the Laundromat who would assume that. Just when I was going to explain to her that I’d had a rough night and hadn’t had a chance to clean up, the nurse called me inside and asked me to undress and lie on the table. After my exam, the nurse gave me some ointment for what she said looked like trauma, and a ten-day dose of tetracycline for the possibility of infection. It takes several days to get lab results, so technically I have not been diagnosed with anything. And because I made no police report, technically there was no crime.
Once I was inside the room with the nurse, I explained that, despite what I first said when I got to the clinic and begged for an emergency appointment, I was not raped by a gang. You would agree, unless you are like Nancy VanderVeen, who owns my building, who thinks that every group of three or more men hanging around an empty lot drinking, smoking, or shooting up constitutes a gang. Those guys across from Elm Street Convenience do not have special jackets or tattoos, and they are not usually as mean as they were this morning. Often after dark one of them will give a girl a beer or else pass her a joint. Those guys all know and protect one another, so you can understand that if I file charges, I’ll never get anything from any of them again, not even in an emergency. Sitting in a clinic waiting room for an hour gives a woman the chance to think about the big picture, but not being able to tell anyone what happened last night feels lonely.
Imagine if you had an emergency need for something stronger than what you usually needed, and you had no money, not even food stamps to trade for twenty cents on the dollar, and the shortest and stockiest of the four guys told you they wouldn’t be sharing anything special with you unless you shared what you’ve got with them, and they all looked at your slender figure and triangular face as though you were some kind of creamy homemade treat presented on a platter. If this happened to you, and you’d been drinking already, you might want what they had so badly that you’d say something like Okay, I’ll fuck you to the guy. You’d figure it’d be over in a few minutes, and you’d be right. Except that there are three more guys.
You would think that a man who probably had a sister like you, a sister who used to bake brownies or yellow cake that filled the kitchen with a warm delicious aroma, would wait for you to get your panty hose all the way off before pushing you against the front quarter panel of his car. It is hard to believe that a guy who remembered his grandmother reverently measuring ingredients such as cocoa powder and vanilla with cups and spoons would cover your mouth when you started shouting that you had changed your mind, that you had to go home to your kids. The way they each in turn ignored your crying and complaining, you’d think these guys had never loved anything their mothers cooked for them, though it is obvious their mothers fed them plenty, and that is why they’ve grown big and strong enough to hold you down. You’d think that if their mothers had cooked special dishes that were their favorites, then they would not laugh at you afterwards as you tried to straighten your skirt and get your curly hair back into barrettes without a mirror, when you shouted that they ruined your last pair of hose from the basket of panty hose that your mother gave you before she left town. Even after they all finished with you and gave you the aluminum foil packet, as agreed, you wanted to shout: I might not be your mother or your sister, but I am somebody’s mother, I am somebody’s sister.
As a mother, as a sister, you know there are things you should not say around children. You have to be a role model in the way you speak. For instance, you should not say that a man called you a dumb cunt while he pushed your face down onto the cold car hood. Or that another pushed his dick into your ass with such force that, according to the nurse, he tore the skin, and that was where the blood was coming from. You should not talk about sex or swear around children at all, because children get enough sex and swearing on television. You know you should try to keep your children away from unhealthy food, especially packaged sweets. This is difficult because children desire snack cakes and cookies, and especially they crave candy, probably because images of candy are broadcast nonstop on every TV channel, so that when you call your son from the Ringside at night, to tell him to go to sleep (though you don’t work at the bar officially, they let you keep the tips if you help when it’s busy), he begs you to bring home a particular sweet snack from the convenience store, and if you have any money, you will do it, because children, especially your own children, for whom you went through twelve and fifteen hours of labor, are hard to resist.
I dream that someday my son and daughter and I will have our own home, a comfortable, well-lit place nobody can take away from us, where each of us has our own room and closet and where our kitchen cupboards are stocked with nutritious goodies. I jangle my keys as I enter this home and hang up my jacket on my own jacket peg or on the back of a chair that matches the other chairs. My kids spread out their homework on the dining room table and ask me questions I know the answers to. For now I live in the one-bedroom apartment above Nancy VanderVeen’s son, who calls me ugly names and hosts weekly evening meetings attended by a half dozen white men in heavy boots. If you lived here, you would surely, like me, try to give your children enough candy that they wouldn’t beg for it or steal it from Mr. VanderVeen, whose rooms are clean because he pays a neighbor woman to dust, scour, and sweep at least once a week. He did not offer the cleaning job to me, though I learned from my mother—as you probably did from yours—how to dust, and how to scrub walls and floors with rags and brushes, and to make bathroom chrome shine. You might be surprised if Mr. VanderVeen refused to help you up after you fell down the stairs the way I did early this morning. And if he laughed when you said you were going home to cook something for your kids’ breakfast, if he said to you, “Get your useless, whoring, stoned ass up by yourself,” not taking into account that this morning had been an emergency situation because of the crippling toothache, and that the men in the parking lot had hurt you, and that the stairway was unheated.
But, as much as you would not want your seven-year-old son going downstairs to the apartment of a man who bad-talks you and lets your kid thumb through magazines full of guns, you also wouldn’t want your son out in the street, and especially you wouldn’t want him going to the Elm Street Convenience by himself. You’ve taught your son safety, and you’ve taught him not to steal, but the allure of candy near the cash register, especially chocolate-coated nougat, nuts, or caramel, can overwhelm any child’s better judgment.
The man downstairs invites your son to use his computer some evenings to play games on the Internet, so that when you call your apartment to ask your son if he h
as remembered to feed his little sister, who, according to the social worker, is behind in her speech and motor skills, you get no answer. The man’s large first-floor apartment features a gleaming enameled kitchen sink, shower curtains with no mold, and a very large television screen. In front of the plush couch, dishes of candy rest on a low coffee table and are accessible to children of all ages, including your tiny daughter. You have found in your son’s pockets fruit-flavored chews and chocolate toffees and creamy butterscotches in foil wrappers, and your son offers candy to you when you get home. You unwrap and eat these pretty candies, because eating them is a sweet simple pleasure, though after you eat them, too quickly, the pleasure is over. And it turns out that eating a lot of these candies rots your teeth, as your mother used to warn you it would. And if you have ever had a toothache like a scream that wakes you from a dead sleep so that you have to go to the lot next to the convenience store at three a.m., and you don’t have money for something to kill the pain, and you tell those guys you will do anything for something to kill the pain, then you will know how candy can become your worst nightmare.
The nurse said she would call me with the results of the lab tests. She told me three times that I must finish this entire bottle of antibiotics even if I feel better after a few days, even if the pills upset my stomach. I understand, I told her. I’m not stupid. I asked her about my tooth abscess, and she told me the county has no adult dental clinic, and that I should take Tylenol, but I know that Tylenol can be dangerous mixed with alcohol, which is also a painkiller. She told me that I should go down the hall and see if my son and daughter qualify for free dental care. It’s important that kids learn good dental hygiene early, she said. As a mother, I already know this, and next time I’m there, I will look into it, but at that point I had been at the clinic long enough.
I don’t know what you have been through today, but since I woke up in pain at three a.m., my whole day has been a nightmare.
Perhaps, like me, you have found that there are discrete, concrete moments in your life as a woman when you realize what you could do to make your life better, such as walking out of that stifling, medicine-smelling county clinic and into the cold winter sunshine. You decide you will go right home to pick up your daughter at Mr. VanderVeen’s apartment where you left her, and your son, too, if he is home from school already. You’ll try to explain about the toothache to Mr. VanderVeen when you are as sober as you are now. Maybe it will turn out he had a sister who used to make him crispy cereal bars or peanut butter balls dipped in melted chocolate, and he will apologize for calling you a whore, and he will explain why he always has neighborhood children in his apartment in a way that will make you think your daughter and son are in no danger from guns or molestation, and also that he is not planting in their minds negative ideas about you. You think of calling your own mom, whom you haven’t talked to in the year since she moved to Indiana to live with her sister, and you decide to start spending more time with your kids, starting tonight when you will bake something nice for them, a cake or a batch of snickerdoodle cookies that will fill the air with the sweet smell of cinnamon. You can imagine the three of you gathered around the table as the cookies cool. You might even put a few cookies on a plate to deliver to Mr. VanderVeen to say thank you for babysitting. For generations, sweets have been a safe way to thank men for their help. But as you walk home, bare-legged, past the convenience store, the pain in your tooth flares again, and you remember that your phone is blocked for making long-distance calls and that you have sugar, margarine, and baking powder at home, but no flour or eggs.
Surely you would agree that now is not a good time to make big decisions. It will be all you can do to endure the pain when you are lying in bed at three a.m. tonight, though the nurse said the antibiotic will begin to help that infection, too, within a few days.
You would also agree that, despite the danger candy poses, people do not hesitate to use candy against our families—and not just the man downstairs. Somebody puts those rows of candy, hundreds of individually wrapped pieces, next to the cash register at the Elm Street Convenience and then focuses a surveillance camera on our hands. A large quantity of candy could arrive anonymously through the mail with no return address, and it would be difficult for us and our children to just throw it away, in spite of our suspicions.
Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers knew the allure of candy decades ago, before convenience stores and shiny packaging, when they neglected important work in the house and field in order to spend hours in the kitchen combining sugar and butter and chocolate and cream and vanilla. And as women like you and me are aware today, candy, despite the pain and damage it can cause, is nearly impossible to resist.
Daughters of the Animal Kingdom
I.
Say you’re the middle-aged only child of an increasingly fragile mother who can no longer chop her own firewood, lug bales of hay, or—though she is loath to admit it—even harvest the honeycomb from her hives. For the past two months, since you decided to take some time away from your entomologist husband, a full professor in the department where you are an underpaid adjunct, you’ve been living in a camping trailer on the family farm, and now your mother has found a breast lump and says it’s nothing, says she wishes she’d never mentioned it. She seemed unmoved when you initially howled at her in exasperation and pantomimed clawing your head with your fingernails, but she is scheduled for surgery this week. Also, let’s say the youngest of your own four daughters has become pregnant and every phone call ends with her hanging up on you because you don’t understand what she’s going through, what she’s trying to achieve, holistically, by becoming a vegan so as not to poison her baby, physically or psychically. No meat or milk, no eggs, no honey—though you made sure she spent summers on her grandmother’s farm, where she learned to process raw honey using the crush-and-strain method as well as to make butter out of the fresh cream from a sweet-natured milk cow named Bambi.
And say, meanwhile, in your mother’s henhouse, your respite from the world of humans—you carry a book in there sometimes—there’s this screwy little Silkie with white feathers on her five-toed feet and more feathers sticking up showgirl-style on her head, and she’s just decided to hunker down in a nest box and peck anybody who touches her. She stays on that nest all night without food. She pulls out her feathers and warms the eggs against her bare flesh.
In this same henhouse there is also one Barred Rock rooster lording it over the dozen hens, squiring them to and fro. Sometimes you toss a handful of straw at him, tell him if he doesn’t behave, his sky will fall. In truth, that black-and-white rooster reminds you of your husband, who has young women gathered around him after every class and during office hours. He was your own professor when you were a young single mom, but he has remained a charming, slender man while you have grown fat and grumpy like your mother. He’s suggested you skip dessert, and this year gave you a gym membership for your birthday. You used to think it merely absurd, the effect he has on college women, until you spotted his Audi outside a café in Texas Corners, miles from campus. You were headed for the Cheese Lady shop to satisfy a craving for Maytag Blue—something you haven’t wanted for years. You were surprised to find him there, and he was every bit as surprised to see you, as was the girl beside him in the booth.
When you try to convince your youngest daughter to supplement her diet with some eggs for the easily digested protein she needs at this time—free-range organic anti-cruelty eggs, you suggest—she informs you that the whole poultry enterprise is immoral for what it does to the males. You are not feeling terribly sympathetic toward the male of any species just now, but you know it would be unconscionable to share with Rosie the particulars of her father’s adventure. Your daughter knows you’ve gone to stay with your mother, and you’ve suggested it’s a sort of spiritual retreat on the farm, a response to the nest emptying, a desire to get your hands dirty. And you would not, especially, share your most shocking personal revelation, that a st
out woman in her late forties with arthritic joints and age spots can get pregnant. You reflect that in the animal kingdom, females usually reproduce until they sputter out and die.
The broody Silkie guards her clutch against the other hens, knowing some of them steal eggs—tuck them under their wings the way running backs stash footballs—and start sitting on the stolen property themselves. Though normally a hen’s poops are dainty pastel blobs, while she is hunkered down she will be constipated for long periods, after which she will shit stinking manly loads. All broody hens have their hackles up, but some lose their bird brains before the three weeks are over and break their eggs in a fit of madness. An especially crazy one might attack the other thieving hen bitches or even the rooster, disturbing the peace of the henhouse, a kind of peace for which you imagine many women would give their egg money or even ransom a child conceived late in life.
II.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Page 11
