Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  The following day at noon, when Isabelle came into the bedroom wearing those white shorts and carrying a sandwich on a paper plate, he yanked the shorts off her, but she refused to have sex with him. Instead he found himself rubbing himself on the arch of her foot while she lay facedown watching Jerry Springer on the bedroom television.

  “Your ma hates this show, you know. She says it’s low class.”

  “At least it’s something,” she said, without taking her eyes off the girl her own age on the screen. “Living here in this house makes me feel like I’m one of my ma’s fucking doilies, one that says, Home is where the heart is. Home is where the sweet daughter is. Gag me. I have to get away from here, but my dad says I can’t come live with him. He’s in a little tiny apartment with four people.”

  “Your ma makes a good home for you. You really shouldn’t keep harassing her about getting braces. You know she can’t afford it.”

  “I have to fight back somehow. Don’t you see how she wraps me up in herself, tries to control me?” Finally the girl looked over at him. “That’s why my dad left, you know, and Josh, too. My dad said her love was like a sticky spiderweb that she caught everybody up in.”

  “Your ma’s a saint.” The truck driver shook his head to dislodge the notion of a spider. He’d been told that spiders tenderized their prey while it was still alive.

  “You don’t see it,” she said and put her sandwich on its paper plate, directed her steady gaze back at him. “That love she talks about isn’t about me or you. She doesn’t even know me and you, or anybody. Look at us, what we’re doing—if she knew us, she’d know about this. She just fills herself up with love and vomits it all over everybody. My grandma used to beat the hell out of her when she was a kid, so she thinks she has to be the opposite. You know she left home and got married when she was sixteen.”

  “Your ma doesn’t deserve this, Izzy. What we’re doing.”

  “So why are you doing it?” Isabelle asked through a mouthful of mashed bologna and translucent salad dressing and spongy white bread. She turned back to the television, but he didn’t stop rubbing himself on her, and she didn’t pull her foot away.

  WHEN ISABELLE ANNOUNCED in February she was three months pregnant, Sherry’s heart almost stopped beating. She begged her for the name of the boy, but the girl didn’t tell. She did not tell when Sherry cried on the kitchen floor; she continued to not tell later in the week when Sherry made peanut-butter-frosted brownies for her. In the bitterly cold first week of March, on the day of Isabelle’s sixteenth birthday, the daughter and the truck driver took off together. Sherry found the note, written in her daughter’s loopy scrawl: I’m sorry Ma. Don’t try and find us. Don’t try to break up our new family. We love each other and we’re going to go have the baby somewhere warm. Izzy.

  “What have I done?” Sherry howled in a voice that filled the house. “Where did I go wrong?”

  When the furnace kicked on, she looked to the front door. She wished the truck driver would pop his handsome head inside and say it wasn’t true, that her smart-aleck daughter was just playing a joke. That he, beloved and trusted, had not molested her daughter, was not planning to make a new life of molesting her.

  Only she suspected it wasn’t as simple as molestation, not exactly. Rather, it was the encroachment of that other world, the world she had tried to escape all her life, where people acted out of the pleasure and convenience of the moment, where they called in sick to work on a summer day to get drunk or go to the beach, leaving other people with extra work to do. The parallel world was the one where husbands left wives for other women, where children sassed, where parents beat them for sassing. It was the world of those television shows where people showed off bad behavior for the cameras, where passion was conceived not in the heart, but in some other organ, and no urge was resisted. And the world where, it now seemed, those closest to you betrayed you in the worst imaginable way and rubbed your face in how you had failed them.

  She reread her daughter’s note and got caught on the word love in We love each other. Isabelle had never used that word lightly, and now it seemed she had left home for love, same as Sherry had all those years ago at the same age, the age of consent.

  She knew she should call her husband this minute and tell him, but the thought of her failure filled her with shame. Instead, Sherry would send out love into the universe in hopes of reaching the girl and calling her back.

  Sherry slid off the couch onto her knees, folded her arms on the seat cushion, and prayed there for a long time before looking up at the school photos hanging on the wall, the girl with her freckled nose, her big smile revealing the canine that stuck out wrong above her other teeth. Sherry knew she should’ve found a way to fix the girl’s teeth, whatever the cost. She never should have wasted money on her sexy intimate things—just last week she’d even lit a candle in the bathroom at work and dimmed the lights to test the effect before buying a particular dangling pair of earrings. The shame of those expenditures petrified her in this kneeling position. And cigarettes—she should have quit the cigarettes when the children were born. Though they’d seemed like her only comfort much of the time, she should have saved the money for her children.

  When she finally stood to get herself ready to go to work, she looked out the window and saw that a great mound of March snow had been pushed behind the rear wheels of her little Chevy. In his hurry to back his big rig out of the driveway this morning, the truck driver had not shoveled, but just plowed through the heavy drift, knocking aside enough loose chunks to block her in. She would have to go out and shovel now if she was going to get to work on time. Sherry put on her work smock and name tag, sprayed some stuff on her hair where it was sticking up, and held it down with her fingers until it dried.

  NINE MONTHS LATER, a navy blue car with a flesh-colored passenger side door and a loud exhaust dropped off Sherry’s daughter and then sped away, skidding and sliding dangerously on the icy road. Sherry’s heart sparked at the sight of her child, at that bare head of smooth copper-colored hair that used to reflect the light when Sherry brushed and braided it. She held the yellow checked kitchen curtain aside and watched Isabelle slog toward her. Isabelle had gained enough weight that her thighs rubbed together like Sherry’s, and she walked with a side-to-side rocking motion, as though her knees were stiff from a long drive, as though her duffel bag, which she was dragging across the snow, weighed a hundred pounds. The tiny baby against her hip was not wearing a cap, either. At first she felt a surge of triumph that she had willed the girl to return, but when Isabelle entered through the back door without knocking, wearing her familiar scowl, Sherry felt a little afraid.

  “Hi, Ma, I’m home,” she said. “I tried to escape this tunnel of love, but I was lured back by your macaroni casserole.”

  “Welcome home, Izzy.” Sherry helped drag the duffel bag inside and closed the door. At the blast of cold the furnace kicked on. Sherry held her arms out. Instead of hugging her mother, Isabelle handed off the pink-eared baby, and Sherry plopped back into her seat at the table with the baby on her lap. As the little one squirmed and shifted, Sherry felt warm wetness seep from the side of the diaper and soak into her black work pants.

  “I never thought I’d be a grandmother at thirty-seven.”

  “I’m a terrible person,” Isabelle said. “I know that now. You’ve shown me that, Ma.”

  “I never said that, Izzy,” Sherry said. “Do you want to tell me where you’ve been for nine months?”

  “It was awful, living in the truck. I had to hide all the time. The company he hauls for has a rule that he can’t have nobody riding with him. One time I pretty near smothered Violet because I had to keep her from crying in the back.”

  “Violet?” Sherry started. The shock of the name was greater than the shock of hearing Isabelle might have asphyxiated her own child. “After my mother?”

  “It’s a pretty name. A family name.”

  “But she was a cruel woman, Izzy. She
hurt people. I never wanted you to know her.”

  “Oh, and I think I’m pregnant again.” Isabelle frowned and then smiled. “Just kidding. Remember, I’m a joker, Ma.”

  Sherry remembered the truck driver slapping the girl’s face, just as Violet had slapped Sherry’s face dozens of times. She wondered how it would feel to raise her hand and swing from her shoulder with enough force that her daughter would drop to the floor. The violent impulse thrilled her for a moment but left her ashamed. Here in her arms was a helpless baby, after all.

  She tried holding the baby out away from her, on one knee, but that made little Violet cry, so she pulled the wet bottom onto her lap again, tried to adjust the diaper so it wouldn’t leak, while she got her bearings. Violet.

  “And then, Ma, you won’t believe this, but last week I caught him getting a blow job from a truck stop girl. Can you believe it? I told him I wasn’t going to stand for that. He said if I’d do it for him, he wouldn’t have to pay somebody else to do it. He told me, ‘Your ma used to do it for me sometimes.’”

  The girl had always said whatever came into her head, speaking without restraint, same as her father, though she didn’t have his other easy ways. Instead of looking at the floor in shame at such an utterance, however, the girl’s eyes settled on the pack of Kool 100’s on the table. She reached around Sherry and the baby, slid a cigarette out of the pack.

  “You know, Ma, when he said that, I told him, Shut up. I told him he can’t talk about you that way, about you sucking his dick.”

  When the baby squeaked, Sherry loosened her grip—she hadn’t realized she was squeezing so hard. Violet began to wail.

  Sherry had never been prepared, nor had she prepared her daughter, for the situations she had wanted to wish out of existence. Sherry had failed to acknowledge the whole unsavory world beyond her gingham curtains and peanut-butter-frosted brownies, a whole world of indecent and inconsiderate behavior and pleasure-seeking. She’d thought that by shining her light on what was beautiful and generous and good, her daughter would want that and nothing more. She hadn’t seen the need to teach the girl about birth control.

  Though half of marriages ended in divorce, Sherry had also not believed, even after four and a half years of separation, that divorce would be her own fate, until last week when her husband’s lawyer sent her divorce papers.

  The tiny girl in her hands resembled Isabelle as a baby, round-faced, red-haired, with a pinched-up brow.

  “You got a dry diaper in that bag, Izzy?”

  “Sorry, Ma, I got no diapers. I got nothing,” the girl said, raising her voice over the baby’s howl, maybe expressing a certain amount of pride in having nothing. She lit her cigarette from Sherry’s orange lighter and exhaled a stream of smoke. “It’s just like you predicted, Ma. I’m a no-good failure.”

  “I never said anything like that.” Sherry looked around her little house where she’d lived alone for nine months. She’d thought she had been lonely, but really she’d taken comfort in the quiet evenings with only the company of the photo of her son in his army dress uniform and her daughter’s school pictures, any of which could make her cry. Her love had not diminished in the absence of the objects of her love—the mere idea of her son and daughter had been sufficient. Every day she’d considered calling the authorities to say a twenty-five-year-old man had taken her sixteen-year-old daughter away, and every day she decided she could not face the shame.

  Sherry had gazed at her husband every day of the sixteen years of their marriage, especially when the sun came into their bedroom to light up his face or his freckled, muscular arm lying above the flowered comforter. In the evenings when his curly hair was tousled, when sweat or grease stained his work shirt, she’d thought she wanted to fall at his feet and thank the Lord for him. Apparently that was stifling him. And by supporting everything he did, she was, evidently, oppressing him. In her two beautiful children, she saw not just her husband’s freckles but his free spirit that had kept him restless, moving from job to job, unfinished project to unfinished project. She had thought her own stability was a benefit for him, for all of them, and she had been certain her love was like a comforter in which they could all stay wrapped, warm and cozy, whatever storms raged outside. As he was packing his things, Sherry had told him she would do anything to keep him home with her and the kids, and he’d said, “That’s the problem, don’t you see?” She didn’t see then, and she still didn’t.

  “I thought about that sampler while I was gone,” Isabelle said now, stabbing with her cigarette in that direction to create a little noose of smoke. “Corinthians doesn’t exactly say what love is, not really.”

  “Here, honey.” Sherry tried to hand the baby back to her daughter, so she could get up and find safety pins, maybe sacrifice an old towel to use as a diaper. Love is patient, love is kind, Corinthians said, but maybe the girl was right that it was vague, that it only held meaning if you already felt love. While the baby hung in the air between them, Isabelle opened the fridge and stuck her head inside. She rummaged around and then shut the door, cradling in her arm a jar of salad dressing and an open bologna package. “Don’t you got any pop? Truth is, I could use something stronger than pop today, but I know you don’t have that.” Isabelle formed words around the cigarette pinched in her lips the way Violet used to.

  “You’ll have to finish school,” Sherry said, pulling the baby close again to quell the crying. School wasn’t Sherry’s biggest concern, not really. Her concern was that maybe her life had all been a foolish waste, that the trajectory away from her own cruel mother had brought her right back to this howling creature on her lap. Somebody would have to watch the baby while Isabelle went back to school, if there was really any point. The girl would need to get a driver’s license and a car if Sherry wasn’t going to have to do everything for her, and they charged hundreds of dollars now for driver’s training. Was she supposed to quit smoking for that?

  “I’m sorry about everything, Ma, but he was a jerk anyhow. I can’t believe it how you didn’t ever fight with him. You have the patience of a saint. No, you are a saint. He and I agreed on that. We talked about you a lot, actually.” Isabelle put the food on the counter and took another lungful of smoke. With her long exhalation, she looked out at the road as though already longing for another big truck to come take her away.

  Sherry had longed for her daughter’s return. Now she followed her daughter’s gaze out into the driveway and wondered how it could look so dirty and beaten down when it was only the second week in December. She pressed the baby to her chest until the little body relaxed, until the choking sobs slowed. Friend, lover, mother was what she wanted to be—not saint.

  Plenty of times as a girl, Sherry had dropped to her knees and thrown herself onto the clean-scrubbed kitchen floor and begged for forgiveness from her mother. Sherry had been crippled, but Isabelle, fortified with a lifetime of unconditional love, should have been able to take on the whole world. Isabelle stubbed out her cigarette so that a bit of tobacco kept burning in the ashtray between them. She reached into the bag of bread and pulled out two slices.

  Sherry knew love was not something you created for the reward of it. Loving was as natural for a good person as shining was for the sun, and the sun shone whether the plants appreciated it or not. Some people could return your love, and others could only absorb it, the way a black hole took in all the light and gave nothing back, but that didn’t diminish the shining.

  Sherry brushed the backs of her fingers against the soft pink cheek and pulled the baby out in front of her again, just far enough so that those dark eyes opened wide and met her granny’s gaze. Baby Violet’s eyes sparked with recognition, and her crying stopped in an instant. Sherry felt electricity move through herself and the baby, an audacious surge of love, like a zipper closing a warm soft jacket around them.

  My Bliss

  First I married the breakfast cereal in its small cardboard chapel, wax-coated, into which I poured milk. Then I marr
ied a cigarette, for the gauzy way the air hung around us when we were together, then a stone, because I thought he was a brick or a block, something I could use to build a home. There was a bird, but flying away repeatedly is grounds for divorce. The shrub was a lost cause from the get-go, and the TV gave me marital-tension headaches. The kidney was dull, the liver was slick, the car was exhausting, the monster in the woodshed scared the children (though I found his stink enticing). The teacup was all filling and emptying, emptying and filling. When I married the squirrel the wedding was woodland, the guests scampered, but all that foraging and rustling of sticks and leaves was too much. And the males sleep balled together in another tree all winter! How foolish, my marrying the truck, the shovel, the hair, the hope, the broom, the mail—oh, waiting and waiting for the mail to come! Marrying the cat was funny at first, and I luxuriated in his fur, until I heard his mating yowl, until the claws and the teeth, the penile spines, dear God. Forget the spider, the mask, the brittle bone. And then a slim-hipped quiet confidence leaned against the wall of the Lamplighter Lounge, chalking a pool cue, and I said, Lordy, this is for real. He ran the table, and I fanned myself with a Bell’s Beer coaster—this was going to last! I called home and divorced a plate of meatloaf. Confidence gave me a good couple of months. I learned aloof and not eating in public, but it did not last. He wasn’t from the Midwest, and, besides, tied to a barstool across the room, some drunk’s seeing-eye dog was already starting to chew the fishnet stockings off a lady’s artificial leg.

  Blood Work, 1999

  When Marika got home from working at the hospital on December 30, she hung up her parka and put the day’s mail on the folding table and sat in the creaky wooden rocking chair her granny had given her before dying. In a few minutes she would go downstairs to help serve dinner at the Good Works Kitchen, from which the smell of tonight’s entrée, turkey tetrazzini, now wafted. She stood at the window to see the cardboard sign across the street, saw that 2 days to the end had been changed to 1 day to the end. She didn’t know who lived there, but she’d been counting down with the occupant for months. The smartest people she knew—her mom, her bosses at the hospital, the volunteer coordinator at the Good Works Kitchen—had assured her nothing was going to happen tomorrow at midnight, and she had no reason to doubt them.