Her eyes widened. “Where did you hear that word?” She was shocked, her voice an octave higher than usual. I got quiet. She had a look on her face that I’d never seen before, a mix of anger and surprise.
“Lisa Weiringer and her mom and her dad,” I said, pointing at the blue car.
Mom’s face clouded with rage; her pupils enlarged, and her smooth skin practically rippled under the surface as she twisted her mouth into a deep frown. She didn’t tell me what it meant. Instead, her voice got the same high-pitched twinge it did when she was about to punish me or Cory. “They said that to you?”
I nodded, not sure if I had done something wrong or not. “Okay, come on,” she said, lifting Cory up by the hand and grabbing mine on the way over. We were walking back in the direction of the school, in the opposite direction of home, trying to keep up with my mom’s long-legged stride. Was I in trouble?
Without stopping, Mom looked down. She let go of my and Cory’s hands and reached out for the first thing she saw—a giant fallen branch in the yard across the street from the school. This was definitely not a stick; it was heavy enough for her to need both hands to pick it up, and long enough that she had to drag it behind her like a cavewoman with a club. This was a weapon. Cory and I pumped our little legs in double time, trying to keep up. I was excited by the uncertainty of what could happen next.
We crossed the street, and Mom bypassed the playground entirely and went right for the Gremlin. Lisa’s parents were still sitting inside while she played on the monkey bars. When we were about five feet away, Cory and I instinctively stopped and hung back a little as soon as Mom bent her face down right into the passenger-side window.
“Did you call my kid a nigger?” my mom yelled. Instead of waiting for an answer, she just lifted the branch over her head and swung it down, hard, on the hood of their car. It landed with a loud pop. Cory and I both backed up; she wasn’t aiming for us, but she was swinging the branch so wildly we didn’t want to get accidentally clipped.
At first, the Weiringers were stunned into silence. Who wouldn’t be? My mom, a woman with the body of a stick insect, was circling the car, swinging a branch like a WWF wrestler. All of the kids on the playground seemed to move in slow motion; they stopped climbing and swinging and running, and the playground fell silent as all the kids watched my mom beat up a car.
“You want to see a nigger? I’ll show you a nigger!” She scraped the branch off the Weiringers’ hood, letting it bounce off the sidewalk once before picking it up again. This time, she swung the branch hard against the passenger-side door. Mrs. Weiringer flinched against the sound. The second swing seemed to shake Mr. Weiringer out of his silence. Soon he was yelling, my mom was yelling, and even Mrs. Weiringer joined in, all of them shouting some variation of the word “nigger.”
“I’ll show you a nigger!”
“Nigger!”
“Yeah, I said nigger!”
I had gone from never hearing the word until that day to hearing it about a hundred times in a row.
My mom dropped the branch and walked over and grabbed our hands. As we were walking home, she was still shouting over her shoulder at the Weiringers: “Mess with my kid again, I dare you. Yeah, you go ahead and try me.”
Seeing my mom that visibly angry was shocking. But it was also exhilarating. My mom was sticking up for us. She was shouting for us, physically using her strength for us.
For me.
It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
4.
I was six when we moved away from my grandmother. Uncle Sy, Nana Dar’s husband, purchased a small building in town; he opened a deli downstairs and rented one of the two upstairs apartments to Mom. Welfare paid for the apartment until Mom got a job working at Pendine Electronics, soldering switchboards. She didn’t have any technological experience when it came to running computers, but she was nimble enough to weld the tiny pieces of the circuit boards together.
All of our furniture was cobbled together from stuff given to us by Grandma and Sweetie Pie—both of our beds, the couch Mom slept on in the living room, the big wooden entertainment center. Mom must have loaded it in with some friends while we hung out with Grandma, because the day Cory and I were allowed to see it, the apartment was already furnished, already looked like ours. Small flickers of the familiar caught my eye as I cautiously crept around, like the small wooden end table in the living room; the brass handle on the drawer made a bright clink every time someone opened it as the metal gently swung back into place.
“And this is your bedroom!” Mom said with the uncharacteristic flourish of a magician. Cory ran in and jumped on Uncle Bobby’s old daybed, pressed into the far corner near the windows facing the street, selfishly laying claim to the space like a cast member of The Real World. “Is this one mine?” he asked excitedly.
“Yup.” Mom looked at me as I sat down on my twin bed, jutting out from the opposite wall, near the bedroom door. There was a small metal table between the beds with a lamp on it. “Is that a TV tray?” I said suspiciously.
“It’s a table now. Cory, don’t pull on that,” Mom said, spying Cory tugging on the curtain tassel.
The bedroom was big, stretching across the width of the apartment and overlooking Jersey Avenue. Mom left us to explore for a few minutes. All of our toys were stacked at the opposite end of the room, near the rolltop desk Mom brought over from Grandma’s house. The desk was too tall for either of us to use properly, but it was 1983—it’s not like Cory and I were sitting at a desk by candlelight to do our homework like Laura Ingalls.
We absentmindedly played with our toys while Mom came back in and put a shiny sticker on one of the lower windowpanes. “What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s so that firemen can find you,” Mom said, smoothing her palm over the windowpane. “This sticker lets them know there are kids in this room, so they should check here first.”
We’d only lived there for five minutes and she’d already planted the idea in my head that we might burn alive in that room.
“What do we do if there is a fire?” I asked, frantic.
“Stop, drop, and roll,” Cory said. He was crushing his army men together, not looking at us, and just repeating what his teacher had told him in class.
“Well, that only works in school,” Mom said, looking around. “There’s not going to be a fire. And if there is, just stand by those windows”—she pointed at the Tot Finder window—“until someone comes to get you.”
I had a sudden twinge of loneliness. We lived on the dangerous second floor, without Grandma or Granddad or Uncle Bobby. The world felt smaller. I didn’t know how we’d survive together, just the three of us.
* * *
—
I had nightmares for the first few weeks in the new apartment, and I told Grandma about them over breakfast at the All Seasons Diner.
“It starts over the doorway, and only I can see it,” I said, jamming scrambled eggs into my mouth. We were sitting next to each other in the booth, our elbows touching. “And it’s pink—”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, child.” Grandma’s cigarette hung out of the corner of her mouth while she stirred sugar into her orange coffee mug. Across from her, Patsy sat with her back against the padded booth, shaking salt onto her plate. Patsy was Grandma’s partner in crime. She lived on Jersey Avenue, just like we did but farther down toward New Jersey, and would always come to pick up Grandma for bingo, breakfast, or shopping at the mall in Middletown. Her eyes were the color of a cornflower crayon, and, like Nana Dar, she wore her bright red hair piled high in a bouffant that was sprayed in place. Patsy had a soft voice and a raspy laugh, which we heard plenty of whenever she hung out with Grandma.
Grandma and Patsy picked us up once a week and took us to breakfast, and she came over to the apartment sometimes. I was always excited to see her and tell her about everything she missed
now that we lived in different places. I swallowed the hot wad of egg without chewing just so that I could talk again.
“It’s pink, and it oozes down from the doorway at the top. And then it gets bigger!” I held my hands apart for emphasis. Grandma looked down at me, squinting through the smoke.
“Grandma, can I have a pancake?” Across from me, Cory was kicking his legs against the back of the booth, hitting me every time his legs swung forward.
“Stop kicking me and let me tell my story!” I said through gritted teeth, leveling a solid kick to his shin. He frowned and kicked me back.
“You two! Cut the shit!” Grandma said, shaking her cigarette at us. Ash fell onto the table, dotting the greenish-gray swirls with black flecks.
“It’s the Blob!” I said, exasperated. “The Blob is coming to get me, and it’s in the doorway, and it’s closest to my bed, so I’m going to get eaten first. And I dream it every night.”
Grandma took a long drag, politely tilting her head toward the ceiling to blow out the smoke. “It’s just a bad dream. The Blob isn’t real. It’s just a movie.” She seemed bored and unwilling to acknowledge that she was the one who introduced me to this bad dream by making me watch The Blob with her, excitedly describing it as “a classic” and insisting I would love it. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the table and turned to Patsy.
“She never showed up to bingo, ya know.” Grandma always talked like she was exhaling, even when there wasn’t a cigarette in sight.
“Who?” I asked, tucking a mouthful of food into my cheek.
“Mind your business, child.”
I felt the sting of dismissal. All I ever wanted was to be part of the adult talk, the hunched-over seriousness and wild laughter and finishing each other’s jokes. I perked up whenever I heard them mention a name that I knew, even if I didn’t know what they were talking about. I tried to chime in, but the adults mostly laughed and shooed me away. My household nickname was Rona Barrett, like the then-popular gossip columnist.
Across from me, Cory tried to whisper while Grandma and Patsy talked. “The Blob is real, and it’s gonna get you.”
* * *
—
The nightmares eased as I got used to the new place. Our elementary school was two blocks away, and Mom could walk to work down the street.
Ever since we had moved, though, Mom seemed to have less patience with us. At Grandma’s, there were a lot of people around, so she could kind of spread out the job of raising two kids. At the apartment, Mom had to do everything. She didn’t seem to like it very much, and it made her kind of bossy. She kept asking us to do stuff, to help out. Mom would lift the mattress as I learned how to quickly tuck the sheets under it. I didn’t mind putting our toys away in the toybox or stacking the books on the desk; if Mom was vacuuming, it gave me enough time to sneak to a corner of the room and read until she caught me. The worst was helping in the kitchen, especially if I had to make the milk.
Of all the small injustices suffered as a welfare kid, powdered milk was surely the worst. Making milk was a whole production, and I hated every step of it. First, I had to climb on the counter and get the nondescript box from the shelf; it looked like a product from the Dharma Initiative, a white box with plain dark blue letters on the side. The box was bigger than my head and always threatened to topple me to the ground. I managed to slam it on the counter, crawl down, wrestle it over to the kitchen table, and kneel on a chair, where I would pour the powder contents into a plastic pitcher.
“Not so much, Dani,” Mom would say while she was slicing cheese. Our cheese came in a brick that was the length of my arm and the width of my torso. The orangey-yellow made me think it could be American cheese, but the flavor was always a mix of something just north of cheese-ish, a pressed log of dairy fraud. The cling-wrap packaging had lines on it like a stick of butter, as if indicating that a normal serving size of cheese was a slice as thick as a magazine.
I stopped pouring, put the box down on the table, and lifted the pitcher to carry it over to the sink. There was an art to how to add the water: too fast and you’d just get foam, too slow and you’d get a thick paste that was impossible to mix. I learned to adjust it perfectly, feeling for the right setting after a few clicks of the cold water knob, and put the pitcher under the faucet. When it was close to the top, I’d teeter back to the table, climb back on the chair, and stir the whole slurry with a long wooden spoon.
To add to the injustice of having to make it, drinking powdered milk was hell on earth. It tasted like old batteries left to simmer in a puddle of hot rain. The chemistry of it didn’t make sense to me, let alone the dubious nutritional content.
“This looks like water,” I’d say, pouring the light gray liquid onto my Cap’n Crunch.
“And it tastes like doo-doo!” Cory would say.
“I want the milk like we had at Grandma’s house.”
“Well, I guess you just have to go out and get Grandma’s house money!” Not all of Mom’s comebacks made sense when she was stressed out or feeling judged by us. “Just finish your cereal!”
* * *
—
What I loved most about our new apartment was the bathroom. Ever since Cory had shaved off part of his eyebrow while no one was looking, Grandma never let us hang out in the bathroom at her house, but Mom let me sit on the toilet and talk while she was getting ready for the day. She was fascinating to me. Watching her was like seeing a peacock fan out its tail.
“What’s that?” I’d ask, swinging my legs against the toilet. Mom was plugging a small white box into the outlet by the light switch.
“It’s a razor. Stop banging your legs.”
I’d watch, enraptured, while she dragged the electric razor up and down on her armpits. “Why are you doing that?”
Mom was standing in front of the mirror, using the overhead light to gauge whether she’d missed any spots. “Because.”
“Because why?” None of this made any sense to me.
“Because it’s just what ladies do.” It was a time when gender dynamics were often the period at the end of any sentence.
“Will I have to do it?”
“Yeah, one day.”
My mom was usually in her bra and a pair of jeans when we were in the bathroom. Henderson women have—and I believe this is the clinical term—absolutely enormous tits. My mom’s tits were always inching out of the top of her bra like a glass of water about to spill. Balanced on her tiny frame, they looked like a burden. One look at her and I’d decided that boobs were bad news, and I wanted nothing to do with them.
“Do I have to get boobies, too?”
Mom laughed. “Yes, Dani, one day you will get breasts.”
“What are breasts?” I asked, disgusted.
Mom always asked me questions when we had our bathroom time. In our day-to-day life, she was kind of impatient, but she genuinely seemed interested in my answers in there. “What did you read in school yesterday?” she asked while dragging blue eye shadow across her lids. She always opened her mouth in a wide O when she put on eye shadow; I’d sit on the toilet and try to mimic the way her face moved, practicing for the day when I’d be old enough to wear makeup.
She always did her hair last. Mom had big, soft curls that she spritzed with something called “activator.” I always asked her to spritz some on my hair. “You don’t need it,” she’d say. When Mom did my hair, she always gave me cornrows or tight braids. Watching her shake her hair around shaped my idea of freedom—there were no barrettes, no rubber bands, no bobby pins.
For her final display, Mom took out her teeth and brushed them. She had a big, beautiful smile, but her top teeth were full dentures. I don’t know how she lost them or why she had them taken out. She’d reach into her mouth and pinch with her thumb and forefinger; after a few wiggles, she’d lower the tray of teeth right out of her mouth. I’d
seen her do it a hundred times, but it was still thrilling to watch.
My baby teeth were falling out, so watching her clean her dentures made me feel like I just might never get teeth again. I think my mom was embarrassed, because she never wanted to answer questions about them. And I had a lot of questions.
“So will I get teeth after these fall out?” I’d already lost a tooth. I hated the taste of blood in my mouth, the loose feeling of it rattling around in my head.
“Yes, Dani.”
“But if I don’t, will you buy me some teeth like yours?”
“Goddammit, Dani, you’re going to get your own teeth. Your adult teeth grow in after you lose the baby ones.” Mom was busy scrubbing the soft, pink gummy part of her dentures. Her top lip looked slack above the space where her teeth usually filled out her face.
I was silent for a beat. “But—”
“Dani, go to the living room. Jesus Christ.”
“I’ll be quiet.” Anything to stay in that space with her. I knew she didn’t want to talk about her teeth, but I was enamored of the whole display. Getting sent away felt like I was being punished; I couldn’t watch her swish the puffy brush around the blush and see precisely where on her face she put it. People stopped my mom on the street to comment on her skin, her makeup, her hair. No matter how many hours I spent with her in that bathroom, it all seemed completely unrelated to me, with my freckles, coarse hair, and stubby eyelashes; I don’t resemble my mom at all. Mom made beauty seem like a magic trick I’d never learn. I think there was a part of me that was trying, in those moments, to know her deeply, deep enough so that I could one day bring to light any small part of me that was hers.
* * *
The Ugly Cry Page 4
