“What happened?” I asked.
“He’s gone,” Mom said.
“But what happened?”
“We got into a fight. I told you he’s moody.” To lure Mark to Lost Lake, Mom explained, she had told him that Liz and I would be spending the night with friends. Once he’d arrived, she’d told him there had been a slight change of plans, and Liz and I were coming home after school. Mark exploded. He said he felt tricked and entrapped, and he stormed out.
“What a jerk,” I said.
“He’s not a jerk. He’s passionate. He’s Byronic. And he’s obsessed with me.”
“Then he’ll be back.”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “It’s pretty serious. He said he was leaving for his villa in Italy.”
“Mark has a villa in Italy?”
“It’s not really his. A movie-producer friend owns it, but he lets Mark use it.”
“Wow,” I said. Mom had always wanted to spend time in Italy, and here was a guy who could jet over there whenever he felt like it. Except for the fact that he didn’t want to meet me and Liz, Mark Parker was everything Mom had ever wanted in a man. “I wish he liked us,” I said, “because other than that, he’s too good to be true.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom pulled up her shoulders and stared at me. “Do you think I’m making it all up?”
“Oh, not for a second,” I said. “Making up a boyfriend would be just too kooky.” But as soon as the words came out of my mouth, it occurred to me that Mom was, in fact, making it all up. My face suddenly felt hot, like I was seeing Mom naked. Mom and I were looking at each other, and I realized she could tell that I knew she had made it up.
“Screw you!” Mom shouted. She was on her feet and started yelling about everything she’d done for me and Liz, how hard she’d struggled, how much she’d sacrificed, what an ungrateful couple of parasites we were. I tried to calm Mom down, but that made her angrier. She never should have had kids, she went on, especially me. I was a mistake. She’d thrown away her life and her career for us, run through her inheritance for us, and we didn’t even appreciate it.
“I can’t stand being here!” she screamed. “I’ve got to get away.”
I was wondering what I could say to smooth things over when Mom grabbed her big handbag off the couch and stormed out, slamming the door behind her. I heard her gun the Dart, then she drove away, and except for the gentle clinking of the wind chimes, the bungalow was silent.
I fed Fido, the little turtle Mom had bought me at Woolworth’s when she wouldn’t let me get a dog. Then I curled up in Mom’s purple butterfly chair—the one she liked to sit in when she was writing music—staring out the picture window with my feet tucked up beside me, stroking Fido’s little head with my forefinger and waiting for Liz to get home from school.
Truth be told, Mom had a temper and was given to her share of tantrums and meltdowns when things got overwhelming. The fits usually passed quickly, and then we all moved on as if nothing had happened. This one was different. Mom had said things that she’d never said before, like about me being a mistake. And the whole business about Mark Parker was epically weird. I needed Liz to help sort it all out.
Liz could make sense of anything. Her brain worked that way. Liz was talented and beautiful and funny and, most of all, incredibly smart. I’m not saying all that just because she was my sister. If you met her, you’d agree. She was tall and slender with pale skin and long, wavy reddish-gold hair. Mom was always calling her a pre-Raphaelite beauty, which made Liz roll her eyes and say it was too bad she didn’t live over one hundred years ago, in pre-Raphaelite days.
Liz was one of those people who always made grown-ups, particularly teachers, go slack-jawed and use words like “prodigy” and “precocious” and “gifted.” Liz knew all these things that other people didn’t know—like who the pre-Raphaelites were—because she was always reading, usually more than one book at a time. She also figured out a lot on her own. She could do complicated math calculations without pencil and paper. She could answer really tricky brainteaser-type riddles and loved saying words backward—like calling Mark Parker “Kram Rekrap.” She loved anagrams, where you rearranged the letters of words to make different words, turning “deliver” into “reviled” and “funeral” into “real fun.” And she loved spoonerisms, like when you mean to say “dear old queen” but instead say “queer old dean,” or when “bad money” comes out as “mad bunny” and “smart feller” turns into “fart smeller.” She was also a killer Scrabble player.
Liz’s school let out only an hour after mine, but that afternoon it felt like forever. When she finally arrived at the bungalow, I didn’t even let her set her books down before I started pouring out every detail of Mom’s blowup.
“I just don’t understand why she would make up all this Mark Parker stuff,” I said.
Liz sighed. “Mom’s always been a bit of a fibber,” she said. Mom was all the time telling us things that Liz suspected weren’t true, like how she used to go foxhunting with Jackie Kennedy in Virginia when they were both girls, or how she’d been the dancing banana in a cereal commercial. Mom had a red velvet jacket and liked to tell the story of how, when June Carter Cash had heard her play in a Nashville bar, she joined Mom onstage and they sang a duet together that brought the crowd to its feet. June Carter Cash had been wearing the red velvet jacket, and right there onstage she gave it to Mom.
“It didn’t happen,” Liz said. “I saw Mom buy that jacket at a church tag sale. She didn’t know I was watching, and I never said anything.” Liz looked out the window. “Mark Parker is just another dancing banana.”
“I really blew it, didn’t I?”
“Don’t beat yourself up, Bean.”
“I should have kept my big mouth shut. But I never really said anything, either.”
“She knew you knew,” Liz said, “and she couldn’t handle it.”
“Mom wasn’t just making up a little story about some guy she met,” I said. “There were the phone calls. And those liner notes.”
“I know,” Liz said. “It’s kind of scary. I think she’s gone through about all of her money, and it’s giving her some sort of a nervous breakdown.”
Liz said we should clean up the place so that when Mom came back, we could pretend the whole Mark Parker mess had never happened. We put the books back on the shelves, stacked the sheet music, and slid the records into their jackets. I came across the liner notes where Mark Parker had supposedly written to Mom: “I wrote this about you before I met you.” It was flat-out creepy.
CHAPTER THREE
We expected Mom to come back that night or the next day, but by the weekend, we still hadn’t heard from her. Whenever I started to fret, Liz told me not to worry, Mom always came back. Then we got the letter.
Liz read it first, then handed it to me and went to sit in the butterfly chair at the picture window.
My Darling Liz and Sweet Bean,
It’s 3 a.m. and I’m writing from a hotel in San Diego. I know I have not been at the top of my game recently, and to finish my songs—and be the mother I want to be—I need to make some time and space for myself. I need to find the magic again. I also pray for balance.
You both should know that nothing in the world is more important to me than my girls and that we will be together again soon and life will be better than ever!
The $200 I’m sending will keep you in chicken potpies until I get back. Chins up and don’t forget to floss!
Love,
Mom
I joined Liz at the window and she squeezed my hand.
“Is she coming back?” I asked.
“Of course,” Liz said.
“But when? She didn’t say when.”
“I don’t think she knows.”
Two hundred dollars buys you a lot of chicken potpies. We got them at Spinelli’s grocery, over on Balsam Street, an air-conditioned place with a wood floor and a big freezer in the back where the pies were stored
. Mr. Spinelli, a dark-eyed man with hairy forearms who was always flirting with Mom, sometimes put them on sale. When he did, we could get eight for a dollar, and then we really stocked up.
We ate our pies in the evening at the red Formica table, but we didn’t much feel like playing Chew-and-Spew—or the Lying Game—so after dinner, we just cleaned up, did our homework, and went to bed. We’d looked after ourselves before when Mom was away, but thinking she might be away for days and days somehow made us take our responsibilities more seriously. When Mom was home, she sometimes let us stay up late, but without her around, we always went to bed on time. Since she wasn’t there to write excuses, we were never late to school and never skipped a day, which she sometimes let us do. We never left dirty dishes in the sink, and we flossed our teeth.
Liz had been doing some babysitting, but after Mom had been gone a week, she decided to take on extra work, and I got a job delivering Grit, a newspaper with useful stories about, say, keeping squirrels from eating the wires in your car’s engine by putting mothballs in an old pair of panty hose and hanging them under the hood. For the time being, money wasn’t a problem, and while the bills were piling up, Mom was always late paying them anyway. Still, we knew we couldn’t live this way forever, and every day, turning down the block on the way home from school, I looked up the driveway, hoping to see the brown Dart parked beside the bungalow.
One day after Mom had been gone almost two weeks, I went to Spinelli’s after school to stock up on chicken potpies. I thought I’d never get tired of chicken potpies, but I had to admit they were sort of wearing on me, particularly because we’d been eating them for breakfast, too. A couple of times, we bought beef potpies, but they were hardly ever on sale, and Liz said you needed a magnifying glass to see the meat.
Mr. Spinelli had a grill behind the counter where he made hamburgers and hot dogs, wrapping them in tinfoil and keeping them under the red warming light, which steamed the buns until they were nice and soggy. They sure smelled good, but they were beyond our budget. I loaded up on more chicken potpies.
“Haven’t seen your mom in a while, Miss Bean,” Mr. Spinelli said. “What’s she been up to?”
I froze up, then said, “She broke her leg.”
“That’s a shame,” he said. “Tell you what. Get yourself an icecream sandwich. On me.”
That night Liz and I were doing our homework at the Formica table when there was a knock at the door. Liz opened it, and Mr. Spinelli stood outside, holding a brown paper bag with a loaf of bread sticking out the top.
“This is for your mother,” he said. “I came to see how she’s doing.”
“She’s not here,” Liz said. “She’s in Los Angeles.”
“Bean said she broke her leg.”
Liz and Mr. Spinelli looked over at me, and I started glancing around, avoiding their eyes, acting, I knew, about as guilty as the hound dog who stole the hambone.
“She broke her leg in Los Angeles,” Liz said smoothly. She was always quick on her feet. “But it’s not serious. A friend’s bringing her back in a few days.”
“Good,” Mr. Spinelli said. “I’ll come see her then.” He held out the groceries to Liz. “Here, you take these.”
“What are we going to do now?” I asked Liz once Mr. Spinelli had left.
“I’m thinking,” Liz said.
“Is Mr. Spinelli going to send the bandersnatches after us?”
“He might.”
“Bandersnatches” was the word Liz took from Through the Looking Glass—her favorite book—for the do-gooding government busybodies who snooped around making sure that kids had the sort of families the busybodies thought they should have. Last year in Pasadena, a few months before we moved to Lost Lake, a bandersnatch had come poking around when the school principal got the idea that Mom was negligent in her parenting after I told a teacher our electricity got turned off because Mom forgot to pay the bill. Mom hit the ceiling. She said the principal was just another meddling do-gooder, and she warned us never to discuss our home life at school.
If the bandersnatches did come after us, Liz said, they might put the two of us in a foster home or juvenile delinquent center. They might separate us. They might throw Mom in jail for abandoning her kids. Mom hadn’t abandoned us, she just needed a little break. We could handle the situation fine if the bandersnatches would only leave us alone. It was their meddling that would create the problems.
“But I’ve been thinking,” Liz said. “If we have to, we can go to Virginia.”
Mom had come from a small town in Virginia called Byler, where her father had owned a cotton mill that made stuff like towels, socks, and underwear. Mom’s brother, our Uncle Tinsley, had sold the mill a few years ago, but he still lived in Byler with his wife, Martha, in a big old house called Mayfield. Mom had grown up in the house but had left twelve years ago, when she was twenty-three, driving off that night with me on the roof. She hadn’t had much to do with her family since she left, not returning even when her parents died, but we knew Uncle Tinsley still lived at Mayfield because from time to time Mom complained it was unfair that he’d inherited it just because he was older and a guy. It would be hers if anything ever happened to Uncle Tinsley, and she’d sell it in a heartbeat, because the place had nothing but bad memories for her.
Since I was only a few months old when we left, I didn’t remember either Mayfield or Mom’s family. Liz had some memories, and they weren’t bad at all. In fact, they were sort of magical. She remembered a white house on a hill surrounded by huge trees and bright flowers. She remembered Aunt Martha and Uncle Tinsley playing duets on a grand piano in a room with French doors that were opened to the sun. Uncle Tinsley was a tall, laughing man who held her hands while he swung her around and lifted her up to pick peaches from a tree.
“How are we going to get there?” I asked.
“We’ll take the bus.” Liz had called the depot to find out about the fares to Virginia. They weren’t cheap, she said, but we had enough money for two cross-country tickets. “If it comes to that,” she added.
The next day, when I turned down the block on my way home from school, I saw a squad car parked outside the bungalow. A policeman in a blue uniform was cupping his hands around his eyes and peering through the picture window. That Mr. Spinelli had ratted us out after all. Trying to think what Liz would do in the same situation, I slapped my head to show anyone who happened to be watching that I had forgotten something. “I left my homework in my desk!” I cried out for good measure, turned around, and headed back up the block.
I was waiting outside the high school when Liz came down the steps. “What are you so bug-eyed about?” she asked.
“Cops,” I whispered.
Liz pulled me away from the other students streaming past, and I told her about the policeman peering through the window.
“That’s it,” Liz said. “Beaner, we’re going to Virginia.”
Liz always carried our money under the lining in her shoe, so we went straight to the bus depot. Since the school year was almost over, Liz said, none of our teachers would miss us. After all, we’d shown up in the middle of the year. Also, it was high picking season for strawberries, apricots, and peaches, and the teachers were used to the way the migrant families were always coming and going at harvest time.
I stayed outside the depot, studying the silver sign of the running greyhound on the roof, while Liz bought the tickets. It was early June, the streets were quiet, and the sky was pure California blue. After a couple of minutes, Liz came back out. We’d been afraid that the clerk might raise questions about a kid buying tickets, but Liz said the woman had slid them across the counter without batting an eye. Some grown-ups, at least, knew how to mind their own business.
The bus left at six forty-five the following morning. “Shouldn’t we call Uncle Tinsley?” I asked.
“I think it’s better if we just show up,” Liz said. “That way, he can’t say no.”
That night, after finishing off
our chicken potpies, Liz and I got out the suitcases left from what Mom called her deb days. They were a matching set in a sort of tweedy tan with dark brown crocodile trim and straps, and brass hinges and locks. They were monogrammed with Mom’s initials: CAH, for Charlotte Anne Holladay.
“What should we take?” I asked.
“Clothes but no stuff,” Liz said.
“What about Fido?”
“Leave him here,” Liz said, “with extra food and water. He’ll be fine until Mom comes back.”
“What if Mom doesn’t come back?”
“She’ll be back. She’s not abandoning us.”
“And I don’t want to abandon Fido.”
What could Liz say to that? She sighed and shook her head. Fido was coming to Virginia.
Packing those deb-days suitcases got me to thinking about all the other times we’d picked up and moved on short notice. That was what Mom did whenever she got fed up with the way things were going. “We’re in a rut,” she’d announce, or “This town is full of losers,” or “The air has gone stale here,” or “We’ve hit a dead end.” Sometimes it was arguments with neighbors, sometimes it was boyfriends who took a powder. Sometimes the place we’d moved to didn’t meet her expectations, and sometimes she simply seemed to get bored with her own life. Whatever the case, she would announce that it was time for a fresh start.
Over the years, we’d moved to Venice Beach, Taos, San Jose, Tucson, plus these smaller places most folks had never heard of, like Bisbee and Lost Lake. Before moving to Pasadena, we’d moved to Seattle because Mom thought that living on a houseboat on the Sound would get her creative juices flowing. Once we got there, we discovered that houseboats were more expensive than you’d think, and we ended up in a moldy apartment with Mom constantly complaining about the rain. Three months later we were gone.
While Liz and I had been on our own plenty of times, we’d never taken a trip without Mom. That didn’t seem like such a big deal, but I kept wondering what to expect once we got to Virginia. Mom never had anything good to say about the place. She was always going on about the backward-thinking lintheads who drove cars with duct-taped fenders, and also about the mint-julep set who lived in the big old houses, selling off ancestor portraits to pay their taxes and feed their foxhounds, all the while reminiscing about the days when the coloreds knew their place. That was a long time ago, when Mom was growing up. Things had changed a lot since then, and I figured Byler must have, too.
The Silver Star Page 2