But even after our mother explained the shawl’s significance, Eileen believed my gift was better. She told me so later that night. My blanket looked more Indian than her shawl; it told a better story on its own than either of us could tell.
* * *
—
I DROVE MY mother and my sister back to Littlestown, where my mother planned to stay with my sister for a few days. That night, we took our mother to the strip club where Eileen worked. She paraded us around the club and told the bartender to add our drinks to her tab. Then she led us past the main stage, dimly lit and Kelly green, to a circular booth along the far wall. Three men sat around the table, but it was hard to make out their faces in the dark.
“This is my mom and my sister,” Eileen yelled over the music.
“Can we buy dances from them, too?” one of the men asked.
“Don’t be gross,” she laughed.
Another looked at me and grinned. “I see who got the ass in the family.”
“And the belly to go with it,” I said.
“We could work that off, babe,” he said, shifting his hips under the table.
My mother playfully slapped his arm and cackled. “Ooh, you’re bad!”
Eileen ferried us to an empty table. She was working that night, and my mother and I were left on our own. I finished my first drink, and then another, and another. I lost track of how many my mother put on our tab. When Eileen found us grinding against each other to the music, she grabbed my arm and pulled me against a wall.
“You guys need to stop,” she warned me.
“Why?” I laughed. “We’re just having fun.”
“You’re embarrassing me,” she said.
My mind flashed back to the last time I had visited Eileen at work—a few weeks earlier, with a couple of new friends from college. At the end of the night, the DJ invited amateurs onstage for the last song, and I climbed up to dance. We weren’t allowed to remove our clothing, but I peeled my leopard-print socks off my feet and flung them into the air. My sister recovered one from under a table, but not the other. The next morning, hungover, I clawed my way to the bathroom, and when I pulled down my pants, crumpled bills fell onto the floor. I landed heavily on the seat and collected them with wondering fingers: four single dollar bills. I couldn’t remember what had happened the night before.
“Why do I have money in my pants?” I laughed as I walked back into my sister’s living room.
“You don’t remember?” she asked.
Eileen’s hand was now tight around my arm, and her eyes were sober. Serious. Her eyes were my eyes, reflected back at me.
“Fine,” I mumbled. “We’ll leave.”
At the bar, I found my mother sitting in a man’s lap. She begged me to let her stay; he offered to take her home. But I grabbed her by the arm and cajoled her out the door.
* * *
—
A DAY AFTER I left, my sister’s boyfriend punched through one of the small glass panes on her front door to break into her apartment. My grandmother dropped my father off to fix the broken glass. My sister called to tell me our parents had sex. Her voice loud, incredulous.
I laughed. “Of course they did.”
“They can’t get back together!” my sister yelled.
I promised her they wouldn’t. But our parents were both drunk at one in the afternoon and she couldn’t handle them by herself, so I agreed to drive back down.
As soon as I walked in, Eileen pulled me into her bathroom and shut the door. She sat on the edge of the tub and clutched a bottle of beer. “They’re out there talking crazy,” she said, “about how there’s no God, but everything is connected.”
There was a hole in her bathroom floor, near one of the feet of her old clawfoot tub. I stared through it at the yellowed tile in her downstairs neighbor’s kitchen and made a noise like mm or yeah.
“That’s what I think, too,” she said, “and I don’t know if what they’re saying is true, or if they’re just crazy, and I’m crazy for thinking the same things.”
“We’re all crazy,” I said. I meant to sound reassuring. I opened the door and led her back into the living room to our parents. Our mother teetered on our father’s leg with one arm wrapped around his neck.
“Your dad’s not the man he used to be,” she cackled, gleeful. “He got fat, and he couldn’t even keep it up!”
My father looked at my mother like a love-dumb dog.
“That’s gross,” Eileen complained. “Don’t talk about that.”
I sat in my sister’s computer chair in the corner of the room and listened to my father’s professions of love; my mother’s laughter; my sister’s groans. I was surprised Eileen hadn’t seen this coming. When she described stripping to me, she made it sound like providing therapy with a different wardrobe: She spent hours listening to men lament their marriages, their career failures, their loneliness. But Eileen couldn’t see our father from the same distance.
After he finally passed out, I offered to take my mother back to school with me so we could separate them for a while.
In the car, my mother asked me if I was a lesbian.
I laughed. “What makes you think that?”
She looked out the window and smiled. “Nothing. Just something your grandma said.”
“I’ve fooled around with a couple of girls,” I admitted. “But I think women want more than I can give.”
My mother laughed. “Yes! They’re so needy!” She told me she had dated a woman, a trucker, a couple of years back.
The farms and the fields and the woods rolled past.
“When your grandma dies, someone’s going to have to take-care of your dad,” my mother finally said.
I stayed quiet. I knew she was right. Or rather, I was raised to believe that was true. I always assumed that person would be me.
“I’ll do it,” she said, surprising me. “You just send him to me, and I’ll take care of him.”
Neither of us knew then, or could possibly believe, that she would be the first to go.
* * *
—
IN HER DIARIES, my mother writes very little about that visit. She ticks off the places the bus stops: Orlando, Savannah, and Washington, D.C. She stays “At Eileen House.” She attends church with my grandmother. She fills her diary with vague pronouns. “It bother me. Stay up half the nite.” My father bothered her? My grandmother? Something my sister or I did? I can never know.
“Mom’s proud!” She writes the day I graduate.
“What a sad day,” the day before she leaves. Sunday. Mother’s Day. “We waited for Mike to come home so we have a family dinner but he never show up. Upset grandma & Eileen and me.” She leaves me out of the upset; I don’t remember this final meal, and it is possible I wasn’t there.
When she returns home, she gets trashed with a man named Glen. She plays bingo at Sneakers and goes to karaoke. She hooks up with and runs away from a man named Vinnie, “becuz of booze.” Her grandmother dies. She gets into a fight with a woman over Glen and Vinnie, and the woman calls my mother a hooker, but, she writes, “I just didn’t listen & went to bed.” She moves back in with Dale.
* * *
—
THAT SUMMER AFTER graduation, I volunteered for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. I received volunteer housing at a bed-and-breakfast a few blocks away from my grandmother’s new apartment in Red Lion, in a subsidized senior living community at the old Opera House. My father helped me move out of my college apartment. I tried to sort through and discard what I could, but he just shoveled everything into giant trash bags to be stored in my grandmother’s closet. I kept what I needed—some clothes, my music, some jewelry—in the back seat of my car.
I worked ten- and twelve- and fourteen-hour days for the campaign. We spent four hours every evening phone bank
ing, and during the day we drove around the city to register voters and canvass neighborhoods. I walked the cracked sidewalks of downtown York and the baking parking lots of shopping malls. I walked the fairgrounds in the rain. I walked the hilly routes of my childhood neighborhood and the empty streets of Etters, where the clean white stacks of the nuclear power plant across the river eerily loomed over the town. At noon the siren in the main square howled, loud and louder, filling the whole blue sky with sound. I walked a neighborhood in the city on the Fourth of July. I was surrounded by people standing on the sidewalks, on the lawns, on their porches, cheering, proud. I could feel the heat from the city’s fireworks on my face. My skin turned as dark as my mother’s.
That summer, my sister found out she was pregnant. I tried to convince her to terminate the pregnancy if she couldn’t get clean. But she fell in love with the baby that wasn’t yet a baby. We fell in love. Between canvassing, I started giving my sister rides to and from doctor appointments. On Sundays, when the rest of the organizers in the office took the morning off, I woke up at five A.M. to drive my father to the flea market where he rented a little gray shed to upsell the junk he found at yard sales. I brought stacks of voter registration forms to hand out. I got into weekly debates with another vendor, a man who rented a shed a few lots down from my father’s. He had a Confederate flag tattooed on his arm.
No one in central Pennsylvania knew how to talk about Obama.
Every night, I cried tired tears over the phone numbers I was supposed to call. One night, a man threatened to lynch Obama if he became president. Another night, a mother of a school friend warned me to never call her about that Muslim again. Another night, a woman claimed Obama killed babies, and I broke down on the phone. I told her about how my sister was pregnant and a heroin addict; how if my sister couldn’t take care of that baby, no one could. “I love that baby already,” I told her, “but that isn’t enough.” I stunned the woman into silence, but it was impossible to know what effect my words had. When I hung up the phone, I noticed my friend staring at me. “Damn” was all she said.
Every night, I drank while entering data and listening to the daily conference call.
At the end of the summer, I was offered a paid position with the campaign. My boss, who knew about my family’s issues, asked me if I needed to transfer to a different office, to get away from them, but I told him that wasn’t necessary; I could focus on work.
A few days later, I slipped away from the campaign and drove south on the highway until I found a hotel with a steakhouse and a pool. I floated in the water for an hour, then ordered a steak and a baked potato for dinner. I called an ex-boyfriend and asked him to meet me there for a quick hookup, and after, asked him to leave again. The next morning, bundled in the crisp white sheets, I ate the cold leftovers with my hands.
Back on the campaign, I started falling asleep on the drive to my volunteer housing at night, and then I started falling asleep on the drive to work in the mornings. I didn’t know how to balance my energy or my time.
One night after work, Nathan drove down to catch a few drinks with me at a bar. He told me he had been accepted into a graduate program in Boston, but the cost of living was high, and he needed a roommate. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to go. He asked me if I might be interested in moving with him. I admitted I didn’t have a plan for what I would be doing after the election—I hadn’t even started looking for the next job—but I had a difficult time imagining the next few years in Pennsylvania. I told him yes.
On Election Day, I spent hours hiding under my desk until one of the other volunteers found me. A man was looking for me, she said. The vendor from the flea market and his wife had turned up at the office; they had decided to vote for Obama, but they weren’t sure if they were registered to vote, or where to go. I looked up their precinct and printed directions to their polling location.
I found out neither my father nor my sister had registered or planned to vote.
After the election, I spent a few short weeks at my grandmother’s. At first I slept on her couch. If I slept too late, she ran the vacuum in the living room, clattered the dishes in the sink, and complained loudly to herself that she was alone, lonely, that everyone hated her. I set up my computer on her kitchen table and played the new World of Warcraft expansion later and later into the night, until I was heading to bed as she was waking up, and then I started sleeping in her bedroom after she got out of bed each morning.
Nathan and I took one quick trip to Boston in November to look at apartments. We stayed with his cousin, who lived in South Boston, and scouted listings close to the university. We signed a lease for an apartment in Allston, a popular student neighborhood.
Before we left, his cousin offered to take us out to lunch at a nearby diner he loved.
While we were waiting for the train, Nathan and his cousin carried on a conversation—about school, or work, or family, I didn’t hear. The city was bigger and louder than I imagined; the people close and in constant motion. I stared at the far wall of the subway and retreated into my own thoughts.
“Helloooo,” his cousin laughed, waving his hand in front of my eyes.
I blinked my staring eyes and closed my open mouth.
Nathan touched the back of my head and said warmly, “She’s a space cadet.”
After the New Year, we rented a Budget truck. I packed a few suitcases of clothes and blankets, and a few boxes of books and notebooks from school. I packed a shoebox of photographs, and another box of photo albums. I packed a file box of my records and letters, and a small firesafe of my most important documents, like my Certificate of Indian Birth. I packed a box of my childhood toys and another of VHS tapes, which my sister and I had divided in half. My grandmother didn’t have enough space to store my things. I had no childhood home to return to. So I brought everything I valued with me.
* Bible study notebook. March 23, 2008. “I called Eileen to wish her Happy Easter and about money but she doesn’t have any so I just told her not to worry about it and I talk to Dani and she said she send me some. I just said not to tell Grandma so she won’t worry.”
[Pretty Little Thing]
DALE, MY MOTHER’S on-again, off-again lover, calls me often after she dies. He cries so long and so deeply that I imagine his mustache dewy and glistening with tears. He misses my mother. He asks me to send him photographs of her and of them together. He tells me that I am his daughter now.
Each time he calls, I ask him if he has heard anything from my mother’s family. If he has found the address book with their phone numbers or mailing addresses. Each time he tells me he will keep looking.
I want to stop answering his phone calls. I am tired of pretending to listen to him. But in many ways, he feels like the only tether between my mother, her family, and me.
* * *
—
DALE CALLS TO tell me the woman who raised my sister Alex has asked for my name. She wants to add me on Facebook. I am ecstatic; I tell him to give it to her.
She sends me a friend request a few days later, and I give her my phone number and tell her I had been hoping to meet my sister ever since she was born. She declines a phone call and says she has only one thing to tell me: My mother didn’t want Alex to know about us until she turned eighteen years old. She is only sixteen. “She only know me as her mom,” she says.
I tell her I understand, though I don’t. Alex grew up knowing the name of her father, but not her mother. She grew up inside a lie.
I find Alex’s profile through her mother’s Facebook page and send her a friend request. She accepts. I stalk all her social media profiles, finding both her Instagram account and her Tumblr page.
I share the photographs I find with Eileen.
“She has your eyes, your cheeks, your chin,” Eileen says.
“I know.”
“She has my crooked bottom te
eth.”
Almost immediately, Alex blocks me from her Facebook page. Her mother warns me not to contact my sister again, but I worry. From the things she posts on Tumblr, she seems alone; she seems depressed. She reminds me of myself at her age. I tell her mother that I believe I could be a good sister to her, that I could help her with the things she is going through.
“You don’t know her,” her mother says, “and she doesn’t know you yet. And if you going to think like that then I really don’t need that in my life. She is very love by everyone.”
I stop messaging her mother. There is no arguing or persuading or communicating with a person like her.
* * *
—
THE LAST TIME I talked to my mother, it was November; the sky, cold; the trees, bare. She was crying. She struggled to tell me that she found Ron, her ex-husband and sometimes-boyfriend, dead; he had hung himself from the back of their bedroom door.*1
I stared at the sidewalk, dotted with dirt-encrusted gum. In one moment, I considered asking my mother to come stay with me in Boston, and in the next, anger chased the thought away. My mother only ever called me when she felt guilty about the distance between us—only ever called me when she needed reassurance, forgiveness. I told her I was sorry, an apology as hollow as her love felt to me.
“It’s okay, baby,” she said, her voice suddenly dry. “Mommy’s friends are taking good care of me.”
“That’s good,” I said.
She told me she was back with Dale. He was grilling in their backyard. She told me they had a garden, and they were trying to grow tomatoes and corn and beans. I responded in single syllables. She told me she loved me, then hung up.
* * *
—
MY FIRST NIGHT at the hospital with my mother, Dale hitched a ride there. Even though he and my mother had dated intermittently for over a decade, I had only met him once before—when he and my mother took a road trip to Pennsylvania together when I was in the eighth grade. Still, I recognized him the moment he crept into my mother’s room: his hunched shoulders, his thick mustache, and his graying mullet, squashed beneath a baseball cap.
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