by Cathy Lamb
She operates on her own accord. When she wants to snort, she does so. When she wants to take a nap, she does so. When she wants to roll in dirt or poop, she does so, and if the chickens squawk angrily and run away from her, their little white bottoms up in the air, she couldn’t care less.
Melissa Lynn is my kind of woman. I admire her greatly. Amazing what you can learn from pigs.
I don’t even mind cleaning out her trough as she seems so appreciative of my efforts. She stands right near me, snorting her encouragement, and has taught her piglets to do the same. She is a mother who demands good manners from her offspring, and so many mothers don’t these days.
Gathering the eggs can take a while. There are, after all, hundreds of chickens. Most of the chickens, as I’ve mentioned, are quite kind; others not so much. The other day, Aunt Lydia received by truck sixty new baby chicks. They are darling to watch and to hold. Their new homes are in the yellow shed. Plywood has been shaped into a number of different circles on the ground, and a circular light hangs straight over each one to keep them warm.
“I learned the hard way about chicks years and years ago,” Aunt Lydia told me one day, wielding her pitchfork at a hay bale. “Ya can’t put them into a rectangular holding pen or they’ll climb all over each other for warmth and smush the little ones beneath them. Then all you get is flattened chicks. Plus the light has to be hanging just so, in the middle of a circular pen. If you put the light in a corner, you’ll have the same problem. Smushed chickens.”
She dug the pitchfork into the ground, then grabbed the gun that she had strapped around her waist for an earlier bout of target practice. She cocked it, aimed, shot, and a snake flipped into the air from about fifty feet away. “I hate when snakes get near my ladies,” she said. “Anyhow, remember that chicks will pyramid, one right on top of another, Julia, so keep ’em in the right bins, and hang the light just so.”
Still reeling from the unexpected gunshot and flipping snake, I assured her I would. Far be it for me to cause the death of a chick.
I went back to my egg collecting, admiring Aunt Lydia’s target-shooting skills. I had not heard from Robert. However, I knew that my mother would shortly tire of her new boyfriend and move back to Boston. “My roots are in that town. Your great-great-great—some more greats—grandma was a maid who sailed over on the Mayflower. I’m practically damn royalty!” she’d declare, usually staggering about as she’d drunk enough liquor to drown her kidneys and liver.
Years ago I lived in hope that my mother would one day become sober enough, or have a lobotomy, or be attacked by killer bees and, lying flat on her deathbed, realize how hideous my childhood had been and would apologize for it.
It never happened. The last time she was in my life, she came to my apartment and demanded money. Her skin hung on her in drapes and droops, as if it no longer had the energy to stay close to her face. Her hair was blonder, almost white, like bleached straw.
She walked in without hugging me, without giving me a kiss, and I thought of all the other mothers and daughters I’d seen my whole life hugging and kissing each other. I cannot begin to tell you how much I longed for that. Such simple things: a hug and a kiss.
We chitchatted a bit about her current boyfriend, and she told me it looked like I still hadn’t lost any weight, that no man would be attracted to a lump, that I should think about that real quick because I wasn’t that young anymore.
I was on the verge of giving her money, my stomach cramping up as if she’d kickboxed me with those black knee-high boots she was wearing when I inhaled her familiar scent—vodka. Straight up.
The smell of vodka and bourbon and beer and cigarettes had swirled around my entire childhood, and it was the stench of that vodka that made me pause, that made me say what I did, misery wrapped around every one of my words like black glue. “Why didn’t you let me live with Aunt Lydia, Mom? Why did you keep me?”
She had been staring at my massive collection of recipe books but spun around on her heel and said, with this ugly look on her droopy-skinned face, “I didn’t give you to Lydia because I will never give your Aunt Lydia anything. Nothing. Even if it’s a nothing that cost me a damn fortune to raise.”
For some strange reason I became daring, for once, with my mother. Maybe it was because I hadn’t seen her in so long. Maybe it was because I knew I wouldn’t see her again for a long time. Maybe it was because I finally had the courage to ask the questions. “What do you mean, I cost you a fortune? I hardly ate, the church ladies gave me clothes—”
“Shut up, Julia. You have always been rude and ungrateful. Always. Even as a young child. Now, for once, I’m in need. Give me the money.”
I whipped my purse behind my back, like a little kid would. “No.”
“What the hell do you mean, no? You can pay me back for all those hellish years when I had to put up with you, the way you flounced around my boyfriends—”
The way I flounced around her boyfriends? Pain flashed through my body as if I’d been struck with a pickax in the heart.
“No, no, no!” My “no”s got louder and louder until I sounded like a shrieking hyena. “No!” I covered my ears with my hands like I used to do as a child. “I never came on to your gross boyfriends. Never. You allowed them, Mother, you allowed them to touch me. You knew what they did to me at night, but you didn’t stop them!” I took my hands off my ears as one sad, hellacious image after another paraded through my head. “You didn’t stop them!” I screamed.
“Give me a goddamn break. I had no idea, Julia. How could I know?” She crossed her arms across her chest, her black bra visible beneath the deep V of her black shirt.
“You did. You’re lying. Lying!” My voice went up another notch, and I could feel hysteria speedily edging me toward a total breakdown. “And your lying makes it worse for me. My own mother won’t even acknowledge that she let her boyfriends attack her daughter.”
“No one attacked you,” she snapped, then sighed, long and heavy. This conversation was so tiring for her. So dull. So nothing. “You flirted with them. You, with your young body and your huge boobs. They’re men, Julia. What did you expect them to do?”
“Oh, God,” I said, bending to hold my head in my hands as my head felt like it might very well implode. “I was a child, Mom. A child. And even now you won’t admit what happened. You ruined my childhood. You turned it into a sick, twisted, scary nightmare. You, your viciousness, your abuse, your drinking, your men who were all over me—you ruined it. You ruined me. You ruined what I could have had with Aunt Lydia.” I turned away from her and leaned against the wall before my knees gave out. “Get out. Get the fuck out.”
Now that ticked her off. She dropped her hands to her sides and swayed a bit, the vodka affecting her balance. “Don’t you ever use the word ‘fuck’ with me, you impossible—”
“Fuck,” I said, tears making their way down my face like two little rivers. “Fuck you. Now get out.”
Her hand struck from out of nowhere, my head thudding against the wall. When the white stars went away, I straightened, still fighting. “How could you do that to a child? How could you do that to me?”
“I didn’t do anything to you.” She put her face an inch from mine. “You did it to yourself.”
“I did it to myself? I hit myself? I starved myself? Really, Mother?” The total breakdown loomed before my eyes.
“Yes. You got yourself into trouble. Always going to the neighbors for help, to your teachers for help, and then the stupid busy-bodies would call the police and Children’s Services, and I would have to explain to them all what a liar you were.”
“A liar? Me?” I choked past the lump of hurt in my throat.
“Yes, you.” She pointed her finger at me.
“I didn’t go to people for help. They came to me. They saw how thin I was as a child, saw the holes in my shoes, saw that my hair was a wreck and I was dirty—”
“How dare you judge me? I worked hard to support you—”
>
“Stop!” I yelled. “Oh God, stop. Stop! You never should have had me, never should have kept me. You had no right to keep me! None.”
When she raised her hand toward me again, I raised mine and blocked the next slap. And the next. My purse dropped to the ground in back of me, coins scattering about.
When my mother realized I wasn’t going to cower in a corner with my hands clamped over my head like usual she slammed out of my house—but not before she ripped a framed picture off my wall, a photo of an open box of chocolates, and shot it in my direction.
After she left I scrambled around and picked up every single coin, then lay on the floor until the crying stopped. When I could see through my tears, I went straight for a recipe book and made a chocolate mousse pie, my hands shaking as I crushed cookies for the pie shell, whipped the eggs, melted the chocolate.
When my mother landed back in Boston and got a new telephone number, Robert would call her. As I didn’t know her boyfriend’s last name or even exactly what town in Minnesota they were in, or if they were really even in Minnesota, I couldn’t reach her first and ask her to keep quiet. She couldn’t afford a cell phone, so that was another dead end.
But even if I told my mother not to tell Robert about Aunt Lydia, it wouldn’t do any good. He’d pay my mother a visit, he’d smile and try to charm her, and of course that wouldn’t work. In terms of manipulation, my mother was a master. Even better than Robert.
But money would work wonders, and Robert tossed around money as if every dollar he spent guaranteed him another hard-on. My guess is that my mother would get about five thousand dollars from him. And then she’d tell him everything he needed to know, including the fact that he needed to look for giant pigs in front of Aunt Lydia’s house.
And that would be all that Robert would need. He and my mother would exchange vile words, and off he’d go…his private jet waiting to fly him here to Oregon to terrorize me.
I felt my hands go cold and tingly, my body freezing as the Dread Disease took hold and a feeling of panic set in. I pictured my blood leaping through my veins as the air constricted in my lungs, the lack of oxygen making me dizzy. I dropped the basket of eggs I held and leaned against a hay bale. I was glad Aunt Lydia wasn’t in the chicken house anymore.
Sweat laced my forehead, then dripped down the edge of my nose. My legs started to shake wildly, so I started shaking them myself, having found that that sometimes helps. I felt myself crest, the air now all gone, and I thought I was going to die. Again. I coughed, coughed again.
For what seemed like hours, I leaned against that hay bale, hoping to breathe, panicked that I wasn’t.
I suddenly felt warm, hard arms surround my waist, and I screamed. One part of me was shocked that I could scream when I could barely breathe, the other was terrorized, believing that Robert had found me.
But it wasn’t Robert’s cold, hypercritical eyes I was staring into. It was Stash’s warm, concerned ones. He wrapped his arms round my waist as he supported my now sagging body. I heard his gruff voice yelling at Aunt Lydia as he swung me up into his arms and carried me toward the house.
I was too exhausted to protest, too shaken by my Dread Disease to object when Stash carried me into the bedroom and onto my bed. Before I closed my eyes I noticed that Aunt Lydia’s face was pale white. “Oh my God, what happened, Stash? What happened, baby?”
I assured her I was fine. I had simply gotten a little dizzy, hadn’t been sleeping very well lately, was a tad bit stressed, forgot to have breakfast. Yes, of course everything was okay. All was well. All was right.
But I knew things weren’t right. Not right at all.
The paper route didn’t pay much, so I talked my way into a job at a library two towns away, in Monroe, for four hours a day in the afternoon. I was going to run a Story Hour for small children, help shelve books, and help at the checkout counter. I was interviewed by five local members of the board who oversaw the library.
They asked me a lot of questions about whether or not I was good at working with difficult people, was I patient with children, was I good at working with difficult people, did I like to read stories to children, was I good at working with difficult people, and, by the way, was I good at working with difficult people?
I saw the writing on the wall regarding this particular job, but I was desperate, so I gave the right answers: Yes, I’m good at working with difficult people; yes, patient with children; yes, yes, I like reading stories to children; yes, and yes again. Working with difficult people? No problem.
I was hired.
On my first day of work at the Monroe City Library I was told by the assistant librarian, Roxy Bell, that the gal before me had quit because she hated the woman I would be working for. So had the woman before her, and the woman before her, and that particular woman apparently had three kids and no husband. “She told me she thought she was going to kill Ms. Cutter with the hatchet her ex-husband had left behind, and she couldn’t see going to jail when her kids were so young,” Roxy Bell told me, her white hair curling around the sweetest face I have ever seen. “I stay because when Ms. Cutter comes around, I just turn down my hearing aid and nod pleasantly at whatever she says to me, when she deigns to speak to me at all, which isn’t often, and I watch her mouth open and shut and I keep nodding, and if she reports me to the board I don’t care because my aunt and my sister’s best friend are on the board, and I know I’ll have a job here till the day I croak over the encyclopedias, but you need to watch out for her, dear, she’s like a viper, and she doesn’t like children, and she likes to keep it dark in here.”
Roxy Bell obviously did not like periods in her sentences.
I looked around the Monroe City Library. It was a small building, in the center of the town, and had about as much warmth as a morgue. Rows of books ran the length of the library, with tables in between. Beige, dying curtains were down over all the closed windows, and the lights were dimmed. The walls were dingy white. Stuffy air filled the room like wet dust. The children’s area was tiny. There were no beanbags or fun posters or paintings that might amuse children. It was simply a corner of the library—a dark corner, I might add.
Ms. Cutter and I did not get off to a good start my first day. “You’re two minutes late,” she said to me as I walked into the library.
Immediately, I felt like a little girl. A fat, clumsy, awkward, tardy little girl. Who was late. Two minutes so. I started babbling. “I’m very sorry, Ms. Cutter, I couldn’t find a parking space, and I know you want us to park away from the library so the patrons can have those spaces, and I ended up parking at the far end of the road, then took a wrong turn walking here, and I’m very sorry…” Looked like I had lost my periods, too.
“Stop.” Ms. Cutter stood to her full height of six foot one inches tall. Six foot three inches in her heels. She held up one hand about a foot from my face. She had short, butch hair, a long nose, and the coldest eyes I have ever seen.
“Please, Ms. Bennett, I have no time for excuses. I’m quite busy. Your job will be to shelve books, as we discussed. When we’re busy, you can run the checkout counter with me. Make sure you are as quiet as possible. Your shoes look like they will be too noisy. Wear rubber soles. Do not wear clothes that make noise. No low-cut shirts or tight pants allowed. Do not let your boyfriends come and visit you here at the library. Leave your personal problems at home, I am not your mother or your counselor. Do not—Is something funny, Ms. Bennett?”
Oh yes. It was. When Ms. Cutter helpfully reminded me that she wasn’t my mother I instantly pictured Ms. Cutter in one of my mother’s more sleazy red outfits that shoved her boobs up nearly to her chin and exposed most of her thighs.
Now, that picture in my head was funny.
“No, there’s nothing funny. Not funny at all.”
“Good.” She crossed her gangly arms and stared down her long beak at me. I was transported to childhood. “Get to work, then.”
Ms. Cutter had told me in the intervie
w that she did not believe that children should spend long amounts of time in a library, so she didn’t think the space should be overly large. “Children are loud and messy in this town. Totally disrespectful.”
Roxy Bell told me Ms. Cutter had initially run the Story Hour and scared away all of the children by reading the classics to them, which bored them silly.
There were not many children at Story Hour.
In fact, the first day I was there, there was only one child, a boy named Shawn Coleman. Shawn told me he was there because his sister was sick and he needed a book to read to her.
No, his mother wasn’t home. She hadn’t been home for a couple of days, he told me.
Unwashed blond hair stuck out around his pale face, his clothes too small on a frail frame. Bare toes peeped out of his shoes, and a battered backpack hung from his shoulders. A muttered “hello” is about all I got out of him. I smiled. He did not smile back. I held out my hand to take him to the children’s area. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. I asked him if he liked books. “Carrie Lynn does,” he said.
So I helped Shawn pick out a few books, then I offered to read to him. He hesitated at first because his sister was sick and he wanted to get back to her. “But she went to sleep right before I left, so we could read a few.” He looked up at me, his eyes a murky green. “If you want to. If you don’t have anything else to do.”
I assured him I had nothing else to do. And, besides, this was Story Hour, wasn’t it? So, Shawn and I read books. He was nine years old and could hardly read, so I read book after book to him. At the end I helped him to read a book. I chose a very easy one to help him gain some self-confidence, but he struggled through it. I was saddened by how poorly he read.
After exactly an hour had passed, Ms. Cutter returned, her back ramrod-straight. I wondered how it would feel to have a pole shoved up your rear all day long. “Story Time is now over, Shawn. Run along.” Her glare was cold enough to freeze every hair in my nostrils, and Shawn’s face got a pinched, worried look to it, just like the one he’d had when he walked in. “Go on home now, Shawn. Ms. Bennett is very busy. Julia, I’ll expect those books to be properly shelved, and then you may start on the stack near my desk.”