Dad charged after her, shouting at the closed door. “That’s the question I want you to answer, Mara! Do we count? Does your being happy have anything to do with us?”
Water exploded from the faucet and let him know she wasn’t listening to him. With his face red and veins sticking out on his neck, he seemed to sense me there behind him. Without turning, he said, “Why don’t you make yourself some lunch?”
I could hear him swallowing hard as he came over to the table and pushed the chairs under it. Then he swept the puzzle pieces into the box.
“But Dad,” I said, “we were almost able to see the whole picture.”
“The picture’s on the lid,” he said, closing the top and handing it to me.
He went to another part of the house, looking for something to scrub clean, while I sat outside the bathroom door with the box in my lap, thinking I should say something. Feel something. After she turned off the water, there was no sound of splashing, no sound that she was moving at all. I sat there long enough to know that the water had turned cold, knowing she wanted someone to comfort her, but I couldn’t do it this time.
34
Coin Trick
DURING THE DAYS AND nights of fighting, I didn’t seek out my mother. There were times I had to be in the same room with her, during painfully silent dinners or to retrieve a paper I needed for school, and if she made any move toward me I turned away. She seemed to accept this as her punishment.
I wandered our huge house the way I did on my first day here, desperately searching for everything I had lost. I wandered in and out of the rooms where I never played because they were cold and empty. I wandered up and down the stairs—close to and away from their battle.
I saw little of my brother, except for the evidence of where he’d been: a toilet seat left up, a carton of milk on the kitchen counter, and when I opened our front door to a blast of our neighbors’ power mowers and transistor radios, I found a bucket filled with river water on the porch.
Phil surprised me by catching the door behind me. He’d been right on my heels. “I found these in your room,” he said, holding out a handful of the silver dollars I’d stolen from him.
“What were you doing in my room?” That was as close to an apology as he was going to get—the fact that I didn’t deny taking them. I hopped off the porch onto a thick tuft of crab grass.
“Did you really think you could run away with her?” he asked, pocketing the coins. “On less than twenty dollars?”
“I don’t know.” I could feel my face scrunching up and I turned away from him. “I just wanted to be able to see her every day.”
“Well, you got your wish,” he said, walking out onto our lawn.
“Why would you care? Maybe you knew she was locked in that room the whole time and just kept it to yourself.”
The toe of his shoe pushed the backs of my knees, and when my legs buckled, instead of trying to catch my balance, I went ahead and collapsed in the tall grass.
“I didn’t know she was in that room,” he said. “At first, I thought she went to the hospital. But it didn’t add up because we never visited. Eventually, I just figured she left us.”
“I don’t understand why you never missed her.”
He sat down beside me, pulling up handfuls of grass. “When we left the old house in the station wagon with a U-Haul attached to it,” he said, “Mom kept threatening to open her door and jump out while we were on the highway. Dad couldn’t calm her down.”
There was his story again, the one he tried to tell over and over. I didn’t interrupt him this time, just curled on to my side.
“We stopped at a motel, and she wouldn’t get out of the car. She just stayed there right outside our room, staring out the window. I was afraid she was going crazy. But mostly I thought, I’m not enough. I’m not important enough to make her come inside.”
This was something we shared. This sense that whatever our mother felt that made her so sad was stronger than her love for us, was stronger than her desire to be there when we needed her.
“I kept waking up in the motel room and looking out the window at her,” my brother said as I stretched out on my back, clouds rolling over me. “She was still awake, but she hadn’t moved, so I finally went out to the car and waved my hand in front of her eyes. They were blank, like a doll’s. I wish I didn’t remember how she looked. I ran back to the motel room, but I’d forgotten the door would lock when it closed. I knew Dad would be really upset with me if I knocked on the door.”
He didn’t tell any more of the story than that, just pulled up more handfuls of grass until we noticed the total absence of noise. The lawn mowers, hoses, and radios had stopped all at once, leaving only the faint sound of bells.
“Um. There’s a black girl on our lawn,” Phil said, standing up.
I propped myself up on my elbows, and with the rest of the neighborhood, stared at Shirl, panting and holding her hands on her hips.
“You’re missing play practice,” she said. “Again. Mrs. Newkirk tried calling and no one answered, so she sent me to get you.”
I had vague memories of my brother nudging me down the hill toward the school, placing lunch money in my fist, but how often this happened, I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t even thought about the play.
“I didn’t hear the phone ring,” I said, brushing grass off my legs as I got to my feet.
“I thought maybe you were swimming in your pool,” she said. The bells jingled impatiently. “Come on, already. We have to go.”
“I can’t.”
I could see an expression settling in her eyes and in her mouth that I had seen from her mother and grandmother. She turned her head sharply toward Phil, who’d been trying to see where the sound of the bells was coming from, and asked him, “Do you have a problem?”
Something inside of me tensed up. We seemed to be fighting, and I wasn’t even sure who started it.
“Hey,” she said, still talking to Phil. “Aren’t you the one with the metal tooth?”
“My brother doesn’t have a metal tooth,” I said.
“I guess he has a look-alike, then.” She stuck her hip out to one side.
“You should probably go,” I said, taking off my sneaker and emptying a rock out of it. “I’m busy today. Sorry.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea to come here, anyway.”
She set off toward the school, not turning to wave good-bye, and I figured our friendship would go the same way it did with Hope. After a while, we’d be strangers.
I parked myself on the front steps, feeling the brief stab of her leaving. But after another moment, it didn’t hurt anymore. I found I could do this—could put my emotions in little boxes and close them up tight. I imagined there were rows of boxes, like the shelves at a shoe store. It was how I could be friends with Shirl and still laugh along to jokes that used the word I was never allowed to say. Everything ft inside of me at one time, in different spaces.
Phil balanced on the bottom step with just his toes. “She’s kind of bratty,” he said.
“I guess.”
Once Shirl had disappeared around the corner, the mowers and radios and hoses started again, but Phil continued to stare down the road with a smirk on his face. Then suddenly his shoulders hunched and he brought his hands over his nose. “It’s all the lawn mowing,” he said. And with a phony sneeze, a silver dollar fell from his hand.
I smiled but couldn’t hold it for long. We could both hear Momma crying again.
“Hey, I tried,” he said, picking up the coin and putting it in his pocket. “I’m going to take off. You want to come?”
“I’m going to stay,” I told him, opening the screen door.
“Suit yourself.” And in a little while I heard the wheels of the skateboard rumble down the road.
“Maybe I tried all the wrong things,” Dad said from behind the door, “but I tried my hardest.”
I opened the mail slot. The end was near. You could hear
it in their drained voices. And I wondered which single word would bring the fighting and their marriage to its finish.
I pressed my face closer. “You told me things would be better if I could just keep everyone from disturbing you and let you rest, but that was a terrible solution,” he said. “We needed you.”
“I didn’t know you wanted me back.”
“Of course. We all did. But sometimes, Mara, you’re barely here. I don’t understand why being with us takes so much out of you.”
Momma cried so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. “I wanted to be like those mothers who loved baking cookies,” she said, heaving. “Playing board games and sitting all day long at the playground. I’m so ashamed they got me as a mother. I stayed away because it was the best thing I could give them.”
She broke down sobbing again, and Dad said, “I don’t know what to do, Mara. I really don’t.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. When I closed my eyes, the image I couldn’t shake was the one of Momma slamming her hands over the locks. Something troubled me as I stood there, a question Hope had asked me long ago: “Who would lock your mom in the closet?” I knew the answer now. My father hadn’t locked her in. Momma had chosen that room and could have unlocked and opened the door whenever she wanted. She wasn’t held prisoner; she was hiding from us.
I had taken so many risks to be with her, and I’d let myself out of her room night after night and walked the black stairwell all alone. Now I understood why she had never walked up that same staircase to find me.
My face had been pressed to the mail slot—who knew for how long?—when I realized the fighting had stopped, and all that was left was an indention on my forehead and an eerie silence. I quietly opened the door and crept closer to the bedroom. With a sense of dread, I peeked inside and found my father holding her.
“I can’t be the only one trying. That’s not going to work anymore,” he said. “You have to want to be here.”
I didn’t know if this meant he would try harder, but only if she did, or if he was betting that this was more than she could give. One thing was sure. He wasn’t going to accept more of the same.
35
The Skipping Brick
LIFE WAS EASIER WHEN there were villains and heroes. My brain didn’t feel so squeezed. I’d grown too close to my mother to hate her, and yet she wasn’t the person I had defended. Not the prisoner who needed to be saved. To love her now—and I did—was to love someone who could hurt me, someone who could hear me searching for her and not tell me where she was hiding.
I had grown too distant from my father to thank him for trying so hard to keep Momma with us. Instead, all of this made me feel worn out. I walked around in a fog, feeling as if time had warped so that in one instant, a single minute might feel as long as a day, and in another instant, an entire day might disappear as fast as a minute.
I missed the final rehearsal for my play, simply forgot it, along with the costume I was meant to have ready. The painted yellow box was complete and stored at school, but I needed makeup, a yellow t-shirt, and yellow tights by seven that evening, when the cast was to meet at school. I told this to Dad around five, when I remembered. The muscles twitched in his jaw and he breathed in loudly through his nose, before he got his car key and drove to JC Penney.
Phil was out of the house, and that left me alone with Momma. Something hurt in my chest whenever I saw her now, a sensation of being crushed that might always be there.
“Why don’t I do your hair and makeup for the play?” she offered in a quiet voice.
I didn’t answer, but sat down on the couch while she pulled a crimping iron from one of the shopping bags in the closet and plugged it into an outlet. “It needs to heat up,” she said. “I’ll just put some rouge on your cheeks and maybe a little lipstick, okay?”
I shrugged.
“Is it okay?” she asked again.
“If you want to.”
She rubbed her fingers on my cheeks, and all the while I looked straight ahead. I tried not to move or even blink.
While the iron heated up, she combed through the tangles in my hair. My shoulders jerked to my ears with her touch. How long, I wondered, would she have been down there in the secret room if I hadn’t found her? How long would it have taken for her to miss me? She squeezed a handful of hair in the iron, and a shiver moved through me.
“Am I pulling?” she asked. “I hope I’m not pulling.”
“Not much.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
She kept working through small sections of hair at a time, as I sat stiff and silent. There were things I could not tell her. I could not tell her how it hurt. How I had needed her. I could not tell her that during those days I didn’t speak to her, as much as I didn’t want to, I missed her. I could not tell her that, even then, while I was still so mad, I was glad for her touch.
“Mirror?”
I shook my head.
Dad had searched in three stores for yellow tights and came back, furious, with white ones. Phil, at Dad’s insistence, lent me a yellow t-shirt, which Momma turned inside out to hide the picture of Mayor McCheese. She cut off the tag and said no one would notice. The shirt came down to my knees.
“Must have been a great audition for them to cast you as a yellow brick,” Phil said. He pulled the crust off a slice of Wonder bread and dropped the crust in the trash.
“Are you coming?” I asked him. I knew the answer, but wondered which excuse he’d use.
“I’m not going to go to school when I don’t have to,” he said, rolling the rest of the bread into a ball and putting it in his mouth.
“Can you hurry?” Dad pressed.
“But Dad, I’m ready.” And then I noticed he wasn’t speaking to me.
“This is important,” Momma said. “And I’m nervous. Don’t rush me.”
“You’re going?” I asked her.
“If she can get ready in time,” Dad said.
Momma’s lips trembled, and she kept her head toward her lap. “I’d like to be there for Tillie.”
She didn’t look at all ready to leave the house again. The trip to the mall, the fighting, had left her looking worn out.
“Well, you can’t go like this,” he said, then made a frustrated grunt and took the comb out of his pocket. She lowered her head, crying.
“I think we should go,” I said.
“Go on and get started, Tillie.” Dad shooed me with his hands. “You better head down to the school without us.”
In my costume, minus the box, I looked very much like someone who hadn’t finished getting dressed. It was muggy outside, and the stage makeup Momma had applied made me even hotter. I scraped my tennis shoes along the edge of the sidewalk on the way to school. Halfway there, I wished I’d thrown on a pair of jeans, but I kept going, my mind churning.
When I reached the school, my parents still not in sight, I sat outside the entrance of the auditorium, feeling stunned and lost. Was I the reason she went away? I squeezed myself to the side of the steps as families filed into the building, only now willing to consider all I’d learned.
I was the girl who talked too much, bounced too much, the kind who tired people. Whenever my mother believed she had a moment to herself, I was there, needing and pestering her. Maybe she only meant to do it once, to prepare the warm, bitter drink on a day that seemed to go on and on. She could use the trick all mothers knew to help quiet me down and bring the day to an end.
I couldn’t say there was anything cruel about that time. I looked forward to the drink as much as she did. I still liked bitter tastes: dark chocolate, swiss cheese, the bloodred wine Shirl snuck into Dixie cups that stained our teeth. I loved how falling asleep felt like spinning on a merry-go-round—my mother’s voice becoming a part of my dreams.
But now it was impossible to look back at that time and feel the same way about it. Instead of remembering her watching over me, I thought of her waiting
for me to settle down, hoping for the break she so desperately wanted. What I understood more than anything else was that Dad didn’t take her from us. All along, Momma was the one who wanted to flee. She walked down the stairs on her own, then closed and locked the door herself. It was being our mother that made her so tired, that made her unable to reach her dreams.
“THERE YOU ARE, TILLIE. Come inside. We need to find our places.”
I stood slowly, dazed because I hadn’t remembered that I was at school. And something inside—a force stuffed down for too long—stood, as well. I followed Mrs. Newkirk to a crowd of other girls with no speaking roles. Shirl was in the very back, and I headed her way until I remembered we were fighting.
“You’ll need to get into your costume,” the teacher said, pointing to the yellow cardboard box against the wall.
I passed the group of stars. The lead looked ridiculous in her short haircut with fake braids attached. I knew Shirl thought the same thing because she stared at Dorothy with a wicked grin on her face. And before you knew it, both of us were bent over, belly laughing.
Mrs. Newkirk marched right over to Shirl, held her by the chin, and told her to quiet down. She said nothing to me, just frowned a little and pointed again to my costume.
I stepped into the yellow box and put my arms through the holes in the sides. Then Mrs. Newkirk gently herded me across the backstage wing, where I was to wait until it was time to skip down the aisle, leading Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion, to see the Wizard.
Shirl waited with the other poppies in her green leotard and giant crêpe paper flower pinned to her head. She was the chubby one with the pointy starter breasts poking out. As she tried to straighten the flower, she caught my eye. I quickly turned away so she couldn’t turn away from me first. Then, to demonstrate just how unconcerned I was with her being mad at me, I peeked into the auditorium filling with parents and siblings. This was what I did best these days. I had become a performer: the little academic, the soldier’s soldier, the girl who never cried, the girl who could not even be hurt by losing her only friend.
Up from the Blue Page 24