“You’ll scare the birds away,” she’d say, and make her descent to the milky pond below.
44
He was a proud man, her father.
Maybe too proud, though she’d never say such a thing. After years in the wilds of northern Maine, he found himself a wife and headed west, to New Hampshire. She was fierce and young, a dark-haired girl whose beauty was more chiseled than soft, whose people were said to be Mohawk. She married the thick-fingered man to escape an arthritic mother, a stranger of a stepfather, and a choking brood of brothers and sisters. She traded them in for just one man. It must have been an easy exchange.
She cooked and cleaned, canned and sewed, gave him two sons and a daughter. He cut down trees and she cooked pies, and the world remained that way for nearly two decades. Until he fell sick. He worked until he couldn’t, refused to see a doctor, refused to allow his wife to take a job, refused to let the family accept the boxes of food and pile of army blankets offered them by kind-hearted neighbors.
His young daughter spent those nights shivering in bed, listening as her father, hero and saint, moaned in pain from the room next door. That was the way things were. Frozen. No one shutting an eye, barely a whisper between them.
Until his young wife had had enough. She defied her husband, found a job cleaning rooms at an inn, put food on the table. And though his pride was damaged at having a woman support him, things seemed for a time as though they might be improving.
The real trouble came when my mother’s mother learned to drive. She was good at it. She loved the feel of the wheel in her hands, and once she’d grabbed hold of it—this young wife and mother who had not been softened by children, who had no outlet for her energies other than cooking and sewing, whose longing must have felt like bits of wool flowering under the skin—once she was able to drive, she bought a car, and spent more time in its hold than anywhere else. Freedom. A new taste in her mouth, hot and persuasive. The click of the key in the ignition, the rush of air tumbling through rolled-down windows, the spray of dirt under the tires, the hushed voice of Johnny Mathis singing directly into her ear—this was everything. The air loosened around her. And for the first time in her life, my grandmother began to breathe.
45
“Who could really blame her?” my mother would ask of her mother when she came to that part of the story, her voice betraying the answer.
“She was young and pretty and didn’t like being cooped up in a kitchen.” Her words must have felt something like charity, and I wondered at how hard things must have been for my mother as a girl.
And then there was the ending, the sad truth of the matter, the part of the story most often set aside in the telling: My grandmother left her husband, proud as a rock, sick and dying, alone in a bed near the foot of the White Mountains. She packed up her clothes and her children, pushed them into the car, and never looked back.
“That’s the last time I ever saw my father,” my mother would say, then clam right up. I imagined her longing for another hour with him, could see the way she wished her mother had driven away without her. Her father, the mountain, that place—all were lost to her. And because my mother did not grieve, they became her fairytales, the stories she returned to over and over, the paths she most often walked upon.
They traveled. Her mother and her siblings. A few streets away. A few towns away. A few states away. Finally landing at the family’s farm near Lake Champlain in New York State. The visit was a good one, people talked and ate and laughed. Big stories were told, bigger plans were made. But the freedom so recently found was honey on my grandmother’s tongue, and even as she wiped tears of laughter from her eyes, she kept those car keys in hand. In the end, the temptation of all those roads leading west would not let her be.
“I’ll be back in no time,” said my mother’s once-contained, now wild-eyed momma, keys jangling between thumb and forefinger. “Wait here, I’ll be back in a week,” said the woman, who might have had the best intentions, but would not return for over a year.
After a few weeks of cousins gossiping about where she’d gone to, my grandmother’s children were scared and shamed. When they realized she wasn’t coming back, the two boys took off and somehow made their way east, back over two state lines. Only my mother did as she was told and waited, withstanding the bewildered looks and muttering of cousins. She worked at the family farm and restaurant to earn her keep, rising early each morning to milk cows and set tables before heading off to high school.
46
We’d sometimes set out on our own, walk the trails, tiptoe over rackety bridges, looking for tadpoles in shallow pools. Other times we followed our mother, listening as she told her stories and pointed out wildflowers. Mayapple. Queen Anne’s lace. Trout lily. We watched her watching the sky, delighted in her delight when a heron set off—the majesty of its slender body, still as a reed, stretching itself into flight. She kept her eyes on the gray-blue bird as it made its way up and over our heads, followed the gigantic flap, swish, and glide. Once the heron had passed overhead and landed in some far-off tree, she’d look at us, her face pink with joy.
“There,” she’d say, “did you see that?” a bit of the sky in her voice.
As though it were magic. As though a heron in flight didn’t happen every time we came. Of course we saw it—and of course we loved it—but we were knots of children, cruel in our love for her, and this bit of kindness we could not give, asking instead, yet again, when we could leave.
“Not yet,” she would say, and then look into our faces, taking pains to remind herself that she was the mother, trying to sound the part, though the look of the child inevitably slipped through the eyes, and there was a plea there, too.
“Not yet,” she’d whisper. “Let’s find just one more.”
47
I sat on the bed and stared at the side-by-side boxes of Cheerios and powdered milk perched atop a pressed-wood dresser. The two boxes were the same size and dimensions, and while I loathed the taste of dried milk mixed with lukewarm water, those boxes still managed to seem like treats.
We were in a motel just off the New York State Thruway. Our room was one of eight that sat in a strip along the parking lot. Dented aluminum chairs painted aqua and white were scattered on the narrow walkway between rooms and cars. We’d be living there until my mother found us a permanent place.
She worked and we went to school, and afterward, we crammed into the room, where I watched TV or closed my eyes and tried to be alone with my thoughts.
I replayed the clips of our most recent departure in my head, pictured my mother flinging her black storage trunk and its contents into a field on the day we left, remembered how no one dared approach her as she tossed years of photographs, legal papers, and our much prized cookie jar into tall grass and weeds. I recalled how we watched and waited by the doors of the green car that whisked us off the reservation and to the motel.
Once I’d spun those memories around my head until they made me dizzy from too much handling, I moved on to other matters.
Like where we were headed next.
I tried to imagine living here long-term, tried to picture what life might be like in this room, everyone fighting over who’d get the bed, who’d get the fold-out chair, who would simply be left the floor.
I thought about the pile of white towels brought to our room each day and where they came from and how many towels the owners could have and what a miracle their constant replenishment seemed.
I thought about how warm water felt on my skin, and how pretty the sight of suds winding their way down a drain could be.
But here’s what I thought of most.
This was my secret:
I could control the wind.
Like Isis, the TV goddess, who carried a crow on her shoulder, wore a white silk tunic, and could conjure the wind when the mood struck.
I loved Isis.
I couldn’t get over how she started out like everyone else, just a regular girl who becam
e a goddess by holding on to an amulet and calling out to the wind.
And how she flew! She lifted off the ground with the force of her will and a simple incantation: “Zephyr winds which blow on high, lift me now so I may fly.”
Just an everyday girl till she pushed herself up and floated among the clouds.
I closed my eyes and imagined a silky tunic falling over my body, a crow cawing from my shoulder. I pushed my arms behind my back, thrust my body forward, called out to the wind and opened my eyes to find leaves jingling like strings of chimes.
I could feel myself rising, hovering, brushing against the tops of trees.
That’s what I did while I waited in that room: I conjured the wind. I shook the trees.
I didn’t know how I did it, and if I ever told anyone—Steph or my mother—they’d have laughed. So I kept it to myself, and brought it out only while lying there, considering cereal boxes and the warmth of running water. I kept the secret in my pocket, and sometimes, when things were just right, I’d let myself feel the wind swelling at the bottoms of my feet.
48
“Come on, kids,” my mother said one day after a long shift at the gypsum factory, “pack up your stuff.”
She walked into the room, dropped her keys on the bedside table, then headed to the sink to wipe the white powder from her hands.
“Come on now,” she called from the bathroom, “let’s get ready to leave.”
Just like that.
Just when I’d begun to get used to the ease of motel-room living, we were leaving. I’d grown attached to the stiffly laundered towels, the cool tile floor clean against my feet, the magic of indoor plumbing. But we were moving, my mother said, tomorrow after school.
This time we were headed east, back to Rochester.
“You were born here,” my mother said as our car exited the New York State Thruway and we headed north, to the city’s core. “We’ve lived in this city before.”
I pressed my face against the glass of our overwrought car as it pulled down Grand Avenue and parked in front of number seventy-eight. I remembered bits of the city, of course, and we’d had visits, but I’d never noticed how close together the houses were, how they seemed to lean on each other for support.
I sat there, and though my body somehow stretched into its new surroundings, a part of me never really unfolded myself from that car. A part of me stayed there, cheek pressed against glass, trying to take it all in.
49
Charlie was the color of chocolate milk. His creamy brown skin was only odd when you considered the fact that his parents were whiter than bleached and bromated flour. Charlie, they said, had a rare blood disease. The blood disease had bronzed Charlie’s skin and coiled his hair into tight black springs. It was not until later that I began to doubt the blood disease story. Not until ninth-grade science class, learning about dominant traits and alleles, that I thought about Charlie, his alleles, and recalled the man with a toothy smile and flame-tipped dashiki who stuffed a black fisted Afro pick into the back pocket of skin-tight jeans while hanging around on Charlie’s front porch, talking to Marlene.
Marlene, Charlie’s mom, went by “Mar,” and while she might not have known much about dominant traits and alleles, Mar understood how much easier it was to catch a tight-jeaned man than a rare blood disease.
A curvy version of Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, Mar took long drags from her cigarette and tossed smooth streams of smoke over her shoulder. She went shoeless most days and the bottoms of her feet were black except for the crescent-shaped undersides of her arches. She melted vanilla ice cream on her tongue and kissed it into the mouths of the babies she cared for. I wanted to turn away from her on account of the filthy feet and her birdlike feeding of the young, but couldn’t. The pout of her lower lip, the slant of the long-lashed eyes, the way she offered no explanation as she blew her smoke and mashed up baby meals in her mouth—these things kept me watching.
Dwayne was Mar’s man, Charlie’s identified daddy. And on those rare occasions when they were not filled with brown-bagged bottles of wine, his long fingers cupped Mar’s ass. Sometimes he held the wine in one hand, the ass in the other. His world, united.
Dwayne loved Charlie. Despite the blood disease, or perhaps because of it, Charlie was his golden boy. He loved Mar, too, judging by the fact that he lived with her. But this was Dwayne, not some TV dad, so despite his affection for Mar, he kept a wife and seven children three streets over. In fact, Mar had been the babysitter until Dwayne could no longer limit his urges to rushed encounters here and there and simply ditched his wife for the pulpy-lipped girl. The ditching of his wife, however, amounted to no more than an address change, and in reality, Dwayne somehow managed to stretch his fingers around the asses of both women.
Charlie’s family lived in the house behind us. My mother had known Mar for years, and it had been Mar, in fact, who helped her find the half-house for rent on Grand Avenue.
Mar had other children, besides the gold-skinned Charlie. Before Charlie. Before the tight-jeaned man. Before Dwayne. When she was still a girl. There were three of them, two boys who were practically men, and a daughter who at fifteen, by neighborhood standards, was more woman than girl. Sheri was sour, and spent all her time dreaming up the wedding she’d have some day, the sparkling white church, the waterfall of flowers, the impossibly ruffled dresses. She tried to pull off smoking like her mother, who, despite her dirt-encrusted feet, was prettier than Sheri would ever be.
Sheri loved James, Dwayne’s boy from his other woman, but for some reason, their love was not allowed. The vaguely incestuous nature of the arrangement seemed less of a concern than the fact that Dwayne was the head of both households and wanted to keep things straight. Plus Sheri said that Dwayne came into her room some nights and tried to talk his drunken way into her panties, so maybe he simply didn’t want his son going into territory he had planned for himself.
James was long-limbed and dark-haired. He went around without a shirt, showing off fine round shoulders and a hard belly that slid clean into loose-fitting cut-offs. He was as lovely as Sheri was plain.
They sometimes paid me quarters to play look out. I got twenty-five cents for every fifteen minutes of standing at the edge of the front yard, looking both ways, and calling out when Dwayne was spotted. I was not to look in their direction while Sheri and the dark-haired boy fell into the cool opening of the front hall. My job was simply to shout when I saw Dwayne rounding the corner. Otherwise, I left them alone and collected quarters.
I learned two things from Sheri.
First, my legs were too thick to wear boys’ basketball socks anymore. “Those orange and black stripes make your calves look big,” she said, “stick to sandals.”
Second, I was smart.
I overheard this while Steph and I were sitting on the dull hardwood of our living room floor, tracing invisible patterns with our fingers. The front door was open and older people had gathered down on the porch. Someone was talking about how smart Stephanie was. This was nothing new; everyone knew Steph was smart. At ten, my sister scavenged parts from lawn mowers and fashioned them into go-carts. She searched sale flyers, made shopping lists, and tried to persuade my mother to budget. She could find her way to sections of the city I’d never even heard of. Clearly, she was bright. And whenever there was a lull in the conversation, or space that needed filling, people talked about how smart Steph was instead of the weather or what the president was doing.
But this time was different.
Sheri interrupted and said that I was smart, too, according to the school.
My head snapped up.
Steph stared hard at the floor, pushed her finger along the space between the shellacked wood planks, and pretended not to hear. I was smart. I didn’t know what Sheri meant exactly, but glommed onto it nonetheless.
I liked being smart for about three days.
Until, in school, Mrs. Santarocco told the class that I’d scored high on th
e California Achievement Test. She asked me to stand. I turned red. I had just begun to fade into the background after our midyear transfer when she walked over with a package in her hands, something special for the high scorer. Some sort of plant. A baby tree. She stretched it out to me and then, just as I lifted my arm to take the sapling, she pulled back.
She’d just remembered, she said, about our being renters, and was not sure whether renters could plant trees. She pursed her lips and surveyed the class with puckered eyes, as if third graders might have access to such information. She’d have to check, she said, then turned away and deposited the sapling into the classroom sink, where I looked at its frilled head from time to time. The roots and trunk were bound in plastic and beads of moisture formed on the clear wrap as the day wore on, so that by the end of the day, you could hardly make out the green inside.
50
I learned a few new words on my first day at School no. 11: honkie, Oreo, blow job. A honkie was a white person, my mother said, and blow job was a dirty word for something adults did. She didn’t know anything about Oreos, but I soon learned that they were kids with one black parent and one white parent. Honkies could also be called crackers, and someone who was an Oreo only minutes before could safely be referred to as a zebra when the mood struck.
Color was important on Grand Avenue. We all wore shoes fished from discount bins and received free lunch, so what else was there?
51
Rufus and Jewel lived in the apartment beneath ours. Jewel was tall and thin with skin the color of creamed coffee. Easily the prettiest woman on the street, she walked with a straight back and had once been a catalog model. Pages from Sears and Kmart ads were displayed in the built-in bookcase of their living room: Jewel in active wear; Jewel in evening wear; Jewel in underwear. A dark-skinned Barbie, she was just about perfect, on catalog pages and in life, until she smiled to reveal a gold-capped front tooth.
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