But if we allowed ourselves to be catty about rock gardening and bad clothes, we never complained about the lack of food, the way she slept for hours and days, not rising until she was inspired by something greater than our hunger, the way her rules veered wildly, changed almost daily. We didn’t remind her about calling a family meeting with forced conversation and plans for improvements one day, only to emerge a tyrant the next, an angry old bear who growled and swiped without provocation.
When she wasn’t working or in the yard, she took to her bedroom and became impossible to reach.
“What do you want?” she’d ask when someone was brave or desperate enough to knock on her door, or “I’m tired, just leave me alone.”
We learned to stop trying. We’d entertain ourselves as she slept. When there was no food, we’d open and close cupboard doors until Stephanie unearthed a bag of potatoes and fried them into slices, or sifted flour and salt and combined it with old Royal pudding packets to make cream puffs, or sprinkled sugar with food coloring and fried it in a cast iron pan till it crystallized and crumbled into pink candy.
Inside the house, I talked and muttered and hated her as needed, but when Sister So-and-So from church or the secretary at school or a friend’s mother from down the street used a tone that put my mother in a bad light, I’d snap my mouth shut and refuse to participate. I said everything was fine, and hated them for implying otherwise. My mother could have been wrong a million times a day, and I’d have hated them anyway.
I was hers in ways that those with loyalties of convenience cannot fathom. I loved her beyond words and clothes and yes, beyond even pain. The strangest of things is the way the hungry always return to the very same hand. The hand they know. The one that cannot give.
91
“How come whenever I hear about you, it’s to find out you’ve been punished?” he asked. Bill McCarthy, a man with ankles as thin as dollar bills and more scalp than hair. He stood in front of me, eyes spinning, asking why I was grounded that weekend.
I shrugged.
“Well, what did you do this time?” Bill went on.
I shrugged again.
He astounded me, Bill did. The way he popped black olives into his eye sockets and then chased kids around Ellison Park during after-Mass picnics. The way, spindly though his legs might have been, he never allowed himself the comfort of sitting in his pew, and so dipped and bent during the standing portions of Mass. The way he’d never married, never had children.
My mother explained that Bill had been in the seminary long ago, but had to leave to care for his mother, which he was still doing. I figured his mother must have been older than dirt, given Bill’s age, which was sixty or seventy, but to a middle-school girl, might as well have been a hundred.
“I’ve never heard of a child so often detained,” he said, then teased me about the things I might have done to get in trouble.
“Talking back, I bet.”
“Nope.”
“Then staying out too late, that must be it. You didn’t go home when the streetlights came on and everyone knows that’s when you’re all due in.”
“No.”
“Well then, I betcha it’s your room—it must be a rat’s nest.” Finally he relented with a “hmmph” and said, “You know—I should stop calling you by your name altogether; from now on, I’ll just call you ‘punishment girl,’ I’ll say ‘hiya, punishment girl’ and ‘seeya, punishment girl.’”
He’d laugh. Sometimes slap his knee. Then return to his quiet life with his unimaginably old mother until the following Sunday, when he’d wink those marbles once again, and ask what punishable things I’d managed over the past few days.
92
Bill was right.
I was in trouble a lot.
Just about every weekend.
I’d be sent to my room for hours at a time, or the weekend—or for a string of weekends. Sometimes my mother would hit me with whatever hard thing was within reach, but mostly, she kept me inside when she thought I’d done something wrong.
Being on punishment meant I couldn’t visit Annmarie VanEpps, who my mother said was a bad influence. She said spending time with Annmarie made me act like I was better than anyone else.
I didn’t argue the point.
Annmarie did think she was better than most people, and I suppose some of that could have rubbed off. Plus, there was something about the way her mother made dinner with items from all four of the food groups that made me cocky.
A few days at Annmarie’s and I’d come home with a belly full of milk, feeling like I owned the sky, only to open the fridge at our house, suck my teeth, and complain about there never being anything to eat, and bam, just like that, I’d be punished for acting high and mighty.
“Just who do you think you are? Why don’t you go upstairs till you can stop acting like you’re better than the rest of us.”
Or I’d stride in wearing Annmarie’s clothes, walking just a little higher in red and white side-striped terry-cloth shorts with matching halter, only to get in trouble for borrowing.
My mother believed that people should not want what they could not afford, and since we couldn’t afford much, our wanting should have been easy to contain. But my wanting was large, and I was finding, as the days passed, that the things at home were no longer a match for it.
93
I was the one most often in trouble. There were four girls left at home, but the others were less inclined toward outward expression. Still, I’m convinced that it wasn’t my verbal tendencies alone that got me punished. There were other factors.
I was simply too good a target.
With my easily tapped outpourings of pain, I was a faucet for the thirsty. My soggy outbursts, the chains of “I hate yous,” the howling. It was all so easy. In short, I offered the most bang for the punishment buck.
Or maybe it was dumb luck. Like the time my mother came home raging about something or other, and started yelling at the three of us seated in the living room. We sat tight, hoping it would pass.
It didn’t.
She pointed and screamed.
Why hadn’t we cleaned?
Why didn’t we turn off the damned TV?
Couldn’t we do anything worthwhile without her telling us to?
She yelled herself into a fit, and then lunged. We darted into the kitchen, went round and round the enamel-topped table while she followed on our heels, calling at us to stop. The more she couldn’t catch us, the more she wanted to. The faster we ran, the harder she chased. We screamed. She lumbered. And even as I ran, I thought of Sambo’s tigers turning to butter and wanted to laugh and share my thoughts with Stephanie so she could laugh too, but I couldn’t, because Steph was turning to butter too, the tiger right at her heels.
“You kids—stop running,” my mother shouted. “Stop your goddamned running!”
We screamed and cried, said we were afraid to stop, and ran even faster. It seemed like no end was in sight, and she must have felt the same way, because the next thing out of her mouth was that she only wanted one of us.
“The other two can go free,” she said, “if just one of you stops.”
“Which one?” I asked as my feet slapped the broken linoleum floor.
“I don’t care,” came her response. And the insanity of her answer stopped us.
We quit our running and faced off, us girls breathing hard in a line on one side of the table, her red-faced on the other. And what was it that kept me standing in the same position, cheeks wet from laugh-crying, heart-thumping even as the other two backed up, and slipped quietly into the other room? What was it that allowed my arm to be taken while the others scurried away? And afterward, once she’d hurt me somehow—once the crying was done, and my skin had returned from pink and was available to her again—what was it that led her in a tender moment to confide that she thought of me as special, more like her than the others, and then follow her confession with a bemoaning of the fact that she was too poor to se
nd me off to boarding school a few states away? Why was it me, looking at a smattering of bleach stains on rust-colored carpet, who was most vulnerable, who found her declarations of love as stifling as hands wrapped round my neck?
94
The other kids got punished too.
It was rare, but it happened.
Mallory was hardheaded. She’d been caught stealing once or twice and was beaten for it. The whippings would have been shortened, of course, if Mal only had fessed up. But she was stubborn and refused to admit anything.
My mother spanked her as we huddled at the top of the stairs. The first few strokes came easy and hard, but after a few more, my mother’s heart did not seem in it. Still, her head was as thick as Mal’s, and she punctuated each smack against Mal’s behind with the hopeful question, “Now, will you admit you took that money?” Mal kept saying no and my mother kept going, each slap against Mallory’s behind sinking into our own skin as we listened, until we could take no more and shouted, “Just admit it Mal—just say you stole that money!”
But Mallory admitted nothing. And in the end, only my mother’s tired arm curbed the whipping.
The baby, Rachel, might have had something taken away for not sharing, or for succumbing to an overall sour mood. But she was chubby-cheeked and sand-skinned, so much like the little girl on the fund-raising postcard for the Indians of Oklahoma that no one could stay mad at her for long.
Steph was rational, kind-hearted, and the biggest helper my mother had, but even she was occasionally punished for something minor. Fighting, say, or swearing.
My mother had her vices, but besides her occasional over-reliance upon the word “damn,” my mother didn’t swear. Except for the night Steph and I wouldn’t fall asleep. After telling us ten times to be quiet, my mother was ready to burst. Had our bedroom been on the first floor with hers, she’d have hit us, but as it was, she was too tired to do anything but yell, which accomplished nothing, so she finally shouted at us to “shut the fuck up” which tore us up with laughter. We laughed so hard at the sound of our mother saying “fuck” that we had to shove our faces into our blankets to choke the gobs of air that came up from our guts.
Though my mother did not normally swear, both Steph and I cultivated a certain appreciation for the sound of bad words. We liked the way they felt on our tongues, loved the power of the forbidden, and sometimes made the mistake of saying “goddamn” or “Jesus Christ” while my mother was within earshot and she’d usher us into the bathroom and insert cracked bars of Dial soap into our mouths. Tears of humiliation and laughter ran together at the sight of orange bar soap in the other’s mouth.
One time, Steph got the idea of squeezing lines of Orajel into our mouths. Orajel numbed babies’ gums, so Steph figured it would block out the soap taste. We smiled to ourselves and waited for (perhaps even courted) the next incident of swearing, then squirted the stuff onto our tongues while my mother went on about no child of hers using that kind of language.
It turned out that Orajel cut the taste of nothing, but simply numbed the tongue some, so that watery suds trickled down our chins as our mouths flopped open.
Another time, Steph joined me in pushing the open mouth of an empty jelly jar into slices of white bread to make gooey communion wafers. We pressed crosses onto the circles of bread with a butter knife, then used the round slices to play Mass on the back porch. My mother stepped onto the porch at the moment I held an oversized wafer to Steph’s mouth, saying, “Receive the body of Christ.”
My mother said it was sacrilegious to act out communion. Then punished us. We laughed. Her rules seemed to come out of nowhere. What was laughable one day was a mortal sin the next. We tried to tease her into easing up, but she’d had a lousy day and wouldn’t give in.
“Keep arguing with me, and I’ll give you a few more days’ punishment,” was all she’d say as we trudged up the stairs, shaking our heads at having such a crazy mother.
95
Any attempt at beauty bothered my mother.
Beauty should be natural, she said, or not at all. Based on her belief, she wouldn’t allow us to wear makeup or high-heeled shoes. She didn’t do any of that, she said; she never did, and was prettier than each and every one of us, prettier than we could imagine. As a result, none of us learned how to apply blusher or curl our hair, and minus the cotton frocks and bonnets, we must have seemed almost Amish in our general appearance.
Aside from those times when I wanted to wear eye shadow and hoop earrings to act out the part of Sandy in the finale of Grease, my mother’s beauty rules were not hard to follow. I liked clothes, enjoyed dressing up, but whether we’d inherited our mother’s simplicity, or developed it out of necessity, none of us girls had an inclination toward excessive ornamentation. And other than minor pleading for lipstick or a curling iron, none of us really challenged her.
Until I met Michelle Labella.
Michelle was the new girl at church who came to Mass wearing a red satin sleeveless top and matching lips. She was a giant almost, standing taller than a grown woman. And as if that were not intriguing enough, she snapped her gum, smoked, and had breasts. I was younger by over a year, but Michelle Labella somehow allowed me into her company and began to dole out her beauty secrets.
“Wear red,” she said, “always.”
“Put lemon juice in your hair for blonde streaks.”
“And if you don’t want to wait for Mother Nature to help you out with those,” she said while pointing at the tiny teepees sitting on the prairie of my chest, “eat raw potatoes.”
I followed her advice; scrounged up a red T-shirt, drizzled lemon juice into my hair, cubed potatoes and crunched them day and night.
Pounds of potatoes later, no breasts emerged.
Still, Michelle seemed a beacon of feminine cunning, and it wasn’t until she told me that Mitochondria was her name in Italian that I began to doubt her. I might have been a grade behind, but I knew perfectly well from helping with her homework that “mitochondria” was just one of the ninth-grade biology words she’d taken a fancy to.
“I don’t care what any old book says,” Michelle said while lying on her belly and filing her fingernails, “I’m Italian and should know my own name.”
I knew she was wrong, but I hung on to everything Michelle said just the same. I mimicked her talking and gum-snapping, and one morning walked into eleven o’clock Mass wearing so much cherry-red lip gloss that the lower part of my face positively sagged.
I’d spent the night before at the Labellas letting them practice giving a perm on my hair. They used no solution, but twisted my hair into tight rollers. So when I walked past the statue of St. Joseph the next morning wearing tight jeans tucked into knee-high platform boots, my lips heavy as glass, and my hair sprayed into a helmet of frizz, my mother did not wait for me to sit down. She dug her fingers into my upper arm and pulled me into the basement, where she took a wad of scratchy brown paper towels to my face.
“Do you know how you look?” she asked in a way that did not invite response.
“Do you know what people say about girls who dress like that?”
Michelle and her two older sisters teased their hair, oiled their legs, and talked to grown men on the CB radio while their mother was at work as an overnight nurse. They lured men to them like underage sirens, then hopped into strangers’ cars for slow and smoky rides round the corner. Even when she was home, they stole the keys to their mother’s mint-green Pacer and took us out for joy rides while she slept. I’d sit in the backseat, hoping to appear casual as I clung to the door handle.
Everything was a toy to them.
Including me.
Michelle brushed my hair, said how much she loved the little wisps that grew round my hairline, said how much like a Puerto Rican I was with all those baby hairs sprouting around my crown. She decorated me while talking for hours about boys and the daytime soaps she watched. We listened to Le Chic and Donna Summer, bought matching shirts, and started o
ur own dance group—the Sly Foxes. Michelle, her sisters, and their friends scooped up the foxiest names. Dr. Fox. Lady Fox. Mama Fox. I hated the name I was given, but knew my place, and so slipped into my “Baby Fox” T-shirt without a word.
Sometimes Michelle’s oldest sister got bored and whipped up a crisis. She talked of suicide, pregnancy, or proclaimed her homosexuality—even started CBing girls. Sometimes she’d feed me pills—birth control once, and speed a few times—just to see how I’d handle it. After the speed, I felt obliged to fake a high for her, flapping my arms, jumping off beds, and rolling all over the floor. I was less motivated for the birth control pill and just clutched at the pink plastic case and acted sick to my stomach.
Besides being an all-around badass, Michelle was in pain. She was in love with Jimmy Sulli. She loved everything about him: the wide shoulders, the chocolate eyes, the corkscrew curls. They’d met at Mass and gone out for two glorious weeks. Since then, Jimmy was all Michelle thought of. Their someday reunion, their someday marriage, followed by their someday babies who’d inherit Jimmy’s mop of hair and Michelle’s green-flecked eyes. She even convinced me to sneak into the rectory office with her so we could type up a marriage certificate.
James and Michelle Sulli, I punched out on the keys of the old typewriter, giggling while she watched the door.
She pasted their wedding certificate to her bedroom wall, but it was not to be. Jimmy was in love with my sister Stephanie, who was everything Michelle was not. Jimmy couldn’t get enough of how smart Steph was, how strong she was, how thick and black and long her hair was. To Michelle’s great pain, Jimmy followed my sister everywhere, and Steph’s overall indifference only deepened his affections.
Michelle’s love for Jimmy soon turned to hate for Stephanie. She talked endlessly of ways to win Jimmy Sulli back. She plotted what to wear, what to say, what to try next. The more her plans did not work, the more desperate she became. Michelle was a soap opera addict, after all, with a natural flair for the dramatic, which led to sensationalized plans to rid the world of Stephanie. She’d trap her in an unheated winter cabin where Steph would succumb to the elements. Or starve. She’d put a chink in a chain, flatten a tire, or otherwise engineer a bicycling accident. She’d write a phony letter to Jimmy from Steph, saying she only had eyes for Scott Matizzi.
Ghostbread Page 13