“What are you doing?” I asked. “Aren’t you going to park?”
“I want you to get your new jeans while I do some other things.”
I was amazed at her ingenuity. I had told her the day before that I wanted a new pair of jeans—I’d been laying the groundwork for a much longer campaign, but she’d figured out how to use the jeans to make this outing go more smoothly.
“Why don’t you come with me?” I asked.
“Dolores.” Her voice was just at the edge of something hard. “I have so much to do today. Please go in here and buy your jeans and whatever else you need, and I’ll be back for you in an hour. I just don’t have time to do everything with you today.”
I hated the way that, even though I knew she was lying, she could still use this exhausted-mother tone and make me seem the unreasonable, difficult one.
I took the money and climbed out. I watched her car turn around and drive back out of the parking lot, its falling whine so familiar. She drove fast with the windows open, braked hard at the turnout to the street, her taillights coming on. She’d forgotten to look for oncoming cars, and the long honk of a truck dopplered away as she pulled out behind it.
I bought my jeans quickly, then went back outside and sat on the curb. I thought about how things had changed. I had wished for my father to get his job back, and he had; I had wanted to get away from Elizabeth and her clique, and now I would be going to a new school. Elizabeth had been disappointingly nonchalant when I called to tell her I wouldn’t be coming back to middle school. My parents had agreed I could take all my classes at the high school for one semester to see how it went. I had hoped Elizabeth would be impressed, but after asking for a few details about the Gifted and Talented program, she hadn’t betrayed any opinion one way or the other.
Sitting there on the curb, I wished that Eric Biersdorfer and I could go to a launch together. We would talk amiably about the books we’d been reading; then, just as the shuttle cleared the tower, he would take my hand. No confrontation, no awkwardness. But thinking of Eric made me think of his father, and I couldn’t help but imagine that Mr. Biersdorfer was with my mother somewhere right at that moment, smiling at her with his large jowls, red-cheeked, laughing, his alcohol breath subtly flavoring the air. He was looking at my mother, his eyes glittering, and she was smiling back at him, her satisfied smile, the one she wore when she felt she had accomplished something.
A man appeared in front of me, a stocky man in a blue guard uniform. His skin was light brown with dark freckles like poppy seeds.
“Hey, how are you today?” he said happily. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me.
“Fine,” I squeaked. I felt disoriented to be pulled out of my thoughts, as if I’d been sleeping.
“Hey, is someone here with you?” he asked.
I stared at him blankly.
“Like your mom or dad?”
“Oh—my mom,” I lied, nodding. He smiled and nodded back, a look on his face like, Of course, silly me.
“Uh-huh. And where’s your mom right now? In there?” he pointed at the clothes store behind me.
“Yeah,” I said, rattling my shopping bag so he could see I’d bought something. “I’m waiting for her.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding again. “It’s just I noticed you been sitting here for a while now. I just wanted to make sure you were with somebody. An adult.”
“I’m twelve,” I said, suddenly feeling talked down to.
“Oh, I can tell you’re not a little kid. It’s just regulations. Minors must be accompanied by a parent and all that.”
“Well, my mom’s here,” I said. “She’s just slow.”
“Hey, that’s okay,” he said, smiling broadly. “There’s no rush. But if you want to cool off, you might want to wait inside. You’ll probably be more comfortable. It’s nasty out here.”
The guard took a dozen steps down the row of stores and stopped with his back to me, looking out across the parking lot with his arms folded, like a lord surveying all that he owned.
I got up and dusted myself off carefully. I went into the store, nervous that someone inside would ask me the same questions—why I was back here after having made my purchase, who I was with. But the woman at the cash register just smiled vaguely at me. I found a place to sit in a window where I would be mostly hidden by a rack of clothes. Every once in a while I looked expectantly toward the dressing rooms, pantomiming waiting for my mother. None of the other salesgirls seemed to notice me.
A while later the guard wandered by again, digging a pinky finger in his ear. He caught sight of me in the window and smiled; he pulled the finger out and waved at me. I waved back. What kind of life was it, I wondered, to be a guard, to walk around just making sure people felt safe? I wanted to ask him whether he’d ever had to deal with any actual criminals, whether he’d had to run anyone down. He didn’t have a gun, just a walkie-talkie.
When my mother finally pulled up, I looked around for the guard before I ran out to the car; I didn’t want him to catch me in a lie. But he was nowhere in sight.
“Hi, baby,” my mother said in a tired voice as I climbed in. “Let’s see your jeans.”
I clutched the bag tighter in my lap. “What time is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, distracted. “Five or so.”
“How long was I there?”
She squinted at me. “What do you mean?”
“How long did you leave me sitting there?” I pushed.
She finally understood that I was challenging her. She looked straight ahead, squared her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe half an hour.”
“It’s been way more than half an hour,” I insisted. “It’s been hours. You left me there all afternoon.”
My conversation with the guard, his assumption that children should always have adult supervision, had emboldened me.
“It hasn’t been nearly that long,” she said curtly. “Maybe forty-five minutes. We should get you a watch so you can keep better track of time.”
“Okay, get me a watch,” I said nastily. “I’ll ask Daddy for one. I’ll tell him I need to keep track of how long you leave me alone with nothing to do while you drive off somewhere else.”
My mother fell quiet and pressed her lips together. My throat felt tight, the tears threatening to erupt. I wished I could feel as bratty as I sounded, but I didn’t. Even now that I’d come this far, if she admitted she’d done something wrong, apologized, I would have stopped.
“You listen to me,” she said in a low voice. “This is none of his business. It’s none of his business if I need to drop you off while I run some errands. Mothers do that all the time, for your information.”
“What other errands did you run?” I challenged her.
“I had to take the vacuum cleaner to get fixed, for one thing.”
“Why couldn’t you have taken me with you?”
It was remarkable how easy it was, undoing her. All you had to do was speak the truth.
“Why, Dolores? Why today?” she asked desperately, checking her side mirror before changing lanes. “Do you have some sort of internal calendar that says, Victimize Mom today? Or is it just that you can tell I can’t take it today? Is that how you choose?”
“I know what you’ve been doing,” I said. “I know who you’ve been seeing.”
For a second she didn’t react, and I thought she was about to explode in rage, but instead she spoke again in her low voice.
“I want you to stop talking like this. If you try to talk to your father about this, you will be very sorry. Do you hear me? You’ll be sorry if you say that. I don’t know what he would do if you told him a vicious lie like that.”
“Yeah right,” I said. “I’ve never seen him get mad in my life.”
“Well, you’ll see him angry if you say something to him like this. Believe me. If you tell him a nasty vicious lie about me that he knows isn’t true.”
“Bu
t it’s not a lie,” I insisted, and for just a moment I was confused. Maybe I was lying; maybe I had made it up? Maybe I hadn’t sat alone for as long as it had seemed.
“Where is the vacuum cleaner place?” I asked. I thought if she could say right away, then I’d believe her, at least enough to drop this. But she didn’t seem to hear me.
“You’ll see,” my mother said. “You’ll find out.” She didn’t say anything else for the rest of the car ride home. In a way I had to admire her for sticking to her story even when challenged, for believing in the force of her own imagination.
When we got home, my mother greeted Delia and my father breezily, then disappeared into the kitchen to start dinner. My father sat in his regular place on the couch, nodding once at me happily before going back to his magazine. I felt a surge of anger. He was ridiculous, laughable in his ignorance of what went on around him in his own house.
“How was it?” he asked happily, without looking up. He liked us shopping now that he was back at NASA; it made him feel rich.
“How was what?” I shot back.
“Shopping,” he said. “Did you get anything good?”
“We didn’t shop,” I said. I was standing near the corner of the couch, and now I swayed on my feet a bit with surprise at what I had done. I hadn’t expected to tell him. I felt a high, giddy satisfaction with myself.
But he didn’t react. I counted to ten. He was still reading. It made me want to pinch him.
“We didn’t shop, Daddy,” I insisted.
“Didn’t shop?” he asked a moment later, his voice rising only slightly with indulgent curiosity. “I thought you were going to the shopping center.” When he finally looked up, it wasn’t at me, but toward the kitchen doorway. My mother stood there, drying her hands on a dish towel.
“We did go there,” she answered in a light voice. “Dolores got the jeans she wanted. Just the right brand. Didn’t you, D?” There was no threat in her voice, no edge, no strain. She smiled at me, a little mom smile. It was so convincing that again I doubted my story myself. Maybe we had been there together; maybe she had been in the dressing room when I talked to the guard.
“Oh, that’s good,” my father said absently, already going back to his magazine.
I thought of the guard’s freckles, his sympathetic eyes. That guard didn’t think I should be alone. I pictured him standing with his hands on his hips. I tried to imagine what would have happened if I had told him the truth when he asked me where my mother was. I thought about how I’d say it: My mother drops me here and goes off to meet someone. She doesn’t come back for hours. His face would change as I told it—first surprise, then concern, then outrage. It’s a good thing you told me, he would say, nodding, already looking around, getting ready to take action, to call someone. Change my life forever. You did the right thing.
It was the guard’s reassuring voice in my mind that made me cry with a sudden desperate pity for myself.
“What’s wrong, D?” my father asked, bewildered. He looked back and forth from my mother’s face to mine. She was regarding me now with flat hatred.
“Go to your room,” she said after no one had spoken for a while.
“What is this about?” I heard my father ask when I was halfway down the hall. “What’s going on?”
I heard her voice join his immediately, almost overlapping, but I couldn’t make out the words.
I went into my room. I wanted to believe that I had only daydreamed the lie. But I remembered the fading sound of her car engine, her sudden brake lights as she sped out and elicited the whining honk from that truck. That was something I should never have been able to remember, the feeling of watching her driving away.
I thought I heard the moving, underwater sound of their fighting that night, low voices and an occasional bump or small crash like a wooden boat moving through water. I crept out to the living room where I might hear them better, waited until my eyes adjusted and I could see the hulking shapes of our furniture. Their words were no clearer. I lay on the couch, a scratchy afghan pulled over me. Their murmuring might have risen to yelling, or maybe I was moving in and out of sleep and didn’t know what I heard. Maybe this will be good, I thought; maybe they will talk and come to some understanding. Maybe she will cry, explain, and they’ll make up, and we’ll have no more of this muddy confusion between them, no more of the days and nights when they drift through the house like separate ghosts, Delia and I the only ones able to see both of them at once. They’ll forgive each other, and forgive me, and then we’ll be able to live all one story at once, without secrets, without having to forget things.
But in the morning, my mother was gone.
Erosion
11.
“YOUR MOTHER’S GONE ON A TRIP,” MY FATHER SAID THE NEXT morning while pouring his coffee. “She’ll be back before too long.” Then he turned to face us and nodded once, a gesture I had come to recognize as his way of trying to get us to accept something without discussion. I could remember many times when he had nodded at my mother this way after telling her bad news—that the garage would take a week to fix our car, that the plumber couldn’t come until Thursday, that he had been laid off—her face going limp with annoyance or anger or disbelief, and his brief nod, with this curt smile, silently begging her to accept what he had said and not ask questions or get upset.
“What kind of trip?” I asked skeptically. “She didn’t tell us she was going on a trip.”
“Your mother just needs some time to herself. She gets worn out taking care of us and taking care of the house and working every day. She needs…some time to herself.” His voice strained to make this sound normal, like something they had agreed upon long ago and had simply forgotten to tell us about.
Delia watched me, waiting to see whether or not I would accept this.
“But why would she go on a trip without telling us?” I demanded.
“Dolores, please,” he said, in exactly the same tone my mother used when I had asked too many questions. But then he added, “It was a last-minute decision.”
Once he was gone, I went into my parents’ room to see what was missing. Most of my mother’s things were still there, but her battered plaid suitcase was gone, as were her black high heels, a green dress that she wore to work often, a red blouse, her pink robe. All the things she liked the best. I pulled open her top drawer, and most of her underwear was gone; all that was left were the old, overwashed pairs. Her hairbrush was gone too, her favorite perfume, her cold cream, her makeup bag.
My mother saved everything: the buttons and little rings of thread that come with the tags of nice clothes, every letter that anyone had ever sent her, every photograph, even ones that were blurry or overexposed. She had a drawer stuffed with every note my father had ever written her, even short loveless notes: BE HOME LATE TONIGHT. DON’T FORGET I’M ON SECOND SHIFT TOMORROW. She saved broken jewelry, old hair elastics that had lost their elastic, old makeup, mascara tubes and eyeshadow cases, the plastic scuffed and cracked, the colors leaking and blobbing together. She kept a carton of her brand of cigarettes in her bottom desk drawer, and when I pulled the drawer open, I was surprised to find the carton still there. She liked to have an excess, a stash, saved against some possible shortage or emergency. She liked the feeling of plenty, the feeling that this need of hers, like many others, would never be made undignified by having to go unmet.
I tried to imagine her packing all of these things in the middle of the night. How had she chosen them; what sort of trip had she been imagining? And what would my father have been doing while she packed? Did he try to talk her out of it? Did he try to help her pack? It was hard to imagine him choosing things, holding up items questioningly and folding them into the suitcase for her when she nodded yes. But it was equally hard to imagine him just standing by while she packed to leave him.
Delia stood in the doorway watching me.
“Where is Mom?” she asked, as if our father had told us and she just couldn’t remembe
r the details.
“He didn’t say where,” I reminded her. “Just ‘on a trip.’”
My father had never lied to me before. He probably thought this wasn’t a lie, that because she had in fact traveled somewhere, she was “on a trip.” She was, in fact, tired from working and taking care of us. It was amazing how little he thought I knew of their lives. It had been my tattling about the shopping that had started all this, but still he assumed I knew nothing about the truth.
Now Delia watched me go through our mother’s things. I knew she wanted to ask me a question, but she was still figuring out what it should be.
“What do you think Mom is doing right now?” Delia asked. She backed into the closet, letting the sleeves of my mother’s clothes fall over her arms like a shawl.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Dancing. Having a fancy meal.”
“Yeah,” Delia agreed. “That sounds good.”
“She’s probably thinking about us,” I lied. “She’s probably wishing she took us with her.”
“Yeah,” Delia said noncommittally, caressing the sleeve of a silky blouse. I wasn’t sure whether she noticed that some of the clothes were missing.
“She’s probably at SeaWorld,” Delia volunteered.
“No, Delia,” I said. Sometimes it seemed that she misunderstood things on purpose.
“I’m going to tell you the truth,” I said, though I wasn’t sure yet whether I should. “I know where Mom is.”
“Where’s Mom?” Delia whispered.
“She left Daddy to be with another man.”
“Oh,” Delia said.
I didn’t tell Delia what I imagined: my mother had driven to a hotel by the highway as soon as she left us, to a place prearranged with Mr. Biersdorfer. A fine hotel right on the beach, a high-rise with an elegant restaurant on the top floor where my mother could go for dinner, wearing the black high-heeled shoes missing from her closet. I tried to feel happy for her. I knew this was what she’d always wanted.
“What man?” Delia asked.
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