Lady Luck's Map of Vegas

by Barbara Samuel

  “My mother,” she says, then clears her throat and starts again. “My mother was fifteen years old when I was born and she had six more children before she was twenty-one. She was pretty sick the whole time I was a little girl and we lost her when I was eleven. My daddy wasn't too much use after that.”

  I feel I'm meant to ask the question. “What happened to her?”

  She taps the cigarette hard, puts it to her mouth. “I sort of let it sound like my mother died,” she says. “She didn't. I mean, she's probably dead by now, but she wasn't then.”

  I put down my spoon. “Go on.”

  “I mean,” Eldora says, and blows out a lungful of smoke, pretty as a picture of the wind, “that she might as well have been dead, but she was just crazy. ” She meets my eyes, and I know what she's going to say. “She was a paranoid schizophrenic. They locked her up when I was eleven.”

  On some level I have felt this coming, but it still slams into my chest like a medicine ball, knocking me backward into the red vinyl booth. My hands fly over my belly protectively, but how can I ever protect this child from something that might or might not go off within her own brain, like a time bomb, ticking away?

  But the sudden sting of tears in my eyes are not for me or this child, but my mother. “Was she delusional when you were a child?”

  She smokes fiercely, and I see her swallow, take a deep breath. “Not so much, really. She was really young, like I said, and we all kept her busy and maybe that helped, I don't know. Sometimes she wasn't there, like, you know, like it was with Gypsy.” She pauses, looks hard at the coffeepot. “I knew about Gypsy a long, long time before I let myself see it. I just didn't want her …”

  “I know.”

  “My mother,” Eldora says, lifting her chin, “had one psychotic break that we know of. She heard voices that told her that my brothers were devils and they needed to die.”

  She is eerily calm, her cigarette curling smoke away from her long fingers. The sense of doom falls down around my shoulders. I want to stave it off. “Mom—”

  “India,” she says without looking at me. “I need one person on this planet to know the whole truth about me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I came home from school and found her about to butcher the youngest one. I had no idea what to do. She scared the living hell out of me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I grabbed the knife out of her hand, picked up my brother, and ran. My other brothers were coming down the road and I told them we had to go find Daddy. ‘It's Mama,’ I told them, and we all looked at each other and ran like hell, all the way to the neighbor's house. They called the sheriff and they took a couple cars out there and that was that. We never saw her again. She was so clearly crazy that there wasn't even a trial. Not one that I knew about anyways. They just locked her up and threw away the key.”

  I can't think of a single thing to say. She's busy with her cigarette, the heavy lashes obscuring her eyes, and the world shifts the slightest bit—not out of alignment, but rather more into alignment. Her hick accent. Certain little mannerisms. “Why did you lie?”

  She lets go of a little laugh, rolls her eyes as she blows cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. I notice the length of her throat. When she looks at me again, there's a slightly different Eldora sitting there, one a lot less soft than the mother I've always known. “Oh, who wants to be poor white trash, India?”

  “It wasn't that bad, was it?”

  “Yeah, honey,” she says sadly. “It was.”

  The waitress brings our plates, and Eldora leans back. When the waitress has gone, my mother says, “Waitresses didn't used to be able to chew gum.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Eldora, 1953

  It's been more than forty years, but I can close my eyes and be right back there, at Dina's café. It stood right on Main Street, which was Route 66 through town back before I-40 was built through Oklahoma and left the town behind.

  I loved working there. Loved my pink nylon uniform with its white apron, which I kept sparkling clean. Everyone says redheads shouldn't wear pink, but I looked real nice in that dress. It fit just right, narrow at the waist, the skirt just to my knee. The only bad part was the white shoes, but they were required.

  We couldn't chew gum, not like now, where I see a waitress popping her gum everywhere I go. And you had to leave your jewelry off, unless you were married and had a wedding ring, like Pricilla Mackey who wished she didn't and tucked hers into her pocket and pretended it was the soaps that gave her eczema on her fingers. She was always hoping to catch the eye of a trucker or somebody, anybody who'd carry her out of Elk City.

  It was a nice-sized place and prosperous. There were twelve booths around the windows and another dozen tables, plus the long counter with its stools. The food was real good—basic American fare, I guess, but it was fine in its way. We served hamburgers made fresh by hand, and real malteds, which you made by adding malt powder to a regular shake. We had vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry of course, but we had some specialty flavors, too. Butterscotch and rocky road, which was my favorite. I used to drink a rocky road malt, with double malt powder, nearly every single day on my break.

  We served sandwiches, all the usuals including grilled cheeses, BLTs and open-faced turkey and roast beef on white toast; soups homemade every day, not out of cans like you get nowadays; all kinds of good dinners, too—roast beef, pork chops, real mashed potatoes and gravy, chicken-fried steak, liver and onions, hot corn bread. Pie, of course, and a full breakfast, hearty enough to hold you all the way into New Mexico if you were going that way.

  I loved to eat there. My papa did what he could to keep us fed, but he was never much of a cook. Everyone knew my situation, of course, and they'd let me take leftovers home if it was something like potatoes or the last of a pot of green beans, or the soup of the day. Whatever it was, my brothers were mighty happy to have it.

  I started working there after school when I was just turned twelve. In those days, it wasn't such a big thing for a child to work early, and I expect Dina and Ned would've let me work there anyway. As I said, everyone knew the situation. My daddy never was worth much after Momma was gone, and while nobody much blamed him, considering, there were folks around town who hurt for us children, going to school in our raggedy clothes. Everybody was clean—I made sure of that—but I was no seamstress, and we'd got pretty threadbare by the time I started working at the café.

  It was a good thing to be making money, and also having somewhere to go nearly every day. I hated being at home with my brothers in that pit of a house. Nobody would ever do anything to help me, and my daddy sat around and stared out the window about twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. We had a little bit of money coming in from the government, and charity baskets now and again, but I loved making money for real.

  I'd been pretty shy till then, but I caught on quick, and pretty soon was getting more requests from regulars than anybody else. I could make even the cranky folks fresh off the road feel better by the time they left, and it showed in my fat pocket of tips every day.

  On slow afternoons, that dead time between two and five, us girls would play all our songs on the jukebox. All country at the time, of course, Patsy and Tennessee Ernie Ford and Jerry Lee Lewis.

  I'd sit by the window and listen to them, and listen to the waitresses talk. We'd smoke cigarettes and look down that open road, watching cars go by to somewhere else, and I'd dream about far away places that all seemed to be somewhere to the west of here, places where men were prone to falling head over heels with the wrong woman, and women were prone to mourn them. Our place mats had a map of Route 66 on them, with the place names in funny letters along the road, and sometimes a drawing of something to represent it—like a rattlesnake in Amarillo and an Indian in Gallup. I'd trace the names and say them to myself like a chant or a poem or something—Tucumcari, Albuquerque, Flagstaff. Like the yellow brick road, it ended in the most magical place of a
ll: California.

  Hollywood.

  The other thing my job gave me was money for the movies. I had to steal it, more or less, out of the grocery money. Every once in a while, I'd take one of my brothers, in the open, even though it made my daddy mad and he'd sulk for a week after. I didn't have many girlfriends, which sometimes hurt my heart, and I didn't have a mother to tell me it was jealousy, plain and simple. Or so I tell myself now. Maybe I just wasn't that likable.

  Anyway, I went to the movies every week, and I read the magazines at the drugstore, because Fred the pharmacist had once loved my mother and felt bad for me. I studied the actresses to see how they made themselves so beautiful, how they moved and what they wore and did their hair. Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor were my favorites. Marilyn was sexy and earthy and I loved the way she wore her clothes, but there was something elegant about Liz. I mixed the two styles to come up with something of my own. Pretty silly on a flat-chested, skinny fourteen-year-old girl, but it gave me practice in wearing the lipstick that was right for me, and how to get my hair into some kind of shape I could manage.

  And then, the spring I turned fifteen, Nature gave me a gift. I didn't see it that way at first, you understand. It was a pretty sudden change, and I didn't feel my usual self at all.

  First thing that happened was that my breasts got bigger. A lot bigger, and they hurt every minute of every day. I bought one new bra, then had to buy another, and then another one two months later. It was embarrassing. None of my shirts would button anymore and I kept forgetting at first that the breasts were there, and I'd bump them into things, which made them hurt even more. A bump could bring tears to my eyes.

  The worst thing was the boys at school. They stared right at my chest all the time. One even said, “You got tissues in your shirt, El-dora?” and grabbed me to see. I slapped him so hard he liked to fall down and he didn't do it again, but he made a real big point of staring right at them whenever he could.

  And I thought the breasts were what was making me all emotional, too. It stressed me out, as we'd say now. All I knew then was that I was not happy. I started falling all apart for no reason at all, like leaving my best lipstick in the powder room at the movies, or when Betsy Patterson snickered at my scarf in fifth-period language class. My breasts ached all the time, and I had backaches, and one day, I started bleeding. I wasn't so ignorant I didn't know about menstrual cycles, you understand. I'd been hoping I might someday get my period, though I wasn't entirely sure what was involved. There wasn't anyone to tell me.

  It happened in the worst possible way, too: in school. I'd had a backache all day and went to the bathroom after fourth hour, and there was all this blood. It didn't leak through, thank God, but there it was and I piled up a bunch of tissues and waited until it was only me in there and then rushed down to the gym teacher to get a pad. She didn't spare me hardly a glance, just handed over the flat little box and went back to her class.

  I tucked it under my arm and hurried into the stall. It had safety pins with it and I figured out you were supposed to pin the thing to your panties, so I did, but all day long, I was pretty sure I'd done it wrong. It felt like I had to walk like a duck, like everyone would know.

  After school, I walked right to the restaurant and went to Pricilla. “I got my period today, Pricilla,” I said, “and it's the first time and I think I've got the Kotex on wrong and I don't know what I'm supposed to do.”

  And I burst into tears.

  She said, “Oh, you poor dear.” She took off her apron and told the other waitresses we'd be back after a while, and took me to the drugstore and showed me what to buy, and did it boldly to show I shouldn't be embarrassed. “It's natural, honey, and every woman bleeds every month, so don't let any man snicker over it. It's like them buying shaving supplies or something, all right?”

  In the next few months, my body felt like it belonged to somebody else. They had to get me new uniforms at work to fit the changed shape, and I knew the first night I worked in it that something was going on. It was like I was wearing bright red neon in big fat circles on my chest. Men I'd known my whole life started acting different around me, nicer or a lot more distant, depending on the kind of man.

  I remember this one day, I had gone to the JC Penney's to buy some new blouses that would close, and a new bra, too, since the breasts had finally slowed down a little and I needed to be able to wash one and wear the other. The woman who took care of me, Mrs. Pachek, had been working there a hundred years or something, and she took some measurements and fitted me. “You'll want to wear good support, honey, all the time. It's worth it to pay a little more for a good bra.” She patted her own fallen bosom. “I know what it's like.”

  She helped me pick out some blouses, too, and I left the store wearing one, and my new bra with its good lift, and was swinging my bag along beside me, thinking maybe I'd head home and put it away and maybe watch television with my brothers for once, or read them a story, when two boys fell in beside me. They were a little bit older, and I knew one of them worked at the Phillips 66 where my daddy took his rattletrap truck for gas. They came into Dina's quite a bit and always asked for me, so I knew them that much. They tipped me good if I kept the coffee coming and joked around with them a little bit.

  “Hey, Eldora,” said the first one. His name was Earl.

  “Hey.” I was pleased. They were handsome boys, which wasn't so easy to come by in Elk City. Earl was blond, with a ducktail smoothed into a point on his neck. His friend, Derrick, was Indian, with slashes of cheekbone and hot black hair shining in the sunlight. He was always the quieter one, and even when he talked he had a nice husky voice I liked.

  “Whatcha doing?” Earl said.

  “Nothing much.”

  “You're looking mighty fine, sugar.”

  I smiled. “Thank you.”

  “You headed home? Want a ride?” Derrick pointed across the street. “I got my truck right over there.”

  Nobody had ever asked me to do anything before. I figured it would be okay because I knew them from the café, and it was a long walk home in that hot Oklahoma sunshine. “All right. That's nice of you.”

  “Who wouldn't be nice to a girl as pretty as you, Eldora?” said Earl. He had eyes as blue as morning, and they gave his face a kind-looking aspect.

  I didn't think anything about it, getting in their truck. It wasn't but three miles down the road, on a Wednesday afternoon, broad daylight. It made me feel shy to sit in the middle, with the gear shift sort of right there, and Derrick's hand kept bumping my knees. Earl seemed to be sitting too close, but it was crowded, and I kept my arms over my chest.

  But they didn't take me right home, as you probably suspected. Derrick took a turn I didn't expect, down a narrow road beneath a big lane of trees, far away from everything.

  I said, “This isn't the way home.”

  “Why don't you come sit with us at the river for a little bit?”

  “No, I don't think so. They're waiting for me at home.”

  “Oh, Eldora, you gonna lie to us now? We know what it's like for you at home. Why don't you just come and relax with us?”

  I was getting a bad feeling about this. I looked at Derrick to see if he would be more help, and said, “Derrick, will you drive me home, please? I'll give you some coconut cream pie next time you come in.”

  Earl snickered. “Yeah, Derrick, you want some pie?”

  I lost my temper a little bit. “Now you're just being ugly, Earl.”

  “Aw, honey, I'm sorry.” He took my hand. “Here's the truth. I've been dreaming of you every night. I just wanted to go somewhere quiet where we could kiss a little bit.” He touched my face, brushed a little hair away from my cheek, looked at my lips real hard. “Wouldn't you like that?”

  I had good instincts, even then. “Maybe another day,” I said, and pulled my hand away. “Today, they need me at home.”

  “Just one kiss? We don't even have to go nowhere. Derrick, stop the truck and let me ki
ss this beautiful girl.”

  “No!” I said. But Derrick was stopping already and I had a bad feeling, and it turned out I was right. Earl half-climbed up on me and started kissing me, sticking his tongue in my mouth, putting his hands right on my breasts, his grimy, clutchy hands, and it made me so angry, I bit his lip. “Let me go!”

  He only laughed. “All right, sweetheart.”

  They drove me home after all. I knew better than to go anywhere with two boys or men ever again. I got lucky. It could have been a lot worse, and I learned from it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  India

  I leave my mother with a pint of bourbon, two Cokes in cans, and her cigarettes, sitting in front of her room in the rocking metal motel chair in the mild night, thinking her thoughts, drinking her cocktail. I kiss her cheek. “Thanks for telling me, Mom,” I say.

  She squeezes my hand. For a minute, I pause, feeling something thick in the air between us, something unspoken. Then she takes a cigarette out of her case and puts it in her mouth.

  I get the message. “ 'Night.”

  Back in my room, I sit down and reorganize my purse. Cosmetics— check. Wallet—check. Zippered pocket with tampons—check, though I sure haven't needed any of them.

  When my purse is in order, I head for the tiny bathroom and close the door. I wash off the day in the shower, thinking about my mother as a fifteen-year-old girl with nothing to her name but wits and beauty. I find myself smiling as the Dallas majorette version of my mother drops away, plastic and hollow, and is replaced by this more substantial Eldora. It's so much easier to see her in a pink nylon waitress uniform and red lipstick than white boots and a flouncy skirt.

  Smoothing lotion on my hands, I wonder about her brothers. It seems unreal, a television movie I saw a long time ago. I wonder if she ever wants to see them now that everyone has grown old.

  The fact of my grandmother's schizophrenia, added to my sister's, increases the chances that my baby will eventually fall prey to the disease. It's so depressing, I can hardly bear to think of it, and I skitter away from a baby to thoughts of my mother as a girl. I wonder what damage such a terrible scene left on my mother's little-girl heart.