Talk

by Rachel Zachary

  ***

  Mary was in kindergarten. Dad had been staying out later and later not coming home until we were ready for school, and he would still be asleep on the floor or on the sofa when we got home late in the afternoon. Mom had gone up to the Big Apple like she wanted to, to visit her uncle and had left the three of us at home.

  I was in charge of the money for two weeks (about two hundred dollars) by default, Mary was still to young and Mom didn’t trust Dad not to spend it all in a day.

  We didn’t need much, Mary and I were both eligible for free school breakfast and lunch. After school Mary and I had been going to the food bank where we got those big industrialized cans of food; corn, beans, beef, and pudding (strawberry and vanilla, there was never any chocolate) and hid them up in our room (my father was against charity of any kind if he had found out I’m sure we both would have got a switching) so we weren’t as hungry as we used to be.

  One morning when we were getting ready for school my father caught me in the kitchen. Mary was upstairs getting dressed. He smiled and rubbed warm but firm circles the back of my elbow.

  “How’s school been? Any trouble?” he asked.

  “Fine.” I said.

  “Baby I need to ask you a big favor.”he said.

  “What?” I asked him warily.

  “I need a little money,” he said.

  I put my backpack down and looked at him.

  “Why?” I asked him. “What do you need it for?”

  “Just some toiletries,” he said. He meant beer and whiskey, probably cigarettes too though he usually bummed some loosies from the bars he went to.

  “Mom only gave me a little money Dad.”

  “I just need twenty dollars.”

  Twenty dollars, was two six packs of beer, a couple packs of cigarettes and a dance or two at Gingers. Twenty dollars was a gallon of orange juice and milk, it was real fresh bread from the market, it was a box of donuts with the heavy icing, it was two dozen eggs, it was a bottle of vitamins, it was toothpaste, it was a bag of apples not bruised or snuck from an orchard, it was a box of cracker jacks and caramel popcorn. It was candy and ice cream, not the homemade kind that they made in the winter when there was plenty of snow and they drizzled hot syrup over it and let it cool and harden or the ice cream they made with hard butter and sugar and powdered milk that always came out gritty and course and not really worth the time it took to make in the first place.

  What made me really mad though wasn’t that my father had asked but that he hadn’t even bothered to be honest, to lie, to pretend that he really did need the money. He didn’t have to beg, or to ask me again. I didn’t-I couldn’t say no even if I wanted to. I was to worn down. And he knew that. He just drank his coffee and waited. I went upstairs and took four crumpled up five dollar bills and brought them back downstairs to him.

  “Thank you baby, ‘ppreciate it.” my father said. He pressed a warm kiss against my forehead. The familiar scent of pine and tobacco had filled my nostrils. I wiped my forehead off angry at myself but I was even angrier with my father who had only chuckled and winked at me like he was letting me in on a big secret said,

  “Oh come on buttercup. Turn that frown upside down. You know you’ll always be my girl. Just don’t tell your mother.”

  I had always been closer with my Dad than with anyone else in the family and he had known that, cultivated that relationship and was constantly taking advantage of it and of me. I felt lower than low. I felt taken advantage of. Not a victim like Mom later liked to complain and compare herself too when she had gotten into the cooking sherry, but used.

  That was a seedy, icky feeling I had come to understand and gotten used to. It felt like I was being poisoned. It didn’t start with the money. It was little things. He stopped going to work. he stopped coming home. He left beer bottles on the floor, on the table, in the sink. I would throw them away and get him a cold one if we had any. He didn’t come home and when he did I would help him get changed and when he left his dishes in the sink I would do them. Because I liked doing things for him. I liked being close to him. But then one day I realized that I was doing a lot for him and and he wasn’t doing much for me or Mom or Mary. Dad was using us. We were being taken for granted.

  Chapter Nine

  One fall when I was fourteen I went and found my mother, who had been drinking since breakfast asleep on the sofa. “Mom,” I said and shook her shoulder hard. “Mom, we need to leave.”

  “Is it time for school?” she asked me.

  “No.” I said. “We need to leave Dogtooth. We can’t live like this.”

  “Susie, you need to think of life like an adventure,” Mom said. “Sometimes you don’t always hit gold, sometimes you have rough spots. We have a good house and a life here.”

  “We haven’t had anything to eat but powdered milk and grapes for two weeks,” I said. My parents had found out about the free school meals Mary and I were getting from one of our teachers running her big mouth and put a stop to it. Dad had made a big show of coming home with a bag full of groceries (bread, real milk, apples, a big package of ground beef and deviled ham with a carton of eggs and a big bag of pinto beans) and talked about how a man always took care of his family. We had gone to bed that night full, but angry. But that had been a month ago.

  “You need to look at the positive side of things instead of the negatives,” Mom said. “Look at the rainbow instead of the rain.”

  “Mom,” I said in a tone I had adopted for dealing with her, small children and the stray cats that had taken up residence in the bushes of our front yard. “Things have gotten really, really rough around here, we need to be realistic.”

  “Your father is doing the best he can do,” Mom said. “And so am I.”

  “I know he is.” I said. I looked outside, I remember seeing the wind blowing the trees half over and another mound of dead leaves filling the yard. It would be winter soon and we still hadn’t put in any insulation in the house, so all the heat went out the windows and the roof.

  “And I’m not?” she asked me.

  “Mom.”

  “The way you treat him like he walks on water. The things I could tell you about your Dad,” she grabbed for one of the bottles on the table that still had some beer in it muttering angrily to herself.“He’s a selfish sorry-ass yellow bellied coward. And he’s a drunk bastard. But don’t tell him I said that.”

  It was true. Most of the time when my father was drunk he was singing and hollering up at the moon or ceiling, or he would just pass out. Growing up it was a little scary but I had gotten used to it because we still had a lot of fun.

  Dad would tell us funny stories about his childhood or whatever had happened to him that day until it was time for bed or for school. But when he drank too much or had some of what Mom liked to call ‘hard stuff’ (which was a homebrew moonshine that the bouncers sold out of the back of instead of beer) Mom (who always stuck to beer or sherry always) would freak out. After he had a few jars he turned into a stranger. A angry stranger. A angry stranger who liked to break furniture chase my sister and I around the house like when we were little (except it wasn’t fun this time and it was filled with hollering on my fathers part and screaming on mine), and to holler and fight with my mother, with me, with anyone who he thought looked at him wrong.

  Dad had never hit Mom, at least he had never hit her in front of me but from the way Mom flinched around him sometimes and kept her distance before they were acting like best friends again laughing and joking I could tell he had.

  But that didn’t happen often because it cost a lot of money, money that Dad didn’t have.

  “Mom,” I had said after thinking about it. “I think we should leave Dogtooth. Just the three of us.”

  I remember how dumbfounded she looked. “You of all people.” she said quietly.

  “I am deeply disappointed with you Susie,” she said.

  We both knew that when it came down to it I was the most gullible member of the
family, the one who still listened to all of Dads stories, the one who made excuses for him and believed him. Even Mary had grown out of her childish naivete. I don’t know if she loved Dad or even liked him, he had mercilessly picked on her and teased her to “toughen her up” and they could argue for days on end about anything and when they weren’t arguing they weren’t speaking. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had heard Dad or Mary say I love you to each other. But I still cared about Dad.

  “You know he loves you.” my mother said.

  “I know.” and I did.

  “Then how can you even suggest leaving him?”

  I didn’t answer. Mom knew why. She got up to go make dinner slamming down pots and pans and filling them with water angrily.

  “Susie? Mary? Where’s the flour?” she yelled.

  Mary came pounding down the stairs, her socked feet nearly slipping on the last step.

  She stopped in the doorway looking between the two of us guiltily.

  “I ate it.” Mary said softly. There had only been half a bag left and it had been sitting on the bottom shelf for ages.

  Later, Mary would tell me that she had mixed it with water and kneaded it into little sticky balls of dough that she had eaten raw. She had been sick for a week after with a fever and diarrhea. I had wanted to take her to see a doctor but Dad said she was a tough trooper and would be fine and Mom had said we didn’t have money for a doctor and it served her right anyway.

  My mother had been furious, she said she was planning on baking a cake or some bread for dinner and now we wouldn’t have anything to eat. She asked Mary why she hadn’t eaten some grapes. Mary told her she just wanted to eat something else.

  I reminded Mom that we didn’t have any eggs to bake a cake or bread. She said she would have asked one of our neighbors for some. Mary pointed out that the electric and heating company had cut off our power last week. Mom said she would have made it like the indians did and that it didn’t matter because Mary shouldn’t have eaten it without asking permission.

  I told her that we didn’t have any eggs, any cheese or any butter and that all we had were grapes and some rice and even then we couldn’t even boil it so we had been eating it raw.

  Mom wasn’t having any of it, she said that we were both greedy and selfish and we would have to go to sleep hungry because we wouldn’t be having dinner dinner because she had been planning on baking something. Which didn’t make any sense because we had already been going to bed hungry and there wasn’t anything she could have made. I wondered if she had been planning on eating the flour herself.

  “Stop yelling at her,” I said angrily. “It’s not her fault. She was hungry. We’re both hungry.”

  She had looked at me with wide eyes and then burst into tears. Mom said that she was under a lot of stress with Dad, from my constant complaining. That strangers knew about our family situation, which had embarrassed my parents to no end (though they both made no move to change and mother had, had a fit when I had been looking at the help wanted ads in the paper and offered to babysit for one of the neighbors newborn baby because they could ‘take care of us’).

  Mom picked up one of the pots and for a moment I thought she was going to throw it at one of us, but then she threw it down on the floor so hard I thought that she had broken it and sat down with her back up against the cabinet sobbing.

  I watched her unmoving. If I was a Daddy’s girl than Mary was Mom’s. When I had been wrestling with Dad or watching the game, or staying up late to hear another bedtime story she had been reading with Mom and learning how to sew and latch hook.

  Mary was fussing over her comforting her but I didn’t move, I crossed my arms and stared down at her.

  She looked up at me as if she expected me to come over and hug her to.

  “If we’re going to stay we need to get jobs.” I said. “All of us.”

  I told Mom that we couldn’t go on like this, and that she had responsibilities, and that she had to go get her old job back or get a new one. That it was her fault and Dads because they were the grown ups.

  She stood up angrily, “You don’t get to talk to me like that. I am your mother. I didn’t mean for this to happen, It’s not my fault I wanted to go to New York, it’s not my fault we can’t go. Do you think I like living here? Like this? In this house? It’s not my fault.”

  But it was her fault and I know that she loved it here. I did to. I loved the valley. When it was summer and the sun was high in the sky, the ground so hot that it could burn your feet, the grass smelled sweet and grew wildly, We would pick crabapples and wild berries. In the fall when the leaves turned into gold we would pick fresh ears of corn and steal small pumpkins to make pies and jack o'lanterns out of them. We would see the most beautiful sunsets and when it turned dark it could get so cold that we would need to snuggle up together but the stars were so big and bright.

  Not like in the city. We would watch them as if it were a TV show and gasp when we saw a shooting star and point out which constellations and planets we could see and make up stories for them.

  Dad would take us out into the fields and we would pick grapes and berries, but the grapes were my favorite and they were the easiest to steal and the cheapest to buy. We would bring home big fat bushels as big as out heads and eat them, when we had nothing, no milk, no bread, no meat, no beans, not even rice; we had grapes. Big fat green ones, and purple ones and once even blue ones after an indian summer. We would eat and lay on the floor and if Dad was home and in a good mood we would listen to him singing or snoring and read some old books and comics that my mother had bought and brought all the way from California until it was time for bed.

  ***

  It was a long and hot fall. So hot that we only wore long t-shirts to sleep in and left the windows open to air out and cool the room. Mom said that it was too hot for underwear and she didn’t want to be doing any extra laundry so we didn’t wear that either.

  Even though I was tall for my age I still had no breasts. I was as skinny as a weed, I could still wear the same things I had worn when I was ten though they were a bit short on me in places. A lot of my clothes were hand-me-downs from cousins I had never met and some of the neighbors children or from the Goodwill, and what wasn’t I had sewn myself. Though those clothes didn’t come out as good, they were shapeless pieces of fabric that hung from my empty chest and you could see straight down them too. I had been making them with a size and shape in mind of what I wanted to be. My mother always said that I looked nice but I knew she was lying.

  Whenever I was wearing one of my homemade shirts or dresses (which wasn’t often) Dad would look at me for a long, long time with shiny eyes and say that I looked beautiful. One time when he had been drinking, I could smell beer on his breath and tobacco on his fingers as he rubbed them along the collar of my shirt before coming out. He didn’t come home for three days and when he came back he was angry and his hands and face were beat to hell but too drunk to do anything but stumble over the couch and sleep.

  “Mom,” I said as Mary and I tugged off his work boots. “We need to leave. Look at him. Who knows where he’s been. What he’s been doing.”

  “Susie,” Mom said with a long sigh, “When I married your father I said for better or for worse. Your Dad’s trying his best, you know that he, he cares about you girls. He would do anything to protect you and make sure nothing bad happened to you. Things are difficult right now...you’ll understand when you’re older.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Why do you think we move around so much?” Mary asked me once when I was sixteen and she was eight.

  It was early morning, the sun was just starting to creep up and we were parked outside of a grocery story. We had been living out of the backseat of the station wagon for a few days after our house had burned down for the second time. The firemen told us it had been an electrical fire, that there had been bad wiring in the walls and that we were lucky the house hadn’t gone up sooner.

  We
had all been out of the house when it happened, Mary and I were at school, Dad was at work and Mom was applying for a job at the post office. By the time we got back home the fire trucks and firemen in yellow coats with big black rubber boots were blasting what was left of the house with water.

  Mary and I were still small enough that there was plenty of room for us to sleep back there, my parents slept in their seats in the front or on a park bench if we were near one.

  I had asked Mom why we couldn’t stay in a hotel or in a shelter but she had gotten that panicked look she sometimes got when my Dad had gotten into the really hard stuff or came home in one of his moods, and told me that we couldn’t afford it right now and to not ask my Dad about it because he was stressed out enough as it is.

  Dad didn’t think it had been an electrical fire, he said he was a damn good electrician and hadn’t had a problem with any of the other houses and buildings he worked on over the years.

  He had been spent the night after it happened hollering at the moon and claiming that there were people after us and there was a big conspiracy to frame him. He had spent all morning talking with my mother in low angry whispers in the car before we had been told to pack up everything that we had that hadn’t been burnt (which wasn’t much) and left. We had been living out of the car ever since.

  We drove about two hundred miles, Dad drinking a beer, nursing a headache and cursing under his breath all the way to New York. We didn’t stop much except to use the bathroom and to grab some cheap food from a fast food joint. Mary I shared hot french fries and dollar cheeseburgers. The moon had just come out when I saw I got my first glimpse of the city far off in the distance. Mary complained that she wanted to see it earlier when the sun was still out but mother said that now was the best time to see New York and that it wasn’t called the city of lights for nothing.