A Mother's Love

by Mary Morris

  Though we had not had our dinner yet, I took Sam into our room. It was always a mess, with clothes and toys strewn everywhere. I’m sure that in the years we lived there nobody bothered to pick anything up. Instead of playing, Sam and I sat quietly on my bed, listening. A little while later my mother came out with a glow on her cheeks, dressed in a sheer pink gown. “That’s good,” she said, seeing us in our room. “Now I want you girls to hop straight into bed.”

  She must have forgotten that we hadn’t had supper, because she made us get into our pajamas and brush our teeth. I think it was more of an oversight than malice, but often we went to bed with an empty, hungry feeling inside. This night she put Sam right to bed, though Sam protested and whimpered. She told me to go to sleep as well, but when she saw me staring at her from the door of my room, she said, “Come here, Ivy. Talk to me.” So I went to her.

  “What do you want to talk about, Mom?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just hate not having someone to keep me company. Tell me about something.” So I told her about the math test I’d taken that day—how I’d gotten all the addition right, but hadn’t done so well with the subtraction. “Oh,” she said. She banged a cigarette on the windowsill and lit it. Her face illumined like a Halloween mask, the lines deep around her eyes. “And who did you play with?”

  I began to tell her that I’d played at recess with Anna, who also lived in Valley of Fire trailer park, but that Anna’s brother was sick—he was always sick—and she had to go home early. My mother didn’t ask me anything about my test or Anna’s brother. She hummed songs from South Pacific while she stared out the window.

  “If only we could go back to California,” she said. This is what they fought about mostly. “If we could go back to the sea, everything,” she said, “would be all right.” Actually we’d never lived by the sea, though to my mother I suppose we had. My father used to fold the laundry while my mother sat, dreamily contemplating the career she would have had in California. What she wanted more than anything was to be discovered. But my father refused to return to where everything, she swore, would happen for her.

  “Ivy,” my mother said. She liked to say my name; it was the name she’d given me. A fitting one, she used to say, for one who likes to cling. My father had wanted to call me something old-fashioned, like Emma or Sarah Jane. He never liked Ivy; he called me Lucky Red because of my hair and because when he gambled he claimed I brought him luck, like a rabbit’s foot or a shiny penny found by the side of the road. He said he did better when I was there. “Ivy,” she said again. A car passed and she perked up, but it drove on, its lights reflecting on the stop sign across the street. She pressed me to her as if she would crush my bones. “We’ll go home.”

  Before moving to Vegas, we’d lived in a valley of smog in a trailer park, near San Bernardino, called the Desert Sands. Where we lived, it was verdant, but across the street, just on the other side of the road, the desert stretched before us, dusty and dry. We could have lived closer to the shore and to the hardware store on Melrose where my father carved the keys for the would-be actors, the wealthy ladies of society, the has-beens, and, on rare occasions, the stars, but he preferred the dry, inland air.

  My father worked in the back of a small appliance shop as a maker of keys, which he ground until the fine metal dust settled into his lungs, leaving him asthmatic and wheezing for the rest of his days. He unlocked doors and repaired locks for people who lived in houses we could never imagine, and he’d come home with tales like the sailor back from the sea. He’d say how he’d made a key for a man who had white tigers roaming in his yard, or he’d changed a lock for a woman whose swimming pool had an underwater cave where tropical fish swam. When my father told us these stories—most of which I am certain he made up—he’d get a distant look in his eyes and the next day he’d take me into the dark, smoky bars with card rooms hidden behind closed doors or down to the bannered track, where I watched the prancing thoroughbreds in the paddock while he gambled our life away. It was his hobby, he told me, the way he liked to spend his time.

  On Saturdays he would take me to the track. He’d stand by the paddock and study the horses as they paraded by. He watched their hooves and their mouths. He’d study the racing sheet and place his bets. For me, the track was one long wait. I never much enjoyed the time between races. My father would find his cronies, slumped over beers and the racing page. “Here,” he said, “look at this one, good on the turf, but not used to five and a half furlongs. He brought his own jockey down.” They’d congregate in the bar while I stared at the muddy track, furrowed with hoof prints.

  When the bartender wasn’t looking, my father took me with him into the bar, where the “boys,” as he called the aging men with potbellies, would tease me. “So, Lucky Red, who’re you betting on in the seventh?” I’d bet on impulse if I liked the sound of a name. Dream Feathers to win, Time Flies to place. They laughed when I told them my favorites—these men who weighed each hot tip, studied their forms. But I seemed to win as often as they did.

  The trumpet sounded and the horses headed into the paddock. My father kept me near him, his lucky charm, and I was happy being close to him. He chewed on his pencil or on a cigar and pointed to the horse that was going to win. Then they’d go to the gate. I liked the frisky ones that kicked and tossed their heads. When the bell went off, and we heard the pounding of hooves, he would clasp my hand, raising it higher and higher as the horses rounded the home stretch.

  Sometimes we won, but mostly we lost, which I liked better. Because then my father took the colored betting tickets—those tickets in orange and blue and yellow and red, those tickets which came in a million colors—and he’d tear them into confetti, sprinkling them on my thick red hair. We’d drive home with the windows down, my hair filled with the confetti of losers’ tickets that fluttered around the car like snow.

  When I was five, my father gave in to his passion. He packed us up and moved us to Nevada, where legal gambling became what he did with his life. His dream was to become a partner in some business venture in Vegas. Real estate or the hotel industry. He said, “You’ll see, it’s the future of America. Right there in the desert.” My mother didn’t believe him. To her, Nevada was just a desert, recently turned nuclear test site. But he believed—and he was right—that Vegas would see a big boom and its values soar. On moving to Vegas, he said, he would do things right. He made a promise that he would give up gambling, and during the time she lived with us, he kept his promise. Only once did he break it—when the Lions Club put three tons of ice in front of the Golden Nugget and took dollar bets on when it would melt.

  The night we drove east along Route 66 into the cold desert, Sam and I huddled in the back under a scratchy blanket, our mother complaining the entire way. It was the first time I’d traveled on that road, but I knew it was the one my father had taken to come west. There was a moon, but nothing else to see, and I kept thinking that he was taking us to a place where we’d lose ourselves forever. I thought that the sound of coyotes, the sudden rise of hawks, the dry desert sand were all I’d ever know. That my life would be jackrabbits and tumbleweed and nothing more.

  ——

  It was late when a set of headlights pulled up at last in front of our trailer. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting at the window in my mother’s clasp, but I felt as if I’d been holding my breath for a long time. Even though she’d said she wanted to talk, we had hardly spoken. Once or twice we’d blown our breath on the glass and written our names in its fog, but that was all. Now she loosened her grip as my father got out of the car and slammed the door. He glanced toward the trailer, looking first dejected, then eager as my mother waved. We both waved at him, but she patted me on the rear. “Go to sleep now, Ivy; go to bed.” But I wanted to stay where I was, nestled against her by the window, and then fly with her into my father’s arms.

  As I slipped away from her body, I was surprised by how cold the night had turned. The floor beneath my feet wa
s like ice and my empty stomach gnawed at me. The door opened and I heard my father come in. They went toward their room, arm in arm, the light from the room illuminating the space between their arms, a small space you could slip coins through. They talked for a while in the low voices that you use when telling secrets. Then their light went out and they were quiet, except for the rustle of sheets, the creak of the bed.

  Later I woke to the sound of someone moving through the trailer and I knew it was she. My mother was a restless sleeper. Often I would hear her prowling at night, rummaging through things as if she were a raccoon. I listened to her moving about for a long time, wondering what she was looking for, until I drifted back to sleep.

  It was early when Sam woke me, whimpering for food. She shook me, asking me to find her something to eat. “I want peanut butter,” she said. She shook so hard, she rattled the bed, even as I tried to push her away. Though it seemed as if Sam was always trying to stuff things into her mouth, she was a skinny child with tiny bones. Yet now she rocked me with all her might.

  I crept out of bed, wondering what I’d fix for her and for me. Sam slipped her hand through mine. The light was dim in the trailer as I opened the refrigerator door, on which my mother kept a list of chores, her menu for the week. She tried to do things to maintain the semblance of a normal life. The menu for the five nights of the week was always the same—meatloaf, boiled ham, roast chicken, noodle casserole, fried fish. But we never ate those things. I have no memory of eating roast chicken on Wednesday or any other day of the week. But I remember the list, because I was always hungry for the food my mother never made.

  Sam wanted peanut butter and jelly but I couldn’t get the top off the peach preserve. I tried, but it was useless. So I opened the door to our parents’ room. The room was dark with the shade drawn but I could make out my mother, lying on her back, her black hair sprawled across the bed. My father moved on top of her, whispering over and over her name. They were bathed in sweat, glistening like sardines.

  SIX

  DINNERSTEIN & SONS, Jewelers, was nice enough in the front, its rows of cases filled with mostly diamond and pearl settings. But in the back where I worked it was little better than a sweatshop, lit with bare fluorescent bulbs. A dreary place. It was here that settings were replaced, stones reset. I was skilled at this, and Mike, the owner, paid me well. It was much more than he paid his two stringers, Alma and Suzette, who resented me because I worked free-lance and came and went as I pleased.

  I worked at a bench like them, though they did only pearls. All day long they sorted through the bins, picking out the best freshwater or cultivated variety. The rosy pearls, the grays and blues, the pure whites. It was tedious, unappreciated work. Alma, a black woman in her forties who’d raised two boys alone, read gothic novels on her breaks and had tiny stuffed bears all around her desk. Suzette, who came from Normandy and hated America (I had no idea why she stayed, but I think it had to do with a man), did her nails in her spare time, grinding them with a file. Alma had the eye for the right pearls, but she had been doing this for a dozen years. Suzette was better with the sizing and stringing, so they divided their tasks along these lines. Alma often accused Suzette, behind her back, of being color blind when it came to picking out the right pearl.

  Alma and Suzette had basically ignored me for years until Mike, a stout man with a bulldog face, came into the workroom shortly after I’d told him I was pregnant and said I should go ahead and make myself a ring—pick out any diamond I wanted. “A present,” he said, “from me.” The “girls” raised their heads.

  “There’s not going to be a wedding,” I told him.

  Mike shrugged, embarrassed. “Well, if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Keep me employed,” I said. “I’m going to need it.”

  After Bobby was born, the office sent me a silver teething ring and cup, engraved. I was grateful for these gifts, but I could have used more practical things, though Alma did send a pair of pajamas. Suzette, who was not a mother, gave him a pair of tiny white silk shoes.

  The day I returned was the first time anyone, except Mike, who’d stopped by the hospital, had seen the baby. Ben, who worked in the front, handed him a lollipop, which I intercepted. “Thanks, Ben. He’ll eat it next year,” I told him. Since Bobby was born, I’d been doing work by the piece at home when I wasn’t working on my collages. But now I needed to earn more, so I decided to return a few days a week. I hadn’t thought through how I’d manage. Eventually I’d have to hire a baby sitter, but for the moment the baby could sit on the bench beside me in his Kangarockaroo.

  “Oh, he is cute. You’ll never regret it,” Alma said in a voice that made me unsure.

  Suzette stopped filing her nails long enough to glance up. “Nice baby,” she said, looking incredibly bored.

  I sat at my workbench, where three diamond rings and one pin setting awaited me. This was a full day’s work, at least, if I went straight through. I began with the pin because it would take the most time. It was an heirloom, missing a few of its precious stones. There was a note attached, saying that this was Mrs. Potter’s mother’s brooch and that it was important that the piece be done properly. I pictured Mrs. Potter’s mother at the turn of the century, wearing this brooch on her bodice. A Victorian sitting room, apricot damask curtains.

  For the first hour Bobby slept as I cleaned the setting. I scraped and polished. I had earned my living for years as a jeweler and designer, specializing in silver and gold. Gold illuminated my youth or at least colored the tales my father told of the casinos where he worked with carpets spun of gold, of a desk where all the knobs were silver dollars and the phone solid gold. Of the Golden Nugget and the legendary Golden Lady, who dressed in gold—gold skirts, gold boots, her skin tanned a perfect tawny shade of gold, her hair shimmering like golden fleece.

  I have held various jobs, some better than others. I’ve been a photographer’s model, for though I’m not beautiful, I am striking, with my thick red curls. At times I think I might just as well be a college professor or a legal secretary, a computer technician or a veterinarian. I did many things, but nothing really held me. Perhaps my peripatetic youth—so much moving around, my mother’s leaving—made my concentration poor; my mind tended to wander from the tasks at hand.

  But I was drawn to tiny polished objects, to perfectly carved pieces, to bits of silver and gold. My stepmother, Dottie, our former neighbor, first noticed I had talent. “A gift,” she called it. Though her notion of art was the velvet painting from Tijuana of a tiger or the crying clowns that graced her living room, Dottie watched me doodling, sketching what I saw. I liked to take an object apart with my eyes. But what impressed her the most was that I drew things that weren’t there. People, animals, landscapes. Whatever was in my head. I could close my eyes and see animals I’d only seen in books—like giraffes or angel fish—and these I’d draw in amazing detail. I could sketch the Eiffel Tower or Elvis crooning on TV. I also did odd sketches of my desert world—a scorpion, its tail raised to strike; a coyote sleeping in its lair. Sometimes I drew my mother’s face, pressed against a window, looking out into nothing at all. Or a woman with a girl like Sam buying purses in a store. Dottie would discreetly admire these. One day, she told my father, “She has talent, Howard. I’m going to see that she gets to use it.” It was Dottie who pushed me to take a class at the local community college when we were still living in Vegas and later saw to it that I went to art school in Los Angeles.

  When I can, I do my work at home, then bring it in to Mike. In the front room of my apartment—the only room that’s sunny—I have Ziploc bags tucked away with diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, as well as less precious stones like tiger’s eye and turquoise, purple onyx and mother of pearl. Occasionally museums send me pieces that their own conservators can’t repair, and I am well paid for this work, though it doesn’t come in often enough. Once I spent a year on a necklace worn by an Egyptian queen who had died three thousand years before. On my table
I had hundreds of the glass beads and pieces of gold chain. I was six months into the project when Matthew bumped into the table, and it took us weeks, during which we could not vacuum, until we found every single colored bead.

  I was a little more than an hour into the heirloom brooch when Bobby awoke. I sighed at being interrupted, and Alma raised her eyes. She made room for Bobby on the bench so that I could change his diaper. Suzette, a disgusted look in her face, turned away. It would take almost half an hour to feed him, and if I wanted to get the work done, I didn’t have that time to spare. I found a cushion, propped him on it, and let him nurse while I worked. Alma shook her head as I struggled not to drop him. When he was done, he was awake and wanted to be held.

  “Here,” Alma said, “I can take a break. You work. Come here, Bobby, play with your Aunt Alma for a while.”

  I’ve always liked Alma. She too was the daughter of a long-departed mother. Once I shared my past with her after work over drinks, confiding my secret. And Alma said, “I don’t know what makes white people think this is so special. It happens to blacks all the time.” Half her friends, she said, had mothers who went away or didn’t know who their fathers were. “You want to know the definition of confusion? Father’s Day in Harlem.” She tossed back her head of plaited curls and roared.

  Alma played with Bobby until her break was over. Then she smiled at Suzette. “Suzie, honey,” Alma said, “why don’t you entertain the baby for a while?” Taking pity on me, perhaps, Suzette put down her nail file and shook a rattle in his face during her break.