In the morning, when we went back into the house, filthy and dazed with fatigue, Father would be at the table, drinking coffee. “You girls,” he’d say, hanging his head. And then, with a smile so sad it broke my heart, “I’m sorry, you girls. I’m sorry.”
All day Mother would stay in bed and Father would shuffle around the house, making cups of tea for her, and telling us he was going to buy us presents of all kinds. Dolls and dresses, games and shoes. Pamela would make the arm-chopping sign and say Sure, sure, he’d do it when the sun turned to horseballs.
But once he did bring us something, a chocolate cake with tiny silver dots decorating the stiff white frosting. He put it in the middle of the table and said, “Dig in, girls.” We ate chunk after chunk of the sweet soft crumbly cake, while he sat there, watching us. “Veronica!” he called Mother. “Come look at this, look at these girls of yours. It’s my birthday today, and they’re eating all my cake.”
“Your birthday!” My mouth fell open.
“Are you little pigs going to leave me a bite of my own cake?”
Mother giggled, passing her hand over her mouth. Then I laughed, and Pamela laughed. We all laughed at Father’s joke. We were all laughing together, like a real family.
The winter I was thirteen, Mother had a cold, a flu, a virus, a bug. Every day she called it something else. She had headaches and a little fever all the time. She said her legs were weak, and her head felt as if someone were sticking heavy pins in it. Day after day, the sky was gray and snow fell, thick thick snow. It piled up on the roof, in the trees, on the sides of the road. Then the snow stopped and the temperature fell, and each day was colder than the day before.
Mother shivered and held her elbows. Her fever was worse at night. She said sometimes thoughts entered her head that she didn’t understand. “It’s like I’m dreaming, but awake. All these dreams, it’s so strange, I don’t know what to think of it.” One day she said, “At work today, I felt like I was already dead.”
“But you feel better now?” I said. “You feel better now, don’t you? You don’t feel that way now, do you?”
“Maybe in the morning I’ll feel better,” she said.
She had always gotten up in the morning and gone to work, no matter what; but now, sometimes she stayed home and rested. One morning I heard her in the bathroom, vomiting. “Maybe I should go to the doctor,” she said. She held the wall to steady herself and went back to bed.
She was still there when I came in from school. I asked if she wanted something to eat. She shook her head. It was Friday. I toasted waffles for supper. Pamela opened one of Father’s beers. He was still not home when I went to bed, but in the morning he was on the couch, asleep, his long legs trailing over the arm. Mother was quiet in her room. She didn’t answer when I opened the door and asked if she wanted breakfast.
At noon, I knocked on her door and went in. She was lying under the heaped blankets. I bent over her and called her. She wouldn’t open her eyes. “Mother.” I shook her by the shoulder. “Mother, wake up.” I kept shaking her and saying this.
I think I had known from the moment I stepped into the room that she was gone, but my mind whispered to me that if I didn’t agree to it, it might not be true. “Mother,” I said. I spoke reasonably. “Mother, wake up.” Something lodged itself between my eyes, something small and hard. It tapped at my brain like a tiny persistent hammer. “Please, Mother,” I said, “please wake up.” I wanted to be standing at her door again, to be in that place where I could pretend she would still answer me.
The doctor who signed the death certificate said it was probably a heart attack, but some time later we were told it was a rare infection of the heart. Her body was taken away. I stood at the window and watched them load the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. It seemed strange to me that they would take her to the hospital, now that she was dead.
Father said he would not cremate her, though it was cheaper. There was a place in Highbridge Cemetery where his mother was buried. There was room there for Mother, he said, “and me, when I go.” Pamela refused to go to the funeral. “I’m not watching them put Ma in a hole in the ground,” she said, so it was Father and me only. Father cried, his bony shoulders curved around himself, his long smooth head turning purple in the cold. My own head seemed large for my body, light and fragile, like a blown-up paper balloon. I couldn’t cry.
At home, Father gathered Mother’s clothes and her bits of makeup and jewelry, some necklaces of colored stones, a few earrings. I watched him move through their room, stuffing her things into grocery bags. He loaded them into the backseat of his car. “What are you doing?” I said.
“Going to the dump.” He got behind the wheel.
I reached into one of the bags and pulled out Mother’s green sweater, the one with the cat buttons. “What do you want that for?” he said.
“I don’t know.” I held the sweater against myself.
He shook his head. “Em, child, it’ll only make you feel worse.”
“I want it.”
“Suit yourself.”
I wore the sweater for weeks. I didn’t take it off, except to bathe. I drifted from room to room, not knowing where the hours went. I stood in front of her window, looking at the gray sky and the black trees and the banks of snow lining the road. Sometimes I sat in her chair, drinking a boiling cup of black tea the way she did at the end of a day. Sometimes I lay down and slept. But even awake I felt as if I were sleeping. At night I dreamed about her: she was calling me to come scratch her back, she was asking if I’d remembered to eat breakfast.
My heart then seemed to be located in the throbbing center of my forehead, or else deep in my throat. I was aware of its weight, and it seemed both as heavy as stone and as fragile as a walnut, which could be cracked with a single rap of the hand. Inside were the two halves of myself, like the two halves of my heart; in one half lay guilt, in the other grief, and each had an equal claim on me. I wondered why I had not been better to her, more considerate, more loving, why I had never kissed her more, as now I longed to do, a thousand kisses for her cheeks, another thousand for each hand. Why hadn’t I told her every single day of her life that I loved her? Why hadn’t I wrapped her green sweater more closely about her shoulders when she couldn’t get warm, and brought her a scarf for her throat, which was always raw, which was always “troubling” her?
Every day I was newly distressed with these thoughts, freshly surprised by her absence. She had been small, she had hardly taken up any room, but without her, how empty the trailer was, how quiet, large, and chilly. I held my elbows and waited for her to come back: waited for the door to open, for her to walk in, coughing and telling me to be a good girl.
Evening after evening, Father sat on the couch, elbows on his knees, staring blankly at the TV. His narrow face, his hands veined and rough, his skinny, hard body, all filled me with pity. In his eyes there was a hot, stunned look. He seemed listless, yet ready for action — as if, at any moment, he might burst out of his skin and explode through the roof, leaving us as Mother had.
Pamela didn’t go back to school, and Father said she should get a job. She went to work in a potato-chip factory. Then a laundry. Then the box factory, where Mother had worked. She was fired from each job, and after the box factory, she refused to look for work again. She said she would take care of the house, do the things Mother had done. Laundry piled up, the windows were streaked with bird goo. Wrapped in a frayed blue quilt, Pamela lay on the couch watching TV — rising, it seemed, only to pee or open another can of potato sticks. Sometimes she cooked supper for us, sometimes not. I could always find something to eat, toast or tuna fish, but Father said a workingman had to have a decent meal at the end of a hard day.
“You don’t give me enough money for food,” Pamela said.
Father said he certainly did. “Same thing I gave your mother. Same thing. And look at the meals we ate then.”
“I know what you gave her,” Pamela said. “You gave
her shit, that’s all you ever gave her. I don’t want you to even talk about her.”
Father’s face was the color of clay. “Don’t you go telling me who to talk about,” he said.
“I’ll tell you anything I damn want.” Pamela stood up, the quilt heaving around her shoulders. She was nearly as tall as Father and must have weighed almost as much. “It’s your fault she’s dead.”
Father chewed his lip, as if he were going to bite it off. He gave Pamela a single terrible look and slammed out. We heard the car motor and the tires spinning.
“I wish you weren’t so mean to Father,” I said.
She whirled and slapped me in the face. “Who’s mean? You don’t know what you’re talking about!” She slapped me again.
“Pamela!” I ran into our room, my hands over my face.
“Wake up!” she shouted after me. “You’re always looking asleep these days. I hate that sleeping look!”
Her handprint was still on my face in the morning, and I didn’t go to school that day.
One Friday, Pamela yelled for me to come outside with her. She was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and an old hunting jacket of Father’s. The cold had lifted, and filthy mounds of melting snow were everywhere. “What are we doing?” I said.
Pamela got behind the wheel of Mother’s car. “You’ll see.” She patted my knee. “Just watch this, little sis.”
She didn’t have a license. She’d learned to drive, she said, by watching Mother, but Mother had never handled her car as if it were a bucking horse she was taming by sheer physical force. We barreled down the road. Pamela wrenched the wheel one way, then the other, slammed on the brakes at intersections, and pounded the gas pedal. We couldn’t stop laughing. It was almost like being with the kind of big sister I read about in my books.
At the gravel works, Pamela parked by the gate. When the men started coming through, we got out of the car to look for Father. “There he is,” Pamela said. He was in a cluster of men carrying lunch pails. Pamela walked up to him. “Give me your pay envelope,” she said.
The men looked at her, then at Father, and they laughed.
“Go home,” Father said. “What do you want? Go home, Em,” he said to me. “You don’t belong here.”
“Don’t talk to us like we’re dogs,” Pamela said. “I want money for food, and not you drinking it all up.”
“She’s got your number, Ray,” one of the men said. They laughed harder.
Father thrust money into Pamela’s hand. “More,” she said. He gave her another bill, and we left.
Every Friday after that, we went to meet him. If he didn’t give her as much money as she wanted, Pamela gripped my arm and squeezed until I could barely stand it. “Cry, you little bitch!” she urged.
I moaned and twisted, but I didn’t cry. I wouldn’t let myself. Bad enough that she called out to the people in the parking lot to look at me, to feel sorry for me.
“My little sister is going hungry, because our excuse for a father is drinking up his check. Look at this poor kid, everyone! Look at my father — look at him right here!”
She always got more money, but we didn’t eat any better, and Father said she must be hiding it. “You’ve got a wad somewhere,” he said. “I know you, Pamela. You’ve got it sneaked away.”
“You think so?” she said. “Where would that be?”
“You tell me. You got it somewhere. I know you,” he said again.
“He knows me,” she said. “He knows me!” She was excited: she liked fighting with Father. She liked it when he went searching for the money, digging into drawers and closets, looking under our mattress, and even checking the freezer and the oven. “Look — look all you want,” she said. “You’ll never find it. Because —”
“Because what?” He stood with his hands on his hips. His skull reddened.
“Because I say so. Because there ain’t any wad. Because you’ll never find where I hid it. If I hid it. If,” she said. “If, if, if,” she shouted. “If, if, if, if, if!”
I went outside and sat in Mother’s car, parked under an oak tree on the bank of the creek. I could still hear Pamela shouting, “If, if, if, if —”
“If ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ were pots and pans, we’d all be tinkers,” I sang, and then sang it again. It was one of Mother’s sayings. I liked it. I liked repeating the things she’d said. I leaned my head back to look at the sky. “If ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ were pots and pans, we’d all be tinkers.” The waxing moon, shining through the trees, seemed to be calmly waiting for me to say something else.
* * *
“I waited for you,” Frank August said.
I nodded. The buses were gone, the parking lot and school were deserted. I sat on the back steps with him. I didn’t want to go home. At home, there was Father, morose, slumped, sniffling tears up his nose or fighting with Pamela. And there was the mess and the bad smell of the trailer, the staleness and disorder, and Pamela wrapped in the blue quilt.
Frank August had heavy, sleepy-looking eyes. Bedroom eyes, they were called. He drew me toward him, touched me through my blouse, walked his hand like silk under my skirt. “Yes?” he said. “Yesss?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move or speak. I thought, How funny … August in May … I thought about being fourteen. So much older than thirteen. I thought about my birthday the month before, the first ever without Mother, and how no one had noticed. I moved closer to Frank August.
We sat there other days, and each time I thought, August in May, and closed my eyes and heard him say Yesss? And each time there were his sleepy eyes and his hands on my skin. His lovely lovely hands.
Then he stopped waiting for me outside, but other boys came up to me. “Hey, Em, how are you?” they said. And, “Em, maybe we could go for a ride?” Some of them were the nice boys, the ones with high bright foreheads. They drove their parents’ old cars and parked on back roads and told me I was pretty. “Let’s do things,” they said, and we did, in the car or standing against a tree. Sometimes they asked me to take off my clothes, and I did. I would fold my things neatly on the seat of the car and stand for a moment in the cool sweet air and watch their faces. Then I’d put my clothes back on. “Aw, what’d you do that for?” they said. “Aw, Em.”
I didn’t say anything. As long as they were nice, I let them do what they wanted, and sometimes it was so sweet — their eager voices, their hands, the way they said “Please” and “Oh, Em.” And when it was that way, sweet sweet, something inside me lifted and rose, and the darkness went away for a while.
The summer days were long and slow. I had almost nothing to do with my time. I slept heavily and woke feeling tired. I dreamed about Mother often. One night I dreamed that Mother and I were in a railroad car, sitting at a table with a pink cloth, looking at the menu. There was a small vase with a frilled pink flower in the middle of the table.
“Mother,” I said, “look how pretty all this is! Aren’t you glad we got here?” It seemed there had been some trouble in our finding the right train.
“Choose anything you want,” Mother said. “You can have anything, Em. You only have to say.”
I felt immensely happy. I leaped over the table and wrapped my arms around her. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“Yes,” she said. She said it very strongly, in a big voice, a voice she’d never had when she was alive. “Yes. I’m your mother, aren’t I?”
When I woke up, the feeling of happiness was still there, and only slowly disappeared as the long hot day passed.
* * *
Sometimes I walked to the store at the Corners and stayed around there, helping out. I waited on customers or stacked things on the shelves. Sometimes I pumped gasoline and washed windshields. Mr. Miller, who owned the store, said he couldn’t hire me, but now and then he would give me a five-dollar bill.
One day, a boy drove up in a red pickup. It was a Saturday in July. Day after day the weather had been hot and humid. At home we
kept the windows and doors open, but the walls streamed and the floors were sticky. Sometimes it was hard to breathe.
“Hey,” the boy said. “How you doing?”
“Okay.”
I knew him from school. His name was Dennis Walter. He filled the gas tank. While he was inside, paying, I cleaned the windshield.
“So you work here?” he said when he came back out. He was a skinny boy with red hair and a funny nose, tilted to one side.
“Sort of.”
“You working right now?”
“Sort of.”
He laughed. “Yes or no?”
“No.”
“You want a ride home or anything?”
“No. Thank you,” I added.
“You sure?” He smiled at me.
“Well … okay,” I said. I got in the truck and sat near the window.
“So where do you want to go?” he asked. He pulled out onto the road.
“Home. I live on Killenhorn Road.”
He nodded, but at Killenhorn Road, he kept going.
“That was it,” I said. “That was Killenhorn Road, where I live.”
He took the next turnoff. It was a sandy road, like ours, with not quite enough room for two cars, but longer and rising in a series of twisting hills. He stopped the pickup near a farmer’s field. “Em,” he said.
“What?”
“You want to do something?”
I shook my head.
“Just something,” he said. “Okay?”
“Like what?”
“Like, you could just take off your clothes.”
“No.”
When She Was Good (9780545361910) Page 5