by Sarah Perry
She felt decidedly, unabashedly superior to women who dyed their hair red. She pointed them out to me—how the color was too even, their eyebrows too dark, their skin not pink enough. Now I’m one of these women, but her genes help me fake it. My driver’s license even has a little “R” next to “Hair.”
Real redheads, on the other hand, were part of a secret sisterhood. She loved the royal Fergie, Wynonna Judd, Bonnie Raitt, even Pippi Longstocking.
When I was about eight, we went to the salon and got our first spiral perms together. I loved the attention, the hours of sitting in the chair and being fussed over, but I hated the choking chemical smell, the tight pull on my scalp. This was when I first learned that pain could yield beauty.
She was terrified of birds, at close range, and moths, at any distance, their blurred wings beating the air, their flight paths unpredictable. She had seen Hitchcock’s The Birds when she was four. Still, she continued to watch horror movies and let me see plenty I shouldn’t have, including Single White Female when I was eleven. The People Under the Stairs that same year. And The Stepfather.
She wore denim-blue eyeliner nearly every day I ever saw her, focusing her soft blue gaze. From small-town stores and crumbling rural malls she assembled a strange and glorious wardrobe. When she went out—once a month or so—she dressed up as though headed somewhere much more glamorous than a dark bar or a town hall dance. She favored white, gauzy shirts with big collars and French cuffs, fitted sundresses with big, cheerful floral patterns, black satin skirts with tiers rustling down to her knees. Her jewelry box was filled with costume pieces—faux gold earrings in the shape of cats, faceted glass hearts on silver hooks, tiny shells strung together on fishing line, which we bought together at the beach. She had a small collection of thin gold rings with semiprecious stones—amethyst was her favorite—bought from Kmart and Ames. On her dresser stood a city skyline of perfumes—Exclamation, Baby Soft, Xia Xlang, Tabu. Gentle, crisp scents she found at the pharmacy, next to the holiday cards.
The clicking of her high heels on our kitchen floor meant happiness to me, vicarious excitement; she put them on only at the last minute, at the very end of getting ready. We’d drive to her best friend Linda’s house, just a couple of miles toward town, and climb the wooden porch to her screen door. Mom would call out, “Hey!” and Linda would tell us to let ourselves in, her voice rising above the radio as she bustled from bathroom to bedroom to kitchen, sipping coffee in between wardrobe changes and applications of lipstick and mascara, her bangle bracelets ringing like bells. I loved Linda, with her year-round tan and big smile. She was a small woman, but she gave good, solid hugs, her blond-highlighted curls brushing my face, stiff with gel and smelling of perfume. She was always running just a little late, and I was always glad; this was the part of the evening I got to share, before the three of us got back into the car and drove across town to drop me off at my grandmother’s, where I’d spend the night while they went out dancing.
Dancing was one of Mom’s greatest joys, and she could fall into the rhythm of any song, her limbs moving with the graceful ease of a trusting swimmer. Her friends still talk about it to this day: how she just lost herself on the dance floor, and carried them along with her.
Even in the car, she liked to move, wiggling her torso in something she called “car dancing” while she sang along. She often quizzed me, challenging me to identify a band or song title before the chorus came in. She’d belt out the words, loud and a bit out of tune, while I mumbled, self-conscious and shy. She’d elbow me gently: “Cutie, sing!”
Once, in a moment of childish, ten-year-old bald honesty, I looked at her thighs, smushing over the driver’s seat, half-covered in shorts, and pointed out how big they were compared with the rest of her. She got very serious and, in an edgy, no-nonsense tone I’d never heard before, said: “I’ll have you know that these thighs are what many men love best.”
Which led to a similar moment: one day in fifth grade, I wore hot pink high heels to school. I remember her mischievous smile when we got them—they were steeply on sale, a fun, weird splurge. I wore them with leggings and a long, hot pink crocheted sweater, and even though I was in my fat phase, I felt fantastic. While I was standing out in front of the school on the ice, waiting for the doors to open that morning, an older girl ridiculed my shoes and for once, for just once, the teasing didn’t bother me. I told her she was jealous. I told her I looked fabulous. And I believed it, staring down this boring little bitch in her snow boots.
Once, a boyfriend left Mom suddenly, on the Fourth of July. He woke up at our place, went home to pick up some things before meeting her at a friend’s barbecue, and never showed up. A couple of weeks later, we drove to his house. I sat in the car while she went inside. After about half an hour, she returned, throwing herself into the seat, her right hand wrapped in a paper towel. It had little flowers printed on it and blood was soaking through, a dark, fast-spreading bloom. Many years later, I learned that she had slammed her fist into a window in a rage and broken through. But if I saw her explode that day, I don’t remember. Instead I remember her mouth in a taut line, and her left hand palm-flat on the steering wheel, carving a smooth arc as she backed us up the steep driveway and onto the road in one perfect, sweeping motion.
When she made the bed with newly clean sheets, she sprinkled baby powder between them. Under the covers, it was soft and crisp and dry and cool. She tucked the comforter an inch or two under the pillows before smoothing it up over them. She believed in bedskirts.
She had the beginnings of carpal tunnel. She had terrible migraines. Because of these, she eventually had to give up chewing gum. And then caffeine.
I’ve had one migraine in my life, when I was eleven, and even though she darkened the house and turned down the stereo, I’m convinced she didn’t believe me, that she thought I was faking, replicating her symptoms for attention. I wasn’t; I remember the pain vividly and terribly—and, worse, that it had started with fear. I’d been reading and suddenly the words didn’t make sense to me, became nothing more than black marks I couldn’t decipher. I was afraid they would stay that way forever.
In a town where no one did, she locked every single door at night. She checked and double-checked, flipping the brass bolts in and out. If it was hot out, she would leave a few windows cracked open. But it made her a little nervous.
She ate pickled green pepperoncini by the jar, sitting on the couch and pulling them out by their shriveled stems. She loved ice cream, could eat a pint in one sitting.
When kids at school called me Heifer, she told me to ignore them, as though this were possible.
Once, in sixth grade, two friends and I—all of us studious, generally well-behaved kids—got caught writing mean notes about our pregnant teacher, Ms. Shane, scribbling back and forth on a big, unlined sheet of paper. We were forced to take a photocopy of the note home and have it signed by our parents so they could see what we’d done. This was the most perfect, most terrifying punishment: I couldn’t stand it when my mother was disappointed in me.
When I showed her the note, crying already as I handed it over, she took a few moments to read it, and then said, simply, “Don’t get caught next time.” This was completely out of character, a gracious, one-off reprieve.
When some punk teenagers smashed the huge pumpkin we carved one Halloween, she wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper to shame them. Another time, she and her boyfriend passed a struck deer on the side of the road, still alive. She insisted they circle back, haul it into the bed of his pickup, and take it to a wildlife rescue farm. She appeared in the paper again for this kindness.
In her romantic selections, she could have done better, and she could have done worse. She was often imperfect in her own love, but that didn’t lead to her death.
Because of her, I used to try to save the tiny moles our cat chased in the yard.
Because of her, I sing along to the radio, in my terrible voice, and I drive with the windo
ws down, the air whipping across my arms.
Because of her, I will always believe love is possible.
Her name was Crystal. She cast light.
* * *
Two days before my mother died, the sun hid behind the moon. For years, I would remember the eclipse as having occurred weeks before, a beautiful event that I—a precocious, nerdy twelve-year-old—had anticipated with great happiness. My memory wrapped it in weeks of empty time that had not existed, trying to keep it untainted, pristine.
It was a Tuesday of bright sunshine. I remember standing on the school lawn with my classmates, cardboard pinhole viewers held up to a greeting-card sky—solid blue, accents of puffy cloud. Everyone was giggling and jostling; we couldn’t see the moon approaching. But when the songbirds went silent and the disk of the moon appeared, not like a hole but like a solid piece of construction paper sliding across the surface of our viewers, everyone quieted down. As the edge of the thing bit into the sun, we gasped. I stood transfixed as it slid into place, much faster than I’d expected, and willed it to stop. If it had, we could have stayed right there in that perfect moment indefinitely, safe on the border of night and day, childhood and adolescence, school and home.
It was an annular eclipse, the moon not quite obscuring the entire sun, instead forming a glowing band of light along its edge. I snuck a glance directly at the sky and found a ring that was more beautiful and more piercing than a full sun could ever be. A glowing yellow ring. I could slip my finger through it, hold it on my hand, bring it back to my mother and replace the one she wore, the one she pulled off and pushed on as she fought and loved and made up with her volatile young fiancé. I could replace that ring that came and went like the tides with something eternal; I wanted to give her a beauty that would burn forever. But the ring in the sky lasted for only a moment.
The eclipse proved something to me. I had been waiting for years to see one and it had finally come, as though my wishes had made it manifest. At the time, the eclipse seemed a culmination of so many good things that were happening in my life—I had begun to write something I thought of as a novel, I was making more friends, my chubbiness was melting away. And most important, my mother seemed happy; that gold band and its small diamond had been sitting on her finger more often than not. That slice of night in the day seemed like a miracle, a singular event that showed, just by its existence, that regularity and constant motion ruled the universe.
But historically, eclipses are not good signs. Eclipses are threats to safety and order. Angry gods flaunting their power—frogs, dragons, and demons eating the sun. Eclipses portend war, famine, and death. After the eclipse come chaos and disorder, raping and pillaging. When I looked up at the sky, I saw none of this. I saw only beauty in that fire-ringed darkness. I didn’t know that one small moment of darkness foreshadowed a much greater one. One that would block out the light entirely, and hover there for a very long time.
2
* * *
the night
The horror begins quietly, in the midnight hours between May 11 and May 12, 1994, after one day has faded and before the next has begun. I’ve been sleeping for hours, curled on my side and wedged among my many stuffed animals, surrounded by the white, filigreed metal of my daybed, one palm pressed flat under my pillow. Then, through the fog of sleep, muffled voices push their way into my brain. An argument. A high voice, a low one. They come to me as if through deep water. I’ve heard this angry duet before, and it awakens me no further. I remain submerged, and moments later I slip back into unconsciousness. Uncountable dreamless minutes pass.
The stillness is shattered by my mother screaming “No! No! No!” Over and over and over. My body lurches into a sitting position as quickly as my eyes open, and suddenly all the lights are on inside me, my blood is slamming through my veins, a high humming is beginning in my head, and I can feel my eyes continuing to open, stretching wider and wider, as though alertness alone could serve as a defense. I’m frozen bolt upright, palms flat beside my thighs, fingers clenching the sheets tighter and tighter as my mother continues to scream. She’s so loud it’s inside my every cell, so loud her screams turn the wall beside my bed to paper. That wall is all that separates my room from the living room, which opens up into the kitchen. I think she’s right in the middle, in the broad opening between those two rooms. I can hear her voice ring off the linoleum, the sturdy cabinets and drawers. We are maybe fifteen feet away from each other. We live alone. Just the two of us.
Panic spills out of me in one word: “Mom?!” Then I try to recall that word, to pull that air back in, gasping sharply because I realize, suddenly, that she can’t answer me without giving me away. I ball my hands into fists and my spine bends down sharply, as though expecting a blow to the head. I shut my eyes for just a second and will myself to disappear. Then I open them wide and listen for any sign that whoever’s out there with her has heard me. I hope that her terror has drowned me out. This hope feels selfish, even in this moment. The screaming continues, and I hear no footsteps approach my room, so I assume I’m safe. Something terrible is happening, and I can still try to get help, try to get us through it. Mom is still screaming “No!”
I swing my legs over the side of my bed and take two steps to my bedroom door. My electrified body registers my footprints in the short, bristly carpet. I lift my bathrobe off the hook and wrap it around myself, holding my breath as the slightly rough terry drags across my bare skin. My partially open door lets in a faint orange light from the kitchen; the dimmer switch must be on low. But the hinges are on the far side, so I can only see down the hall, away from the screaming. I cannot risk opening the door farther and peering around to see what is happening. I don’t need to see. I need to survive. Mom is still screaming “No!”
I grip the door handle tightly in my sweating palm, turn it slowly. I hold the latch in while I push the door shut, as silently as possible. There is no quiet way to push the button to lock the door, and it sounds like a gunshot announcing my presence. I flinch and wait, but nothing changes. I sit back down on the bed. My feet hover parallel to the floor. My posture is perfect, and my eyes are still wide-open; even my ears feel wide-open. Mom is still screaming “No!” I can think of nothing to do but wait, silently, and strain to piece sound into meaning.
Then. Boots thundering across the linoleum. A drawer pulled to the end of its runners, slamming at the end. Metal on metal, a knife pulled out, surely. Impossibly, her screaming gets louder. In that scream I hear absolute terror, terror I didn’t even know existed. But there’s fury, too. In my bedroom, I’m still, so still my locked joints ache. I hardly blink or breathe. And then.
A heavy, wet thudding, fast-paced. My hectic mind brings me the image of a gigantic fish, a five-hundred-pound deepwater sturgeon, wet and thrashing for air and life on the hollow kitchen floor. A hopeless seizure. I know there is no fish. The fish is insanity.
The no’s continue, now quieter and quieter, automatic animal moans, drained of anger. A sound of defeated sorrow. In tandem with one of these last moans, I hear a deep grunt, the sound of pure hatred, disgust. A finishing. Then, the staccato, robotic pulse of a phone left off the hook, beep-beep-beeping into the new silence.
Finally, the phone stops screaming, the prerecorded alarm reaching its limit. The house is utterly still, and the silence presses into my ears as though I’ve gone deaf. I do not hear a door open, do not hear anyone leave. I know I’m not safe but it’s quiet now and this is what I’ve been waiting for and if I don’t move now I never will. The gray morning light will creep into my window and I’ll still be sitting here, wide-eyed on the edge of my bed. I’ll have to go out there and see everything in the light, and no ambulance will have come. I have to get someone to come.
I stand up. I take two steps. I slowly start to open my door. Quiet still: grip doorknob, turn it to retract latch, pull door smoothly open. The button of the lock pops softly against my palm. The orange kitchen light has been switched off, but the night-ligh
t still shines dimly from the bathroom across the hall. There’s a clock there in the bathroom, and I stare at it as I step into the hallway. It is exactly one o’clock, and the second hand is nestled in with the hour and minute hands. The trio makes a black mark on the night, and the black mark is, for a brief, horrifying moment, a large, segmented insect. A quivering insect, made of time. My eyes widen further, and then the funhouse mirror warps again and it is just a clock on the wall, ticking in the silence. I turn away, toward the living room, toward the kitchen.
Blood on the floor, on the part of the floor I can see past the couch, blood on the chair by that entryway, on the wall above the back of the chair. There are more pools and spatters, too many for me to take in; they are black, darkness within darkness. A little hope blooms in me, a desperate, fervent vision: my mother standing over a body, holding a bloody knife and staring at me, wide-eyed, terrified, ashamed. Self-defense, like on TV.
I step slowly past the couch, avoiding my reflection in the wide mirror above it. I can see myself peripherally there, my slow-moving shadow, and I know that if I turn and see my own face, see myself in this horror, something in me will break and stay broken.
I approach the body, a crumpled shape wrapped in a familiar blue bathrobe. It’s her, as I knew it would be. I shriek, “Mommy!” High-pitched but quiet, my throat compressed with fear. I hear myself do this, and I fear for myself, because I haven’t called her that since I was very small. I can’t slip now, I have to get help. Now is not a time to be small. A new part of me is born right here in the kitchen. This one doesn’t waste time on terror or sadness; her only goal is to find a phone and make a call and get herself and me and Mom out of this alive. This second self begins acting without hesitation, propelling my body along, forward, forward, forward.