by Sarah Perry
Still, Grace kept at Tom. She must have realized that she was going to lose her baby daughter for real this time, and she panicked. She latched onto the idea that the two were “living in sin,” her own errant weekends momentarily forgotten. She’d call constantly and demand that Tom return her daughter, so soon enough he drove to her house alone to reason with her.
When Tom arrived, Grace let him in—here was an opportunity to lecture him in person. But she hadn’t gotten very far before he said, “Hey, listen. I don’t wanna live in sin; I want to marry her.”
She had not expected this. “Absolutely not!” she said. “No way! Get outta my house!” If she kept yelling, he’d have to take it back, this ridiculous thing he’d said.
Tom backed toward the front door, square-palmed hands in the air. “Okay, okay,” he said. He paused. “Well, just think about it.”
But Grace kept screaming, “Get out!”
I imagine Tom chuckling, shaking his head as he started up the car.
Ray liked Tom, though. He’d bring his dull brown Oldsmobile to the garage where Tom worked, in the center of town behind the laundromat. They’d talk man to man, share a cigarette. The way Tom saw it, Ray wasn’t perfect, but he was doing his best. Grace was so high-strung, and she had so many damn kids.
One day Tom’s phone rang at the trailer. It was Ray, a sober weekday Ray: “Come on up to the house. Bring Crystal.”
Crystal was quiet on the ride over, tensely flicking one fingernail against the other. It was Ray who opened the door this time; Grace was nowhere in sight. He asked them to sit down in the kitchen, and soon it was settled: Crystal and Tom would get married as soon as possible. She was a minor, so there would be paperwork, but Ray assured them that Grace would sign. Crystal knew it wasn’t kindness that motivated her stepfather.
When they brought the marriage papers to her mother, Grace voiced no objections. The men had arranged it, and she knew how eager Ray was to clear the house of children. This would, after all, remove some friction from her life. Crystal would be sixteen in two months, just about the age Grace was the first time she married Ray. For Crystal, pregnancy was nowhere in sight, but freedom was.
Tom and Crystal were married June 20, 1979, in a little chapel in the nearby town of Harrison, on the slender northern shore of Long Lake. There were only two witnesses: Tom’s brother Tony and his friend Mike Macdonald. I have no idea what she wore.
* * *
Gwen never quite forgave their mother for signing those papers. One summer, she and Crystal were painting vacated dorms at Bridgton Academy—a tiny college prep school near their house, a green-lawned alternate universe—earning extra cash, driving each other crazy, playing one-on-one basketball on the abandoned courts. And then the next, Crystal was married at fifteen and on her way to California with a husband Gwen hardly knew. The sisters wouldn’t live together, work together, help each other out, as Gwen had hoped. Now she was on her own, and she didn’t know what might become of Crystal. In the seventies, California meant adventure and sunlight. To Gwen it seemed like everyone was heading out there, although most would return before long, finding that it wasn’t the gold-rush opportunity they’d imagined.
* * *
Tom and Crystal ripped across the country in a black 1966 Ford Fairlane, a boxy hot rod of a car that Tom had fortified with a police cruiser engine so it could better haul the weight of his tools. They had nothing to lose, and he had family out there. They stayed at campgrounds along the way—cheaper than motels, safer than rest stops.
The Fairlane covered more than three thousand miles in five days, finally rolling up to the house of Tom’s father and stepmother. Tom and Crystal just appeared one day at the front door. Tom didn’t call anyone to tell them they were coming; he figured that once he arrived, with no money to go home, they couldn’t turn him away. Faced with asking permission now or forgiveness later, it seems Tom has always made the same choice.
The family gave them the space they had: a huge enclosed porch with a view of rolling, thickly wooded mountains. They slept under an electric blanket to stave off the Northern California chill. The town was called Brownsville, in Yuba County. To this day, Brownsville is still an unincorporated community, like Milton, with a population of about twelve hundred.
I wonder about Mom’s image of California, the fantasies that magnetized all those other kids Gwen knew. Did she picture sandy beaches and desert bluffs, long-haired men and suntanned women in beads, only to land in a flannel-and-jeans, barely there town remarkably like the isolated communities back home? Or was she open to anything that took her a continent away from Maine?
The route from Bridgton to Brownsville is a straight shot across the country, almost the longest line you could draw from one coast to the other. I look at images of restored 1966 Fairlanes, parked in clean deserts with mountains climbing into the sky behind them. It’s exactly what I would have chosen for that drive. That car really does look like freedom.
* * *
Tom found work easily; his father was a logger and a welder and had good contacts. He first worked as a roustabout, an odd-job man, in a huge log-processing mill in Marysville, a larger city about an hour away, down out of the hills.
Tom did a good job, worked hard, and was soon promoted to servicing trucks in the mill on the night shift. The promotion meant that he and Crystal had to move to the city of twelve thousand, and they had trouble adjusting. Tom hated the late hours, and the work was tougher and dirtier than he was used to; he hated smelling like oil and grease all the time. But Crystal studied for her GED at the local high school. The school made her an assistant teacher, and after she aced the eight-hour test, they invited her to teach full-time. Tom still glows with pride, talking about Crystal the teacher.
She was only seventeen when they offered her that job. But she didn’t accept. She and Tom had never gotten used to Marysville, where they lived in an apartment complex on the sad fringes of town, a place with a mossy pool in the center, full of drug dealers and child abuse. They soon moved back up into the hills, where life was simpler. Tom’s father got him a job as an auto mechanic, and they rented a trailer right behind the garage.
Crystal liked to tease Tom about his motorcycles, an endless series of fixer-uppers that he bought and sold and traded with other young men. One evening she sat on the porch attached to the trailer, surrounded by the warm orange air of a California dusk in September, watching Tom work on one of his bikes. Much of it was brown with rust and the soft dirt on which it was parked, but he knew what he was doing. Crystal thought he might actually finish this one, couldn’t wait to sit on the back of it, speeding down a curvy ocean highway, just like on TV. She thought about this while she sat quietly sipping her beer and watching Tom’s back muscles move under his T-shirt.
Finally he stepped back and threw the wrench on the ground next to his other tools. He smiled at her and brushed some dirt off his hands.
“Hey,” he said, giving her a little smile. “Watch this.”
He jogged a few yards away from the motorcycle, then took a running start. He planted his hands on the back of the seat, flipped himself over in the air, and landed, perfectly, astride the bike.
She didn’t know he could do that.
“Wait!” she yelled. “Wait right there! I’m getting the camera.”
He beamed at her, face smudged, legs splayed out. It was still plenty light out for a picture.
* * *
But that motorcycle, and all the others, stayed in the yard: Tom never got them in good enough shape to take her out for a ride. Often, he’d take the car and drive off alone, then get in a wreck on his way back, driving drunk on mountain roads. He went through one vehicle after another. And even when they had a working car, Crystal couldn’t go far on her own, because she didn’t have her license yet and she didn’t like breaking the law. It made her too nervous. There wasn’t really anywhere to go anyway, and soon she was bored and homesick. Sometimes she picked up shifts at the c
afé connected to the garage, but there wasn’t any work around that stimulated her mind. “She went right up the wall,” as Tom puts it.
Eventually Tom got his hands on a classic Chevy Impala, a comfortable vehicle meant for long cruises. They scraped together a few dollars and drove back home to Maine—the California experiment had lasted about a year and a half. Of those California days Tom now says, “I was too wild—I wasn’t behaving myself at all! I’m positive she would’ve wanted to come back to Maine anyway. But it would’ve been better to come back, y’know, not as penniless as we left. She deserved better—I know that now, and I probably knew that then.”
I don’t doubt that he knew Mom deserved better. But I’m not sure she knew. Not yet.
* * *
When Tom and my mother returned to Maine, they rented one of Bridgton’s many run-down apartments. It was a place of tilted floors and leaky sinks, one of a dozen or so units in a flat-roofed, three-story building, a typical Maine affair with porches clinging to the green chipped-paint sides and crooked stairs and landings running over it like spiderwebs. Mom started work at Pleasant Mountain Moccasin, known as the Shoe Shop, one of Bridgton’s two major employers back then—the other was a textile factory called Malden Mills, known as the Mill. Mom worked at the Shoe Shop until her death: twelve years spent standing over a workbench pushing large needles through the stiff leather uppers of loafers, Docksides, and moccasins. She added the thick white topstitching around the toe, the rustic touch that made those shoes so charmingly casual, so magnetic to flatlanders who wore them sockless on vacation. But those stitches also held the shoe together; uniform stitches meant that it would be beautiful, would have a nice, even shape. It was a job requiring skill and precision and strength.
While Mom sped through each day at the Shop, Tom worked on cars and took on some construction jobs. He is a skilled mechanic and carpenter, good at the work but not good at keeping it. He’s counted on these sorts of jobs all his life—fixing broken-down cars, working house construction for a day or a week, hired through personal referrals and favors, friends and father figures. Back then, when he wasn’t working, he was at the Sulky Lounge, a tiny bar wedged into the main downtown strip, walking distance from their apartment.
Mom wanted to make a nice family, nicer than the one she’d grown out of, so she was thrilled when she got pregnant, and even happier to see that Tom was excited, too. He knew he needed to get his act together, and he reckoned fatherhood was the perfect motivation. He’d clean up some, they would get along better, and they’d be joined by a cute little baby. He loved babies, was good with them. For a while, he calmed down, stayed home more, saved some money. As her little belly got rounder and rounder—friends said she looked “like a pea on a toothpick”—the two talked about the future. But soon Tom went back to partying, once again blowing his cash on old bikes and booze. Even before I was born, Mom started worrying. She told Glenice she wasn’t confident she’d be able to track Tom down when the time came to deliver her baby. “How am I going to get to the hospital?” she wondered aloud. “What am I gonna do, walk?” She didn’t think she’d have the cash for a taxi.
Tom says he managed to be there for my birth, but some of Mom’s friends have cast doubt on this. He was hidden away somewhere, drunk and unreachable, one woman recently told me, shaking her head. He dropped her off and didn’t come back until it was all over, said another. I don’t know what’s true, but I believe everyone is faithful to their own memory. Tom is just as likely to have shielded himself from regret as Mom’s friends are to have created yet another story of failure.
But Mom knew he had it in him to do better, so she waited. She walked the creaky floors at night, calming my cries and listening to Tom snoring in the dark. California was over, but here they could get further ahead; she could contribute more working at the Shop than she’d been able to in Brownsville.
Mom dropped me off at my grandmother’s every morning before she went to work and picked me up at the end of the day, taking me home, where we spent hours on the couch, cuddling or playing peek-a-boo. Sometimes she was so happy she hardly noticed that Tom wasn’t there, but as time went on, his absence burned her. He missed out on so much, and she had to do everything herself.
Mom grew tired of waiting for Tom to grow up with her. Things got harder and harder. He kept drinking his money. Even when there was some left over, it was difficult to get it from him. He would go straight to Sulky’s after work, come home after she’d already gone to bed, pass out, repeat.
One day, Mom came home from work expecting to find cash on the kitchen counter, for basics: baby formula, milk, eggs. Tom had promised. Of course, there was no cash on the counter, no Tom in sight. She called her downstairs neighbor, Ruth, who agreed to babysit for a little while. Although we would leave that apartment when I was still very young, I have a hazy sense of Ruth from those early years: a dark-haired woman with a loud laugh, her kitchen full of spider ferns and cigarette smoke.
That day, Mom pushed open Ruth’s screen door and banged out into the street, marching to the bar, getting angrier with each step. She passed someone she knew walking the other way and could barely nod a hello. She yanked the bar’s heavy door open, and when her eyes adjusted to the light, she found Tom lined up with the others. She walked over as calmly as she could.
“Jesus Christ, Tom,” she hissed. “Where’s that money I asked you for?”
“Crystal, listen . . .” he began, his s’s gone slippery. “Listen, hold on. Les’ talk about this,” he continued as he got down off his stool, taking her thin arm in his hand and steering her outside. Too late. They had everyone’s attention. The afternoon crowd peered out the door, wondering how it would go down this time.
Mom ripped her arm out of Tom’s grasp and starting yelling. “Fuck, Tom, fuck! You don’t have it, do you? What am I supposed to do? You have a daughter now, goddammit!”
He leaned toward her, perhaps to placate her. He was bleary-eyed; she’d never get through. As he bent closer, she cocked her fist and punched him right in the face.
Tom was a violent person, and his temper flared especially hot when someone put him down or acted better than him. He was and is given to fights—in bars, at parties—that he can barely remember later. In his late youth, he had the shortish, muscle-heavy body of a boxer; my mother had lost all sixteen pounds of her pregnancy weight, putting her at about five foot five and 110 pounds. But when she punched Tom in the face, he fell down to his knees on the sidewalk and stayed there. He hung his head and shut right up, with all his friends looking on. If he didn’t touch her then, he may never have hit her at home, despite the screaming fights that kept their neighbors up night after night. But it’s hard to know for sure.
Those fights continued. Ruth and her boyfriend Spencer regularly heard them yelling at each other for hours into the night. They heard plates and chairs thrown. Crystal lost it again and pushed Tom down the stairs. There would be a few quiet weeks, then a huge blowup. A few more quiet weeks, then a series of smaller engagements. This chaos was familiar, and eventually she left it again. She was luckier than Grace; she had the strength to leave, and had only one child to take with her.
I do think Mom may have still loved Tom—at least a little—when she left, although his behavior in the years that followed would destroy any tender feelings that remained. But he wasn’t showing her respect, he wasn’t helping her, and she could see that he might drag her—and me—down with him. It was hard to give up on her dream of a happy family, but she finally had to admit that wasn’t what she had.
But she did have me.
* * *
As the years passed, Mom’s work at the Shop would remain our steadiest constant, the only thing we could really count on besides each other. All through my childhood, the smell of the Shop marked her return home at the end of each day, a sharp smell of leather and glue and dust buried in her hair and in the dye-smudged medical tape wrapped protectively around her fingers. I’d hug her
when she came in—the clock reset, the day renewed—and the smell would drift around to envelop me. When I was very young, that smell made me happy but also nervous, although I didn’t understand why. When I was a little older—ten, eleven, twelve—it was a reminder that my mother went places I couldn’t go, that she wasn’t just a mother but many other things, too. Now, when I buy a pair of handmade leather shoes or boots, I bury my nose in them and breathe deeply, and that same smell moves through my body, cell by cell. It’s the smell of her hard work, of her devotion to me.
The Shop operated on a piecework basis, with employees paid for each case of shoes completed. Each case contained twelve pairs, and paid between twenty-one and twenty-four dollars, depending on the style. Moccasins were simpler and softer, so they paid less; loafers were stiffer and more structured, and paid more. Sebago boat shoes, named after the most beautiful lake in the area, paid somewhere in the middle. Under this system, speed was rewarded, and there was nothing to keep a determined young mother from working herself to exhaustion.
The string Mom used in sewing came in long pieces, cut to just the right length to weave all around the front of the shoe. There was a needle on each end, and she would begin by pushing one into the leather and pulling it through until the two ends were of equal length. She’d push both needles back in, pulling them out on opposite sides, completing the motion with a firm outward tug to secure the stitch. Then her hands would arc in again to puncture the leather, arc out, tug, arc in. Sitting at my desk now, I pantomime this two-handed motion, shown to me by her fellow hand-sewers and friends. It’s like a reverse butterfly stroke, an attempt at flight, at keeping your head above water.