by Sarah Perry
We had to pay Grammy rent—although it was less than we would have paid for an apartment. We were allotted one tight corner of the basement for our belongings, and had to keep everything under a plastic tarp so the damp wouldn’t ruin our photo albums and clothes, or my toys. We had to leave a lot behind at Dale’s house, which left Mom, a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a ten-year-old daughter, without a couch or a bed or a dresser of her own. Gwen and Glenice had worked hard to talk Grammy into letting us stay so that I wouldn’t have to switch to a lesser school district. Grammy, Glenice says, didn’t like how it looked—that her daughter, an unmarried mother, had moved back home. She didn’t want her friends to know. Her friends never came to the house, but Grace wanted everything tidy and exactly the same as before, just in case.
Grammy’s unsolicited opinions about Mom were relentless. In the first couple of months, when we were moving back and forth between Dale’s house and hers, she wanted to know why Mom couldn’t fix their relationship. Without knowing any of the details, she assumed Mom was at fault, although when it suited her she criticized Dale, and Mom for choosing him in the first place. She always pointed out when she thought Mom’s clothes were too “flashy.” She asked her how much she spent on groceries and how often she was changing the oil in her car—even though she herself didn’t know anything about cars. Whenever Mom was in the house, Grammy constantly hounded her. “Crystal!” she’d yell. “Crystal! Why isn’t the water jug in the ’frigerator full?” “Crystal, who turned the heat up—what about the ’lectric bill?” “Crystal! What is that Dale doing now, anyway?”
When Grammy started to pick fights, Mom did her best to appease. I’d hear her mumble an explanation or response, see the tension in her shoulders when her mother sent her off on a chore the minute she got home from work. I got home about an hour before she did, and I remember my rushing excitement when Mom came through the door, but too often, Grammy ruined what should have been the best moment of the day. And soon I became a target, too. “My, Sarah sure is getting husky,” Grammy would remark loudly to my mother. I’d be sitting right there on the other side of the dining table, blushing with anger and thinking about how “husky” was the label for the fat boys’ section of the Sears catalog. Grace always knew just where to strike; I so desperately wanted to be thin and graceful, and I cursed Tom’s stouter genes for making it so I’d never be as lithe as Mom.
Grammy hated that I read constantly, that I mostly kept to myself; she wanted me to make more friends, be more popular, get out of her house. But as much as her comments hurt me, watching her bully Mom was worse. I couldn’t stand seeing my normally outspoken, witty mother bow to this woman, and I realized then that their relationship must have always been like this, that Glenice had been right when she’d once told me that my grandmother had been very different with her daughters than she had been with me.
* * *
One day during this time, Mom picked me up from school about an hour early—a big surprise, as it meant she had left work. I remember all the other kids staring at me as I collected my books and papers while the school secretary stood by the door, waiting. When I got into the car, I saw that Mom wore a thick patch over her right eye, fashioned from gauze and the familiar white tape that also bandaged her knuckles. Someone’s needle had broken in half as they pushed it into a shoe, and a jagged end had come flying across the aisle and hit her eye—a strangely common accident. Sitting there in the passenger seat of her little Tempo, I was very close to her. Her attitude was stormy, and the creepy lump of bandage seemed to stare at me far more intensely than the eye itself could have. She had already been to see a doctor at the hospital less than a mile from my school, so it made sense to pick me up a little early, but she wasn’t interested in talking. We barely spoke, her loudest expression her hands tensely gripping the steering wheel. I admit I gazed at her more openly knowing that she couldn’t look at me closely while driving. I felt like I was seeing something I shouldn’t, something that in that moment she didn’t have the energy to hide. I wondered what else there was to see.
* * *
Mom was working tirelessly to figure out how to get us out of Grammy’s and into our own place. She didn’t want to rent. She visited a realtor’s office again and again, trying to figure out what we could buy and how we could buy it. She was tired of shuffling around, of living in spaces owned by other people—a landlord would just be another man to whom she was beholden. She wanted a home of her own, of our own, a place where she and I could settle peacefully, breathe easily. Something simple and tidy, with trees for privacy and a wide lawn in back where we could sunbathe.
After nine months of Grammy’s criticisms and my impatient frustration, Mom secured a government loan for low-income, first-time home buyers. With that and some savings she had scraped together, she purchased a plot of wooded land—two acres, not so big for rural Maine—out on Route 93, a narrow, paved but unlined road that extended from 302 on the northwestern side of town.
Soon after, she stopped by the realtor’s office once more and picked up a catalog of prefabricated homes. As soon as she got back to Grammy’s, she pulled me into the little bedroom we shared and handed it to me. I flipped through the glossy pages, which detailed three or four layouts and gave options for the colors and finishes of kitchen counters, bathroom fixtures, vinyl siding, and indoor and outdoor lighting. Every surface of the house represented possibility. After months of research and paperwork, her goal finally seemed within reach.
She took the catalog back from me and opened it to a page near the front. “We’ll have this one,” she said, pointing at the simplest floor plan, its boundaries detailed in delicate blue ink, the trajectories of its doors etched in perfectly curving lines. We were sitting close together on the twin bed; Grammy was out in the garden.
“This will be my room,” she said, pointing at the largest one, which seemed fair, since she was the grown-up. “And this can be yours. We’ll put your books and an extra TV in the third one, and a little pullout couch in case Glenice wants to come up and visit, or Gwen and Dave want to stay over.” By then I wasn’t looking at the blueprint anymore but at her face. She looked more lighthearted than I’d seen her in months, and seeing her happy was as exciting as the prospect of moving into our very own house, a brand-new house that no one else had ever lived in before, where we were in charge.
Mom and I studied the rest of the catalog together, and she asked me what I thought about colors and other options. I felt honored, like the house was as much mine as hers. I desperately wanted to add a bay window—it seemed the girls in the books I read were always sitting in bay windows, gazing out into pastures filled with calmly grazing horses. Of course, that option was too expensive. I had a knack for desperately wanting things we could never afford, which must have alternately frustrated Mom and broken her heart. But a wide picture window came standard with our house, and that seemed fancy enough. We settled on beige carpet for the living room and hallway, so we could use whatever colors we wanted for the curtains and furniture. But we picked fun colors for the bedroom carpets—seafoam green for mine, royal blue for hers, and rose for the spare room. For the exterior, we settled on white siding with black trim, cute and simple. In the next few days, I drew a picture of our house in colored pencils, based on the blue-and-white sketches from the catalog. I added a bright green lawn and a row of stately trees out front. When I showed it to Mom, I could tell she was truly happy. The next day, she went downtown to Renys and bought a frame for it.
* * *
This should have been a time of victory and the feeling of impending freedom. But just before we left Grammy’s, a shadow fell over us that would remain until Mom’s death.
One night, Mom went out dancing at Tommy’s, the dive bar that she and Linda liked, in Naples. She was a worrier, and she had a lot to worry about, but I think when she danced, she felt truly free. I was happy to see her go, dressed up in rhinestone jeans and a billowing white shirt with wide lapel
s. I wanted to send her out into whatever fun she could have.
A few hours later, I woke up alone and could hear Mom and Grammy talking in the kitchen. I shuffled down the hall, wanting to give Mom a hug and see if she’d tell me anything about her night. The light was on above the dining room table, low on the dimmer, glowing orange against the night-blackened windows. Grammy’s voice was high and quavery, full of that manic energy that always meant trouble. Her back was to me, and when she moved aside I saw that Mom’s face wasn’t right. Her hair was wild, and a purple bruise spread from her cheekbone up to her eyebrow. The eye was swollen and not open all the way, her lip split, her nose pushed off-center. The damage was all on one side—she looked half herself, half stranger. Her beautiful white blouse was askew. I stood there, speechless, while Grammy took pictures according to Mom’s instructions—one from the front, one from each side. Mom’s face was expressionless as she turned at right angles, making sure her mother could get the worst of the damage clearly in the frame. Grammy was shaking, but she complied, quieted down for once. The shutter snap echoed into the late-night silence of the house.
Mom took the camera back and I started to speak.
“What—”
“Sarah, I’m okay. I’ll explain later.”
Her tone left no room for protest. She slept on the living room couch that night, keeping herself away from me.
It was Teresa, Tom’s girlfriend, who had attacked her in the bar. Teresa had somehow become convinced that Mom wanted Tom back, after six years of bitter estrangement. Anyone in town would have known this was a delusion. While Mom had known about Teresa for years, this was the first I’d heard of her; I did not know then that it was her arrival in Tom’s life that had halted our visits. Mom described her to me: a tall, rugged brunette who would smile at me but not mean it. She told me to avoid anyone who seemed like they could be Teresa; if I was accidentally rude to someone else, that was okay.
Soon after, Mom had Teresa arrested for assault, those snapshots proving more useful than the ones she took of Tom getting out of Bruce’s work truck. A judge later ordered Teresa to pay for Mom’s medical bills, incurred the day after the attack, and also put her under a restraining order. This only worsened her anger, as Mom knew it would. But she wasn’t going to let Teresa push her around without consequences. And she really could not afford to pay the hospital.
Mom’s face healed soon enough, but her nose retained a slight bump from the break. I never got used to that bump; I felt uneasy when I caught it in profile. At the time, I didn’t understand why this tiny disfigurement bothered me, but now it’s clear. It was Mom’s beauty that Teresa hated, that convinced her that Mom could disrupt her relationship with Tom. It was her beauty that she’d attacked so viciously, that she’d tried to stamp out. That bump on Mom’s pretty face was a reminder that beauty wasn’t only power. It was also danger.
16
* * *
after
I would not see my mother laid in the ground. Her body was turned to fire and ash and pebbled bone with no one watching but a somber technician. I do not know what her urn looked like, but it matters little, because the family buried it. Her ashes weren’t scattered on a beach or a mountaintop; the funeral was hard enough. Her remains were buried beneath that pink, heart-shaped stone, cast into the darkness next to her stepfather, Ray, in the North Bridgton cemetery, less than a mile from her mother’s house.
Some days later, the police visited her grave and found a single black rose. After all these years, we still don’t know who left it, or what they could have meant by it. Black roses are the rarest of all, much more rare than peach ones, so it must have been silk or plastic. I like to think of it as a mourning gesture that accidentally slipped into poor taste, but I can’t help but feel like it was meant to be a mockery.
* * *
At the funeral, Linda had sat in one of the back pews. I had a vague sense that this was wrong, but I wasn’t able to speak to her—I was in the receiving line, and then I was ushered to the front, and then it was over, a mass of bodies rising from their seats, scattering to their separate sadnesses. There were other friends of Mom’s present, but it was Linda I’d thought of while I sat up front with my aunts. She seemed so alone.
About a week later, I visited her. Gwen drove me over in the afternoon so I could have a break from Grammy’s house, its dense air of grief. When I arrived, Linda looked as hollowed out as I felt, entirely drained of her bright energy. Suddenly I could see how the years she had spent baking in the sunshine were aging her. She hugged me briefly, then got us sodas out of the fridge. We settled onto her living room couch and turned on the TV. I’d never sat there before—usually the three of us had perched in the kitchen. It was the first time Linda and I had ever been alone, and the silences between our words were cavernous. We didn’t know how to be together without my mother, didn’t know what our friendship was supposed to look like. Within moments, the Addams Family movie came on.
Linda said, “Oh, geez. Do you want to watch this?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s fine. I heard it’s really funny,” I said. I was fast settling into the habit of pretending everything was okay, of wanting desperately to behave like a normal person. But the coffins and the animate, severed hand and the pale, waxy faces of the characters were sickening, and we watched the entire movie without laughing.
When it was time to go, Linda hugged me at the door, her eyes shining.
She said, “Keep in touch, kiddo. I love you.”
I didn’t keep in touch. The awkwardness of that visit, all that pain and silence, remained with me, and life took over. I would move many times in the coming years, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes against my will. There were too many people to keep track of, too many to hold on to. But I carried with me a lead-glass cat that Linda had given Mom for her last birthday, moving it from bookshelf to desk to dresser. I would look at that sweet, simple present and think of Linda: her best friend dead, the killer still free, possibly living in her town. I would picture her in her little tan-and-brown house, and I would write her a letter. But the letters never got sent. I folded them neatly, slid them into envelopes. I left them on my desk to await postage, where they got buried in books and homework.
* * *
Not long after the funeral, Carol and her husband, also named Carroll, took me to stay with them for a few days in the town of Peru, about fifty miles north of Bridgton. Their house could have been cozy under other circumstances, but now it felt dark and cramped, full of worn carpet and brown furniture and marooned in the woods on a poorly paved road that ended, a few miles away, in a narrow lane that looped around a small pond. Carol and Carroll had only one visible neighbor, an old woman who lived across the road. They were two miles from the center of a twelve-hundred-person town: cemetery, schoolhouse, two-pump gas station, one-truck fire station, and one traffic light flashing red and yellow.
Theirs is a small house, their bedroom in one downstairs corner, then the living room, dining room, kitchen, and a tiny bathroom. Upstairs, two small bedrooms with sloped ceilings, tucked under the roof and surrounded by narrow crawl spaces. At night, I watched television in the living room, which shared a wall with their bedroom, numbly staring at the screen with the volume turned down low so I could catch any unusual sounds around the house: a thud on the porch, a screen door creeping open. The distance between Bridgton and Peru insulated me, helped me talk myself out of my fear a little, but not much. I kept my shoes on. When I slept, I did so on the couch. The bedrooms upstairs were too far away. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hear if someone entered the house, and if someone came up there after me, I’d have no way out.
I lay on the couch and tried to convince myself that whoever the killer was, if he had wanted to kill me, he would have done it already. It was a dark thought that I hoped had the substance to hold me up. But every time the wind chimes on the porch tinkled gently in the dark, I imagined a rough hand brushing them, to terrify me. To let me know w
hat was coming.
Back in Bridgton, the police were monitoring any location that had anything to do with Mom, hoping he would make a mistake, show himself somehow. An officer had sat in a cruiser across the street from the funeral, and cops regularly stopped in at the Shoe Shop. Several times each day, a patrolman drove past Grammy’s house to check for anything unusual, and the Bridgton Police called Carol and Carroll every few days to make sure I was okay, to ask if we had seen anything strange. The police were sure the killer was someone Mom knew, and anyone she knew would have known that I was in the house that night. “We had no idea who this guy was,” Gwen now says. “We didn’t know if he was going to come after you.” Everyone around me tried to hide or downplay the same fear that kept me up most of every night, a fear that would remain unresolved for years.
A week passed, with Carol and Carroll letting me stay up on the couch late into the night and acting, during the day, as normally as they could. My aunt asked me few questions, other than whether I wanted milk or soda with dinner, and my uncle spent most of his time at work, hauling trees out of the deep woods and delivering them to the nearby paper mill. I was grateful for their pragmatism, their lack of tears. If Carol went to the grocery store, I went with her, glad for something mundane to do. Sometimes we encountered women she knew, and when they looked at me their faces were complex mixtures of concern and forced cheer, struggling under the fluorescent lights of the produce section.