When she caught me slipping through the screen door late one night and learned my destination, her eyes went soft, and she cried into her hands on the living room sofa. “Has he ever tried to touch you?” she asked me. Her tears left dull pink tracks from her eyes to the corners of her mouth.
“No! God, Mom, no.” This was a painfully embarrassing question. “Gross. He’s, like, sixty. He’s my friend.”
“You can’t be friends with men.” She said this softly, as if she knew it would have no impact—that I was already too far gone. She took my hand and traced my lifeline with her finger. “Your life is long, Olivia. Don’t walk by the highway at night. Promise me that you will never, ever do anything so stupid again.” My mother clasped her hands around the back of my neck and leaned her forehead against mine, our same-green eyes very close.
“I promise,” I said. Then, half an hour after she clicked off her reading light, I tiptoed out of the house and sprinted along the parkway, cutting into the wind so fast I couldn’t smell the salt. My rebellion had started so quietly that it surprised me, at moments like this, to find myself sprinting in the dark away from a warm house.
I DREAM WILDLY: I am on a bus sliding backward down hills, I am in a dark house with a door that bangs open and shut in a high wind, I am setting off a long line of Roman candles with Jake, one after the next after the next in an interminable row stretching to the horizon. They make a rhythmic firing sound: thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk . . .
An X shadows the midmorning sun patch on the floor of my bedroom, and I rise to see two plywood bars across the outside of the window frame. My mother is outside, pounding nails into the clapboard, sweaty in the old Yankees jersey she saves for dirty jobs.
“Are you kidding me?” I shout at her, and she clenches her jaw victoriously. I try my bedroom door and find it unlocked, and a hot plate of eggs and bacon waiting on the kitchen table. The front and back doors are locked from the outside. The windows will not budge. She has unplugged and hidden the telephone. I sit and eat furiously, too much, until I feel ill. With the windows closed, it is hot and stale, and the smell of the nursery pervades the house: close, faintly antiseptic, a kind of sweet that is neither flowers nor food.
I am spitting mad at my mother. I am sorry I came back. I will not be contained, I will not be included. I do not belong to her. A picture develops in my mind of a future Olivia holding out a match in the middle of the nursery, lighting the spirit world on fire, burning away all the babies and the just-dead fathers, the cards and the runes and the old photographs, while the real and certain furniture of the world remains—clean, inviolate.
I AM LOCKED in for thirty-six hours. If I were still the obedient daughter of yesteryear, I might have been locked in forever. I spend the first morning ignoring my mother, who is, judging by the sustained banging of pans and hissing of burners, cooking a banquet for thirty. I watch the daytime talk shows (topics: “Runaway Homecomings,” “He Cheated with My Sister,” “Exes with AIDS”) until she comes to me, as I knew she would.
“Okay,” she says, settling beside me on the sofa. “Tell me all about it.”
“It?”
“What you’ve been up to.” She blinks too quickly. I don’t believe her when she says she isn’t angry, only concerned. “This boy.”
So she has figured me out. There is nothing to say. In my mother’s mind, the danger that Jake poses would far exceed the more legitimate dangers of a sudden adolescence: the alcohol, the group mind, the availability of mysterious pills. Worse, she would understand the pang I feel when I smell Jake’s dark boy-smell as he leans in to kiss me, and this new desire to feel his particular hands on the curves of my neck and the pooling places behind my collarbones. She would know just what I mean when I say that this feeling struck me fast and hard, the stroke of a hammer on a nail. She would understand me perfectly and tell me I am making a mistake. I imagine my sisters sitting opposite us in the brown corduroy armchairs, shaking their heads in solidarity with me. Don’t tell her anything, they say. She won’t understand.
My mother lets go a train-whistle sigh and pads over to the dining room hutch to fetch a tarot deck. She lays out my signifier, the Page of Wands, and hands me the cards. We take our places on the carpet. Imaginary Courtney crosses her arms over her chest and raises her eyebrows at me to say, Really?
“I want the queen.” I hand the cards back.
My mother shuffles through the deck, switches out the Page for the Queen of Wands. I can tell she doesn’t like this by the soundless tightening of her throat. I will be her Page of Wands forever. “Fine. Shuffle it in,” she says, meaning that I should shuffle in my question. I shuffle automatically, trying to think of nothing at all, to keep her out of my head. She lays out the spread.
Most of her reading is predictable (I am lost and confused, I should turn to my loved ones for guidance), but I zero in on the Knight of Swords, the charismatic lover, in the position that indicates the uncertain future. Reversed, the Knight of Swords brings instability, heartbreak. My mother and I sit across from each other over the cards so that what she sees straight on is reversed for me and vice versa. I am convinced that I am in the best position to see the truth of my future.
“Can I go now?” I ask when she is finished.
“You lied to me. You might never leave the house again.” I have no way of knowing how serious she is, but she has done a remarkably good job of escape-proofing the house, and I am truly locked in. Tonight everyone is going up to Asbury Park to see a punk show. I’m supposed to ride with Pam. Jake knows the bassist from the opening band, and he’s promised to get us backstage.
At three my mother has a shift at the store, and she leaves me locked in with Blanche. I go from room to room, doing damage. The kitchen surfaces are covered with her morning’s work: quiches, coq au vin. Cake. I put it all on the floor for Blanche, who goes into a feeding frenzy, but then, when she whines and paws my knee, I realize I can’t let her out. She dances at my feet. Her whining escalates to a howl. I put newspaper on the bathroom floor, but she doesn’t understand. She is in pain.
This is worse than anything that has happened. I lie facedown on my bed and shout into my pillow. Blanche cries and cries. Eventually, the house smells like shit. Blanche jumps up on my bed and curls up against the back of my knees, and I rub her silky ears. She doesn’t even know she should be mad at me.
None of my friends come by to break me out. They don’t know I need breaking out. So eight o’clock rolls by, then nine and ten. My mother comes home, and I hear her stop short in the kitchen, taking it in. I fall back asleep. I must have tapped in to some emergency hibernation instinct, for I don’t wake up until the next afternoon, when I can hear my mother explaining the boarded-up windows to a client as she walks him into her study. “It’s a vermin problem,” she says. “Possums.” I am possums!
When I do emerge from my room to scavenge for food, in the middle of the night, the nursery door is closed and framed all around with light. The kitchen mess is untouched, chicken bones and frosting all over the floor. I pick my way through and put my eye to the keyhole. My mother is kneeling, and I can see only the back half of her: a cotton peasant skirt draping over her calves, her feet protruding behind her, dirty and bare like my own. She is lit by a warm, flickering light. For a moment I think she has beaten me to it and set the nursery on fire. I open the door.
What at first glance appears to be a heap of random objects in front of my mother has been, I see, arranged carefully. Candles stand on makeshift pedestals: stacks of books, Kleenex boxes set on end. Certain objects I recognize from elsewhere in the house: the three ballet-slipper ornaments, the dried baby’s breath flowers from the living room side table. But there is more. A red plastic steering wheel, a crocheted blanket, tiny dolls made of thread and cigarettes. There is a plain wooden cross in the center, wrapped in Christmas-tree lights.
My mother is moving her lips in quic
k silent speech. She has lipstick and mascara on. She doesn’t respond to my presence at all. I stand there until I feel stupid, and then I ask her what she’s doing.
She holds up a hand to shush me, cocks her head sideways, and squints, her forehead trembling with strain. “I can’t hear him when you talk,” she says without looking at me.
“Hear who?” I ask, though I already know. I want to hear her say the things that damn her most.
“God.”
I leave her to it.
I wonder now what God said to my mother at these times. It was easy then, and it is easy in memory, to dismiss her religious fervors, bound up as they were in her dramas of mood. But she said that God spoke to her, and so it must have seemed. And so it was, for what else do we have but the seeming world?
BY THE SECOND evening, Imaginary Laura and Imaginary Courtney are seething. What a fucking bitch! they say. I can’t believe she would do this to you. Maybe she did this to us, too, maybe she smothered us to death. They laugh and give each other a high five. The house still smells awful, though my mother has shoveled the worst of the mess into the kitchen and is going about business as usual, showing clients in and out.
My claustrophobia peaks. I kick a hole through the drywall of my room. I have begun to hate the house, its very walls, and it feels good, the white dust clouding and settling on the hairs on my arms like a fine snow. Your walls cannot hold me! I think, and bare my biceps in the mirror. It is a lucky kick: right between two wall studs. I snip the chicken-wire drywall backing, kick through the clapboard, duck under a snaking bundle of wires, and I am through. Mice will nest in the walls now, but I don’t care. Let them have a warm, dry place. Let them invade.
I CONTINUE SLEEPING at home to prove that my mother can’t stop me from coming and going as I like. I tack a dry cleaner’s plastic garment bag over the hole to keep the rain out, and my mother, defeated, lets it be. Jake comes by to pick me up or drop me off, and my mother stands in the doorway as I jump into the passenger seat or as Jake gets out of the car to open the trunk so I can grab my backpack. They stare at each other, Jake with a daring curiosity and my mother with a lively hate, her eyes bright and her hands planted on her hips, the only motion in the waves of her hair rising and falling on the breeze.
Jake is aware of Kandy’s affection and of what would happen if she felt herself betrayed, so our connection grows in secret, in glances and trysts. We go to the beach or drive on the lonely back roads, going nowhere, making plans. When we leave this town, we say, we’ll go to Brazil and win a samba competition, get filthy rich, and buy a bungalow dripping with trumpet-blossom flowers. Or we’ll hijack an airplane and land it in Las Vegas, where we will become notorious casino robbers, making our escapes by air. But, I stipulate practically, why not just kidnap a pilot? Why take the hostages at all? Jake says it would be easier to hijack a passenger plane on the way to Vegas, security-wise. He smiles and plants his fingers in my hair at the nape of my neck, drawing me toward him. “Don’t worry, baby,” he says, “we’ll give the passengers parachutes and let them jump into the Grand Canyon, and they will see such beauty on their way down that their lives will change, and they will thank us.” This is how Jake thinks. I can get lost in it.
Sometimes I risk discovery by an Emerald spy to steer Jake to the bike rack in front of the grocery store, where I know my mother can see me through the glass windows from her checkout counter, and I hook my thumbs through his belt loops and kiss him hard. There it is, love, that tightening stomach feeling. Maybe only one person can love me at a time, I consider, and my mother has had the job too long. Jake must feel it, too, for he locks his arms around my waist and holds me tighter. How perfectly sinful all of this must look to my furious jailer mother as she scans cans of soup and hurls them clinking into a pile at the end of the moving belt.
FOR A FEW days after I broke through the wall, my mother ceased to see me. I turned ghost. We spoke sometimes like strangers, asking each other the time or where something lost might be. Now she has begun to acknowledge me again with her body and her face. When she thinks I am distracted, she watches me closely, a scientist tending a failed experiment. When she puts her hand on her hip, waiting for my answer to a question she has asked, she looks like such a normal American mom, in socks that come from the Hanes catalog. It makes me furious, how she can look so normal.
We drop the formalities and traditions, each, perhaps, afraid that to make Sunday-morning pancakes or to tend together to the roof garden might ruin these things forever, might ruin even the memories of them. We shed the layers of our family life, and as we approach August, there seems to be very little between us but this new animosity, this inarticulate anger that has become our food, that powers our appliances, that keeps us strong and separate.
Small tortures: I will not take her messages. I give her messages that do not exist, like, Danielle from the pharmacy said you dropped some cash when you bought that Tylenol—she has it at the register. Sometimes I throw in a real one to keep her guessing. She does not invite the boyfriends over to witness my betrayal. She goes out. She leaves my meals on the table at six o’clock sharp even when I am not there, instead of refrigerating them, a punishment for poor attendance. Once I eat a fly with my mashed potatoes. I leave the toilet seat up. I think this will bother her somehow, the illogic of it.
My mother is spending more time in the nursery. I thought at first that she was back to cleaning; I have stopped entirely. Tumbleweeds of dust and dog hair float across my bare toes, and in the kitchen, cockroaches die happy deaths, mired in ketchup on old plates. One night she doesn’t come home after her shift, and as a joke, I make a stir-fry and leave a bowl of it on the table in her place. When I come in at two A.M., I find her eating it stone cold.
IT IS A sweltering afternoon, and my friends and I are moving in a pack. We have heard that some city kids ganged up on one of the ratty boys’ little brothers and broke his nose last night, and we are ready for a fight. Jake is into it, calling us the Townie Army, and I am amped up on the drama. Pam has made me promise that I will find a way to let Kandy down about Jake this week, but I have no idea how to do it, and I don’t see myself trying to figure it out. Jake and I communicate by glance and by an energy that seems tangible to me: gossamer threads growing between us, connecting us. Even with my back turned, I can tell where he is. Kandy walks beside me in lace gloves, with war paint on her tan cheeks, enjoying the hunt. Oblivious.
As our war party rages down Second Street, making mothers hurry their children into stores, eliciting clucks of displeasure from old ladies at the bus stop, I see my mother. She is on her hands and knees, reaching behind a pile of garbage bags and broken-down boxes in the mouth of a long alley that winds behind a row of restaurants, nail salons, and real estate offices. The alley is sheltered by these buildings’ wide eaves, and at night it is the best place to sleep if you have to sleep outside. All summer it is a dormitory for runaways and bums, raided occasionally and halfheartedly by the cops. Beside my mother is a bulging canvas beach bag.
I fall back, hoping that nobody will notice, and duck into the alley. My mother is dressed beautifully in crisp black pants and a fuchsia blouse with a tie neck—expensive old clothes from her New York life. Long dark ovals of sweat stretch beneath her armpits. Her hair is ribboned neatly back, as she wears it for holidays. Her elbows move as if she is doing some work with her hands, obscured by the trash pile.
“What are you doing?” I ask over her shoulder, and she jumps.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Nope, just me.”
“Help me with this. I can’t reach the thing.” I peer behind the trash bags, and it still doesn’t make sense. She is positioning a gift box in the open mouth of a drainpipe. The box is wrapped in shiny red paper and tied with curled white ribbons. This has always been her gift-wrapping style; she taught me how to rough the scissor blade across the ridged ribbon and watch it curl.
; “What are you doing?” I ask again, loudly. I move to the other side of the trash pile, by the building, and grab the box. “What is this?” A glimpse of red catches my eye, and I focus on her canvas bag, full of these boxes.
She stands up, wincing as her knees crackle. “Olivia Reed, put that back.”
Kandy’s voice, behind me: “Hey, what’s she doing?”
“Charity,” says my mother, and smiles broadly. She hasn’t smiled like that all week; she is on to something bigger than our feud, and that is bad.
I rip the red paper off the box as my mother advances on me, incanting, “Don’t you dare don’t you dare don’t you dare Olivia!”
Inside the box is a tiny purple flower in a moist peat pot, a Russell Stover chocolate assortment, and a small sealed envelope on which my mother has written in her elegant looping script, To give you joy. It’s almost exactly what Jake said to me when he gave me the pink pill on our last night at the Emerald; did she find that phrase in my mind? I rip open the envelope as my mother snatches the box back, and I pull out a hundred-dollar bill. I picture, fleetingly, my mother robbing the grocery store in a stocking cap, with a fake gun (the kind with the flag that says BANG!) But then I understand. Our savings. She is giving away our savings.
This is not the first time my mother has felt generous. It’s the reason she keeps our balance low and the bulk of our savings tied up in two-year CDs, so it won’t be too hard to spring back from a generous mood. I count back, and a dead feeling blossoms in the pit of my stomach—the anticipation of hunger. Her last investment must have matured. The timing is just that wrong.
What I Had Before I Had You Page 10