Mary Edna lived with her mother’s various relatives and whoever from the church invited her home, and I lived with my grandma because my mother was too young to be a mother; my mother wanted a chance in life, and Grandma felt like she deserved that. I think of it as the chain reaction of mamas. Everybody is guilty; everybody is trying so hard to make up for her mama’s failures. We all learn from one another. For example, my grandma used to always say “work like a nigger,” and I had to preach long and hard for years to convince her that it did not sound nice. She said it wasn’t racist because they did work hard, and I gave up explaining the point. Still, she has come around enough that now she’ll get that n sound coming through her nose and then catch herself. Now she says things like “He works like a n-n-nun” or “She works like a noogie.”
“A noogie?” I asked, and she waved her hand and said I knew what she meant. Grandma and I aren’t where we should be but we keep on moving. She is all I have.
And come to think of it, I guess that’s where my life differs from Mary Edna’s. At her house everything was coarser, shakier. She claims her mother’s first cousin never touched her but that she was always scared he might, that his face haunted her, and she discovered early that the more men she was with, the further she could get from that feeling. He is doing time by now, anyway. Her third ex-husband is probably the only person other than me and my grandma who ever really loved her, but he finally gave up and married a quiet, nearly homely woman from a neighboring town. I think he got as far from Mary Edna and her need to make somebody hurt her as he could—both of them running like rabbits, leaving the girls to stare out at the world with their round-eyed fear. They are four and five, dark-eyed beauties who deserve a hell of a lot better. I have thought of stealing them and driving to the west coast, except that would be one more example of running, and I think more than anything they need a spine of steel; they need to stand tall until they can safely walk forward. These days more kids are not in “a traditional home” than are—and those that are will one day go into a therapy office and say how very lucky they were, or they will say how the facade of a traditional family does not a traditional family make. There is no human with the answers.
Speaking of dysfunction and mama failures, I only met my mama once, and she was an absolute mess. My grandma said, “This is what I gave up my life for you to do?” My mama sat there like a big overstuffed chair, her toenails looking like she’d been digging potatoes. Mary Edna has always said that that’s why she’s big on painted toenails in the summer; you can hide the dirt. I told her that soap and water is another fine way to deal with the dirt—you can get rid of that dirt if you desire. That’s what I wanted to tell my mama. I wanted to say, “Liberate yourself—shed that filth and pestilence.” I wanted to tell her that mothers don’t come with a warranty; that she could at least try to make it up to me. I was, after all, trying so hard to forgive her, especially if she bathed and did something with her hair. Her name is Ashley Amelia, and I had spent much of my childhood mooning over that name and creating wonderful romantic adventures for my mother in my head. The one picture my grandma had of her was from a high school yearbook where she looked no different from the other girls lined up there in the home ec class. My grandma could almost always kill a fantasy with warnings like “Things ain’t always as they look, sound, or smell.”
I recently read that all of these foreign people were given a list of English words and asked to select which one sounded most lovely. Nine out of ten people chose “diarrhea.” This certainly seemed to fit my life. I hope those people weren’t embarrassed when they found out what their chosen word meant. I hope they just shook their heads and laughed about how you just can’t count on anything to be as it appears.
My mother was having trouble acting like a mother. It was more like she was my long-lost sister or cousin; she got along fine with Mary Edna. She showed us pictures of the latest man to dump her, and my grandma and I both shook in fear to see such an ugly face. For all the things my grandma had always said about the boy who had fathered me—a thick thatch of hair parted too far to the right, so that it pitched off like a rooftop (deceiving hair, because it made him seem sweet, when really he was the devil incarnate)—he was far superior to this thing in the photo. She stared down at his ugly face (even Mary Edna couldn’t bear to look at the photo, said it stunk fumes off the paper) like she was in a stupor and said she didn’t know why he treated her so bad. She said his words sometimes were so mean they cut her to the bone, though for the life of me I couldn’t see a bone through that balloon of a body. I kept thinking that his words must have punctured, sliced like a knife does a melon. He ate what was edible and trashed the rest, and she had been rotting ever since, carrying that sweet, rotten smell of decay in her every pore and crevice. When she said she guessed she better head to the bus station, my grandma did not try to stop her, as I’m sure she wished somebody would. My grandma said she couldn’t afford to keep her around and give her the liquor that without a doubt was close to killing her. Grandma said that when the time came, she wouldn’t even need to be embalmed. I pictured this huge woman bottled up like those old pickled eggs they used to sell in the little grocery store down the road.
“My mama is all but dead,” I kept thinking, and when she opened her arms to hug me, I felt like my heart was breaking. Here she was, already a ghost and replaced with this fleshy apparition.
If I was a child I might’ve been shuffled off to DSS but instead my friend Elizabeth, the third-grade teacher I am the assistant for, came and took me out to lunch, got me to talk about these things, cry a little bit. Elizabeth is a saint. If Mother Teresa had been five feet nine inches with wild red hair and was pro-choice, that would be Elizabeth. Sometimes I like to stand and look in through the glass of her front door and see her inside with her husband and baby; just this glimpse is all I need to make me hang on for what will be right for me. I want things to be clean, sober. I want Mary Edna to want the same things, but she is nowhere near seeing it all my way.
The only other thing I know about my daddy was told to me that day my mother came to visit. When he was a boy he had two cats he liked to torture. Their names were Uddnnnn and Errrrrnt, so that when my daddy went outside to call them, it sounded like a car wreck. A car wreck sounds like such a pleasant event compared to spending time with him. And why did somebody named Ashley Amelia choose such a loser? Maybe because her own mother threatened her husband that she’d kill him if he didn’t take to the road and never return. There are some people who are not entirely convinced that my grandma didn’t do something to him. Such is my legacy.
Way back, when I was on a scholarship at the junior college nearby and thought I needed to get married to be safe in this world, I often kept a boy in my room. I liked the way that a boy looked propped up on my bed, like something you might win at the fair. One of them was real cute but not too swift at all. A real limited vocabulary, limited mainly to well I’ll be goddamned or Ain’t that some shit. He was real handsome, when he was all cleaned up, but I couldn’t stop thinking of his head as a maraca, like the ones I loved to shake in elementary school; he had little tiny specks of information rolling around in his head and making enough sound that he didn’t seem like a zombie. Another boy who liked me a lot I let go, due to the fact he smelled like a chicken.
“Don’t you know?” Mary Edna asked me while laughing hysterically. “All the unknown things in life taste and smell like chicken.”
I said that I didn’t say “chicken” but “a chicken,” like that coop we grew up down the road from. The smell of chickens in a coop has nothing in common with the Colonel and his seven secret spices. I told her that she had to change the way that she looked at men, that it was like upgrading your car or anything else in life. At the time she was dating a man whose idea of a good time was renting those red-shoe diary videos and ordering out for pizza. I met him once, and he invaded my space so entirely that I could smell his gingivitas. When I told Mary Edna this
, she said I should be ashamed, like I might have really sniffed this jerk around the butt like a dog. I said, dental hygiene? You know bacteria, decay, death within life? Unflossed gums like an unplowed field. Rotten. She looked at me like I might be insane, and I thought then we had moved so far from each other that there was no hope of us ever conquering the world.
I love to floss my teeth. I like the thought of how you can take pulpy, unhealthy gums and floss them until they are tough and ready, no longer bleeding. There’s enough blood in this world without what is unnecessary and completely avoidable. That’s how I see the children I work with. Elizabeth has talked me into going back to school, and in a few years I’ll have my own classroom. I might have Mary Edna’s children with me.
I fall asleep at night while creating my future. I make my grandma color-blind. I tell her to give me a little bit of a smile, work those muscles so she will keep her face in shape, like old Jack Lelane—as ancient as he is, he keeps teaching. I give her a freezer full of frozen Baby Ruths (her very favorite), and I buy her that fancy sewing machine she has wanted forever. And then I start telling lies, as many of us do as a form of survival. I tell her that she ought to forgive herself for the way my mother turned out, that it wasn’t her fault at all. I tell my mother that I’m sorry her life took such bad turns, that it wasn’t her fault at all, that she could still climb up and out of that hole and start over. I tell her that just because your back tire gets stuck in a muddy field doesn’t mean you ought to drive the whole car in. I give her a case of Ivory soap and thick nubbly washcloths to cleanse herself; I give her a new dress and a new hairdo and a daughter who in my opinion has turned out damn well. I tell her I wish I had the power to send her back to the time of that high school photograph and give her a second chance, but I can’t. And that’s what is really the sad part. I can’t change a single thing in her past, and even if I could, I don’t know now that I’d want to. Who knows where I would be if things had not happened as they did?
First, you recognize what was wrong, I tell Mary Edna’s girls every chance I get, and then you accept it. This does not mean that you agree with it, just that you say, yes, that is what happened. And then you walk off and leave it there; it is not your mess to clean up. Right now I use that speech when I’m talking about the neighbor’s dog who uses the sidewalk for his toilet, or when some child gets mad and throws toys around the room in a tantrum. But there will come a day when I have to say it in reference to their mother; I like to think they will be relieved.
A Blinking, Spinning, Breathtaking World
The temperature plummeted, and by late afternoon what had promised to be the beginning of the spring thaw refroze in slick, sloppy patterns, prompting radio deejays to warn drivers again and again that they should use caution, should prepare for long delays on the turnpike, should stay home if possible. The back roads were dangerous, especially in the suburban towns that refused to use salt. Charlotte lived in such a town. She rented a small, two-bedroom house at a very busy intersection. The house was so small it barely held her half of the marriage.
She played the radio at the end of every day while she cooked dinner—Stouffers for herself, Chef Boyardee for her six-year-old son. Station 93.7—hits of the seventies. It seemed the music was the background of her whole life. Sometimes it left her feeling hopeful, as if she was back in high school and worried only about a math quiz or a date for the football game. The radio was her spouse now, churning out words and rhythms to prompt her emotions. Meanwhile, Sam stared into the big colored screen, orange and blue with the Nickelodeon logo. The Eagles, America, Seals and Croft—take it easy and summer breeze. She often thought of clothes and record albums and turns of phrase her husband would not recognize as her. He didn’t know that her; it was odd to think how often people must not really know their spouses. They know part of a person—the post–high school, postcollege, postdivorce person. Were the missing parts important?
It was in the afternoon that she most felt the cold; when the tendon in her upper thigh—thanks to an ancient hamstring pull—tightened like a knot. But there was more, an animosity, a fear. The cold set her teeth on edge as she looked out over that dark backyard just big enough for a swingset and sandbox. She was separated from her neighbors by a row of dark shrubs. The neighbors’ sensor light switched on and off with the movement of the icy tree branches. The lights should have been a comfort, but instead they kept her alert, vigilant, waiting for something about to happen. Her paper was delivered and often remained untouched, the headlines too bleak for her to handle. People were snapping, committing the unthinkable. Crimes were described in too much detail. Like the au pair who shook a child to death. The man who was leading a double life—he murdered his girlfriend of five years and their child, then drove to the next town where his wife of three months was waiting for him. The young bride was so shocked by his arrest—it’s a mistake, she screamed at reporters. Last night the word murder, smudged by damp plastic wrap, prompted her to toss the whole paper unopened into the garbage. The sensor lights went on and off and on and off, and she felt a chill as if someone or something out in the darkness of the yard were watching.
Last night had been warm. The sidewalks were slushy. Early crocus bulbs were trying to surface. It was supposed to stay warm, today and tomorrow; it was supposed to rain and wash away the last of the dirty gray ice outlining the yards. Oh, but April fools, the deejays began saying, promising snow, lots of snow, a nor’easter with inches and inches predicted for the next day. Phone lines and electricity could be downed. People should stay in, be careful, which translated to get out to the store while you can. Get your candles and sterno and firewood and flashlights. Charlotte had a closetful of supplies, which had prompted her husband to nickname her the liberal survivalist. He said that she was a woman prepared for all emergency situations. Bring on your storm, your power failure, your Nightmare on Elm Street. Now she went to the small stuffy basement to make sure her supplies were in place: water, batteries for the transistor, candles, flashlights, thermal blankets, astronaut food (Sam’s contribution). She was prepared for everything except her current situation. How do you prepare for rejection?
They had planted crocus bulbs back in the fall, a last attempt at planning a future. He had never planted a bulb in his life and dug every hole meticulously, measuring with a ruler, sprinkling the bonemeal, topping with the mulch. She watched with fascination, hopeful of spring, an end to the bleakness, a welcoming to warmth. Now all over New England crocus tips were reaching up, trying to break out, and where were they? Not divorced and not together. Domestic purgatory.
She should have seen it as an omen that she’d met him at the Spooky Carwash on Route 9. The waiting line of cars wrapped out into the road, screeches and bad organ music mingling with the squeals of children and the sounds of swishing suds. Both of them were young and single. So why do young and single people go to the Spooky Carwash alone in late October?
“Car freak,” he said. “And I like the entertainment.”
“Feature article,” she said, though at the time she had no idea that the local paper would actually run it. She wrote as a freelance while attending nursing school at night. They talked so long waiting in line that they agreed she would park her car and just ride through with him. It was a decision she was relieved to have made once they were inside the dark, scary tunnel. She grabbed his arm and held on until the idling car was pushed back out into the crowded lot.
Now the memory of the haunted house sounds and goblin faces gave her the creeps, and she went to close the drapes. There was a time when Jeff called to check on them. Are you in for the night? Are you okay? The calls both comforted and angered her. At first his voice pulled her back to the beginning and bathed her in a wash of promise, charming and witty and oh so concerned. She would feel herself near the point of begging; they could start all over. She would pretend that he had never cheated on her, something he still denied, as did all of their friends, who, she is certain, must h
ave known something. Things don’t just happen without any clues at all, do they?
Too late, he said, in so many words. Too late. And she knew in his dismissal that his life had never stopped moving. He got off one train and boarded another. He left his son behind like he might a piece of luggage. He’d come back with a claim slip one of these weekends.
“Can’t we try?” she had whispered, Sam asleep in the next room. But his silence, his inability to look her in the eye was the answer. He could cry. He could express a sadness that the marriage had failed. What he couldn’t seem to express is why it had happened—how, when, and where it had happened. How could he see it as a complete failure when she didn’t? She felt stupid to be caught in such an ordinary situation.
“How did this happen?” her relatives kept asking, and when she responded “I don’t know,” they looked at her in a way that left her feeling guilty and responsible. She could hear the females clucking their tongues, determining that she must have fallen short on her wifely duties. Poor thing, Jeff, after all, worked so hard. Yes, all of those emergency dermatology calls. If it’s wet, dry it up. If it’s dry, make it wet. From the beginning, he went to this convention and that, and no one ever offered to come and help her. But just turn it around and look what happened—little helpers flew in like good fairies with casseroles and hours of free babysitting for him. There were no survival kits for what that made her feel like. So why is it that everyone seems to understand why he left her? Why don’t they wonder why she didn’t leave him?
She thought of those people who snap suddenly—or so it seems to the public—like the man who impaled his wife on a post in their well-landscaped backyard, all because his tostado was too hot. Or the one who forced his girlfriend to climb into a trunk in his attic and watch wild-eyed as he tore off lengths of silver electrician’s tape to plug the airholes, to bind her wrists and ankles. All the papers. All the news programs. How many domestic cases? How many in the poor neighborhoods? Blue-collar? White-collar, like the hideous impaling, makes it to the front page.
Final Vinyl Days Page 9