by Meredith May
She stepped back onto her chair and resumed watering her plants.
This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. She was supposed to drive me to the store, show me what to get, have that mother-daughter moment when she tells me about her first time. I don’t know...we were supposed to have the talk now, weren’t we?
I was too mortified to buy sanitary supplies from old man Jim, a fixture behind the lone cash register who’d known me since I was small. He always rang people up slowly so he could inquire about new jobs and weddings and babies, or pass along the latest news of new jobs or weddings or babies. Jim knew the score of every Little League game, who got into college, who had recently died, and passed out cigars when a new baby came to Carmel Valley. He was our de facto town crier, and I was mortified at the thought of buying feminine products from the same man who still called me “kid” and slipped a candy bar into Granny’s grocery bag when her head was turned.
I pleaded with Mom that it was too embarrassing. I would just die if Jim saw what I was buying.
“Nobody cares,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Just go.”
Mom lowered the stereo needle onto a Bee Gees record, and I watched her for a moment, humming along to “Night Fever” and spraying her plants, willing her to change her mind. Why couldn’t she help me, just this once? The market was only a few blocks away, but I worried that by the time I got there, I might bleed through my jeans.
“Can’t you just drive me?”
She pointed at the bag on her head and shrugged her shoulders, indicating she was in the middle of coloring her hair and couldn’t leave the house. I folded the money into my pocket and returned to my room, where I tied a sweatshirt around my waist. I twisted open my piggy bank and took a few more bills from my college fund, then left through the screen door, slamming it as hard as I could on the way out.
“What’s your problem?” she shouted after me.
At the market, I kept my eyes on the floor as I ambled toward the shelf with the feminine things. The pulse of teenage awkwardness knocked in my ears; I was terrified that someone may see me and learn that my body had become sexually mature. I was physically, but not mentally, ready for womanhood, and until I sorted that out, it was nobody’s business but mine. I cursed Mom under my breath for staying home, then waited until the aisle emptied and quickly swiped a box of sanitary pads into my shopping basket. I chose the same brand I’d seen in Mom’s bathroom, and quickly buried it under a box of Cheerios, a carton of milk and a loaf of bread. Just another kid on an errand for her mother.
Jim looked up from his crossword and smiled as I set the basket before him, and he rang me up as always, making sure to ask me how the bees were doing. He automatically plucked Mom’s brand of cigarettes from the display behind him and asked me if she was running low. Matthew and I often made cigarette runs for her, but this time I wasn’t sure I had enough money so I shook my head.
“Okay,” he said, putting them back. “Grab yourself a candy bar, then.”
Mom was in her room with the door closed when I got back. I set the grocery bag on the kitchen counter, took out the scandalous pads and scurried to the bathroom. I examined the packaging, read the directions and practiced walking with a pad between my legs. My transition to womanhood passed as quietly as a sigh. I didn’t feel any different as I took my new woman-self back to my bedroom, and as I passed the kitchen, Mom was taking my groceries out of the bag with a puzzled expression.
“Did you buy all this stuff?”
I swallowed. I’d forgotten to hide my extra purchases in the cabinets so she wouldn’t notice.
“I thought since I was at Jim’s, I should also pick up a few things,” I said.
I had never bought groceries before, so Mom stared at me a long time before she answered.
“That was thoughtful,” she said. “But I guess you’re right, as you get older you should start paying for some of the groceries around here.”
I felt flattened. I should have known not to come to my mother for anything. She now saw me as an adult housemate who should divvy the grocery bill and not come to her with personal problems. I knew this, but it hurt each time I was reminded. When put in a situation that required her to put her needs aside for another person’s, it did not compute. Her circuitry overloaded and she shut down. Her insatiable need to protect herself was not going to change, no matter how many times I hoped otherwise.
I did not say any of this. I smiled and told her it was a great idea for me to start buying my own food.
Then I left the house and returned to my grandparents’ home, where I didn’t have to pay for the right to exist.
By the time I became a junior, Granny had signed on as a volunteer in the high school career center, so she could get her hands on every college scholarship that came in and steer it my way before the other students had a chance to apply.
“It’s not cheating, it’s just being smart,” she said. “Besides, you need the money more than those rich kids.”
Mom didn’t get involved in Granny’s drive to get me to college, and while I was thankful someone was helping me, my grandmother’s eagerness to plan this next step sometimes felt like it veered into a desire to get me out of her house. She gave me nearly weekly reminders that I had to bring home A’s, because there was no way we could afford college unless I got a full scholarship. When my birthday came, she bought me luggage. She selected a handful of Bay Area colleges for me to apply to, corrected the grammar in my college essays and called the schools to check the status of my applications.
Our mailbox started filling up with college brochures, but the most persistent recruiter was Mills College, a private women’s liberal arts school in Oakland. I didn’t consider applying because it sounded like something out of Pride and Prejudice, but Granny announced she had signed us up for a tour.
We entered the campus through an impressive wrought-iron gate on a drive that took us through a row of ancient eucalyptus trees. We passed manicured lawns, and dorms built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style with stucco walls, terra-cotta tiled roofs, and balconies. The campus had bubbling fountains and a creek, an enormous library, and I learned Mills had chefs who prepare three meals a day for students, even baking the bread for toast. It looked more like a spa than a college.
But what impressed me the most was the students. I met a violinist, a rower, a ground squirrel researcher, a computer programmer and a fashion model—all in one day. They majored in mystifying things such as Political, Legal and Economic Analysis, or Sound Theory. These were women who didn’t feel sorry for themselves, and I wanted to be near them so that I might absorb some of their confidence. By the time we left, I no longer cared that Mills was a single-sex campus. It was my first choice. They had an early-admission program, and I could apply immediately.
A few months after our visit, a student worker from the principal’s office came into one of my classes and passed a note to my geometry teacher. He halted in the middle of his chalk equation and looked right at me.
“Meredith, can you come here, please?”
I went to the teacher’s desk and opened the pink square of paper. “Call your granny,” it read. I used a dime in the pay phone near the front steps of campus. Granny was out of breath when she picked up on the first ring.
“You got it!” she managed.
“Got what?”
“Mills sent you an acceptance letter. You got in!”
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. My knees felt weak, and I gripped the edge of the metal box surrounding the pay phone to steady myself as colors melted and blurred around me. I could hear Granny catching her breath on the other end of the line. It was a win-win, signaling the beginning of Granny getting her life back and the start of mine.
“We did it!” she cheered.
Then I remembered the price tag. Thirteen thousand a year. Private school tuition wasn’t part of our f
amily’s vocabulary.
“But we can’t afford it,” I said.
“Don’t worry, you are getting financial aid. We only have to come up with three thousand. Your grandfather and I will pay half, you and your mother can pay two hundred and fifty each, and you’ll have to call your father to get the last thousand.”
Granny had obviously been putting some thought into this. By patching together grants and loans from the school, the state and the federal government, and scraping together what our family could from selling honey, teaching and washing dishes, I was somehow going to go to college.
Walking back to class in the stillness of the empty hallway, I exhaled my first full breath of air in what felt like months, overwhelmed by the incredible notion that I now had a place to go. Relief felt like taking off smudgy glasses; the mundane became suddenly beautiful, and I saw new colors where I’d never seen them before: in the rows of scuffed brown lockers, the tramped-down crabgrass lawn where we ate lunch, in the crumbling adobe bricks worn concave inside the mortar of the school walls. Everything was just as it should be.
Although I had yet to hear back from schools I’d applied to in Berkeley, San Jose and Santa Cruz, I didn’t want to wait. Mills was the first college to say yes, so I said yes, grabbing the first lifeline thrown to me. Like the bees, it was time to take a risk, go out there and choose a new home.
Later that afternoon, I knocked on Matthew’s trailer door, loud enough so he could hear me over the pounding bass. He turned the music down and poked his head out of the door.
“You rang?” he baritoned, impersonating the butler Lurch from The Addams Family.
“Permission to enter, sir.”
He swung the door open all the way, and took a step back so I had room to come in. He pushed aside a pile of music CDs on his bed to make space for me, and I sat down in a cross-legged position. My news fizzled out of me in one big whoosh.
Matthew clicked his stereo off and sat down next to me.
“Wow.”
I’d expected a slightly more celebratory reaction.
“That’s it? Wow?”
He sat down next to me on the bed, put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. “So that means you’ll be leaving.”
I was so self-centered. I’d been so focused on escaping that I hadn’t considered what it would be like to be the one left behind. All this time I had been the natural buffer between Mom and Matthew, absorbing her hostility so he wouldn’t have to. Now I was breaking an unspoken promise to keep him safe.
Mom had always aimed her neediness at me instead of him. Maybe because I was the first child, or because I was female, or perhaps because I looked so much like my father; I’d never know why she fixated on me and largely ignored my brother. She clung to me for comfort when we shared a bed after the divorce, while Matthew was banished to a small cot. She chased and cornered me, not Matthew, in the bowling alley. And even though we both consumed water and electricity, I was the one who took the punishment for the both of us.
Now, with a sick feeling, I worried that with me gone, Mom might finally focus on him.
“Be sure you keep staying out of her way,” I said. “You’ll be all right. She doesn’t come out to the trailer.”
“I know,” he said.
He rearranged his face into a smile. “Hey, I’m really proud of you. I suppose now you’re going to get all smart and stuff?” He swung open the door to his mini-fridge and held out a grape soda.
“Want one?”
I passed. He cracked it open, took a long glug and set it down in the sink.
“You know, she tried to hit me once,” he said.
A pain shot up from my stomach to my temple, making me wince. “What?” I whispered.
I’d never seen her raise a hand to Matthew, and assumed he’d been spared.
“She took a swing at me, but I grabbed her arms and pinned her against the wall. I got right up in her face and told her never to touch me again, or she’d be sorry. I guess that scared her because she never tried it again.”
Matthew was now taller and stronger than Mom. She probably sensed he could overpower her, so she backed down.
“Why was she mad at you?” I asked.
“I can’t even remember what it was. You know Mom. Could’ve been anything. That’s really not the point.”
He picked up his drumsticks and began tapping out a rhythm on the wall.
I’d wished a thousand times that Mom had an understandable reason for off-loading us; I almost wanted her to have an addiction, something I could blame to remove the possibility that it was her choice. But she didn’t drink. She never touched drugs. She didn’t stay out late, leave us with strangers, nor did she bring men home. She was never institutionalized or homeless. She didn’t gamble. She wasn’t a religious zealot or a workaholic. She wasn’t consumed by any of those things that can steal a mother and really screw up a kid.
Our mother simply wasn’t.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Matthew stopped drumming for a second.
“It was no big deal.”
Not to me. This was a violation of our unspoken family rules. Matthew was supposed to be off-limits, but I had obviously failed to protect him. He had rescued me from her once, and I’d failed to do the same for him. Not only that, I was leaving him behind.
I tried to cheer us both up by reminding him that Oakland was only a couple hours away, and I’d be home for summers and holidays.
“And what about you?” I said, hearing Grandpa’s words echo through mine. I imagined our grandfather was having similar conversations with Matthew about his future when they went to Big Sur.
“As soon as I’m old enough to drive, I’m gone,” he said, slicing his hand through the air in an imaginary trajectory.
“Gone where?”
“Cal Poly, probably,” he said.
Unlike me, Matthew already knew what he planned to study in college. A double major in music technology and graphic communication.
“Pick out another CD,” he said, pointing with a drumstick at his pile of jewel cases.
I sifted through and handed him Dire Straits. “What do you think is wrong with her?” I asked.
The CD player slid out its tongue, accepted the disc and swallowed it again. Matthew paused with his finger over the play button.
“Seriously, Meredith? You’ll never get an answer to that question.”
Maybe he was right. But I had to give it one last try before I left her for good.
Although our relationship was permanently severed, I couldn’t imagine, after all this time, simply walking away from her without an answer. I didn’t want us to live the rest of our lives always wondering why we never could find a way to love each other. I needed to know what my family was hiding.
15
Spilled Sugar
1987
Mom was watching a Danish pastry spin in the microwave when I came into the kitchen one afternoon. She was wearing her pajamas all day again. I could hear an I Love Lucy rerun playing in her bedroom.
The microwave dinged. She reached inside, yelped in pain and dropped the steaming sweet to the floor. The swear words flew as she rushed to the sink to run her fingers under the tap.
“Mom!”
“Shouldn’t be eating that on my diet anyway,” she said.
I filled a dish towel with ice cubes and offered it to her.
“Thanks,” she said, pressing it to her fingertips.
“Does it hurt?”
“Like a mother-scooter,” she said.
I swiped the roll off the floor with a paper towel, then wet a second towel and rubbed the grease off the linoleum.
“You’re a good kid,” she said.
I could tell something was on her mind. Her show was beckoning, but she was lingering in the
kitchen as if she wanted to tell me something. In these last few weeks before I left for college, we walked carefully around one another, not quite sure how to politely end our relationship. Both of us knew that soon there would be no artificial reason to keep us together anymore, beyond the perfunctory Christmas cards and birthday calls.
Mom poured herself some coffee that smelled like gingerbread cookies, and leaned against the counter, drinking it while still keeping her two burned fingers in the air. She looked at the ceiling as she spoke.
“So, I know I haven’t been the best mother...”
Was this an overture? Did Mom want to make peace after all? She fidgeted with the amethyst ring Granny had given her, as I held my breath and waited for her to continue. She spooned more sugar into her mug and turned back to me.
“What I was going to say was, you know I did the best I could. At least you didn’t starve.”
True. She kept me alive. I had to give her that. But now that I was leaving, I’d been thinking about all the mother-daughter things we never did, and wondering if she had been doing the same. What would it have been like to go on a trip somewhere, to see her in the stands at my diving meets, or to just sit together in the house and talk about nothing special?
“All in all, I’d say you had it pretty darn good,” she said, her voice brightening. “You certainly could’ve had it a lot worse.”
She was filling in both sides of the conversation, what she wanted to say and how she wanted me to react. My job was to listen and agree, to make her feel better by replacing my reality with hers. I crumpled inside. This wasn’t reconciliation; this was Mom wanting forgiveness for free.
“You think your childhood was hard. Mine was absolutely rotten.”
Suddenly, she had my attention as her secret vault creaked open ever so slightly. She’d made many references to her ugly childhood over the years, but always brushed aside my questions, saying she didn’t want to go into irrelevant history. But I’d never forgotten the one time we’d visited her father, how she’d left trembling in anger and it had taken her weeks to recover. She never told me why she was so upset with her father all those years ago. Now, maybe because our time was up, she was ready to talk. Even though I didn’t drink coffee, I poured myself a cup and sat down, ready to listen.