by Sarah Smarsh
Aaron’s small apartment in a poor neighborhood was clean, thanks to his wife, but he gave me the creeps and his eyes were always cloudy-looking. He had opened a can of beer first thing in the morning for so many decades that doctors warned him not to stop.
In Dorothy’s apartment, the blinds were drawn. She was worried the man in the television was talking to her. She was obese by then and had type 2 diabetes. “Diabeetus,” Grandma called it.
Dorothy was always saying, “That can’t be.” If she didn’t believe what you were telling her, or if she didn’t believe the nightly news, or whatever else, it was always, “Well, that can’t be.” Even her stare said it. She had a way of looking at you, an animal distance in her eyes, one eyebrow pointed toward her dry hairline, dark and graying. Her eyes were yellowish green like Betty’s and mine, but schizophrenia made them see things we didn’t.
Dorothy carried with her the mysterious aura of her apartment, which smelled like Vicks VapoRub. On tables lay her day-of-the-week pillboxes full of medicine she pretended to take, along with astrology magazines, little ceramic figures of cats and clowns, bowls of sugar-free candy, Publishers Clearing House mailings opened with hope. An old television flashed images with too much red tint. On one wall hung an awkwardly placed portrait of Jesus Christ, his brow drawn and imploring.
She moved in with us for a while at the farm. I had started seventh grade ten miles west in Kingman, a town of more than three thousand people, after telling Grandma Betty that I wasn’t learning enough in Murdock. After the long bus ride home, I’d find Great-Grandma Dorothy sitting quietly at the kitchen table. But soon she moved back to Wichita.
When I was a little older I’d come to wonder whether my mom and grandma’s vagabond ways amounted to behavioral training from a mentally ill matriarch. I’d come to wonder, too, how so many women ended up feeling crazy. It seemed to have something to do with kitchens, and most of the recipes of my childhood could be traced back to Dorothy.
The last time I saw her, Thanksgiving of 1993, she was seventy-one years old, sitting in the farmhouse living room and painting her long, brittle nails, ridged and yellow beneath a pinkish-orange lacquer. I was thirteen, an eighth grader newly uncomfortable around her and most adults. She wore a bright rayon muumuu and sat with her legs parted to make way for an abundant middle. She breathed with an oxygen tank and smoked cigarettes anyway. Dangly moles dotted her fleshy upper arms, and her mostly gray hair was curled with an at-home perm. She smiled and hugged her grandchildren and fed them her macaroni-and-cheese casserole or her cranberry salad, which had more walnuts in it than any salad has a right to. She scowled at the men because she thought they were good-for-nothing.
A week before Christmas, Dorothy had a stroke alone in her apartment. She pushed the Help button her children had ordered, but help took too long to arrive. At the hospital, her grown children agreed to take her off life support.
Grandma Betty was quiet in the front seat on the way to the funeral. We got to the mortuary chapel, and I saw Mom. It was only the third time I had seen her cry. She was hurting because she had lost her grandma, who decades earlier had been a mother to her. I knew that when Mom was a baby, and teenage Betty went to work or out on the town, it was Dorothy who fed her a bottle.
At the gravesite, the casket wasn’t situated correctly and nearly slid off the metal lowering device. Dorothy’s body shifted to one side with a thud, and the casket’s buckles came partly undone, allowing the lid to pop open slightly. The corpse’s face pressed against the opening. Aunt Pud turned away quickly, closing her eyes and putting a tissue to her mouth. Betty stared right into her mother’s gray face with a pained but steady look.
As Betty lost her mom, I looked at mine and realized how much I missed her. Her strange poise made her even less a mother in my eyes and more a beautiful, funny, smart woman whose locked-up love I wanted. By then, I was old enough to glimpse an understanding of her—the cracked foundation of her life that I overheard in hushed family conversations about the past.
Mom was even less inclined to talk about that past than Grandma was. At the farm, I dug through photos and documents hidden in drawers to piece together her own childhood. I saw there a black-haired, dark-skinned father and a blond baby no one had ever told me about.
Living in the same corner bedroom that Mom had inhabited as a teenager, I cried when I found a little trunk of her teenage keepsakes deep in the narrow old closet beneath our collapsing brick chimney. I’d been living with Grandma for over two years, and I’d never been as happy as I was living at the farm and going to school in Kingman. But I’d never stopped worrying about living so far from my parents and brother. I knew I was happier that way, but I felt like I was failing my responsibility to my immediate family—to protect and teach Matt, to discourage my parents’ bad habits, to simply be present. And I needed them, too, in the way any kid needs her closest relatives or at least feels like she does.
I’ve done so many things different from and apart from my family that it’s a surprising part of who I am, maybe—a deep allegiance to the same environment I increasingly wanted to leave. Considering that and my strange maternal relationship to you, I think, if born into a different environment I might have thrived in a mostly domestic life, maybe even been a very happy mother. That pull inside me was always there. I decided I should move back in with my mom.
I moved my things from the farm to Mom and Bob’s house in Wichita and started ninth grade at a big high school on the northeast side of town. Mom and Bob, who had recently been married in their home by Judge Watson, were getting along well. Matt was ten years old and happy to have me back; we played catch and cut tiny cardboard “Marlboro miles” from Mom’s cigarette packs to buy a poker set to share.
Now that I was a teenager, people often thought that Mom and I were sisters, the consensus being that we looked just alike except for hair and eye color and a few years. We quietly read the newspaper together in the mornings, wore each other’s clothes, watched the news together in the evening, and talked about astrology late at night while she and Bob drank their wine.
Mom was thirty-two and starting to drink more. Her reserved demeanor disintegrated into bawdy troublemaking when she was with her friends, and I would raise my eyebrows in disapproval. I hated my new school and felt like moving had been a mistake.
Mom didn’t try to stop me from leaving again—like maybe she thought, deep down, that she didn’t know any better than I did. So, in the tradition of my maternal line changing addresses in a matter of months, at age fourteen I moved, yet again, back to the farm. It was about two months after the school year started—an awkward moment to arrive at my new small-town high school. It was the eighth school I’d attended, and I’d just begun ninth grade.
The horror of being financially reliant upon a man who hits you, blows town, cheats on you, disrespects you, and generally works less than you do was so deep in the women I knew that I understood it by proximity. The men who helped raise me were good ones. But I carried such doubt of the economic institution of marriage that it never even crossed my mind that someday a man’s income might help me survive. I had trouble asking my own family for money, often pretending I wasn’t hungry when my friends bought food with their allowance. I grew into a command of my own finances as early as I could.
To pay for gas to and from school and outings with friends, in high school I worked two jobs, as a waitress at a Pizza Hut on Highway 54 and as a secretary at the county parks and recreation commission. I would hold two or three jobs at a time for years to come, by necessity. I remember high school and college—the peak of physical energy, in theory—as the most tired years of my life.
I looked at my family then and felt I had two choices: be a relentless worker with a chance at building my own financial foundation or live the carefree way so many of my friends did. The latter, by my estimation, almost assured my becoming a young mother and an underpaid
worker, too. It was an easy choice.
The maternal cycle I was born to felt so hostile to my mission in the world—my amorphous intention to do something “big” in places those women had never gone—that I perceived it as a threat rather than a fate. It wasn’t you that was the threat, of course. You were an orb in my aura like a zygote in a uterine wall, helping me answer questions about how to live my life: What would I want for my daughter? It was the demanding earthly life you might have had that worried me. For both of us.
I pictured myself marrying and having kids one day, but there were a lot of things I wanted to do more. I wouldn’t have thought of it in those terms when I was a teenager in a small town, but it’s plain to see from what I’ve prioritized in life.
I was never one of those girls who want to hold every baby they see. Some of them struck me as a little too eager, to be honest. There’s often a big performance to the whole thing. That’s true everywhere. But being a Catholic girl in rural Kansas gave me endless opportunities to see it. There, the baby shower invitations from friends began in high school. A lot of those young moms were just repeating what their own mothers had done. It’s not much different from a girl going to the same elite school her mother attended, having the same liberal politics as her mother, and starting to think about raising a family in her thirties just as her mother did.
I had a feeling my mom had given up her life for me, and not without regrets. That’s what I never wanted you to feel. My being a poor teenager’s baby, then, is why you and I had the sort of connection we did. I knew deep in my cells what it felt like to grow inside a girl who couldn’t afford or even love me because of some mix of financial and emotional poverties that I had no choice but to inherit.
I guess a person could say that a girl with that depth of awareness would have done okay as a poor mother. Jeannie and I had a lot of interests in common but different natures. Babies fell asleep when I held them.
“Her moon is in Cancer,” Mom would explain to other people in the room. “Nurturing and protective.”
I’m not so sure that means I would have done right by you, though. The mother I would have been then was doing well on the outside but was deep in pain alone at night. Like it did for my own mother, I think, that pain would have taken over when you cried or tried my patience. I would have slapped you or screamed at you to shut up or, worst of all, beamed the same quiet hatred in your direction that I once felt.
I therefore rarely talked about having kids one day, and no one inquired about it. Oh, people gave me dolls galore when I was little, told me I was a good mommy for how I held the doll. But once I got to a certain age—ten, maybe—that all stopped. No one asked me whom I was going to marry or how many kids I wanted, that I recall. No one in my family, especially. They must have known I was on a different path. That was apparent to them, I guess, in my fervent devotion to school, my vocal views on alcohol and drugs as a trouble I didn’t have time for, the crushing schedule of extracurricular activities I organized myself if only to list them on a college scholarship application.
When I moved out of my mom’s house again and returned to Kingman, I quickly got back into that almost mindless achievement frenzy. I was too late to try out for the football cheerleading squad. Moving always came with missed opportunities like that—art contest deadlines just past, school play auditions too soon for preparing a monologue. But I threw myself into everything else—basketball, theater, track, student organizations—and by the next fall I was holding pom-poms again on the squad that in a small town comprises the same girls who lead student council.
My friends had changed quickly while I was in Wichita, I found. We had been a chaste pack of middle schoolers, but now they smoked, drank, and had sex with older boys on the hoods of cars on dirt roads. I myself had made my mind up about what I was in high school to do: wring it for everything it might be worth on a résumé and, above all, not get pregnant. I went to road parties but didn’t drink, instead getting my puking friends home safely along dark dirt roads in their cars that I didn’t yet have a license to drive. I had boyfriends but kept my jeans zipped.
My first big party was in a barn miles outside of Kingman. A senior girl’s parents were out of town, and about a hundred teenagers stumbled up and down the ladder to the enormous loft, where they sat on hay bales with beer cans in koozies and danced to country and grunge rock on a boom box. Boots stomping on the boards kicked up hay dust, lit by buzzing lights in the autumn night. I had fun but felt like I was on the outside of something—careful not to drink, not to let anyone touch me.
Striving to always do the right thing was at once the ultimate rebellion against my family and a boost toward my goals in life. The exalted virginity of my Catholicism, the prized work ethic of my class, the competitive ambition of my country’s economic order—I took them all seriously and saw no room for error, knowing that high school was the moment that would make or break my dreams.
Grandma noticed my straight A’s but couldn’t offer much about the path that lay ahead, except for the most important advice of all for women like us.
“Be careful,” she’d say. “You don’t want to get tied down.”
Like her and Mom, I had been a poor girl’s baby, and I knew exactly what she meant.
For many poor women, there is a violence to merely existing: the pregnancies without health care, the unchecked harassment while waiting tables, the repetitive physical jobs that cause back and foot pain. Then there are the men—whose violence I’m not convinced is any worse than a middle- or upper-class man’s, but whom a woman without economic means will have a harder time escaping.
I had dreams in which I killed men who were coming after me. I sometimes imagined such moments in real life, figuring out the ways I would fight. But my greatest strength was not showing any fear.
When I was a freshman, a senior boy who was angry that I didn’t want to be his girlfriend drove me to a dirt road late at night and pulled out a handgun. I sat in the passenger seat, scared but refusing to let him know it, and told him to take me home until he did.
If it wasn’t pregnancy tying poor girls down, it was dangerous men.
Maybe that’s why the person I fell in love with when I was sixteen was a passive, peaceful boy who had no interest in having sex with me. My family assumed I was doing what they’d done, what most teenagers do—sex, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs. But they were wrong, and it had far less to do with “morals” or Catholicism than it did with my intention to graduate and get a full ride to college with no baby or addiction or controlling partner.
This was such a foreign turn in our family that they looked at me with a deep suspicion. With my involvement in clubs and sports teams, I often didn’t get home until late at night. Grandpa Arnie had quit school after sixth grade in the late 1930s and couldn’t fathom the schedule of a modern-day student. He analyzed my tire tracks in the dirt. If my car had weaved on the loose gravel, he accused me of driving drunk. In truth, I just had a habit of driving too fast. When I was nominated for Future Farmers of America “sweetheart” at my high school, I won the nail-driving contest, and a boy made me a plaque with a horseshoe and the engraved words HELL ON WHEELS. Grandpa Arnie thought a teenage girl that bold must be causing trouble.
“I wasn’t born yesterday, by God,” he would say.
I would roll my eyes and fasten the bathroom door’s old hook lock.
“You’re not too old for me to spank your ass!” he would bellow. Grandma Betty would get out of bed and come downstairs, yelling, “What the hell is going on?”
Great-Grandpa Aaron and his longtime wife had moved into the trailer that was parked next to the farmhouse. His wife’s cooking and caring had slowed down with age, so Betty cooked almost all their meals. Maybe it was out of a sense of duty that she would have felt as a middle-class woman, too, but she didn’t have the option of paying for someone else to care for him.
I hated being around Aaron. When he wandered over for Betty to feed him, I’d rush out of the house, hoping to avoid talking to him. He started drinking Natural Light first thing in the morning, so there wasn’t much to say.
I’d hang buckets of feed on the three-wheeler handles and, after stopping at the bumpy pasture to take care of the cattle, ride for miles until the sun went down. My thumb would be numb from pressing the accelerator—past Old Lady Miller’s house, where I sped up because her dog always chased me, past the potato patch where Grandpa Arnie had found a young woman’s body after her boyfriend killed her and dumped her there in the 1970s, past the abandoned farmhouse where I took my friends to scare them and throw rocks at the glass, over the bridge where I dangled my legs as semis passed underneath and honked. When I got home, I made my dinner plate and slunk away as quickly as I could.
Aaron detected my disdain and didn’t like the looks of it, there being no worse crime than thinking yourself “too good.” When his shy wife let me keep a collection of swing-music CDs she had loaned me, that was the final straw for Aaron.
“She’s up to something,” he’d tell Grandma Betty. “Keep an eye on her.”
Mom didn’t trust me, either. She was still a thirty-something going out with her girlfriends, changing from pants to skirts when she left Bob at home, and drinking until she passed out. Our rebellions were simultaneous, opposite in purpose, and reversed by generation. It was an explosive mix.
Once, staying with her during summer months, we had an argument, and she said something so awful and inaccurate that I refused to speak a word in her presence for two weeks.
Finally, one night, I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep. Mom appeared in my doorway. With the hallway light behind her she was a tiny, dark silhouette. She stepped slowly to the side of my bed. She smelled strongly like herself, workday perfume and cinnamon gum and wine. She sat down next to where I lay. I sat up.