by Leah Carroll
I say, “Mom lets me eat grapes when we go shopping.”
She looks at the waxy green grape in her hand and drops it into a bin of oranges.
I THINK THAT things might stay like this forever—that it will be just me and Grandma and Grandpa—but then things change. The police find my mother’s body and in March 1985 there is a funeral. Nobody tells me about it and I don’t go. It’s a secret but I’m the only one who doesn’t know. Even though I kind of know.
TWO
When she was alive, my mom drove a blue Volkswagen Scirocco. There was rust around the wheel wells, and inside it smelled like marzipan and cigarette smoke. I remember that car. I remember standing outside that car while my mom chatted with neighbors. I remember being lifted from the backseat of that car by a man in a uniform one rainy night when we drove through a puddle and the engine stalled. Was he a policeman? A tow truck driver? I don’t remember that.
On the night my mom disappeared, October 18, 1984, she attended a Simchat Torah celebration with my grandmother at Temple Sinai, and then said she was going to meet a friend named Debbie. She promised to be back before eleven, and she reversed her sweet-smelling Scirocco out of the driveway at 65 Midland Drive, turned down the cul-de-sac, and was gone.
At nine thirty the next morning, she was still gone and my grandmother called the Cranston police. Officer Derrico drove to 65 Midland Drive and wrote the facts in his police report: We’d been living with my grandparents for the last month because my parents had separated. Last winter, my mother went to Edgehill for drug rehabilitation, but my grandmother was positive she’d since been behaving herself to the fullest.
Her daughter Joan would not, according to my grandmother, stay out all night without calling. She did not have any boyfriends. And she wouldn’t leave her baby daughter without contacting my grandmother to tell her where she was. My grandmother could give a description of her car: a turquoise Volkswagen Scirocco, but she could not recall the plates. They were Rhode Island plates. Maybe they were KC-??? Or maybe they were PB-??? She tried, and had been trying, unsuccessfully to contact my father.
The officer patrolled the streets of Cranston from Knightsville to Meshanticut but was unable to locate any vehicle matching my grandmother’s description. He took down my mom’s description: Joan B. Carroll… DOB 4-6-54… 5’1” tall… 100 lbs.… short brown hair… scar over one eye… LSW maroon print dress and tan heels.
The next day my grandmother called back. Officer Palmer reported to her house. She’d made contact with Joan’s estranged husband, my dad, Kevin Carroll. The vehicle was registered in his name with RI plates KC38. A 1975 Volkswagen Scirocco, color blue. The officer put out a broadcast to all cars in regard to the plate. Officer Davies reported that he knew the car, he knew the female, he had, in fact, stopped this female in her car several nights before. She was known to frequent the Atwood Avenue area, in particular Sonny Russo’s Restaurant at Atwood and Fortini Street. An officer was dispatched to the location but neither the vehicle nor the female could be located.
There was no more information to report at that time except this: “Attention: Investigators… Mrs. Goldman is quite concerned as to possibly what might have happened and fears the worse [sic] about her daughter.”
THIRTY YEAR LATER I sit on the back porch of my grandmother’s house with my mother’s childhood best friend, Audrey. She was interested in the Goldmans from the moment they moved to 65 Midland Drive. It was the early 1960s. Kennedy was president. My mom’s family was the only family on the street without a Christmas tree in the window.
“My world,” Audrey says, “was very white. It was very normal. Everyone was the same. I was fascinated by your mother. No Christmas tree! Everybody talked about the Jews next door.”
Audrey is reluctant to go inside my grandmother’s house. She doesn’t feel like she can talk freely inside. So we sit on the back deck holding enormous iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts. The plastic cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee sit inside a Styrofoam one. It’s called a hot cup and you get one whether you ask or not in Rhode Island. One nonbiodegradable material inside another. The Styrofoam keeps your iced coffee cold and drip-free. I tried once to explain the hot cup to someone, laughing at how provincial it seemed. “But does it work?” they asked.
“Yeah,” I said. My instinct had been to dismiss it. But it does work, really well.
We hear the cars speed by on Phenix Avenue, to the Warwick Mall maybe, or to the beaches, where you need to steel yourself for a full-body plunge—inch by inch is the fool’s way into this part of the Atlantic. The moment the cold salt water slaps your belly, grown men shriek and make for the shore. But here on the porch, sweat drips down the back of my neck in the summer heat and everything smells like baking asphalt.
“I want you to know,” Audrey says, “your mother and I, no matter how she died, no matter any of that, we were just giggly girls. We had the same sarcastic sense of humor. In a way, we thought we were better than everyone else. We didn’t care about painting our nails or shaving our legs.”
Audrey has fared well. Her face is the same kind one I remember from when she babysat me as a young girl. Her dark-brown hair has turned silver and is cut to her chin. “I didn’t get clean right after your mom died. I knew I should, but I couldn’t.”
The sound of cars in the distance. We sit silent. And then, “Your mom had the rare ability to be one hundred percent honest. I could tell her anything and just by listening, somehow she made it better. When she was gone, I lost that.” Audrey’s crying now, big tears that cling to her chin before they splatter onto her knees.
“She was, and I mean this, she was a real person. She was a rebel, a kindred spirit. She was… she was delightful. For years I thought about her every day. But I haven’t thought of her in a long time.” She looks guilty when she says this.
If I were a better person I would tell her not to feel guilty. I would tell her that I hadn’t really thought about my mom in thirty years. Not as a real person anyway. I would tell her it took me thirty years, thirty selfish, callow years, to realize my mom had been a human being, a woman, a person on her own and not an extension that ended where I began.
If I were a better person I probably would have also told the teenage girl at Dunkin’ Donuts that I didn’t need that hot cup and right then I’d be holding a sweaty, melting iced coffee and the whole world would continue to spin. But I’m not. Instead, I’m jealous of Audrey. I’m jealous of this woman and the grief she feels because I don’t know the Joan Goldman Carroll she’s talking about: my mother.
ON OCTOBER 20, 1984, according to the police report, they located my mother’s car. It was parked in front of 17 Mill Street in Johnston, Rhode Island. The engine was cold. One neighbor told them she remembered the car had been there at least since Thursday afternoon. Another neighbor said he didn’t recognize the vehicle, did not remember seeing it in the past, and had not seen anyone leaving or returning to it.
My mother’s pocketbook was in the car. In the pocketbook was a license and a ten-dollar bill. Inside the car there was also a NJ Registration 374 MXU license plate, which came back as “nothing in file” from the New Jersey Registry. The little blue Scirocco was taken to the police garage awaiting BCI for fingerprint examination.
Once the police released it, nobody knew what to do with the car. My father and my aunt covered it in a tarp and parked it behind a friend’s garage so I wouldn’t recognize it.
“I GOT THAT car, you know,” Audrey tells me, sweating on the porch behind my grandmother’s house. “The Volkswagen—your dad gave it to me. It smelled like almonds. Something to do with the engine or transmission or something.” This memory makes her weep but I feel vindicated. I knew I remembered that smell.
In all likelihood it’s the heater core that gave it that smell. A leaking heater core that spilled onto the floor of the passenger side where the scent would linger long after the problem itself was actually fixed.
IN THE MARCH 9, 1977,
edition of the Providence Journal’s Evening Bulletin, two stories appeared side by side. Separating them are two photographs of my mom, the newly appointed Warwick dog officer. She’s wearing a surprisingly official-looking uniform: heavy jacket over a crisp white dress shirt, buttoned to the top and fastened with a neat black ribbon. It’s topped off by a black-brimmed hat to which is fastened a large gold badge. I can’t make out the insignia but the badge is huge, almost comically oversized, replete with eagle wings spread across the top.
In the bottom picture my mom stands, hands on hips, in front of a cage marked NUMBER 4. It looks as if she has been snapped in the middle of speaking—she’s looking into the cage, her hands are on her hips, and she seems, more than anything, uncomfortable. In the upper photo, the hat and badge loom over her downturned face as she looks down at a puppy she’s cradling against her chest. In that photo, it’s as if she doesn’t realize anyone else is there.
In 1977 my mom is not yet my mom. She’s Joan Goldman, twenty-three, who has “taken a veterinary assistant’s course at Rhode Island Junior College and has had more than two years’ experience as a dog groomer and kennel supervisor. Before she became dog officer, she cared for research animals at Roger Williams General Hospital in Providence.”
In March 1977 my mom is still a few months away from meeting my dad. She has a real job for the first time in her life and it’s a hard one: She has had to explain to the police chief that the dogs’ kennels need to be papered or their joints will ache, that they need higher-quality food and stainless-steel dog bowls. She has had to beg a man not to surrender his black puppy, only to discover once he has left that the puppy’s hind leg is broken.
Her fifth day on the job she has had to deal with controversy when seven dogs were nearly taken to the Providence facility to be gassed in violation of a city ordinance that says animals must be held at the pound for fifteen days before they are killed. She has had a confrontation with the president of Concerned Citizens for Dogs, “the city’s most strident pound critic,” who was able to have the van full of dogs halted only after an anonymous member who “keeps an eye on the pound” notified her of the violation.
And, while it doesn’t say it in the article, on top of all that, my mom has shown up at my grandparents’ house with seven dogs in need of adoption and she will slowly, over the course of several weeks, cajole and persuade friends and strangers to take them in. My grandfather winds up with a black puppy with a broken back leg that he names Spot, which is a joke, they’ll explain to me later, because he doesn’t have any spots. The last to go is an older dog, a large mutt. He’s suspicious and not particularly pretty with long legs and short fur. He’s territorial and bares his fangs and is devoted, utterly and completely, to his new owner, Joan Carroll, the Warwick dog officer. She names him Brandy.
IF I FOLD my photocopy of this article in half it’s almost like seeing photos of two different women. On the bottom is the woman in the uniform, slightly uncomfortable in front of the camera but faking it with her hands on her hips. On the top is the woman cradling the puppy—that’s who I thought my mom was growing up.
My family rarely talked about my mom once she was gone. It was my grandmother who most often brought her up. My mother loved animals. She led the other kids in funeral processions for all the pets—the hamsters and turtles and fish—that died in the neighborhood. She would deliver a solemn eulogy and all the other kids listened, even though she was the youngest.
My mother smiled all the time. She was so happy and so friendly and everywhere she went the room lit up and people exclaimed, “Joanie!” This is why—my grandmother would explain to a sullen twelve-year-old me—I should smile more. I used to think my grandmother was foolish for her constant ingratiation, the way she smiled even at surly pharmacists and drivers with the misfortune of being stuck behind her. I realize now it’s how she survived. It’s how she survived my mother’s death, and my grandfather’s mental illness, and fifty years at the same job, smiling and clicking away at her adding machine. And even today when she walks into a room, pale and unsteady, her brain all but wrecked from Alzheimer’s, it’s true that everyone rushes to greet her. “Ruthie!” they say, delighted by her.
But most important, my grandmother told me, my mom was smart. She was so clever and she read books all the time. Once, my grandmother showed me a story my mom had written for school. It was about four pages long, handwritten, and it was about a man who murdered a child. When I got to the final page it was revealed the man was the child’s father, and he was horribly deformed and he had passed that deformity on to his son. The last line read, “It was a case of euthanasia.” And then beneath that was a picture of the grotesque man, rendered in green and brown colored pencil. I wished that one day I could be that talented. I asked my grandmother what euthanasia meant. She wasn’t sure.
My mother inherited my grandmother’s petite frame with tiny wrists and large breasts. Before I was born my grandmother had a breast reduction. “They took out four pounds of flesh from one side and six from the other,” she once said. She explained that when you were large-breasted you had to dress to cover it up or it’s all anyone would notice. They were a curse, really. She hoped I wouldn’t get them too. I’ve waited my whole life for those breasts to show up, but my grandma got her wish. And still I find I take fashion cues from her—shirts buttoned to the top and accented with a big necklace, maybe a brooch at the throat. I remember watching her in the mirror, taking off one necklace and holding another up to her neck, matching the accent in her paisley blouse to the amber beads.
My mother, though, had no need for fashion. She was a tomboy. She kept her hair short, she wore pants and T-shirts and plain blouses. I’ve seen two photos of her in a dress—one is her wedding day, in a beautiful empire-waisted ivory gown. In the second she is heavily pregnant with me and it must be one of those last few sizzling days that sneak up on you in September, because she’s wearing a waistless maternity dress and has bare legs and it is also, coincidentally, the only photo I have seen where she looks utterly and completely miserable. It’s the look of misery I’ve seen since on women in the last few weeks before they give birth, uncomfortable in any position, unable to sleep, everything swollen. It’s a picture I love, because for years my mom was described to me as practically beatific, a tiny woman cradling a lost puppy, a smiling sprite dancing into a room. But in this photo there’s no pretense. It’s hot. She’s huge. She’s not in the mood to mug for the camera. She wants me out of her.
“Your mom was wild,” my aunt tells me. She tells me how at night my mom would dangle from the sill of the second-story bedroom the sisters shared and plop onto the grass below, my aunt’s heart in her throat every time she did it. And then she was off.
“We were hippies,” Audrey tells me. “We wanted to hitchhike to the beach and we wanted to hang out in old-man bars and we didn’t want to do anything people expected us to.”
In 1968, the same year my father was dropping out of high school in tenth grade and signing up to go to Vietnam, my mom was fourteen. Everyone around her was getting high. I found a stash of letters in my grandmother’s closet once, the letters written in response to her letters to boys from her high school who’d gone off to war. They talked about the music they were listening to and what they’d do when they came home. They talked, more than once, about trying heroin, about how my mom should stay away from it.
My mom was also always a woman who took in strays. Stray dogs and stray people. The stories go that she one time clung to the side of a moving city bus, pounding on the door, after the driver refused to pick up a handicapped woman; that she was constantly on the lookout for injustice, volunteering to visit the patients at the Institute for Mental Health.
“We used to joke that we were social workers,” Audrey tells me. “Everyone would come to us because they thought we had our shit together. We’d be at a party doing God knows what and people would be coming to your mom for advice and she’d try to help them an
d then she’d say to me, ‘Audrey, I think I’m probably more fucked up than anyone else here, don’t they notice?’”
As the story goes, she met my father at a party. I try to imagine it, my dad home from Vietnam, his mustache and long hair, high-end stereo equipment, and Rickenbacker bass guitar. The two of them, like celestial bodies, partygoers orbiting around them until, inevitably, the two most charismatic people in the room collide in an explosion of wit, and charm, and no sense whatsoever that they were not invincible. The only thing my mom couldn’t believe was that a man as handsome as my dad would be attracted to a woman as plain as she believed herself to be. The cute one. The tomboy.
MY FATHER RARELY talked about my mom. I know now they were separated when she died, that they likely would have gotten a divorce. But there was something wistful in the way he talked about her on the rare occasions when it happened. My mom was smart, he told me. My mom was intellectually curious. One of their first dates had been to see A Clockwork Orange, and she loved it. She wasn’t put off by the violence at all. In fact, she was something of a true-crime junkie: Her favorite book was Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. She wasn’t big on music, though. That was a passion they didn’t share. She fell asleep curled up in her seat when he took her to see Elvis Costello at the Orpheum Theater in Boston.
Mostly when my dad talked about my mom it was to remind me of my Jewish heritage. My dad converted to Judaism to marry my mom and he took it pretty seriously for a while, though after she died he never observed any kind of religious practice. He wasn’t entirely sure he believed in God, and he’d been a good Irish Catholic growing up and going to Mass at St. Michael’s in Providence. But he wanted me to understand the cultural importance of being Jewish, and I can only attribute this to how much it meant to my mom.