by Wendy J. Fox
She checked the baby and the time again. Without the ticking of the punch clock at work, the hours moved unevenly. There were a few dishes in the sink, so she did those. Jenny was content in her bassinette, so Lucy Estelle took the garbage out, and bagged the aluminum cans. Always between jobs, Larry would have taken them himself to the scrap man, but she had always just left them on a corner in town for someone else to pick up. She thought of making herself some lunch, but she wasn’t hungry. Jenny’s diaper was fresh, and she wrapped her tightly in a blanket so she would not fuss, and returned to the car. She was low on gas, and when she stopped at the filling station closest to her house, the attendant refused to let her pump it herself even though she had pulled up on the self-serve side. No ma’am!, he said, and he also washed her windows. She tipped him fifty cents and continued towards town.
First she returned the dead bolt and lock to the hardware store, and Roger counted back her bills to her and offered to come out to the house and help her if she needed it.
“Haven’t seen Larry today,” he said, trying to be casual.
“Is he usually in?” She was a little startled. She did not know what her husband had done during his days, but it was not house projects.
“No, Lucy. I was only saying.” He closed out the sale on the old manual register.
“Thank you,” Lucy Estelle said, accepting her refund and sorting the bills into one compartment of her wallet, the change into another. She took a deep breath and left the store with its smell of fertilizer and dry goods, bleach, and packaged teakettles.
* * *
The other thing that happened in her dream was that she would be in the vegetable garden, and she would find something, like a tiny toe, a bit of hair ribbon, or a lock of blond curl scattered there among the roots of an azalea. This caused her to dig carefully, wishing for bristles and tweezers rather than a spade. She would rummage in the boxes in the carport for a discarded paintbrush or an old ice pick, and with the makeshift tools for her personal archeology, she unearthed a velvet dress and a fire engine, a stuffed bear—matted and maggoty—and once a full crib complete with yellow trim and tiny, downy sheets, the pillow imprinted but empty.
Always, the pigs, the cattle, and the sharp beak of the chickens at her heels. Always, her mother’s voice in the distance.
Sometimes, when she woke, she would wonder what would have been different if she were not an only. A tall sister to take her hand, a small brother to protect. Like the hens, she would guard the clutch, and even without her parents, feel sure.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Melanie
Summer, 1988
The apartment building they lived in was flanked by impenetrable juniper bushes and was between her mother’s job at the bank and Melanie’s school, and sometimes when she flushed the toilet the water knocked through the pipes in an unconventional way.
One day when Melanie checked the answering machine there was a message from her father about his child support checks. He was reminding her mother to cash them. He said he did not understand why she had not cashed a single one—almost a year’s worth. He said he did not think it could be that hard to just take care of it, since she went to the bank every day. He said he was not sure what to make of it, since cashing checks was what she did for a living.
It was not his business, Melanie thought, but she could see his point. She deleted the message.
She knew where the checks were; crammed in the junk drawer in a repurposed solicitation envelope, with two plastic windows on the front. This was unlike her mother, who was organized and saved receipts and kept records. The junk drawer itself was not even that junky. Melanie wondered if her mother was ashamed to take her father’s money, since she was very good at making do. Her mother had come from a large family, and she was the last of four girls—her three younger brothers followed her. Sometimes when Melanie complained, her mother told her that she should be grateful that she never had to wear hand-me-down underwear and that if she had a cavity she got to go to the dentist instead of chew aspirin. Melanie did not actually believe that the dentist was all that great.
“I don’t have any cavities,” she reminded her mother once.
“Because I had your teeth capped, and you get your teeth cleaned,” her mother said.
That night, when her mother came home, Irene was with her. Irene had high-piled hair and Melanie adored her—she smelled like cigarettes and lemon and was once widowed and once divorced. She never talked about either man, but Melanie’s mother said she would have liked Irene’s first husband, and when Melanie asked why, her mother thought about it for a little bit before she said because he was like them. He was young, and his name was Sammy, and he would have loved her.
* * *
Her mother didn’t get the paper, but she brought home week-old news from the branch. Melanie read the comics, the lifestyle section, and the horoscopes.
What meticulousness, Cancer! You may feel a sudden, urgent need to take a close look at your financial situation, wardrobe, cupboards, or car. List the things you need to do in order to fix them over the next few days. You’re going to spend this time taking inventory in your life. Why not? It’s important to get a really good look at the reality of things, occasionally.
* * *
Irene lived in a nicer apartment building nearby, with aqua siding and a small pool. She always wore heels, which she almost always took off as soon as she was in the door, padding around in her stocking feet, sparkle or suede waiting to clack home with her. Irene and her mother worked together at the bank. Her mother had gotten the job for Irene, because they had been friends for a long time. There was no part of her life that Melanie could remember without Irene. When she was young, Irene would come for Thanksgiving and stay the night and stay up late with Melanie whispering in the dark—Melanie would tell her everything: crushes, the teachers she hated, and the ones she loved, the things that drove her crazy about her parents. Irene always listened to her, nodding and sometimes squeezing her arm. You’re a good girl, Mel, Irene would say. Your folks are so lucky to have you.
For dinner, Melanie’s mother made an egg-drop soup, the wisps of white like lace through the broth, with slices of fried tofu on the side and a sprinkle of scallions. She was branching out, she said. Experimenting. Melanie thought she and Irene were dieting again. The apartment was warm from the stove, and they had gotten tipsy from wine. After dinner, Melanie spread her homework on the kitchen table, and Irene insisted on doing the dishes since they did not have a dishwasher.
“I won’t argue,” Melanie’s mother said.
“Because you’re not stupid,” Irene said, and they both giggled.
The pans clattered in the sink as Melanie worked through her figures. Her mother had taught her fractions with recipes as a guide long before they got to them in school, and algebra had worked out all right for her, but now she was struggling with geometry. She liked the neat graph paper, and she liked the ragged sound of her mechanical pencil along her protractor, but she did not care about triangles. Equilateral, isosceles, scalene, her teacher had written on the board, with examples. Melanie cursed Euclid and looked out the window.
Irene finished the dishes and went to the balcony to smoke, and Melanie’s mother opened another bottle of wine.
“I love you, honey,” her mother said, pulling the cork and dropping it into the garbage can.
“I love you, too,” Melanie said. “I liked your soup.”
“You’re so polite.”
“That’s what Irene always says,” she said, flipping to a new page in her notebook.
“You should listen to her,” her mother said.
“I do. Can I have some wine too?” she asked. She was almost fifteen, she reasoned.
“Half,” her mother said and poured it for her. “My European daughter,” she said, laughing and clinking Melanie’s glass. She liked her mot
her like this, in one of her easy moods.
Irene and her mother stayed up talking until the second bottle was drained, and Melanie listened to them from the sofa, thinking about the checks and wondering how much her mother cared if she failed geometry.
When Irene went home, and her mother closed the door, the apartment was quiet. Melanie helped dry the remaining dishes, and they made lunches for school and work—a sandwich for Melanie and leftover soup for her mother.
“I like that Irene still visits us,” Melanie said.
“She’s one of the good ones,” her mother said.
The telephone rang—Irene confirming that she was home. They always did this—and Melanie and her mother went to their respective rooms. As she closed her eyes, she wondered if her mother also waited in the dark, for something.
* * *
The next day, Melanie took the child support checks out of the envelope, and she heard her teacher’s voice. A rectangle is any quadrilateral with four right angles. She had her own account at the branch that her mother had opened for her when she was in elementary school, but it seemed like a lot of work to deposit her allowance into it then record everything in the register, so she pocketed her weekly twenties, and when her money was gone it was gone, or if she had some leftover, she put it into an old mustard jar that she used as a piggy bank. Once in a while her mother would bring home coin wrappers from the bank, and they would sit at the table listening to records and roll Melanie’s change and bundle the one-dollar bills, while her mother would compliment her on learning to save. Then they deposited everything so she would earn interest, but she didn’t like how the mustard jar looked when it was empty, like clutter.
Many of the checks were expired, going back years, and she was pleased with herself at understanding to look. She separated these and wrapped them in a piece of her lined notebook paper. She could do her mother’s hand very well; being in her first year of high school, she was old enough to have to forge a note once in a while. Got your message, she wrote to her father, these need reissue. She did not sign her mother’s name even though this was what she could do best because she thought that would be a little like showing off, and she wanted to keep it all very businesslike.
Carefully, she addressed a clean envelope. She put two stamps on it to be sure. She dropped the letter in the outgoing bin in the apartment hallway immediately so she would not have time to change her mind. She checked twice to make sure that not even a corner peeked out of the slot.
For a week straight, she rushed home from school to retrieve the mail. In those days, she noticed that they did not really get much besides bills and grocery store circulars, and she was not sure what she had been expecting, other than that she was surprised how frequently the box was crammed with announcements of a sale on beef chuck, addressed to Or Current Resident. When correspondence from her father finally arrived, it was the only thing that was personal, made out in his square hand. Her heart pounded for a minute. Maybe there was something besides money; maybe her forged note had meant something to him. She wondered if she should have tried to write something emotional, like I miss you, or better, and less of lie, Melanie misses you. The envelope was heavy, cream-colored stationery from his job. She liked the texture of it, and she liked the gray marks left from the sorting machines where letters skidded through rubber wheels. They had been to the post office on a school field trip, so she had seen how it all worked.
When she picked the seal off carefully and slid the contents out, there was no message beyond the glue, just her own name, Melanie, made out on a single check’s subject line, with the range of dates it covered. It was the largest sum she had ever seen. There was another check, new, for the current month, and she understood that this was what was left of her parents’ lives together, a transaction.
She was not sure what they thought, but Melanie was not happy with either one of them. Her mother did not ever talk about him, except out of sheer practicality, like Remember you’re going to Andrew’s tomorrow. Her mother never called him your father or your dad or Andy, which is what he went by, always Andrew, and sometimes Melanie had to remind herself that her father did have a given name, just like she did. Her mother used to call him Toots. Her father used to call her mother Kath, like most of her friends did, and now, he did not refer to her at all.
When her mother came home from work that day, she kept asking Melanie what was wrong, and each time Melanie said, Nothing, because she could not really name the disappointment. She had put the check back in the drawer, but she could not stop thinking about it. She had also folded and torn her father’s stationery until she could not get it any smaller and thrown the shreds in the trash. Then, when she was worried her mother would notice the confetti on top of the garbage, she took the whole bag out to the dumpster at the back of the apartment building and put a new liner in their kitchen can.
When a week had passed, there was another message on the answering machine. You should have received the check by now, he said, but still nothing has cleared. She played the message over and over again. Was there not something else he wanted to say? Was there a part that had been cut off? The beginning of the answering machine tape always made voices sound scratchy and warbled, since it had recorded and deleted messages over and over again so many times. She listened again and again until the cassette jammed and part of the tape came spooling out. Then she unwound the plastic from the heads of the cassette, untangled it, and cranked it back into its case with a bobby pin. When she tried to play it again in the answering machine, her father’s voice was even more distorted and the message would not erase, so she took a quarter from her mustard jar and went to the pay phone on the corner and dialed. She waited for the machine to pick up, and then she stood there, recording the sound of the traffic in the background and her own breath, until she heard the beep that meant the machine had cut her off. Inside, she deleted her call successfully and sat in the kitchen with no lights on until her mother came home.
As a child, before they had moved to the apartment, she had dreamed of finding treasure in the attic or in some forgotten cubby under the stairs, a box of tarnished silver waiting to be uncovered in the yard. The envelope was tucked neatly back in the junk drawer, and every time she looked in that direction, the handle wanted to be pulled.
Melanie knew her mother took lunch from eleven until noon, so the next day she faked sick to get out of her classes, dodged the nurse’s office, and hurried to get to the branch. She knew almost every one of the tellers, but she picked Irene, who was glowing bronze with self-tanner. She thought of Irene on their patio, cigarette smoke curling like a halo around her, and Melanie did her best to approach her with confidence and calm.
“I have a money problem,” Melanie said, firmly, and she told Irene about the checks and the message from her father, the new envelope, and the second message.
“Sounds like a man problem to me,” Irene said, and her penciled eyebrow was arched high.
Melanie thought she might cry, and Irene explained she could deposit them all into Kathleen’s account, because anyone could make deposits to anyone else, or she could just tell her.
“She’ll be angry either way,” Melanie said, and Irene agreed, so Melanie decided to deposit the checks, and she asked Irene if she would please come over after work.
“Sure, honey,” Irene said. “Sure thing.”
Melanie was not sure what to do when she got home, so she did what her mother did when she was agitated and lit the stove. She dug into the freezer, through the crisper, and dashed to the corner store with the four dollars she had left from her allowance. She came up with enough food to make three turkey burgers and a salad with lemon dressing.
When her mother and Irene walked in the door, she saw by her mother’s face that Irene had already told her. Kathleen went to the junk drawer, fingered through it, and shut it hard.
“It’s actually a lot of money,”
she said, to neither of them. “Dinner smells good, Melanie.”
“I told you, you should not be ashamed to take it,” Irene said. “It’s for Mel.”
“Your perspective might be different,” she said. “But I don’t want Andrew’s money.”
“Not so different,” Irene said, and bowed her head a little.
Finally, they decided that because the money was for Melanie, she should choose. She could return it to her father if she wanted, or she could put it in her savings.
Melanie had not thought beyond getting her father’s voice off of the answering machine, but she remembered her mother had told her about going to the ocean once when she was a teenager. One of her older sisters had moved to Portland and invited Kathleen to visit. This was before Melanie’s mother met her father—she was sixteen and took the Greyhound from Denver to Oregon, and she was scared for most of the way because the bus was populated by so many men, and she was not used to being on her own. She kept her bag in the seat next to her but at certain times the bus would become full, and someone with a gritty chin would sit down next to her and ask her name, and she always said, Cathy, even though no one ever called her Cathy.
Her mother had said that when she arrived on the shores of the west coast, she had been surprised at the constant, grainy drizzle and her sister’s damp apartment. She had spent forty-eight hours on the bus, and when she took a shower she did not feel clean, closed in by lumpy mushrooms sprouting out of the tiles and tufts of peachy mold around the windowsills.
Melanie wanted to see the water, but she did not want to go to the cold Pacific. When she thought of the maps she had drawn, and when she thought of the travels she had traced with Ponce de León, Florida was like a finger pointing to her.