by See, Carolyn
Irritated, but still smiling, mother moved the twin bed into the room. “You can’t stay under there all day!”
Rose moved with the bed, staying out of reach.
Mother finally put her head level with the floor. “I see you under there! You’re going to catch hell when you come out, pal!”
“Well,” I said, “I’ve got to go now. I’ll see you next time, Rose.”
—
Around this time Jim would drive into the garage, note down a few sentences in a diary my mother would find later, cross the lawn to the kitchen, and hit the cupboard for a drink. Then into the living room, where Rose, safe now, would dance into his lap. He’d turn on the television, and yes, it would be Lawrence Welk. My mother would go out to the kitchen to fix dinner: lamb chops, baked potatoes, frozen peas, those biscuits that come in a carton that you bash against the sink to open.
My guess? Mother never said much during these evenings. She put Rose to bed at eight, but first she went out on the back porch, clenched her fists, pulled her hair, ground her teeth, and sobbed.
As Rose turned four or five she was given tap lessons. She fell in love with the Mouseketeers. She performed in Saturday-morning television amateur hours and brought home trophies.
“Rose can have anything she wants,” Kate would often say to me. “She’s beautiful, and her rich cousin is going to take care of her education. She can have anything she wants.” I would have been jealous hearing these words, except for the tone in which they were said. To Mother it was monstrous that anyone on earth should get what they wanted.
Jim loved his little girl. He paid for those lessons, he doted over her trophies, he watched her dance in front of him. In every other respect, he played the garden-variety monster.
Kate, her new husband, Jim, and Rose.
Jim, almost chair-ridden by now, would sit silent and drinking through dinner, and after dinner take some verbal revenge. One memorable evening he suggested to us all that his wife was a lesbian and having an affair with her sister and that I had been working as a hooker instead of as a waitress to stay in school. My boyfriend got to his feet and said shakily to Jim: “Stand up and fight like a man! You can’t talk about my girl that way!”
“That’s right,” Jim said. “You’d hit a cripple. Go on. I can’t stop you.”
Rose watched television all through this with focused intensity. She lived in the set. Between the set and the constant assurance from her dad that she was a princess, Rose was getting through. She stayed out of her mother’s way. She only saw her for an hour in the morning, two or three hours at night, and dancing on Saturdays, church on Sundays.
“Don’t believe everything our mother says,” I told her one day when she was seven.
“Oh, I don’t,” she replied. And that was the end of that.
—
One fall morning, my mother got grumpily up in the gray chill and clattered out to the kitchen to make breakfast for two of her least favorite people. She was stopped by the sight of the television test pattern, and the top of Jim’s sewn-up head showing above the back of his easy chair. He was dead as a trout. Mother called a priest and then went in to get Rose ready for school. She took eight-year-old Rose over to a neighbor’s house while the priest held Jim’s dead hand and said, “You’ve gotten a little sick, Jim. It looks like you’re going to have to go to the hospital.”
Mother called Jim’s nephew so that he could arrange for the funeral. Then she called me.
When I got to the house, Mother was dancing in the driveway, that curious skipping dance that she only performed when she was seriously enraged.
“He’s … he’s …” In each hand she held a little red book bound in limp leather. “Diaries!” She gasped. “He’s left diaries.”
Every day in dozens of limp leather, five-line-a-day diaries, he’d faithfully—if subjectively—recorded his feelings about his nine-year marriage.
Another terrible scene with Kate.
Kate beat Rose again. I don’t know what to do.
Kate broke four plates—our best china.
Life with Kate is unbearable. I only stay for my little girl.
My mother was hopping mad. She couldn’t stop hopping. I began to laugh, and she did too. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll burn the son of a bitch!”
Kate started up a fire in the incinerator with yesterday’s trash, and with boundless, snapping energy began to rip the little books to shreds. She burned them and burned them until they were all gone, and then she tore up the cardboard carton they were in and pushed that in too. “The lousy son of a bitch,” she said.
Mother told Rose that her father was dead. The little girl cried and cried.
Within weeks, Mother had decided to move up to Victorville, to be with her half sister. “It’s not like I have anyone down here,” she said to me. “It’s not as if you’d do anything to help me out.” She sold the house, took Rose out of school, and moved the two of them up to the high desert, in with Aunt Helen.
—
It made sense that Kate would move to be with the only person in her life who had always “been there for her,” in the greeting-card vernacular. My mother’s needs were not particularly financial: Poor Drunk Jim had been insured and had a pension, and there was Social Security for her and for Rose, but Kate had been locked for nine years in a passionate tug-of-war with a deadly enemy and now that enemy was dead.
Victorville, in our family, was the equivalent of Grandma’s house. It was the provincial hideout, the place that wasn’t the city. It came into our family by coincidence, when Aunt Helen married the World War I air ace with the silver plate in his head. But was it coincidence or fate or what that made people call it, in the Great Depression and later, Liquorville? Was it fate or what that instead of a little town with rolling green meadows and a church with a steeple, Victorville was a town of scorching sand, boarded-up houses, tumbleweeds passing through front yards, with, for years, just one restaurant (and bar) called The Green Spot, and a bookstore full of paperbacks called The Happy Booker?
Aunt Helen and Uncle Bob in Victorville, with Rose. (Uncle Bob dressed, as usual, in suit, tie, hat and probably gloves in the 110-degree heat.)
Aunt Helen had run here from her first marriage, leaving her daughter behind in New York. When Helen snagged Bob, who had a position in this town, Helen sent for her daughter but didn’t meet the train. Instead, she sent Uncle Bob, who, totally at a loss about what to do with a twelve-year-old, took her into the nearest bar and bought her a brandy. She drank it right down. And my mother had sent me to Victorville to spend two summers after the divorce—with Aunt Helen.
The other side of Victorville was that there was something wonderful walking home from swimming all day, just one step from sunstroke, something wonderful about my wild-eyed aunt coming home from work in her high-heeled shoes, sitting down, waiting for Bob to fix them both highballs, while she tossed her vigorously permed hair and said, as she always did when she first saw you, “Hi, Hi! Let’s have a short snort!” My parents had once called her, behind her back, “Mrs. Victorville,” because she wore long dresses and belonged to civic organizations. But when the sisters got together, beware.
My Aunt Helen took the position that anybody who gave my mother any trouble was the enemy. She hated her niece, little Rose. (She couldn’t stand me either.) By the time my mother moved with her daughter up to this desert town, the fix was already in. Helen saw that Kate bought a house just two doors down from her so that Helen could keep an eye on Rose. War money had made it possible for Bob and Helen to buy one of Victorville’s first postwar houses. It had two bedrooms, a sleeping porch, a garage that turned into a den. In one of the stunningly bad decisions of her life, Helen had decided to decorate it in native yucca wood, so the furniture seemed to twist and writhe beneath you. Two doors down, my mother bought a house built to the exact same plan. The main furniture was a huge television set. Rose danced alone after school in front of this set, rocking out to
American Bandstand so steadily that she wore a hole in the rug, and caught hell for it.
My mother worked as secretary of the junior high school, so every teacher knew, when Rose came in, that they were dealing with a criminal, a deviant, a crook. Mother told them so.
Rose happened to mention, one day when she was ten, that a man had followed her home from the swimming pool. I was there at the dining-room table when she said it. I knew she was making a big mistake.
“Did you lift your skirt for him?” my mother screamed. “Did you touch yourself? He wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t done something. Did you talk to him? Did you ask him home here? How do I know what you do after school?”
“No, no, no, no, no,” Rose protested, in tears.
“Are you lying to me again, then? Is that what’s going on? To get attention because your sister’s here?”
“No, no, no, no! There was a man. But he stayed across the street.”
“Did you lift your skirt?”
“No, no, no, no.”
“I’ll have to call the police. Again.”
“No, please!”
But mother was already on the phone. She had done this with me when I was a kid, but down in the city nobody paid any attention to her. Up here, she was Mrs. Victorville’s sister, and the fix was in. At the age of eight, until the time she was sixteen, Rose was labeled incorrigible.
My crime, my participation in this, was paralysis. I was terrified of my mother. I could only wait until she had downed her Hill and Hill Blend and then try to console Rose in the way my father had consoled me, say that there was another world out there, and tell her that she was—in my eyes—a swell kid.
My mother had a field day with Rose.
Even after Rose disappeared out of Victorville at the age of sixteen, she remained a town legend, like Deadwood Dick or Jesse James. By this time my mother was getting a little on the old side, and her cronies, once so loyal in her defense, were on the old side too. Aunt Helen had moved away. (The story, always furiously denied by her sister Kate, was that Helen had killed somebody in a drunk-driving accident.)
As she got older, Mother collected flocks of spinster friends and widow friends named Verna and Wilma and Edna and Thelma. At some point, when I was divorced, and maybe forty—I got a call from Edna. They’d all gone out to the Fairgrounds to see the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions. (Check it out! Is someone around here saying there isn’t progress in this world? The Royal Lipizzaner Stallions prancing around out there in the new Victorville Fairgrounds, when thirty years before there hadn’t been anything but tumbleweeds and The Green Spot?) My mother had had a seizure. We’d better come up to the hospital.
I took my older daughter Lisa, who was twenty by then, along for the ride.
We found Kate snoozing comfortably, a wooden stick taped to the wall in case her teeth clenched in another fit. One of her friends, Verna, was there with her. Verna told us all about the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions.
“Oh, your mother, poor thing, the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions were just coming out and making their first turn around the stadium when Kate fell over. I don’t think she even got a glimpse of the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions. Because your mother, poor thing, she’s had such a hard life, having to raise that terrible child, that criminal child, all by herself.”
I’d always more or less liked Verna. She was one of Aunt Helen’s old drinking buddies. When Helen would say, “Hi, Hi! It’s Toddy Time! Let’s have a short snort!” Verna would always reply, in pure delight, “Oooo! Let’s do!” (But once she got in trouble with the girls when she said that just once, she’d like to lie down next to a man again. Not for the sex. Just for the affection.)
“All that stealing!”
Once Rose had snitched my mother’s credit card, caught a ride to the next town, and bought my mother three blouses for Mother’s Day. Mother had called the cops and had her booked for theft. Luckily, since Rose was still a juvenile, it wouldn’t stay on her record forever.
“And that mouth of hers!”
It was true. Rose had a mouth. When someone—and generally speaking that meant Kate—bad-mouthed her, Rose, without hesitation and with great, heedless courage, bad-mouthed her back.
“And she’d never do her homework!”
Lisa and I began to shift in our seats. Here was Kate Daly, deprived of her glimpse of the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions, out cold in a Victorville hospital. We were there to do what a family does; stick by, stand by, but we hadn’t counted on Verna. We weren’t up for it.
“Once, your mother told Rose to go on into her room and do her homework. It was seven o’clock! Time for her to do it!”
A two-bedroom house, on Forest Street, on an unlovely road full of tract houses that seem barely to perch on the sandy ground. If it’s seven o’clock, Mother and Verna will have already put away at least one bottle of Hill and Hill Blend. Rose will have dawdled through the dishes, talked on the phone. The last thing on earth Rose would ever want to do as a teenager would be her homework. And at seven o’clock? Why?
“Kate told her to go to her room and get started. Kate knew what was up! She grabbed my arm and we went out the front door, around the side of the house and stood right there as Rose climbed out the window!”
The hospital sighs. The air, though comparatively cool, seems to heat up. The television set, bolted into the ceiling, is dead.
“Well, you know Kate! She wrestled that girl right back in through the window. I ran around to the front and came in by the front door. By that time Kate had Rose back into the hall. That girl was screaming! Kate closed the door from the hall to Rose’s room and to her own room and the bath. I closed the door from the hall to the kitchen and to the living room. There was nowhere that girl could go! There were two of us, you know, so we got her down pretty quick. Your mother sat on her stomach and I got ahold of her head—you know how Rose always felt about her hair—I put my fingers into her hair and got a good hold of her and banged her head on the floor until she stopped screaming and then she stopped struggling. Kate got up and opened one door off that hall—the one to Rose’s room, so she could do her homework. Then she went outside and nailed the window to Rose’s room shut. That girl! She gave your mother trouble!”
Mother woke up. “I missed the stallions,” she said.
We stayed about fifteen minutes, and then said we had to get on the road back to LA. Outside, the air pressed down. Hot? You don’t know hot until you’ve been in Victorville, Barstow, Adelanto, at three-thirty or four on a summer afternoon.
“Wow,” Lisa kept saying. “Poor Rose!”
The Green Spot had burned down. Now the place of choice was a big motel on the outskirts of town close to the hospital. The Green Tree had a coffee shop and nightclub and gift shops and Indian jewelry displays. By this time busfuls of European tourists came on through to eat three-egg omelets and buy souvenir bolo ties. The nightclub was closed, but another bar, chilled to 60 degrees and thick with cigar smoke, was doing a land-office business.
Lisa and I ordered margaritas. “My God,” Lisa kept saying. “Poor Rose. Jesus.”
I know we had two rounds and we probably had three.
I was feeling pretty low by that time, but I knew we had to get on the road home. But before we got up, bracing ourselves for the wall of dry heat that would suck those margaritas from our skin before we even got to the car, we saw two old geezers, rustling and creaking in front of us, making their way to the door.
“I’d like to take you home with me right now, and do whatever!”
“Oooh! Let’s do!”
“Whatever I like. Whatever you want!”
The old people made their way to the door of the bar. They both had cigarettes, dangling. The guy wore a baseball hat. His pants were huge on him, and he shuffled.
“Whatever you like! We’ve got all afternoon to do it.”
Nobody else even looked up. They’d heard it all before.
The door opened and a bar of mighty sun slashed
in. The old guy took a breath and heaved the lady up in his stringy arms. It didn’t seem hard. The lady was dead-thin under her pants and overblouse and hairdo and earrings. He held her like Rhett Butler himself and said, “Let’s go back to my place.”
“Oooh,” Verna said delightedly, looking like tobacco-gin death itself, “let’s do.”
Lisa and I watched them go.
“God,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”
—
When Rose and I sit down now to talk this stuff over, or spend long hours on the phone reconstructing the past, she doesn’t remember all of it quite that way. As long as her father was alive, she says, she grew up happy. “I remember the kitchen we had in that house in the San Fernando Valley. There was a real feeling of—family. I had my cat, I had my dog, Shawnee. I was close to that dog! I’d be playing on the floor with him and I’d eat the food off his dish, and Mother’d be on the phone with the doctor to be sure it was OK.… We had neighbors in the house next door, and we had boysenberries in the backyard and once Mother made plum jam. It was great, it was wonderful.
“At Christmas my dad would step in the ashes in the fireplace and walk over to the Christmas tree so it would look like Santa had been there, and they’d take a bite or two out of some cookies. In fact, when a little kid broke the news to me that there wasn’t any Santa, Mother got mad at her.
“I don’t remember them fighting, I don’t remember them drinking. Mother drove me everywhere. She drove me to tap-dancing lessons and to Brownies and I went to school at Saint Patrick’s Elementary. At tap classes we worked up some little routine, there were three of us, I was in the middle, and we went on some Saturday-morning television thing and won first prize. Daddy said I grabbed the trophy. Then after that Mother actually took me to a Disney audition for something. There were a million kids like me. We didn’t make it, of course.
“Daddy took his religion very seriously. Once we were driving to mass and I was in the front seat with him and I asked, ‘Why does it always smell so funny? What do they call that funny-smelling stuff?’ He reached over and smacked me. ‘It’s incense,’ he said. ‘It’s sacred. Don’t ever make fun of it.’